captain I guess the question I would wonder about is whether, in a world without as many rigidly defined behavioral conventions, certain conditions would still be so problematic for a person that the person might still want to treat it.
I think you got it right later when you said we don’t have the contextual information to speculate about it to that degree. We don’t want to romanticize the past either of course, surely, some cultures or even the same cultures at different points of history would celebrate stuff like that, some would tolerate or normalize it, some wouldn’t tolerate it at all. I guess I just don’t need a reason to think about how 21st century western white supremacist capitalism is so often designed to be terrible to anyone below a relatively high standard of productive worth, like what if the city in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas wasn’t a utopia or even nearly one and instead of one child it was most people on Earth.
This isn’t even necessarily because Persona 5 is uniquely awful and barely functional as a game, I mostly feel like it’s a ⅒ because of how it stabs you in the damn back. Unlike Brandon, I got swept up and 100% sold on it for the 1st Palace, but the feeling of betrayal I felt from the “funny” scene with Ann “Just Got Done An Incredible Arc Where She Went Through A Litany of Complex Emotional Revelations Culminating In Her Putting The High School Teacher Who Raped Her Behind Bars” Tamaki wearing all of the layers of clothes was just too much to come back from for me
