A talkative pigeon

Something a lot of people mistakenly believe is that Akechi enjoys the work he does for Shido and that he takes the orders to kill without any resentment or regret. These text messages shed some light on the way he thinks and show that this is not actually the case. Unfortunately, these texts are entirely missable if you finish the treasure route to Sae's Palace too early. As a result, this crucial characterization is often overlooked and people take what they know about characters like Persona 4's culprit and Persona 3's traitor and assume that Akechi is playing it straight.

But even without these obscure texts, it's not like the game is subtle about this. Akechi's lack of freedom and agency is a recurring aspect of his character that people will often cast aside because it's much easier to boil him down to "crazy serial killer" than actually look at the complexity of his situation and his own victimhood.

Throughout his Royal confidant, Akechi's perfectly crafted mask cracks several times. Moments like this show him offering an out, even if he's MUCH happier if you don't consider it.

He doesn't WANT Joker to change. As much as he claims to hate Joker, he admires his convictions. Wishes he had what Joker had. Wishes he could have been more like him. See: the Gun About rank up where he mentions how he used to want to be a hero of justice.

The creepy smiles and shit you see on 11/20 and in parts of the engine room are another mask Akechi wears. Akechi ALWAYS swaps out his masks to best serve his situation. Yet he still tells Shido not to kill the thieves, that Morgana is just a cat, and is perfectly content to leave them alone, and after his fight in the engine room, when the mask literally breaks...

We see his regrets on full display. He isn't proud. He's done making excuses. All those little times the mask broke in the Royal confidant were ways to set up this moment. He genuinely cares SO much about Joker, but that caring was dangerous to his objectives, so he HAD to hate him. He HAD to want to kill him to achieve his objective, and yet...

He still cares. He's putting out spikes in third sem, no doubt because he suspects his own fate should they destroy Maruki's world, but...

Not just Sae's Palace, but all the Palaces have these additional "prompt chats" buried in the game flow. They only play if you have not completed the infiltration. And yeah, sometimes they're boring, just "wow, we really should do that Palace, huh?"

But sometimes they're not. And these four in Sae's Palace are so critical. For instance, did you know that Akechi is systematically murdering people on the PT ranking list during the Sae's Palace mission?

There are a ton of references to this in October, actually, but they suffer from "having a mental shutdown" being translated as "losing their mind" or similar—a common error. But this is what the hysterical references to the PTs being murderers are all about—it's not just Okumura, it's that Akechi has been sent to whip up the public again by killing people listed on the Phan-Site.

And that's made explicit in this 11/3 chat, where Ryuji and Akechi use 殺す korosu, "to kill"—these people are being murdered. And there are a lot of them.

gasps for air

Like he said, he was extremely calculated about his life. I can't even imagine the scope of how much work and how hard he worked all. the. damn. time. empathizing yet again that someone coming from a background of nothing to getting to where he was is almost unheard of. No one but him knew Shido was his dad. Also it's easy to forget that while yes, the fabricated crimes he “solved” made him famous, that he couldn't have even gotten there in the first place without also doing actual detective work. He's done good work. The point of him is that he's exceptionally smart, but narrow-minded and dumb in a way that a child is. his revenge plan wouldn't have worked even without the slip of the "pancakes." Persona 5 puts a lot of emphasis on children, in fact it's the main root in the entire game, so it makes sense that the "villain's" fault is childish motivation.

And wrapping back around to “basically no privilege” instead of "none at all" is because he has 2 privileges: being a man and being attractive. He arguably wouldn't have gotten where he was if he was a girl, and while he could have gotten far if he was unattractive, his fame would be no where near the same. A lot of his fans were highschool girls who found him hot. I enjoy his character a lot in contrast to Sae, who is greatly affected by misogyny, a main factor in her being driven to the point of corruption herself. She is seeing Akechi, who is a lot younger, who came from nothing, getting more "progress" than she is. It’s very interesting.

♧ authorized reprint for tumblr // artist:    メメ   /   p5 log

Something a lot of people mistakenly believe is that Akechi enjoys the work he does for Shido and that he takes the orders to kill without any resentment or regret. These text messages shed some light on the way he thinks and show that this is not actually the case. Unfortunately, these texts are entirely missable if you finish the treasure route to Sae's Palace too early. As a result, this crucial characterization is often overlooked and people take what they know about characters like Persona 4's culprit and Persona 3's traitor and assume that Akechi is playing it straight.

But even without these obscure texts, it's not like the game is subtle about this. Akechi's lack of freedom and agency is a recurring aspect of his character that people will often cast aside because it's much easier to boil him down to "crazy serial killer" than actually look at the complexity of his situation and his own victimhood.

Throughout his Royal confidant, Akechi's perfectly crafted mask cracks several times. Moments like this show him offering an out, even if he's MUCH happier if you don't consider it.

He doesn't WANT Joker to change. As much as he claims to hate Joker, he admires his convictions. Wishes he had what Joker had. Wishes he could have been more like him. See: the Gun About rank up where he mentions how he used to want to be a hero of justice.

The creepy smiles and shit you see on 11/20 and in parts of the engine room are another mask Akechi wears. Akechi ALWAYS swaps out his masks to best serve his situation. Yet he still tells Shido not to kill the thieves, that Morgana is just a cat, and is perfectly content to leave them alone, and after his fight in the engine room, when the mask literally breaks...

We see his regrets on full display. He isn't proud. He's done making excuses. All those little times the mask broke in the Royal confidant were ways to set up this moment. He genuinely cares SO much about Joker, but that caring was dangerous to his objectives, so he HAD to hate him. He HAD to want to kill him to achieve his objective, and yet...

He still cares. He's putting out spikes in third sem, no doubt because he suspects his own fate should they destroy Maruki's world, but...

Not just Sae's Palace, but all the Palaces have these additional "prompt chats" buried in the game flow. They only play if you have not completed the infiltration. And yeah, sometimes they're boring, just "wow, we really should do that Palace, huh?"

But sometimes they're not. And these four in Sae's Palace are so critical. For instance, did you know that Akechi is systematically murdering people on the PT ranking list during the Sae's Palace mission?

There are a ton of references to this in October, actually, but they suffer from "having a mental shutdown" being translated as "losing their mind" or similar—a common error. But this is what the hysterical references to the PTs being murderers are all about—it's not just Okumura, it's that Akechi has been sent to whip up the public again by killing people listed on the Phan-Site.

And that's made explicit in this 11/3 chat, where Ryuji and Akechi use 殺す korosu, "to kill"—these people are being murdered. And there are a lot of them.

gasps for air

really liked this persona akechi gets in EP，so i tried to design it‘s image for a bit。p1 kinda says how i got the idea and p2 is sort of a three-veiw drawing about Medea

（and Jormungand on the left corner but im sure i didn‘t get it right on this one nevermind）

hope it would not be too inappropriate？

ps. was imagining a vison of medea showing up behind akechi and gestures a hug，using her arms to surround him in some way during his boss fight when i drew this.

p.ps.the two look—like—wings something floating beside medea on p2 is referenced to the dragons dragging her chariot when she left jason