#english not doing too hot rn this seems incredibly messy and overcomplicated

[disasterinbound]

the scene where souji chooses to be trapped by izanami in persona 4 the animation: no one is alone kind of made me start thinking of a (yosuke centered but not really) au again hooray

souji has been repeating the same year over and over again, until he realises that something is very much wrong because why does everything seem so... familiar??? yet also so different?? and then comes to a realisation of "shit i'm in a time loop"

he tries to tell the others. he manages to get chie to remember the past years, of how weird it was that she could remember some details about july yet it was only march.

chie definitely doesnt tell yukiko. but yukiko finds out because souji and chie were trying to find ways to get out of the time loop and she overhears them by accident. its easier to manage if she doesn't think too hard about it. if they all don't really think too hard about it, tbh.

so the three of them try to come up with ways to figure out how this mess started. souji knows that he has to get his juniors to remember as well, though he doesn't know exactly why. maybe its just a gut feeling.

yukiko does know she's gonna get kidnapped and put into the tv, though she doesn't remember who did it, for some odd reason.

but this is yukiko, who in the previous loop had her social link completed by souji, so her dungeon and shadow confrontation is much more easier for her to deal with cuz she remembers her growth.

it probably goes the same for the juniors as well as teddie. after teddie gets a new body and clothes (sponsored by yukiko), they try to get him to remember, but he only has fragments, unlike the rest who can generally recall the loops.

skip to 20th of march. they havent figured out whats going on. its not the murders, they've already solved the case.

until the events of the true ending happen, and souji figures out the identity of the gas station attendant.

of course its izanami whos trapped them all inside a time loop, and maybe she reveals that souji has been looping for a long time but this is the first time he's actually remembered.

and then she gives them a hint to how to stop the time loops. remember the person who was at the beginning of it all. find her son.

then she laughs, and souji wakes up in his room on the twelfth of april, 2011.

this time though, he has a clue.

wanna just note that the original loop was a bad end route when souji failed to get adachi by the end of his dungeon date. izanami appeared to yosuke (susano-o) and accepted his plea to keep his friends safe, even in a timeloop. but yosuke has to stay with her.

so she basically made yosuke disappear from everyone's memories, until souji manages to remember the timeloops.

bonus souyo: once they get all their memories of yosuke back (before they only had this feeling of someone that was missing from their group and only some small parts coming back to them as the year passes) , souji feels really guilty about forgetting yosuke.

maybe because before december, he promised yosuke to never forget him, and yet here he was, having forgotten his own boyfriend. and maybe he doesn't quite cry about it, but it certainly feels like he's about to start blaming himself. no wonder souji never felt complete and whole every loop.

he'll apologise to his partner when he gets him back.