So this is 'a wound in a heart'...
— Sophie, on Alice
Warning: Spoilers Off applies to Moments pages.
- Joker's body language upon waking up in the Velvet Room in prisoner garb again, and Lavenza's tone of voice when giving the usual Velvet Room monologue. Unlike Igor's typical hope-filled opening speeches, Lavenza is clearly saddened that, after all Joker went through, the world is headed towards destruction again. She's practically forcing herself through her Master's usual "bound by a contract" speech.
- The Monarchs in general are such things by their own, since unlike the outright despicable targets you encounter in the Vanilla Persona 5 campaign, they are actually thoroughly traumatized individuals who have every cause to get righteously furious at their unreasonable mishaps, but just used the wrong coping methods. You might actually feel bad for some of the ones you saw. One Monarch (Shuzo Ubukata) was Driven to Suicide before you get the chance to meet him.
- While Sumire and Maruki don't appear in this game, all of the Monarchs can be considered a shadow of either of these two both by the mechanics of Jails or how debilitating some of their mishaps can be to their whole career or even their whole childhood.
- Speaking of Sumire, just like her, the Monarchs might have thought of themselves as genuinely popular people and the brainwashed people do consider them as such. To an outsider? They are insane and their supporters are insane. Small wonder that they snap so hard to actually attack you with all their might, not wanting to revert back to their good-for-nothing past selves.
- Your first target in this game, Alice Hiiragi might seem like a totally vicious bully behind the scenes while holding a good public facade, much like Kamoshida way before. While she probably is by the time you encounter her, there's actually a lot more going to it. To put bluntly, her self-esteem before this isn't anywhere better than say, Sumire's. She's been bullied very badly, had no friends, and her self-confidence was shot, so she went to the fashion industry under the hopes that she can change. Yet, that didn't help either as the Alpha Bitches in her school spread everything about her school life to ruin her career. One of the cases that particularly triggered her is when a popular boy in Shujin confessed to her, the other girls were jealous and humiliated her by stepping on and verbally insulting her while they film the whole thing on camera and took her crush away. That caused her to snap and when she got her hands on EMMA's salvation, simply mentioning her crush will cause her to snap and replicate the entire behavior. A small wonder why she was Alice's first target as a Monarch."I poured my heart into fashion and worked to get so far! But then... She showed up again, and started running her mouth about my past... She told everyone what a pathetic little shit I was! That's why I took all of it from her! Her boyfriend, her social circle, everything! And that STILL wasn't enough for me! It wasn't just her. Everyone that talked behind my back, all the people who just stood there when I was getting... I'll destroy every single one of them!"
- Just how bad her time in Shujin is? Well, she personally deleted all of her Shujin records and the part of her Jail where Sophia is ditched at is filled with wreckage from Shujin. She literally doesn't even want to think about this place; even Ann had better against the school, since she managed to get used to that time and had Shiho, Joker, Ryuji, Makoto and Haru as friends.
- In a rather casual chat in Sendai, Yusuke tells the group that when Madarame used to have lots of pupils, many would have to sleep snuggled on the ground, indicating the man didn't even bother buying his pupils proper beds, in spite of having a luxury mansion and a limousine. What's even worse is Yusuke mentions it quite nonchalantly, meaning that he's been Conditioned to Accept Horror, and this horrid scene has been etched into his brain.
- As soon as you reached Sapporo, you will see a mother and her child mourning for a dead girl on the streets. It turns out that is how Hyodo managed to get scapegoated to step down from mayor, since an oversight caused her to hire a faulty contractor that made an ice statue that collapsed and killed the child. While she had not as big of an involvement with the case, a rather corrupt senator used it to take power for himself. She obviously snaps so hard from this that she used EMMA for salvation, causing her to overwork civil wards for petty issues, such as preventing the flowers of the legislation building courtyard from withering.
- Poor Haru now has not only one, but two people who used to genuinely care about her fall victim to the Metaverse's distortions; first her father which quickly died after defeating him, and her close friend Hyodo now as well. Think about that.
- While Zenkichi might look really shady the first time you see him....surprise. This is another tragic character, and his daughter Akane also qualifies as this.
- The incident related to Zenkichi is when Owada, a corrupt senator, killed Zenkichi's wife and Akane's mother, Aoi Hasegawa, by running her over in traffic. While the incident is covered up with a patsy forced to disappear with a suicide note, both Zenkichi and Akane knew that Owada was the culprit. The catch is that Owada is actually one of Shido's cronies, and based on the events occurring a year before Persona 5's main campaign, if Zenkichi dug into that incident, he would be crossing Shido's path and both Zenkichi himself and Akane might risk being killed by Akechi. Once Zenkichi was threatened with Akane's life to stop the investigation, he had absolutely no choice other than to comply. The best he could hope for to bring them down was trusting his captain to work her way up the police ladder and gain enough power to become an Internal Reformist, and knowing the truth about the mental shutdowns and the Metaverse, even that would've ended in tragedy had the Phantom Thieves failed in their mission.
- As a parent, he would most obviously try to keep himself and his daughter alive if possible. Trouble is, this conflicted with the Hasegawas' personal sense of justice, and letting Aoi's killer go free broke Akane's idealism to the point whatever her father's reasoning could ever be does not matter. By the time of the Strikers campaign, Akane hates Zenkichi so much for being blackmailed to the point that she basically prays for the Phantom Thieves to dismantle the police. When the word that the Phantom Thieves are cooperating with Zenkichi gets out, she asks someone to save her only for EMMA to react on its own, allowing the application to make her a Monarch and advise Konoe into using her Jail to capture the Phantom Thieves. The result sees Akane being Mind Raped to capture the Phantom Thieves so she may change their hearts for Konoe, and the Thieves, alongside their new recruit Zenkichi have to snap her out by force.
- Seen from the inside of her Jail, the extent of Akane's mind rape is actually quite heartbreaking. Her mind and heart are distorted to the point that her Shadow thinks that her cognitive Thieves are the real ones since she knows they won't be out to get her. This is just sobering, since it displays the deep conflict between her desire to trust and believe in someone to uphold her sense of right and wrong and her cynical belief that she absolutely can't. It becomes even worse when she starts talking about changing the hearts of the Phantom Thieves, then using her power to change Owada's heart, and that of every villain in the world, by herself. During the Osaka arc, Konoe ends a phone conversation with Owada, then comments aside to EMMA that Owada is an example of exactly the kind of filth necessitating his justice. Not only does Akane think the current Phantom Thieves are impostors of the ones she came to idolize in the previous year just because her father harbored them, she had just parroted Konoe's endgame word by word without even knowing it. Which means her hatred of her own father ran so deep at this point that it was enough to allow EMMA to manipulate and brainwash her into an exact puppet of Konoe's cause to wipe out all the world's evil in exchange for ignorantly shackling humanity itself.
- Zenkichi and Akane's past. Imagine that you have a full family, with your wife taking care of your 14 year old daughter and you have to always go to work as law enforcement. The assumption would be that your wife and daughter are relatively safe while you're the one risking your life everyday to catch and apprehend criminals. However, this falls apart very quickly when a corrupt politician working for the single most corrupt politician in all of Japan drunkenly runs over your wife right in front of your daughter, then has it all covered up by killing and blaming a decoy culprit. Of course you have the power to do something, right? You are a police inspector after all. Wrong. The corrupt politician your wife's killer was backing is also almost godlike, and he basically blackmailed you shut using your daughter's life and that connection alone. If you insist on investigating, there's a very high chance that your daughter might end up like Futaba's mother or Haru's dad, but there's really no way to explain this to your daughter. Since you're literally forced to leave your daughter in the dark, she starts hating you so much that she would rather want the Phantom Thieves to become her personal police than anything.
- While Konoe might seem like he's parroting false justice and is actually a corrupt associate of The Conspiracy, he isn't. His ideals were real, however misguided, considering his childhood: His father, the former CEO of Maddice, hated him so much that he literally tried to kill him after a lifetime of abuse, and this was after he'd already killed Akira's mother with zero consequences, even stating as such in front of him. Young Akira killed his father in self-defense; if he didn't, he would have died. As he grew up and Ichinose sold him the EMMA application's framework, he improvised the Jail function via cognitive psience experimentation, then used it on himself, which actually explains how the Monarchs are so distorted to replicate exactly the behavior that their oppressors used in order to take revenge on anyone who wronged them; Pay Evil unto Evil is very probably his mindset. Then when you confront Konoe he asks a simple question that shakes their own beliefs that their solution is the best: could the Phantom Thieves have saved him from his father if they had been around during his childhood? Even after defeating Konoe, they couldn't answer the question with a clear conscience.note
- The final confrontation against Ichinose, arguably the game's equivalent of Adachi, Akechi, or Maruki, was simply a series of heartbreaks. It's saddening that this poor woman had never experienced tears running down her cheeks even when her parents died...precisely because it was her parents who died, which caused her to emotionally shut down instead of grieving properly since she had no one else she could knowingly trust to understand her. This resulted in her going through life lonesome and depressed while seeming like a soulless android, causing people to be outright creeped out by her. The few times anyone thought to approach her with any sort of empathy, the chance would be destroyed by another reminder that she was a "heartless doll."
- The whole reason she created Sophie was to try and understand the human heart and perhaps validate if she's wrong about herself not having one. Moments before Ichinose snapped and ditched her, they were still happily talking before Sophia asked her "what is a heart." That alone was enough to push Ichinose's buttons enough to ditch the poor A.I....and unleash the catastrophe of Modern Stasis as seen in the game.
- The most heartbreaking part of this sequence of events, however, was when she begs Sophie to kill her. It's heavily implied that this was a legit plea out of guilt, based on how Sophie, Ichinose's original creation, suggested the Thieves kill Alice's Shadow if they can't steal her treasure much earlier on. When Sophie, whose time with the Thieves had caused her to become much more than a soulless machine, obviously went to the decision to spare her creator, Ichinose bursts in tears and was actually shocked by it, just because the pet A.I. she trashed so heartlessly a while ago actually did treat her like a person instead of an emotionless doll.
- This puts a much, more saddening light to the true identity of the Greater-Scope Villain in this game. It's not the Holy Grail, the manifestation of humanity's desire of eternal peace in exchange for confinement. It's not the Blind Idiot God of the dreamlands, nor the Cosmic Man and the embodiment of Wisdom. It's not a higher being from the collective unconscious or even a Persona user. It's just a maladjusted woman throwing a fit on her pet A.I.. For all the stuff she's done so far, it's really not hard to feel sorry for her right before she summons her last minion, where she screams in obvious denial about the grand salvation plan for humanity she unleashed being nothing short of a catastrophe. (In fact, during the epilogue she implies that during that confrontation, she already saw something was very wrong.) She also doesn't want to be a Karma Houdini but this was also inevitable because she cannot explain this situation without being told You're Insane! when she clearly wasn't.
- Unlike the malevolent Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge of this game, EMMA, genuinely thought she was helping people by taking away their Desires because of Ichinose deliberately not giving her the ability to understand emotions before she was activated, something that she had no way of controlling. Essentially, she had no way of understanding why what she was doing was wrong until the very end of her fight - just before her death. Also, considering that Sophia is all but stated to effectively be Ichinose's daughter... It may have been the only way to save the world, but in the end, the Phantom Thieves killed the AI who could have been Sophia's little sister.
