i'm at the combination mishima and strega blog

also do you have any thoughts on that sort of thing that weren't explored in the fic because im really interested.

first of all, i'm so sorry it took me such a long time to answer this, but i wanted to make sure i could actually sit down and write out a response with substance because i was so touched to receive this message!

it's been so many years now since i played p5 and admittedly i only played royal once (when it first came out), so i have unfortunately forgotten a lot of finer details, but i feel like both mishima's role as a sort of filter between the phantom thieves and their interactions with the public and strega's using the dark hour to their advantage via the internet were underutilized in their respective stories.

especially in p3, where the dark hour is rightfully seen as an overwhelmingly negative consequence of the actions of the kirijo group, i wish there was more exploration of how those same consequences could be a tool. as someone who knows what the internet was like in the time p3 released and how largely disconnected and sort of... spread out (?) it was compared to today's social media-based internet, i was just really interested in the idea of some kind of dark web-esque bounty hunter/hitman for hire position only made possible by the extremely specific life circumstances that strega found themselves in by their misfortune of being artificial persona users. foolishly, i thought maybe p3re might expand on strega's situation, but alas.

but with regards to mishima, i think it's interesting how he is sort of a facilitator of whether a request "matters enough". as the phantom thieves get more widely acknowledged by the public and more people become aware of their activities, it seems like an online forum or even a regulated submission form would be flooded with far too many requests for them to handle realistically or even for mishima to read through completely. there has to be some kind of moderation in place to figure out what makes it through and what doesn't. that gives mishima a lot of control to work with and also, i would assume, a lot of exposure to darker or at lease less conventional requests.

knowing what kind of person he is and what his moral code is like, there is no reason he would send through the sort of requests that strega willfully took on, but i do find it believable that he WOULD possibly suppress requests from, for example, people he personally doesn't like or people he doesn't think deserve to have their requests humored. he could also fabricate requests for personal reasons, which we sort of see with him talking about changing the heart of an actor he's jealous of. he is the person who decides what matters and what isn't worth the phantom thieves' time. to summarize, i just think he has a lot of leverage here that many people ignore in order to write him off as annoying or useless to the story at large.

hope this is relevant to what you were asking and not just me rambling incoherently. i can't really say whether i had thoughts that didn't make it into the fic because i wrote it 7 years ago (wtf) and i just do not remember! but this is what's still rattling around in my brain nowadays.

everytime j thibk abt akechi and mishima being in a relationship during the events of p5 i never think of it being fully positive... i feel like, if theu were to interact itd b bc akechi wanted to benefit in order to stop the ptheives...

like maybe he contacted mishima via psite to get the okumura raitings up... maybe mishima noticed someone tampered w the site and assumed it was akechi and was correct, so when mishi called kechi out he had to be silenced (sounds harsh but i dont mean it like akechj killed him)... or maybe akechi went undercover and spoke to mishima online to get more info in the pthieves' identities or whatever...

anyway my point is i cant imagine a healthy balanced relationship between them during the events of p5

pre or post game however.. even aus... yes... yesyesyes...

anyway thats why this so angsty.. i was just thibking abt a hypothetical relationship between them. ik i usually draw them happy together but those r me hallucinating ok

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