#but i've been all over the place :/

[phoenixcatch7]

Okay but it's super interesting how

Din = Power = Ganondorf

Naryu = Wisdom = Zelda

Farore = Courage = Link.

Because Din, in the hylian creation myth, created the physical world. Naryu then created the laws - gravity, time, etc. And Farore finally created life - plants and people.

Din created the body, naryu the mind, Farore the soul.

And the triforce and its wielders so perfectly reflect that.

Ganon is physical power, he is big and intimidating and he breaks things. He is cunning and determined, but that's not what he focuses on. He is might makes right.

Zelda is wisdom and cleverness. She is stall tactics and information and team work. She is a powerful mage with a spine of steel, but that's not how she'll win. She is the pen being mightier than the sword.

Link is courage and persistence. He is the wild card sneaking behind enemy ranks, always moving, plunging into terrifying situations head first. He's a phenomenal fighter with a keen wit, but that's not what will get him through his challenges. He is bravery not being the absence of fear but the triumph over it.

They sit in perfect parallels to each other.

And ganon is reborn through his body - his resurrection is immortality. No matter how low he is cast, as long as he has a body he can claw his way back. He can cling to his power, build it ever higher.

Zelda is reborn through the magic of her bloodline. It's the accumulated knowledge handed down for generations, the unique power she must master, the skills she must develop to survive and get her kingdom out the other side intact. Even her name, the knowledge of herself, is handed down from all the way from the very first. Her ancestors knowledge of her future presence, her stability, is what gives her the edge.

Link is reborn in spirit. He is not bound by flesh or blood. Just like his wanderlust soul he can reappear in any time or place. His variation, his unpredictability, is exactly how he fights. It's what makes him so hard to pin down.

Ganons need to build strength means he can't chase after link. Links impulsiveness means zelda can outwit him. Zeldas stationary predictability means she's an easy target for ganon.

But the other direction?

Fire melts ice, ice redirects lightning, lightning burns fire.

And that's the very essence of the triforce.

[gros-chat-fait]

[...Jake was faster still, for short distances. Fast enough to outrun the Hork-Bajir that were after us. But he wasn't going to leave me behind.]

---

Cousins

[iizuumi]

Do you want my soul in exchange for more shirtless Soshiro? I'll give it to you, just say the word!!

dskjfhskjdhf please keep your soul I don't think it would like being separated from you 🙏

[nanonkorapat]

Just Hoy seeing right through Joke for a second.

[cecoeur]

[fiona-fififi]

Call me homophobic, but I don't actually think it's great representation to stick a complex, dynamic, newly-realized bisexual character permanently with a flat, boring, underdeveloped love interest just because that was the first guy who showed interest.

[greywoe]

"The she-wolf laid into the squires with a tourney sword, scattering them all. The crannogman was bruised and bloodied, so she took him back to her lair to clean his cuts and bind them up with linen."

[caemidraws]

---

[front-facing-pokemon]

[epickiya722]

I'll be honest, I'm going to sound probably all over the place with this, but I tried my best!

Okay, so going back to chapter 252, I see that Yuta was indeed sliced by Sukuna, but what I wasn't expecting that would resort to him being sliced in half just as Gojo was back in 236.

This is where it got confusing to me. How was Yuta sliced in half? Why was he sliced in half? Before this, just like Yuji, he was tanking Sukuna's cuts and using RCT. Just before this moment, Sukuna was also hit with Jacob's Ladder and his guard is at his lowest.

Did Sukuna manage to actually execute a slash that could completely cut through at that specific, odd moment and Yuta couldn't stop it? Or... did Yuta let it happen?

What if Yuta is just... tired?

I know, I know!

Like, I don't know, it just seemed odd to me.

It gets me that in 262, they state that their plan is that if Satoru loses and dies, his body will be taken over by Yuta, but... that was it. No one said anything that in order for Yuta to take over Satoru's body that he (Yuta) had to be mortally injured.

He could have switched his brain without being on the verge of dying, right? Which makes me question when Kenjaku uses the technique, does Kenjaku have to be close to dying to body hop?

That's for another day!

I recently (last week) rewatched JJK 0 and watching the beginning of that movie reminded me just how depressed he was and how little of himself he cared for. Yuta tried to off himself.

Also take note that he is constantly amazed by whatever his friends do. Evident enough against his fight against Geto. In 261, he shifts the attention back onto the topic of Gojo when Maki remarks how he's important to him, too. His reaction is highly negative.

He gets angry, and thinking about what Maki said, I feel like that has a double meaning. Yuta is important because he is a friend. But he is important because he is also a weapon. He is the best player after Gojo that they got, he's the strongest after him.

It's almost feels like this is the moment Yuta decided to just throw it all out the window and take that risk because he was tired, but at the same time he wasn't just going to leave the others hanging.

This chapter does feel a little like the ending half of Shibuya. Yuji is once more unable to finish off the enemy that has been constantly terrorizing him because of an interruption by someone with a technique that allows them to use other techniques and just so happen to arrive possessing the body of a Special Grade sorcerer.

But let's go deeper into this, because when you think about it... Yuta is the Yuji in 261.

There are people dying around him after Gojo is out of commission in some way because of a dark haired villain who again uses the techniques of someone else! Both Yuta and Yuji had Gojo on the mind, but disregarded themselves, however there is a difference. Yuji's main goal was to save Gojo, Yuta has to use Gojo's body.

Here's something else about 261. Yuta is also like Kenjaku here. Both choose to possess a body because the technique engraved in the body is useful.

However, in opposition, Kenjaku willingly seeks out to do this. Kenjaku wants to do this because it benefits Kenjaku. Yuta doesn't want to possess Gojo's body, it's not something he is at all happy about. It's not something he ever dreamed of doing.

While this chapter is similar to the Shibuya Incident, there's bits where it mirrors Shibuya but distortedly. Kenjaku gets away with Gojo at the end of that arc. Here? It's not looking too good for Yuta. (I do believe in him though. I do feel like he will indeed accomplish something here.)

It's reminded that Yuta's technique allows him to copy a technique for five minutes. When Mei Mei points out the three possible outcomes of Yuta's technique timer running out, two of them has a result that may lead to death. Only one doesn't, and that's living on in Gojo's body.

So Yuta knows that he has a possible higher chance of dying possessing Gojo's body.

There's also the case of taking over Gojo's body to use his techniques was a last resort when everyone else was wiped out. When Yuta arrives back on the battlefield, Yuji had his claws right in Sukuna's chest. Yuji probably would have easily ripped Sukuna's heart at that moment had not Yuta showed up.

And I know, I know some Yuji's fans wanted that, I definitely would have loved to have seen that (payback), but I think back to Yuta's words in this chapter and overall what has happened.

Everyone, at some point, had to shed that bit of their humanity to win their fight.

It takes a curse to kill a curse. This is literal and figurative to the story. To be a jujutsu sorcerer you have to shed some bit of yourself to kill a curse.

This whole time, Yuji, probably the most human character (how ironic) has little by little shed his humanity as the story progresses. He's losing himself.

What if Yuta caught that? While we know Yuji didn't know some of the plans doing on, we can guess it wasn't the case vice versa. What if Yuta knew about everything or most of what Yuji had to do to get to where he is?

What if Yuta coming in right as Yuji was about to rip out Sukuna's heart was him saving Yuji from losing that last bit of humanity he has? Keep in mind that Yuji and Sukuna mirror each other, so ripping out his (Sukuna's) heart would make Yuji no better than Sukuna.

Shibuya was the start of Yuji truly believing himself to be less of a human. Chapter 261 mirrors Shibuya in some regards and I feel like the next couple of chapters may be Yuji seeing himself as a human, not a cog, again.

What if for the next chapters during Yuta's second confrontation with Sukuna, Yuji may get that hit of morality back when he learns what Yuta has done, he'll reflect on it and think about himself? What if once he learns what Yuta has done he gets a "do I want to be like that" moment?

I don't know, I don't know. But I feel like this...

Yuta is tired. He has those dark shadows under his eyes that make him look physical tired, but what if that is also a connotation/visual way of saying that Yuta is tired of how his life is now?

He acts like he's in a better state than how he really is and maybe this whole time, he just wanted to let go. He puts on this show though because he doesn't want the others to fret over him and snapped when Maki said he was important to them. He no longer felt like a human. Just a monster, a cog to the system... a curse, if you will. He accepted death when he knew there wasn't a high chance of escaping it.

However, he chose a moment that was "Hey, I'm going to die and I accept that, but you (Yuji) I'm giving a chance". I'm sure he knew about Gojo's plan to wanting a better future for the next generation. He's continuing to pave a way for that generation. Yuta's giving Yuji that chance to still be human, something he feels he can no longer be. He's been in Yuji's shoes, so he certainly know the path Yuji may be heading. Yuta may have the intentions to stop him heading in the same direction he and Gojo were steered into.

This may be Yuta's way of helping Yuji break that cycle.

[elderwisp]

ℑ𝔰 𝔦𝔱 𝔱𝔬𝔬 𝔪𝔲𝔠𝔥 𝔱𝔬 𝔡𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔪 𝔗𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔴𝔢 𝔠𝔞𝔫 𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔯 𝔟𝔢 ℜ𝔞𝔯𝔢 𝔥𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔱𝔰 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔫𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔯 𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔞𝔤𝔯𝔢𝔢

[twisted-wonderland-shenanigans]

Past Me: *-struggles for months on end to figure out how to write the next chapter of Kaiju!AU-* "I know what I want to write and I have the scene in mind, but how do I get it on the page????"

Today Me: *-decides to do a web diagram of potential scenes for said chapter after seeing the success I had with a different story's plot point and suddenly has a new plot device to give Yuu a bigger role in the story-* "????? How????"

Soooooooo...yeah, I've been productive, I swear, just words being stubborn with me 😅

[ineed-to-sleep]

She is simply the cutest creature in the whole entire universe. To me

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[deoidesign]

Someone killed my boss last night and he sent me this I'm so fired

god I can't wait to make this comic.

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

P5R Random Thoughts #3: Annoyance, Anger, and Conviction

Or, just a couple more random thoughts about Joker.

I actually do enjoy that Joker seems to sometimes get genuinely frustrated with his friends' antics - I don't know if it reads that way to anyone else, but a combination of his dialogue options and character model body language definitely reads that way to me.

He's gotten mildly annoyed with Ryuji's loudness on several occasions - often having dialogue choices that are essentially some variant of "keep your voice down!" Much as Joker feels what I suspect is quite a lot of gratitude for Ryuji's unflinching support and passion (he was his first friend in Tokyo, after all - no deal, just friendship), his dialogue options also become a lot more passive aggressive during early Kaneshiro arc - and small wonder, because Ryuji's eager carelessness actually did get them caught; thankfully by Makoto, and not law enforcement. Of course, he still cares a lot about Ryuji; I think he's just a little frustrated right now.

He's usually pretty chill with Morgana bossing him around - for what reason, I honestly couldn't tell you, but he does pretty much anything that not-cat recommends. However, when Morgana spontaneously invites Yusuke to stay with Joker without asking him, Joker kind of "!!" and looks at him. It's then followed up with everyone deciding to invite themselves to Joker's place, again, without asking him and Morgana encouraging it. The scene ends with Joker straight up elbowing/jostling Morgana in the bag after everyone's left for Leblanc. Pfft.

He tells Yusuke to hurry it up in Mementos when he gets too in the zone... and much as you can't rush an artist, they do near immediately get jumped by Shadows after that, so, you know, he does have a point.

Even with Ann, Joker frequently sweatdrops at her kind of out-there ideas of how to strengthen her heart. While I wouldn't call it annoyance, per se, there is at least one scene I can think of where two of the options straight up shut her down, and the last is basically a sarcastic "good luck with that", which Ann proceeds to take at face value as encouragement, leading to Joker sweatdropping once again. Lol.

So many of these are basically the equivalent of Joker going >:( at his friends and them typically completely not noticing which is funny as heck.

Also, because I'm the kind of person who loves to read into things, I think it can tell us a little more about Joker. What actually frustrates him here?

Drawing attention to the group in the real world - something he actively tries to avoid, at first, because of consequences for him, and then, because it puts the thieves at risk

Getting himself and the group into unnecessary trouble - so we've got two instances of Joker being mindful of potential consequences

People getting invited over without being asked first - this one's a little ambiguous as to why. Could be a simple courtesy thing, could be related to Joker's earlier obvious discomfort with people getting in his personal space without permission, could be that he likes his privacy. Personally, I suspect he's actually somewhat embarrassed and a little concerned about what his friends' reactions will be to where he's staying - I do have some reasons for this interpretation but ultimately, no matter what reason you ascribe, he's definitely not initially happy about this spontaneous invitation by Morgana.

I think we can even condense the first two and say that Joker seems to be a little more focused on outcomes and consequences than much of the rest of his group, who (before Makoto joins) very much people who act in the immediate moment. He's not quite on par with Morgana's brand of pragmatism, but he does seem to always be at least thinking ahead.

There are a few exceptions, however.

Joker's actual anger is something he is evidently not good at hiding. He has an excellent poker face, but his eyes and, apparently, the way he speaks give it away entirely. To hide his anger, he outright has to not say anything and obscure his face. That actually does not seem like someone who is especially good at hiding strong emotions, even if he can school the rest of himself.

Ann, of all people, has to make excuses for his obvious disdain towards a cop. Every single dialogue option is some flavour of snippy comment. His character model continues to stare directly at said cop, even after Ann interrupts.

He is not thinking about consequences here. Joker fucking hates cops, and he is either very bad at hiding it - or he has no desire to. A very similar thing happened with Kamoshida too. He has nothing but disdain for abusers with power and authority over those they hurt. He also outright doesn't trust the justice system at all after seeing how it failed him and so many others ("They do more than the cops" <-hello. on live tv no less.).

And this leads to something else that's actually a fairly interesting facet to his character that I'm curious to see if it'll get acknowledged in some way.

For the most part, despite the Metaverse confidence and flashiness (which I feel isn't a great metric anyways - all the thieves are like that), Joker responds to most compliments and successes by either complimenting the whole team in turn, or brushing it off as luck or not a huge deal. This is likely in part a cultural thing, but when it comes to genuine appreciation being shown, he does seem to have some semblance of humility about it all - which is why it's almost hilariously shocking how pushy he can be about helping others.

He chases after Ann because she's upset, even though initially she told him not to. He corners some of the students getting exploited by Kaneshiro and won't leave until they tell him the details, even resorting to playing into the rumours about him so that they'll talk. He overhears his confidants in some kind of trouble on several occasions and near immediately asks them about it, and then continues to bring it up if they don't elaborate. It's notable that these instances are some of the few things he decides to do himself, without Morgana's explicit encouragement. I suspect a lot of this is because he has so little faith in anyone else to do the right thing - he has no trust in the justice system, and most adults don't seem to care. But Joker cares, and he will listen to what happened, and he will do something about it, and he will help, and he does so by refusing to let up - he does not wait for someone to ask for help necessarily, he just kind of goes and does it. It's not like I can't see the rationale here, but it's also, kind of, a little bit... presumptuous, in a way.

Again, it's a fascinating contrast with his typical (at least apparent) humility, and his kind of wishy-washy dialogue from early game - Joker has always been firm about this.

The official forming of the Phantom Thieves at the buffet is a scene that really caught my eye for this. Again, much as Joker has the same level of anger as his friends, his answers are still largely "probably"s and "maybe"s. He "hadn't even considered" continuing to act as Phantom Thieves. But interestingly, there is one dialogue option that is stated with none of the usual hesitancy or vagueness - "I want to help people". <- It's the crux of his awakening. This is Joker's true conviction. And he's willing to do anything, be whoever he needs to be, to see this through. He wants to help. He can't bring himself to look away.

Asserting the Phantom Thieves' brand of justice is a conviction that arises later on through proof of the effectiveness of changing hearts, and as a natural extension of his growing familiarity and confidence in their methods. Joker nearly always needs a little push to get started, but once he gets going, he's kind of relentless. He doesn't seem to be truly all that angry with either Makoto or Akechi for their questioning of the thieves' justice (barring his initial reaction), but he does, again, get annoyed at the assumption that the thieves are somehow a threat to people who aren't inflicting harm onto others - Joker says the thieves only target "criminals", implying that even though others may see them as criminals themselves, Joker does not agree. And when Makoto winds up joining them, there appears to be no residual hard feelings from him - she's like them, and she's come around.

It's likely too soon for me to state with any certainty, but I do think that's what Joker is hoping for - that people will come around if he gives them undeniable proof that they help instead of harm. Every character has at least some "selfish" motive to being a Phantom Thief, in addition to the shared goal of providing courage for those left abandoned by society. Ryuji wants positive instead of negative attention for once, Morgana wants his memories, Ann wants to alleviate her feelings of guilt surrounding Shiho, Yusuke aims to understand the human heart, and Makoto wants to feel useful and needed. What about Joker?

He started off this story just trying to help. No one believed him. He was punished for "hurting" someone and there was nothing he could say or do that would convince anyone otherwise. It was his word against society's. And when the Phantom Thieves' motives are brought up, it's the same questions: aren't they going to hurt people? Aren't they dangerous and untrustworthy? And this frustrates Joker in a similar way to the rumours surrounding his own arrest, but now - now he has proof. Proof that they helped, proof that this works. It's undeniable, to him, that real good is coming of this. And so now he has a leg to stand on; he can actually argue his point by saying "the Phantom Thieves aren't like that; look at the people they're helping, and how the people who should've done something can't do half the good they do". It's no longer his word against the rest of the world. He's counting on people being unable to deny what they are forced to witness.

In a way, Joker now has grounds not just to plead the Phantom Thieves' justice... but also his own innocence and good intentions. His defense of their justice is also, I believe, a defense of his own ego, to an extent.