There is a certain trope that people groan when they encounter it that is almost synonymous with Japanese media aimed at teenagers: concluding a story with the so-called “power of friendship.” What those who take issue with this don’t realize is that every aspect of your life involves defeating some force or the other with the power of friendship, or at least your connections to other people, because the world is simply the presence of a person other than yourself. Even the teenagers who are the target audience of this kind of message have been taught to treat it as the hallmark of a “lesser” story, the kind you grow out of and inevitably graduate to higher forms of storytelling and ultimately literature. Those who successfully separate themselves from this process will come to find that even those most celebrated works of literature--the Dostoevskys, Chekhovs, and Tolstoys--are also undeniably about salvation through giving yourself to another person.
Those who can't get over it are the people who furrow their brow when they encounter some giant robot anime or a 50 hour long RPG that concludes with the characters banding together and facing off against some kind of total and conceptual enemy; a political figurehead, the warped childhood friend, the demiurge of their world, the list goes on. The characters proclaim something that boils down to what many call “the power of friendship,” and the enemy yields in its might. ”What a cheap way to end this,” these people think to themselves, and then take to an internet dumpsite of their choosing to write about how their time investment and excitement while experiencing that story was invalidated by a cheesy and cheap moral at its end. But it’s these same people who should be reevaluating their relationships with the people in their lives, and ask themselves if they could defeat God with their friends. And to you who just thought to yourself, “I’m quite comfortable with my relationships, thank you, defeating God wasn’t on my to-do list anyway,” I promise you, you aren’t as comfortable as you think.
Anyway, I want to write about friendship, because this is a subject I have struggled with my whole life and have only now come to see in a way that no longer causes me grief and anxiety in a vicious cycle but instead happiness and, most importantly, guilt-free recreation. There is a key event that starts all this:
When I was thirteen I played Persona 4, an RPG for the Playstation 2. This game was recommended to me by someone who was older than me and I considered to have The Correct Taste in Video Games, so I took its contents as gospel and decided I would model myself after its protagonist (and whether this was a desperate appeal to this person or an attempt at covering up my insecurities is a story only to be discussed in a therapy setting). What made Persona 4 special to me was not just that it was aesthetically interesting in a way I had never encountered at 13, or that it was “like Pokemon if it was hard,” but that it had a cast of varied and unique characters who dealt with real life problems (as exemplified by their ability to say shit and ass, words that aren’t usually in RPGs, or that they were gay, which is another thing most RPG characters aren’t). The most interesting thing about this cast of characters was that you could interact with each and every one of them through what’s called the Social Link system.
For the uninitiated: Social Links are like visual novel vignettes embedded into the time-management system that drives Persona’s plot forward. You pick between grinding away in the dungeon or spending quality time with your party members. Across ten different levels they slowly reveal more of their personal lives and stories to you, and their emotional moments within the main plot become all the more amplified by your personal knowledge of their characters. What you know and about who varies on who you’re interested in and who you invested your time into, so it makes for a very personal experience. Sure, it also yields power-ups that help you in the dungeon, but at times it felt as though I was playing this game just to experience this.
In fact, many people say the same thing--that they play Persona games to feel like they have friends either to make up for their lack of them in real life or to replace the ones they’re dissatisfied with. You can scroll through the YouTube comments of soundtrack uploads or the ending cutscenes of the game; those lamenting that their real lives aren’t as interesting as Persona, or that they can’t be the person they were in the game.
I felt the same because I didn’t have a good time growing up, but there’s no use writing the specifics of this here. Anyone else who had a hard time relating to their peers can identify with the cloud of rejection that colours all those memories, so just imagine I went through the same things you did, the same hardships you did, and ultimately had as little friends as you did.
What made the cast of Persona 4 so special to me was not just the illusion that they were my friends, but that they were friends with each other. They would mention times they hung out off screen and came to similar understandings about each other on their own terms just like I did on my own time, and it made the party feel more alive in a way I didn’t know outside of the game. Whatever friends I did have were individual endeavours, i.e. we would hang out one-on-one and I knew them all through different contexts: school, family friends’ children, online, tennis class, in another town, and so on. I was not accustomed to groups well and I could not imagine myself in one. Any time I tried I would feel some level of fragmentation, even in my middle school anime club! In 2009 Persona was not the household name it is now, and my adoration of it was not as cool as liking Final Fantasy or something. This was a long time ago.
In any case the example set by Persona 4 became something of a goal, a target for what I considered to be “true” friendship, and if I could achieve that then I could safely say I had graduated to becoming a normal person myself. To this end I did try to emulate behaviour inspired by the most key aspect of the protagonist you control in Persona 4, that no matter what you chose to say to the other characters they would always accept and like you. I started voicing my opinions as confidently as I could, or dressing the way I wanted, even if that meant there are now family photos of me wearing flimsy H&M cardigans and red pants and suede heeled boots and so on. Being 15 is not easy.
But, of course, real life is not an RPG, and you can’t divide real people into ten easy steps to ultimately become the Truest and Bestest Friends Forever, wherein you receive an ultra powerful demon that represents your connection and then you stop hanging out with them forever. I don’t remember high school all too well, but I’m sure I was rigid and weird enough that led me to lead the quiet life I did where I rejected all experiences I couldn’t see as a Social Link event. I went through high school with less difficulty than middle school, sure, but I was nowhere closer to reaching that ideal I had set for myself.
That’s fine. When I was in elementary school a teacher once told me I would really come to find “my people” in university, which at the time was still seven years away. Even if high school wasn’t working out, in just a short couple more years I’d be with “my people,” my very own Persona 4.
This didn’t happen either. There is no switch that flips in people’s minds to be more mindful of their weirder classmates once they undertake higher education, and many people become dumber the longer they stay in school. I was also in the wrong program at the wrong school and after many twists and turns I suddenly found myself sitting in Tokyo, Japan on a year-long exchange program.
The word I heard other people use most to describe myself during this year was “harsh.” Maybe it was because I had to be around many people I was not always keen of far more than usual--at home I lived with my parents and when I left campus that was the end of it; in Japan I lived in a dormitory with all the other helpless foreigners who looked to me and my ongoing East Asian Studies degree as a kind of beacon in the scary country they just found out was not actually called Japan by the people who live there. I didn’t know Japanese as well as I do now back then, and I was very much as lost as everyone else, but this country and its culture being something of my expertise was definitely enough to make me something of an Important Cool Guy for the first time in my life, or at least I felt that way. To that end I plainly said whatever it was I thought of every person I had to live with, because I knew I only had a year there and I figured I should be as quick as possible about weeding out who I didn’t like and who would later offer me their couch to sleep on when I took a tour through Europe.
I made friends with many people, and I had to pretend to be friends with others just for niceties. I experienced times I thought I hurt people, and times where I thought everyone else had finally had enough of me and saw me for what I was: a fraud who knew some kanji. There were many nice times, too: very early on, I remember, we were going out to an izakaya as a group of strangers and I had forgotten my wallet in my room. Everyone had just left the dorm as I realized this and I begged them to wait while I ran up and got it. On the elevator ride up my entire middle school experience flashed before my eyes: people I considered friends not waiting for me to pack my lunch bag away, or not caring to check if I was walking with them, being left behind in a bathroom stall, or just simply and purely forgotten. I just knew with complete conviction that when I came back down the group of 15 or so people would be gone, and I’d have to meet them at the izakaya like nothing had happened. But to my surprise they were all still there waiting for me when I came down, all greeting me with smiles, and I realized then that there was nothing inherently wrong with me.
I used Persona 4 as this kind of yardstick to measure my personhood with, but as painfully obvious as it is to write now: you cannot use an RPG dating sim mechanic to judge your relationships with other people. It is a gross oversimplification of reality and a representation of only 1% of human interaction. There were plenty of people whose so-called “Social Links” I raised and then reversed and others who entered negative numbers through continued unwanted encounters. I was basing the health of my interpersonal relationships on a game written by a guy who's said he's never had a true friendship with a woman, and expecting reward just for being present in a social situation.
Then, one day, it happened: Maybe eight or nine months in we were sitting in a friend’s room, some five or six of us, and I plugged in the little USB disco light I kept in my bathroom to make my shits a little funkier. Everyone smiles at the nice atmosphere I brought, my friend connects to his Bluetooth speaker, we’re all enjoying a simple beer and snacks and passing around stories of our first loves. Someone is telling her long-winded tale about an autumn’s day in Spain when I suddenly realized I had achieved my very own Persona 4. Everyone in that room was friends with me; I had spent time with them alone, in groups, and they had all spent time with each other. We knew each other in this very real way because, like the cast of Persona 4, we had survived this very personal thing together: living in Japan, a thing we were all doing for wildly varying reasons. And it was as soon as I realized it that it just as suddenly slipped away, like it had never mattered at all, and I felt silly for ever wanting something so simple in the first place. If I had simply let go and just followed that tired and true maxim of being myself, I would naturally have found my people like my fifth grade teacher promised me.
The problem really is that this is so obvious that it takes this level of years-long investment and having it beaten into your head until you really do understand that unforgivingly being yourself is all any great human has ever done, and if you do the same it should work out at least a little bit. It took me an unhealthy relationship with a Playstation 2 game, many tight pairs of jeans from Hot Topic, and a year’s stay in Japan before I understood this and it will take a journey of equally epic and absurdly personal proportions before you do too. All I can offer in the meantime is my own anecdote.
There were other moments after this that I was going to write about that reaffirmed this feeling: the founding of Mode Gone, or the going away party I held before I moved back to Tokyo last year. The latter was especially nice; everyone I invited came against all odds (some crossing the American border), and I was able to say something personal to each friend so I could leave everything on my own terms. I felt loved and I loved everyone else in return, and there was no anxiousness about whether or not I cared about them more than they cared about me, the same thought that destroyed so many of my relationships with people as a younger kid. Ultimately these stories would just reaffirm the one about Persona 4: that real friendship does exist, it’s out there, and you can find it.
All of these things turned me around on defeating God with the power of your friends, because it isn’t even about defeating God or the state or the church or whatever it is in the silly stories we shit on so hard despite spending so much time with. It’s about defeating that feeling within yourself, the one that tells you that trope is tired and corny and stupid, it’s begging you to go outside, live your life, and be honest, earnest, and true with other people, which is the most any work of art can ask of you. If you’re still upset by this trope then you’re about to be upset by this too, because I’m also going to end this by writing the words: the power of friendship saved me, because it did, and it will save you too. It might not be because of this post and it definitely won't be because of a game like Persona 4, but it will happen to you the same as it did to me by virtue of the fact that you’re still alive and conscious enough to write headass posts on Twitter about how much smarter you are than the average Japanese RPG. Log off and read the post a second time, because I promise you’re smart enough for it to make sense.
September 13th, 2023