Roleplay / Persona Rebirth

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Persona Rebirth is a Play-by-Post Game forum loosely based off the Persona series of video games. The game has run consistently since 2010, and depicts an original plot taking place in the Persona universe, using the same mechanics as its source material. The site can be found here if you're interested or just want to read through all the topics. Be warned though: it's been known to dip into some scary stuff at times.

In 2003, a mysterious, supernatural disease tore through the city of Nagashima before suddenly disappearing as quickly as it appeared. In the same year, the people working in a laboratory investigating the disease all disappeared, apparently killed by an unknown force.

Ten years later, groups of people begin to wake up in the ruins of this same laboratory after seeing a vision of a golden butterfly. Since the incident that brought an end to its use, the laboratory has become twisted and infested by Shadows. Shortly after waking up in the laboratory, these people awaken to the power of Persona — a projection of their inner self — and begin to fight against the Shadows.

Now, the Persona users of Nagashima have to find the answers to what lies within the ruins of the laboratory, while simultaneously facing their own internal conflicts, and those brought by Persona users with less than good intentions. But even as they struggle to control the shadows within themselves and hide their identities from the public, the creeping threat of the laboratory's ruins still remain... and with the newfound knowledge that they only have a year to solve it, their struggles are only going to intensify.

NOTE: TV Tropes upkeep is not treated as a particularly high priority by Rebirth users. Some tropes listed may not be accurate to current events on the site, while others are only applicable to the pre-reboot version of the site and will be noted when that is the case.

A Note To Editors: Please place all character related tropes on the Characters page instead of the Main page!

Tropes related to Persona: Project Rebirth

• Aborted Arc: Happens sometimes, since RPers come and go for various reasons.
• Abandoned Area: The Ruins is two distinct flavors of this, mixed into one area:
  • Abandoned Hospital
  • Abandoned Laboratory
  • Ghost City: The Inverted World at the bottom of the Ruins, a copy of Nagashima that looks just a bit... off.
• Academy of Adventure: Taiyoutono High and Reitaku High both serve as this, since the majority of Persona users hail from the two schools, and both have their own connections to the Ruins.
• Alien Sea: The Primordial Sea at the bottom of the Ruins is a pitch black ocean filled with the building blocks for Shadows.
• All Myths Are True: The number of mythologies serving as sources for Personae is staggering.
• Alternate Universe: There's a subforum for it. The topics range from full on alternate versions, mini-RPs, and For Want Of A Nail scenarios.
• Author Appeal: Of varying degrees. Comes with the territory of being a roleplaying website.
• Big Bad:
  • Yoko Yamaguchi, a human scientist-turned-Shadow, was the main antagonist for much of the story, until it was discovered that she wasn't so much a villain as the linchpin keeping the Ruins from spilling out into the real world.
  • Several threads have revealed that there's something else in the Ruins that has been manipulating events both within and without the Ruins, and may or may not cause the end of the world in a year. Characters have taken to causing this "the Entity."
  • Aleksandria Fyodor was this for the first player-created board arc. However, her character and the results of her influence have gone by the wayside due to the reboot.
• Body Horror: Pretty much a staple of Monster form. A good lot of Shadows also showcase this.
• Broken Masquerade: Played straight pre-reboot with the Park Incident. Post-reboot, this was narrowly avoided due to the Park Incident happening at night instead, but Nagashima's Persona users are constantly fighting to keep this from happening, even as more of the Ruins leaks into town.
• Captain Ersatz/Expy: Very common character types.
  • More specifically, Masao Mori, the Wild Card of the 2010 group, is clearly based on the archetype of the standard Persona protagonist, down to him being a New Transfer Student and romancing all of his female Social Links. It doesn't end well for him or his companions.
• City of Adventure: Nagashima, the setting of the story, sits next to an abandoned laboratory full of horrors and is populated by a myriad of Persona Users who delve that same laboratory to keep the city safe.
• Continuity Nod: The RP takes place in the same world as the rest of the Persona franchise, so nods to events that took place in those games happen occasionally. However, the setting's fully removed from the events of those games, so no one in the RP knows the truth of what happened in them.
  • It's been discovered that Matsumoto Technologies, the company responsible for the Ruins, stole some information from the Kirijo Group and was sued out of existence for it.
• Continuity Reboot: In 2018, the RP had to move to its own forum because of Zetaboards being acquired by Tapatalk. The user base took this as an opportunity to retcon away parts of the plot that didn't make sense, didn't fit in anymore, or were deemed too edgy. The focus of the plot also moved away from conflict between the Persona Users and the anti-User vigilantes and more towards exploring the Ruins and fighting its residents.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: Though a few RPers try to avoid this, things that are undeniably American tends to pop up every now and again. The large number of American characters could be related to this as well.
• Creator's Favorite: Many roleplayers tend to use one of their characters more than the others, if only because they feel more comfortable or confident roleplaying them.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Salome famously gave one of these to Ren after he tried to challenge her.
  • Some of the Qlippoth fights have turned into these (from both sides), due to their unique weakness. Not everyone who encounters one has a Fusion Spell to fight them with, but they tend to fall quick when one is available.
• Darker and Edgier: The regular Persona games aren't all sun and rainbows, but Rebirth tends to dial things up a bit. There's a notable Survival Horror influence in Rebirth's setting and how information is doled out, and some of the player plotlines and characters can get into some dark material.
• Demonic Possession: Many Persona users begin to suffer from varying degrees of this, ranging from their Persona simply influencing their actions to it actually taking control of their body.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Most of the Ruins Residents are now on friendly terms with the Persona users, but Mana Kogane especially tends to make this trope literal — most conversations with her involve sitting around a table and snacking on some food.
• Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Possibly delves into this regarding Treo and Mana Kogane, although she seems to be teasing him more than anything.
• Dysfunction Junction: Persona users in Nagashima tend to be troubled but functioning at best and crazy at worst.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Shadows in general. Even the lowliest Maya is a walking (well, slithering) violation of natural law.
  • Whatever "the Entity" is, it's probably one of these.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Ruins might have once been an underground medical facility, but the Eversion has since transformed it into a sprawling maze infested by Shadows, and there are parts of the Ruins that do not conform to natural laws (known as Tableaux by the users.)
  • No Man's Land is a formless space that changes based on the thoughts of those entering it, often becoming perverse copies of locations in Nagashima with something wrong about them, whether it be classrooms turned on their sides with no change in gravity, or Chinese restaurants whose dragon mascots have suddenly grown to coil around the whole building. Space doesn't seem to work the same way in No Man's Land as it does outside it, as traveling through it allows you to go to places that you logically shouldn't be able to within the Ruins.
  • The Inverted World is a rusted out, abandoned copy of Nagashima populated by yellow-eyed copies of everyone who lives in the city, with signs that some great disaster was the cause of its state. Floating in the sky above the city in a constant rotation are masks that match up with the masks of the Qlippoths, and beyond those, a mysterious shining orb.
• Enigmatic Empowering Entity: The Golden Butterfly, presumably. It renders specific individuals catatonic, and guides them into the ruins, where they awaken their persona. Entering the ruins without being guided does not enable awakening.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: Half of the time, this is what Ascension means, at least in comparison to "normal" Persona users. Note that "Ascension" does not mean ascending to a good Persona: one can ascend wrong and gain a very different Persona with accompanying worldview. Most Users who "Ascend wrong" are also Enlightened Antagonists.
• Ensemble Cast: A given, due to the nature of the game. The number of characters involved is currently in the hundreds.
• Evidence Dungeon: Since the Ruins were destroyed while they were still functioning, the place is just chock full of extremely incriminating documentation of the violations of medical and scientific ethics that went on there. Since Matsumoto Technologies, the company bankrolling the lab, has gone bankrupt, and the only survivor who could really be charged for anything has since become a Shadow, it's unlikely this could actually lead to any legal repercussions.
• Game Face: When someone dons their mask, it is generally a signal that a fight is imminent.
• Geographic Flexibility: No one really knows where Nagashima is, beyond that it's on an island in a river on the west coast of Japan.
• Guardian Entity: While Personas generally help their users, that doesn't necessarily make them good or evil.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: This is almost a given, considering most of the cast.
• House of Broken Mirrors: The bathrooms in ruins all have broken mirrors, for some reason. No one's really sure why.
• How We Got Here: Played with. The very first document found on the site was an audio log from the moment of the Eversion, stating that the events that happened were the faults of the scientists there. Much of the focus since then has been on finding out what happened before that day that led to that moment.
• Humanoid Abomination: Several, due to how varied Shadow forms can be and the origins of what Shadows are.
  • The Ruins Residents are a group of once-human Shadows that, in almost all cases, were present in the Ruins on the day of the Eversion and survived by being transformed into Shadows. Though all of them have a human form, it's just a cover for their more monstrous Shadow form.
  • Qlippoths look like holes in reality wearing a Shadow's mask — it's just that most of them happen to have humanoid forms. The Tower Qlippoth, notably, does not, instead taking the form of a ziggurat made of human hands.
  • Multiple enemy Shadows that can be found in the Ruins have humanoid form, with some explicitly looking like people.
• Invincible Boogeymen: Qlippoths, assuming you don't have a Fusion Spell. You can slow them down, but they can't be permanently defeated without one.
• In Vino Veritas: Salome clearly believes this, as she tends to get her guests boozed up while she advises them.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Due to the fast pace of the forum, the large backlog of topics and events, and the RPers' love of discussing character arcs and ideas, things tend to end up being spoiled to new users fairly quickly before they can even read the relevant threads.
• Lighter and Softer: The 2018 reboot, in comparison to the pre-reboot setting. While Nagashima is still a bit dysfunctional and quirky, it's no longer a hive of criminal activity with a corrupt police force and teenage vigilantes running around. In addition, the incident where a Persona User went berserk and trashed Ruwashi Park now happened at night, had a far smaller body count compared to the masquerade-breaking tragedy of the pre-reboot Incident, and didn't result in the creation of an anti-Persona-User vigilante militia.
• Mask of Power: With the acquiring of one's Persona, one also receives a mask. If he/she would like to summon their Persona, they must be wearing the mask.
• Meaningful Name: Played straight with a lot of characters.
• Metafiction: There is a forum within the forum, called "Bedlam."
• Misfit Mobilization Moment: The Persona users are a rather disparate group, but several events and the creation of a forum they can use to convene and inform each other of problems has led to several instances of this. There were several scattered events prior to this on a less organized scale, and there's no sign of this trend stopping.
• Mind Control:
  • Charm spells like Marin Karin can have an effect like this, though the effects wear off quickly enough and direct orders can be easily resisted. More often, they're used to endear the user to the victim and make the latter more suggestible.
  • Mana Kogane has suggested that she's under some form of this, but has refused to elaborate as to how it happened.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • One of the most defining traits of the forum. There are just as many topics involving wacky hijinks and the sillier side of the setting and characters as there are topics looking into the darker sides of people's pasts and neuroses.
  • Shadow designs in the RP vary wildly: on one hand, they can look absolutely ludicrous (a demonic baseball player, flying cats, a floating gym sock), on the other, they can look horrifying (a chimeric monster made of fused-together corpses, necrophiliac zombie mermaids, eyeless snail-human hybrids).
• Mutual Kill: Famously in the pre-reboot era, Nana Samurakami and Aleksandria Fyodor, ending the Story Arc that began with the actions of the latter.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The 2010 Persona User group came very close to wiping the Ruins off the map and saving the day, preventing the events of Rebirth from even happening at all. But because their interpersonal drama tore the group apart, they never defeated the Big Bad, allowing the Ruins to grow and new Persona users to awaken en masse in Nagashima.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Played with; while Persona users will come to recognize others' Personas through joint combat, the Persona talks to only its user and the trope is invoked if they appear as an hallucination, same with most Shadow Selves. Justified as Personas/Shadow Selves are the representations of one's psyche.
• Order Versus Chaos: It's implied that Salome and Elijah are supposed to be opposite ends of this dichotomy, but the two tend to muddle the lines in their interactions with Persona users.
• Perplexing Plurals: Based on the Greek, the plural of "Persona" would be "Personae", but the games tend to prefer "Personas" for their plural. Most users just go with what they prefer.
• Personality Powers: Note the definition of the word Persona and guess what it implies about the titular powers.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Almost every named character, PC or NPC, can be considered this on some level.
• Play-by-Post Game
• Playing with Syringes: Found in the backstory of the setting, and the cause of Mana Kogane's transformation.
• Power Born of Madness:
  • Those who have "descended" are often considered this.
  • When a character tries to use their Persona while under a lot of emotional stress, they turn instead into their monster form. This usually happens for Rule of Drama.
• The Power of Friendship: Bonds between Persona-users allow them to use Fusion Spells. The stronger their bonds, the more powerful their spells can be. Unbreakable bonds also allow the users to gain access to more potent spells.
• Red Herring: In the early days of the site, Yamaguchi was almost always presented as the Big Bad, and several documents seemed to imply that the "she" they referred to (who was responsible for most of what went wrong in the Ruins) was her. However, as Yamaguchi's true intentions became clearer, Mana began to act more suspiciously, and the first hints of the Entity began to appear, it became more and more obvious that Yamaguchi was not responsible for everything bad that happened in the Ruins. This was finally outright confirmed during the trip into the Enveloping Phantasy, where it is outright stated that Mana is "the core of this tragedy", though what that exactly means is still unclear.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Much of the IC lingo mirrors how the meta-game of the Persona series is discussed, such as strength ranked by spell tier, scanners for analysis users and recent recognition that messing up your relationships is a bad idea in the Persona battles.
• Tarot Motifs: A carryover from the Persona games, and explicitly invoked with the Qlippoths, which each represent a Major Arcana.
• Teens Are Monsters: Since most of the characters are under twenty, this pops up from time to time.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The entire modus operandi of personal Shadows is to give these - what makes them dangerous and hard-hitting is that, most of the time, they contain elements of truth.
• Transformation Trinket: Upon ascension, Persona users gain access to what is known as Armored Form, turning their masks into this.
• Was Once a Man: Every Ruins Resident was once human.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: A meta example. It's not uncommon for people to sign into the forum, make a character, post a thread or two with them, and then disappear forever from the forum. The forum does have a decently large and active community, though.
• With Great Power Comes Great Perks: Some Persona users, upon getting their powers, started using them to improve their lives in little ways, down to using them to run a forge for weapons and trinkets.
• Yakuza: Though they're not as ubiquitous as they were pre-reboot, there's still a yakuza presence in Nagashima. Some Player Characters are members of it.
• You Wake Up in a Room: The most common premise for awakening threads, threads where player characters get their Persona.