Ohayogozaimashite, Kirijou-senpai!
The Mighty One* is out of town this week, slacking off as usual, so you get to put up with Shirt Girl Moira today.
Actually she just asked me to write up something for her. I’m profoundly upset about my situation at work; it makes things difficult. My mind does not wander, it veers. So this may not have a point at all. Just so you know.
What I’m trying to do is write a bit about Kirijou Mitsuru from Persona 3. Bog knows if I’m actually going to get there.
The meat and the bone of it all is that she’s fucking awesome. She’s strong — physically she hits harder than Our Protagonist, has stronger magic. If it weren’t for Protagonist-san’s ability to carry multiple Personae and to switch among them in battle, she’d be absolutely more effective in battle. Kirijou-senpai wields an one-handed sword in a Western fencing stance, whomps the hell out of the Shadows, heals the group when needed, and visits icy shattery death upon our enemies.
Emotionally she’s holding together amazingly well; there’s some super bad stuff in her past, and she still copes. A senior at Gekkoukan High School, she’s the Student Council president and president of S.E.E.S., the school Club for Persona-users. She consistently tops out the exam scores posted for all to read, she drives a motorcycle, she’s beautiful without being girly. The woman doing the English voice acting gives her a low, intense voice. She has the best glare in the game. She’s the scion of a major corporate conglomerate (the Kirijou Group pretty much owns the city), and staggeringly rich.****
No wonder there’s a girl in the hallway outside the Student Council room who’s madly in love with her.
* I had started to call her Our Esteemed Hostess, but Dana over at Pandagon** has poisoned that particular little well for me.***
** Pandas be damned; I’ve always seen it as Pan-Dagon. The site’s a front for the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Do not be fooled!
*** Rather than get parenthetical, which is all kinds of how I’m feeling this fine Thursday morning, I inflict upon you footnotes. Is it because they break up my sentences more, or less? The world may never know.
**** In an American story, all this ’she’s got it all going on’ thing would be used to point up how much of a bitch***** she was. Since it’s not, it’s just reason to admire her.
***** That’s pronounced “Heather.”
September 20th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Heathers was a great movie.
September 21st, 2007 at 2:28 am
I’ll happily add a second opinion as to Mitsuru’s awesomeness. I haven’t gotten too far in the game (still in early June at the moment), and haven’t had a chance to see her in combat yet, but she comes off as intelligent and an effective leader. While Protagonist-san may be the leader when it comes to exploring Tartarus and whacking demons, it’s pretty clear that it’s Mitsuru who’s in charge of SEES. Thus far, she doesn’t seem particularly pushy or bitchy, which, as Moira points out, is how she’d be portrayed in an American story.
This isn’t unusual for the Persona series, though. Both Nate and Ellen from the first two games are portrayed as wealthy, and seem to believe that their positions of privilege confer upon them a responsibility to lead and protect their peers, much like Mitsuru. Interestingly, these self-appointed leaders tend to leave the amibiguous moral decisions to the silent protagonists of their respective games, which raises some interesting questions. In doing so, perhaps they’re simply slipping out of character so as to allow the player to determine the course of the story. On the other hand, given the amount of responsibility and expectations piled onto these characters from a young age, perhaps they’re uncomfortable in unusual situations where there isn’t necessarily a right answer, and that’s why they’re willing to defer to others in such circumstances.
[NOTE: very minor spoilers ahead, because it’s not easy to discuss characterization without discussing plot, too.)
Another interesting facet of Mitsuru is that, at least during the first couple months of the game, other people talk about her as though she’s much harsher than she actually is. Many of the random students hanging around the school talk about how important it is to get good grades in order to impress Mitsuru-senpai, and prior to exam week, Yukari tells the protagonist that if they don’t do well on their exams, Mitsuru and Akihiko will laugh at them. Oddly enough, while I totally blew off my academics in order to hang out with Kenji and hang out around town maxxing out my charisma, the only character who admonished me about my test scores was Yukari herself, which implies that she was projecting a bit.
I have to admit that Yukari is somewhat less annoying than I expected. Sure, she acts like the stereotypical cheerful girl, but she seems to be driven by fear and insecurity. She studies for exams because she’s afraid of being laughed at if she does poorly; she takes the lead in investigating the ghost story because she’s scared by the prospect of a vengeful spirit haunting the halls. Like many potentially maladaptive behaviors, sometimes it works out well for her, and sometimes it doesn’t.
That’s getting away from the main point, though, which is that Mitsuru is awesome. I suspect that, having been out of high school for longer than I care to admit, Mitsuru is easier for me to sympathize and identify with than most of the other characters, insofar as she acts more adult and responsible than the other members of SEES. It also helps that, as in Persona 2, the characters are generally well-written and believable; well, as believable as you can get when your story revolves around high school students killing demons with Jungian archetypes.
Anyway, I was afraid that Mitsuru would have some sort of tragic backstory pointing to some sort of hidden vulnerability, but it’s good to hear that she manages to cope nevertheless. It’s easy for a lazy writer to give a character a tragic past and make it all-consuming; it’s much harder to portray a character who’s had their share of troubles, and is possibly still dealing with them, but is also getting on with their life.