Does Persona 5 have characters that think homosexuals are sexual predators or that's the statement the game is making. They're very different. Do they make you relate to the abusers or the person being abused?
For example, just last year, A Fantastic Woman won a handful of international film festival awards - including an Oscar - and it's about a transexual woman dealing with the sudden death of her boyfriend, while at the same time being harrassed by the boyfriend's family and the other people involved including the police and hospital staff. The movie isn't shy about showing how far people will go to hummiliate someone who they think is a sexual pervert and they never get any sort of retribution for it, but the audience will heavily empathize with the protagonist.
As an aside, you may not know: "Transsexual" is now considered a pretty outdated term; unless you know that someone specifically identifies with the word it's better to use "transgender".
I have neither played P5 nor seen the film you're talking about. You're right in terms of how the camera lens and the eyes of the people creating the movie dictate how certain characters are to be viewed. And it sounds like in the movie you're describing, the camera lens is definitely on the main character's side, and the abuse she endures is portrayed as explicitly bad.
What it sounds like in P5 is that the camera itself, and by proxy the people creating the game, portray the LGBTQ+ characters as punchlines at best and predators at worst. They are seen as something inflicted upon the main characters, and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself that's something that I couldn't take even over the course of a 100+ hour game. Though the Ryuji character's behavior would probably turn me off before that, from how people are describing it.
This is reminding me of how I've been playing through all the old PS2 games I wanted to try but never could when I was younger. I booted up
The Warriors, an old Rockstar brawler, and had fun with the game through the tutorial. It looked like a pretty fun conceit, I've never seen the movie on which it was based but the tone was interesting. Then I get control of the Warchief and am instructed to look for the rest of the Warriors. I come across a man in the process of sexually assaulting a woman, pressing her against a dumpster and feeling her up. I'm disgusted, but I'm thinking that maybe the game wants me to beat the hell out of this guy. Unfortunately: he was one of my gang members. I turned off the game immediately.
How far we've come, and how far we have to go.
