kotaro

in persona 5 there's a little girl and her mom and they've got a dog
if you walk past and listen to them you can hear them talk about what they're doing and the dog slowly gets older and at the end of the year it passes away.

in persona 5 royal the dog is brought back to life by actualization. i am obsessed with this. because when does that dog die? for life to exist it must grow and shift and change but some of these changes will inherently cause harm to others. a little kid is never going to want that dog to die, so how long does that dog live?

if that dog lives until the kid is old enough to process it, the dog will have been with them long enough that it would be as painful as losing a family member. there is no right time to kill that dog. there is no right time for anyone to die. not out of a belief that death is bad, but that as long as you form human connections, your death will always hurt others.

because it’s less about death and more about loss. if you had a dream of academics going to study overseas, but the loss of you would leave your family and friends lonely, who takes importance there? it's the ones feeling pain, because that person could easily be changed to not want to take the study trip. that makes things much easier for everyone, right? they aren't missing out on anything if they don’t remember wanting to take that trip in the first place, and their family and friends don't have to deal with losing them. that's better, isn't it?

one of the things maruki says when trying to convince you on 2/2 is “if you just stay in my reality, you’ll never have to suffer the pain of loss, or the pain of people or things being stolen away from you.” he holds an ideology that puts people on the same level as objects. and this is clearly something the game is paying attention to. it shows up in all of the new endings, and akechi’s entire character over the course of third semester. let’s get into it.

ending number one, accepting the offer:

“i want to stay forever.”

you wake up from a daydream, or maybe it’s more like you fell into one. everyone is chatting at leblanc. futaba is there, kasumi is there, akechi is there. he’s sitting in the middle of the room, right next to haru. everyone’s chatting, carefree. they’re talking about how happy they are, and how they want to stay friends with each other forever. sojiro tells you arrangements have been made to have you keep living at leblanc.

flash forward to graduation, everyone is there, everyone is happy. yusuke talks about switching to shujin. futaba and morgana talk about enrolling. akechi shows up, and offers to take a photo of you. a man in a hat that you can’t quite recognize says he’ll take it instead, so akechi can stay in the picture. “you’re all friends, aren’t you?”

what happens after that? we don't know. it ends with the idyllic little photos of paradise and everyone going "we're all gonna be friends forever and stay right here forever." what happens when they get older?

persona 5 royal made a deliberate decision to make it clear in the ending that it’s not just joker who’s leaving at the end of the game. everyone is going their separate ways, promising to stay friends and keep in touch, but they’ll be leaving. which hurts but it's necessary. it's good. they're following their own dreams, and they’re happy.

here that can't happen because the rules of the world are based on avoiding pain at all costs. so what happens? how do they move on from there? are their dreams all shifted to remaining in the same spot? even though sumire's dream was to win on an international level?

we see photos of the phantom thieves, most of them identifiably in areas you visit in game, very close to shujin, and none of them are like. not. they could all definitedely be in areas within the game, which are all close enough to travel to within a day. and they’re all finding their happiness through things that were lost. futaba, haru, and makoto with their parent, yusuke with madarame, ryuji with the track team, ann with shiho, morgana with his dreams of being human, joker with akechi. ”kasumi’s” gymnastics outfit looks like kasumi’s, but it’s actually her own.

(i don’t have anything smart to plug in about this here beyond sort of a, the truth of that situation cannot be changed it can only have a loose coat of paint slapped over to make it look like the problem is fixed, but the important part is to this paragraph is that it looks like kasumi’s and i didn’t want to lie about it just being hers)

everyone’s staying right where they were, and refusing to move on from the past.

ending number two, missing the deadline:

“i’ll bring you your happiness. pleasant dreams.”

joker wakes up, for a moment. how long has he been asleep? it’s hard to say. his phone battery is flat. five more minutes couldn’t hurt, could it?

so, like, what's happening to joker there. he doesn't eat or drink he just keeps willfully going back to sleep. dr. maruki has decided making the choice to do anything will cause pain for joker, so the best course of action is just for him to go to sleep.

whether literally or metaphorically, time is not moving here. it's the same repeating cycle where nothing happens. joker does not- cannot grow shift or change. this could be the same day over and over and over again, and it wouldn't make a difference.

the dog does not simply “not die,” it is remarked that it is healthy again. it was a sick old dog but now it's fine. and it will stay fine. nothing will change. will people grow? growth, both personal and literal, will hurt. parents don’t want to see their kids grow up. kids don’t want to see their parents get old.

both of these endings are functionally the same. will of rebellion manifests through the metaverse, which joker accesses through his phone. no more rebellion, just keep going back to sleep. stay in this dream forever. there's nothing wrong with that, right? everyone's happy, aren't they? we'll always be together. right here. staying together in this one place. no more dreams of leaving, no more dreams of growing. it hurts to grow.

about akechi:

in maruki’s reality, akechi gets brought back to life because dr. maruki thought the way he died was so tragic. but akechi absolutely didn't want to be brought back. this doesn't matter. maruki has decided that ‘joker’s wish’ is to have akechi back, because he was so torn up when he died. and all the importance of that decision goes to joker.

when akechi walks in during the 2/2 conversation like “this whole thing is stupid, do you think holding my death over our heads is going to make a difference” maruki is like “that’s what you think, but i’m not asking you.” no matter how much akechi kicks and screams, it’s not his decision. he’s just a cat being taken out of a tree, clawing and scratching because it doesn’t know what’s best for it.

when i finished royal for the first time i spent a lot of time thinking about it. what was being said, with the addition of all the new content. the first thing i landed on was “maruki’s actually a good guy, the game just has to not promote “everything is perfect and problems don’t exist” as a good option because that’s not possible in real life, and it’s a game about going outside and making real change.” but after beating the game again i thought "that’s not it at all.”

i believe there's a point being made through the whole game about personal agency. it cannot cannot cannot exist in the maruki endings. in his ideal reality, being alive is something that’s fundamentally changed. akechi died and him being alive not through his own actions, and not for his own sake makes him fucking miserable. well, It Doesn't because he will Simply Forget because Everyone Is Happy And Everything Is Fine Look At How Happy Kasumi Yoshizawa is. but you know what i mean.

and it's not that akechi wants to be dead. at the end of the true ending he is likely alive, and if he is it's through his own will and talent. he's alive because he wanted to be, not because he accidentally made one (1) friend so he's obligated to take his role in maruki's fucked up little märchen utopia performance because he decided everyone's problems were his problems.

if wakaba isshiki or president okumura wanted to stay dead that wouldn't matter. if someone wanted to commit suicide when they had loved ones they wouldn't be able to. it removes everyone's personal agency and puts their entire life in the hands of the people who want them. i think about that a lot. what if the dog passed away happily, maruki? that doesn't matter? because that girl would be sad?

nobody has personal agency because if someone else wants you to not do something, you won't do it, because that would make them sad. and them being sad would make maruki sad. and at the end of the day, this entire reality is for his own sake.

in the palace, akechi says “Call it what you like--you’re merely brainwashing people for your own satisfaction.” maruki cannot shoot down that claim. he responds with “i’m wholly aware some will interpret my acts that way... but if that self-satisfaction leads to the happiness of thousands of others, don’t you agree that outcome is for the best?” i think about this interaction way too much

the first thing that i want to bring up is how akechi drives in again and again how miserable the concept of being under someone’s control for their own sake like that would make him. he takes shots at maruki whenever he can, he describes the concept as embarrassing, and refuses to back down, even when told to his face it will cost his life. and it’s perfectly understandable.

he spent the entirety of the past few years thinking he was doing something, making a change in the world of his own will, but he was just being controlled by shido for his own personal gain. when this realization happens in the engine room, he gives his own life to know that shido will be taken down. of course he’d do it again. he views joker considering maruki’s reality once he finds out that akechi will die as pitying him, and a complete betrayal of his wishes

sumire reacts basically exactly the opposite, constantly sympathising with maruki, defending him, desperately trying to cling onto this “perfect reality.” maruki caught sumire at one of her deepest moments of weakness, after just losing her sister, in what’s meant to be a safe space with a medical professional, and manipulated her to use her as a test subject.

since he’s only just gained his powers and is not a very good therapist, maruki ends up taking what sumire says about nobody wanting her at face value. he understands sumire’s wish as being “i wish kasumi was the one who lived instead of me.” right in front of him, there’s a weak and sad girl, offering you her ideal solution. what else is he supposed to do? she’s in pain and he can fix that. so he does.

sumire clings onto this immediately. she describes herself during her social link like this: “i’ve always been really bad at making decisions on my own... i mean, kasumi always picked perfect things for me anyway.“ in that moment after kasumi’s death, the two things she wants most are a strong person to make all her decisions for her and tell her what to do, and to be anyone else other than sumire, fuck-up younger sister who killed the perfect kasumi yoshizawa. maruki indulges both these desires immediately and without a second thought.

but despite that being what she wanted, it wasn’t what was best for her. at all. in the same social link conversation, she describes “a desire to see, and be seen” and tells you about how she “never really knew making my own decisions could feel validating. so i didn’t really feel a need to choose anything for myself. after all, nobody expected me to.” the kid will be better off having learned to move on from the death of her dog. she’ll be a stronger person after that. maruki’s reality is one that does not want strong people.

she works through her issues by facing herself in the metaverse and forming real connections with other people her age. both of these efforts maruki tries to stop at every opportunity to convince her that his reality is the best option, that her becoming kasumi is the only way towards strength and happiness. so much of the early palace as you go through it is designed to specifically make her feel uncomfortable and bad to try and get her to leave and not think about things too hard. he re-traumatizes her in front of her only friends by playing a video of what she perceives as her killing kasumi, and forcing her to fight them.

maruki refuses to accept that what he did for ‘Kasumi’ wasn’t not only the best option, but the only one, because she’s far too weak to actually work through her problems. if she could have just worked that out by assessing herself and making some friends her own age? he’s done immeasurably fucked up shit to her. and of course he hasn’t done that. he couldn’t have. he was helping her. he's going to help everyone.

“how’s yoshizawa-san holding up? i’ve been concerned about a potential relapse, considering her... difficulties with accepting this reality.”

“sumire's one tough lady.”

“...you know, i would love for that to be the truth. but, people can’t maintain their strength forever.”

with the video tapes we can see in his head he’s already labelled her as “kasumi” and thinks all her problems were fixed by that. the problem looks fixed, so it is. that girl was caused pain by the dog passing away, so the solution is to bring back the dog. there’s no need for growth or strength if everyone just relies on maruki to fix their problems.

the second thing is how maruki’s entire palace portrays someone who fundamentally views himself as more important than everyone else and thinks that people are just issues to be fixed. things that hurt that need to stop hurting. the way he thinks a problem should be solved “correctly” and the way he goes about solving his own problems are antithetical. let’s pull up the psychological exam.

Q1 - You see your good friend being led away by a group of scary people! You want to help your friend, but if you fight them alone and lose, you could easily get hurt. If you go look for a teacher, there would be no danger to you, but if you take too long, your friend would most likely get hurt. Which would you do in this situation?

A: Go after your friend
B: Go get help

Q2 - You have a personal dream that you really want to make come true. You’ve worked so hard to achieve it, but it’s just not coming to fruition. It’s causing you a lot of grief, but if you give up now, all your hard work is for nothing! Which would you do in this situation?

A: Keep up the hard work
B: Do whatever it takes
C: Give up for a new dream

Q3 - You've gained the power to steal hearts! You can use this power for whatever you want without fear of getting caught! In this scenario, which sounds closest to what you would do?

A: Steal something valuable
B: Never steal anything
C: Steal my own heart to heal
D: Steal evil hearts to fix society
E: Steal the one I love's heart

the correct answers here (b, c, d) show maruki’s m/o, and you can see it’s exactly how he operates with dialogue snippets about one of yusuke’s friends giving up on painting, and stuff like that. but the other thing about this is that maruki would fail his own exam three for three.

in the video tape with rumi, instead of waiting for the doctors to do their work, he ““fixes”” her with his persona, and ends up getting hurt because of it.

“she’s... passed away.” (B: Go get help?)

in the video tape with shibusawa, when faced with major roadblocks in studying cognitive psience, he refuses to give up. he’s so hung up on the concept of the research lab, feels so strongly that the spot in odaiba belongs to him, it becomes his palace.

“i don’t care how long it takes me... it’s going to happen.” (C: Give up for a new dream?)

the last one is less clear, but it’s definitely not d. both on the level that he’s actively opposing the phantom thieves, and he mentions multiple times that he believes changing hearts one at a time isn’t good enough. there's another part that really nails this in but i'll get into it into a minute. i think the idea with the strongest argument is that maruki would have ‘stole something valuable’ by using the power to make progress towards finishing his research paper since he is. still incredibly hung up on that. he gets hung up on shit very easily, and is driven by spite and the fact he’s certain he’s correct.

“i've learned how to change the cognition of not just an individual, but all of humanity!” (D: Steal evil hearts to fix society?)

there’s really a huge gap between the way he treats his own problems and the way he treats those of everyone else. he’s his exact definition of a “broken person who needs fixing” but he won’t address this. because his problem is that so many people are feeling pain, and that needs to be fixed, right now. and he’s got a solution for it, if he just keeps trying.

a thing you may be thinking right now if you have played the game i've been talking about for the last 10 minutes is "i thought the game was trying to make a point about changing hearts being amoral and brainwashing" which is fair. they lean very heavily on trying to make you think about the moral dilemma of changing hearts, the hearts of characters on your side like mishima or sae never have their hearts stolen, at least on screen, and all the ex palace rulers get trapped in yaldy's little prison. anyone you face who knows about the metaverse makes claims that "you're all just brainwashing people" and the only defense given is "well. we don't kill people!" akechi is one of the people to bring this up the most, like when there's a request during third sem of someone asking to be killed and when you decide to change his heart instead akechi is like "is that really what he’d want?" and the phantom thieves are like "he's not in the right state to decide something like that." at first glance this seems very similar to akechi not wanting to be brought back to life, doesn't it? so, like, is what maruki's doing with his actualization and what the phantom thieves are doing with stealing hearts that different?

to elaborate on this, here's a cool bit of text i stole directly from my friend katsu. thank you katsu.

I don’t think this “changing hearts without consent is a point of overlap between them” dog (heh) actually hunts (heh heh). To really dig into this we have to deal with some implications that exist in the vanilla text but are a little better supported by the cut Will Seed flashbacks. I’m going to use the latter preferentially (with a note that I think the place we ultimately land at with Yaldabaoth basically affirms their thematic underpinning) because getting into the weeds of the post-Shido pre-Yaldy period is beyond my scope at the moment.

So in the cut Will Seed flashbacks for Kamoshida and Madarame, we see Kamoshida do something Unclear But Less Bad As A Type Of Sexual Harassment Than What He Was Doing On Camera and Madarame do Yusuke-mom activities… eventually. The thing that’s interesting here is mostly that at this stage in their development the characters are legitimately uneasy and contrite about this but are constantly egged on and enabled by society at large, which wants kings to abdicate their personal responsibility to. “Suguru Kamoshida” would not exist if “Suguru Kamoshida’s agent” and “Suguru Kamoshida’s sponsors” and “Suguru Kamoshida’s coworkers” all did not collectively agree that “Suguru Kamoshida (Olympic Medalist)” was worth a few human sacrifices.

In this sense, removing a distortion isn’t mind control – it’s more of a reset. If you were really, truly a dogshit person with no meaningful interiority, stealing your heart wouldn’t do anything; some part of you needs to be able to recognize that you-as-you-are-now is a dogshit human being. This is also why we get things like Shido hating “rotten adults” despite himself being Possibly The Sixth Most Powerful Man In Japan Even Before You Price In The Conspiracy – there’s part of him that is contemptuous of the type of person he has become and doesn’t recognize that he’s that guy now.

Meanwhile, what Maruki is doing totally is. It is the rejection of the notion that any of these people would or could make a decision for themselves, even if someone peeled back the veil and allowed them a chance to look at themselves as they would a third party; he’s not removing obstacles or freeing them of societal expectation, he kind of… is the obstacle at this point. He has literally hooked into Mementos to *become the societal expectation that distorts people*.

[That third semester request with Akechi] is about Sumire and the full-throated rejection by the PTs of Maruki’s approach to problem solving. Like, it’s not literally about Sumire, but she trots into Maruki’s office and asks him to kill her and he obliges in at least some meaningful sense. The Phantom Thieves are showing judicious, even-handed use of their power here – it is not showing they’re similar, but that they’re *different*, because presented with the same prompt they choose a different outcome.

everyone say thank you katsu for being smart and cool and good at words.

(as another super quick side note about the whole "the correct answer is being a phantom thief" thing, i want to talk about the p5 bad ending a little bit. the point of stealing hearts, the phantom thieves say, is an attempt to empower people and show them that they can make changes in their own lives. the reality yaldabaoth offers you, is one where this is not the point. it's a reality entirely hinging the thing sumire stated she didn't like about the phantom thieves, that everyone might stop trying to solve their own problems and just rely on the phantom thieves for everything. this is presented as a bad ending, and completely antithetical to what the phantom thieves stand for. does that remind you of anything?)

so, what do we get from all that. maruki wants to fix everyone's problems. maruki does not want anyone to fix their own problems, or, maruki does not believe people can fix their own problems. sometimes maruki fixes problems bad. maruki refuses to admit he fixes problems bad. maruki acts in a way one might view as sad and self-devaluing, but maruki just does not view other people as people. he views other people as broken things with blinking "fix me" lights, cats stuck in trees, as problems. did this make sense? i don’t know! do i have a smooth lead up to a conclusion? absolutely not! but i don’t write stuff often and this was just for one specific tumblr user in my replies. i guess it’s just like.

a rant about a dog named kotaro

ending number one, accepting the offer:

ending number two, missing the deadline: