"I'm rude now" - a thread about Goro's "real" personality and how he presents himself in the third semester

Goro isn't rude to the Phantom Thieves in the third semester because they're mean to him. How they treat him is laughable to him at best, a minor inconvenience at worst.

In fact, for the most part Goro really isn't rude at all during the third semester, including to Maruki.

I'll start with Maruki: when speaking with him directly, he addresses him with the honorific -san. He also uses basic polite speech (desu/~masu verb forms).

And this is with someone he absolutely *reviles.*

Note there is a difference between speaking politely and speaking deferentially. Goro uses polite speech, not deferential. Polite speech is baked into everyday speech and everyday grammar forms whereas deferential speech has all kinds of fun new grammar rules.

In fact, a lot of Goro's speech patterns in Japanese during the third semester are pretty similar to what they are pre-boiler room, up to and including disparate personal pronoun usage ("ore" in battle, "boku" in all other contexts).

He just cuts out a lot of the chaff.

That bit--cutting out chaff, or filler--is central to what Goro's real personality is. I'll get to that in a sec.

First I want to talk about the question of "how fake is Goro, really?"

It's largely accepted that everything Goro says/does pre-boiler room is entirely false or predicated on lies.

That majorly misses the point.

Up until having all of his walls stripped away from him and having his internal ugliness lain bare for the Phantom Thieves' spectacle, Goro has largely cultivated a specific public personality that he designed to be as palatable and appealing as possible.

It's in the cutesy, playful "ka na?" and "deshou," it's in the photo ops with sweets and popular foods, it's in the spending his free time playing "fashionable games." Boy is 17 and runs a food blog but doesn't actually care about food.

Everything, everything, screams, "I am desperately lonely so please pay attention to me."

Yes, his pre-boiler room personality is fake.

To an extent.

Goro--like Akira--is ultimately a chameleon: he can change his personality to suit his audience, but that doesn't mean what he's showing is 100% a lie, it's just not the truth.

There's a difference between a lie and a not-truth in these kinds of contexts.

How much is true and to what extent is hard to say, because I would argue that even in the third semester we never really get to see the real 100% authentic Goro.

He's a liar, lying is performative, ergo Goro Akechi is a performer.

So pre-boiler room!Goro (can I abbreviate this? Let's call him pBR!Goro from here on out) utters clever witticisms to make people laugh/praise him.

Real!Goro is genuinely smart and witty, he just doesn't use it to put himself in the spotlight.

Same trait, different expressions.

So in the third semester, Goro comes across as snappish and occasionally (incredibly rarely) says mean things. That doesn't mean that he, himself, is normally snappish or mean.

Context Matters. Please write this down. Context Is Important, Context Always Matters.

The way Goro presents himself in the third semester is the same way: it is still not 100% pure unadulterated Goro Akechi.

Let us count the ways:

- thinks he's probably dead
- knows Akira thinks he's probably dead
- disappointed in Akira for thinking he's dead
- believes he'll die when Maruki's reality collapses
- incredibly tired and stressed from Maruki's reality
- just 100% Done With This Bullshit

None of the above leads to a scenario where Goro can just be his genuine, authentic self because he's in fight-or-flight mode the entire month of January.

What Akira can get Goro for Valentine's Day: a goddamn nap.

@impropercorvus today introduced me to the quote "Not everything before the third semester is a lie, and not everything during the third semester is the truth"

She didn't remember the source so please share if you do know. But I think, with Goro specifically, it really fits

Not every part of Goro's personality before the third semester is a lie, and not every part of Goro's personality during the third semester is the truth

And you can @ me and say "but TEQ the creative team said--" all you want (not that anyone has, I'm being hyperbolic), doesn't make a difference.

If Word of God was how we determined what is and isn't good writing, JKR would have a GLAAD award for Harry Potter.

But I'm getting off tangent. Tangent, tangent!

Time to get to the point you're really reading this for: Goro Akechi's True Personality. This is largely my interpretation based on my character reading and the arguments outlined above. Disclaimers do apply.

Here's what it comes down to: he crafted a public personality designed to get people invested in him for a *reason*, the reason being that his real personality is not palatable.

Not palatable =/= not likable, in an individual sense. Palatability as a concept is merely about expressing commercial appeal.

Goro's real personality isn't one that invites other people to want to be besties with him, but that doesn't mean he's not *likable.*

Goro is not rude. Goro is no-nonsense, acerbic, and direct, all of which can be read as rudeness but are not, semantically speaking, the same thing. "God is dead" can be both a statement and an argument.

Goro's real personality is all teeth and barbed wire and saw edges, because he fundamentally does not trust other people.

That has nothing to do with the Phantom Thieves specifically and everything to do with his personal background as an orphan in the public system.

(If you've read this far, hold please. Twitter capped me and I want to continue this thread.)

Thread continued here, apologies bc I'm still learning how to Twitter https://twitter.com/existentlqueer/status/1263629073466765313?s=19