Sexual Transaction, Power, and Play in Persona 5 and Ladykiller In A Bind
Donald Everhart, Contributing Editor
A frequent slogan that appears on the loading screens in Ladykiller in a Bind is “All Power Exchange Must Be Negotiated.” It’s a slogan for the kink-positive elements of the game as well as the larger, dialogue-heavy political maneuverings of the plot. It’s also something for players to keep in mind as the main character may be alternately coerced or coercive, depending on the situation. No scene is more controversial in this regard than the penultimate one, in which the player has the option to engage in transactional sex in order to resolve a major conflict. That proved to be controversial even for a queer, kinky, visual novel - so much so that the game was patched post-release to make the scene (which was already optional) entirely skippable. Nonetheless, Ladykiller is rare in that it explicitly recognizes and reckons with the often transactional nature of romance and sex in games.
Transactional relationships are part and parcel of recent entries in the Persona series. These are entwined with the series’ blend of dialogue and story conventions from visual novels within the framework of a dungeon-crawling RPG. In recent series entries like Persona 4 and 5, the protagonist meets a range of people from party members to friends and mentors. During the game, the player has the opportunity to level up their character’s relationship with these non-player characters. This social link system is much lauded, and I’ve had plenty of fun with it, myself. But I am uncomfortable with the linear way that Persona 5 presents relationships as processes of efficient interaction that lead to rewards.
Image: The Persona 5 protagonist, Joker, mulls over his decision to become an experimental subject for the back-alley doctor Takemi Tae.
That “insert time, collect rewards” transaction is never more pronounced than in the moments that take place if players max out relationships with just about any female NPC. Persona 5 arguably features the most dubious set of these in the series to date, including relationships between the teenage male player character and several adult women. Those include a doctor (whose relationship you build as an off-the-books experimental subject), a reporter (whose relationship you build after visiting a bar in Shibuya while underage), and the protagonist’s homeroom teacher (who moonlights as a maid that you hire to do routine housework in her chirpy guise as “Becky”). As Jessica Howard has explained over at Uppercut, the developer’s portrayal of these relationships ignores the predatory character of these love interests. The toxic masculine fantasy of control reinforced by so many of the game’s systems - from the management of the game’s calendar to the retribution the player and their crew delivers upon corrupt and powerful figures - is speechless when it comes to the power dynamics of the relationships it portrays.
Image: Each time a character is introduced in Ladykiller in a Bind, the player can select their name from a set of options or provide a custom name.
In Ladykiller, on the other hand, power dynamics are practically the name of the game. Players control a character who may be referred to as The Beast (as in the image above, players have the option to select the name, and two options are given for each character by default). She’s the twin sister of a scheming brother. In exchange for his help in getting her motorcycle back from their father, The Beast agrees to take The Brother’s place on a cruise. The cruise is an over-18, post-graduation last hurrah for a recently graduated class. The Brother is more interested in manipulation than in partying and sentimentality, so he arranged for a surprise on the cruise in the form of a game. His game is a popularity contest of sorts: whoever can collect the most votes within seven days will win a million dollars. Votes are transferable, which immediately gives some of the most influential characters plenty of clout. The player’s job is to figure out how to navigate this situation, preferably while keeping the secret that they’ve replaced The Brother on the cruise.
To help keep this secret, two other characters are initially revealed to be in on the ruse: the popular and dominant class Vice President (who may be referred to in-game as The Beauty), and a shy hacker (The Stalker or The Hacker) who keeps the whole system of votes and the game going. Players can spend their nights with either one. In either case, romance and sex are on the cards, but whether the player character takes a submissive or dominant role depends on whose cabin they visit. That choice impacts the story, including which ending a player receives. Deciding who to visit is also a decision about rewards. Visiting The Beauty eases suspicions that the player is acting out-of-character in their guise as the Brother, while The Hacker rewards visits with a handful of counterfeit votes.
Image: Ladykiller in a Bind’s Beauty teases the player character about their assumed role as The Brother.
So far, so similar - the player exchanges time and choice and accumulates rewards relevant to their in-game progress in both Persona and Ladykiller. The difference is what happens in and around Ladykiller’s explicit and intimate scenes, the very scenes that Persona 5 elides with a fade to black. With The Beauty, The Beast assumes the role of a sub. As The Beast’s name implies, this is portrayed as an unfamiliar role. With The Stalker, scenes progress with The Beast in control as she leads a series of progressively more sexual encounters night on night. In either role, consent is foregrounded. Ladykiller’s use of BDSM is wholly consonant with this emphasis on consent and the willful exchange of power and control.
This emphasis on trust and consent is further illustrated by way of contrast to the messily coercive and dishonest character of Ladykiller’s transactional scenes. The more infamous one, that I alluded to at the start of this piece, comes about near the end of the story. To bargain for the rescue of The Beauty, The Beast can engage in a degrading bout of sex with the male class president. Leading up to this, most scenes between The Beast and The President are fraught conversations that devolve into verbal fights. Turning that dynamic physical is a sharp contrast to scenes with The Beauty, which explore the nuances of trust and consent in sadomasochistic sex. The transactional character of sex with The President, should the player go down that route, results in sex where trust and care are absent.
Those aspects of trust are also left off the table in Persona 5. While many social links involve insecure characters who open up, the player character isn’t impacted by any relationship in the same way. Rather, as the player character ranks up social links, they gain abilities and expand inventory and discounts at shops. Becoming more intimate with your homeroom teacher is rewarded with more time in-class to work on building skills or making items to help with dungeon crawling. Participating in clinical trials as the back-alley doctor calls you her “little guinea pig” is rewarded with the ability to purchase a wider range of healing and support items. There’s little to reflect how the player character feels about these relationships beyond dialogue options. And even those dialogue options can be minmaxed, as selecting optimal responses in conversation with your social links enables those relationships to progress more rapidly. There’s little room for authenticity or reflection when the game’s calendar constantly pushes you towards efficiency.
In some ways, this may seem reflective of a difference in how much agency is given to the player to decide their own character or make their own interpretations. The Beast has a backstory and begins the game with her own reasons for agreeing to impersonate The Brother. The story is her story, even if some of the specifics of each scene are decided by the player. The main character of Persona 5, on the other hand, isn’t provided quite as much of their own character. Even so, Persona 5 can’t get by as a 100-hour RPG without providing some interpretation of the thoughts and feelings of the player character. But such interiority is kept to a minimum, mostly expressed in the slightly differing tone of dialogue options. At worst, the player is left with superficial, transactional representations of relationships. At best, the other character shows some development, but the player character remains largely untouched.
Image: Ichiko Ohya, a journalist, pays the protagonist of Persona 5 a drunken compliment.
Other characters learn to trust you in Persona 5, but your character doesn’t think much about trust, himself. Given the dynamics of several social links, however, it would do the player character and several NPCs a lot of good to think carefully about power and consent. It’s a shame that was left off the table in service of the game’s heterosexual power fantasy, in which the player is always able to progress relationships and to turn any relationship with a woman into a romance. There’s no in-game alternative to this. Queer romance is stifled and gay men are treated as laughable predators. For all its overt messaging about subversion and rebellion, the player character’s straight masculinity is enforced and assumed from every direction.
Unlike Ladykiller, Persona 5 doesn’t feature graphic sexual images. It’s ironic, then, that of the two games it’s Persona 5 that provides the more exploitative and pornographic depiction of relationships. While Ladykiller features pornographic images, it refuses to reduce the characters within them to single dimensions. Persona 5 does the opposite: there’s no graphic sex or nudity, but each relationship objectifies the other character. The structure of social links is instrumental, no matter how romantic, friendly, exploitative, or predatory they may be in their text or subtext. Compared to this, Ladykiller’s developers attempted to provide insight into the messy, uncertain, but ultimately rewarding development of relationships for the characters involved. The negotiation of power is a constant underpinning of the action, even when it isn’t the overt topic of a scene. In the relationships that are depicted as more healthy, boundaries are open for renegotiation. Scenes featuring coercion and toxicity, on the other hand, are tortuous.
There’s more to sex and relationships than leveling up, and there’s more to exchange than material rewards and plot progression. Depictions of sex and romance that don’t consider power dynamics are hollow. Perhaps that’s what should be expected of power fantasies, but as Ladykiller shows, games can do better. While Ladykiller is by no means the perfect representation of relationships, it does right in its effort to tell a queer story. With its focus on kink, dominance, and submission, it places power at the center of its conversation about sex and romance.
Games should strive to incorporate such conversations, especially when they depict sex and romance. We gain nothing by intentionally submerging power dynamics in the background. As Persona 5 shows, that can enable toxic, straight masculine fantasy to paper over relationship dynamics. For a game that talks big about rebellion, Persona 5 unquestioningly reinforces structures of heterosexual dominance and control. This is done through what social theorist Steven Lukes might describe as ideological power: the power of a society to dictate what may or may not be allowed as a possibility for politics, action, or desire. It’s not that Persona 5 is without depictions of queerness – it’s just that they’re bullshit, regressive depictions. And even those minor intrusions of a wider, more complicated world are kept far away from the characters of the main cast. Any hint of queer fantasy or life can only be brought into the game through player interpretation or metatextual fiction; the game pushes back and polices such attempts inside of its universe of discourse and play.
The GwG Love Connections series, of which this piece is part, is an effort to bring forward the subtleties and possibilities of love and games. All of us writing for the series are embracing and celebrating how games and play incorporate and discuss love. I’d like to see more of that openness, and the accompanying desire for experimentation, interpretation, sincerity and complexity represented in the games that we play. Ladykiller in a Bind shows one possible direction. And many games, Persona 5 included, remain relatively open to interpretation. Even so, I would like to see more of an emphasis on power and messiness, and less on leveling up, within games that include romance.
For more writing on video games and love (in all its many forms), check out to the introduction to our series “Love Connections,” Edmond Chang’s “Cruising Animal Crossing”, and Nate Schmidt’s essay on love and community in We Know the Devil.
