#i guess if you would like to hear what happens with yaldabaoth and maruki and the like i will rb this and add more details LOLLLL

[butchfalin]

i would love to know your ghost akira lore

HIII perfect <3 i won't give away the Full thing because i do think i want to write it someday and i want to keep Some secrets BUT. here is the gist (and tw for major character death, light emetophobia, and some canon-typical violence and gore):

it starts on 11/20, where everything is going well... until it comes time to show akechi his phone. because his phone battery is dead. it's been like... at least a full 24hr since he charged it, and that is literally all that does him in

which means he's conscious enough to have a conversation with akechi when he comes in to assassinate him! but he's still drugged and out of it, and akechi is far too deeply entrenched in his quest for vengeance to be convinced. they talk, but it's not quite enough, and it ends just like it was always meant to: with a bullet in akira's head

and then akira wakes up in the velvet room, where "igor" taunts him but tells him that his role in the story is not yet over, and then akira is back in the interrogation room just in time to see akechi calmly tuck the silencer into his pocket and exit... and to see his own eyes staring, glassy and lifeless, into the empty space ahead. he's in such a state of shock that all he can think to do is follow akechi down the hallways and watch as he steps briskly into the nearest restroom, throws up into the nearest toilet before so much as locking the stall door behind himself, and then arranges himself into the perfect image of composure he was before. so, okay. maybe he's not as totally onboard the "kill akira in cold blood" train as it seemed when he was, you know, killing akira in cold blood. but there's only so much akira can do with that, and akechi doesn't seem to be able to see him, so.

the only thing akira can think to do is walk back to leblanc... and by the time he gets there, everyone else has gathered. there's a heavy moroseness in the air as they try to reflect on what went wrong, when suddenly morgana looks up and spots akira where he's just entered through the door (through in the most literal sense - he passed through it as if it was air, but he tries not to think about it)

morgana is immediately overjoyed to see akira alive and rushes over to him... and passes right through his leg. everyone else is in a state of shock/fear/anger/sadness at morgana's outburst that akira is alive, because 1) time and place, cat, that's not funny and 2) he seems to be talking to empty air. morgana comes to the realization quickly that something isn't right (you know, when he passes through akira's leg and also really looks at him, because he looks distinctly ghostly), but he can see and hear akira, which is more than can be said for anyone else, who are all in various states of disbelief

regardless, now they know who their next target is, and they're filled with even more righteous fury than before as they aim to take down the man who both ruined and ended akira's life. no one's quite sure what to make of morgana claiming to see akira, but they confirm a few key details that only akira and sae could have known, and so eventually they do come to believe that he's there... but they're really not sure what to make of it or what their next plan of action could be, so they decide pretty much unanimously to throw themselves into taking down shido

and akira... lingers. it's absurdly lonely, being a ghost, so he spends most of his time in the attic with morgana until everyone is ready to begin the infiltration. sometimes he hangs out down in leblanc, but the sight of sojiro crying over him when he's right there is too much to bear for long. at least with morgana he has someone he can talk to

when it comes time for infiltrating the palace, akira follows along, because what else is he supposed to do? and he doesn't expect anything to change, but when the world warps and he finds himself on the deck of a cruise ship, he's met with a chorus of gasps as the phantom thieves all suddenly see him in his full ghostly glory

and suddenly, things change. akira can't access his personas for some reason he doesn't know, but he finds he's essentially made of pure curse energy that he can send out in concentrated blasts if he tries hard enough, and also that he can't be hit (or touched in any capacity, but that's much less useful for fighting). within the palace, his teammates can see and hear him, and even if his outfit and personas are gone, he's still joker. it's the most alive he's felt since he was arrested.

but eventually, it comes time to leave the palace. no one is quite sure what will happen, but they can still see him when they leave. they assume it's something to do with cognition, like with hearing morgana speak - they know he's there, and so he exists to them. it's a huge relief, at least for akira, and he's thrilled to be seen and heard again. he never wanted attention much when he was alive, but he couldn't have predicted how much he missed it once he had died.

(no one can quite look at him, though, and no one can quite look away. haru tries to wipe away the blood from the bullet still embedded in his skull, but her hands pass right through him with an uncomfortable pulse, like the creeping tendrils of an eiha. when akira tries to wipe it away himself, blood just retraces its path down his face in a steady, constant drip. he tries lightheartedly asking ann whether he might still have a career as a model, if being an undead criminal comes into fashion, but her attempt at a chuckle is weak. he tries joking with yusuke that his next painting should be about the various shades of yellows, blues, purples, and reds marring his skin, but yusuke doesn't even pretend to laugh. he tries to ask ryuji what the damage is, whether or not he still looks cool like this, but ryuji just turns and unsubtly wipes at his eyes. he stops trying to make jokes after that.)

so they make their way through shido's palace, and it's... rough. on the bright side, it seems ghosts are immune to becoming rats, which is lucky. it's just about the only win he sees, when the mood is still so horribly downtrodden and there's nothing he can do about it

until they reach the engine room, that is

tensions are at an all-time high. akechi seems shocked and disturbed at the sight of akira, and everyone else seems ready to unleash their worst upon him. but akira... he's mad, too, don't misunderstand, but he also remembers that they talked, and the way akechi pretended to be fine with the whole thing until he was alone and then threw up the sparse amounts of curry akira had ordered him to eat before the fight with sae's shadow. he knows that it's complicated, okay? so when akechi shoots the button to raise the emergency partition, akira passes through it like it's nothing. and akechi might be impervious to curse, but his cognitive mirror is not, and it goes down easily in the face of akira's complicated rage

so akechi is alive! hooray! except akira is still dead, and absolutely nothing is fixed, except that they have a new teammate that no one wants to so much as look at, much less speak to. akira tries, once or twice, but akechi doesn't seem to want to talk to him, either. it's a horribly tense situation

(they fight. it ends with a flood of emotions and no clear winner, but they're on even ground. things are a little less tense after that.)

at some point, after defeating shido and before the world begins to end, they pull sojiro - briefly - into the top level of mementos. it's only fair that he be able to see akira, too, since he's grieving just as much as any of them. oh, kid, he says, how could we have let this happen to you? and the bitter swell of emotions akira has kept bottled up for the better part of a month explodes out of him as he finally breaks down at the terrible injustice of it all. he's just a kid - all he ever wanted was to help people - why did he have to die? and he stands there, sobbing and shattering, surrounded by his friends who cannot touch him, cannot do anything but watch as their dauntless leader crumbles into the ghost of a boy who only ever wanted to keep people safe - the body of icarus drowning in a swirling sea, surrounded by waxy fragments of broken wings

and then shido confesses, and nothing changes. and i am out of characters LOL

[radiantresplendence]

Doctor Takuto Maruki Was Right

Maruki is the Councillor Arcana in Persona 5 Royal and is a fantastic character that the original game was sorely lacking. I’ll be talking some spoilers here. Be warned. 

We can talk about how Demiurge/Yaldabaoth/Yagor/Jägermeister (or whatever you want to call him) is straight trash and shouldn’t be the overarching antagonist of Persona 5 another time, but that’s not what’s important here. 

What’s important here is that Maruki wasn’t in the original game and that does a disservice to everyone who played it. 

For the vast majority of P5R, Maruki is just the high school counselor who was brought in to the school in the aftermath of the Kamoshida incident as a means of damage control. He’s kind, emphatic and insightful and genuinely wants to help anyone seeking his services. 

The Phantom Thieves, due to their involvement in the Kamoshida incident are mandated by the school to talk to him; as the game progresses, most of the team members form some sort of connection to him, save for Akechi and Futaba (I believe) as Akechi is only a Phantom Thief when his goals align with the team and Futaba isn’t a student. 

Even Yoshizawa and Yusuke interact with Maruki, as Yusuke goes out of his way to do so after hearing about him from the other thieves and he was Yoshizawa’s counselor after the death of her sister. 

Over the course of his confidant, Joker gives Maruki his perspective on some of Maruki’s research, which is later revealed to be Cognitive Psience. At the end of his confidant arc, Maruki reveals that he’s known that Joker’s group were the Phantom Thieves since he saw them exit the Cognitive world during the first heist. He says he supports the thieves and their justice but he has to go a separate way. He then exits the story until after the defeat of the God of Control.

If you finish Maruki’s Confidant Arc by the time that he leaves the school, Maruki completes a belated Cognitive Psience paper that he was working on with funding from a college in Toyko and winds up applying his theory when Mementos merges with the real world. 

In short, Maruki fully awakens to his persona with the special ability to rewrite cognition. When the cognitive world and the real world are merged, however this power becomes absurdly potent, and Maruki begins to warp reality in order to make a world where no one suffers. 

Maruki’s machinations affect all of the Phantom Thieves positively: Joker doesn’t go to prison because... Akechi is alive and confesses to his crimes in Joker’s stead. Akechi is let off the hook for his crimes. Morgana is a human. Ryuji was never injured and is still the star of the track team. Ann’s friend Shiho never attempted suicide. Yusuke was never exploited by Madarame, who instead acts as a passable father figure to him. Makoto and Sae’s dad was never assassinated. Futaba’s mother is alive and is presumably in some sort of relationship with Sojiro. Finally, Haru’s father wasn’t executed after his bossfight and he was never an exploitative egoist. 

There’s a lone exception to this: the girl who the game refused to let join the Phantom Thieves; a girl who had been receiving therapy from Dr. Maruki since before the start of the game due to her trauma from the death of her sister, Sumire Yoshizawa.

In a way, “Kasumi” was Maruki’s prototype for the world he wanted to create. She couldn’t process the guilt she felt for surviving the crash that killed her allegedly more talented sister and consequently wished that she was her late sibling. 

Now the world that Maruki creates is essentially a utopia, where no one suffers and crippling psychological harm is unable to befall anyone. Now we can consider the value of free will that Maruki is removing by becoming a new “God of Control”, but as a card carrying deterministic nihilist, I see it as more or less as trading the whims of an uncaring chaotic universe for those of a benevolent eccentric. The game frames this as a stagnation of humanity, something I don’t entirely agree with. Maruki understands that physical wounds (aka hardship) are inescapable (and can provide adversity to fuel growth) and his big theory revolves around altering cognition to inoculate against mental illness. Any issue with Maruki’s world revolves more around his personal flaws and lack of moderation than it does with his theoretical framework. Regardless, Maruki’s world is more ethical than what it replaces. 

In the third semester, if we ignore some of the alterations like reviving the dead as they’re more of a condition of the world than an effect of it, many people who would otherwise be sick or destitute are not, and the natural conclusion of Maruki gaining full control (as evidenced in the bad ending where you side with the doctor) is a world where no one is. Essentially, the Phantom Thieves in the third semester who fight against Maruki are condemning these people to poverty, despair and a miserable death. Ethically, for the sake of their own morality, the Phantom Thieves are the bad guys. 

Maruki’s motivations need to be examined closer. He is someone who has been largely unable to move past his own trauma (as evidenced by the entire third semester and foreshadowed in the scene where he runs into a college friend) so he has come to the conclusion that he should dedicate himself to moving others past theirs. I mean, mind-wiping your fiance of most of her life with you to cure her of her PTSD and having your life’s work stolen by Shido as you try to pick up the pieces would probably leave a guy feeling pretty empty. Essentially Maruki has resigned himself to his own sorrow after repeatedly being dealt a bad hand, so to speak. 

I think we can safely say that at the very least, Maruki has been emotionally displaced (if not worse) since the incident with Rumi and having his life's work defunded has led him to a place where his only real desire is the pursuit of a singular goal: obliterating sadness. Not his mind you, but everyone else's. 

Basically, Maruki is not well, emotionally or mentally, despite him being able to function as a productive member of society. Completing his contract with a cosmic entity and taking the throne of the god of control, enables him to pursue his goal far beyond what he was capable as a mere doctor with a special power. He infests the human subconscious to further his goal and relentlessly tightens his grip on the world. Despite having augmented physiology in the fused metaverse as a persona user, I feel that he's a mentally ill man who's burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. I think, if anything, fully awakening to Azathoth’s power exacerbated his preexisting mental state. 

To evidence my claim of Maruki’s declining illness, allow me to cite: putting a friend and confidant into a vegetative state because he couldn’t solve a moral dilemma in a month’s time, tentacling a teenage girl and brainwashing her because her dissent is a rejection of your life’s work, picking a fistfight with a high schooler while screaming about stuff unrelated to him, choosing to martyr yourself in resignation to your own suffering when you have the power to avert it. 

Imagine a world where Maruki became the new ruler of the Cognitive World, but acted in a more limited capacity that is more in line with his original research, than the extreme conclusion of it. Consider him acting more like the collective subconscious's guardian angel than the god of control, possibly with the blessing of the Phantom Thieves. I think that’s more what a sane Maruki would settle on, feeling responsible to use the powers he was granted by his contract with an outer god. 

With that out of the way, let’s discuss the way that Maruki implements his agenda.

While working at Shujin, Maruki isn't anything particularly special as a counselor, as it's neither something that he's particularly skilled at, nor is it something that he's passionate for. It's more or less a case of his job being something that he is qualified to do. 

We know that his real passion was cognitive psience research. In essence, he's a scientist over a health professional, even though the funding for his area of expertise was slashed to bits forcing him to take an alternate career path. Especially early on, the way he’d approach his job would certainly be influenced by his passion. To that end, I think you need to analyze his session with Yoshizawa from a research perspective. He rewrote her cognition to be that of her sister’s because he thought it would help her move on. His actions here were absolutely unethical, as he was experimenting on a minor without guardian consent or full disclosure of information, but initial results of his cognition rewrite were positive (especially in the short-term, despite Yoshizawa struggling more in the long term than she otherwise may have). 

"Kasumi" in a lot of ways is a proof of concept for the world he creates in the third semester, even if she isn't necessarily an optimally-functioning prototype. Now, I think Maruki was definitely acting as a bad counselor, and a "mad psientist", if you'll allow my pun, in the flashback. In the third semester however, there's no validity in examining him as a counselor, as he's not actively doing counseling. You can't even really examine him under the lens of ethical science, as he's essentially beyond morality. The man has the power to massively warp reality, raise the dead and alter memories. Essentially, his powers are such that only the end result of any action he takes really matters. If Maruki were to harm or kill someone, regardless of intent, he could make it never happen. So, only the ends of his actions can really be taken into account. 

The ends of his actions are, of course, to obliterate human misery, and he proved effective at this. The exceptions being Sumire Yoshizawa (albeit before the full implementation of his agenda) and himself (his palace is the Laboratory of Sorrow after all.) I guess what I'm getting at here is that, Maruki has to be judged as a god for all of his actions in the third semester, as that’s really the only lens applicable to his role there. 

With that in mind, the questionable actions that he takes in the third semester are basically just holding Akechi’s life hostage and forcing Yoshizawa to be Kasumi. He avoids physical altercation with the Phantom Thieves until they literally approach him with a mutual agreement of force. The Akechi situation is one that Maruki claims to be unintentional, and I do believe him. I think the awkwardness of that reveal is more due to Maruki’s social ineptitude and difficulty revealing that sensitive piece of information than it is anything nefarious. As for the Kasumi situation, Maruki has every ability to revive the real Kasumi and adjust Sumire’s life to become one more satisfying to her. In the end I think that that unfortunate situation has more to do with an ill man with unlimited power unable to distance Yoshizawa’s rejection of his initial gift as a personal sleight to everything he’s spent his life working towards. With his work being pretty much the only thing he’s currently attributed meaning to in his life his swift rejection of dissent makes a little more sense. 

This leads to something I consider mandatory, Yoshizawa needs to rebel against the fate Maruki assigned to her, or every member of the Phantom Thieves would be working against their and all of humanity’s best interests. 

I think no one would disagree with me when I say that his role in the third semester is that of a god antithetical to the themes of Persona 5, and thus narratively has to be deposed for a satisfying conclusion. Looking objectively at his grand plan however, even with his hiccups, I can’t really say he’s wrong, even if his implementation isn’t as clean as I (or even himself in a better frame of mind) would like.