CW for a very brief mention of self-harm toward the end of the “Deja Vu” segment
Okay please bear with me until we get to the hook here I promise I'm working my way up to something. (this writeup is about fanfiction)
I’ve got a flavor of depression called dysthymia, which is just like, when you’re just kind of a little bit depressed all the time, ambiently, forever. I had more immediately obvious emotional issues and more attention-grabbing family members growing up, and ours wasn’t the kind of family that acknowledged this sort of thing in the first place really, so this went undiagnosed until I essentially shut down altogether as a functioning person during my first year of college and had to drop out of school and move back in with my parents. Even then, I didn’t get consistent treatment for a few years after that. BUT, my mental health has never been as bad as it was that year, real low point for me.
A cool thing that can happen when you’re dysthymic though, is that you can still be prone to the big, fuck you depressive episodes that characterize major depressive disorder. This is called Double Depression when it happens, that’s the official medical terminology, which IS very funny. So that happens to me in a way that lasts for a couple-ish weeks usually maybe two or three times a year.
Alright so PERSONA 5 is IMO a like, vacuous game. Completely empty of themes and ideas at best, contradictory of its purported ideas and deeply mean-spirited at its worst. Fails entirely to capitalize on almost every seed it plants, uninterested in plumbing the depths of almost any of its characters in an interesting way beyond their introductions (and sometimes even during them). (Don’t argue with me in the comments if you think this game rocks that’s not what we’re doing here just keep reading I promise I’m doing a thing here.) But it IS a compelling game in your hands. I’m by no means immune to the charms of Persona, even if my feelings towards the modern iteration of the series are lukewarm. I played Persona 5 on its initial release and didn’t particularly enjoy myself. I caught Royal on a MASSIVE discount sometime since it came out but never really had it in mind to play it until one of my mutuals did a few months ago and was tweeting a lot about it, in such a way that reminded me of the kind of fun there is to find in these games if you’re willing to take them as they are and not as you wish they were. So right at the end of August I booted up Royal to see if I could find that. And I did! I’ve had a pretty good time with it over the last couple months. If nothing else, Persona 5 is an incredibly smooth game to play at all times, and Royal even more so. Goes down easy.
Then at the beginning of September my brain just like completely fell apart. I entered the worst depressive episode I’ve experienced in over a decade, since that time when I was 18 that I mentioned earlier. All kinds of weird brain shit that I haven’t had problems with for years and years has been coming back to me and it’s been hitting hard. And I don’t even know why! No apparent trigger. And it’s still happening! This is a very long time for me to be like this dude it sucks. I can’t get in with my doctor until the end of November, hopefully we can figure something out man idk.
All of this is to say that Persona 5 became a weird thing that I have clung to for these last couple of months; the game’s looping structure makes it easy to indulge in “one more day” thinking, punctuated by long stints of very relaxing, methodical dungeon crawling. There’s a rhythm to it, and enough depth that I could really sit down and crack the thing open to engage in the challenge content after a certain point. Max out the compendium, all that shit. As much engagement as you want it to be, but never any friction.
I also, have read, uh, somewhere between 6 and 7 million words of Persona 5 fanfiction since the beginning of September. I think this game’s cast, widely, is pretty easily my favorite in the series, or the IDEAS of them are. As I’ve mentioned, I think almost everyone in this game is an incredibly compelling SKETCH of a person, and that Atlus has almost across the board fudged the details in coloring them in. So I was like damn I bet there’s some good fanfic for this game. And there is, of course. P5 is one of the most popular games around, especially with the kinds of people who write fanfiction. And bro I sleep like four hours a night at absolute maximum right now, I have needed a lot of shit to get me through those hours without thinking about, y’know, anything else. So that’s what I’ve been doing with almost every moment of free time for ten weeks.
I didn’t initially intend to review Persona 5 here – I think it’s a game that’s been pretty thoroughly discussed over the years - but I thought it might be fun to recommend some of the fics that I’ve enjoyed during this very bizarre chapter of my life. Of course, in talking about what I like so much about a lot of these stories, there’s going to be a lot of natural comparison to how the game handles parallel ideas, so evaluation of the game is going to be peppered throughout. This isn’t a comprehensive review by any means, just a small sampling of stuff that I’ve read recently and stuff that’s really stuck with me since I’ve started my reading. Most if not all of these should be tagged pretty well and a lot of them are good about giving content warnings at the top of individual chapters if there’s tough shit in them. I didn’t include anything here that’s just porn but a few of these have sex in them at some point, AO3 has a whole rating system, you can’t miss it if you don’t want to see that stuff. Okay so let’s get into it:
Actually, I have to disclose first that I fuckin hate when people have personas talk to their persona users inside their heads, nobody has ever done it in a way that I didn’t think sucked ass but it IS gonna be in some of these and I think those stories are cool anyway but bro I need you to know I don’t condone that practice okay now we can get to it.
This is a very small sample size of only a few fics that I quite liked off the top of my head, in no particular order:
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One Year On Probation by FlOrangey 44 chapters, 214k words, last updated June 2020
My favorite kind of fanfiction for stories like this has always been the sort that removes the supernatural elements. My favorites of these stories are always conduits for human drama, so foregrounding that sort of thing always appeals to me. A project like One Year On Probation is especially interesting, because where most fics that I’ve read that do stuff like this will put characters and perhaps versions of their canon conflicts into mundane scenarios (including some I’ll recommend further down), this one aims to retell the events of the game, just, without the superpower bits.
It makes for an interesting thought exercise when you take a scenario that is to some degree about offering powerless people the power fantasy of being able to exert influence over abusive elements of society that are otherwise untouchable and take that catharsis away from them. But if we’re still adapting the narrative beats, how do these kids handle the people hurting them? I think FlOrangey does a good job here of not letting those answers feel cheap or easy, especially not for the Madarame story, which this fic, seemingly long abandoned (dropped for two years in 2018, a few chapters in 2020, and nothing since), comes so close to finishing that you can see the outline of where it’s going.
The removal of the metaverse has other ripple effects – characters tied closely to it lead very different, more stable lives, particularly Futaba and Akechi. Without the narrative out of just showing it to him, Yusuke’s wake-up call is longer and colder. Morgana is, obviously, a regular cat. And this interpretation of Joker is just a guy tryin’ to get by, dealing with a pretty bad anxiety disorder that he’s at least developed since the events leading up to the game, but it’s implied he could have exhibited signs of earlier. Author’s notes suggest that FlOrangey is writing that stuff from experience and it does read like it. While that becomes a big part of Akira’s character here, and you might expect it to given his circumstances, he’s not like, a conduit for trauma, he’s a pretty roundly written guy.
These are very warm iterations of these characters without feeling like they rely much on you being a fan of the game to like them, which is always nice. You can tell it was being written with that really long plan in mind, and Makoto, despite being essentially the secondary main character by the time the fic stops, is definitely the character who feels the most like “ah damn yeah I bet this version of her would really go places if this writer had gotten the chance to get to the parts of the story where she’s center stage.” As it is though I don’t think this fic feels terribly incomplete, even if it does abruptly end like 9/10ths of the way through the second part of a like eight part story. It’s very long as it is, 215k words, and there’s a lot of good shit here to dig into.
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Black & Red by Alexilulu, 18 chapters, 126k words, last updated April 2020
Another one loosely adapting the events of the game that gets cut off midway through the Madarame story arc, Black & Red’s method of shuffling the story around is by being entirely from Haru’s perspective and moving her whole central story up to take place during and after the initial story arc of the game. It’s nice to have a story that makes the main character transgender but doesn’t have her constantly thinking about that, tbh, even though I have read other fics where trans characters ARE thinking about it all the time and that can be good too, I like diversity in my t-slur representation. It’s also an interesting choice to make her the perspective character and putting the focus on her burgeoning relationship with Joker without actually having her get involved with the Phantom Thieves.
There’s not NOTHING else happening but this fic is pretty heavily focused on Haru and Joker coming together, and a big part of that early on is them being edgy teens smoking on the high school roof in the rain, him clearly wanting to let down the walls of his goofy Dangerous Delinquent persona that he’s built up so people don’t approach him and he can be a Phantom Thief in relative solitude, while also trying to keep her at arm’s length because obviously being a Phantom Thief is scary and dangerous, and Alexilulu does interpret their adventures more violently than average, and without the conveniences of extreme healing magic a lot of writers adapt from the games. This could all be fine on its own but it reflects really well on Haru’s character – Alexilulu really emphasizes an anger that is present in the game but never really explored. As someone who is in a genuinely horrific abuse situation, having it made pretty obviously clear that she’s being fucked around with by one of the very few people she’s been able to open up to leads to a lot of really good scenes of the teens Sitting Around And Talking About How Fucked Up They Are which is one of my favorite kinds of fanfic writing.
The elements of Haru’s story that are fleshed out are pitched well too – it’s easy to write her abusive fiance really over-the-top and Alexilulu occasionally rides that line but never in scenes where it really matters. Essentially too, they give Haru’s father some more, uhhh, I’ll say believable notes of humanity, without making him sympathetic (I think he is actually more evil than he is in the game, on a personal level, by the time he makes his final appearance in this story). Elements of Haru’s family history and social link story also get folded in here and complicated in ways that the game simply isn’t interested in and they all make for a richer personal tableau; there was a lot of meat left on this bone, should the fic have continued, but given that it didn’t, it’s good that Persona 5’s inherently clean, arc-based nature got us through the one so heavily focused on the fic’s main character. There’s some sense of closure even without a resolution.
Alexilulu has written a lot of Persona 5 fics, mostly one-shots and most of them porn. I’ve read several of them and like pretty much everything I’ve read of theirs, but I might particularly also recommend What I Want to Say (Without Saying ‘I Love You’), about post-school-aged Ryuji and Ann and their nebulously defined sexual relationship as they feel like they’re kind of adrift in that ennui of being an adult with no direction and no sense of future, surrounded by peers who are Doing Stuff and Going Places (10k words) and A Garden For Traitors, two stories about Ann and Haru getting together, both short one shots, both very sweet. Alexilulu seems to have moved on from P5 writing but they did have a great voice for these characters.
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i wanna kiss your silhouette by wtfoctagon, 5 chapters, 35k words, complete
My favorite thing about fanfiction generally speaking is the way writers naturally bring out and emphasize different aspects of characters they’re writing about. Maybe someone is gonna hit a character pitch perfectly the way they’re portrayed in the original work, but I’m a lot more interested when you see people’s inclinations drawing stuff that’s already present in a character and sharpening it. Persona 5, having most of its characterization be so scattered and messy throughout, has a lot of potential for this.
wtfoctagon stages this fic as a romance between Ann and Makoto (imo an EXTREMELY underrated pairing), and it is, and it’s a really compelling one too, but it’s also a pretty thorough look at a side of Ann we don’t see much after the opening hours of the game – the one who is contemplative, keen, and empathic. The Ann in this fic is the Ann from that scene where she sees Yusuke’s painting and feels the honesty of intention behind it, and touches him with her comments, and knows intrinsically that Madarame can’t be who he says he is. This is a good look for her, and it comes through without losing the way that she is also easily flustered, easily bored, compassionate, and quietly the emotional rock of her friend group.
The dialogue is really sharp but a lot of this characterization – for both girls — comes from the prose. The narration from Ann’s perspective carries a loose, casual vibe but communicates strongly her ability to perceive every small detail about Makoto: her anger, her insecurity, her practiced way to use body language to hide herself in plain sight. Something that’s not really emphasized in Persona 5 but makes for great food for fanfiction writers is that almost any combination of main characters in that game can relate to each other on some level via their bad experiences. The specifics of their hardships don’t always align but portions of them do, and the ways people react to trauma can. Ann and Makoto both know what it is to feel small, to wish to not be seen at all, and to have that contradictory feeling of simultaneously wishing to be seen on their own terms. They both know what it is to be lonely, and to be powerless, and to be angry.
It’s also just, genuinely, a really romantic story. Lovely writing. Other good stuff by wtfoctagon includes i’m just feeling low, feeling low, a one shot where makoto and akira commiserate over their respective bad days on the roof for 1500 words, and several Tales of Berseria fics that you know I gotta shout out because I’m a huge ToB head over here. Mostly their stories are shipping fics between Magilou and Eleanor but wtfoctagon does seem to know in their heart that magilou/eleanor/velvet is a true OT3 and I respect them hugely for this. They run the gamut from real world AU stuff to stuff set during the game to an 80k word post-game story that I haven’t gotten around to but I’m saving for a rainy day. Big fan of this writer's voice.
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a storm is coming in by canticle, 6 chapters, 40k words, complete
A fic that takes place the summer after the events of the game, where Ryuji goes to visit Akira for the entire break. It’s evident that Ryuji is depressed and that he’s avoiding SOMETHING that’s happened in Tokyo since the game ended but it takes a long time for Canticle to get around to disclosing that stuff. This is a very slow-paced fic, very much more about soaking in the vibe of a bad summer than the catharsis of a horrific revelation. The revelation isn’t horrific either, it’s really mundane, and so is the depiction of Ryuji’s depression. He’s just really tired, he doesn’t want to do stuff, he avoids talking to his friends. His time with Akira is fun, sort of, but it’s also a form of harmful escapism, even as they figure out a routine, and even as things get……….a little bit homo.
Not to open THIS can of worms, I PROMISE I don’t mean anything by this I’m JUST more familiar with the girl shit, but the whole romance carries the vibe of a soft yuri, one where all the moves on both ends are hesitant. The most like, romantically forward thing anyone does before they’re kissing is when Ryuji starts sad wearing the hoodie that Akira wore when he was pretending to be dead during Persona 5, without commenting on it, which could be perceived as a power play but could also just be like, a weird thing to do. Mostly it’s a lot of increasingly gay cuddling, falling asleep with his forehead pressed against Akira’s which is NORMAL FOR BROS. When you’re sad it’s normal to wear your bro’s hoodie all week.
There’s a bit in this fic where Akira helps him re-bleach his hair, and afterwards Ryuji can’t stop thinking about how he LOOKS the same as he always does after he does his own hair but he FEELS different because it was Akira putting his hands on him and it was like, in a way Akira marking him and holy SHIT dude that energy is nowhere else in this thing. Just the tiniest hint of the kind of shit I like but I was hooting and hollering. I know I can get that elsewhere in P5 fandom and I can probably even get it from canticle but to do so in an m/m situation you pretty much HAVE to be willing to let one of the boys be Akechi and I am simply NOT INTERESTED.
This one’s really pleasant though. Eventually all the other Phantom Thieves come to hang out and Ryuji gets scenes specifically with Ann and Makoto, who are always good characters to pair him with. Ryuji and Makoto are another one of those duos who Just Work that basically nobody is really tapping into, but when people do it rocks. BUT HEY HOW ABOUT ANOTHER ONE ABOUT AKIRA DYEING RYUJI’S HAIR BUT THAT’S THE ENTIRE THING THIS TIME
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Dyeing To Kiss You by Mysecretfanmoments and Suggestivescribe, one shot, 9k words
This one really only aims to be a romantic moment of an initial getting together between Ryuji and Akira, and it does that well, but there’s more meat on the bone than I might have expected going into it. Both boys are really well characterized, especially when they’re being described from the other one’s perspective (something I always like to see, I’m realizing as I write about these various fics), and there are little hints at the deeper layers to each of them – specifics about Ryuji’s relationship with his mom, hints at Akira’s sensitivities about how much living at Leblanc actually would suck and how fragile his pre-Tokyo relationships turned out to be.
But the really great shit here IS the stuff centered specifically on the romance. Ryuji only realizing his feelings are romantic like forty minutes into being actively aroused by his buddy having a degree of intimate control over him while they go through the steps to bleach his hair really just rules, and when things to escalate to acting and, later, talking, the authors do a good job at keeping Ryuji sounding gruff and inarticulate without making him sound stupid or cartoonish, which is something a lot of writers struggle with for him and characters like him.
Likewise I think the authors are really great at just like, describing the sensation of touching? Of how good it can feel to touch someone and be touched by them in an uncomplicated way, especially when it’s in places that people don’t normally touch each other (i’m not even talking about sex stuff!), and the sense of romance is palpable without omitting things like pauses to negotiate how they want to go about stuff once they are going. This kind of writing isn’t easy to do as well as they’ve done it here but they make it LOOK easy which is about the highest compliment I can think to give.
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The Lonely Fortune Teller’s Club by petaldancing, one shot, 14k words
I have found that other than the shockingly high number of Joker/Iwai fics, there really aren’t very many out there that focus on the adult cast members of Persona 5, and even fewer that are like, actually very good lol. Takemi and Kawakami and Iwai to a lesser extent are often PRESENT because so many stories try to adapt the events of the game and those three have prominent early roles in a logical progression of the story, and they’re well-liked characters for sure, but it’s rare to really get to see these people as actual people beyond the limits of what the game gave them, and even rarer to get inside their heads. This is one of the few stories I’ve seen that’s not porn that’s focused on Chihaya and I think petaldancing does very well by her.
Chihaya is one of my favorite confidants in Persona 5, kind of existing in a middle space of age and maturity between the teenaged characters and the rest of the adult cast. As with most of them, her story gets a little goofy in the details and is let down thematically and in its resolution by Being In Persona 5 but in the broad strokes I think it’s pretty affecting and she’s characterized in a really charismatic way throughout it.
This story takes place in the year after the game, and manages to make Chihaya getting a job working the desk at Takemi’s clinic seem entirely un-contrived, which is a genuine feat, and while this is a story about the two of them making a romantic connection, and it indulges in my least favorite romance story structure (a long tease out and then ending with the acknowledgment of feelings when it feels like there are a lot of depths to plumb still, were the actual relationship to be explored), the story really reads more as a character study on Chihaya, a what-if story about what her life would logically have to look like after she blows it up at the end of her social link, which was a good thing that she was right to do, but did leave her at a crossroads that the structure of a Persona game is unprepared to address. In that regard I think petaldancing does everything right here; they nail the voice, they nail the beats, they say what they want to say and get out in a relatively succinct little story.
Petaldancing has one other Persona story called But Even Iron Trembles, another long oneshot from Hifumi’s perspective in a version of the game events where her mother has a full-blown palace that the Phantom Thieves draw themselves into in the time between stealing Kunikazu Okumura’s heart and the press conference he calls to resolve that story arc. It’s got a backgrounded Hifumi/Makoto romance built entirely off of the supposition that those two would hit it off and start hanging out after that scene in the game where you might run into Hifumi while hanging out with Makoto in the neighborhood with all the bookstores, and that stuff is good, but it’s also the best fleshing out of Hifumi’s family life and her feelings about her situation that I’ve read, which there aren’t MANY of (Hifumi another character I would have expected to be more popular with fanfic people tbh) but like, I’ve tried them all lol. So I recommend that too.
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Fate Written Into Stone by KindredTea, 24 of 26 planned chapters at time of writing, 394k words, ongoing haha oops nevermind I’ve been writing this document for so long that she actually finished the fic while I was working on it, 26/26 chapters, 405k words
This one feels a little bit like cheating because at first glance it’s much more a Persona 3 fic than a Persona 5 one. I AM about to spoil Persona 3, which due to its upcoming remake is presumably about to get a lot of first timers but the premise of this story is like entirely predicated upon the ending of that game so if you care that’s the heads up.
FWIS takes place ten years after P3 and three after P5, opening with an extremely frail, malnourished, 28-year-old Kotone Shiomi (the official name for Persona 3’s female player character) being found on the side of the road by Ann from Persona 5, and it’s immediately clear to the reader that this is not a coincidence, but that Kotone, who by all means should not be alive, was placed deliberately in Ann’s path by someone who knows the identities of all of the Phantom Thieves and is deliberately fucking with them. It doesn’t take long for the Thieves to find out Kotone is a Persona Protagonist and take her under their wing, but it also doesn’t take long for all the guys from Persona 3 to figure out that she’s mysteriously alive and also presumably not in place over the Great Seal, which does herald the return of the Dark Hour and apathy syndrome and all that other bad shit from Persona 3, so very quickly the questions are raised of How Did This Happen, Why Did This Happen, Does Kotone Need To Sacrifice Herself Again, Are We Willing To Seek Another Solution While Things Fall Apart, and also Is Kotone A Human Person?? We did, after all, cremate her body ten years ago.
That describes maybe the first like, six? Chapters of this story, which is dense with plot and is constantly twisting and turning with big new ideas and huge swerves, which I mean in a complimentary way. I usually find really plot-heavy stuff that’s entirely original kind of boring or unconvincing when it’s trying to build out the existing supernatural elements of the work, but KindredTea has it down pat dude. She’s doing a ton of stuff in this fic that feels like it fits right into the shared world of these games but more importantly has kept me on the hook for hundreds of thousands of words beyond a desire to get to the next set of character interactions.
Those are great too, though, don’t get me wrong. KindredTea makes a fascinating Kotone here; it’s not unusual to interpret this character as one who wears a mask of really overt cheerfulness to cover some combination of depression or anger or loneliness (she is the protagonist of Persona 3 after all lol, but also dialogue options in the game support this) but KT’s Kotone is eventually fleshed out into someone who WAS like that as a kid, grew into genuinely being cheerful and fulfilled by her experience in Persona 3, and is now faced with the dilemma of having to choose to die again, alone, and confused, and without the support of the people who she loves dearly, all of whom feel really differently about her after she’s been dead for ten years and they’ve done varying degrees of moving on.
All of the P3 cast’s characterizations kick ass in this fic, and they all respond differently to the idea that some version of Kotone may be alive, but the real star of probably the entire story is Yukari. In KindredTea’s telling of Persona 3, Yukari and Kotone were a couple, and she both had the hardest time moving on from Kotone’s death and the most virulent reaction to the idea that she could be alive again (and also may need to die again too). Yukari is a character who is in a lot of ways defined by grief – throughout all of the games she appears in, and I think KindredTea does a really great job of not simplifying the complex weirdness of this scenario for her.
I lied when I said she’s the star though the real star in my heart is SAE NIIJIMA, a character who I think is very cool, like at least 60% because I think she’s cool LOOKING, but another one who I think is just really underserved by the Persona 5 Fanfic Community. Sae is often treated as a cartoonishly evil character, with people just like grossly overdoing her mistreatment of Makoto (I think the way Sae is abusive in the game is actually generally well handled – passive aggressively, mostly quietly screw-turning in a way that just never really lets up, it’s so normal – just not very present due to the way the game is structured), or, in works set post-game, she’s usually just Nice. And that’s fine for what it is I guess; these stories are rarely ABOUT Sae, but I guess I just wish that they were! She’s cool! You could do a lot with her! And guess what mother fuckers FWIS does! Sae may be a good person now but she’s also portrayed as deeply lonely here, someone who turned her career around to suit her idealism but that didn’t like, solve any of her personal problems, it just made her a Good Person. She’s still a woman ambiguously in her late 20s with no social life because she had one friend who was really a coworker she didn’t like and he’s a dead teenager. When she meets Kotone she kind of throws herself at her, romantically, but also because they both immediately pick up that the other is really aching for a connection with someone their own age who gets what they’re feeling. And this new, kinder, gentler Sae isn’t a different person either; some of the best writing around her comes from when she gets hurt or other people fuck up around her and she reflexively snaps into the cold, mean personality she carried in Persona 5. Easier than being hurt again, easier than admitting that you can be suckered into feeling so bad about people leaving you, again.
I haven’t mentioned that the other pillar of this fic is the long-term romantic relationship between Makoto and Ann? And it’s great? This story is technically a sequel to two fanfictions KindredTea previously wrote, Whim of Rebellion, a huge oneshot following Makoto and Ann figuring their shit out over the entire course of P5, and I didn’t compromise just for the love, which does something similar for P3, intercut with scenes of Yukari grieving Kotone in the year following her death. All of these stories are good, but I do think FWIS is the crown jewel here (and it even adapts the P3 portions of I didn’t compromise late in its run). KindredTea is a deft plotter, and has come up with a really fun premise and multiple really fun twists to go along with it, but I think her biggest strength as a writer is how good she is at understated character writing. It’s an underrated skill in fanfic writing to be able to say a lot with a little, or to strongly communicate what characters think and feel without coming out with it, but KT’s got that down hard. There’s a bit in chapter 8 of this fic that I’ve shown like four people, two of whom don’t even know what Persona is, I just can’t stop thinking about it. Good fic. I like it. I still need to read the last six chapters lol but I really want to post this writeup at some point.
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Deja Vu by Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya, 101 chapters at time of writing, 645k words, ongoing
There’s a somewhat popular subgenre of video game fanfiction called New Game + fics, where the main character is forced, usually by some supernatural means, to relive the events of the game with all of their memories and usually all of their powers or abilities or whatever that they had at the end of the story, as if they were experiencing a new game plus of their story but like, y’know, applying the logic of that to them being a real person. The idea is usually that things will play out somehow differently, or they might try to make them play out the same way but the effects of their knowledge and power will ripple out until things go off the rails irreparably. I find this type of story to be almost uniformly uncompelling, either because the writers trying to take this format on don’t seem to really have any ideas on how they want to make the story particularly different or more interesting for having the wrinkles they’re introducing, or because the ways these experiences affect the characters going through this time travel often boil down to the subject feeling TORTURED and ANGRY about it in a very rote, juvenile sort of way, the way you think of when you’re being really mean about fan fiction.
I haven’t fucked with a lot of Persona 5 NG+ fics, largely because, having dipped my toes into a few, I’ve found my opinions to be largely validated, but in running my filters by things like “SHOW ME STORIES WITH TRANS CHARACTERS” (don’t make fun of me), Deja Vu did just keep popping up until I gave in and checked it out. Being awake all night every night means anything THIS long warrants at least a look for me. Deja Vu’s trick is that rather than the standard P5 NG+ tactic of having Joker return to the beginning of the game upon being killed by the traitor in the bad ending, the writers simply have Ren receiving packages with letters and items from a version of himself in the doomed future of a previous timeline, something that’s it’s suggested has actually happened to many Rens over hundreds of cycles. Eventually he starts seeing memories belonging to the previous Ren too, intrusively, and it’s all pretty fucked. This creates a lot of drama without making our Ren knowledgeable or powerful or out of place in his own story, and the variables that the authors introduce right off the bat and continue to introduce throughout the story, including the casts of Persona 3 and 4 (ALWAYS DICEY but it pays off here in a big way) make this plot feel like it could be anything, even when it’s still adhering fairly strictly to the tenants of Persona 5’s story arc before things do eventually fly entirely off the rails.
While I do think the balancing act that Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya manage with their plotting is really impressive, I’m certainly personally here for the character work. There are some clear objectives in Deja Vu when it comes to how the characters are approached: the first is to make much more explicit their social vulnerabilities. Every Phantom Thief is somehow queer now, many of them are transgender in ways that profoundly affect their experiences, and disabilities and mental health issues are given serious consideration in how everyone is written throughout. The second is to emphasize the ways these kids are trauma survivors, and in this story that means pretty much universally digging a lot more deeply into the effects of their experiences than the game did, and occaionally making things explicit that were left to implication in the canon story. Everyone’s stories are tweaked, with Ann and Ryuji getting a lot more detail and time spent on their feelings during and after their spotlight arcs, Yusuke and Haru’s stories see significant additions, and Kasumi and Makoto’s are reworked entirely - Makoto’s in a way that brings her experiences more in line with the rest of the crew’s and, I think, reflects the authors’ contempt for the police as an institution (rightly lol get Makoto’s cop shit from the game OUTTA MY FACE please, every writer who makes Makoto be like “what the fuck was I thinking I am not going to be a cop actually” is a hero).
There’s certainly a way about this story where just by describing the kinds of things that happen in it, or going by its tags, or by its very careful chapter-by-chapter content warnings, that would make it easy to write it off as over the top in its darkness, as edgy, and it’s definitely true that this is pound for pound the most intense story I’ve got on this list. But it’s not about rolling around in that, and it’s certainly not GRAPHIC when it gets into this stuff. It’s a lot more about these characters opening up to each other and finding a sense of solidarity together; the hot pot scene from early in the game becomes a recurring moment in this fic, where every time a new thief joins the group they share a meal and let each other in on their baggage, give the new person space to do that or not at their discretion. There’s a lot of careful attention paid to how even though the supernatural power to force the immediate change you need IS cathartic, it doesn’t FIX you the way you might wish it did or feel like you need, and the lingering effects of everyone’s experiences are present thought the narrative.
I think maybe the best, most obvious example of all of these factors together is the way Akechi is handled. While he pretty much retains his characterization and role from the game for most of this story, and certainly he’s a sicko and a turbo murderer, there’s also an acknowledgment that he was an abused child who was groomed into being basically a serial killer by the adults who had complete authority over him?? And regardless of his own motivations and how complicit he may be and how he may feel about his own actions, a kid in that situation simply can’t be fully responsible for the person he’s become and the shit Akechi’s done. But it’s not treated in such an open-and-shut way either. He’s a lot closer to being an adult than a kid at this point, and he’s not stable, and him having been manipulated isn’t gonna un-murder Futaba’s mom. There’s an entire story arc dedicated to the problem of What To Do About Akechi, and exploring how the very large cast feel about him as individuals, with a lot of characters arguing for and against how sympathetically he should be handled, and a wide gradient of feelings across both sides of the debate. Even when things are made more severe and more explicit in Deja Vu, they’re also treated with a degree of nuance that the game isn’t interested in. Here, exploring that nuance feels like one of the driving motivators of telling this story.
Daxiefraxie told me in a comment reply that they were using both authors’ first and secondhand experiences to inform all of the hard stuff in the fic, and I think you can feel that here. There’s a lot of shit in this story that I also have firsthand experience with and while it can be an emotionally intense read, it’s never been an overwhelming one for me; this is one of the only stories I’ve read, particularly in fanfiction, that deals directly and extensively with cutting that hasn’t triggered me, which I think says something about the approach the writers have taken given the active intrusive thoughts I’ve been having over these last couple months.
So yeah idk I think the whole package is pretty good. I’m maybe ten chapters away from being caught up – I stalled out on a lot of these really long fics when I got close to current with them because I hadn’t finished the game yet, and I do think that having the events of the game in mind has been good while reading these stories. Not that all of them feel like they rely on you knowing the plot of the game to fill in gaps – I would say any good one that aims to retell the story of the game doesn’t, for example – but knowing where we came from helps me appreciate what we’re doing now. So I’m eager to go back and catch up fully. These might be my favorite takes on Ann and Haru especially.
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Aces High and Queens Wild by SpellStruck, 3 chapters at time of writing, 21k words, ongoing
This is a VERY new story, which seems to post a chapter every couple months so far, but it’s very COOL so I wanted to include it here. Will it continue? Idk. Will it finish? Who can say. But it’s got a sick opening.
There’s a popular type of story in Persona fanfic called Arcana Swaps, which uh, is what it sounds like. In the games all the important characters have a Tarot arcana associated with them which usually offer some narrative relevance to the themes of their personal stories, and in arcana swap fics the author will shuffle those arcana around, which can mean a lot of things, but always means familiar characters assuming the narrative roles of other characters in the stories. Sometimes this means also bringing with them elements of their own stories, sometimes it means pasting them into an adapted version of the original story for the arcana they’ve stepped into. If the writer is trying, or they’re good, they will still take the narrative significance of the arcanas into account when they’re writing the new stuff. Lots of ways this can play out.
So in this story our main character, our Fool, is Ann. She’s joker in this story, coming to Tokyo on a train to live with a guardian she doesn’t know after doing some kind of criminal assault that we don’t get the full details for. Her guardian is Maruki rather than Sojiro, and he is recognizably Maruki, but we get to see a side of him we don’t see in the game – his personal home, his neighborhood, his job before going to Shujin. He’s Maruki though, and he’s friendly, and welcoming, and tries to be really openly communicative with Ann. A human Morgana is the Ryuji, Yusuke is the Ann, and Madarame is the Kamoshida. That’s about as far as these early chapters take us.
It’s just really well-written, I think! I think I’m pretty on the record at this point as an Ann Liker, and to see an introspective, maybe insecure, definitely uncertain version of her trying to feel out her place in a new world is really stimulating, especially her interplay with Maruki, a type of adult she very clearly has no idea what to do with. There’s drama just pulsing through the establishing moments of this story in a way that makes me wish it was a no metaverse thing because I’m just like that BUT as it is I’m just happily waiting for whatever we get, whenever we get it. I really do hope that SpellStruck keeps posting chapters, it’s off to a sick start.
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Not Enough Time by SpaceCakes, 29 chapters, 102k words, complete
Finally, I am closing it out (more because I am tired of writing this document and want to get this thing out the door than because I have run out of Persona 5 fanfiction to talk about), with one for the heterosexuals.
This is another of my precious No Metaverse AU stories that follows a college-aged Haru who, in this telling, has managed to stave off her arranged marriage until after she finishes her university education. The story begins right at the end of her second of three years, and she’s starting to really keenly feel the time slipping away from her. The key difference between this story and canon, besides the lack of supernatural elements, is that Haru didn’t know any of the other characters in high school, and at the start of this story is only friends with Makoto, who is her ONLY friend, actually, and whom she met in college. This is a romance between Ren and Haru, and that’s good, I like the mellow but sure characterization he gets here, and think it pairs especially well with this somewhat rattled, insecure version of Haru, but I do think Haru’s internal life is the good shit in this fic.
This is a pretty grounded take on Haru’s situation, and in that sense it can be a tough read without ever becoming explicit or graphic in content. She’s a woman who has learned, desperately, how to manage the men in her life, but who knows she can’t walk that tightrope forever. She’s bargained a tiny amount of freedom from her father – single life for a couple extra years, and an apartment to live in while she’s in school – but it’s all conditional. She has to answer her phone quickly enough and often enough, she has to answer questions in a satisfying way, she has to wear the right clothes and say the right things and of course, she has to marry a man that she and her father both know is vile. Sugimura too, is a constant presence who has total power over her and knows it, constantly pushing the already paper-thin boundaries between them, held at bay more by his own ultimate disinterest in Haru as an object than by a belief that he couldn’t get away with anything he wanted to. And the moment she’s out of line all of the freedoms she’s bargained for herself as insulation from these pressures could disappear isntantly. They’re going to disappear anyway, in a year.
That’s why Haru only has one friend, and hasn’t told her about her upcoming marriage. The plan is to quietly cut contact with Makoto and assume Makoto cares a lot less about Haru than Haru does about her, not enough to really care where she went. And selling this oppressive atmosphere of resignation is what makes it feel like such a relief when Haru does start hanging out with Makoto’s friends (and not only Ren either), something that takes a surprisingly long time to happen. It’s scary, too, though. The other shoe is always ready to drop.
This is, of course, a fluffy romance story with a sex scene at the end, so things do resolve sweetly, but they don’t resolve cleanly, which is something I always appreciate about good Haru stories. And the sex scene at the end is good! Shoutouts to the heteros. See? I am a fair and balanced media consumer.
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Edit 12/17/23: Even as I have finished the game and I quickly approach the end of a couple of the spinoffs I find that my appetite for P5 fanfic hasn’t really left me, so I may turn this review into something of a living document, come back and add stuff to it as I read new things that really catch me, and I have read a couple of really good ones since I initially posted this so that first one may come soon. My hope is that this thing will be like a good pu’er tea, y’know - it’s good if you drink it right now but it will probably continue to improve with age. Thanks for reading!
Okay please bear with me until we get to the hook here I promise I'm working my way up to something. (this writeup is about fanfiction)
I’ve got a flavor of depression called dysthymia, which is just like, when you’re just kind of a little bit depressed all the time, ambiently, forever. I had more immediately obvious emotional issues and more attention-grabbing family members growing up, and ours wasn’t the kind of family that acknowledged this sort of thing in the first place really, so this went undiagnosed until I essentially shut down altogether as a functioning person during my first year of college and had to drop out of school and move back in with my parents. Even then, I didn’t get consistent treatment for a few years after that. BUT, my mental health has never been as bad as it was that year, real low point for me.
A cool thing that can happen when you’re dysthymic though, is that you can still be prone to the big, fuck you depressive episodes that characterize major depressive disorder. This is called Double Depression when it happens, that’s the official medical terminology, which IS very funny. So that happens to me in a way that lasts for a couple-ish weeks usually maybe two or three times a year.
Alright so PERSONA 5 is IMO a like, vacuous game. Completely empty of themes and ideas at best, contradictory of its purported ideas and deeply mean-spirited at its worst. Fails entirely to capitalize on almost every seed it plants, uninterested in plumbing the depths of almost any of its characters in an interesting way beyond their introductions (and sometimes even during them). (Don’t argue with me in the comments if you think this game rocks that’s not what we’re doing here just keep reading I promise I’m doing a thing here.) But it IS a compelling game in your hands. I’m by no means immune to the charms of Persona, even if my feelings towards the modern iteration of the series are lukewarm. I played Persona 5 on its initial release and didn’t particularly enjoy myself. I caught Royal on a MASSIVE discount sometime since it came out but never really had it in mind to play it until one of my mutuals did a few months ago and was tweeting a lot about it, in such a way that reminded me of the kind of fun there is to find in these games if you’re willing to take them as they are and not as you wish they were. So right at the end of August I booted up Royal to see if I could find that. And I did! I’ve had a pretty good time with it over the last couple months. If nothing else, Persona 5 is an incredibly smooth game to play at all times, and Royal even more so. Goes down easy.
Then at the beginning of September my brain just like completely fell apart. I entered the worst depressive episode I’ve experienced in over a decade, since that time when I was 18 that I mentioned earlier. All kinds of weird brain shit that I haven’t had problems with for years and years has been coming back to me and it’s been hitting hard. And I don’t even know why! No apparent trigger. And it’s still happening! This is a very long time for me to be like this dude it sucks. I can’t get in with my doctor until the end of November, hopefully we can figure something out man idk.
All of this is to say that Persona 5 became a weird thing that I have clung to for these last couple of months; the game’s looping structure makes it easy to indulge in “one more day” thinking, punctuated by long stints of very relaxing, methodical dungeon crawling. There’s a rhythm to it, and enough depth that I could really sit down and crack the thing open to engage in the challenge content after a certain point. Max out the compendium, all that shit. As much engagement as you want it to be, but never any friction.
I also, have read, uh, somewhere between 6 and 7 million words of Persona 5 fanfiction since the beginning of September. I think this game’s cast, widely, is pretty easily my favorite in the series, or the IDEAS of them are. As I’ve mentioned, I think almost everyone in this game is an incredibly compelling SKETCH of a person, and that Atlus has almost across the board fudged the details in coloring them in. So I was like damn I bet there’s some good fanfic for this game. And there is, of course. P5 is one of the most popular games around, especially with the kinds of people who write fanfiction. And bro I sleep like four hours a night at absolute maximum right now, I have needed a lot of shit to get me through those hours without thinking about, y’know, anything else. So that’s what I’ve been doing with almost every moment of free time for ten weeks.
I didn’t initially intend to review Persona 5 here – I think it’s a game that’s been pretty thoroughly discussed over the years - but I thought it might be fun to recommend some of the fics that I’ve enjoyed during this very bizarre chapter of my life. Of course, in talking about what I like so much about a lot of these stories, there’s going to be a lot of natural comparison to how the game handles parallel ideas, so evaluation of the game is going to be peppered throughout. This isn’t a comprehensive review by any means, just a small sampling of stuff that I’ve read recently and stuff that’s really stuck with me since I’ve started my reading. Most if not all of these should be tagged pretty well and a lot of them are good about giving content warnings at the top of individual chapters if there’s tough shit in them. I didn’t include anything here that’s just porn but a few of these have sex in them at some point, AO3 has a whole rating system, you can’t miss it if you don’t want to see that stuff. Okay so let’s get into it:
Actually, I have to disclose first that I fuckin hate when people have personas talk to their persona users inside their heads, nobody has ever done it in a way that I didn’t think sucked ass but it IS gonna be in some of these and I think those stories are cool anyway but bro I need you to know I don’t condone that practice okay now we can get to it.
This is a very small sample size of only a few fics that I quite liked off the top of my head, in no particular order:
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One Year On Probation by FlOrangey 44 chapters, 214k words, last updated June 2020
My favorite kind of fanfiction for stories like this has always been the sort that removes the supernatural elements. My favorites of these stories are always conduits for human drama, so foregrounding that sort of thing always appeals to me. A project like One Year On Probation is especially interesting, because where most fics that I’ve read that do stuff like this will put characters and perhaps versions of their canon conflicts into mundane scenarios (including some I’ll recommend further down), this one aims to retell the events of the game, just, without the superpower bits.
It makes for an interesting thought exercise when you take a scenario that is to some degree about offering powerless people the power fantasy of being able to exert influence over abusive elements of society that are otherwise untouchable and take that catharsis away from them. But if we’re still adapting the narrative beats, how do these kids handle the people hurting them? I think FlOrangey does a good job here of not letting those answers feel cheap or easy, especially not for the Madarame story, which this fic, seemingly long abandoned (dropped for two years in 2018, a few chapters in 2020, and nothing since), comes so close to finishing that you can see the outline of where it’s going.
The removal of the metaverse has other ripple effects – characters tied closely to it lead very different, more stable lives, particularly Futaba and Akechi. Without the narrative out of just showing it to him, Yusuke’s wake-up call is longer and colder. Morgana is, obviously, a regular cat. And this interpretation of Joker is just a guy tryin’ to get by, dealing with a pretty bad anxiety disorder that he’s at least developed since the events leading up to the game, but it’s implied he could have exhibited signs of earlier. Author’s notes suggest that FlOrangey is writing that stuff from experience and it does read like it. While that becomes a big part of Akira’s character here, and you might expect it to given his circumstances, he’s not like, a conduit for trauma, he’s a pretty roundly written guy.
These are very warm iterations of these characters without feeling like they rely much on you being a fan of the game to like them, which is always nice. You can tell it was being written with that really long plan in mind, and Makoto, despite being essentially the secondary main character by the time the fic stops, is definitely the character who feels the most like “ah damn yeah I bet this version of her would really go places if this writer had gotten the chance to get to the parts of the story where she’s center stage.” As it is though I don’t think this fic feels terribly incomplete, even if it does abruptly end like 9/10ths of the way through the second part of a like eight part story. It’s very long as it is, 215k words, and there’s a lot of good shit here to dig into.
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Black & Red by Alexilulu, 18 chapters, 126k words, last updated April 2020
Another one loosely adapting the events of the game that gets cut off midway through the Madarame story arc, Black & Red’s method of shuffling the story around is by being entirely from Haru’s perspective and moving her whole central story up to take place during and after the initial story arc of the game. It’s nice to have a story that makes the main character transgender but doesn’t have her constantly thinking about that, tbh, even though I have read other fics where trans characters ARE thinking about it all the time and that can be good too, I like diversity in my t-slur representation. It’s also an interesting choice to make her the perspective character and putting the focus on her burgeoning relationship with Joker without actually having her get involved with the Phantom Thieves.
There’s not NOTHING else happening but this fic is pretty heavily focused on Haru and Joker coming together, and a big part of that early on is them being edgy teens smoking on the high school roof in the rain, him clearly wanting to let down the walls of his goofy Dangerous Delinquent persona that he’s built up so people don’t approach him and he can be a Phantom Thief in relative solitude, while also trying to keep her at arm’s length because obviously being a Phantom Thief is scary and dangerous, and Alexilulu does interpret their adventures more violently than average, and without the conveniences of extreme healing magic a lot of writers adapt from the games. This could all be fine on its own but it reflects really well on Haru’s character – Alexilulu really emphasizes an anger that is present in the game but never really explored. As someone who is in a genuinely horrific abuse situation, having it made pretty obviously clear that she’s being fucked around with by one of the very few people she’s been able to open up to leads to a lot of really good scenes of the teens Sitting Around And Talking About How Fucked Up They Are which is one of my favorite kinds of fanfic writing.
The elements of Haru’s story that are fleshed out are pitched well too – it’s easy to write her abusive fiance really over-the-top and Alexilulu occasionally rides that line but never in scenes where it really matters. Essentially too, they give Haru’s father some more, uhhh, I’ll say believable notes of humanity, without making him sympathetic (I think he is actually more evil than he is in the game, on a personal level, by the time he makes his final appearance in this story). Elements of Haru’s family history and social link story also get folded in here and complicated in ways that the game simply isn’t interested in and they all make for a richer personal tableau; there was a lot of meat left on this bone, should the fic have continued, but given that it didn’t, it’s good that Persona 5’s inherently clean, arc-based nature got us through the one so heavily focused on the fic’s main character. There’s some sense of closure even without a resolution.
Alexilulu has written a lot of Persona 5 fics, mostly one-shots and most of them porn. I’ve read several of them and like pretty much everything I’ve read of theirs, but I might particularly also recommend What I Want to Say (Without Saying ‘I Love You’), about post-school-aged Ryuji and Ann and their nebulously defined sexual relationship as they feel like they’re kind of adrift in that ennui of being an adult with no direction and no sense of future, surrounded by peers who are Doing Stuff and Going Places (10k words) and A Garden For Traitors, two stories about Ann and Haru getting together, both short one shots, both very sweet. Alexilulu seems to have moved on from P5 writing but they did have a great voice for these characters.
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i wanna kiss your silhouette by wtfoctagon, 5 chapters, 35k words, complete
My favorite thing about fanfiction generally speaking is the way writers naturally bring out and emphasize different aspects of characters they’re writing about. Maybe someone is gonna hit a character pitch perfectly the way they’re portrayed in the original work, but I’m a lot more interested when you see people’s inclinations drawing stuff that’s already present in a character and sharpening it. Persona 5, having most of its characterization be so scattered and messy throughout, has a lot of potential for this.
wtfoctagon stages this fic as a romance between Ann and Makoto (imo an EXTREMELY underrated pairing), and it is, and it’s a really compelling one too, but it’s also a pretty thorough look at a side of Ann we don’t see much after the opening hours of the game – the one who is contemplative, keen, and empathic. The Ann in this fic is the Ann from that scene where she sees Yusuke’s painting and feels the honesty of intention behind it, and touches him with her comments, and knows intrinsically that Madarame can’t be who he says he is. This is a good look for her, and it comes through without losing the way that she is also easily flustered, easily bored, compassionate, and quietly the emotional rock of her friend group.
The dialogue is really sharp but a lot of this characterization – for both girls — comes from the prose. The narration from Ann’s perspective carries a loose, casual vibe but communicates strongly her ability to perceive every small detail about Makoto: her anger, her insecurity, her practiced way to use body language to hide herself in plain sight. Something that’s not really emphasized in Persona 5 but makes for great food for fanfiction writers is that almost any combination of main characters in that game can relate to each other on some level via their bad experiences. The specifics of their hardships don’t always align but portions of them do, and the ways people react to trauma can. Ann and Makoto both know what it is to feel small, to wish to not be seen at all, and to have that contradictory feeling of simultaneously wishing to be seen on their own terms. They both know what it is to be lonely, and to be powerless, and to be angry.
It’s also just, genuinely, a really romantic story. Lovely writing. Other good stuff by wtfoctagon includes i’m just feeling low, feeling low, a one shot where makoto and akira commiserate over their respective bad days on the roof for 1500 words, and several Tales of Berseria fics that you know I gotta shout out because I’m a huge ToB head over here. Mostly their stories are shipping fics between Magilou and Eleanor but wtfoctagon does seem to know in their heart that magilou/eleanor/velvet is a true OT3 and I respect them hugely for this. They run the gamut from real world AU stuff to stuff set during the game to an 80k word post-game story that I haven’t gotten around to but I’m saving for a rainy day. Big fan of this writer's voice.
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a storm is coming in by canticle, 6 chapters, 40k words, complete
A fic that takes place the summer after the events of the game, where Ryuji goes to visit Akira for the entire break. It’s evident that Ryuji is depressed and that he’s avoiding SOMETHING that’s happened in Tokyo since the game ended but it takes a long time for Canticle to get around to disclosing that stuff. This is a very slow-paced fic, very much more about soaking in the vibe of a bad summer than the catharsis of a horrific revelation. The revelation isn’t horrific either, it’s really mundane, and so is the depiction of Ryuji’s depression. He’s just really tired, he doesn’t want to do stuff, he avoids talking to his friends. His time with Akira is fun, sort of, but it’s also a form of harmful escapism, even as they figure out a routine, and even as things get……….a little bit homo.
Not to open THIS can of worms, I PROMISE I don’t mean anything by this I’m JUST more familiar with the girl shit, but the whole romance carries the vibe of a soft yuri, one where all the moves on both ends are hesitant. The most like, romantically forward thing anyone does before they’re kissing is when Ryuji starts sad wearing the hoodie that Akira wore when he was pretending to be dead during Persona 5, without commenting on it, which could be perceived as a power play but could also just be like, a weird thing to do. Mostly it’s a lot of increasingly gay cuddling, falling asleep with his forehead pressed against Akira’s which is NORMAL FOR BROS. When you’re sad it’s normal to wear your bro’s hoodie all week.
There’s a bit in this fic where Akira helps him re-bleach his hair, and afterwards Ryuji can’t stop thinking about how he LOOKS the same as he always does after he does his own hair but he FEELS different because it was Akira putting his hands on him and it was like, in a way Akira marking him and holy SHIT dude that energy is nowhere else in this thing. Just the tiniest hint of the kind of shit I like but I was hooting and hollering. I know I can get that elsewhere in P5 fandom and I can probably even get it from canticle but to do so in an m/m situation you pretty much HAVE to be willing to let one of the boys be Akechi and I am simply NOT INTERESTED.
This one’s really pleasant though. Eventually all the other Phantom Thieves come to hang out and Ryuji gets scenes specifically with Ann and Makoto, who are always good characters to pair him with. Ryuji and Makoto are another one of those duos who Just Work that basically nobody is really tapping into, but when people do it rocks. BUT HEY HOW ABOUT ANOTHER ONE ABOUT AKIRA DYEING RYUJI’S HAIR BUT THAT’S THE ENTIRE THING THIS TIME
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Dyeing To Kiss You by Mysecretfanmoments and Suggestivescribe, one shot, 9k words
This one really only aims to be a romantic moment of an initial getting together between Ryuji and Akira, and it does that well, but there’s more meat on the bone than I might have expected going into it. Both boys are really well characterized, especially when they’re being described from the other one’s perspective (something I always like to see, I’m realizing as I write about these various fics), and there are little hints at the deeper layers to each of them – specifics about Ryuji’s relationship with his mom, hints at Akira’s sensitivities about how much living at Leblanc actually would suck and how fragile his pre-Tokyo relationships turned out to be.
But the really great shit here IS the stuff centered specifically on the romance. Ryuji only realizing his feelings are romantic like forty minutes into being actively aroused by his buddy having a degree of intimate control over him while they go through the steps to bleach his hair really just rules, and when things to escalate to acting and, later, talking, the authors do a good job at keeping Ryuji sounding gruff and inarticulate without making him sound stupid or cartoonish, which is something a lot of writers struggle with for him and characters like him.
Likewise I think the authors are really great at just like, describing the sensation of touching? Of how good it can feel to touch someone and be touched by them in an uncomplicated way, especially when it’s in places that people don’t normally touch each other (i’m not even talking about sex stuff!), and the sense of romance is palpable without omitting things like pauses to negotiate how they want to go about stuff once they are going. This kind of writing isn’t easy to do as well as they’ve done it here but they make it LOOK easy which is about the highest compliment I can think to give.
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The Lonely Fortune Teller’s Club by petaldancing, one shot, 14k words
I have found that other than the shockingly high number of Joker/Iwai fics, there really aren’t very many out there that focus on the adult cast members of Persona 5, and even fewer that are like, actually very good lol. Takemi and Kawakami and Iwai to a lesser extent are often PRESENT because so many stories try to adapt the events of the game and those three have prominent early roles in a logical progression of the story, and they’re well-liked characters for sure, but it’s rare to really get to see these people as actual people beyond the limits of what the game gave them, and even rarer to get inside their heads. This is one of the few stories I’ve seen that’s not porn that’s focused on Chihaya and I think petaldancing does very well by her.
Chihaya is one of my favorite confidants in Persona 5, kind of existing in a middle space of age and maturity between the teenaged characters and the rest of the adult cast. As with most of them, her story gets a little goofy in the details and is let down thematically and in its resolution by Being In Persona 5 but in the broad strokes I think it’s pretty affecting and she’s characterized in a really charismatic way throughout it.
This story takes place in the year after the game, and manages to make Chihaya getting a job working the desk at Takemi’s clinic seem entirely un-contrived, which is a genuine feat, and while this is a story about the two of them making a romantic connection, and it indulges in my least favorite romance story structure (a long tease out and then ending with the acknowledgment of feelings when it feels like there are a lot of depths to plumb still, were the actual relationship to be explored), the story really reads more as a character study on Chihaya, a what-if story about what her life would logically have to look like after she blows it up at the end of her social link, which was a good thing that she was right to do, but did leave her at a crossroads that the structure of a Persona game is unprepared to address. In that regard I think petaldancing does everything right here; they nail the voice, they nail the beats, they say what they want to say and get out in a relatively succinct little story.
Petaldancing has one other Persona story called But Even Iron Trembles, another long oneshot from Hifumi’s perspective in a version of the game events where her mother has a full-blown palace that the Phantom Thieves draw themselves into in the time between stealing Kunikazu Okumura’s heart and the press conference he calls to resolve that story arc. It’s got a backgrounded Hifumi/Makoto romance built entirely off of the supposition that those two would hit it off and start hanging out after that scene in the game where you might run into Hifumi while hanging out with Makoto in the neighborhood with all the bookstores, and that stuff is good, but it’s also the best fleshing out of Hifumi’s family life and her feelings about her situation that I’ve read, which there aren’t MANY of (Hifumi another character I would have expected to be more popular with fanfic people tbh) but like, I’ve tried them all lol. So I recommend that too.
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Fate Written Into Stone by KindredTea, 24 of 26 planned chapters at time of writing, 394k words, ongoing haha oops nevermind I’ve been writing this document for so long that she actually finished the fic while I was working on it, 26/26 chapters, 405k words
This one feels a little bit like cheating because at first glance it’s much more a Persona 3 fic than a Persona 5 one. I AM about to spoil Persona 3, which due to its upcoming remake is presumably about to get a lot of first timers but the premise of this story is like entirely predicated upon the ending of that game so if you care that’s the heads up.
FWIS takes place ten years after P3 and three after P5, opening with an extremely frail, malnourished, 28-year-old Kotone Shiomi (the official name for Persona 3’s female player character) being found on the side of the road by Ann from Persona 5, and it’s immediately clear to the reader that this is not a coincidence, but that Kotone, who by all means should not be alive, was placed deliberately in Ann’s path by someone who knows the identities of all of the Phantom Thieves and is deliberately fucking with them. It doesn’t take long for the Thieves to find out Kotone is a Persona Protagonist and take her under their wing, but it also doesn’t take long for all the guys from Persona 3 to figure out that she’s mysteriously alive and also presumably not in place over the Great Seal, which does herald the return of the Dark Hour and apathy syndrome and all that other bad shit from Persona 3, so very quickly the questions are raised of How Did This Happen, Why Did This Happen, Does Kotone Need To Sacrifice Herself Again, Are We Willing To Seek Another Solution While Things Fall Apart, and also Is Kotone A Human Person?? We did, after all, cremate her body ten years ago.
That describes maybe the first like, six? Chapters of this story, which is dense with plot and is constantly twisting and turning with big new ideas and huge swerves, which I mean in a complimentary way. I usually find really plot-heavy stuff that’s entirely original kind of boring or unconvincing when it’s trying to build out the existing supernatural elements of the work, but KindredTea has it down pat dude. She’s doing a ton of stuff in this fic that feels like it fits right into the shared world of these games but more importantly has kept me on the hook for hundreds of thousands of words beyond a desire to get to the next set of character interactions.
Those are great too, though, don’t get me wrong. KindredTea makes a fascinating Kotone here; it’s not unusual to interpret this character as one who wears a mask of really overt cheerfulness to cover some combination of depression or anger or loneliness (she is the protagonist of Persona 3 after all lol, but also dialogue options in the game support this) but KT’s Kotone is eventually fleshed out into someone who WAS like that as a kid, grew into genuinely being cheerful and fulfilled by her experience in Persona 3, and is now faced with the dilemma of having to choose to die again, alone, and confused, and without the support of the people who she loves dearly, all of whom feel really differently about her after she’s been dead for ten years and they’ve done varying degrees of moving on.
All of the P3 cast’s characterizations kick ass in this fic, and they all respond differently to the idea that some version of Kotone may be alive, but the real star of probably the entire story is Yukari. In KindredTea’s telling of Persona 3, Yukari and Kotone were a couple, and she both had the hardest time moving on from Kotone’s death and the most virulent reaction to the idea that she could be alive again (and also may need to die again too). Yukari is a character who is in a lot of ways defined by grief – throughout all of the games she appears in, and I think KindredTea does a really great job of not simplifying the complex weirdness of this scenario for her.
I lied when I said she’s the star though the real star in my heart is SAE NIIJIMA, a character who I think is very cool, like at least 60% because I think she’s cool LOOKING, but another one who I think is just really underserved by the Persona 5 Fanfic Community. Sae is often treated as a cartoonishly evil character, with people just like grossly overdoing her mistreatment of Makoto (I think the way Sae is abusive in the game is actually generally well handled – passive aggressively, mostly quietly screw-turning in a way that just never really lets up, it’s so normal – just not very present due to the way the game is structured), or, in works set post-game, she’s usually just Nice. And that’s fine for what it is I guess; these stories are rarely ABOUT Sae, but I guess I just wish that they were! She’s cool! You could do a lot with her! And guess what mother fuckers FWIS does! Sae may be a good person now but she’s also portrayed as deeply lonely here, someone who turned her career around to suit her idealism but that didn’t like, solve any of her personal problems, it just made her a Good Person. She’s still a woman ambiguously in her late 20s with no social life because she had one friend who was really a coworker she didn’t like and he’s a dead teenager. When she meets Kotone she kind of throws herself at her, romantically, but also because they both immediately pick up that the other is really aching for a connection with someone their own age who gets what they’re feeling. And this new, kinder, gentler Sae isn’t a different person either; some of the best writing around her comes from when she gets hurt or other people fuck up around her and she reflexively snaps into the cold, mean personality she carried in Persona 5. Easier than being hurt again, easier than admitting that you can be suckered into feeling so bad about people leaving you, again.
I haven’t mentioned that the other pillar of this fic is the long-term romantic relationship between Makoto and Ann? And it’s great? This story is technically a sequel to two fanfictions KindredTea previously wrote, Whim of Rebellion, a huge oneshot following Makoto and Ann figuring their shit out over the entire course of P5, and I didn’t compromise just for the love, which does something similar for P3, intercut with scenes of Yukari grieving Kotone in the year following her death. All of these stories are good, but I do think FWIS is the crown jewel here (and it even adapts the P3 portions of I didn’t compromise late in its run). KindredTea is a deft plotter, and has come up with a really fun premise and multiple really fun twists to go along with it, but I think her biggest strength as a writer is how good she is at understated character writing. It’s an underrated skill in fanfic writing to be able to say a lot with a little, or to strongly communicate what characters think and feel without coming out with it, but KT’s got that down hard. There’s a bit in chapter 8 of this fic that I’ve shown like four people, two of whom don’t even know what Persona is, I just can’t stop thinking about it. Good fic. I like it. I still need to read the last six chapters lol but I really want to post this writeup at some point.
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Deja Vu by Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya, 101 chapters at time of writing, 645k words, ongoing
There’s a somewhat popular subgenre of video game fanfiction called New Game + fics, where the main character is forced, usually by some supernatural means, to relive the events of the game with all of their memories and usually all of their powers or abilities or whatever that they had at the end of the story, as if they were experiencing a new game plus of their story but like, y’know, applying the logic of that to them being a real person. The idea is usually that things will play out somehow differently, or they might try to make them play out the same way but the effects of their knowledge and power will ripple out until things go off the rails irreparably. I find this type of story to be almost uniformly uncompelling, either because the writers trying to take this format on don’t seem to really have any ideas on how they want to make the story particularly different or more interesting for having the wrinkles they’re introducing, or because the ways these experiences affect the characters going through this time travel often boil down to the subject feeling TORTURED and ANGRY about it in a very rote, juvenile sort of way, the way you think of when you’re being really mean about fan fiction.
I haven’t fucked with a lot of Persona 5 NG+ fics, largely because, having dipped my toes into a few, I’ve found my opinions to be largely validated, but in running my filters by things like “SHOW ME STORIES WITH TRANS CHARACTERS” (don’t make fun of me), Deja Vu did just keep popping up until I gave in and checked it out. Being awake all night every night means anything THIS long warrants at least a look for me. Deja Vu’s trick is that rather than the standard P5 NG+ tactic of having Joker return to the beginning of the game upon being killed by the traitor in the bad ending, the writers simply have Ren receiving packages with letters and items from a version of himself in the doomed future of a previous timeline, something that’s it’s suggested has actually happened to many Rens over hundreds of cycles. Eventually he starts seeing memories belonging to the previous Ren too, intrusively, and it’s all pretty fucked. This creates a lot of drama without making our Ren knowledgeable or powerful or out of place in his own story, and the variables that the authors introduce right off the bat and continue to introduce throughout the story, including the casts of Persona 3 and 4 (ALWAYS DICEY but it pays off here in a big way) make this plot feel like it could be anything, even when it’s still adhering fairly strictly to the tenants of Persona 5’s story arc before things do eventually fly entirely off the rails.
While I do think the balancing act that Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya manage with their plotting is really impressive, I’m certainly personally here for the character work. There are some clear objectives in Deja Vu when it comes to how the characters are approached: the first is to make much more explicit their social vulnerabilities. Every Phantom Thief is somehow queer now, many of them are transgender in ways that profoundly affect their experiences, and disabilities and mental health issues are given serious consideration in how everyone is written throughout. The second is to emphasize the ways these kids are trauma survivors, and in this story that means pretty much universally digging a lot more deeply into the effects of their experiences than the game did, and occaionally making things explicit that were left to implication in the canon story. Everyone’s stories are tweaked, with Ann and Ryuji getting a lot more detail and time spent on their feelings during and after their spotlight arcs, Yusuke and Haru’s stories see significant additions, and Kasumi and Makoto’s are reworked entirely - Makoto’s in a way that brings her experiences more in line with the rest of the crew’s and, I think, reflects the authors’ contempt for the police as an institution (rightly lol get Makoto’s cop shit from the game OUTTA MY FACE please, every writer who makes Makoto be like “what the fuck was I thinking I am not going to be a cop actually” is a hero).
There’s certainly a way about this story where just by describing the kinds of things that happen in it, or going by its tags, or by its very careful chapter-by-chapter content warnings, that would make it easy to write it off as over the top in its darkness, as edgy, and it’s definitely true that this is pound for pound the most intense story I’ve got on this list. But it’s not about rolling around in that, and it’s certainly not GRAPHIC when it gets into this stuff. It’s a lot more about these characters opening up to each other and finding a sense of solidarity together; the hot pot scene from early in the game becomes a recurring moment in this fic, where every time a new thief joins the group they share a meal and let each other in on their baggage, give the new person space to do that or not at their discretion. There’s a lot of careful attention paid to how even though the supernatural power to force the immediate change you need IS cathartic, it doesn’t FIX you the way you might wish it did or feel like you need, and the lingering effects of everyone’s experiences are present thought the narrative.
I think maybe the best, most obvious example of all of these factors together is the way Akechi is handled. While he pretty much retains his characterization and role from the game for most of this story, and certainly he’s a sicko and a turbo murderer, there’s also an acknowledgment that he was an abused child who was groomed into being basically a serial killer by the adults who had complete authority over him?? And regardless of his own motivations and how complicit he may be and how he may feel about his own actions, a kid in that situation simply can’t be fully responsible for the person he’s become and the shit Akechi’s done. But it’s not treated in such an open-and-shut way either. He’s a lot closer to being an adult than a kid at this point, and he’s not stable, and him having been manipulated isn’t gonna un-murder Futaba’s mom. There’s an entire story arc dedicated to the problem of What To Do About Akechi, and exploring how the very large cast feel about him as individuals, with a lot of characters arguing for and against how sympathetically he should be handled, and a wide gradient of feelings across both sides of the debate. Even when things are made more severe and more explicit in Deja Vu, they’re also treated with a degree of nuance that the game isn’t interested in. Here, exploring that nuance feels like one of the driving motivators of telling this story.
Daxiefraxie told me in a comment reply that they were using both authors’ first and secondhand experiences to inform all of the hard stuff in the fic, and I think you can feel that here. There’s a lot of shit in this story that I also have firsthand experience with and while it can be an emotionally intense read, it’s never been an overwhelming one for me; this is one of the only stories I’ve read, particularly in fanfiction, that deals directly and extensively with cutting that hasn’t triggered me, which I think says something about the approach the writers have taken given the active intrusive thoughts I’ve been having over these last couple months.
So yeah idk I think the whole package is pretty good. I’m maybe ten chapters away from being caught up – I stalled out on a lot of these really long fics when I got close to current with them because I hadn’t finished the game yet, and I do think that having the events of the game in mind has been good while reading these stories. Not that all of them feel like they rely on you knowing the plot of the game to fill in gaps – I would say any good one that aims to retell the story of the game doesn’t, for example – but knowing where we came from helps me appreciate what we’re doing now. So I’m eager to go back and catch up fully. These might be my favorite takes on Ann and Haru especially.
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Aces High and Queens Wild by SpellStruck, 3 chapters at time of writing, 21k words, ongoing
This is a VERY new story, which seems to post a chapter every couple months so far, but it’s very COOL so I wanted to include it here. Will it continue? Idk. Will it finish? Who can say. But it’s got a sick opening.
There’s a popular type of story in Persona fanfic called Arcana Swaps, which uh, is what it sounds like. In the games all the important characters have a Tarot arcana associated with them which usually offer some narrative relevance to the themes of their personal stories, and in arcana swap fics the author will shuffle those arcana around, which can mean a lot of things, but always means familiar characters assuming the narrative roles of other characters in the stories. Sometimes this means also bringing with them elements of their own stories, sometimes it means pasting them into an adapted version of the original story for the arcana they’ve stepped into. If the writer is trying, or they’re good, they will still take the narrative significance of the arcanas into account when they’re writing the new stuff. Lots of ways this can play out.
So in this story our main character, our Fool, is Ann. She’s joker in this story, coming to Tokyo on a train to live with a guardian she doesn’t know after doing some kind of criminal assault that we don’t get the full details for. Her guardian is Maruki rather than Sojiro, and he is recognizably Maruki, but we get to see a side of him we don’t see in the game – his personal home, his neighborhood, his job before going to Shujin. He’s Maruki though, and he’s friendly, and welcoming, and tries to be really openly communicative with Ann. A human Morgana is the Ryuji, Yusuke is the Ann, and Madarame is the Kamoshida. That’s about as far as these early chapters take us.
It’s just really well-written, I think! I think I’m pretty on the record at this point as an Ann Liker, and to see an introspective, maybe insecure, definitely uncertain version of her trying to feel out her place in a new world is really stimulating, especially her interplay with Maruki, a type of adult she very clearly has no idea what to do with. There’s drama just pulsing through the establishing moments of this story in a way that makes me wish it was a no metaverse thing because I’m just like that BUT as it is I’m just happily waiting for whatever we get, whenever we get it. I really do hope that SpellStruck keeps posting chapters, it’s off to a sick start.
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Not Enough Time by SpaceCakes, 29 chapters, 102k words, complete
Finally, I am closing it out (more because I am tired of writing this document and want to get this thing out the door than because I have run out of Persona 5 fanfiction to talk about), with one for the heterosexuals.
This is another of my precious No Metaverse AU stories that follows a college-aged Haru who, in this telling, has managed to stave off her arranged marriage until after she finishes her university education. The story begins right at the end of her second of three years, and she’s starting to really keenly feel the time slipping away from her. The key difference between this story and canon, besides the lack of supernatural elements, is that Haru didn’t know any of the other characters in high school, and at the start of this story is only friends with Makoto, who is her ONLY friend, actually, and whom she met in college. This is a romance between Ren and Haru, and that’s good, I like the mellow but sure characterization he gets here, and think it pairs especially well with this somewhat rattled, insecure version of Haru, but I do think Haru’s internal life is the good shit in this fic.
This is a pretty grounded take on Haru’s situation, and in that sense it can be a tough read without ever becoming explicit or graphic in content. She’s a woman who has learned, desperately, how to manage the men in her life, but who knows she can’t walk that tightrope forever. She’s bargained a tiny amount of freedom from her father – single life for a couple extra years, and an apartment to live in while she’s in school – but it’s all conditional. She has to answer her phone quickly enough and often enough, she has to answer questions in a satisfying way, she has to wear the right clothes and say the right things and of course, she has to marry a man that she and her father both know is vile. Sugimura too, is a constant presence who has total power over her and knows it, constantly pushing the already paper-thin boundaries between them, held at bay more by his own ultimate disinterest in Haru as an object than by a belief that he couldn’t get away with anything he wanted to. And the moment she’s out of line all of the freedoms she’s bargained for herself as insulation from these pressures could disappear isntantly. They’re going to disappear anyway, in a year.
That’s why Haru only has one friend, and hasn’t told her about her upcoming marriage. The plan is to quietly cut contact with Makoto and assume Makoto cares a lot less about Haru than Haru does about her, not enough to really care where she went. And selling this oppressive atmosphere of resignation is what makes it feel like such a relief when Haru does start hanging out with Makoto’s friends (and not only Ren either), something that takes a surprisingly long time to happen. It’s scary, too, though. The other shoe is always ready to drop.
This is, of course, a fluffy romance story with a sex scene at the end, so things do resolve sweetly, but they don’t resolve cleanly, which is something I always appreciate about good Haru stories. And the sex scene at the end is good! Shoutouts to the heteros. See? I am a fair and balanced media consumer.
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Edit 12/17/23: Even as I have finished the game and I quickly approach the end of a couple of the spinoffs I find that my appetite for P5 fanfic hasn’t really left me, so I may turn this review into something of a living document, come back and add stuff to it as I read new things that really catch me, and I have read a couple of really good ones since I initially posted this so that first one may come soon. My hope is that this thing will be like a good pu’er tea, y’know - it’s good if you drink it right now but it will probably continue to improve with age. Thanks for reading!
11 Comments
thank you! i’ll admit that a large part of this was kind of exorcising some of these thoughts and feelings from my brain in lieu of inflicting them upon my partner and friends who could not possibly care (which i already have been doing a fair bit of), but i HAVE been thinking a lot about the relationship between fanfic and the game, especially since Persona 5 has such a deep pool of fan content to swim through. I thought it would be fun to touch on that a little bit as I went.
This is great :) like you mentioned, I think this cast has soo much potential if the game actually did anything compelling w their characterization. Appreciate the fic recs!!
i really respect this review mostly cuz im pretty sure no one else would do something like this for any other game. well done!
New favorite review on Backloggd of all time and I mean that completely sincerely
@Nerdietalk nerdieeeeee this means so much coming from you!! thank you!!!!!
I appreciate you acting as a buffer between me and the world of sex-havers constrained just barely in the confines of AO3
sincerely the only reason i didn't put anything on here that is just straight up pornography is because i think a lot of my favorite stuff ranges from "kinks not everybody is here for" to "genuine sicko shit" in a way that i didn't want to put in everyone's path without knowing what they were getting into. That sounds probably worse than it is but i'm not here to take risks i'm here to shit talk the character writing in a game for teenagers
this review genuinely rips. the big tragedy of persona 5 for me is that i really love the characters conceptually; they have really strong designs, and i think even if most of them don't embody rebellion on the face of their general archetypes, there was so much room for them to explore how their relationship with the power structures that be affects their perspective on what social upheaval and justice truly means (i probably shouldn't have expected that from modern atlus in the first place tho). and really, just honestly, if i were like 10 to 15 years younger i probably would've fallen down some sort of inescapable makoto x haru rabbit hole after playing p5r to completion earlier this year, so i can relate to this on some level even if i never capitulated on that particular brainworm personally
@theia thank you! i have obviously been sinking my entire life into this world for months and while i don’t think this turned out exactly how i wanted it to i am still fairly proud of it so i am extremely enjoying being praised either way
yeah lmao the game is just like truly not about any of the stuff it purports to be about but it’s ALSO not interested in its characters almost at all despite how much of the game is taken up by them hanging out and talking about basically nothing. like i don’t LIKE persona 4 or even 3 all that much but i don’t think those games have this problem of like abject shallowness the way this one does.
and yeah as a 29 year old who is completely detached from the concept of fandom at this point in my life i’ve found that whichever kid from persona 5 is my blorbo or whichever is my favorite pairing was basically just like “whichever one i was just reading a good story about.” And that’s partially to do with the way i think all these guys are underwritten and partially because i think pretty much any of them can go together. i did make a shipping chart for this game and it was extremely boring because it was all just like “oh yeah i pretty much would like any of these if they were good enough”.
it did put me in a position where i was like “i would not pair haru or futaba with this male character because he killed both of their parents” but i had to face the realization that if he was a woman i would think it was hot and cool for a potential relationship story that he killed their parents. and that’s on me that’s just how i am, its cool when girls do it.
i am just glad that although circumstances have foisted this unnatural fixation with the game onto me, i still have this sort of distance from that flavor of obsession because i did find that basically every time i actively searched out a specific pairing i would find that my tastes do not align with the persona 5 fandom’s at large. tragic for me. doomed to suffer from good taste.
yeah lmao the game is just like truly not about any of the stuff it purports to be about but it’s ALSO not interested in its characters almost at all despite how much of the game is taken up by them hanging out and talking about basically nothing. like i don’t LIKE persona 4 or even 3 all that much but i don’t think those games have this problem of like abject shallowness the way this one does.
and yeah as a 29 year old who is completely detached from the concept of fandom at this point in my life i’ve found that whichever kid from persona 5 is my blorbo or whichever is my favorite pairing was basically just like “whichever one i was just reading a good story about.” And that’s partially to do with the way i think all these guys are underwritten and partially because i think pretty much any of them can go together. i did make a shipping chart for this game and it was extremely boring because it was all just like “oh yeah i pretty much would like any of these if they were good enough”.
it did put me in a position where i was like “i would not pair haru or futaba with this male character because he killed both of their parents” but i had to face the realization that if he was a woman i would think it was hot and cool for a potential relationship story that he killed their parents. and that’s on me that’s just how i am, its cool when girls do it.
i am just glad that although circumstances have foisted this unnatural fixation with the game onto me, i still have this sort of distance from that flavor of obsession because i did find that basically every time i actively searched out a specific pairing i would find that my tastes do not align with the persona 5 fandom’s at large. tragic for me. doomed to suffer from good taste.
This is, without a doubt, the best possible Persona 5 review that could be written
ranrannerson
5 months ago