Fridge / Catherine

Fridge pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

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Fridge Brilliance

• Vincent always starts the night at the bar with one drink power-up already applied out of a maximum of three. This confused me until I realized, that in every preceding cut scene, Vincent drinks a full glass.
  • Yet another for the fridge; when Vincent is drunk, he walks around in a really odd manner. Until you realize he stumbles around like a sheep.
• Another for the fridge; Dumuzid's plan doesn't really make sense. He wants to increase the population by forcing people to get married. In a world in which the global population is a massive drain on resources and the planet, his plan seems absolutely idiotic... unless you consider the fact that his plan may be exclusively focused on the dwindling Japanese population.
  • Doubtful that he's focusing on Japan, the game is set in America.
    • Still works if you're in Europe or North America — they've got an aging population and dwindling reproduction that isn't much better than, or - in the case of Germany/Italy/Spain - arguably worse than, Japan. The only difference is that Europe has an influx of immigrants, which masks the problems of declining reproduction such as in Spain, where the immigrants would usually head to the cities, with entire villages near abandoned.
  • It's probably more about survival of the fittest. Let's assume that unfaithfulness and inability to commit are inheritable. The mastermind would probably think "What good are these guys? I don't want them to produce the next generation" and so he offs them (which, by the way, will still drop the population count). At least that's how I see it.
  • It probably has something to do with what we learn in the True Freedom ending. Namely that the series is set in a time period where not only do they have massive, futuristic starships, but space colonies that look like regular towns, raising the question of whether or not the ENTIRE GAME takes place in space. If something happened to earth and humanity was surviving on space stations, that would certainly call for ensuring survival, wouldn't it?
  • Bear in mind that Dumuzid is working under Ishtar, a goddess of fertility. It probably has less to do with actually keeping the human population up; rather, suppose that in order to sustain her power or possibly even to exist, Ishtar needs humans to breed? It certainly makes more sense, then, if that were the true purpose.
  • It's probably not that. If all she needs are for humans to breed, then she's probably one of the most powerful deities in existence. If she gains power from breeding, it's likely that she needs first to exercise her divine abilities and touch on the situation, gaining power not from the general breeding populace but from the breeding of those who have survived her trials.
• Consider the stages where Vincent directly interacts with other sheep, instead of them just falling to their deaths in the background. The bosses for those areas are based off of fear of commitment, which is why you never see the NPC sheep (who all have a constant, specific boss in their Nightmares). So why did he run into Steve after fighting his Shadow? Because Shadow of Vincent was also a monster to Steve, as the man who stole Catherine from him. When he realizes the sheep before him is Vincent, the Shadow appears and sheds its mask.
• More Fridge involving Shadow of Vincent. It's the only boss who never actively pursues Vincent, nor can Vincent outrun it. Instead, it hovers around the sides of the tower at the same level as him, constantly. This makes perfect sense; you can't outrun your own Shadow, after all. As it says in its Boss Banter, it's always watching him. Additionally, it's the only boss who doesn't get vaporized by the light of the door at the end of the night. Going by implied continuity with the Persona series, the only way to defeat a berserk Shadow for good is to accept it as part of yourself, which Vincent didn't do.
• Why is the Karma Meter in this game leaning towards Unfortunate Implications? Consider that the Nightmare world is under the jurisdiction of a womanizing man who gained the powers of a god. Thomas Mutton/Dumuzid is either taking out his own issues on average Joes and lying about why so he looks good, or he's just incapable of changing his ways unless defeated. And in the myths, he was condemned to the Underworld because he didn't mourn his wife when she was trapped there, which is why he's working with demons. In short, it's Deliberate Values Dissonance.
• One of the confessional questions is "Are you a masochist or sadist?", with "Sadist" as the "Chaos" answer and "Masochist" as the "Law" answer. The "Good Cheater" ending's credit pictures show Vincent and Catherine engaged in S&M activities, with Vincent as the Masochist. To get the "Good Cheater" ending, Vincent has to be mostly, but not fully, committed to Chaos. He craves excitement enough to live with Catherine in the Netherworld, but that little bit of Law manifests as masochistic tendencies.
  • Relatedly, "Good Cheater" Vincent still partially desires stability, so he settles into a kinky, but ultimately stable, relationship with Catherine. Whereas the fully chaotic "True Cheater" Vincent grows restless just living with Catherine and takes over the whole damn place.
• In both of the Bad endings, Trisha says that it could be considered a "good ending" for Vincent, as the girl he was pursuing may not have been what he really wanted from life. The credit pictures of the "Good" endings leave some ambiguity as to how happy Vincent really is, since to get those endings, he must be favoring Law or Chaos enough to win the girl back, but still have some doubts. So, in that sense, the "Good" endings could be interpreted as actually worse than the "Bad" endings in some ways, since Vincent is in a relationship that he isn't completely sure he wants. He looks more unambiguously happy in the "True" endings, where he is completely committed to Law or Chaos.
• One of the confessional questions is "Boxers or briefs?" — kind of an odd thing to ask Vincent, since he's clearly already made his choice, so answering "briefs" would just be hypocritical on his part. However, Astaroth, who is an avatar of Ishtar, is responsible for the questions, and Ishtar/Trisha always speaks directly to the player. So the question isn't really for Vincent anyway.
• Why does it seem like when they're trading techniques, it's hinting towards "certain techniques"? The fact that they're climbing a tower doesn't help.
• Casting Laura Bailey and Michelle Ruff to voice Catherine and Katherine respectively in the English version must have been deliberate. Rise and Yukari both represent the Lovers Arcana, which classically represents two paths in life and choosing the one to follow. Guess what Vincent has to deal with?
  • Amusingly enough, the Betty of this game voiced Yukari and the Veronica voiced Rise. They switched archetypes.
    • Really? Yukari is very much one of the normal girls for Male Protagonist and Rise is an "exotic" idol. Not at all. Just showing the different sides of the arcana.
    • Yeah, really. Yukari is an emotionally troubled popular girl, while Rise is a friendly girl next door type who used to be bullied and wanted to make friends.
    • Context is what's most important here, Betty and Veronica isn't about the girls' personalities as much as it is about how they relate to other members of the Love Triangle/Harem, and specifically how easily attainable are they (be it because of class, attitude, or appearance), with Betties being ordinary and easy to "catch" without causing any major fusses while a Veronica is a girl that would otherwise seem out of their guy's league. Compared to Delicate And Sicky Fuuka, Fem Bot Aigis, Up Town Girl Mitsuru, and... whatever the heck Elizabeth is, the Tsundere Clingy Jealous Girl Yukari is easily the Betty of her game. On the other hand, Genki Girl Idol Singer Rise is an extremely popular Idol whose competition are all rather normal high school girls, in appearance and personality if not profession, like the Tom Boy Chie, Yamato Nadeshiko Yukiko, and Sweet Polly Oliver Naoto, which makes her the game's most obvious Veronica. So frankly, the voice actresses still line up with their original role's archetypes rather nicely.
• It's implied that every time Vincent has a nightmare, he's actually sleeping with Catherine. All boss battles end with a stream of white shot right at the boss's face while Vincent basks in the afterglow from the door.
• The reason given by Thomas Mutton/Dumuzid for the nightmares doesn't sound very real at first, considering the size of humanity. However, when you get to the intro for Axis Mundi, Ishtar admits that the stated reason was really just bull and its real reason was to find someone who could be her consort to replace Dumuzid.
• You might wonder why Catherine managed to get your phone number and sends texts even if you don't respond. It makes perfect sense when you remember that (and this is barely a spoiler) she's a succubus whose texts disappear the moment you win your freedom. She probably was able to just send everything directly to Vincent and never his phone.
• Catherine's photos to you. If you pay attention and apply a bit of Fridge Logic, you'll notice that several seem far too professional to do with a phone. They suddenly make a lot more sense once you find out that they're all illusions that follow what Vincent wants.
• While playing the game, when you do well and climb fast, you'll hear people cheering you. Eventually, I realized that there was a pretty good in-universe reason for this happening as the other sheep climbing comes to see you as a leader as you progress through the tower.
• Given Atlus's major investments in the Persona series, and that series' preoccupation with associating people with the major arcana of the tarot, having this game center around The Tower makes perfect sense. The Tower, in the tarot, is considered an arcana with heavy associations with catastrophe, destruction, accidents, damage, liberation, and major changes in one's life.
  • Any man who finds himself in the midst of the nightmares finds himself in great danger of death due to the obstacles and perils that climbing the tower presents. Any wrong slip can lead to their falling and dying in the real world.
  • In the time period that Catherine takes place, Vincent faces a lot of looming and unexpected changes in his life that he resists facing due to his desire for an easy, stress-free lifestyle. Many of the bosses in the levels of the nightmares reflect on what he perceives as the greatest changes he's fearing facing: marrying Katherine, Katherine being pregnant, Catherine being thrown into the mix and upsetting his whole easy lifestyle.
  • One of the greatest themes of the game is following one's own destiny and earning one's freedom through their labors. Vincent is constantly climbing the tower every night in order to earn the freedom of himself and the other "sheep" who climb it. "The man of legends" is given the opportunity to earn his freedom and whatsoever he chooses if he successfully climbs the tower. And, in the end of the game, one of Vincent's biggest choices is in deciding whether he wants the stability of a calm life, or if he'd be willing to face some danger to have an exciting life — with a great deal being focused on the dichotomy of order vs chaos (freedom), and the True Freedom ending being that Vincent chooses neither and makes a freedom of his own.
• It makes sense that Toby isn't affected by the dreams for a few reasons. One, he wants to find his soulmate and have a family, and is looking for a woman who he can have that with (the reason that Erica, a trans woman, is affected by the dreams, for keeping him from doing so), so he doesn't fit the MO of the men who usually must climb. Second, he's simply too young. The majority of the victims are men in their late twenties/early thirties or so, as are their partners. Toby is only 23, and doesn't qualify; likely the only way he would qualify would be if he were with an older woman with no intent to marry her, but given his preferences and what he wants, he likely wouldn't qualify anyway.
• Playing with the concept of Chaos (Catherine) and Order (Katherine), their Alternate Endings in Full Body involve the ladies playing with their opposite theme. Catherine, who genuinely loves Vincent by the end of her route, goes back in time so that they could have an ideal romantic story as an ordinary human girl, embracing order to dedicate her life to Vincent. Katherine, after her break up with Vincent at the end of her route, decides to let go of her more conservative personality and decides to let loose more by becoming a model and becoming popular through her beauty, embracing chaos to feel more free.
• Why can't Dumuzid, a literal god, pony up fifty thousand bucks even under duress? In Shin Megami Tensei, the parent franchise, the heroes often recruit demons (including gods) by bribing them with items, energy, and money. There's precedent for broke gods doing anything for money.

Fridge Horror

• What if Katherine actually got the knife instead of Catherine on the 7th day?
  • Nothing, because it was a dream.
    • The entire point of the game is that people are dying in real life because they died in a dream. And given that that cut scene happened in one of THOSE dreams...
    • That was Vincent's dream, not Katherine's. There's no indication that people can die in someone else's dream.
    • I know that was Vincent's dream, but he could have been killed and died in the real world because Katherine would have killed him if she had gotten the knife.
    • Wait, I thought Katherine was going to kill Catherine.
    • She could be planning on using the knife as a bluff, considering that she was horrified to see that she accidentally killed Catherine.
    • Since it was just a dream Katherine, it was just a part of Vincent's own mind and obviously couldn't actually plan anything. Whether or not the dream had to go as shown or if it could have gone another way (possibly leading to Vincent's death or a bluff) is very unclear, especially since we don't know if it really was the kind of dream where you can die or if Catherine had anything to do with it.
• If Dumuzid's plan was to increase the world's population by horrifically killing people who hindered reproduction, just imagine what he could and would do if he wanted to limit or decrease the population! So many sheep, so little time...
• So YHVH needs prayers badly, but there's a minority who don't believe in him, and they are disrupting society to the point of Rage Against the Heavens. What does he do with the minority? Send them through this nightly endeavor by allowing angels to select a person who will obtain "True Freedom". This is implied by Astartoth and Thomas Mutton, both of whom are angels or work under them.
• Let's assume Erica was having the nightmares for keeping Toby from a relationship that would produce children. How many innocent unsuspecting LGBT people could have or did die because of Dumuzid wanting grandkids?
  • It seems to mainly be an issue of people leading their partners on. Toby didn't know about Erica's past at the time it was implied that she was having the nightmares. Transpeople who disclose their history to their partners probably wouldn't be affected, since everyone involved would either leave the relationship or choose to stay with the full knowledge that it won't result in children.
  • Alternatively, if someone stayed in a relationship that they knew had no hope of producing children, they might end up thrown into the nightmares as well.
• In stage 3, Vincent is being chased by an upside-down body with a tongue protruding from the...er...behind. Each monster he faces is stated to have come from his own mind. Well, the next morning, Catherine calls him a "perv" but refuses to expand on what they did... Eww. She was probably lying to further tempt Vincent, but the implication is still there.
  • Later in the game, by meeting the right conditions, Midnight Venus reveals herself as Ishtar and congratulates the player character by making you her co-deity of love with everything that goes with it. The problem? Ishtar's lovers, even the non-mortal ones, had a tendency to end up dead, as pointed out waaay back in The Epic of Gilgamesh. With that in mind, though, maybe it's better that you don't turn her down.
  • You can get the same cutscene in pairs as well. So what does this mean?
• At various points, there are references to Erika being hurt badly in a previous relationship. Then comes the revelation that she is a trans woman, and it becomes clear that she was the victim of a hate crime. Suddenly, Vincent, Johnny, and Orlando's desire to keep Toby from dating her looks very different.
  • Or maybe the partner in the aforementioned relationship wasn't supportive.
    • That doesn't account for the way her friends describe the relationship.
    • They only say she was hurt by the relationship, they don't explain how. Maybe she just didn't explain to her previous partner who she used to be or how she felt; Toby is a nice guy, but even he got upset about being left in the dark. Sure, she's still on friendly terms with him, but it's not hard to believe that someone else might take the info much more negatively if they weren't informed from the start.
    • And many anti-trans hate crimes are born from that exact scenario.
• There's an easy-to-miss one in the rest area/confession booth thing, from the sixth level on. Talking to the longhaired sheep, you learn that the monster he keeps trying to outrun is his mother, a mother who tried to 'lock him away', but that he escaped and has been running ever since. On one of the landings when you talk to him, he mentions that her hands were always cold and that she never let him wear clothes....
  • Archie outright confirms this on a later landing, if you save him and Todd. Todd's reaction to this probably matches the player's.
  Todd: Holy fuck!
  • Considering Archie's having the nightmares for sleeping around and Vincent's just wearing what he falls asleep in for the nightmare stages (i.e. just his boxers), he... might or might not have been wearing much, if anything, for his first boss encounter. Yikes.
• Is Fridge Squick a thing? After the first nightmare, Vincent wakes up to find he's wet the bed. A few days later, Catherine finds one of Katherine's hairs on his sheets. So... did Vincent never wash his sheets after that accident? Ew...
• When you die in the dream world, you die for real. Every sheep you see in the dream is another man. It's inevitable that a lot of the sheep you encounter will die and oftentimes, it'll be done by Vincent's own hand, either by accident or on purpose. Depending on how you play, Vincent could very well be a murderer whose crimes are never once addressed.
  • However, closer to mid-late parts of the game, Astaroth mentions that many of the sheep who are climbing with you are actually insane men who no longer have physical bodies in our world. So it really depends on your interpretation. Judging by how the death toll on the news doesn't get any higher no matter how many sheep you watch fall to their deaths, it might be leaning towards that explanation.
• At the end of the super challenge thingummy, Ishtar decides to go after you, the player. This is not a good thing. Remember The Epic of Gilgamesh? Sure, she's a pretty girl, but in the end she always gets tired of her lovers and does away with them. Mutton should just thank his lucky stars that he's easier to leave than kill...

Fridge Logic

• If the point of the Nightmare Sequence has something to do with making babies, shouldn't it be automatically Unwinnable for Erica?
  • She's a post-op trans woman, as Toby would know if she hadn't. Therefore, she has no means to reproduce.
    • I know that, but the point of winning the Nightmare Sequence doesn't have something to do with making babies. Men are thrown in there to die because they are in a relationship that won't produce kids. Erica had the nightmares because she was with Toby, who wants kids but didn't know she was a trans woman.
    • It is never proven that Erica is having the nightmares. All the talk seemed to only give her just one, unrelated nightmare.
    • Even if she was having the Nightmare, you don't have to follow Dumuzid's rules to escape. Vincent is able to win even if he takes the Cheaters or Freedom route.
    • He technically won before then, but challenged Dumuzid to another round.
• If the bosses really wanted to stop Vincent, couldn't just they head for the top and destroy the door or something?
  • But they are heading for the top... Shadow of Vincent seemed to be toying with Vincent, though.
  • It looks like Shadow of Vincent, Thomas Mutton, and the Dumuzid are the only bosses who aren't restricted to climbing, so probably not.
  • I know that, but can't the aforementioned bosses just go ahead of Vincent to the top and destroy the door instead of just watching him climb for it?
  • They're probably just moving as fast upwards as they can, or they could probably just ram (heehee) right into Vincent, too.
  • Thomas Mutton/Dumuzid always believed that Vincent could never win against him. Removing Vincent's win condition from the get-go is like acknowledging that Vincent is an actual threat.
• Justin says that the series of unexplained deaths among men happens every hundred years. Later, Thomas Mutton claims that if he hadn't gotten the wrong man away from Vincent's mother, he wouldn't have been born. Wouldn't that have been much more recent than 100 years ago?
  • It isn't certain that Justin's correct. For all we know, this has been going on every single year. Alternatively, Mutton was simply lying. Or maybe Atlus simply missed it.
  • Margin of error? There's no indications that would tell us how long the nightmares last, so while they could happen every hundred years, they might also last several decades.
  • Or maybe, every centaury, there's several deaths in a short time frame and the rest of the time there are still deaths, just staggered out more.
• If Vincent knew he'd be confronting Thomas Mutton in his dreams on the ninth night, why didn't he wear more clothes to bed?
  • He's trying to defeat him to win his lover back, not taking him out on a date. He's not self-conscious enough to give a crap about how naked he may or may not be during his dreams.
    • But why does Vincent wear boxers to bed? Speaking of which, why do men wear just underwear to bed?
    • As a women who wears just underwear to bed, I just find it more comfortable.
  • More importantly, why can't he just dream himself a jetpack?
    • Mutton is in control of the dream world here, you think he would allow that?
• Speaking of boxers, if Thomas Mutton is anything to go by, you look like a sheep in boxers (with an afro) to all the other sheep in the dreams. So doesn't that mean a lot of the other sheep wore clothes to bed?
  • Mutton is the only one to remark on Vincent's underwear, and can probably see everyone in the nightmares as they really are. To the other sheep, Vincent is just "Sheep with Afro".
• So since Katherine killed Catherine in the knife struggle, did she take a level in badass?
  • It was just a dream, so it's irrelevant.
  • Considering the angle, it looks more like it was an accident and Katherine clearly isn't at all happy with the outcome. Probably not an example of badassery.
• If the whole point of these dreams is to remove men from relationships that won't result in children, then could committed, but infertile men be subjected to the dreams? And what about lesbians? One would assume that adoption wouldn't be a way out of Ishtar's scheme, for while that is child rearing, it doesn't do anything to increase the population. I guess in-vitro fertilization is still a choice, there, but would that count?
  • Check the Fridge Brilliance section. Ishtar admits that the given reason is bull and she just wants a new boyfriend. OR girlfriend, considering she talks to the PLAYER, not Vincent.

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