Idly considering my ideas for The Phantom Thieves of Balls, and most of the major targets actually make sense for forcefem. Kamoshida, Kaneshiro, and Shido all sexually exploit women. Okumura tries to push his daughter into a loveless marriage. Futaba is a depressed autistic hacker, and therefore trans by default. Sae could start as a guy who can’t so much as consider being trans because it would be devastating to his professional reputation. The only odd one out is Madarame, who left a woman to die, but didn’t have gendered reasons for it.

The million-dollar question: what deadname do I give Sae the Guy? I don’t know enough about Japanese names for this. (I can brute-force Futaba by deadnaming her as Fuuta.)

Edit: and in the end Yaldabaoth gets a bullet in his “head.”

I feel like Persona 5 had a really good initial idea for Ann, and then failed to build on that. Which is fair, because I don’t know how I would build on it either.

Ann is clearly supposed to be the “seductress” character, right? Except Ann never actually seduces anyone. That’s Kamoshida’s mental model of her, someone who lured him in and then cruelly rejected him. Ann is a teenager who never asked for any of this.

In a sense, she achieves her Persona by claiming the stereotype. A girl who’s attractive and yet refuses to have sex is “evil,” but also free, compared to a “good” girl who submits. So she wields a whip and the power of flames to “dominate” her enemies. “Squeal, piggie!” But then where do you go from that? How do you take the dubious “power” of people wanting to have sex with you and turn it into something truly liberating? In Persona 5, you faff around a lot and never really come up with an answer. It aims for something to do with her modeling, but that just retreads Rise’s character arc in 4, which frankly wasn’t that good in the first place.

Aragami/Yamiko is the same ship genre as Joker/Goro Akechi. Pass it on.

Unfix-it fic idea for Persona 5: what happens if Ann kills Kamoshida?

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The main reason I don’t respect Persona 5 Strikers is that it never tells me to go fuck myself.

Persona 5 keeps hammering home how all this bad shit is everyone’s fault. Kamoshida was able to hurt so many students because all the other teachers and parents pretended not to notice that kids were coming home with bruises. Madarame was clearly plagiarizing from his apprentices, and critics and audiences praised him for his “varied style.” When the final target is “the entire city of Tokyo,” it really makes you feel that you, IRL, are to blame for all the bad things you ignore every day.

P5 Strikers talks about bullying, but it never gets into the idea that you might be a bully. It shows domestic violence, but it doesn’t consider the neighbors who heard and ignored the shouting. The only general condemnation it pulls is some lame thing about how we’re all glued to our phones, and even aside from the old-man-yells-at-cloud aspect, it doesn’t seem to tie that back to how you, the player, are glued to your video game. It feels lazy--why bother putting any thought into our story, when we already know it’ll sell based on the previous game’s name and reputation?

https://uppercutcrit.com/how-persona-5-royals-mature-love-interests-reinforce-toxic-masculinity/

I don't agree with everything here, because frankly, she sounds like an anti talking about how someone's fanfiction is "unhealthy." But at the very least, I will agree that the Kawakami romance sucks so, so much.

Peridot from Steven Universe/Futaba Sakura from Persona 5. It’s “child coding” all the way down!