#tatsuya suou is one of my top characters of all time

[maomaopilled]

now that i'm not totally crashing out over persona 2 and can think rationally about it the one specific thing i can't get over is how tatsuya's story is so unbelievably tragic but there is still something really beautiful about it. beautiful in a sad way.

(full analysis below, beware spoilers for p2 innocent sin + eternal punishment)

to me, innocent sin was about growing up and eternal punishment was about being an adult. specifically, that being an adult means you have to take responsibility for your past choices/mistakes/regrets and make peace with them so that you can forge your own way forward.

it's inevitable that you will have to make sacrifices or give up on your dreams (like katsuya) or make terrible decisions that you regret (like baofu) or feel completely lost and unsatisfied with where you are in life (like ulala). but that is never the end, you can still take ownership of yourself and your own fate. you can defy a terrible fate, you can choose to make yourself into a better person, take the shattered pieces of your life and build something new.

at the end of innocent sin, they had to make a sacrifice: their friendship and memories of each other to save the entire world. but tatsuya rejecting this caused everything that happens in eternal punishment. and you can't really blame him... he went through so much only to have everything ripped away from him.

the poem they quote in innocent sin is le calmant by marie laurencin: "Worse than alone / Exiled. Worse than exiled / Dead. Worse than dead / Forgotten." is being forgotten truly the worst fate? maybe it is for tatsuya.

maya asks them to forget her, then philemon asks them to forget each other. if being forgotten is worse than death, how can tatsuya allow that fate for the people he cares about the most? and for himself? so he rejects that fate and has to suffer the consequences. and of course, he feels extreme guilt that so many people are endangered because of his 'innocent sin' and he takes responsibility for it by trying to stop nyarlathotep. he ends up losing the most important people to him forever at the cost of saving them in an alternate timeline.

but in the end... didn't he get what he wanted? he didn't forget anything, he carries the memory of his friends and by doing that they avoided the worst fate: being forgotten. even if 'this side' tatsuya doesn't remember them, he does and that has to count for something. bc as long as he remembers it, their friendship is kept alive in his memory and isn't completely erased from the world.

and because of tatsuya, maya also regains her memories meaning that the memory also remains alive with her too. through tatsuya and maya, the memory of everything they went through in innocent sin and their friendship remains alive in both timelines. as long as it isn't completely forgotten, it still exists in some ephemeral form. and although it wasn't his intention, 'other side' tatsuya also avoids the worst fate of being forgotten as so many people now carry the memory of him: maya, katsuya, ulala, baofu, shiori, nanjo, etc.

if one of the messages of p2EP is that being an adult means taking responsibility for your actions then tatsuya illustrates it beautifully. his actions at the end of innocent sin have far reaching consequences but he takes responsibility for saving the new timeline. he takes his own fate in his hands and he ends up following through with his desire to not forget or be forgotten. i feel like even though his fate is tragic he can at least take solace in the fact that he carries those memories and if this is the sacrfice he has to make to ensure that his friendships won't be completely erased from the world then maybe it was worth it, in a way. and there's something heart breakingly beautiful about that.