Persona 6 Is About The Apocalypse (A Theory)
So. 👏
Persona 6 has just been revealed for the first time, and in classic Atlus fashion? This teaser is extremely cryptic and leaves lots of room for interpretation.
¨You can kill the man, but not the idea.¨
Some people might be annoyed by this vague marketing, but I'm not one of those people, I enjoy sharing my own little wild theories & speculations, regardless if they're wrong or not, and given that this is the return of one of my favorite franchises after over a decade of nothing but Persona 5? I embrace it!
But you've all read the title and are probably wondering what this is all about, so I'll cut to the chase and show some of my theories as to WHY I think this game could deal with the end of the world (as we know it.)
The very first things we see with this trailer is a sickly-looking green fog, with the rest of the trailer being mostly centered around a graveyard filled with tombstones.
I'm not breaking any ground here when by proposing the ¨wild¨ idea that these pieces of iconography being our very first look into the next chapter of the Persona franchise are by no means an accident and are in fact a deliberate choice by Atlus to clue us into this game's story & themes.
And, if I may be allowed to speak from personal experience here? It feels very deliberate from Atlus to invoke this kind of imagery after many of us had to live through a catastrophic pandemic that killed millions and ravaged society in a way not seen since The Spanish Flu of 1918.
As someone who lived through those events and everything that came afterwards as a direct or indirect consequence from them? It almost felt like the world itself was ending... So is it much of a stretch to say that Atlus could have incorporated that sensation into their next game? Their first major release since Persona 5 to take place in the 2020s? One that would undoubtly deal with the fallout and trauma from such a dark chapter of modern human history?
It doesn't just end there, though, if there's one factoid of the Persona franchise that has remained consistent since Persona 3? It's that the colors for each game aren't chosen at random, they are very helpful at informing us about the themes & symbolism of each game, so with that said...
Naturally, people tend to interpret & associate colors with very different values and meanings, the game goes for the Persona series, we often tend to see Atlus choosing the colors of their games based on a specific connotation that color has in popular culture.
Blue in Persona 3 was picked based on it's association with melancholy & sorrow, fitting for such a depressing game.
Yellow in Persona 4 was picked for it's more positive connotations, it symbolizes happiness & optimism, perfect for a game that's the antithesis to Persona 3 in many ways tone-wise.
Red in Persona 5 symbolizes the anger & courageous nature of The Phantom Thieves, they lashed out at a cruel world and set out to change it as rebels.
So, what could the green in Persona 6 symbolize?
Green in Perssona 6 could symbolize nausea & sickness, the world of Persona 6 could still be reeling from the effects of the pandemic or another similar event - and metaphorically speaking? - we could bear witness to the ills of society, which have only made themselves clearer and clearer to us in the real world, specially in recent years.
This symbolism of sickness and viruses could work as a perfect double entendre for both literal sickness brought about from the pandemic and the rot it has directly or indirectly brought about to our planet in more ways than one.
There's another commonly used term for sickness in our vocabularies, and curiously? It's also a reocurring aspect of not just the Persona series, but Shin Megami Tense itself.
Commonly interpreted as The First of The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse in The New Testatement.
The first sign of The Apocalypse in religious circles.
And as luck would have it? Him and his brothers have been a reocurring feature of the franchise for many, many years.
It's worth noting that the identity of the white rider is highly debated amongst historians and theologians, and SMT itself tends to stick closer to the 'Conquest' intepretation of white rider... But SMT itself hasn't been shy of reinterpreting certain mythological figures for the purposes of their narrative, whose to say they wouldn't do the same for white rider and his brothers?
Whose to say they wouldn't use him to drive the point home that the pandemic and the disease it brought to this world was the first domino to fall in the apocalypse?
¨A Hell of my own making.¨
Naturally, there's a few rebuttals I can imagine for this theory, but there is one in particular that comes to the top of my head.
¨This isn't new for Atlus, we've already had multiple games with apocalypses in them.¨
And that's correct, specially for SMT.
Hell, one of SMT's mainline games is literally called:
However, there's something I wish to point out.
The plot of many SMT Games and even Persona games deal with apocalyptic themes and potentially world-ending events.
But tell me? Who are usually the final bosses and antagonists of these stories, the ones pulling the strings and causing all of this to happen?
Nyx, Izanami & Yaldaboth.
And what do these three all have in common?
They're power-hungry gods who wage a war against humanity in the hopes of destroying it and reshaping it into their image.
These world-ending plots are always, without fail, brought about by these divine forces, either subtly or not-so-subtly manipulating humanity into accepting death, destruction and or control.
You know what we haven't really seen in a modern Persona game?
An end of the world scenario brought about entirely by humanity's hands.
One where the gods have next-to-no role in the problems humanity finds itself in.
Perhaps this game could be the very first game in the series to break this tradition and focus on humanity's own failures that were caused entirely by them and them alone.
Which would feel disturbingly appropiate given the times we're currently in...
Persona 6 will explore the rot of modern society, it's decay and the subsequent end of the world, all brought about by a viral pandemic... Or perhaps only accelerated by it.
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