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I can respect that sort of motive. Sometimes simplistic works best for motivations.
But i can respect Shido attempting to use the mental world to gain political power even more.
Yeah, that's strange. He's honestly the most satisfying target, and he brought a scale in human antagonists never seen before. Like it was genuinely creepy to hear NPCS sing his praises, and i like how he played Akechi like a cheap fiddle, it turned the whole expected dynamic on it's head.
Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 7th 2020 at 12:40:28 PM
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"Yeah, i'm excited for that part in the game.
Besides, his calling card cutscene never fails to be awesome. A good villain has to be satisfying for our heroes to take down, and that cutscene delivers.
Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 7th 2020 at 12:47:40 PM
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"I feel like you could replace Akechi and Joker with literally any hero and their enemy/rival/best friend in every single Japanese work ever.
One Strip! One Strip!![]()
Yaoi and redeeming villains is never a good combo.
Okay, Goku and Vegeta? Nah.
I see their relationship to be similar to Batman and Joker.
Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 7th 2020 at 12:47:44 PM
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"Goku and Vegeta are in a weird place where while they don't hit the usual notes, they still probably care more about fighting than about their wives....well, ok maybe just Goku.
And this is despite have two children each with them.
One Strip! One Strip!
Glad you get his character more than the rest of the fanbase.
Joker is the voluntary celibate though. Adachi and Joker have similar motivations, they hate society and want chaos to make things more fun for them. They also kill a heavily identifiable way. They also had one really bad day.
Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 7th 2020 at 12:59:31 PM
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"I feel like yakuzu hit the nail about a page ago : Antagonists do not need to be some kind of nuanced complex characters to fulfill a role in the story.
Someone brought up Strega earlier in P3. Strega may not be memorable for it's deep characters, but Tayaka fullfills one specific thematic role : the one of the Last man who'd rather let the world burn than take action to change it, which is a key figure in nietzsche's philosophy that the game heavily borrows from, opposed to the Ubermensch, which in this case are the protag and the SEES, willing to defy even death for the sake of their morals. Tayaka isn't memorable for what he does or say (aside killing shinji), but his presence highlights the qualities of the cast and make their resolve stand out.
Most of the human antagonists in persona works in that manner : Adachi serves to provide contrast with the main team. Adachi later grew as his own person and fans latched on to that chracter, and that's cool, but it's not strictly needed for original persona 4 to work, and removing that aspect of him doesn't mean you could remove him of P4 and nothing would be lost either.
Akechi was given more effort to make him a character but I'd argue this was only done to reinforce this idea of contrasting the protagonists, which is why his arc ends up with a death-redemption in p5 vanilla after spelling outright how much a waste his life was.
The same can be said for a lot of the personifications of emotions that serves as final bosses : they exist to embody ideals to reject, not to be deep characters. Hell,Erebus doesn't even talk, but he still fullfills his role within the story.
As for the targets not hiding their villainy even in real life, I gotta disagree. Both Madarame and Kamoshida puts in visible onscreen effort into it. Kamoshida offers you a ride to Shujin the first day for no other reason than because he can. When you come late to school after the first metanav incident, he goes all "nah it's fine, let's pretend nothing happened" when he could decide to expel you on the spot for it. While he does absolutely badmouths you to everyone he can find, he also does it mostly in a way that comes off as him simply being concerned about the wellbeing of the school and with plausible deniablity. He only starts showing his true colors after Ryuji directly accuses him of causing shiho to try suicide.
Goes double for madarame who has a lot of similar bits of voluntarily letting the protags go a couple of times and be like "nah it's my fault sorry" and because this time the gang doesn't have a passive with him, they legitimately go "wait, you sure we didn't heard about an homonym or something ?" before finding his palace and getting undisputable proof.
Other than those two, Kaneshiro doesn't attempt to hide it, for the obvious reason he's already a mob boss, futaba obviously doesn't count, Okumura is a CEO and a much more distant figure to asically everyone he hurts and the fact he doesn't hide his villainy is Truth in Television, Sae also doesn't count, Akechi is really good at pretending, and Shido is like Okumura.
Ultimately, there's only three villains who don't hide their villainy, while just as many either at least try to pretend or are actually pretty good at it, while two are off-contest in the first place. Critics may say they're not taking the shadow selves into account, but I think it's very much a case of the shadow selves rubbing them the wrong way and trying to rationalize that into a borader point despite not being all that valid.
As for the repetition of the text, I did notice it a couple of times playing through Royal, such as the gang reacting to a scene that just occured, then talking it over through chat text and saying almost the same thing, but the reason it doesn't really register in my brain is that I find that sort of behavior very true to real life, where people will talk about the latest thing that happened and often end up saying the same thing at the core twice or thrice in a couple of days, but worded differently, and those conversations are this behavior but obviously reduced to a videogame scope that makes it feel like repetition if you look at it purely from "what does this tells the player" perspective, when it's supposed to describe the everyday life of a group dynamic. I do agree the simplification makes it dumber than it should, but I also think it's a necessary compromise of making a videogame that needs to compress an average day into half an hour tops.
Edited by Yumil on Apr 7th 2020 at 10:09:37 AM
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."Shido's problem is that he never meets the thieves.
Except for Joker and even then, he forgot. And it's not even in the "Tuesday" sort of way.
Also, he's a politician but we don't know what truly stands for. You could make the argument that he would be on the conservative side of things, but it's still never really given what hes even promising.
Edited by NoName999 on Apr 7th 2020 at 1:08:00 AM
Shido's a populist.Someone who gets elected because he can point the current problems eloquently, not because he has good answers to give about them. The fact he's never given actual political opinions works better than giving him some because making him left or right would tie him to a specific context when populism has historically be used by various ideologies over the course of history. Some people have associated him with trump, Japanese compared him to Shinzo Abe, but the way he's presented in the game means I can also compare him to Emmanuel Macron pretty effectively despite both being two very different beasts.
Edited by Yumil on Apr 7th 2020 at 10:14:48 AM
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."I ended up editing my post a couple seconds too late it seems, but I feel like this definition pretty much works for what I'm trying to say : Someone who gets elected because they can point out the current problems eloquently, not because they have good (as in, realistic, applicable) answers to give about them.
Edited by Yumil on Apr 7th 2020 at 10:16:33 AM
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."noun: populism
- a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
- support for populist politicians or policies.
- the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people.
One bit of social commentary I feel the game does exactly right, in spite of its flaws in other areas, is the idea of credibility, in particular its examination of the sad fact that society will tend to believe a bad person with a lot of credibility over a good person with little credibility. It's not hard to see who has more credibility between a famous athlete and three teenage weirdoes. Or a celebrated surgeon and a back-alley goth creep. Or a grieving couple mourning their son and a woman working a job that's basically a half-step above a hooker.

Adachi's still my favorite Persona villain of them all because he's just an average dude that snapped one day.
The legend has returned.