a semi-controversial(?*) shuake thread, regarding two things i've been meaning to talk about: shuake canon, goro's canonical feelings for akira & what the true ending of royal actually means

*(controversial only in that i am old & don't believe in trusting corporations) /

*first, to clarify what i mean by not being a "shuake canon" person--i think "shuake canon" is a statement of reclamation to wrest back a narrative from the hands of cishet writers, but i feel that in how memetic it's gotten, it's really kind of....lost that awareness? /

i don't believe shuake is actually canon but i worry that other people do bc i have seen how these kinds of attitudes have resulted in toxicity in fanbases: fans become entitled to the point of developing a tribal mindset and i don't want to feed into that /

(not that i think anyone is actually doing that ATM, but. i have been around many fandom blocks and i have Seen Things. the dragon age fandom was.....a trial, and i was not an innocent party in that mess)

but i digress /

i don't vibe with the whole "shuake canon" thing bc reclaiming a narrative means understanding that you don't actually have ownership

it's a form of protest, in a sense. i like to liken it to conscientious piracy. /

stealing from minority creators is unethical and stealing from corporations is good actually, but be mindful of stealing from corporations when the product poses to shake up the dominant cultural narrative (e.g., pirating black panther before it broke the box office was bad) /

pirating harry potter is good because JKR is a neolib sellout and a TERF, but pirating a small name author who literally depends on their sales to make ends meet is bad

conscientious piracy /

reclamation of corporate creative properties and transforming them via transformative works (e.g., fandom & fanworks) is then a form of conscientious piracy because we as fans pillage the creative source material to transform it into something safer for our communities /

tl;dr, for me shuake canon is a statement of reclamation as opposed to a canon truth but i worry the depth of its meaning has gotten lost in the process of being made into a meme yes TEQ shut up stop ruining our fun

i promise had a point with all this /

on to goro's feelings for akira. i am.......genuinely dubious of the extent to which their interactions are meant to be read as queercoded rather than queerbaiting.

or more specifically: i think it's blatantly queerbaiting.

but i do think it's one-sided. /

i can't quite pinpoint why--discussions with friends, rereading the P5R confidant, rereading the interviews and supplementary materials, reflection on all of those sources...

i've genuinely started to think recently that goro is deliberately written as being in love with akira /

all of the above uhhhhhh i didn't bother counting tweets are just the preface to this.

i really do think???? that goro was written, not consciously in the vanilla game, but consciously and deliberately in royal, to be in love with akira /

"sees himself as if in a love triangle" MY GOD

that? that right there? that is flat out queercoding. they're actually acknowledging that reading goro's feelings that way is correct /

here's the caveat. i do think royal intends for it to be nebulously one-sided. atlus is, in the end, staffed by cishet male writers. the games are cishet male sex fantasies (you can date your teacher! or your doctor! or your foster sister! teehee they all love you) /

atlus wants to walk this very, very fine line where they have akira/ren/pego be a self-insert for any cishet male player to project onto and also have a fairly defined character whose feelings are clearly shown in the actual main narrative

including his feelings for goro /

but atlus also wants plausible deniability. look, we can almost blatantly confirm that goro is in love with akira--and i think, honestly, that they would if they were asked out right--but akira? oh, no, that's up to the player /

(and i really do think they would confirm goro's feelings if pressed on the question, especially given catherine: full body, but so far no one really explicitly has) /

so here's where this leaves us: goro is almost certainly deliberately written as canonically in love with akira, but akira's feelings are up to the player

to an extent /

bc you can finish goro's confidant in full or you can ignore it entirely, but one way or another, if you want to play royal's 3rd semester the narrative forces you to face the fact that akira cares about goro so much he'll passively watch reality get overwritten before his eyes /

what atlus wants to say is, "goro akechi is in love with akira kurusu, but what akira kurusu feels is up to player interpretation (and also we won't confirm gay feelings on his part ever because we can't alienate our cishet fans)" /

which, like. okay, fine. we've already established this is about reclaiming cishet texts and explicitly queering them, god is dead, i am god now, it's free real estate, thanks for the sandbox to play in" /

but, the point is, that i, a cynical, disillusioned thirty-year-old who hates corporations and wouldn't trust cisthets to tell a proper queer story within an inch of my life, genuinely believes that goro akechi is canonically written as in love with the protagonist /

so, TEQ, where do we go from here? you said you had three points to make and i have sat through your cynicism so far so please get to the third point.

i am sorry to say that my cynicism continues, but for good reason, i promise /

whether or not atlus wants to actually acknowledge the fact that they accidentally queered the entirety of persona 5 from beginning to end is irrelevant to the fact that they established that goro and akira are first and foremost equals and partners, not just rivals /

but here's the other thing: the final thesis of persona 5 royal is that together we are strong, but separately we grow stronger.

it starts during the scene in march when ryuji says he's moving away. suddenly everyone else is talking about going their separate ways /

the ending is everyone acknowledging that to grow, they have to part. and they talk about coming back together again in the future, but they don't know when it will happen. it's a question mark because it's secondary.

it's about putting yourself first /

akira and goro decide to destroy maruki's reality together not knowing what they'll be on the other side. they don't know if goro's even alive. that's not the point.

the point is that their autonomy over their own futures is more important than their relationship /

and yet also, seemingly conversely, what's important *is* their relationship: their past and their present together. but they can't sacrifice their futures for a static present /

p5 & p5r are very strongly about autonomy, bc that's the root of rebellion

and part of autonomy means saying goodbye so you can put yourself first /

that shot of goro in the true end--what it's really saying is:

akira and goro may never meet again. and not only is that okay, that's *good*. because they have to be their own people and build their own lives and what matters most is the impressions they left on each other. /

and don't get me wrong, i am a diehard shuake and i will be until i die (or at least realistically move on to my next hyperfixation), and i have written and i will continue to write about their relationship evolving into the future /

but i feel like the game ending on the thematic note that what's most important is what's *already between them* is so much more impactful and moving than a happily ever after

and that's it i'm done