#but jesus. really dude. it makes me feel so weird seeing greed written as so like. predatory. no he fucking isn't!!!

[ghostyolive]

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[c-is-for-circinate]

Another lengthy list of Persona 5 thoughts and bullet points, before tomorrow’s inevitable ten-hour marathon of play.

(Spoilers through late June and the third boss dungeon)

Makoto is my favorite character, full stop.  If you have read my epic capslock, you may have already figured this.  She is so fierce and so badass and yet also, the whole judging her self-worth based on her utility thing resonates so hard with me, and I love her and if she weren’t seventeen and also fictional I might propose, but probably I’d just stand back in awe and crush forever.  My new game goal is to max out her social link.  Given that starting it requires significantly more knowledge than I currently have, I forsee a lot of studying in my future...

Current social links I do have: Fool, Magician, Emperor, Hierophant, Lovers, Chariot, Strength, Justice, Death, Moon, Sun.  I am waiting on either stats or trigger events for Makoto (Priestess), Iwai the fence (maybe Tower, I’m guessing now? because who the fuck knows???), the fortune teller in Shinjuku (I am assuming Fortune...), my homeroom teacher who I have been told is an SL (maybe Temperance?  IDK, she seems very ‘sigh why me I just can’t’, which isn’t quite Hanged Man, but whooooo knows), and the two party members I know I’m getting but don’t have yet.  (I’m going to randomly guess Empress and Hermit just based on their character art and the fact that a hacker navi seems Hermit-y to me.)  That counts up to 17 out of 22.  Judgement and World/Universe always auto-level, so I’m still missing three--Devil, Star, and Hanged Man if all of my probably-terrible guesses are right.  Really hoping Sae Nijima is one of them.  Besides that--the reporter lady who gave me Kaneshiro’s name, and maybe that rival model of Ann’s who is such a bitch?  Maybe?  WE SHALL SEE.

Pretty sure I need to do Mishima’s damn Maidwatch thing to start an SL, damnit.  I know I’m not going to max everything (I will max Makoto if she is the only thing I do so help me), but I refuse to deliberately not start something.  Sigh sigh sigh.

Speaking of social links, I’m actually loving Strength most of all right now???  Mostly because of the twins talking about that mysterious list.  I want Margaret or Elizabeth to have written that list for vague arcane reasons more than I can possibly explain.  I am so curious about how these twins and their relationship with the protag is going to develop.  So curious.  That said, the whole ‘how did whoever wrote this list know our next guest would have  Wild Card’ thing???  Who ever goes to the Velvet Room without a wild card?  How is the Velvet Room even remotely useful to anybody without a wild card?

Also speaking of social links and also previous game references, WHO ELSE NOTICED TAKEMI CALLING UEHARA-SAN AT THE HOSPITAL AND MADE HIGH-PITCHED NOISES BECAUSE I SURE AS FUCK DID.  Jesus those two need to be drinking buddies.  I need one million words of Sayoko and Takemi going out to bars together.  Maybe they go out in Shinjuku and run into the reporter-lady.  GIVE ME SOMETHING.

Ahem.  Moving on, can I just say some extremely enthusiastic words about dungeon design in this game?  (Fun fact: it is possible to do the full exploration of Kaneshiro’s dungeon in one day in-game.  Stock up on HP and SP restoration items first, but I have done it and I feel very proud of myself for it.)  It’s so puzzle-y and labyrinth-y!  There was definitely a while where I felt like I was being deeply frustrated by one of those point-and-click escape games I always find myself playing, which I enjoyed immensely.  Everything is so cool and so full of stuff.

So far, we’ve robbed a castle, a museum, and a bank.  We know we’re going to climax with a casino heist.  What else do people classically rob?  Thinking about Leverage is not super-helpful here; they took on a bunch of super high-security office buildings, but I’m not sure they have Sterenkos in the Metaverse, and beyond that it was either new and unusual locations or a lot of museums.  Maybe some kind of ancient tomb/pyramid thing, with lots of traps, very Indiana Jones/Lara Croft?  Possibly a temple to some dude who thinks he’s a god.

I have been theorizing that, as we go through bosses and dungeons, we’re going through the seven deadly sins--seven is a solid number for total dungeons in a Persona game (matches the number in P4), and I feel like we’ve been on par so far.  Kamoshida’s lust, Madarame was specifically called out as ‘vanity’ (which is a subset of pride), Kaneshiro I would’ve expected to be greed but was explicitly called ‘gluttony’, which certainly makes sense with all the pig imagery.  Which means we still need envy, greed, sloth, and wrath.  I could see greed as a ‘greed for power’ final boss dungeon, but I can only imagine what sloth looks like in a P5 boss.  Curious to find out if I’m right!

There have not been a lot of plot developments for me to mull over since last I did a big long one of these.  Not a ton of other things to say on that!

I keep batting ships around in my head, thinking about what-if’s and maybes.

It’s cold and October when the protagonist invites Ann back to his room, just Ann.  They both know what it means.  He kicks Morgana out for the evening and makes coffee and doesn’t meet Sojiro’s eyes, but upstairs it’s... It’s strange, like their lives are strange, this big empty attic-room, this weird outside-of-the-world world where this boy lives like a kid and like an adult and like a thief, making lock picks and training his HP, watching DVDs on rickety chairs with his cat.  And it’s strange because these two people...they lost everything months ago and rebuilt themselves anew.  Panther and Joker are rough and scarred and ferocious, furious, determined.  Panther and Joker don’t do this.  They kill, shadows and now humans because this thing they started once keeps getting bigger and bigger than both of them and sweeping them along with it and they are young gods with magic at their fingertips, and-- here in this room, right now, they’re not the Joker and the Panther, they are.  Children.  They’ve never done this before, because the boy who is now the Joker (most of the time, even when he’s not wearing the mask--how will this train me to be a better thief, how can I use this person, what choices do I make?) well he was quiet and nobody and some core chunk of him still is, under so many masks that he doesn’t know himself any more.  Ann’s never touched anyone like this, not really.  And they are soft to each other, lying on their sides face to face under the covers on his bed, soft and a little wondering and he touches her, shoulder, waist, skin, and she touches him, chest, hip, face.  Very few people have been soft to either of them in a long, long time.

Akechi joins the Phantom Thieves (we all know Akechi already has a persona by this point, right?  Akechi who can understand Morgana from the very beginning, when the game makes such a damn obvious point of Makoto not just a few days later?) and Akechi runs with them and Akechi sells them out, because look if it’s not a fake-out then it’s more interesting that way. Akechi sells them out and the protagonist knows right away that it must have been him, because there are ways and ways they play this game.  They are not soft to each other and they are not done yet.  And however he escapes that jail cell--it is escape, not release, with cops and hounds at his heels, and the help of his team, probably, but our Joker is clever and he manages to twist the facts or appearance of the situation to make it very very clear that Akechi helped in that escape, maybe even masterminded it (even though he probably did no such thing.) That’s it, then, you’re stuck as one of us, boy, one way or another.  The protag meets up with the rest of the team just long enough to make sure everybody’s alive and then they scatter, because he was in there too long and talked too much, and the people watching on that camera have every single name they need.  Everyone in Tokyo is after them.  They need to get out of the city and they need to split up and lie low.  Protag calls his social links, sends party members in ones and twos--get to Shinjuku, the fortune teller will put you up.  If you can slide through Yongen-Jaya without attracting attention, don’t go to Sojiro they’ll look there, go through Takemi’s back door.  Drags Akechi with himself, no questions asked, and they end up in the secret basement Iwai so clearly has for the illegal crap he so clearly sells. Why didn’t you tell them? Akechi says, and the real answer is because that’s not the game, and that’s part of it, but also... We need you now.  You need us.  We’re stronger together.  And also, also, because the team is everything and everyone is at risk now, game or no game, if you do anything like that again I’ll kill you myself, and he will if he has to.  Maybe.  If he actually can. But they spend thirty-seven hours trapped down there in the dark and the dust and the cobwebs, and it’s not the first time they’ve had sex, but every single time previous it was some how much does he know that I know masque of intent and suspicion, and this time, they know.  They know everything.  They’re still enemies.  They’re still closer than the best of friends.  That’s how a good enemy should be.

So look, I don’t know if Morgana ever stops being a cat or not, but if he does, there is going to be Morgana/protag bedsharing fic and I am going to write it.  I don’t even necessarily ship it but that needs to exist.  What’s more in your space than a cat that insists on curling up in your bed, at the small of your back, on top of your face, right next to you night after night?  What’s more ingrained into our protag’s life than the cat in his bag voice in his ear?  What happens if and when that suddenly goes away?  (Sex.  Sex happens.  I am just saying.)

I am weirdly into Makoto/Ryuji right now?  Because okay, look.  Everybody assumes when they get paired together for divide-and-conquer team activities, it’s so Makoto can keep Ryuji out of trouble--impetuous, chariot, loud and somewhat reckless Ryuji.  And it is, but it’s also so Ryuji can keep Makoto out of trouble--because everybody looks at the girl with the grades and the brain and the planning skills, and lets themselves forget the girl who marched into Junya Kaneshiro’s nightclub with absolutely none of that on her side.  Her inner soul is a motorcycle made of light and she’s every bit as much a rebel as any of them, full throttle, no holding back. And so I see Makoto and Ryuji tasked with doing something together, casing out the next target, exploring some bit of a dungeon, and she’s getting a little bossy and he’s getting a little snappish back until, “Come on, Skull, we both know I’m here to keep an eye on you” and he shoots back with, “Nuh-uh, I’m here to keep an eye on you.”  And they face off in annoyance until they discover that no, their leader literally told each one of them separately to keep the other on their best behavior.  And look, it’s an effective personnel management technique.  They respect that.  But also, goddamnit. It makes them both want to do something reckless, just to prove the team wrong.  Nothing to jeopardize the mission, that’s the opposite of effective, but.  But hmm. So maybe they show up to the next meeting both of them on the back of Makoto’s real-life motorcycle, the one she’s said she has a license for, Ryuji squished up against her back with his arms around her waist in a borrowed helmet, and act like nothing’s changed at all while people gape.  Maybe they go a little wild together.  It’s good for both of them. (And they have conversations, the stop-start time that runs into awkward walls but then finds a way around, about their missing fathers, the female relatives they want to do right by and just keep disappointing, their self-worth, their dreams.  Ryuji keeps up with her.  She wasn’t expecting that from him.  He doesn’t take over and he doesn’t try to, but he matches her.  So okay, yeah.  Sure.  Yeah.  This will work.)

They have to flee in the end, every one of them, the whole eight-person-one-cat team--out of Tokyo, and let’s leave all of Japan, and let’s leave the Pacific, leave Asia, get half a world away and regroup.  They’ve got a hacker and they’ve got skills and they end up in Paris because that feels inevitable, in some grand loft apartment or a converted warehouse that looks like the hideout from Inception.  They’re not real adults yet but they’re going to have to act like it, because every adult in their lives is long left behind.  They were the teens and the children rebelling against the shitty grown-ups, but they have to figure out how to be the grown-ups now.  Good luck not being shitty about it They steal because they need to get by and because they’re good at it, and to keep themselves from turning into just exactly the same sort of assholes profiting off the weak they target the biggest assholes they can spot.  Not just in Paris--that’s too close to home, that was part of the problem, wasn’t it?  They spend a week and a half in Belgium, the better part of a month in Germany, a very long weekend in London wrecking things from the base of a couple of hotel rooms, and then they go back to their beautiful huge empty warehouse loft with the tall high windows pouring in sunlight that traces beams through the dust hanging still in the air, and they figure out how to live next. They’re all on top of each other, every one of them, and the boundaries rub away from friction and proximity until they sleep on top of each other in strange piles, until touch comes easy--a hand on a shoulder, a back, a neck, a face.  They pretend to date each other for cons and cover in a dozen different combinations until nobody remembers who’s supposed to be dating who any more, until it doesn’t matter.  They fuck in pairs behind the screens they set up for something like privacy, and there’s no real privacy to it, so instead they start fucking in threes and fours and maybe that’s better. There’s no real rules here except the ones they make for themselves.  They make those unanimously--well.  Let them make this one, then.  The team is the only family, the only life they’ve got.  Let it be everything.