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extensionallydefined · 3 months

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It's time for a sequel! My last essay post was about the thematic relationship between standard Persona 5 and the added Royal content, and there I said that I'd do another little writeup on individuality in that context. I'm going to assess it especially regarding the Royal Trio. So here it is! As always, spoilers, you've been warned.

(This is post-finishing-the-writeup extensionallydefined here - this one's a long one, get ready! It gets into character study territory, yay!)

So, I wanna approach this topic from the lens of the characters of Akechi and Sumire. They're two characters whose individuality and autonomy are heavily put into question in Maruki's desired reality. But before we discuss them.

In Maruki's reality: 1. Your suffering is eliminated. 2. Your wishes are granted.

These are its two basic precepts. In the case of people like Akechi and Joker, it's stated that reality has been rewritten in such a way that they didn't commit any crimes. If we follow Morgana's logic of the world being a product of cognition only, then we can assume that this was done by altering everyone's memory to remember a world where the mental shutdowns and changes of heart never happened.

This means that people's prior actions and lives can be altered via perception, and we can see that this can happen to the individual themselves too - It follows that if Futaba fully believes her mother to be alive, she does not remember anything that happened during, at the very least, her Palace arc during the game - including the choices she made during it.

This means that Maruki's reality fundamentally alters people's perception of their own identity. It's no secret that people's memories are one of if not the most constitutive part of their identities, so if Maruki can change someone's memories, he can change their identity itself.

I wonder, if Maruki deems that someone's identity causes them too much pain and suffering in relation to their desires, is he willing to change it? And if someone desires their identity to be overwritten, will he do it? The answer is yes to both: Akechi is the first case, and Sumire corresponds to the second question. Oh hey! It's like the Royal Trio have very relevant thematic connections!

Let's do Akechi first, since my posts here are thinly-veiled Akechi propaganda in the end. Akechi's whole "thing" is that he's been under others' control his whole life, and he's been putting on different kinds of masks to achieve his goals. Personally, I believe both "Detective Prince Akechi" and "Black Mask Akechi" are not "the real Akechi".

Detective Prince Akechi corresponds to his public persona - the Ace Detective, the celebrity. He goes on talk shows and acts nice, he's a hero of justice, and his sole purpose is uncovering the truth.

This is a mask, of course - He doesn't have that much regard for the truth, and although he does seek his justice in a way, it is not the one he preaches online. His Detective Prince mask is the one that, as he says himself, he uses so that someone will want him around.

On the other hand, we have the Black Mask persona (Holy shit Persona reference?) he utilizes. This one is definitely more genuine than the regular Akechi, but I think his ruthlessness when acting as Black Mask, especially before 3rd semester, is forced as well. I think too many people forget what Ryuji says before his fight:

I actually agree with Ryuji's theory here. I think Akechi needed to force himself to go psychotic to fight the Phantom Thieves after losing the first time. His Black Mask persona is one where he lets himself be controlled by his anger and his thirst for revenge, it's his mask of *Spite*. It's the one that pretends to hate Joker (which is partly why Morgana telling him that he doesn't hate Joker is one of the things that prompts him to use Loki on the PTs). Maybe I'll write more about this if I ever do a deep dive on him, but for now, know this: Akechi's Black Mask is what it says on the tin, a Mask.

The real Akechi is somewhere in between, and somewhere else entirely at the same time. I think the fully genuine Akechi is the one we see in Joker and Akechi's interactions during the Third Semester. He's more than just Robin Hood and Loki. He's the Akechi that can awaken to Hereward.

The thing is - the real Akechi is the way he is because of what led him to develop those masks. Even if they are his "personas", they're still parts of him, born of his pain and suffering and his struggle to get what he thinks he wants.

And that's the thing, isn't it? Maruki denies him that. He takes away his crimes - So he at least takes away Black Mask Akechi. During 3rd Sem, Akechi is aware of this, but in the "accept Maruki's reality ending", the PTs and Akechi are totally chill, described as friends - like nothing bad ever happened.

That's not our Akechi.

That's a sanitized, perfect little version of Akechi that Maruki thinks is the best one for Akechi. But in a way, he's taking away the life and identity that Akechi built for himself - He doesn't think that the flawed Akechi deserves to live. And if you, Joker, decide to take Maruki's reality? That's the ultimate betrayal. You tell Akechi to his face that you prefer the perfect version of him. You're just like the foolish masses that rally behind the Detective Prince - you want the version of him that's happy all the time and can do no wrong. Choosing Maruki's reality is an affront to Akechi's agency, that much is obvious - but it's also a betrayal of his wishes and a violent attack against his very sense of identity.

It's ironic, isn't it? Even if Maruki presents his reality as the one where Akechi lives, that's not our Akechi... So he dies either way. Except if we fight Maruki, he maintains his autonomy til the end, and if you ranked him up to rank 10... his death is still ambiguous.

(And if you're a Shuake enjoyer like me, be it for their platonic, romantic or whatever-they-got-going-on-over-there dynamic... This is just perfect angst material. Chef's kiss.)

After this whole Akechi rant (Goodness me this is turning out Really long I hope I can keep people's attention sksks), let's take a look at Sumire.

Sumire is someone who wants her personality to be overwritten. She does not want to live as someone who led her own sister to die. She wants to be the vessel through which Kasumi's goals are fulfilled. She wants to be Kasumi.

But what does it mean for Sumire to be Kasumi? If we follow our logic, it means that Sumire has to die. She disappears. Her self-perception has to be altered to such an extent that she will not exist anymore, but rather an amalgamation of what Sumire thinks Kasumi is like, what Maruki thinks Sumire wants and Sumire would be born out of the actualization of her wishes. In a way, what Sumire is saying is... she wishes she was the one who died that day instead of her sister. But she still wants to help her sister fulfill her wish. So, instead of just telling Maruki "I want my life exchanged for my sister's" she says she wants to become Kasumi altogether. Kasumi can live through her, bringing the sisters together.

Sumire wants to lose her individuality. Akechi does not. This makes them clash directly. But in the end, Sumire accepts that 1. Her sister was more flawed than how she saw her. 2. She should carry on her sister's wish because it was their collective wish. 3. She should do it as herself, because she has as much worth as Kasumi. So, she ends up carrying on Kasumi's wish, but without losing her identity and creating the "Kasumire" that we meet during the base game. "Beauty in devotion", as they say.

So, in conclusion, what does Maruki's reality do for individuality? It prioritizes the reduction of suffering and the fulfillment of wishes above the subject's self-perception. In the end, Maruki's actualization works through changing cognition - And if cognition is a part of ourselves, well... In a way, we could say that the person whose wishes Maruki grants disappears in favour of a version of themselves whose wishes have been granted. Autonomy-wise, even if Maruki grants people's conscious wishes, it's not like he asked: "Hey, would you wanna live in a new reality with all these philosophical implications?" I think he realizes this to an extent, which is why he allows the Phantom Thieves and Akechi to challenge him.

First, he prioritizes dialogue, but he knows conflict may be unavoidable. "May the strongest will decide our fate" - something like that.

Maybe my point of view is very anti-Maruki, and I'm not trying to hide it. I was against Maruki from day 1, just like Akechi. (To be clear, I don't hate the guy, I love him as a character, but we have vastly different worldviews). I highly value individuality and autonomy and I don't subscribe to Maruki's brand of utilitarianism/hedonism. But I think these rough kinds of trains of thought are the ones that P5R demands from us, and I love it for that. I think my next essay will be about Maruki and death, relating P5 to P3 and Maruki's utilitarianism to Nietzschean ideas of life-denying slave-morality. Yeah, we're going deep into the philosophy sauce in the next one. I hope you'll stick with me for that!

(Btw I added images by popular demand - I hope they help with reading!)

#persona 5 #persona 5 spoilers #persona 5 royal #persona #writeup #goro akechi #akechi goro #takuto maruki #sumire yoshizawa #am i tagging this shuake? you bet i am #shuake #character analysis #media analysis #tw sui implied #hope that last tag makes sense #im still kinda new to tumblr

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ccherlush · 7 months

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(THIS IS EXTREMELY INCOHERENT HOWEVER I AM CORRECT)

Let’s start with the center. Akechi Goro is our ace detective/black mask. The ALIVE???? Above his head is to represent my insanity and act like a detective in a movie. He is the star of this theory. That’s abou all I will say about him as of right now. I am going to truly begin with the photo in the bottom right corner. In this photo you can see a screenshot from within the game. This is the point ingame that Akechi reveals his “true form” as the black mask. I put true in quotations because, like joker, he can also hold multiple personas at once. This is only the second person in game to be shown to be able to do that. Whether or not he can hold as many as joker is simply unknown. I also put true in quotation marks because both Robin Hood (prince side) and Loki (black masks) were formed within him. This means they both represent his true self in a sense. You must battle with him twice(?) I believe in the game before he is defeated. Your first fight with him is against Robin Hood, once you defeat that he has a monologue. This monologue is quite funny and the start of it is shown right below akechi. TEAMMATES????? FRIENDS???? TO HELL WITH THAT. WHY AM I INFERIOR TO YOU?? I would type out the whole thing, but I don’t have time for that. (every single website with it is also blocked on the school computer sighhhhh) In this whole spiel he goes on to talk about how he worked so hard to maintain his perfect image. He talks about how he was an ace detective, a celebrity, and how did you, a criminal living in an attic, defeat him. As you continue to try and calm him down, he starts going crazier. In the midst of it all he explains that Shido is his father, and that he was working with him. (Shido does not know that Akechi is his son.) He goes on to say he wanted to be the one to defeat him, and he was not about to let you take that away from him. As he gets crazier and crazier (I <3 my crazy gf) he soon reveals Loki and the black mask. Triggering mental shutdowns is a capability that only black mask can do. He triggers a mental shutdown within himself and then you get launched into battle with him again. After you defeat him again you begin speaking with him. During this speech it seems he has a slight change of heart and he wants to join you but his shadow counterpart interrupts this conversation (as see in bottom right photo).

In palaces there are sometimes shadow versions of people. These shadow versions are not the actual people, just how the palace ruler sees them. This shadow version of Akechi is like Shido’s lapdog. He calls real Akechi pathetic and worthless for not being able to complete his mission in killing the Phantom Thieves. He proceeds to threaten Akechi, so Akechi shoots a button in the room you are in with him and it causes a wall to come up between the two of you. Behind this wall you can hear two gunshots go off. After those gunshots Futaba (the navigator of the Phantom Thieves) claims to see no singles on the other side of this wall. This would hypothetically mean that both the shadow and Akechi are dead. HOWEVER I DO NOT THINK THIS IS THE CASE IN ONE SPECIFIC UNIVERSE WITHIN THE GAME.

In all the previous persona games there have been errors with navigation in the game. (Error that are canon within the game, Not mistakes with the creators.) In Persona 5 Royal this could be the navigation error. If we look at the photo in the top left, you can see MAruki. Maruki comes into the story soon after you defeat Kamoshida, the first palace in the game, he is a therapist and will be working as a school counselor to help students cope with the abuse that they endured with him. (Assuming you’ve played the game I am not going to explain further). He is one of the confidants you can up your friendship with within the game. You do that by hanging out with him after school for counseling. If you reach the max level with him before he leaves the school you will unlock the 3rd semester and a new palace. You unlock this palace after you defeat the god, Yaldabaoth. Typically this is the end of the game. You defeat the evil, mementoes disappears, and society is mostly reformed, but not in this timeline. In this specific timeline Maruki finds the remains of the dead god and absorbs its power. With this power he “reforms” society to his ideals. He makes the world perfect for everyone and grants their greatest wish. In this scenarios Sumire becomes her dead sister Kasumi, Ryuji is still on the track team, Shiho is perfectly okay, and Futaba’s mother is alive. There are more examples, but that’s all I’m going to say right now. I’m going to rewind a bit again.

Back to right after you defeat Yaldabaoth. It should be Christmas Eve when you defeat it. No later than that. And on Christmas eve it starts snowing, you adire the snow in towns square in Tokyo, but then Sae approaches you. (Sae is a detective much like Akechi. She was building a case against the Phantom Thieves, but at this point in the game she is on your side.) When she approaches you she requests that you admit that you are the leader of the Phantom Thieves. Doing this would incriminate you and send you to prison but asks that you trust her. In the timeline where you do not max out your friendship with Maruki, you will be sent to jail and used to help in trial to incriminate Shido. In this timeline I presume Akechi is dead because he is MIA the entire time. So he is either fleeing and taking on a new identity (which is something I really don’t see him doing) or he is dead. HOWEVER, if you DO max out your friendship with Maruki, right before you accept Sae’s offer Akechi comes out and say he will take your place for that.

I say this is the strongest evidence for his survival in Shido’s palace because this is before Maruki fully absorbs or even absorbs the power of Yaldabaoth at all. This means that Akechi was physically there on his own. MAruki’s weird perfect world powers don’t kick in till at night on New Years Eve. This is known because you have a dream the night before, a very vivid one. It takes you through the school and to Maruki’s office. When you wake up the next morning, you go into the cafe part of LeBlanc. You woke up without Morgana, but you ignore it. When you get downstairs Futaba and HER MOTHER????? Are here. That’s when you first realize something is wrong. (that was all kinda off topic). My point of this is that none of Maruki’s freaky shit triggers until New Year’s day.

Now to disprove anything that may prove me wrong. (I physically can’t be wrong. I’m always right) The first thing that may make my theory seem untrue is the Confidant cards. In Akechi’s, after the altercation in Shido’s palace, it says, “He sacrificed his own life in order to save you…in the end your wishes become one.” In this we can INFER he is dead. HOWEVER THIS CAN”T PROVE ME WRONG. These descriptions are based on what YOU think of the person. What Joker himself knows. This means some information may be inaccurate. It would be accurate for the point of time in the game, but can change in the future. At that point in the game Joker THINKS Akechi is dead. Therefore this can’t prove me wrong. The other thing that may prove that I am wrong is the fact Akechi disappears after MAruki’s palace with all the other delusions. If you think i’m wrong L + ratio

#AKECHI #persona 5 #p5 akechi #persona 5 akechi #goro akechi

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vashtijoy · 1 year

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this question isn't akechi-focused, but you're the person i know who knows japanese and persona 5, so i thought i'd ask anyway jic you were interested in answering. during sumire's true awakening she refers to a "you" that i have always read as her addressing joker, but i suppose could alternatively be her addressing cendrillon? where she says something along the lines of "you" being the one who has always been true to yourself. and i was curious if the japanese through pronouns or whathaveyou made it clear who she was addressing in that moment. thanks :)

Hello, anon! Questions about the Japanese script come firmly under the special interest no matter who they're about. Thank you so much for sending this one to me. <3

The long and short of it is that Sumire is unquestionably addressing Cendrillon here. She addresses her as anata:

Sumire 貴方だけは最初から偽物じゃなかった! anata dake wa saisho kara nisemono ja nakatta! You were the one... the only one who stayed true to yourself! [lit. all along, you were the only one who wasn't a fraud!]

That's to say: Cendrillon is the part of Sumire that always knew who she was, the part she's reuniting with and welcoming home.

Sumire has only four uses of anata in the third semester. Three are in this awakening scene, to Cendrillon; one is to a shadow in Mementos. She has one other usage as Kasumi on 1/2; that's to a shadow, when she's demanding to know how the palace ruler thinks they know about her. Note that that isn't just in the third semester; it's in the whole game. Yoshizawa is excessively polite, and does not refer to people as anata.

So how does she refer to people? She uses their name. This is why she can come across as overusing them in translation—Joker-senpai, Crow-senpai. She simply does not use second-person pronouns, to a degree that maybe (I'm speculating here) makes her sound a little quaint and old-fashioned. Yoshizawa, of course, is very proper and ladylike and "delicate".

Here's an example, from the 7/11 Royal Trio crepe party. You can see {lastname}-senpai has been translated as "you". And very often, "you" will be the completely 100% correct translation of someone's name:

Kasumi 前に{lastname}先輩に話した、夏の大会⋯ mae ni {lastname}-senpai ni hanashita, natsu no taikai... About that summer competition I mentioned to you before?

This isn't something only Yoshizawa does, of course. Here's Akechi a few lines down, doing the same thing. Joker is always 君 kimi ("you"), but when Akechi needs to refer to Yoshizawa (other than a 君は kimi wa... ("and you are..?") at the start of the scene), she is Yoshizawa-san:

Akechi 芳澤さんが通ってるクラブチームって、かなりの名門だったよね。 yoshizawa-san ga tootteru kurabu chiimu tte, kanari no meimon datta yo ne Isn't your club's team considered to be quite prestigious?

Joker has his own problems, of course: he doesn't have a name for the voice acting. He's always kimi, or anata, or omae, etc. But in the third semester, even in the palace, Yoshizawa is still always Yoshizawa-san to Akechi. Maruki, by contrast, often speaks in a much more informal way with a lot more second-person pronouns; he uses kimi to her, like he uses kare ("he") and kanojo ("she") a lot.

What about the other girls on the team? How do they speak? Well, Ann uses kimi a lot to Joker. Makoto uses anata consistently, to just about everyone. Haru mostly uses {firstname}-kun, but she has some anatas in there. As for Futaba—her style of speech is idiosyncratic as hell, very bolshie; even if you date her, her second-person pronoun of choice is the boyish, rude omae, and she never uses honorifics to anyone.

So Yoshizawa's deliberate formality, her avoidance of second-person pronouns, is definitely a character quirk. She never even uses -kun honorifics, for instance—Akechi is always Akechi-san to her, when (for instance) he's Akechi-kun to Ann, Makoto and Haru from the start.

#asks #persona 5 #japanese language #sumire yoshizawa #goro akechi #takuto maruki #the squad #have i mentioned that i love yoshizawa btw?#fuckin love yoshizawa #my girl

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argentsunshine · 8 months

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adding to persona but good au :

the interrogation room actually makes sense and the pt's actually stop being assholes to kechi and pay attention to him practically telling him whats happening to him/him silently begging for help (gee i wonder who else did that but became a pt. hmm...) in the gc conversations and everything..

you see i find this interesting because - compared to Akechi's behaviour - the Thieves are actually pretty chill to him, by which I mean that if futaba or haru just straight up killed him they'd still have the moral high ground compared to him. some of the Thieves have less good reasons for being openly antagonistic towards him, but none of them has a reason worse than "actively plotted to kill one of our best friends" so i think being a bit prickly is understandable. also, just on an interpersonal level, he's just kind of a dick a lot of the time, especially towards people he thinks are dumber than he is, which is most people.

it's also basically impossible that he would have accepted help in sae's palace, even if the Thieves had had all the pieces - he's so resistant to being helped that he tries to kill them all multiple times in the engine room. he's so deep into the sunk cost fallacy - he's dedicated years of his life to this plan, done things that he's clearly not comfortable with, and put so much power in Shido's hands that he has to follow through with it. he's so deep in the sunk cost fallacy that he doesn't even seem to consider that Shido might get rid of him first until that fact is literally pointing a cognitive gun in his face.

but i do think the question of how people treat akechi is interesting! on the level of questions that most people actually have to deal with, how do you treat someone who's clearly suffering in some way but has decided to make this your problem? on a more societal justice level, what do you do when someone with no access to justice within the system resorts to illegal means? if someone commits a crime can what they've done be evaluated separately from their upbringing? can justice be left in the hands of the people harmed or should it be impartial? what's the purpose of the justice system and what's the purpose of punishment? if someone in a vulnerable situation is manipulated into hurting someone, where does the blame lie? where do you draw the line?

also you could argue there's shades of misogyny in the fact that futaba and haru's pain is treated as ignorable because akechi is also suffering. i think it's interesting to examine it in terms of them being able to break the cycle where akechi won't let himself, and what that takes, mentally

now none of this is to say that i don't think people should like akechi or want better for him - i think actually moralising about people liking fictional murderers is boring, and if anyone rbs this from me going "and that's why akechi should die <3" will get blocked - i just think that as a character he raises a lot of interesting questions about. well. justice. and the way people view others. (i have a lot of thoughts about him and "unsympathetic" mental illness symptoms, because my own mental illness often presents in ways that make me hard to deal with, though obviously on a lesser scale) i keep getting worried someday someone's gonna put me in Nerd Jail for getting excessively... (waves hand at the previous paragraphs) about all this.

i mean at the end of the day do what you want and think what you want. i just think it's inherently more interesting to examine things

in conclusion:

#if you're wondering if you should unfollow me for being full of myself this is your cue

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arcplaysgames · 2 years

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So as far as beach episodes go: P4G > P3P > P5R

this one was a snoozefest, so let's touch on the important bits that stand out and then talk about Beige Boy and Solid Snake.

One, I have fully turned against Ryuji on the basis of his frequent and repeated disregard for Morgana as a part of the team and frankly as a full person. I am getting really teed the fuck off because for the last five hours or so of gametime, I have been watching Mona get more and more anxious about his place and about whether anyone on the team cares about him and his journey to the heart of Mementos

and at every fucking opportunity, Ryuji basically reinforces to Morgana yeah, you're not really one of the guys, you're not really part of the team, you're the mascot.

If I had agency in the world of this game, I would take Ryuji aside for a Fucking Discussion about this, because the fuse is lit and I am certain we are headed for a rift between Morgana and the team,a nd you know what? I'm on Morgana's side. He should be pissed, he should be hurt, because I'm hurt on his behalf just watching this unfold.

Fucking Ryuji, you are the bottom barrel of the Token Best Friends. Yosuke would never do me like this*. And if Junpei were here, he'd be Morgana's BFF, are you kidding.

(* in fact yosuke did the Literal Opposite and adopted the 'mascot character' lmao fuck you ryuji)

Yusuke is the fucking load-bearing column holding this game up, i swear to god. I have never understood the Moronsexual joke until right now. I imagine Reverie is like "I have to marry him, he'd be fucking hopeless without me???? it's just the right thing to DO"

Alas, Atlus hates me.

Futaba trying to grab the lobsters while Yusuke holds them out of her reach is the best rigging and animation this game has given us thus far.

Futaba picks her name, Oracle. And she is explicitly here to learn more about her mother's research, less to save people. Which is respectable and she's very up front about it.

THAT'S THE BEACH TRIP. like this one just was..... ugh. it had the weird queerphobic stuff again and it pulled the "the boys try to pull girls and fail" gag again but this time with ZERO charm at all. I remember that scene in P4G with Kanji, Yosuke, and Reverie was one of my favorites because it was genuinely really funny. This had nothing.

SIGH. WHATEVER. LET'S TALK ABOUT MORE INTERESTING STUFF.

blah blah blah evil evil evil blah blah blah

i have at this point accepted that Persona just sucks at foreshadowing the Big Bad of their games and P3 was a fluke. interested to see how P2 does when I eventually play it.

oh shit this game caught some of the Sony Hot Sad Dads disease, huh? Iwai has a dweeby looking son named Kaoru and he's ex-yakuza.

Do I like Iwai or do i just miss MGS2 Solid Snake? Who could say.

Also his shop theme tune fucks severely, it sounds like SMT4.

Anyway, after that we're having very domestic funtime at the cafe when

oh shit Beige Alert

Futaba immediately hides behind Reverie because she got Vibe Radar. Vibedar, if you will.

I feel like when Akechi enters your vicinity, your phone should get one of those emergency PSAs. Like when a tornado touches down in your county.

Okay so. /points. Eyes closed.

/points.

The fuck is happening here. Like, bruh, you showed up and immediately mentioned the lady who threatened Sojiro's custody of his daughter, and now you are looking like a wounded puppy because it turned the atmosphere frosty.

You did that, homeboy, that was you. I know you are astute enough to know that.

He sadly drinks his coffee and reveals his backstory: he was raised by a single mom who died soon after, then got stuck in the foster care system for a while.

THAT FAKEASS SMILE AGAIN. See, this is why I know he stirred up the hostile energy on his arrival on purpose, he is extremely good at tone and social cues, enough so that he can use or not use them to his advantage.

I would tell Reverie to install a deadbolt on his door but he doesn't have a door lmao this is going to be great

I keep saying this but: Bryan Fuller vibes. My god, Bryan Fuller vibes.

Futaba realizes she missed the fireworks festival so she runs out to get some small fireworks, and Morgana goes with her to make sure she's okay.

Morgana is the fucking best. He really gives a shit and puts himself out there for people and I just want him to be appreciated dammit!

This is Reverie's family now, yep. See that gurl? She is his sister. See that old man? That's his dad. Yep!

Also Sojiro doesn't even know Morgana is a person and treats him better than Ryuji.

yeah this is me going full kill bill sirens on Ryuji, sorry. i will slam dunk him into a fucking dumpster, i'm so angry with him for his MANY MANY fuck ups and, specifically, how he doesn't seem to learn or grow from any of them.

I think that's my beef with him. Like, P3P, Junpei did multiple big fuck ups, but he both apologized explicitly for them and also learned from them and became a better person for it. He was my ultimate ride or die. I romanced Akihiko but my true love was my broship with Junpei.

Yosuke also fucked up a lot and even went full Joker Mode once, but he also experienced one of the longest arcs of character growth in the game. I remember when I started to like him after being tepid on him for the first third of the game and how annoyed I was that he was growing as a person!!!! But he wound up being a fave.

I need Ryuji to get his shit together and start growing tf up bc I am real sick of his self-important bullshit and how he steps on Morgana's feelings. I am hoping whatever the upcoming blow-up with Morgana is leads him to wake tf up, but also I'm not holding my breath.

At least I have Ann and Yusuke.

#p5 #persona liveblog

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pugs-cats-bb-8 · 5 months

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Persona 5-The Daybreakers

This has never been dubbed into English, it is subbed through. Just letting people know.

I love Morgana 🤣🤣

They have to go down to the train station to access Mementos? I thought they entered from above. So they just disappear into thin air?

So this takes place sometime after Yusuke.

Why does Ren look pissed and disinterested?

I love the shot of them getting in.

Ren drives like I do. 🤣🤣

I can drive the cat. No, I can't.

They make Akechi even prettier 🥰🥰Also his eyes look more red here.

This dude looks like Wonder.

I know that beer brand 🤣🤣

Pink chalk?

Yusuke's friend looks like a wet puppy.

Does the game ever ask "Why don't they go to the police"? Like I know it's established pretty early on that the police aren't going to do anything (the game's words, not mine) and that's basically why the Phantom Thieves exist.

Ren is pretty 😍😍 And basically stalking that dude. Way to take tips from your boyfriend🤣🤣

I've never seen Ren wear a cross-body bag. Minus that uh, fashion disaster (IMHO) of a collab with a tourism thingy.

Damn, he really pissed... and hot.

Ren looked normal for a frame. Is this an AU? Like Ren's harder than usual.

Why does he react like he forgot Morgana was there? 🤣🤣

My man is risking his ass using Leblanc. Like I remember reading about this on the Wikia but really. I like how they weren't concerned about using Leblanc. Like really, especially cause Ren could get kicked out, property could be damaged, Morgana could get hurt, Sojiro could get hurt if he walks in. Not to mention it's just plain rude to be that careless. Ren has balls.

Where'd the panic light come from? They don't have Futaba yet. Iwai!?

If it wasn't Makigami? then who was it?

It was his brother, Yusuke's wet puppy friend. 😲😲

He's the leader? I thought he was the lackey😲😲 I thought the older dude was the leader.

That transformation was uh...

Where'd the bloody Oni come from? I thought we were fighting Mitras.

Add in the onion bird.

Ren is badass 😍😍🥵🥵

If Arsene's gonna get more lines. I would love it if it got dubbed. That's part of the reason I kept him. 😋😋😋😋

I like how they do baton pass all athletic and dramatic.

Long legs 😍😍

What I wouldn't give to be his position. 😍😍

"The arrogance in your heart. I stole it". (I accidentally flipped it although I think it works better the other way). It reminds me of a line from dancing. "Did you enjoy the show? Well, until next time". 🥵😍

Although, it sounds like intil to me. Same thing happened with Ippon Datara. I thought it was Ippon Tatara. In my defense, I had to learn what his voice sounded like.

Wait, this dude is a Mementos Mission. He's a combo of 2MM. 6/18 you get The Phantom Thieves vs. Burglary Ring. The story matches up halfway and the dude's name is Makigami but it never mentions him having a brother. It's even the same shadow. Fake-Man Show in 3rd sem has a brother that he abused and he says the same thing as his shadow disappears.

Morgana's dopey face. Maybe because I have it paused? 🤣🤣

Pretty girl in the crowd.

Just hear a random cat and find a key and a note 🤣🤣. That's how we got some of our cats. Minus the key and note.

He's kinda cute. Why does he look like a mix of Akechi and Natsume? But add in wet puppy.

😍😍😍🥵 Fuckin' gorgeous shot. Reminds me of when Morgana's floating away at the end/near the end of 5.

They went straight into Kaneshiro, without Makoto? I wish the game did that. 🤣🤣 Maybe it was near Kanoshiro to begin with.

So, that was a test run? I don't know how to word it. It makes sense, given that Ren's not that confident when he starts. It does provide insight on what thiefy lengths Ren is capable of.

A-1 (Steak Sauce🤭) animated this? It looks amazing. What happened between episode 0 and 1? Come to think of it they did the opening for Radiant Historia too. Which also looks great and it's on the 3DS. I think they also did a couple of P3 movies too. So, why does the anime look like it does?

youtube

#ren amamiya #persona 5 #The Daybreakers #long post #Youtube

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velvetroomkeeper · 5 months

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Wondermagenta’s terrible persona 5 criticism pt 2

What is with the attitude for a reviewer the tone here is awfully condescending and dismissive like “oh this stupid game isn’t worth my time” like at least cvit had the decency to be thorough (well then again that’s not saying much

Uh oh boy someone clearly doesn’t understand akechi’s character if there making this dumb complaint

I’ll just be brief but to put it bluntly akechi is supposed to be like the phantom thieves but gone down the wrong path like many of the others he is someone who was shunned and taken advantage of however instead of reforming society like the phantom thieves he wants to take revenge through killing shido and humiliating him I’ll touch on more of his character as I go along

Oh sure it’s not like hiding your true self WAS A CONSISTENT THEME THROUGHOUT THE GAME and using light and Adachi when both of them had to hide their true selves posing as a simple high school student and an idiot detective respectively and akechi does that as well he’s what happens when you constantly try to seek approval from people who don’t deserve eventually they might turn on you like what happened in shido’s palace Why are you such a moron you sham game designer!

Sorry got a little flared up their let’s go

See above argument and pay attention to the daddy issues thing oh baby we’re gonna come back to that one another thing akechi’s persona is stated to cause mental aggravation I think the implication here is that akechi’s persona may be part of how he’s behaving

The reason the game is because it recognizes akechi despite everything he’s done is still a victim it doesn’t justify his actions but it lets us empathize with him as well as akechi’s jealousy over joker being loved while he’s alone don’t get me wrong he’s an asshole but he’s still human

Also I find it pretty hypocritical to praise light and then call akechi unrealistic when they both kill in your same blog

(Not bringing up royal since this is about the vanilla persona 5)

Uh no they don’t the game makes it evidently clear that everyone was onto akechi

Watch it bub that’s a dangerous line you’re treading and it’s dismissing worldbuilding

And another shido doesn’t have control over his cognition his cognition is just more advanced than any other palace owners the game makes that very clear (mostly Likely due to his connection with yaldaboath) and place owners typically aren’t aware of what goes on in their own palace the game establishes that early on

See above argument

Akechi ends up causing the phantom thieves to be framed as criminals I’d hardly call that a small part and no synergy really let’s take a look

Principal kobayaki had connections to the siu department

Madarame and Kaneshiro were giving money to shido

Futabas mother was killed by people who work for shido and those same men lied about why futabas mother died

Okumura was paying to cause mental shutdowns

Sad was part of the siu prior to her change

Are you just being stupid here and your criticisms aren’t shit I just debunked them on the same post

Oh no it’s not like this has been foreshadowed in the beginning

It’s not like people’s cognitive abilities helped enhance the phantom thieves

It’s not like any of the criticisms you made were lazy misinformed or flat out dismissed

Gee no this game sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks it suck it suck it

youtube

Sorry about that I just had to get that off

So yeah these are terrible criticisms and the fact that I saw some people praising these criticisms makes me pissed because of how genuinely poor these criticisms actually are

Some game designers this asswipe is this review was lazy poorly constructed dismissive condescending and I haven’t even touched the political stuff yet then again people flocked to cvits video so why am I surprised

#persona 5 #persona #response #goro akechi #can you tell I’m an akechi Stan

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cobaltswriting · 2 years

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So, time for a bit more writing, although this will be a bit different.

This is more of a theory. Specifically, for Persona 5.

I will be mentioning Palaces that are late in the game, but that's why there are spoiler tags. I will also say that this is a long post, so if it's on your dashboard and you don't wanna read it, just hit J to skip to the next post.

So, here's the basic theory...

I think Sae Niijama's Palace forms far later than the others.

I'm basing this one a few things.

A. Only Akechi really noticed (or pretended to care) the difference in her behaviour B. She still seems to care about other people, especially Makoto C. The appearance of 'people' in her Palace.

So, let's go though this step by step. C will be the longest one.

So, we'll start with A. Akechi was the only one who really noticed the different in Sae's behaviour. Not even Makoto thought her sister's behaviour was much different from normal, her worries being about what Sae was doing would mean for her and the other Phantom Thieves rather than what her sister was actually doing.

Keep in mind Akechi knows about the cognitive world, and likely had some knowledge of Shido's plan, since he was one of Shido's best assets.

So it was likely part of Shido's plan to put all the pressure for catching the Phantom Thieves onto Sae, to help cultivate a Palace. It's not that simple, though. It's not like Palaces are Prisons from Scramble, you can't just take someone and make them the ruler of it, as they did with Zenkichi's daughter.

So they kept piling the pressure on Sae, making it so Sae's main thought would be 'I have to win this'... resulting in a Palace, with a gambling theme. Although the theme isn't entirely down to the plan, Makoto wasn't surprised by the appearance of the Palace, more the Palace itself. But, the appearance of it wasn't necessary, just that she had one.

Since Makoto didn't notice a significant change in her personality or demeanour that would point towards a Palace for her, I'd say it must be recent. Akechi noticed, because he was specifically looking for it.

B. She still seems to care about other people

This is more earlier, but the thing is, a Palace does not pop up overnight. While putting pressure on Sae to catch the Phantom Thieves would have helped cultivate a Palace, I doubt it would work to give someone a Palace if they wouldn't have one.

Like, the pressure was feeding a seed, but it wouldn't have worked if a seed wasn't there to begin with. And no, I'm not saying Sae is a bad person, keep in mind that Futaba had a palace. And while I won't be talking about him in this theory, because it's not that relevant since he's a special case, Maruki also wasn't a bad person.

In any case, we are shown that Sae does still care about Makoto. She snaps at her sometimes, but is not that cruel to Makoto, and certainly not abusive. She cares about Makoto, wants her to get a good education so she can succeed.

Let's look at some of the other Palace rulers, here.

Kamoshida was abusing the members of the Volleyball team. Physically, and, in the case of some of the girls, sexually. While they never outright say 'rape', I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of it as well, although I do think it would have been mentioned more outright if it was, and that Kamoshida would have confessed to it when his heart was changed. He didn't care about anyone other than himself.

Madarame used his students to profit off their art. He did a pretty good show of pretending to care for them, kept them fed, but this was all so he could profit off them. We know that when one student rebelled, they got completely blacklisted in the art world. Madarame only cared about himself.

Kaneshiro... you don't get to be the boss of a mafia like he was the boss of by caring for other people, or by being nice. He was also blackmailing children, and forcing girls into sex work if they could not pay. Even the one person he might have 'cared' for, the main point of giving her money was to blackmail Makoto and the others for the money that'd fill that gap. He didn't care about anyone other than himself.

Futaba... is a special case. She did care about other people, although by the time we see that, the only people she cares about are her mother (despite the view of her mother having been twisted and distorted by the fake suicide note) and Sojiro, bugging Leblanc in order to keep an eye on him.

Okumura very clearly did not care about anyone other than himself. This'll be mentioned in the next bit as well, but all the cognitive beings in his palace were robots. Even Sugimura and Haru were robots. And those who broke down were simply discarded. He didn't care for anyone.

Shido... the only people he 'cared' about were those who he could profit from knowing. And that was more like a business transaction, offering them a place of power when he became Prime Minister, in return for them helping him to reach that position. He definitely didn't care about any of them, a lot of the people he had Akechi kill were people who got too big for their boots. I think he mentions that he wouldn't have had Okumura killed if Okumura hadn't wanted to make the move into politics. He didn't care for anyone.

Sae, however, does still care about Makoto, at the very least. That does say something, since Okumura didn't care about Haru as a daughter. He only used her as an item, an offering to another family.

And now we come onto point C. The appearance of people in her palace.

I will admit this one isn't quite as clear cut a difference as with others, but bear with me here.

The appearance of cognitive beings in someone's palace tells you a lot about the ruler's opinion on people in general. As well as what is happening to them.

In Kamoshida's Palace, all the cognitive beings were the members of the volleyball team. The males were being abused, but the females were being... sexualised. We see shadows of the girls basically nude, and we also see Ann and Shiho in bikinis. They are to be abused, whether physically or sexually, although he's managed to convince himself that the girls WANT it.

In Madarame's palace, there are two sorts of cognitive beings. We have people lining up to go into the gallery/museum, customers who are to there to give him money. And we have his former students, all paintings. Items in his gallery. His works of art.

In Kaneshiro's palace, there are also two sorts of cognitive beings. We have guards and cronies, who work for him. And we have the people he is blackmailing, who are walking ATMs. Sources of money, until they break down and become useless to him.

Futaba's palace is a special case. There aren't really any cognitive beings there, other than the Cognitive Wakaba, who is a giant monster who hurls abusive lies at her daughter when she shows up, and says that Futaba belongs to her. Once that one is taken out though, a Wakaba who is more like how Wakaba actually was appears. As we've mentioned though, Futaba is a special case. Futaba's distorted desire of wrath was directed at herself, she was the victim of her own desires, rather than other people.

It is also notable that Futaba's Shadow is not intentionally hostile to you. She does want to help you, she wants you to free Futaba from her pain. But her trauma and other issues get in the way, since Futaba puts up walls to stop people from hurting her.

Okumura, as we've mentioned, the cognitive beings in his palace are all robots. Even Sugimura, who appears to be human at first, turns into a robot before you fight him. For him, people are to be used.

Shido, all of the people there ARE people, but they're also all under his thumb, and all of them compliment him a LOT. He's deluded himself into thinking they all love him and they all need him. When there are probably a bunch of them who do not like him at all, but can see the profit in helping him. Like, keep in mind Akechi, the cogntive version of Akechi was a loyal killer, whereas the real Akechi was planning on betraying Shido.

And then we get to Sae.

All the cognitive beings in her palace ARE people. While you could say that the games are rigged, and that she is simply profiting from them, keep in mind how casinos works. The games are rigged, but it is still possible to win at them. She hasn't quite gotten to the point of other Palace rulers where she simply profits from absolutely everyone, otherwise when you start winning, security would be on you immediately to beat you up and take the coins you earn, and there would be no-one on the higher member levels. She does try to cheat you near the end, by jacking up the price required to reach her, but that's more of a self defence thing. Think about it, wouldn't you do the same in that situation if you knew that a group was on their way to possibly kill you?

All of this adds up to me thinking that Sae's Palace is relatively new compared to the others. Otherwise Makoto would have noticed a more pronounced difference.

As for how long I think the others had their palaces, just as a bonus...

Kamoshida probably had his before he started at Shujin, from an over inflated ego related to his gold medal. He definitely had it when he broke Ryuji's leg.

Madarame probably had his palace for a LONG time. Considering how many students there are pictures of, and how old Madarame himself is, I would estimate at least 2 decades, and that's me lowballing it.

Edit: I was reminded by the lovely @auncyen that Madarame's 'descent' started with the Sayuri, and Yusuke's mother. Yusuke was three when his mother died, and he is, I believe, the same age as Joker, Ryuji and Ann in Persona 5, which places him around 16-17, so this would have started about 13-14 years ago. With me having been reminded me of all this, I will re-estimate Madarama's palace to having appeared somewhere between 12-13 years ago. While what Madarame did was absolutely terrible, it would still take time for his Palace to form, I think. Although the Sayuri was, of course, a huge part of it, hence it being the Palace's treasure.

Kaneshiro probably had his Palace when he started in the mafia. One of the things about his Palace is that he frets about getting money, otherwise he'd be worthless, which is more something I'd think someone lower on the ladder would be thinking. But considering how he acts in the real world, blowing 3 million like it's nothing, I think he's in charge. Might have someone he answers to, but he's definitely very near the top of the ladder.

Futaba's is a bit easier to guess. We know that Wakaba died about two years before the events of Persona 5, and that a lot of her issues stem from seeing her mother die, and the fake suicide note. I do not think it would have sprung instantly from her mother's death, and that a Palace likely requires time to develop. So it would be less than 2 years old, but definitely more than 1 year old, and I'd wager close to the two year mark.

Okumura... it has been stated that he was not always the way he was. But somewhere along the way, he changed. I imagine he would have changed sometime after taking charge of the company, maybe a little before. I would assume his palace has been around for a decade. It is notable that his move into the political world involved 'leaving' his palace behind, at which point I imagine the palace would have actually changed to reflect his new goal.

Shido... it's hard to know, honestly. I can't remember if we learn much about his backstory, other a little about his history in politics. He definitely had it when Ren encounters him before the events of Persona 5, and had had it for quite a while. Something tells me that he hasn't had it as long as Madarame or Okumura, though. I'd probably lowball it at 5 years, but it's likely closer to a decade, although, as I said, maybe not as long as Okumura, and definitely not as long as Madarame. We know that the metal shutdowns have been going on for two years, so the MINIMUM, it would be 2 years. Because it'd be a bit fucked up to find out about the cognitive world, and then immediately go "this'd be good for killing people!"

But yes, I think Sae Niijama's palace is the most recent one. Thank you if you've read to the end of my rambling.

#Persona 5 spoilers #Persona 5 Royal spoilers #spoilers #theory #headcanon #tw: rape #tw: abuse #Persona 5 #Persona 5 Royal

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ciaran-archive · 3 years

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Character I really want to bitch about: Akechi Goro P5R. I can't really put it into words but god I hate fandom characterisation of Goro. Not in a "everyone woobifies him" way but "how can everyone ignore the huge fcking handle-with-care sign on him". I'm. Frustrated. Hngh. I'm sure I'm too hyper about this, but just. no. All of the tragedy of his character, his intelligence, his relationship with his mother is almost completely lost in "aggresively-tsundere serial killer". I don't get the need to... dumb him down or make him incapable of love or lacking in understanding and empathy while portraying his rather just anger at the world. His relationship with Ren too, the confusing love he feels and the way destiny works into their relationship to nearly destroy them both. I feel Ren is portrayed awfully... helpless and morally upright wrt Goro. Which does not make for good ShuAke. (They're foils, thesis and antithesis, not... I'm not sure how to explain it honestly). This is why I prefer JP Goro, a lot of nuance is lost in the English translation of the game itself.

(I loved your characterisation of him a lot, I think I sent some anon asks fangirling about your fics.😅)

I recently got into BSD, and I think I'm going to stay away from fandom (esp wrt Dazai) outside of jokes. There is just no trust.

YES I FULLY AGREE (and thank you for liking my fics!!)

i have said this before, i think, but a huge element of akechi's character is that he is deeply traumatized by humanity as a whole. he has little faith in the goodness of people and even less in systems and governments. he doesn't want to be kind to people because it doesn't end well for him. he cannot bring himself to help people because he has to think about how that might hurt him down the line, and no one else is going to think about his pain. also, he is 18. he's a kid! you know who else is a kid? everybody.

one of the best themes in p5 is how every phantom thief has their own traits that are reflected in akechi: ryuji and goro have similar relationships with their parents; ann and akechi are both public figures/minor celebrities with the self-image issues that entails; yusuke and akechi both have corrupt father figures who use them relentlessly; haru and akechi both have fathers who treat them like objects; futaba and akechi are both clever and lonely in their cleverness and unable to connect with other kids their own age. and akira, of course, always akira, but all of them.

any of the thieves could have ended up like akechi, if not for. if not for akira, if not for people who loved them and reeled them back from the edge, if not for each other. akechi is the only person who gets none of that until it's too late for him. of course he's bitter and jealous and hates everyone! anybody would, in his place.

another thing is that trauma just makes it harder for you to empathize with other people because all your resources are dedicated to getting through your own days. akechi isn't inherently unempathetic or incapable of kindness (not that lacking empathy is bad); he's just not in a place where he could exercise those traits even if he had them. he pretty much has to kill - we don't know what, if anything else, shido had to maintain control over him. can you imagine how much worse it would be if he spent time sympathizing with his victims and the consequences of his actions and then had to do it anyway?

and lastly, p5 stresses that children don't get choices. children don't have power in a world ruled by corrupt and callous adults. they have to bear the abuse until the universe takes pity on their misery and grants them a persona - but in akechi's case, a persona isn't enough. his life is still dominated by the self-serving cruelty of adults because it's not just power that saves you, it's also having other people who understand. and akechi never had anyone understand him until long after it would have changed the trajectory of his life.

as for the way akira gets flattened to his moral uprightness - lmao. pretty much the whole point of akira's character is that he would be exactly like akechi if not for, again: if not for sojiro, ryuji, ann, yusuke, futaba, all his confidants, hammering in over and over that what gives him strength is the bonds he builds with other people, and what keeps him moral is those same bonds. he was willing to kill! it's not that he's a better person than akechi inherently, it's just that the course of his life is dramatically different in ways that support him being good. it's a tenuous morality. he does have an internal sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice - akechi does too. it's not what made him good, though.

i didn't realize i still had so much to say about p5! thanks for sending this in and thanks again for liking my fic <3

#madhya-raatri #i love your url #asks #character salt #i'll reveal your true form #a lit match and a lighter

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ellenripleysbelieveitornot · 4 years

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What about an Akechi/Joker role swap AU where Akechi is still the detective prince and Joker is still the Shujin delinquent, but the major difference is that Morgana never lost his memories and found Akechi before he approached Shido with his metaverse assassination plot?

Like, imagine Akechi, bitter and jaded, who has just awakened Loki and felt the terrifying and thrilling rush of the berserk power. He's formed a plan to get back at his piece of shit father, even managed to set up a meeting, which he had to set up months in advance, and on the day he's going to present Shido with info on the metaverse, he winds up arriving a few minutes late, because even though he intended to be early, he was accosted by a talking cat (he's been in the metaverse, so he can hear him) on the way over, and in the whole wtf-ery of the moment, lost track of time. Shido, being Shido, refuses to see him and will not reschedule because he doesn't like having his time wasted.

Pissed off, Akechi leaves to find Morgana still waiting for him outside. So he doesn't look like an idiot yelling at a cat on the street, he brings Morgana back to his shitty apartment, where Morgana explains why he had found Akechi and whats up. He doesn't know about Yaldobaoth taking Igor's place, he just knows there's two champions, and Akechi was the one he found first, so he must be Igor's chosen champion. (It is my theory that it doesn't actually matter who was Igor's and Yaldobaoth's champions, it was more about the choices they each made and where they ended up.)

Akechi has no interest in saving the world, but he knows that if he wants to get back at Shido, he needs to become someone of consequence, so he agrees to undergo Morgana's training, since Morgana clearly knows more about the metaverse than he does, and he can use it to solve cold cases, earning him a place as the Detective Prince. He changes a few hearts, to pacify Morgana, too. It takes a couple years, but during his senior year in high school, he makes it, earning himself the cooperation of the police and the spotlight of the public eye. He's getting so close to making Shido notice him that he can practically taste it. Also, what’s this ‘velvet room’ he keeps dreaming about?

Then Morgana finds Kamoshida’s palace and is like ‘heyo, you thought changing hearts in the metaverse was cool, check this shit out’ and Akechi is admittedly intrigued , so he takes a look. He sees the inside of Kamoshida’s heart and is appropriately disgusted and says to Morgana, ‘hey we should totally kill this guy’s shadow.’ Morgana’s like ‘why is your first suggestion always murder, we don’t know what would happen if we killed his shadow, Igor wasn’t very clear about that bit, we should try stealing the treasure instead’ and Morgana has been useful (and it’s been really nice to have the company these past two years, though he won’t admit that) so Akechi agrees ‘fine, we’ll steal the treasure, but if that doesn’t work, then I’m killing his shadow.’

And that’s when Ryuji and Ann make an appearance (’ohmigawd, goro, be more careful with that damn app, i s2g.’) Ryuji’s mom apparently thinks Akechi is pretty neat and watches all his interviews, so Ryuji knows who he is and is delighted to find out that the lame-ass detective his mom has talked about is actually a grumpy badass in the metaverse, with this shadow that has some kind of insane power, and hey, he helped them bring down Kamoshida (alive,) so maybe he is actually pretty cool, even though sometimes he spaces out and talks about evil twins and some longed-nose dude. He decides then and there that he’s going to be Akechi’s best friend, since he apparently has none, and Ann is all too happy to join in for the ride, and all of Goro’s protests have fallen on deaf ears, and they know about the whole detective prince thing being a facade, so he might as well indulge them for now.

The ‘Phantom Thieves’ (a name that makes Goro want to roll his eyes whenever he hears it, and why is everyone calling him ‘leader?’) gain fame and change hearts, gaining new members such as this weird-ass artist dude who fights with ice, and oh, god, one Nijima is bad enough, don’t tell me there’s two! and she uses nukes, wtf?!

Around this time, he also meets Shujin’s delinquent, enigmatic transfer student whose talk of hope and justice never quite seem to reflect in his stormy grey eyes, and he and Goro are clearly birds of a feather in a way, he can tell, there’s just something about him, and he thinks this guy might actually be his best friend, but don’t tell Ryuji that, he’d never hear the end of it.

Akechi learns the truth behind Akira’s arrest and Shido’s involvement and he is disgusted to find that he genuinely wants to help this guy, and he can’t do that if Shido’s dead, maybe he doesn’t want his revenge as badly as he thought??? Oh, ew, I have feelings that aren’t anger and it’s all my friends’ fault, I can’t just leave them and go off to get revenge, they’d literally die without me, those lovable idiots. Also, when Ryuji saw his home, he pretty much insisted he stay with him instead, and Ryuji’s mom reminds him of the good times he had with his own mother, and he honestly doesn’t think he has the strength to disappoint her like that. So, he decides to change Shido’s heart, but he knows that there’s no way that this little group of miscreants is strong enough to take on the fucked up bullshit that he’s seen in Shido’s heart, so let’s hit pause on that for now.

Shido had Wakaba killed via completely non-supernatural ways and stole her research, same as before, so Futaba still has a palace. He found out Akira worked at Leblanc a while ago and started dropping by, and then somehow Ryuji found out about it, and now all the Phantom Thieves know, so much for a peaceful place to get away, but he actually doesn’t mind that much, and Akira lets Akechi keep an eye on the shop when there are no customers so he can go out and do errands and Boss doesn’t mind, so they’ve ended up hanging out there as a group from time to time and talking Phantom Thief business, so Futaba knows who they are, and asks for their help.

Okumura’s palace pretty much goes the same, Okumura dies somehow, are we responsible, why does murder actually make me feel kinda bad, stupid friends and their stupid good influence.

Goro attends the Shujin student fair as guest speaker, whoa, the class president being friends with Akechi does have its perks, doesn’t it? Akira finds them all there together and approaches them, tells them he saw them go into the metaverse, awakened his own persona, and saw a guy in a black mask kill Okumura’s shadow, hey why don’t I join you, you probably need all the help you can get, who’s heart are we stealing next, how about Sae, she knows my probabtion officer and has been giving me hell, plus I already checked, she definitely has a palace.

They agree, and oh, hey, Akira can hear Morgana talk now, but WAIT A MINUTE?! Didn’t he hear Morgana talk before when he told Goro that Leblanc didn’t sell sushi, even though Goro hadn’t asked for any?

They hack Akira’s phone, learn that Shido (Akechi recognizes that voice) will have thugs waiting to capture them when they leave the palace. They plan around it, pull the metaverse switch and manage to sneak a heavily drugged Akechi out of the warehouse Shido stashed him in by traveling through the metaverse. Shido’s lackey’s have written a fake suicide letter from the leader of the Phantom thieves, and the chief of police, under Shido’s orders, delivers a statement confirming its authenticity, and look the plan succeeded. All they need to do know is take down Shido.

Things are going great, until they get to the engine room, where Joker, having realized what happened, is waiting for them. Joker, who lost everything after he transferred, who discovered the metaverse completely alone, who didn’t mean to kill that guy’s shadow, but he attacked him first, and Shido had somehow known, had been keeping an eye on him, had him convicted for a crime that he didn’t commit in the hopes that he would break because he needed an agent in the metaverse, and so far he’s had no luck. Joker, who had nothing left to lose and had accepted the only hand that had reached out for him.

They fight, and when it looks like things are going badly for Joker, he pulls out... a second persona?!?! At least, it looks like a persona, but something about it is off. it looks familiar somehow. And then Akira asks if they knew it was possible to fuse personas and Akechi realizes what he’s looking at. These aren’t the clean executions that Caroline and Justine perform, these are personas that have been ripped apart and haphazardly thrown back together with no thought to form or elegance, look, there’s a Yaksini’s arm, and that bit right there clearly used to belong to a Rangda, and I think that piece might have belonged to a Seiryu, and Akechi should stop listing personas now because Ann thinks she’s going to be sick.

They keep fighting. Joker can’t understand the difference in power between them. After all, aren’t they the same? Unloved, unwanted, soldiers pitted against each other by some bullshit higher power?

When Joker shoots the bulkhead door closed and Futaba reports that she’s lost Joker’s reading, Akechi vows then and there that he’s going to kill Shido after all. And he almost does. He stands there, with his gun pressed to the head of the shadow of his father, his friends can’t blame him, and even Morgana knows better than to try and stop him. But he doesn’t. He remembers Akira’s madness there at the end, and wonders what he would have become of him if it weren’t for Ryuji, who somewhere along the way, he’d realized he’d stopped tolerating and started actually liking. Ann, who shared his woes about being in the public eye and swapped tips with him about how to handle the press. Yusuke, who, although he was still completely bizarre to him, appreciated the beauty in life and didn’t tease Goro for his taste in Grandpa clothes. Makoto, who knew the importance of hard work and who, between herself and her sister, had caused Goro to pick up some healthier coping mechanisms. Futaba, who made fun of him for his food blog, but liked the same nerd bullshit that he did and would bombard him with memes until his day somehow became a little less shittier. Haru, who dreamed of starting her own business and actually cared about Goro’s opinions, and could threaten someone with a smile in a way that even Goro was jealous of. And Morganna, who had reminded him what it was like to not be lonely, and demanded more sushi than he could afford, but always made sure Goro ate his fill, instead of getting so focused on his work that he forgot.

Akechi guesses that he must have turned soft somewhere during the past several months, but after seeing what happened to Akira, he can’t help but be grateful, knowing with certainty that if things had turned out differently, that would have been him. Hey, Morgana, you know that world-saving bs you talked about two years ago? Let’s leave this piece of shit here to rot and focus our attention on that instead.

And you guys know the rest.

Or, at least, that’s how I thought it would go. Feel free to share your thoughts. :)

#shuake #akeshu #akechi goro #akira kurusu #ren amamiya #Shuake roleswap #roleswap #persona 5

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patchesthegothictramp · 4 years

Text

Feather Seeker and the Okinawa Jail

So anyone who’s been talking to me knows Feather Seeker is a game that’s perked my interest from the get-go, and I’ve been thinking of talking about it for a while. Now that I’ve been able to replay Royal and play Strikers, some other things have come out in the meantime and I’ve been paying more attention to additional media, I want to make a meta post about Feather Seeker, the Okinawa jail from Strikers and it’s connection to Akechi specifically. Be warned, this ended up being a very long post.

Let’s start with just getting a few questions out of the way:

Isn’t it just a mini game made to raise your stats?

Yes, absolutely, it’s optional and honestly if you don’t care for playing the video games it’s easy to miss. I don’t think it was honestly intended to be some massive breakthrough on a character’s backstory but rather an Easter egg that gets you to think about it.

It’s just about Neo-Featherman, there’s references to it in all persona games, so why is this one different?

It’s not different. There’s been plenty of times when Easter eggs have led to something bigger in this game, even specifically featherman ones. There’s an episode of Featherman that describes exactly what happens in the 3rd semester, where a character loves another so strongly it brings them back to life. Now whether you want to apply that to Futaba and her mum, Ren and Akechi or whoever it still fits- there’s an entire semester where at least one character loves another one and wishes them back to life through Maruki’s power. So having another piece of media, like the Feather Seeker game, be another allusion to something else isn’t entirely unjustified.

Feather Seeker is just detailed cos it’s about Featherman, why are you comparing it to other games?

See, here’s the thing and why I needed a second playthrough to make sure I was right about it. Feather Seeker is the odd one out. All of the games have some kind of plot or something going on (except for Golf sim but y’know... it’s a golf sim), but they’re all very, very basic things. Train of Life is just board game with very simple characters, the Goemon game has you just walking through hell but doesn’t really go more in depth with characterisation. Whereas you find out so much about what’s going on with Gray Pigeon and Osagiri in Feather Seeker that it feels a little… weird to simply ignore it. Do I think that the simplest answer, that they just wanted some plot in there for fun, is the right answer? Honestly I think that’s highly likely. But it’s the boring explanation too, it’s easy enough to just write any kind of intrigue like that, so whether what I’m writing about was intentional or not, I still want to discuss Feather Seeker and see people’s own thoughts on the possibility that it could be more than just a basic game.

So with that out of the way… let’s get into it.

First, there’s establishing who’s who. I can pretty confidently say that Gray Pigeon is Akechi in this entire metaphor. This one is the most obvious for multiple reasons, first of which being that it’s the exact same costume Akechi gets in the featherman outfits DLC so there’s the direct correlation there. Beyond that, Gray Pigeon is a character who awakens to a new power and wants to become a hero of justice, just like the feathermen, the hero’s he’s heard about before. Ring any bells?

Also the final revelation of Feather Seeker is that actually the Feathermen see Gray Pigeon as their enemy, who ends up sacrificing himself so they can keep fighting.

Which brings me to discussing who Osagiri and the Feathermen are. Given the timeline presented, I don’t think it’s possible for them to be one specific character or even group of characters. I think these aren’t supposed to be characters, but rather the major influences in Akechi’s life. Osagiri is a scientist (possibly Wakaba, I’ll get into that later), but also the one who pushes him to do bad things. Osagiri starts by training Gray Pigeon to become one of the Feathermen, the good guys, but eventually ends up manipulating Gray Pigeon into trying to kill them. Osaigir at the bare minimum has to be two people- the cognitive scientists who were able to uncover more thanks to Akechi’s escapades in the metaverse and the people who pushed him to commit crimes- the conspiracy.

The Feathermen, at the end of the game, have to be the Phantom Thieves- they’re the ones Gray Pigeon/Akechi ends up sacrificing himself to save but… that can’t be possible. Gray Pigeon’s journey starts with him gaining a new power and wanting to use it for good like the Feathermen do and of course the Phantom Thieves weren’t an inspiration for Akechi to do what he did. I think then the Feathermen are what Akechi aspired to be- the heroes of justice who fought the bad guys.

I can’t lead myself to believe that at 15, Akechi thought of this overly convoluted plan where he would help Shido to become prime minister only to then ruin him, there’s way too many factors in this that could change. I think originally Akechi wanted to avenge what happened to him and his mother, make sure that the man who wronged him would face justice. That’s what the Feathermen would do, right? They fight bad guys. Translating it from Feather Seeker, Akechi was angry, furious even and that rebellion woke hm up to Robin Hood, the embodiment of justice for him.

There’s plenty things that point to Robin Hood being first, his placement when Akechi awakens to Hereward on 2/2 being in the same spot as everyone else’s, the fact that for all of the other Thieves their third tier personas are different versions of their initials personas and that applies to Hereward/Robin Hood and that the trend of initial/second awakening personas is that the first is a fictional who was considered a criminal (Robin Hood) and the second is described in game as a ‘mythological trickster’ (Loki).

Here is where I want to get to the Okinawa jail and why I didn’t post this theory/metapost sooner.

I mentioned earlier that Osagiri could have been in some part Wakaba, Futaba’s mother, and when I initially wrote this I didn’t have all that much to go off of. There’s concept art in the original p5 artbook of Wakaba experimenting on someone. There’s no context given and it’s sort of the odd-one-out. Of course, human subjects would have been necessary to study the cognitive world but this research is so under wraps it seems it’s almost impossible to get. There’s no military connotations anywhere so why is it such a secret? Well, illegal human experimentation would certainly be a good reason to keep this away from the public. They must have figured out somehow that killing a shadow can cause a lot of damage, even death, to a person, we know that from the research notes, but Wakaba was a scientist, working in a lab, she must’ve done experiments that weren’t entirely legal.

Here I wasn’t sure because accusing Wakaba or anyone of illegal human experimentation was a pretty big reach but the Okinawa jail in Strikers shows us that illegal human experimentation is something that was used for cognitive research. I don’t think that Akechi was experimented on there or that was where Wakaba worked, there’s no indication of it but… Konoe and Owada seemed to build on the work that Shido and his scientists began. That being said, I think the Okinawa lab is a continuation of that human experimentation, with whatever lab Wakaba worked in being its predecessor before Shido probably shut it down to prevent it from ever being discovered. Which is also why he had Wakaba killed- the research was only meant for him and no one else.

Beyond what we see in Feather Seeker of Osagiri/sometimes Wakaba experimenting on Gray Pigeon/Akechi, we’re also told (albeit this is of course biased information), that he only targeted people he deemed deserved it but… Wakaba is the odd one out here for the most part. Okumura was hardly a good person and the principal decided covered for a sexual abuser, most of the others were survivors except for accidents which are mostly uncontrollable and unpredictable. Wakaba however, like Kobayakawa and Okumura, were targets that were supposed to die, Akechi intended to kill them. How then was Wakaba a bad person? Illegal human experimentation would explain that, especially if it was done on Akechi himself.

So then, Akechi was experimented on by Wakaba. I don’t think he was fully informed about what he was doing either. Gray Pigeon certainly wasn’t. Akechi was still trying to be a good person, using his power for his own vengeance yeah but I don’t think murdering random people was part of his initial plan at all. I think that Feather Seeker also emphasises just how little he knew about what his actions were doing. How would he know what his effects of shadows are on the real world? He could only know that from the scientists, from Shido. Of course he did find out, eventually, and that rage he must have felt about being used and lied to gave him the power to awaken to Loki, as Futaba puts it, the representation of his anger. It’s only then that he forms his plan, to get back at Shido for all of this, not just him abandoning him and his mother but for using him for his own means as well.

And we know how the rest of the story goes.

The overall story presented in Feather Seeker, as I see it, is this: Akechi awakens to Robin Hood, and realises that his anger is no longer a hopeless endeavour, he can use it, show that he’s useful and get acknowledged by his father. Shido sees this, sees that he can use this power and subjects him to experimentation, as someone who can actually survive the cognitive world and even have an impact on it. Wakaba sees what he can do, tests him but he’s never told what he’s done. He’s manipulated through praise and lack of information. One day he does find out, he realises this wasn’t getting him any closer to vengeance or getting acknowledged by Shido, he’s just another test subject being used by them. He’s angry, he awakens to Loki and now with the unique power of psychotic breakdowns, Shido recognises him and hires him as his assassin.

Granted this is all just my own theory, I think there is a lot pointing us to at least something similar but of course I also think this is wishful thinking as well. At this moment, my biggest wish is that Atlus makes a game that actually delves into what happened to Akechi. All the explicit information we have is given to us from biased sources, ie. Akechi himself, and it’s really the only question I have left for persona 5’s continuity.

#p5r spoilers #p5s spoilers #p5r #p5s #akechi goro #goro akechi #metapost #theory #p5a #proof of justice #persona 5 #persona 5 strikers #persona 5 royal

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goji-pilled · 3 years

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so how does the MG AU come about? I've been digging for a lore dump post but I can't find one? like how does ham come back and sae meet her and yadda yadda

Oh god now I really have to make a proper basics post about this AU shangdkshs

Okay so I actually have no explanation as for why Hamuko is alive again shamgdkss Maybe Elizabeth was successful in her mission? Maybe humanity's desire for death just got replaced by the control stuff with Mementos? Maybe some other magic bs? I really dont know lmao

As for the other stuff...I could offer you a rough "timeline" of things

-Almost 5 years after she died Hamuko wakes up on a train to Tokyo, shes got Thanatos as well as the yen she had still left from the SEES days (dont ask how thats not important shsbhsnweh) and gets a hotelroom

- Next day she visits Leblanc for the first time and meets Sojiro, Wakaba and Futaba

- Later on the same day she explores the streets and finds a libary thats run by Saori (who is in a happy relationship with Rio :)) because girl cant catch a break

-Reuinions and explanations ensue

-The following two weeks are full of commiting crimes to get housing bc she IS legally dead afterall

-Hamuko becomes a regular at Leblanc during that time and hears about some corrupt politician through the news

-The same day she runs into people protesting aginst said politician, Hamuko starts cursing the politician and oh dear!

-Welcome to the metaverse and your first palace!

-Thanatos at least knows somewhat whats happening

-Life threatening situation happens and tada, Persona re-awakening! And murder time!

- Two weeks later comes her run in with 13yo Goro

- A week after that (thank god for crimes!) happens the little post I where I said "Its my AU and I get to choose the dynamics" aka this:

Goro: "You are the most incompetent adult I have ever met"

Also Goro: "I barely had you for six hours but youre my mom now and please dont leave me-"

-She loves her feral bird son and is very much aware that he already killed a guy (thats her boy!)

- Futaba and Goro meet and its a disaster (the good kind)

- Goro "I'm 13years old and bitter but suddenly theres so many genuinely nice people around me that show me kindness simply because they want to" Akechi doesnt know how bonds work but wants to learn anyway

-Because sure he still has his plan against Shido but he also got the change for a life with people that actually care about him so why not both?

(Spoiler he should not have chosen both)

-Hamuko running into Sae comes a month later feat. Stressed Hamuko bc it rains and shes in a cafe with dozens of people waiting the rain out, Sae who's like "This place is free ;)" and gay people being gay people

- Hamuko inviting Sae leads to her bring Makoto along

- Cut to Goro being a little shit and Makoto suplexing him into Oblivion

- "Good to know theyre getting along"

- And welcome Goro "I had Makoto for six hours but I'm her brother now"

- Hamuko even gets to meet Mr. Niijima before he dies (haha fun times :'))

- Lots and lots of shenanigans ensue

- But also lots of pain (see Wakaba and Officer Niijima)

- More family bonding

- And even more chaos!

The rest may be better for another time bc this is probably long enough as is sbksgsjasg

#lime answers #mg au #hope this helps somewhat for now #I SWEAR ILL WORK ON A PROPER LORE POST SOMETIME-

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c-is-for-circinate · 3 years

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I'd love to hear more of your thoughts about why P5R didn't quite land for you. I had the same reaction to it, but I've never quite been able to properly articulate why the last section fell so flat.

God okay so I've tried several times to answer this, and it seems like the answer is 'I still have way too many feelings, personally, to say this in anything less than thirty pages and fifteen hours of work', because Persona 5 the original is a game I loved a lot and care about a great deal. And most of the reasons I disliked Royal feel, in my head, like a list of ways it broke some of the things I liked best about P5--which means explaining them feels like I need to explain everything I loved about the original game, which is a book in itself, complete with referents to P3, P4, Jungian psychology, the Joseph Campbell mytharc, and fuck all even knows what. And that is too much.

But today I realized that I could instead describe it from an angle of, Persona 5 Strikers succeeds really well at doing the thing I think Royal was trying to do but failed at. And that I think I can talk about in a reasonable amount of wordspace, hopefully, behind this cut because I have at least one friend who hasn't played Royal yet.

Note for reblogs/comments: I HAVE NOT FINISHED STRIKERS YET. I got through the jail that pretended to be the final jail and have not yet gone into the obviously inevitable 'ohshit wait, you mean there's something more than simple human machinations behind all of this?' dungeon. (I got stuck on a really frustrating side quest, put the game down, and then dived into Hades to avoid throwing the Switch across the room for a while--and anyone around this blog lately knows how THAT'S been going.) Please no spoilers past Okinawa!

So, one of the many, many things I really appreciated about Persona 5 was its straightforward and unashamed attitude towards abusers and their acts of violence. Because, while yes P5 is a story about the use of power and control to make others suffer, it fundamentally isn't about those abusers themselves. It's about their victims, those that survive their crimes. And this shows up repeatedly over the course of the game.

We do not give a shit why Kamoshida wanted to beat and rape his students. We really don't. Kamoshida does not deserve our attention one moment longer than it takes to make him stop. Because, ultimately, that's the goal of P5, start to end. We don't know for sure if what we're doing is fair, if it's justice, if it's questionable. What we know is that people are being hurt, badly, actively, right now this second. What we know is that victims are suffering. What we know is that we, personally, us-the-protag and us the Phantom Thieves at large, are in danger. And in those circumstances, we don't care about the abuser's side any more. We don't. We don't have the space or time or capacity to care, because that is not the point.

The point is to help the weak. To save the people who need saving, right here and now. To give others the courage to stand up on their own behalf. We're not even out to change society, not really--that's a byproduct. We are reactions. We are triage. We are important.

There's something so empowering and validating about that as a theme, y'know? In a media landscape so full of "sympathetic villains", the idea that, you know, maybe sometimes you don't have to break yourself to show compassion that might possibly heal the bad guy--that sometimes you can just make the bad guy stop hurting people--feels both refreshing and satisfying. I really appreciate it as a message! I liked it a lot!

And yes, there's nuance to that theme, and the game is not without compassion. We save Futaba, because 'make the bad guy stop hurting people', in that case, means 'make this person stop hurting herself'. We give Sae a path forwards, help her fix her own heart. Yet it's worth pointing out that in both of those cases, while we were very glad to do those things, to save those people, we also went into both of those palaces for extremely practical reasons to begin with. We needed Futaba's help. We needed Sae's help. The fact that we chose to talk Sae into a change of heart rather than simply stealing her treasure, while ultimately a very good thing for her, was absolutely a practical choice predicated on the need for her palace to still exist to save our life. And yes, we wanted to save her, for Makoto's sake--yes, we wanted desperately to save Futaba. But Sae and Futaba let themselves be helped, too, and that doesn't change the overarching themes of the story itself.

Akechi (and to some extent Okumura) would not let himself be helped. Akechi's another interesting nuance to this theme, because of all our villains, we do learn the most about what drove him to the cruelties and crimes he's committed. He's at that intersection of victim and villain, and we want to help him, as a victim--but we also know that stopping him as a villain is more important. We'd like to save him from himself if we could, because we save people from their sources of trauma, it's what we do. We regret being unable to do so. But in the end, what matters to the story is not that Akechi refused to be saved--it's that Shido and Yaldabaoth need to be stopped, for the sakes of everyone else they're hurting now and may continue to hurt in the future.

The thing is, there's space and maybe even a need for a corollary discussion of those places where victim and villain intersect. It's an interesting, pertinent, and related topic. Strikers made an entire video game about it, a really good video game. It's centered in the idea that, yes, these people need to be stopped, and we will make stopping them our priority--but they're not going after us, and that gives us some space to sympathize. Even for Konoe, who specifically targets the Phantom Thieves--compare him to Shido, who actively destroyed the lives of both Joker and Futaba, who ordered Haru's father's death, who's the entire reason the team is still dealing with the trauma of Akechi's everything. Of course the game can be sympathetic to Konoe where it can't with Shido. There's enough distance to do that.

But right--Strikers is a separate game. It's a separate conversation. It's, "last time, we talked about that, so now let's take it one step further." And that's good writing. (It's something Persona has done before, too, also really well! Persona 3 is about terrible, occasionally-suicidal depression and grief. P4 is about how you can still be hurting and need some help and therapy even if things seem ok. Related ideas, but separate conversations that need to be separate in order to be respectful and do justice to either one. P5, as a follow-up to P4, is a conversation about how, ok, changing yourself is great and all, but sometimes the problem is other people so how do you deal with that? Again, still related! Still pertinent! Still alluded to in P4, with Adachi's whole thing--but it wasn't the time or place to base a quarter of the game around it.)

So one of Royal's biggest issues, to me, is that it tries to tack on this whole new angle for discussion onto a game that was originally about something else.

Adding Maruki's palace--adding it at the end, which by narrative laws suggests that it's the true point that everything else should be building up to--suddenly adds in about a hundred new dimensions at once. It wants us to engage with "what in this abuser/manipulator's life led him to act this way?" for basically the first time all game (we'll get to Akechi later). It wants us to engage with, "if the manipulator has a really good reason or good intentions, does that mean we should forgive them?" It requires us to reflect on, "what is the difference between control and cruelty?" It asks, "okay, but if people could be controlled into being happy, would that be okay?" (Which, based on the game so far, is actually a wild out-there hypothetical! Literally not a single thing we've seen in the game suggests that could ever happen. Even the people who think being controlled is safer and easier are miserable under it. Control that's able to lead to actual happiness is completely out of left field in the context of everything we've encountered all game so far.)

That's too much! We don't have time to unpack all that! We only have an eighth of the game left! Not to mention we are also being asked to bring back questions we put to bed much earlier in the game about the morality of our own actions, in a wholely unsatisfying way. Maruki attempts to justify his mass brainwashing because "it's the same as what you're doing", and we know it isn't, but the game didn't need Maruki calling it out in order for us to get that. We already faced that question when we started changing hearts, and again several times throughout the game, and again when we found our targets in Yaldabaoth's cells. The fact that we change hearts does not mean we think "changing hearts is fine and kind and should be done to everyone, actually." Changing hearts has been firmly established in this game as an act of violence, acceptable only because it prevents further systemic violence against innocents that we must prevent. The moral question has never once been about whether it's ok to change the hearts of the innocent, only about how far it's ethical to go against individuals who are actively hurting other people. Saying "you punched that guy to keep him from shooting a child, so punching people is good and I will save the world by punching everyone!" is confusing! and weird! and not actually at all helpful to the question of, how much violence is it acceptable to use to protect others! So presenting the question that way just falls really flat.

(And right, I love Strikers, because Strikers has time to unpack all that. Strikers can give us a main bad guy who wants to control the whole world for everybody's own good, because Strikers has earned that thematic climax. It has given us sympathetic bad guys who started out wanting to control the world to protect themselves and ended up going too far. It's given us Mariko Hyodo, who wanted to control the world to protect other people and went too far. It's given us a long-running thread about police, the desire to serve, and the abuse of power that can lead to. And since we are actively trying to care for the people whose hearts we're changing in Strikers, we can open the door to questions about using changes-of-heart and that level of control to make other people happy. We can even get a satisfying conclusion out of that discussion, because we have space to characterize the difference--Konoe thinks that changing peoples' hearts means confining them, but the Phantom Thieves think it means setting them free. We have seen enough sympathetic villains that we as an audience have had the space to figure out how we feel about that, and to understand the game's perspective of "stop them AND save them, if we can possibly do both." And that message STILL rests firmly on Persona 5's message of "it is Good to do what you have to do to stop an abuser so long as you don't catch innocent people in your crossfire.")

It's worth noting that the general problem of 'asking way too many new questions and then not answering them' also applies to how Royal treats its characters, too. P5 did have unanswered questions left at the end! The biggest one, and we all knew this, was Akechi, and what actually happened to him, and how we should feel about him, and how he felt about us. That was ripe for exploring in our bonus semester, and to Royal's credit they did in fact try to bring it up, but by god did they fuck up doing it.

Akechi's probable death in the boiler room was absolutely the biggest dangling mystery of the game. It was an off-screen apparent death of a key antagonist, so all of the narrative rules we know suggested that he might still be alive and would probably come back if the story went on for long enough. So when Royal brings him back on Christmas Eve, hey, great! Question answered. Except that the situation is immediately too good to be true, and immediately leads to another mystery, which leads to a flat suspicion that something must be wrong. We spend several hours of gameplay getting sly hints that, oooh, maybe he's not really alive after all, before it's finally confirmed by Maruki: yup, he really died, if we end the illusion we'll kill him too. Okay, at least we know now. Akechi is alive right now and he's going to be dead if we do this, and that doesn't make a ton of sense because every other undead person disappeared when the person who wished for them realized they were fake but at this point we'll take it. So we take down Maruki, and okay, Akechi really is dead! Probably! We're fairly sure! Aside from our lingering doubts!

And then we catch a glimpse of maybe-probably-could be him through the train window, and I just want to throw something, because come on.

Look, it is just a fact of storytelling: the more times you make an audience ask 'wait, is this character dead or aren't they?', the less they will care, until three or four reversals later you will be hard pressed to find anybody who gives a shit. Royal does this like four different times, and every iteration comes with even less certainty than the last. By the end, we somehow know even less than we did when we started! Did Akechi survive the boiler room to begin with and Maruki just didn't know? Or was Maruki lying to try and manipulate us further? Or was he actually dead and then his strength of will when Maruki's reality dissolved was enough to let him survive after all? Is that even actually him out the train window?

Where is he going! What is he doing! How did any of this happen! What is going on! We all had these questions about Akechi at the end of the original P5, and the kicker is that Royal pretends like it's going to answer them only to go LOL JK NO. It's frustrating and it's dissatisfying and it annoys me.

The one Akechi question that Royal doesn't even bother to ask, though, let alone leave ambiguous, is how does the protagonist feel about him? The entire emotional weight of the third semester rests on the protagonist caring about Akechi, Sumire, and Maruki. Maruki's the person we're supposed to sympathize with even as we try to stop him. Sumire's the person we're trying to save from herself. And Akechi is our bait--is, we are told, the one thing our protagonist wished for enough to actualize it in this world himself. Akechi's the final lure to accept Maruki's deal. Akechi's survival is meant to be tempting.

For firm Akechi fans, this probably worked out fine--the game wanted to insist that the protagonist cared for Akechi the same way the player did. For those of us who're a little more ambivalent, though (or for the many and valid people who hated him), this is a super sour note. Look, one of the Persona series' strengths is the way it lets players choose to put their time and emotional investment into an array of different characters, so the main story still has weight even if there's a couple you don't care about that much. It has always done this. The one exception, from P3 all the way through P4 to here and now, is Nanako Dojima, and by god she earned that distinction. I have never met a person who played Persona 4 who didn't love Nanako. Nanako is a neglected six-year-old child who is brave and strong enough to take care of herself and all of the housework but who still tries not to cry when her dad abandons her again and lights up like the sun when we spare her even the tiniest bit of time and attention. It is impossible not to care for Nanako. Goro Akechi is not Nanako.

And yet third semester Royal doesn't make sense if your protagonist doesn't feel linked to Akechi. The one question, out of all the brand new questions Royal throws out there, that it decides to answer all by itself--and it's how you as a player and your protagonist ought to feel about an extremely complex and controversial character. What the fuck, Royal. What the fuck.

In conclusion, I'll leave you with this. I played the original Persona 5 in March and April of 2017, as an American, a few months after the 2016 election and into the term of our then president. It felt painfully timely. A quick calendar google early on indicated that the game's 20XX was almost certainly 2016, and the closer our plot got to the in-game November leadup to an election destined to be dominated by a foul and charming man full of corruption and buoyed up by his own cult of personality, the more I wanted to laugh/cry. It felt timely. It felt important. It felt right.

I went through Royal (in LP form on youtube, not having a platform to play it on) in summer of 2020, with a hook full of face masks by my front door and protests about racial tension and local policing that occasionally turned into not-quite-riots close enough to hear at night if I opened the windows of my apartment. The parts of the game that I remembered felt as prescient and meaningful as ever, if not even more so. The new parts felt baffling. Every single evil in the game felt utterly, painfully real, from the opening moments of police brutality to the idea of a country led by a guy who probably would use his secret illegitimate teenage son as a magical assassin if the opportunity presented itself and he thought he could get away with it. Yaldabaoth as the cumulative despair of an entire population who just wanted somebody to take over and make things be okay--yes, yes, god, in summer of 2020? With streets full of people refusing to wear masks and streets full of people desperate for change? Of course. Of course that holy grail of safety should be enticing. Of course it should be terrifying.

And then Maruki. Maruki, who was just so far outside the scope of anything I could relate to the rest of the game or my own life. Because every single other villain in the rest of Persona is real. From the petty pandering principal to the human-trafficking mob boss. The corrupt politicians and the manmade god of cultural desire for stability. And this game was trying to tell me that the very biggest threat of all of them, the thing that was worse than the collective force of all society agreeing to let this happen because succumbing was easier than fighting back--that the very biggest threat of all was that the world could be taken over by some random nobody's misguided attempts to help?

No. Fuck no. I don't buy it. Because god, yes, I have seen the pain and damage done on a tiny and personal and very real level by the tight-fisted control of someone trying to help, it never looked like this. Not some ascended god of a bad therapist. All the threats to the world, and that's the one I'm supposed to take seriously? This one man is more of a threat than the fundamental human willingness to be controlled?

Sorry, but no. Not for me. Not in this game. Not in this real-life cyberpunk dystopian apocalypse.

#c plays persona #driveby meta attack #p5 royal spoilers #p5 strikers spoilers #holy crap I did it #I actually wrote a semicoherent essay of a length I'm willing to put on Tumblr #about my problems with this game #I have been trying on and off for MONTHS #I wanted to like Royal SO BADLY #it makes me SO UPSET #anyway #now back to your regularly scheduled Hades blogging #asked and answered #Anonymous

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