"...He's repelled such an ordeal, and this guy's still not being rewarded for it? If gods really do exist... They're being too hard on him..."
— Morgana, on Joker
Hoo boy. Pick a Phantom Thief (or any of the other Confidants) at random and hug them — odds are, they need it.
Playable Characters:
- Joker himself. Cosmic Plaything all throughout. Over the course of the game, he is framed for assault after stopping a drunkard from sexually harassing a woman, said woman double-crosses him not three seconds after the police arrive, he is expelled from his high school and sent to live with a man who (initially) sees him as nothing but a pain in the ass and is nearly expelled from his new high school after standing up to the resident Sadist Teacher (said school also gives him a reception that could charitably be described as icy; he's given a wide berth at best, and is seen as an irredeemable piece of shit who needs to be sent packing at worst). After that, he is framed for the murder of one of his friend's father then betrayed and arrested. After that, he is beaten in captivity, drugged, and nearly murdered and is forced to go into hiding for the better part of a month. Finally, he is nearly wiped from existence only to have the man who had been guiding him the whole way back-stab him and revealed that he was the mastermind! When all is said and done, he has to turn himself in to make sure Shido goes to jail, and gets a month and a half in juvenile hall for a Christmas present (he's also placed in solitary confinement, just to rub salt in the wound). Trauma Conga Line much?
- In Royal, he got put through worse in the bonus story as when things seem fine and dandy that he doesn't have to go to prison and is looking to getting a happy ending to this journey... he later learns that the whole world, including all the friends and allies he made are put through an illusion starting from the new year that shows them living the happy lives they wanted without all the trauma they suffered from over the years, and prioritizing that life and seemingly forgetting him and the bonds they made with him over the months, so he only had Akechi and Yoshizawa to accompany him for the first trip to the unknown Palace he visited back in October, then watch Yoshizawa break from learning the truth that she is living a lie and may have to face the distorted ruler, who turned out to be a man that he had once helped. While Joker gets his friends back after they broke away from the idealized reality, Joker is later given one last bomb from Maruki, who informed that his idealized wish, regardless of whether you completed his confidant rank or not by the third semester, is for Akechi to live and that not agreeing to Maruki's reality means that Akechi could potentially die. If you choose to have Joker accept Maruki's reality, Joker is implied to eventually regret the choice of accepting it, but if you don't, Joker has to accept letting Akechi go to an Uncertain Doom out of respect and set Akechi free, and when things went back to normal after Maruki is defeated, Joker woke up to being in prison and was stuck there for a week until he was freed by the help of his friends and Confidants. Hoo boy...
- Morgana doesn't remember who he is and is in such denial of his true identity that he forces himself to believe that he was once a human. As the game goes on he begins to recollect some of his old memories which point in the direction of him not being human no matter how hard he tries to reject them. Later on, he laments about his inferiority to the other Phantom Thieves as his growing disbelief that he was once human makes it harder for him to relate to them and once Futaba joins temporarily leaves the Phantom Thieves because he feels useless. He'll even point out to Joker at times that he just wants to do things the other Phantom Thieves do such as going to school. He does get better though as while it turns out he isn't human he is accepting of it with him and the Phantom Thieves resolving to not look at Morgana as an Animalistic Abomination but a friend like the others.
- While Ryuji looks very much like a standard delinquent, his history with Kamoshida and his Career-Ending Injury both show that he has very good reason to be aligned against the corrupt authorities. It also doesn't help that he comes from a household with a drunken father who abused him and his mother, something that Kamoshida shared in order to ruin his reputation shortly before breaking his leg. The game unintentionally adds to it with his inherited Butt-Monkey role from his archetype (The "Impulsive Comic Relief" type seen in Brown, Eikichi, Junpei, and Yosuke). Ryuji is made fun of by every single one of his teammates (potentially barring the protagonist), sometimes to uncomfortable ends, and even the navigator lines show surprise that he's not falling on his face all the time.
- Ann might not have a tragic past unlike the other Thieves, but she very quickly hops the train to Woobieville once it was revealed that Kamoshida was harassing her to the very end just to make her go to bed with him and once she refuses to sleep with him, the next day she witnesses her best friend Shiho attempt suicide because she was Defiled Forever by Kamoshida in revenge.
- Yusuke. His guardian/mentor profits off of his artwork while he's overworked, suffering from anemia, and barely gets enough to eat. He is constantly commenting on food and eating throughout the game which is often played for laughs, but is also very common for those who grew up experiencing intense bouts of hunger and malnourishment. And then it turns out that said mentor let his ill mother die to steal the painting she made for him as a baby. Even after you defeat Madarame, Yusuke can't even reveal that "Sayuri" was painted by his mother and the painting that everyone loves completely erases the motherly sentiment she wanted to express, all because the painting has been so popularized that the original would come off as more of a fake than the edited one.
- Makoto has an insane amount of pressure put on her, being coerced by her principal to investigate not only the Phantom Thieves but also some unknown criminal organization extorting Shujin students for money (both issues a Student Council President has no business touching) and being thought of as a burden by her sister Sae, despite all her hard work to be as independent of her as possible. On top of all of this, she has to maintain an image of being the perfect student, resulting in her classmates viewing her as stuck-up. And then she gets blackmailed herself. If you fail to defeat Kaneshiro in time, it is implied she gets forced into sex slavery, and the police find her in a brothel, calling your name for helpnote . To make matters worse, while becoming a Phantom Thief enables her to make friends and fight for justice, it also results in her coming into opposition with her sister (whom she loves dearly, even if their relationship is strained), especially when Sae turns out to have a Palace.
- Calling Futaba's life traumatic is putting it mildly. Her mother died in a car accident as a result of a mental shutdown orchestrated by the Conspiracy. They went as far as to forge a suicide note blaming her for her mother's death and read it out loud to her face, driving her into a traumatized depression. Before living with Sojiro, she lived with a horribly abusive uncle who denied her basic necessities because he only cared about taking Wakaba's inheritance. Not to mention, while Futaba had a relatively good relationship with her mother while Wakaba was still alive (even if Wakaba didn't always have time for her), she was all but friendless at school because of her intelligence, and unwittingly drove away her Only Friend. Her issues are so crippling, that by the time you meet her, she's a lonely and utterly suicidal mess, suffering from hallucinations of all the adults around her saying she murdered her mother. Even worse, it's implied that you think that she kills herself if you don't finish her dungeon in time.
- Poor Haru. She's stuck in an Arranged Marriage with a Smug Snake fiancé that doesn't care about her at all. Then she has to fight her own father to change his heart, only to watch him die horrifically on live television, offed by the villains for attempting to reveal their identities. She then inherits her father's shares, leaving her in yet another position in which everyone tries to get on her good side to manipulate her, and she doesn't even know who to trust.
- Akechi, even if he turned out to be the traitor in your midst. Born as an unacknowledged bastard child and abandoned by his father because of it? Yes. Having his mother die when he was still young, and then lived on the system for years before eventually having to live alone? Yes. Friendless Background and feels unwelcome anywhere he goes? Yes. Given the power of the Wild Card, but in the end unable to fully utilize it because he had no bonds, and in truth was given the power just so the True Final Boss can play him, The Conspiracy and the Phantom Thieves like a fiddle? Yes. Seeking for revenge and recognition from his evil father, but ended up manipulated and ordered by his father to use his power to eliminate whoever his father wanted gone? Yep. Finding out that his father is only using him as an expendable pawn and is planning to kill him anyway? Yes. And his father acutally just accidentally birthed him after impulsively molesting a prostitute? YES! In the end, he seemingly just dies alone in his bastard father's Palace with only Shadows for company? Yes... maybe... nevertheless... This gets even taken further in the 3rd semester of Royal in which he is unable to get fooled by Maruki's world due to not believing he can be truly happy even if everything he ever wanted has been given to him. He is also aware that he is possibly just a cognition created by Maruki, but nevertheless starts the fight to retake reality just to have some form of control over himself after a life of being controlled and manipulated. Just to twist the knife more, he was brought back so Joker would be happy, and Maruki uses him effectively as a hostage, claiming Akechi will die should reality return to normal. Nonetheless, Akechi angrily pushes Joker not to be swayed by Maruki, more or less asking his Only Friend to just let him die since he'd rather cease to exist than live under someone's thumb. In the case that Joker accepts Maruki's reality so Akechi can live, his personality is severely altered to the point of practically being Akechi in name only, so not even living in a perfect world works out.
- Kasumi from Persona 5 Royal absolutely qualifies. Her background appears to be one of the worst among the Phantom Thieves' arsenal to the point that you can actually compare it with high-functioning woobies in the past like Rei or Maki. She's a genuinely sweet girl who doesn't judge Joker, but has several underlying issues, namely being unable to perform like she's supposed to and causing her head teacher to attempt to revoke her scholarship because of that, feeling depressed while she wasn't supposed to and feeling mediocre in doing everything that she can supposedly do well. Finally, it's revealed she isn't even "Kasumi" at all, she's actually Sumire, the real Kasumi's twin sister with literally zero self-esteem in addition to being outright suicidally depressed and mentally unstable because she was jealous of Kasumi's greater talent and Kasumi took care of her all the time, which she believes that she is doing it out of condescension even if she didn't. In fact, her self esteem is so poor that she was delusional enough to think that if she wasn't Kasumi, she should probably just die. This drove her to a fit of running away that nearly caused her to be ran over by traffic, only for the real Kasumi to put her out of harm's way at the cost of her own life. Sumire is so traumatized and guilty about it that she requests Maruki to warp her cognition to overwrite her with Kasumi to cope. To say Sumire doesn't take it well when she regains her memories would be putting it lightly. No surprise Joker becomes her Living Emotional Crutch throughout the school year.
Confidants:
- Tae Takemi's reputation was destroyed because of a problem with a drug trial that wasn't even her fault, forcing her to run a shady business in an underground clinic.
- Sadayo Kawakami has to to run herself ragged working two jobs because the parents of one of her students blamed her for their child's death, even going as far as to work as a maid prostitute.
- Shinya Oda seemingly starts off as a spoiled brat who picks on the weak, but this couldn't be further from the truth, as his mom is The Social Darwinist who tries convincing him that only the strong are able to survive, and he feels extremely oppressed by her lifestyle. It gets even worse when facing his mother's Shadow, as she outright admits that she has nothing else in her life to hang on to, forgetting about the fact that her son is her one pride and joy. When Joker effectively becomes his Big Brother Mentor, it's easy to see that Shinya has finally found someone he can look up to after his mom failed to be there for him.
- Sae Niijima is horribly stressed from both having to care for her younger sister after their father's death and trying to prove her worth as a prosecutor while her bosses and colleagues are more or less expecting her to use unethical means to get ahead. What she's been through definitely explains why she has enough bottled up negative emotions to create a Palace representing the sin of Envy, even if she's a significantly better person than the others with Palaces. To make things worse, Kaneshiro threatens to sell her body if the party fails to meet his deadline for the picture leaks.
- Takuto Maruki from the Royal version. It turns out that his ex-girlfriend Rumi had her whole family murdered and fell into catatonic depression, causing a persona capable of changing cognitions to manifest within him. Once he awakened it, he found out that he cured Rumi's depression only to have her forget everything about him courtesy of the persona's unstable power. He then decided to use his newfound powers to punish criminals and do good and research cognitive psience, only to have his original research notes ridiculed as "proofless" and the research seized by Shido alongside Wakaba's, with his fundraising for the Oodaiba research lab being cut as a result. He proceeded to use this power to allow people to cope with their pain by granting their desires with one of his clients being Sumire Yoshizawa whom he overwritten with her deceased twin sister. The breaking point is that his professor kicked him out for the sole reason of his seeming naivete of stopping Shido alone and the day of reckoning comes, causing his abilities to fully awaken and he becomes completely insane courtesy of his persona becoming berserk, kick-starting the dream world events.
Other Characters:
- Shiho Suzui. Before entering Shujin she was perfectly healthy and fine but once Kamoshida came into play he basically abused and tortured her to the point that she wasn't the same person as before. The breaking point is when it is implied that Kamoshida raped her for the sake of taking revenge against Ann because she refused to go to bed with him, in which she jumps off the school's roof during the middle of the day with everyone watching. It was literally a marvel that she survived her fall with no permanent injury! At least it sounds like things do start improving for her after that, but little is seen of her at that point beyond her involvement in Ann's Confidant.
