Fridge / Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth

Warning: Spoilers for the game will be unmarked.

Fridge Brilliance

• The opening theme "Road Less Taken" has a line: "How can you change your fate if your life has been written into stone?." Considering that the final boss is a Mesopotamian God, it might reference that stone tablets are used to write things in ancient Mesopotamia.
• The quote at the start of the game is "...we do not go astray because we do not know, but because we think we know." This comes into play via multiple parts of the game:
  • The P3P Heroine nearly breaking down since she thought that the S.E.E.S before her are her comrades, yet they are not.
  • The dinosaurs in the second labyrinth believing that they have to listen to what everyone said despite none of them believed like that at all.
  • Hikari believing that everyone hated her for being abnormal and even her father did the same because the things he taught her made people hate her, even though he doesn't.
  • The theatergoers in the Theater District thought that they cannot leave, yet they simply didn't want to.
  • Enlil believed that the very complex she curates will bring forth salvation to the weak and oppressed. It just makes them feel worse.
• How come the Phantom Thieves are the frontmost characters of Q2? There's quite a few answers:
  • Given how lavish the Theater looks, it's likely a Movie Palace — and we all know how much the Thieves love raiding their Palaces. Hikari's own movie being one makes this an example of Accidental Pun.
  • The films have a heavy theme of authority, with its antagonists questioning or fighting against it. In the Phantom Thieves' home game, questioning authority when it allows harmful behavior is one of the main themes.
  • It's not that deep. It's more because Persona 5 is the most recent of all three games and one the general public would be more familiar with, so that's why the game features them at forefront.
  • Actually, it’s more than just because it’s the most recent game, as the above makes a good point. Many of the themes throughout the films are reminiscent of what the Persona 5 cast go through in their home games, so it’d make sense they’d be front and center of it all.
• The third movie A.I.G.I.S, a movie about Individuality Is Illegal, is where the two protagonists of Persona 3 meet. Despite being the same person, the two protagonists are still individuals with many differences that make them unique. One is a sword wielding young man who is rather somber and serious. The other is a young woman who’s very bright and bubbly and wields a naginata. So it’s fitting that they meet in A.I.G.I.S, where they prove the movie’s message wrong by showing that they’re still unique individuals while also being the same.
• The FEMC's signiature skills are all link and bond based, while in the actual game she felt distant as her group is just herself and none of her teammates were actually there. That's because her entire arc involves her making new friends with a group of people that she doesn't know, including completely identical lookalikes of her teammates.
• Arsene's signature skill is "Rebel Vanguard" and Satanael's signature is "Revolt Vanguard." Joker, with Arsene is the rebel because he opposed society. However, once being freed from Yaldabaoth's solitaire game, Satanael leads a revolt against Yaldabaoth and wins.
• Captain Kidds' signature skill randomly activates Death Counter when battle starts. That's actually an irony about Ryuji trying to kick Kamoshida out of self-defense which allows Kamoshida an excuse to remove the entire track team...But it also represents the other way around where that act led to him assuming revenge and Kamoshida's very own downfall.
• Why were Makoto and Haru captured by Kamoshidaman at the beginning? Based on their Persona’s abilities, they specialize in Nuclear and Psychic skills respectively which were absent in Persona 3, 4, and even the first Persona Q game.
• All of Kamoshidaman's formes are weak to fire and the F.O.Es are respectively weak to Fire and Electric. These are the same elements that Ann and Ryuji specialize, making this a nod to Kamoshida's downfall being his mistreatment and abuse of Ryuji and Ann.
• The examination test required to enter the laboratory area of A.I.G.I.S is symbolism. There are three tests: "Adaptability, Power, Knowledge," and if all three of them are past should the gate to the research lab open. All of these are necessities to gain an office worker or store clerk job, but there is somehow no "creativity." Since the movie is a part of Hikari's psyche and Hikari is exactly being denied recognition of a movie director job which requires creativity, it means that she thought that creativity is worthless because that seemingly bought her downfall.
  • It’s also a call-back to her relatives, who disapproved of her dream; They want her to work on getting a good resume and a good job. So it’s understandable that they would want her to focus on building up those three traits: They would help Hikari get the kind of job they want her to do.
• During A.I.G.I.S., the teams are assigned serial numbers like the robots in the movie, which are rather easy and interesting to decode. Simply put, it's an abbreviation of their hometowns' names plus the number of the character's respective Arcana (IW = Iwatodai for SEES, YS = Yasoinaba for the Investigation Team, and TK = Tokyo (more specficially the Shibuya district) for the Phantom Thieves).
• The Mother Computer is being hacked via Ribbon by Futaba in order to defeat it. If one pays attention to the English subtitles, the robots that had not been awakened to individuality speak in ALL CAPS. If a robot has personality, they speak normally. And the Overseer/Mother Computer is initially the only robot speaking normally in the reality; However when Ribbon awakens to Orgia Mode, she too begins to speak normally while the Mother Computer speaks in ALL CAPS. This means that the hacking actually steals the Mother Computer's individuality and renders it powerless.
• Why do all the movie antagonists look like people the respective parties know, such as Kamoshida, despite it later being revealed that they don't actually represent them, and are instead part of Hikari's cognition? The labyrinths are all movies. The movie characters are being played by people familiar to the main characters, just like actors play characters separate from themselves in movies. So Kamoshidaman isn't Kamoshida, he's "Kamoshida as the corrupt superhero", the third boss isn't Ikutsuki, it's "Ikutsuki as The AI Overlord", and so on.
• From another perspective, the films aren't inherently wrong about their setups — they all have plots and "villains" common to their respective genres — it's just how they're "about" those elements that twist them into dark parodies of themselves.
  • Superhero films often have a dissenter as a common antagonist. One who slanders the hero's name, dredges up information to turn the people against them, or just plain ruins their life for the fun of it. Kamoshidaman wants to stop this problem before it starts — ergo, the mission becomes to hunt those jerks down before the people's trust is broken and the city no longer has a hero.
  • In Junessic Land, the herbivores' "dissenter" turns out to be one of their own — a classic case of betrayal from someone they thought they could trust. Of course, the natural action is to bring them back to the "good guys"' side or drive them out if they become too far gone in their "betrayal".
    • Additionally, Junessic Land's plot sums up as a group of herbivore dinosaurs trying to use The Power of Friendship to drive away carnivorous dinosaurs that try to eat their friends. Indeed, the Herbivore Dinosaurs are friends with each other and they do have a representative (Yosukesaurus); It's only nobody listens to the representative and the Herbivores abuse friendship to silence him or anyone else who makes up ideas that are not theirs instead of gathering the friendship to confront the carnivores. While downplayed, it should be noted that the carnivorous dinosaurs are still dangerous threats, but they just take advantage of the herbivore dinosaur's laziness and egotism.
  • The main robot in A.I.G.I.S. is supposed to be the rogue robot that disrupts the order and fights off its creators, with peace only restored once the bot is subdued or destroyed. The AI is the "hero" while the robot is the "villain" in this movie; This is almost always the other way around.
  • Alternatively, the films take common Rooting for the Empire or Ron the Death Eater interpretations of "The Heroes were the real villains all along" and play them absolutely straight. Sure, the labyrinths give the typical antagonist the spotlight and happy ending, but they change absolutely nothing in the process until Nagi's influence is removed and the movies become more self-aware about their flaws.
  • The fourth Labyrinth is a biopic and a musical, and thus has no real "villain." Biopics are intended to represent success stories of a person while musicals are intended to be happy and cheerful. However, the "biopic" aspect of the movie depicts how Hikari got her life ruined and became the depressed mess that she was at the start of the game, while the "happy" part of the musical turns out to be "unsettling" with depressing yet mundane lyrics and drops off its guise at its depths, revealing a horrifying flowerbed that represents its host's mental state. Musicals also end with Happily Ever After endings with all the main cast successfully achieving the happiness they wanted after a struggle, but in here it was twisted to everyone successfully making Hikari believe that everyone hated her for being "abnormal." Biopics are often inaccurate and contain fabricated parts of that person to stretch the person's achievements, aside that the "fabricated" part of the fourth labyrinth consists of something that is distorted by Hikari's false memories courtesy of PTSD instead of a deliberate fabrication for style.
• It should also be noted that Kamoshidaman and Junessic Land are also perverse versions of movies that Hikari used to watch; They twist the original message of those movies into dark parodies.
  • Kamoshidaman is based on a movie where a teacher is a superhero of absolute justice, so the superhero in the labyrinth takes the form of Kamoshida, which is in fact, a teacher, a dictator and a bully, much like Hikari's primary school teacher.
  • Junessic Land is based on a dinosaur movie where a group of herbivore dinosaurs team up to save their friends from carnivores, but in the labyrinth, the Herbivore Dinosaurs did the exact opposite, because Hikari's secondary school friends which the Herbivore Dinosaurs are based on didn't only refuse to help any of the bullied girls, they even actively lynch them so they won't get dragged in. And since Hikari was the one who told them to not lynch anyone, they lynched her and only her because nobody agrees with her suggestion. Therefore, her cognition became Yosukesaurus in the movie, because Yosuke is widely regarded as the "different one" of Inaba.
• While A.I.G.I.S isn't particularly based on a sci-fi movie Hikari watched, it's actually a Literal Metaphor of Hikari's trauma with her relatives, in which they claimed that if she insisted her film director dream instead of getting good grades and a "normal" office job, she will have "no future." This is taken in the most literal sense, where robots that have personality get all of their future robbed from them since they were scrapped and disposed of.
• The fourth Labyrinth is also very likely a perverse version of the movie that Hikari wanted to make; At the post-credit events, the movie festival announcer even calls the finished product a movie about her growth, indicating that what she wants to create is a biopic of herself, and the movie combines this with what her father expected her to be; The center character of a musical, to be loved by everybody. Therefore, it appears as an unsettling musical crossed with her biopic, aside that it ends up with her giving up living completely due to the influence of others and turning into a personality-less Empty Shell of her former self.
• Why is the fourth labyrinth's title obscured and after you complete it, it makes a "to be continued" sign? That's because the movie is titled "Hikari," its namesake host that has lost her identity and is now no different from the wall on her room. Since she has regained her motivation to live and the movie is her biopic that ends with her giving up life, it says "To be continued."
• Nagi mentions early on that the superhero movie in her theater wasn't titled Kamoshidaman originally. Which means that all the Kamoshida motifs came from the Phantom Thieves' preconceptions about rotten authority figures. The movies were probably all mindless entertainment before Doe overwrites them with Hikari's memories and the persona users showed up, in which the latter brought Persona's more introspective tropes with them. The final dungeon's movie genre is also called "documentary" despite not being a movie itself, implying that the movies were originally all documentaries of people suffering from the hardships of life, with all of the positive memories cut off.
  • On a tangent, the "Hero is God" propaganda doesn't quite fit the rapist gym teacher we know - he only thought of himself as a King. Perhaps more power gave him bigger delusions. Or maybe it was left over from before the phantom thieves arrived? The final boss is a god of justice...
    • That's because "Kamoshidaman" is not the rapist teacher, nor is he a superhero. "Kamoshidaman" is in fact - Just a completely unrelated Primary School Teacher who falsely accused Hikari for poisoning a rabbit that she probably didn't care for and humiliated Hikari with the entire class joining in for the sole reason she spoke against her. As a Truth in Television note, elementary school students REALLY consider their teachers like gods or the Big Good; It's really difficult for another lone elementary school student to speak against them without getting into trouble, especially when the student in question is Hikari, who isn't particularly known for her speechcraft or communication skills, making her a easy target for anything that the teacher decides to pull out afterwards.
  • Rabbit-Kamoshidaman seems like it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, besides a slight Logo Joke. That's because it doesn't. That Logo joke and the thieves' discussion of corrupt authority harming people are what triggered Hikari's memories of the rabbit incident and created this more direct metaphor. By the time the game starts, the movies aren't supposed to have Applicability to Hikari's past. And if they once were, that's long been... obscured.
  • The other two movies work in similar ways; Yosukesaurus was based on the Investigation Team's perception of a Butt-Monkey, the Overseer is based on S.E.E.S' perception of a non-authorative parent and Ribbon is based on their perception of a unique co-worker filled with personality.
• The large security robot FOEs in A.I.G.I.S are just as devoid of personality as most of the other robots in the reality. They even share the same elemental/status affinities and moves, with the exception of the stronger one had Charge alongside Hypercharge while the weaker one only had Hypercharge.
• What did the teacher at Hikari's primary school feed to poison the class rabbit? Judging from Super Kamoshidaman's carrot guns...it's very likely, and surprisingly, carrots. For rabbits, carrots are not appropriate food, since they generate large amounts of sugar that can easily cause diabetes to them; Carrots are like a big, sugary cake for rabbits and shouldn't be fed to them at large amounts.
• Doe doesn't talk when first encountered; He simply stays still even if the scene is a fully voiced cutscene.^note His dialogue is "......" without voice acting there; be noted that this cutscene is fully voiced. At the fourth labyrinth, when Hikari ("Vacant-Eyed Girl") is being "scolded" by her father into a breakdown in the fourth labyrinth's Act 7, she makes the same response. Since Hikari is connected to Doe, this indicates that her depression has reached catatonic levels at the start of the game and it is reflected on him, and the scenes where he creates the keys further prove that the two are emotionally linked.
• Hikari shares the same voice actor as Himiko Toga from My Hero Academia, Misato Fukuen, and the resemblances of the two are quite uncanny towards Foil. Both of them were being told by abusive people to give up their personality/quirk (Which is written in the exact same way as each other in Japanese^note Kosei, 個性) so they could become "normal," wanted to make friends with other people, finds living in the current society difficult and exhibit destructive/screwed up behavior. It's just that while Hikari only harms herself because of the abuse chain in her childhood and is actually a Nice Girl that genuinely helps and benefits her friends after being rehabilitated, Himiko is a deranged villainess that tries to kill and impersonate anyone whom she considers a "friend" or love interest out of some incredibly twisted Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Nagi's voice actor, Kikuko Inoue, also voiced Kirumi Tojo from Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. Much like Kirumi which was (supposedly) the servant of all of Japan, Nagi is a servant of humanity tasked to take care of the people trapped in her realm. Both look elegant and mature in terms of appearance, with Kirumi being an English maid and Nagi being a refined actress. They are also willing to harm others for the sake of the people they take care of; In Nagi's case, she would defend her wards from the pain of life even when it means killing off the Persona users.
• Why is the turning point of the game a Musical instead of anything else more intimidating than that, like say, Magatsu Inaba, Shido's Cruiser Palace and the like? It's probably because they are genres where a multitude of characters will sing and dance together, no matter what their role is. This fits to the theme of the game where "Everyone is here".
• Why are the past copies of Hikari in the fourth labyrinth trailer telling her to give up her personality while they appear as completely fine and are supporting towards the actual Hikari in the Labyrinth explorations? It might be actually Foreshadowing that the last blow that actually made her consider giving up her personality to become normal...is nobody but herself. Her father never meant to treat her daughter as an disappointment or force her to conform to the people that emotionally abused her; That was merely a misconception that she implanted onto herself due to trigger-driven impulsive thinking.
• Exactly why is Hikari, a powerless, insignificant girl be able to recover binds with a support skill and single-handedly stop a powerful god like Enlil in her tracks? That's because it's not her real person, but her disembodied spirit. (Not a ghost; It's essentially her living force.) All of her powers are of a result of a Your Mind Makes It Real rule seen in the collective unconsciousness. There is still a real Hikari in the real world and it's a moving and living entity, although since her living force has ended up in the Cinema, the real one is just left as an depressed and withdrawn Empty Shell until the one you encounter in the game returns back to reality and its body.
  • Also, this is why the Shadows or other enemies you encounter in the game cannot target Hikari; They might had been realized that it won't be any different from attacking a projection instead of a real person.
  • The P3P heroine that the other Persona users meet and interact with the game is not the real person for the same reasons, as she entered the theater from a dream just like Hikari; The real person is actually having a nap in her study time.
• Why can you only hurt Doe's film tape by typeless attacks (Physical and Almighty)? That's because your're bashing a lack of individuality to him. (As the Mother Computer indicates, elements are symbolic with personality in this game.)
• Doe's name, at first gives the impression that it comes from "John Doe," which is confirmed during the in-game dialogue where Nagi introduces him. However, it has a double meaning; It also comes from "Doushite Omae Ha Soudanda" or "Why do you have to be like that," a trigger word for Hikari because supposedly everyone who antagonized her asked her such a thing before they flip out. Her father asked her the exact same question which made her snap because she thought that he was saying "Why do you have to be abnormal," which transforms his cognition to her as a terrifying monster. In reality, when he said that he's actually saying "Why do you have to withdraw yourself" and is cheering her up instead of rejecting her worth.
• Perhaps fittingly to Doe's Signature Move "Infinite Despair," one of the items that are unlocked after you sell his mask to Theo is a male armor that nulls all binds named "Desperate Plate."
• Why are there no special screenings in the Theater District at all? That's because it's not a movie. How can a screening possibly happen?
• Why does the Namtaru FOE in the Theater District mirror your movements? It might be a magnetic robot that only negatively reacts to your movements. The artbook explicitly states that the Theater District FOEs are not Mesopotamian spirits but security robots.
• Nagi being the real villain suddenly makes the corrupt movies very insightful and somewhat hilarious to a film school buff. Every one of them is evil because the main bosses are considered to be the protagonists and are suffering from a case of severe Protagonist-Centered Morality; beating them in the Boss Rush causes them to realize how shallow their viewpoints were and choose to accept that the villain has a point. Nagi's flaw is that she absolutely refuses to see how there could be any other way than creating shallow, meaningless Lotus Eater Machines to isolate her prisoners further - and without the movies being changed, all of them are pretty much the exact same script. She's not just a Control Freak, she's a hack, one-note director who can't write another perspective to save her life.
  • One tip for making good characters is to make them relatable to the audience with Nagi's audience being a bunch of people beaten down by life for being different. But rather than show them characters who overcome such difficulties and become better people, Nagi only displays those characters getting beaten down for going against the status quo and portray them as the villains of those movies, censoring their good sides such as joy or happiness. Nobody wants to be the villain in their story and to be portrayed as a depressed wreck that cannot do anything right, but Nagi assumes that's what they want and refuses to listen to Hikari when she tells her differently. Not only is she a hack director who can't write a different perspective, she's also a director who doesn't truly listen to her audience and brushes away any criticism of her works as them not understanding the purpose of the films.
  • Similarly, Doe can't speak, but his edits give the films strong central themes that draw a contrast between justice as social harmony and justice as compassion towards those beaten down by society; Doe is an arthouse director who lets his work speak for him, one with an obvious agenda of social critique but who avoids shackling his films to his themes too deeply to let them breathe. It's shown in the Hikari film, which is the only film he made from scratch and is the most surreal, since he's doing it as a passion project with a single clear goal; curing Hikari's amnesia.
• The first F.O.E that the party encounters in the game, Chicken Kid, has an amount of traits resembling Enlil, the last big enemy in the game. Both of them are heroic-looking beings resembling avians, wear a cape and represent some sort of authority. What seems to be even more interesting is that, Chicken Kid is weak to fire and resists wind, in which the fire weakness is the polar opposite of Enlil's default affinities and Enlil has her wind resistance upgraded into an outright immunity.
• The Theater District and the movie labyrinths take an extreme turn of irony compared to Persona 's ideal dream world and Q1 's fake Yasogami. Sure they are someone's dream world and are realities based on their desires infested with monsters...aside that they are all distorted self-destructive desires and the theaters amount to a horrible, inescapable nightmare to them.
• While Nagi/Enlil might seem like yet another generic "God" boss seen in a MegaTen game, unlike most of them she seems to be representing something that is actual human behavior instead of an ideology or concept, namely how people actually try to cope with their mental illnesses. She locks people's will to live in compact cinemas and has them watch pure negativity to feed in their depression; This plays exactly similar to real-life Hikkikomoris shutting themselves in extremely small rooms and never getting out due to being abused/humiliated/denied worth, immersing themselves in fiction and trying to cope with their mental illnesses and pain, only to make their mental health worse. Enlil's dialogue even reflects this as a thing, as for them, their confines are nothing other than a sanctuary, and they will do everything to prevent therapy even if it's fully warranted.
• Enlil's motives are nonsense if looked exactly in a Persona perspective. Why do you even have to kill her even if she was not the one causing the problem? That's because she's also an Etrian Odyssey final boss; A titan, namely something close to the Heavenbringer guarding over a corrupted tree. She herself is not the instigator much like the Heavenbringer isn't; She is called by someone to spread corruption, which is oblivious to both sides, and she is the personification of the district; To remove her will result in the district being destroyed as well. In other words, the district and Enlil are not separate entities.
• Exactly why is the Big Bad called "Enlil" and is doing something that the original god absolutely won't do in the first place? That's because it's metaphorical. For the catatonically depressed, the world is equal to a field ravaged by storms with everything out to get them. Enlil is providing the storm shelter for them, but is inadvertently causing another storm; one that comes from the inside. The storm in the form of pure negativity shuts down their thinking and causes them to lose the will to live, making them nothing other than Empty Shells of their former selves.
• Kamoshidaman, the Herbivore Dinosaurs and Hikari having a Heel–Face Turn and atoning for their actions mirrors what happened to the targets of the Phantom Thieves, since they were done in a much, more positive sense of word. In the original Persona 5, the targets that the Phantom Thieves Heel–Face Brainwash more often than not become emotional husks that can do nothing other than rot for an eternity in a grief or regret, while in this game, they actually promise to be a better person and actually do.
• Futaba sees Hikari and resolves to be friends with her because she reminds Futaba of how she used to be. The two are actually far more similar than they know the further one goes in the game. Both girls were ostracized for being different, have absolutely No Social Skills, had horrible relatives that didn’t care about them and only made their problems worse, believed that their beloved parent hated and regretted raising them because of being driven by others into believing a lie, and were both so deep in depression that they refused to leave their comfort zones. On the positive side, both girls can get really excited about subjects they’re interested in, have parental figures that support and encourage their interests with the one that they thought hated them turning out to be their biggest supporter, will support and cheer on their friends in any way they can, and are both really sweet girls once you get to know them and they open up to you.
  • There are two points that are somehow Foil between them, however; Firstly, Futaba's trauma amounts to a One-Hit Kill, while Hikari's trauma amounts to Death of a Thousand Cuts. Secondly, Futaba's trauma was an extremely unnatural case where her mother was killed for holding and researching potentially super-confidential information that can easily destroy an entire opposition group once it's leaked; You can say that she was born to the exact wrong type of parent. In the other hand, Hikari's trauma was a much, more natural and accurate portrayal of how youngsters get their life ruined in Japan and her father was pretty much stable, alive and well.
• The more you look at it, the resemblances of Nagi with another MegaTen Big Bad, Boss from Catherine is more and more striking. Both of them are Mesopotamian gods (Enlil for Nagi and Dumuzid for Boss) who appear as elegant folk in white, are kind and charming at first glance, curate the in-game hub, traps people in horrible nightmares, are Well Intentioned Extremists who trap people in such complexes for good intentions, do absolutely nothing until The Reveal, are fought in both human and One-Winged Angel forms (Which is actually rare for Persona bosses), and are Bad Liars and Hypocrites. Babylonian myth even merges Enlil, Marduk and Dumuzid into Bel, further solidifying the similarities.
• The way each movie’s ending changes can be seen as how Hikari wished those moments in her life went.
  • In Kamoshidaman, the citizens stop supporting Kamoshidaman when they finally see he isn’t as mighty or just as they thought. Kamoshidaman also has a change of heart later on and resolves to become a real hero. Hikari wanted her classmates to side with her against the teacher and make her realize she was in the wrong and that being the teacher doesn’t mean she can force others to listen to what she believes is right.
  • In Junessic Land, the herbivores come to realize how badly they treated Yosukesaurus and welcome him back into the herd while also promising to communicate their feelings better in the future and no longer decide everything by majority rules. Hikari wanted her friends to stand by her side regardless of what they all firmly believe was the only way out and for them to stand against the bullies together.
  • In A.I.G.I.S, Ribbon stands up to the Mother Computer and refuses to throw away her individuality and what she likes just to be normal like every other robot. While it had some dangerous consequences that almost led to her death, Ribbon managed to overcome it and was finally allowed to be herself. Hikari wished she could stand up to her uncle and aunt and proudly tell them she loves movies and wants to be a director instead of just going to college and getting an office job like everyone else.
• In Enlil's realm, the definition of "normal" is being an emotional wreck who's given up on trying to be themselves; Her wards comfort themselves by saying everyone else feels the same about their situation and they shouldn't try to stand out among the majority. The realm is also a district in a faraway isle on the collective unconsciousness that is ruled by an almighty being who decides what is right and what is wrong. And what's right to this almighty being is feeding negativity to her wards and cutting out anything positive. This makes Enlil's realm a combination of all the themes that were played in Hikari's Cinema.
• In some way, each of the protagonists of the movies are huge hypocrites who don't follow what they espouse.
  • Kamoshidaman believes himself to be the sole authority of deciding what's right and wrong due to Might Makes Right. The Phantom Thieves prove themselves to be stronger than him and yet, he refuses to admit he's wrong and keeps yelling that his ways are justice when just about anyone can tell that they aren't.
  • The Herbivore Dinosaurs decide everything by Majority Rules but none of them even believe what they're deciding on is right and none of them take responsibility when the majority is proven wrong. Despite calling themselves weak, they are still dinosaurs and are strong enough to do actual damage against persona users, crash down trees or even fight and overwhelm real carnivores in numbers.
  • The Mother Computer declares no one is allowed any form of individuality in its society. Everybody but itself though. The Mother Computer has a unique appearance based on Shuji Ikutsuki and shares his liking of bad puns, both forms of individuality that sets it apart from every other robot in the setting.
  • Ironically, Enlil and the Theater District FOEs are NOT individuals as well; Enlil is the equivalent of the district's core and the other FOEs are just robots without free will.
• Exactly how does Hikari escape reality while later on it was revealed that she doesn't enter the Cinema in-person at all? She only notices it during a dream like how Joker can enter the Velvet Room via one. In other words, she is escaping reality by oversleeping.
• During the finisher against Enlil, Hikari has 15 HP. The 15 might come from 3 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15, with Persona 3 and Persona 3 Portable being two 3s, Persona 4 being the 4 and Persona 5 being 5.
• One possible reason why Hikari is not a party member till the end of the game is that as a director, they do not participate on the movie action on scene, save for cameos.

Fridge Horror

• One of the most disturbing aspects of this game is that "Discarding your individuality" doesn't actually represent conforming to everyone else's standards; it seems to be a metaphor for catatonic depression. Loss of individuality seems to be more like "If you just shut down your heart, you won't have emotions, personality or any sort of individuality to begin with" in this instance. It's especially obvious with how the Overseer actually disposes of robots with individuality; they are scrapped and reverted into husks.
• Another disturbing Fridge Horror aspect of the game is Hikari's traumas are extremely realistic. Unlike the majority of video game traumas, they are really mundane, but it doesn't make them any less unsettling; She can basically be anybody in real life. It is in fact, very likely for a typical teenager in Japanese or Asian society to fall into her way. Japan is a conformist society and they probably would just humiliate and bully anyone with No Social Skills. The education system (Teachers and students) there isn't known for being merciful towards adolescents like Hikari, either, and bullying can be incredibly debilitating in Asian countries like Japan. Of course when the social expectations and abuse go off the roof, they totally bereft the adolescent of any more desire to live and steer them to the Despair Event Horizon. This is how Hikikomoris come into being; The large amounts of stress simply damages them to the point that they lock themselves in their rooms for years and never get out. And Hikari is driven into becoming one herself; After her relatives rejected her future wishes, she simply retreated herself in her room and never came out, and when being talked to by her father, she just weeps, until her father accidentally pushed her Trauma Button and caused her to outright break down. The "Hikkikomori" situation for Hikari continued under Nagi's "protection"; just replace the computer screens with cinema screens and you get the big picture.
• It should also be worthy to note that Hikari is a disturbingly accurate portrayal of Post-Traumatic Stress disorder (Particularly of a C-PTSD variant), from her amnesia, to her general apathy about the world, to having a trigger phrase, to her self-destructive paranoia. If you have even some knowledge about depression and PTSD, you will easily recognize the very obvious symptoms of C-PTSD on her. Just compare her behavior with this and this and see how many of her traits match; You will be surprised.
• Another terrifying point of this game is that all of the labyrinths are not a collection of desires like the Yasogami attractions in Q, they are a series of massive complexes made out of an ordinary girl like Hikari's personal traumas and depression. This is a very good clue that her mental condition is simply unsustainable and self-destructive.
• A Fridge Horror case combined with Harsher in Hindsight is that we do not see Hikari's shadow self anywhere in the game; Most characters including Rei from Q1 has a Shadow self that explicitly appears in some way, be it negative thoughts or forgery by godly beings. This probably means that just like Mitsuo or Rei, she is distorted to the point that she is already the Shadow.
• The reason for Hikari's breakdown and toxic escapism from humanity is what exactly ignites Adachi and Akechi's murderous impulses. Just like those two, she is one of those people that society seemingly doesn't like; Everything she does gets her nothing other than an in-the-face humiliation. Unrealistic expectations that she cannot do are piled upon her by other people. ^note Namely her relatives who only cared about her getting good grades just like how Adachi's parents are to him. She does not have any friends because people supposedly hated her, and she does not find a reason to live in human society. The only thing that makes Hikari harmless to anyone but herself is that her mindset is the exact polar opposite of those two; If she had their mindset, you would be met with a psychopathic murderer. Adachi/Akechi blames only other people for their mishaps; They never realize their flaws and see themselves as perfect humans, saviors and enforcers of justice and others as nothing other than being garbage to be disposed of. This is the mentality that makes sociopath serial killers, as it allows them to commit atrocities with no regard towards others; All other human life is equal to worthless scum for them and can be just disposed of without consequences. They do not believe that they need any friends or people around them because they consider all other humans as worthless and disposable, even when it comes to people who genuinely care for them, or those whom they genuinely care. Hikari in the other hand blames only herself for her misery; She views herself as a living failure and other people as monsters out to destroy her. She never blames her father or the people who bullied her, but believes that if she just did everything as told, she wouldn't be hated and embarrass her father, because he taught her to become unique so everyone would love her, which on the contrary appears to cause her to be hated. This is not the mentality that creates serial killers; It creates suicidal Hikkikomoris, since they do not see themselves as anything other than worthless garbage; They are willing to do any self-destructive act to prove they don't exist. Unlike Adachi or Akechi, Hikari does subconsciously know that she needs others, it's just she is too afraid to make contact with them in fear of harm.
• Just like the previous game, if you die in the theater world you and any other Persona users around you are officially Ret-Gone. In the Persona 5 case, without you and Akechi to stop him, Shido would had been unleashed his grand plan on election day to turn Japan into a hyper-nationalist facist state. If you had not clear all locks yet, Nagi and Hikari would be trapped forever and since Doe failed to help her, she would had been lost all of her desire to live and get Driven to Suicide. If the party is defeated by Enlil, then the theater district will be left to rot until it self-repairs and attracts more wards with the same consequences to the P5 cast as above.
• The Theater District can Reality Bleed if not taken care of. So if the party just leaves the district, it will enroach into Tokyo in Persona 5 and go into conflict with Yaldabaoth. Since the two gods have conflicting beliefs, it means that Enlil will square off with Yaldabaoth and the results are not good.
• Throughout the game, Hikari had a desire to "discard her self" so she could become "normal." This is supposedly fulfilling society's expectations by going into a normal university then getting a pencil pusher job instead of going into another path like the movie industry, aside that it is not. The truth is that by becoming "normal," she likely meant turning herself into a mentally empty shell that submerges herself in complete apathy, because an Empty Shell is "normal" since it has no living force. (Like how a brick wall is "normal" because it is inanimate)
• One of Super Kamoshidaman's skills is "Bunny Slumber." That's because when rabbits sleep, they almost look like that they are dead; Aside that in this case, it's already dead because the teacher (Kamoshidaman) poisoned it.
• Yosukesaurus, Ribbon and Doe's most common postures when suffering is clutching their heads. What kind of pose that Hikari makes the most when she is suffering or relieving traumatic memories? Clutching her head.
• Yosukesaurus turns into a Carnivore during the fight against him and the herbivores. Exactly why does he transform into a carnivore? That's because all of the carnivores are loner F.O.Es. Since he's already ostracized from the group, he turns into a carnivore himself because he has no friends and is thus "alone" like the real carnivores. While it is very likely that Hikari (Yosukesaurus) didn't get driven into being a bully herself, it is also a portrayal of how a student is driven to be a bully (carnivore) themself because they were bullied and the group that was supposed to stop bullies (herbivores) ostracized them for being different.
• Disposed defect robots that are ridden of any personality in A.I.G.I.S are left to be empty husks rotting near the center server. That's because to Hikari, the removal of her self doesn't equal a good resume then a boring office job; A more appropriate explanation for "normal" in this case is an emotional death and complete withdrawal from the world.
• Why does Hikari's Aunt take the form of an omnipotent Mother Computer A.I. in the third movie? That's because her relatives destroyed her. She thinks that they will simply wipe out human trash like her at any moment just because she had her own future goals instead of the standard pencil pusher job.
• Why is the bottommost floor of the fourth labyrinth called "Endless Interlude"? That's because it's Hikari's mindset and since she believes everyone hated and rejected her including her father, she doesn't think that she needs to live for anymore purpose.
  • Additionally, why does it take the form of a monochrome, unsettling flowerbed with the flowers making Ghostly Gape smiles? That's because after beating Doe, a flashback of her father said that she would often fake a smile to make her not stand out from the crowd ^note In other words, she faked a smile just to make sure he doesn't notice her issues even though she was already a deeply depressed Empty Shell of her former self without any traces of self-identity left.
• Doe's moveset is a lot more thoughtful and unsettling at second glance.
  • The first thing is that he does not learn any electric, wind, nuke or bless skills. Electric and Wind are elements that Nagi/Enlil uses, indicating that he's trying to protect Hikari from Nagi. Nuke and Bless are light elements, which Hikari is devoid of. Therefore, he is only reduced to using Fire, Curse (Both Eiga and Mudo) as well as Psy attacks.
  • The status conditions that he cause are also meaningful. The status that he inflicts are Curse, Sleep, Poison and Stone. Curse is this game's version of fear and it represents Hikari's fear of being unique. Sleep indicates that she was escaping reality by overlseeping. Poison indicates that the escapism that she was in is toxic escapism. And stone probably means catatonic depression.
  • The last thing that comes into mind is Psiodyne. Psy skills attack the mind by giving the target a mindbreak; What did Hikari had when her father asked the trigger phrase? Mind breaking hallucinations.
• Why does Doe just lie around sloppily for a few turns if you destroy the film tape surrounding him? That's because what caused Hikari's PTSD to kick in is her film director dream being destroyed by her relatives. At the ending, her father even notes that she stopped shooting films after the relatives incident.
  • Also, why is the film only damageable by physical and almighty? Just like the Mother Computer, Elemental attacks seem to represent personality. You are only able to damage the film by attacks that have no personality because Hikari got her severe depression by having her movie morals denied.
• Doe took the form of a morbid abomination with film tapes surrounded by it, even though Hikari's father's unintentional triggering of her Trauma Button supposedly isn't enough to make her think of him as that thing; That's because he is also an amalgamation of pure negativity. This should give you a really good insight on how negatively affected Hikari's person is by her Trauma Conga Line. It should also be noted that the eyes on the film tape resemble Hikari's eyes, it's only that it has black pupils instead of white.
  • And why it can cast Infinite Despair, a triple bind that absolutely bypasses all passives and is uncurable? That's because it was the exact same despair experienced by Hikari; She thinks that she can't hide from it, can't fight back and can't recover from it during that time, and the Persona users were the one that helped her break free from the mindset; Now since they were stunned by that despair themselves, it has became the other way round, where she cheers them to break out from it.
• At the start of the game, neither Hikari nor Nagi has heard of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. As Hikari lives in the same reality as the Phantom Thieves, she should at least had been heard of them considering that they are all over the news during the Niijima's Palace arc events where this game likely takes place in. Therefore, Hikari's breakdown and subsequent imprisonment is likely in somewhere when the Phantom Thieves had not made their name at all, likely in a time before Kamoshida got his heart changed. As Kamoshida has got his heart changed during May and the events of this game likely happened in November, this indicates that Hikari was trapped in the Cinema for a minimum of 8 months. Supposedly, a person who has basically lost all the will to live wouldn't be able to sustain anything like this for such a long time before at least attempting to commit a real suicide.
  • Doe and the movie labyrinths are also likely recent creations, as before then the movies are simply generic negative films that served no purpose other than to sink Hikari deeper in her depression and self-loathing than she already is.
• Speaking of Akechi, in this game he does not display any form of his darker personalities at all. It is almost like he is a completely different person; Despite being treated as an outcast by his Phantom Thieves comrades, he can still make friends with the other Persona users such as Naoto without any problems, and he cooperates with the rest of the party properly. However, his memories will be wiped and he is fully aware of how abhorrent he actually is before his experience in the movie world, only to face a Redemption Failure thanks to his memories being wiped out, meaning that he will revert to his usual ways as before. In a nutshell, he genuinely became a better person, only to have it all be for nothing.
  • Many times Akechi looks as if he wants to be real friends with those around him but doesn’t open up, as if resigning himself to his fate of being the bad guy. It’s likely he believes himself too far gone to change and just sees this as an opportunity to either be himself for once or get on the Phantom Thieves good side for when they eventually go back to their lives.
  • By this point in the timeline, the Phantom Thieves already know Akechi is the traitor. Just imagine what it must’ve been like to see somebody they knew were going to betray them, is involved with a massive conspiracy, and has killed many people in the past, including the father of one of their party members and the mother of another beforehand, interacting with the casts of Persona 4 and Persona 3. Especially when Akechi plays with Koromaru, which would likely humanize Akechi in their eyes and make the knowledge of him inevitably betraying them more painful.
  • One of the special screenings ends with Shinjiro telling Akechi that he's done bad things before that he wishes he could take back, referring to his accidental killing of Ken's mother, but chooses to live his life with no regrets since he knows he can't. After he leaves, Akechi sadly puts his hand over his eyes and says, "I really am sorry....I don't understand. "Regrets" indeed." This is a pretty clear indicator that he truly does feel bad about what he has done, which not only supports the theory that he did grow to care for the other Phantom Thieves, but also makes his sacrifice hit harder in hindsight.
    • In Royal, Akechi rejoins the Phantom Thieves after his sacrifice to help them with their final heist, but it turns out that he may have been just a cognitive recreation of himself, and he doesn't believe he deserves to be forgiven. Two chances for him to genuinely redeem himself, and they were both all for nothing.
• The song that plays in the theatre lobby, "Cinematic Tale", has lyrics that sound like they're Nagi's perspective, addressing Hikari. Once you know what Nagi really is and what she's doing to Hikari and countless others, the song suddenly gains very dark undertones, its lyrics laced with Condescending Compassion. Especially what she really means by "when you're blue, we'll be there for you". The cheery lobby theme you've been hearing this whole time? It's Nagi's Villain Song.

Fridge Logic

• In the epilogue, Hikari exits from theater 4 with the P3P Heroine. (Notice that when the Heroine parts with the P3 Hero, she is walking on the other side of Theater 3.) Just why does this happen? It's because Hikari and the Heroine appeared in the Theater world via a dream. The 4th theater exit merely awakens Hikari and the Heroine's body in the real world while the first, second and third directly and respectively departs the P5, P4 and P3 cast back into their realities.

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