#cops would not ameliorate this situation in any way

[snailchimera]

SEPTA is doing a survey on public transit safety. Based on the questions, my guess is they're trying to justify more transit police. If you live in the area served by SEPTA, please consider encouraging them to instead maybe work with local leaders to improve pedestrian paths, and fix their lights/add more lights, so that people using public transit are less likely to become roadkill trying to get to a bus stop.

[16ruedelaverrerie]

It makes so much more sense to answer this privately, but this message is still one of the funniest things I’ve seen over the last six months, so I need to enshrine it in visible form. @king-kodi​​ I hope you figured out the answer in these SIX MONTHS SINCE YOU MESSAGED ME, I’m sorry! This account is still active, in the way that a lizard that does not move for 10 years is still alive.

The answer, belatedly, is that the little shit cat in question (when not hungry or ill) decides whether it wants to go for a stroll or not. Sometimes it just wants to chat instead of going for a stroll, but them’s the breaks, all control is an illusion and the tiny virtual piece of shit must be left to its own devices to do what it wishes. I love this game. All cats are perfect, even the ones that aren’t real.

 ANON!!! YES!!!!! Wow wait first of all can I express how touched I am that you remembered having been in previous disbelief over people liking Theon Greyjoy, then after you started reading the books you came back to this blog to let me know about your changing thoughts THAT IS THE KIND OF ENGAGEMENT THAT I AS AN EDUCATOR CAN ONLY DREAM ABOUT AND WOULD NOT EVEN DEMAND FROM MY STUDENTS

Truly it is a no-good life for Theon, when the only friends and family he has are a bunch of people who are technically licensed to execute him WITH THE SWORD THEY MAKE HIM CARRY AROUND FOR OTHER BEHEADINGS fkl;dhgk and the whole “the Starks are such lovely people” angle that the show takes most of the time... really fails to shed adequate light on how there are so many bigger issues here than individuals being decent individuals! ANON... THEON JUST WANTED TO GO HOME, ANON. HE JUST COULDN’T FIGURE OUT WHERE THAT WAS. ANON HOLD MY HAND.

 Oooo did you get around to it? How did it turn out?? I feel like Markus was also working on his own version of a Les Mis crossover! This is always the case when I think about crossovers or AUs of any kind, but what delights me the most tends to be moments that crack me up and don’t necessarily have any staying power as an extended parallel-- like, this is an AU and not a crossover, but just the thought of Javert infiltrating the barricades with a beanie and a wide stance because that’s what he thinks insurgents look like....................................... that is so fucking funny to me.............

 This is so kind, thank you! I hope you are taking care of yourself too! All these messages are from a thousand years ago so “taking care of yourself” had somewhat less urgency and gravity then, but it is important to take care of yourself regardless of circumstances. I’m doing okay, overall. Actually my work and life situation are a bit unorthodox at the moment, but in a way that is very conducive to leading a hermit-like existence, so at least in that way I am fortunately equipped to weather these times. Seriously though! I hope you are all taking care of yourselves!

 Thank you very much! I think it’s always easier to recognize and define other people’s styles than your own, but I have an especially hard time figuring out what my ~art~ ever is, so it’s very generous of you to say so. Because of my aforementioned unorthodox work and life situation, I find myself with no more leisure time right now than I did in the before, but I am trying to brush up on very basic art stuff a little bit! I feel really unsteady with art most of the time because I don’t have solid basics, so I’m hoping this will ameliorate some of my THIS LOOKS WRONG BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY problems u__u

 ~*~THE CONTINUATION LIVES IN YOUR HEART~*~ wow what a cop-out answer. This is one of those things that HAUNTS ME anon! I remain a “never say never” person at heart so I am still refusing to say that there won’t be more comics in that universe, but... in all honesty, it’s been so long since the first one that all the ideas and jokes I had related to it have become... well, I’ve thought about them so much that I’ve become unable to tell whether they’re funny at all, is what has happened. I mean really! Chivalry Comics was posted more than SIX YEARS AGO! I SHOULD HAVE MADE SOMETHING LONG BEFORE THIS POINT, I’VE FUCKED IT UP

And yet, I remain a “never say never” person at heart. One day, anon! One of these godforsaken days.

 Ah thank you for this annual message! And for the NAKED REMINDER OF HOW LONG IT HAS BEEN SINCE I HAVE ANSWERED MESSAGES... I am deeply ashamed of this, but some amount of self-abasement builds character.

 H-HAPPY NEW YEAR, DEAR ANON! I know, once again, I am rubbing this timestamp into my face while demanding of myself, LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE DONE, YOU HIDEOUS MISCREANT, but also that does mean that your message has been warming my inbox for the last three+ months! That’s why I take so long to answer these, so that whenever I feel a pang of guilt for not having gotten to them yet, I also at least get to feel a corresponding pang of gratefulness and joy at how nice the message is.

I so vividly remember reading so many instances of Nines noticing Gavin’s core temperature spike that I was like “this is a good trope and I am into it, but also I’ve never seen this much talk of core temperatures outside of, like, natural family planning discussion forums” ON THE OTHER HAND WHY HAVE I EVER SPENT ANY TIME ON NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING DISCUSSION FORUMS????

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL

AND ALSO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES!

[pierrehardy]

Police in America

In recent weeks, the death of one man in America sparked a protest all over the country and the whole world. You know it’s bad when people are forced to protest despite a pandemic. So it’s worth taking a closer look at what happened and studying ways to move forward strategically.

This write up will cover what happened and how we can move forward for the better. I will highlight three questions: how to protest smart, how Trump can exploit this for the upcoming elections, and how to fix America’s police. For most, we use history as our guide.

TL;DR

Honestly, if you’re not too into reading, watching John Oliver’s previous episode covers the essentials.

So we have a pandemic going on, as well as an upcoming election. We also sent astronauts to space, but that feat of engineering was overshadowed by racially motivated mass protests and riots. Eerily, I’m describing 1968 (flu pandemic, Nixon vs. Johnson election, Apollo 8, and MLK’s assassination) but also 2020 (COVID-19, Trump vs. Biden, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, George Floyd’s murder). Why does this keep happening over and over? 

This is a lot to unpack, and I can’t cover it all in this blog. But know that things have barely changed in the United States: black Americans are still overrepresented in jail and they still live in districts with the worst healthcare, jobs, and schools. Racism in the US is deep and systemic and discouraging in scale, but this is no time to wallow in that. Let’s see what America can do and what same advice can be applied to our own countries.

How to protest

One thing is sure: rioting is  not the way. I understand rioting; it is the natural result of refusing to hear an angry voice that deserves to be heard. But any argument that rioting is necessary is just a fancy academic exercise that justifies unlawful stealing. A bit of rioting can be effective to be heard, sure, but it should never be excessive. Rioting can hurt businesses that are especially fragile due to the pandemic and harm the livelihoods of many people. There are three main reasons against rioting.

The first and most compelling argument against looting and rioting is history: the rioting after the assassination of MLK made predominantly black districts suffer (Figure 1). The establishments that burned down never came back. Those who can leave (which are the relatively wealthy and usually more educated), left. Shops didn’t reopen, meaning jobs also left. The home values also went down.

Figure 1 [1]

Such declines in a district will lead to more poverty, then to more violent crimes that will eventually lead to more violent policing. Excessive rioting hurts the very people the movement is trying to fight for and would put everything back to square one.

Second, any movement relies on the majority of the public opinion being in favor of the cause. If you set a city on fire, people will be too busy putting out the flames to care about what you were fighting for in the first place. Chaos also sells better in the news, so its focus will be overblown. Therefore you must protest peacefully, document it, and blast that everywhere. If the police escalate, don’t bite but keep documenting. Due to documenting, people were able to see the brutality of the police and how they are prone to escalate otherwise peaceful situations. This adds fuel and legitimacy to the protests. 

Third, excessive violence from rioting can cause a sense of fear and anarchy to the people. When people are afraid, idealism is thrown away, and restoring order will be prioritized over change. This will be an opportunity for Trump to take notes from 1968 and copy Nixon’s law-and-order platform. That leads us to the next question.

Can Trump copy Nixon?

In the 1960s, America was in the middle of the unpopular and hopeless Vietnam War, wherein Lyndon Johnson succeeded JFK after being assassinated. The protests over the Vietnam War and MLK’s assassination led to chaos that Nixon used as an opportunity to campaign that he can restore order, which worked. Today in 2020, the script is set too perfectly for Trump.

It is also worth noting that due to gerrymandering, Republicans have an advantage in the electoral college, meaning that Trump needs only a bit less than the majority vote to win. [2] This is especially concerning when you consider that Trump’s approval rating is also just slightly less than 50%. [3]

However, this is not a guarantee for Trump’s reelection. If we go back to Nixon’s victory, it was a Republican nominee defeating a Democrat president whose riots were sparked under his leadership. This time, the protests started during Trump. People are not that stupid, and they will recognize when the president is the cause of the trouble. Add the fact that people disapproved of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. [4] There is still a chance to avoid another Trump term, if only Biden can muster up enough charisma.

Policing in America today

Before delving into what can be done to ameliorate policing in America, let’s establish the current landscape. 

One reason why managing the police departments in America is difficult is because, unlike in other wealthy countries, they’re not unified. In America, there’s the federal police, state police, county police, municipal, Puerto Rico, and others. In total, there are 18,000 separate departments, each with their own rules. [5]

That being said, not all police departments are corrupted. There’s one particular department that is doing the right thing (well, okay, not perfect, but better than most) and can be used as an example or model on how to reform America’s police. This is the Camden county police department in New Jersey. I’ll dedicate a whole section on this later.

The lack of gun control in America is well known. Figure 2 shows that America is the most heavily armed rich country in the world. An armed population is an unsafe population that’s more difficult to police. This contributes to the justification that “warrior” style training is necessary for police officers. 

Figure 2

The police are doing too much to the extent that people have forgotten what the police are for. People call 911 for things that cops are not equipped to handle but can’t refuse. Here are some examples.

Police are assigned to patrol schools. [6] This should not be the job of the police but of a security agency instead. 

Police are dispatched when people call in a person acting erratically due to mental illness. [7] The police are simply not trained to deal with this. This is the job of medical professionals. 

Police are dispatched when people call in matters involving drug overdoses. [8] Like the last point, this is a job for the paramedics, not the police. 

The key is to remember that the police’s function is (supposedly) to serve and protect civilians using force while respecting their rights. In short, summoning the police anywhere should be the last resort. America seems to be trigger happy with the dispatch button. Clearly, the system is broken: the police are too deadly and has almost no accountability (Figure 3)

Figure 3 (Visualized using R; Pierre Hardy)

Ways to fix America’s police

From my research, I found nine promising solutions to fix and improve America’s police. Let’s start with the most popular one. 

Defund the police. As I mentioned, the police are doing too much. However, police unions are biting down and refusing to let go of the budget and responsibility that is too large for them to chew. Defunding is about reallocating the resources to other institutions so that they can take some work away from the police. For example, reallocate some of the funding to dedicated drug or mental illness responders, or to community initiatives. 

Bolster police accountability. Prosecutors are supposed to keep the police accountable. However, since prosecutors need convictions to climb the ladder, and the fact that police departments can hinder an investigation, the incentive to uphold justice is low. Read figure 4 for more information.

Figure 4 [11]

Limit union power. Typically, unions are underpowered these days, to the demise of laborers. It’s the opposite for police unions. They’ve been too powerful, too stubborn and too protective of their workers, making police departments more like university fraternities than agencies to serve the people. They defy politicians’ directives to fire violent officers and stop hostile “warrior” style training. They prevent the reform the police need.

Demilitarize the police. The Pentagon has been giving the police some surplus military equipment since the ’40s. [9] This is counter-productive as it fails to reduce crime and only worsens police reputation (Figure 5). The military is meant to win wars by killing their enemies. The police shouldn’t have the same tools used for that objective.

Figure 5 [10]

Fix “Qualified Immunity” loopholes. Qualified Immunity is a law that protects officers from liability for actions they did during their official capacity unless they break a “clearly established” federal law. [12] The “clearly established” loophole has been abused, like a case where cops who stole $225,000 during a search warrant had legal immunity. [13] Read the full story for more details. 

Legislate. In this case for politicians, they need to have an honest willingness to do good, since the incentive to legislate about this is tilted. So far, the main antagonists to progress are police unions and prosecutors. Meanwhile, the main benefactors would be the low-income group, which is usually politically disconnected and doesn’t vote. This is where the protests contribute the most: by pushing politicians to act. But how can the government govern a police system as disconnected as America’s? Refer to Obama’s efforts from 2014. [14]

Issue recommendations to police departments on how to modernize their police forces. 

Increase funding to Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). They help shift police tactics away from the “predator-prey” point-of-view of warrior-style training into a more community-oriented one. 

Be more active in launching federal investigations on police misconduct. These investigations usually lead to consent decrees between the police departments and the DOJ that’s useful in making departments actually improve their policing. 

Implicit bias training. The trouble with an institution that’s so deeply and systematically racist is that cops usually do not regard themselves as racists. They genuinely do not believe that they are. So any effort at pointing out their implicit biases is taken with resistance because they think it’s a reflection of their character. Nonetheless, these kinds of training should be required more and should need re-training.

Data? Being educated in business intelligence, there’s always this faux-truism that data can enhance literally anything. Can it also be in this case? Maybe. There are two main problems on why data is not sure to be effective in this case.

Data gathering through CompStat (the data software that the police use) is unreliable and unequal across different departments. [15] 

The main difficulty is that in this particular case, establishing causality is important and difficult. There are correlations everywhere, but we can’t pin the right reasons. Like, if arrests are higher than usual in a particular neighborhood, is the problem that there are too many cops in a certain neighborhood, or is crime naturally higher there? Are minorities arrested more because they do more crimes (which tends to happen if they live in a discriminative society), or it’s because the officers are racist? Or if you go deeper, is it the officers that are biased, or is it the 911 callers that are racists? [16][17]

Camden County Police Department

Camden is widely regarded as the role model for police reform. Frankly, they’re not a flawless department, and copying them entirely doesn’t guarantee the police reforms America needs. But it’s worth noting some of the policies they do that undeniably turned the department around. First, a bit of history. [18][19][20] (The whole section weaves between the 3 sources)

2012. Camden (the city) was a dangerous place, placing 5th high in the country’s murder rate. 

2013. The Camden City Police was disbanded and turned into a county police department that rehired most of the laid-off officers due to corruption. Though this time, pay and benefits were lower. 

2014. It started on a rough start. During this time, 65 excessive force complaints were filed, and crime rates were still up. 

Today. During 2019, the number of excessive force complaints went down to 3, and the murder rate was reduced by two thirds. 

With calls to disband the Minneapolis police department growing louder and Camden showing improvement, it’s worth learning from their experience. Here are some changes they did that stood out for me.

Use-of-force policy. Every Camden cop wears a body camera, and each time they use force, the footage is reviewed by four people. Every footage is seen by the watch commander and internal affairs officer, including the policeman who owned the footage and his senior officer. Sitting down and watching events unfold again helps cops change their perspectives and receive feedback from their seniors on how they could’ve handled the situation better. 

“Warrior” to “guardian.” When Camden was rebuilt, they shifted their focus to a more community-oriented policing. This shifts how the police see themselves against the citizens. They are not warriors at war with the people they serve, but rather they are the keepers of peace and protector or citizens and their rights. Their job is to build a community that’s safe, not eliminate the rot. 

Training. Camden officers are trained and re-trained again every year, in matters of de-escalation and implicit bias training. 

I believe these policy changes have profoundly contributed to the turning of Camden’s police force and are worth taking notes from to improve the way you are policed wherever you live.

George Floyd’s life

Before I finish my blog, I wanted to share what I learned about the life of George Floyd. A little obituary, in a way. I wanted to know the man’s life too, and not just his death. 

Mr. Floyd was not a perfect man, but he was not a bad man that deserved the disgrace of having his life choked out of him, face on the asphalt with a knee to his neck. Mr. Floyd grew up in Houston, in a less than ideal neighborhood. With his height reaching until six-feet-six, it was natural that he was in the Yates football team (Figure 6) and then the South Florida State’s basketball team (Figure 7). He was also into the music scene, known as Big Floyd (check out his discography at [24]), which backed DJ Screw (Figure 8).

Figure 6 (Second one from the left, upper most)

Figure 7 (leftmost)

Figure 8

As lively as his life was, he wasn’t able to escape his circumstances being on the bad side of town. During his 20s, Mr. Floyd has been arrested multiple times with armed theft and cocaine possession. It wasn’t done out of desire but of need. Struggling for a job and with a menacing figure, he was too easily drawn to it, as in 2007, when he was arrested for breaking and entering a house. 

After spending five years in prison, he aimed to be better, and he did. He devoted himself to being a better father, being more active in church, and moved to Minneapolis. Using his height and muscular figure, he worked as a bouncer in a club popular among the Latinos. His reputation as a gentle giant shone here as he was good at de-escalating trouble and greeting regulars with a hug. 

The same cannot be said regarding the previous bouncer of the club. He was a white man with jittery eyes and was an off-duty police officer that was quite trigger happy with the pepper spray while on bouncer duty. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Floyd was not spared by the COVID-19 and lost his job as a bouncer. On May 25th, he went to a store to buy cigarettes and was told that the $20 bill he used to pay for it was counterfeit. Mr. Floyd refused to return the cigarettes, and the clerk called 911 on him. What happens next is all too known, as videos circulating around of the white man with jittery eyes kneeling on the neck of a man crying for his mama as he was being suffocated. The police officer that worked in the same club as Mr. Floyd was the same man kneeling on his neck while staring directly at the video recording him, without fear in his eyes that he was going to get in trouble for what he was doing. 

[21][22][23] (The whole section weaves between the 3 sources)

References

[1] Collins, W. J., & Margo, R. A. (2004). The labor market effects of the 1960s riots (No. w10243). National Bureau of Economic Research.

[2]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/17/20868790/republicans-lose-popular-vote-win-electoral-college 

[3]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-approval-rating-has-dropped-how-much-does-that-matter/ 

[4]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/09/presidential-job-approval-trumps-re-election-prospects-look-bleak/ 

[5]https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/race-problem-black-and-white  

[6]https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/06/12/schools-police-george-floyd-protests/ 

[7]https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-mental-health-crisis-training-police.html 

[8]https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/05/01/lawmakers-say-some-police-ill-equipped-overdoses/83789462/ 

[9]https://www.autoblog.com/2020/06/08/surplus-military-vehicles-weapons-police-departments/?guccounter=1 

[10] Mummolo, J. (2018). Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 115(37), 9181-9186.

[11] Trivedi, S., & Gonzalez Van Cleve, N. (2020). To Serve and Protect Each Other: How Police-Prosecutor Codependence Enables Police Misconduct.

[12]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

[13]https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/09/17/federal-court-cops-accused-of-stealing-over-225000-have-legal-immunity/ 

[14]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Task_Force_on_21st_Century_Policing 

[15]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat#Critique 

[16] Goff, P. A., & Kahn, K. B. (2012). Racial bias in policing: Why we know less than we should. Social Issues and Policy Review, 6, 177–210.

[17]https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-03/svitlana-flom-amy-cooper-george-floyd-police-racism 

[18]https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/06/04/how-to-fix-american-policing 

[19]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_County_Police_Department 

[20]https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html 

[21]https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020/06/04/george-floyd-was-killed-on-may-25th 

[22]https://www.kwtx.com/content/news/George-Floyds-former-teammate-wants-him-remembered-as-more-than-a-news-story-570889511.html 

[23]https://theundefeated.com/features/george-floyd-lasting-impact-as-a-two-sport-athlete-in-houston/ 

[24]https://www.discogs.com/artist/2002742-Big-Floyd 

[itsbenedict]

OH RIGHT YEAH I FINISHED PERSONA 5 ON SUNDAY

first i’m gonna say stuff that isn’t spoilers, and then after i’m done with that i’ll put spoilers under a cut. (at least, plot spoilers- there’s going to be details on the game in general, so if you haven’t played it yet and want to go in blind, hurry and scroll past this)

It’s good. It’s really very very good and improves on previous Persona games in... I think every possible dimension, except for how in this one every single female social link is romanceable, including the adults, including your teacher, um, hey??? Don’t???

Using personas as shadows was a really good move- the masked shadow designs from Persona 3 really fit that game’s aesthetic and had a whole unified design language, but they were sort of out of place in Persona 4 and would have been very out of place in P5. It was a savvy move both from a saving-on-art perspective, and from an aesthetic perspective- they were free to pick and choose from their huge library of persona designs to populate the palaces with thematically appropriate bad dudes. And, of course, as a fan of the series, it was fun going up against personas I’d used in previous games as enemies, and applying that knowledge to get an edge in combat.

The social stats system, where you have to grind up smarts and courage and charm and stuff in order to unlock things? Still terrible. Still a huge drag on the pacing and the game would have been way better without it. Hated it. But, it was slightly better than in P4, because social link activities often give you points in your social stats in addition to s.link points, so you don’t always have to choose between one or the other. Not that having the system at all wasn’t still bullshit, but it was ameliorated by some smart design decisions.

Speaking of social links- every single link, this time around, provides mechanical bonuses as you rank up. It’s not just a matter of, okay, I get an extra level on personas of this arcana- investing in social links provides a huge array of quality-of-life improvements. Getting extra time in the day, unlocking special moves in combat, letting you rearrange your party on the fly, improving your stealth in dungeons... it’s not just your immediate party members who are empowered by s.links.

Your crew is constantly having conversations in a group chat on your phone, and it really does a lot to make you feel connected to them- you have whole-group interactions on a daily basis, without having to meet up in person or have plot contrivances to justify it. That little touch (I say “little”, but it’s a big undertaking in terms of volume of writing) did a lot to make me care about the team as a whole.

EVERY PART OF THE GAME IS STYLISH AS FUCK AND THE MUSIC IS GREAT AND IT LOOKS AMAZING AND I WAS CONSTANTLY SUPER PSYCHED ALL THE TIME, THE HYPE IN THAT AREA WAS NOT A LIE, THAT’S ALL I NEED TO SAY ON THE MATTER

In general, it kind of made a show of departing from previous Personas, while really sticking pretty close to the formula overall. The main improvements were in the dungeon-crawling stuff- fixed-layout palaces with loads of cool setpieces and puzzles, stealth mechanics that made sneaking up on enemies engaging (except when the dang hiding spots restricted your camera for absolutely no good reason, dammit, i can literally reach out and touch this shadow’s toe and i can’t lock onto it from here??? fuck off), and cool faux-platforming sections.

anyway, PLOT SPOILERS (spoilers: the plot is good):

So, dang. The big thing that bugged me about Persona 4′s plot was “hey, so, you could at any time just go to the police, show them that you can go into TVs, and explain using the easily demonstrated evidence that the killer is using the magic TV world to do murders”. It made zero sense- particularly because the protagonist was living with a senior police detective. The usual “oh, they’ll never believe us” angle is nonsense in the face of how you can totally prove it no problem. 

Persona 5 neatly sidesteps this by putting the protagonist on probation, and making the core group a bunch of Phantom Thieves, and oh shit yeah actually making the cops the bad guys- so of course you keep all this stuff secret and don’t just let the authorities sort it out. YOU WOULD GO TO JAIL. (In fact, you do go to jail, as the flashback framing device points out early on.)

And speaking of this framing device: holy shit the clever plan for how you get out of that situation is genius. When the protagonist gets shot directly in the head and the bad guy checks the head wound to confirm that he is in fact dead? That looks pretty damn final until you remember that hey, realistic fake people are totally a thing and have been substantially involved in the plot this whole time, and of course if the police believe you’re in a cell then there’ll be a cognitive duplicate of you in the police’s cognition. There were so many layers to that plan that, in retrospect, didn’t seem like unrealistically risky gambits. No shit, it worked perfectly! It was a really fucking clever plan!

I’ll be honest: I didn’t exactly see Akechi coming. At first I saw him coming- like, okay, who’s going to be the traitor? We know there’s a traitor- I wonder if it’s the guy who we know works for the police, and has been trying to capture us? It was way too obvious, and so- while I kept him as my first guess, in acknowledgment of that obviousness, I was ready to pounce on any alternative explanation. (My secondary hypothesis was that I hadn’t been betrayed at all, and that the cell was in the Metaverse and the whole thing was a fiendishly elaborate setup. So, in a way, I was double right? While being, in fact, completely wrong.)

I caught the pancakes thing, but I didn’t put two and two together with his explanation- I knew he had to already be a persona user because of it, but when he confessed “I’m actually already a persona user”, I didn’t think too closely about the timeframe he presented- his claim that it had been recently, during our Okumura Foods heist. Or- well, I sort of considered that, but wrote it off as “maybe he misheard “cakes” as “pancakes” the same way Ann originally misheard “pancakes” as “cakes”. His thing on TV where everyone was blaming the Phantom Thieves, but he was like “actually, I think it might be someone else” threw me off the scent entirely.

(i also suspected Mishima, at least until i got further into his social link and he became less of a disaster area)

The Igor twist fucking ruled super hard. I thought it was kind of eerie that they introduced “Shadows are Personas, and they talk like people do, and are alive” at the same time as “hey, let’s do fusion with GRUESOME EXECUTIONS”, and I did think “wow, this doesn’t sound like how Igor should sound at ALL, but I guess I’m going to have to get used to it.” That said- I get that it would have taxed the art budget, but they really should have phased out the guillotines and gone back to the tarot card stuff once Lavenza and real!Igor came back into play. It was weird that they had the open door, but put an invisible wall in front of it, too- like, I guess they planned to revamp the Velvet room after that twist, but ran out of time?

The final fight was kind of eh. Big marathon against a god with multiple limbs and a lot of health, and then he kills you but your social links give you strength and your persona turns into a bigger cooler persona (although  and you win the fight good. Kinda boilerplate Persona final boss there- but not as disappointing as I assumed the final boss was going to be, because with Igor I ♪ never saw it comiiiiiing ♪ and thought Shido was the big bad, which would’ve been kind of anticlimactic. The whole bone bridges full of angels situation in the leadup, though, was pretty damn rad.

Let’s see what else. Sojiro Sakura is best dad, Hifumi Togo is best girl, Morgana is best cat, Akechi’s little foot dance thingy after all-out attacks is more adorable than he deserves to be, and Becky Kawakami deserves a god damn vacation.

I’ll probs have more P5 opinions to say later?? It was a VERY VERY good game that I liked a lot, tenouttaten.

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Networking Building and its Benefits

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