thoughts on souji persona4 and joker persona5's personalities/characterizations... all of this is 90% headcanons and an amalgamation of fics i've read but i like to think it has decent basis from the games... THREAD

i feel like all the persona protags are quiet but for very different reasons--essentially souji is the sort of person with a very thin/nonexistent sense of self whereas there is more to akira than he first appears. souji and akira both give me the impression of someone who

were always a little too responsible and therefore their parents largely left them alone, mistaking their maturity for a good reason to stop interacting with their own kid; but souji seems to have become a quiet, if odd, responsible young man and akira become more withdrawn

souji's response to additional pressure on him from his parents & the rest of inaba & his team was to rise to the occasion and become even more responsible and dependable & even more of a role model and upstanding model citizen, & it compacted him into someone sturdy and stable

but in doing so even he mistakes himself as emotionally invincible because he never bothers to think of himself... he has to be there for other people and he has to be what other people ask him to be and he has to rise to their expectations...

neglecting his own sense of self meant that there was almost no "true self" since he's only ever what other people need from him, especially because he never cultivated it or thought of himself outside of his relationships with others, so there's no real identity on the inside

akira's response to shit in his life was rather to retreat and grow more distant... he hid himself and his true thoughts and feelings and identity and kept them all to himself, even back when his parents still talked to him

his parents/teachers/friends maybe asked him to be a little more friendly or less angry or to stop getting so heated when injustice happened or be more palatable to their tastes and instead of deciding there was something wrong with himself,

akira decided that he'd just conceal his true self and preserve who he was and resist their implied judgment that there was something wrong with him. he'd rather be a little more withdrawn and closed off than change who he is

so even from an early age he put a mask over himself and learned how to hide certain aspects of who he was... and by hiding himself and his true thoughts he wound up preserving it, instead of allowing other people's opinions to convince him to change for others' convenience

it's a kind of resistance even at that sort of young age to decide that *he's* not in the wrong for what he thinks or feels, and other people don't have the right to tell him he shouldn't think/feel that way... hiding yourself can be a form of rebellion, esp for a young student

well, maybe he was a little bit more open back before his probation started but as soon as that started he shut down fast and hard and clammed up. rather than disassembling himself for other people like souji & making himself overly emotionally available, akira withdrew entirely

he started to open up a little bit especially when ryuji and ann showed up and they could relate a bit to what he was going through, but even then he tries to keep an bit of emotional distance between himself and his confidants

especially when he has to interact with other people, he doesn't go out of his way to change himself dramatically for someone else; instead of changing who he is, he just masks his personality to various degrees or puts on an "act" to affect a different air

so instead of souji's extremely weak sense of self, akira definitely knows who he is and what he's about--he just keeps it to himself and gives only a select few the privilege of seeing even a glimpse of it

(a lot of this is based off how the p4 s links are more earnest and souji seems genuinely attached to his s links, whereas akira is more aloof/transactional, & he keeps his true identity as leader of the PT a secret, only for his confidants to see part of his true identity later)

anyway not to be a shuake/souyo shipper on main but imo these headcanons are also partly based off the fact that i think someone like yosuke is so self absorbed but also simultaneously seems to give a real genuine damn about souji as a person

i think in the best timeline yosuke would mature a bit and start to realize that souji takes care of everyone else but someone has to be there to take care of souji... and that maybe it should be him who tells souji that it's ok to be selfish when he's with yosuke

god knows yosuke needs to learn how to give rather than take at least a little bit LMFAO it'd be a good exercise for both of them... anyway for shuake especially with the thief/detective dynamic there's this feel of akechi wanting to know akira's true identity/uncover who he is

akira having a really strongly defined sense of self that he prefers to keep away from others as an emotional barrier that akechi is determined to break down for JRPG Villain Reasons at first but later they realize that they have the same method of layering their identities

goro has two extremely distinct identities--one a mask that he uses to make himself palatable and one that he's hidden away from everyone, what he probably believes is his quote-unquote "true self"

(debatable if everything about the detective prince facade was fake especially because i think his wanting to be loved by other people was definitely true, so his motivations for creating the prince facade are "true" in some way... but that's another thread of tweets)

anyway i think it is very sexy that these two people who've hidden their true selves so far away from the rest of society and have both made the decision to retain their sense of self & resist society's demands rather than try and change who they are for other people's comfort...

and these two people finding each other and slowly lowering their guard and letting their true selves show and finally letting down the emotional barriers they put up against everyone else that kept them isolated... it's a good ship brent