I feel the same way. I feel like crossdressing in Japanese games is meant to be seen as awkward or funny (or even, unfortunately, seen as gross), while in the States, it just gives fans (gay, allies, or just yaoi/yuri fans) false hope that the character might be canonically gay, genderqueer, or trans.

Oh, uh... huh. Normally I just roll my eyes at these crossdressing shenanigans (usually because they’re played more for a gag, a la Kanji in P4), but... god damn, this does it for me. Seems I have a thing for protagonists dressed as sexy lady cops, go figure.

They’ve talked about it before and it sounded like they aren’t too keen on doing it again, since it required quite a bit of extra work to implement. I think they were only able to justify it because P3P was the 3rd release of the game, and apart from all the changes made to the female side they didn’t add much new on…

Persona 3 portable for the PSP, Yeah, but that was actually a full redesign of ps3 with every character interaction gender inverted, including the dating sidequests with men instead of women, not merely a DLC that spectacularly crossdressed your lead character.

Didn’t one of the Persona games have a re-release special edition where you could play as a female instead of a male protag?

With the series, on the whole, not having the best or most nuanced history with regards to cross-dressing—or anything at all having to do with discussing gender or female characters, in general—I guess this is. Um.

*trying to slap down his confused boner with a phonebook*

False alarm! false alarm damnit!

I think Susan Cain had a worthwhile critique/take-down of Carnegie and the cultural norms represented by “How to Win...” in her book “Quiet.”

There’s a quote from CSI that immediately comes mind when I think of Dale Carnegie: “It’s not about what happened, it’s about what you can convince a jury happened.” Persuasion trumps principles, and every act is a performance.

‘While it might have been revolutionary to hear that people tend to like you more when you listen to them in 1936, it’s a little silly to read now because it all seems to obvious.’

I used to read this book every year and have bought it for all our nephews and nieces over the years. I know some of it reads simplistically today, but the basic truths are there. I’ve tried to adopt every one of them, especially remembering people’s names. One day I happened to think of all the same people I…

Never really thought about it this way. I might need to put more effort into being genuine I suppose.

Yep, and that was something I tried to keep in mind the entire time I was reading it, but decided to stay away from in the actual text above because I knew someone would pop in and say something smarter than I would here.

So the book is 80 years old, and was written by a man. While the advice mostly sounds good, I’m really unsure of how it would apply to, say...women.

I wholeheartedly agree with that. There is not one size fits all solution for everything and everyone. The best we can do is be honest and try.

I like the idea of taking away the what not to dos, I didn’t really think of that. I guess that’s a lot of stuff that I tend to do naturally, partially because I’m really bad at talking about myself/have no interest in sharing anything personal with strangers/new people.

Absolutely! and I tried to convey that above—there’s some solid stuff in the book for sure, and being obvious isn’t necessarily bad since most of us still don’t do the obvious stuff, but it depends a lot on who you are.

I like this book more for what it guides you *NOT* to do:

I would agree that in our current cynical and jaded world, most of his tips are pretty two dimensional. But on the other side, if you can be genuine about all the advice and take it to heart, then it should be pretty effective in my mind!