feotakahari

I finally beat Persona 5. I’m still gathering my thoughts for a full post, but one thing I can say–Paranoia Agent just got one-upped. Hard.

The big idea in Paranoia Agent is that Japan, as a culture, cannot function in a world where trauma is possible. Since trauma is possible in the real world, this requires retreating into fantasy worlds where nothing can hurt you. Social obligations are abandoned in favor of absolute selfishness, your failures are never your own fault, and if a problem still exists that can’t be ignored, you erase it, either by killing others or by killing yourself. The only way to escape is to accept that suffering is a natural part of life, which in practice seems to mean continuing to act within the role society has assigned to you.

In Persona 5, the initial antagonists have retreated to fantasy worlds under their absolute control, enabled by power structures that keep other people from stopping them when they try to enact their fantasies in reality. As in Paranoia Agent, everything is about them, and everyone who isn’t them is a tool to be used and discarded. But these aren’t people who need to escape.

These are the people who did escape.

According to Persona 5, society’s central problem is that people are terrified to make their own choices without someone else validating those choices and reassuring them that those choices are correct. This easily lends itself to social structures in which a leader takes absolute power over followers and exploits them for his or her selfish gain. No matter how much the followers are suffering, they’ll convince themselves they’re in paradise, because they’re “free”–free from having to think for themselves or question the abuses around them.

This is why even the people who escaped are still evil, because society is so warped that once they’ve escaped from being abused, the only possible alternative they can think of is to become abusers themselves. Throwing them down from their lofty positions doesn’t solve anything, because it puts them back in the position of the masses, abused once again by the remaining leaders. The true solution is to acknowledge that suffering is wrong. If it’s necessary in order to maintain social structures, then throw out those social structures! If people think it’s ordained or inevitable, then prove them wrong! Live for what actually makes you happy, not just what society tells you will make you happy, and help other people find their own way to their own true freedom!

It’s a very simplistic message, sometimes ludicrously so. But it seems a lot less dreary than anything Paranoia Agent came up with.