#flameburger

I’ve spoken about that multiple times before, but while Shadows can channel demons/deities, Shadows are not the same as Deities.Erebus is a demon (Not a Shadow channeling a demon, but an actual demon), hence he’s not a Shadow.

The matter becomes very obvious when you’re familiar with C.G. Jung’s writings and the equivalent concepts of what Shadows and Deities are in the Persona Series: “Complexes” and “Archetypes”.

A “Complex” is a cluster of feelings, thoughts, emotions and other information that sticks together in association in one’s mind (consciously or unconsciously) and makes up an aspect of the bigger network of one’s personality. Complexes can form, dissolve, split, merge and contain one another. 

Shadows are complexes, both in the Persona Universe and in Jung’s writings: They’re clusters of mental information and energy, which are in constant flux.

“Archetypes” are something else, something much bigger. An archetype is a cluster of extremely basic, extremely natural human ideas/assumptions that every person has access to on a certain level. Like every baby knows that the person who feeds it is important (which is part of the mother archetype), or everyone instinctively is afraid of danger (which makes danger, too, an archetype). Archetypes are collective ideas many people, if not all of them, share. While in Jung’s writings archetypes are genetic, in Persona they are mutable, hence why new deities can be born based on the state of society. 

Archetypes exist only in the collective unconscious, not in the personal unconscious. However, Complexes (which includes Shadows), often *draw from* and *channel* from Archetypes, making a complex appear to be like a certain archetype. That’s what’s going on with the Shadows in P5: they’re channeling demons and deities, becoming more or less “avatars” of these demons and deities. Hence why they tell you they’re “not really shadows of this place”; their true self, the one the Shadow is channeling, is an archetype, a deity living in the collective unconscious. 

Given what we’ve seen for him, he actually has quite a bit of personality already!

Koromaru is characterized as a sweet, brave but somewhat naive person, who’s honest to a fault, to the point that he often blurts out things he really shouldn’t be “saying” by virtue of not understanding the social implications of it (because he’s a dog). If he were a human, he’d probably be a bit of Keet-type character, very happy-go-lucky and playful, always motivating those around him - until you upset him by threatening his friends in ANY way, at which point he’ll EAT YOU ALIVE. 

I think his Arcana reflects that: Strengths reflects his, valiant, positive and brave approach to life, willing to endure whatever hardships he’s thrust into, as long as he can just make himself useful for the people that matter to him. 

The team on P5 was a completely different one than the team that did P3 and P4.

The translators for P3 and P4 translated by the meaning of the text, rather than by the words.

The P5 translation team tried to do a literal translation instead.

Now, many people are going to disagree with me on that, but as somebody who actually speaks multiple languages and loves to translate, I find that “literal translation” almost always produces the inferior product, mostly because it doesn’t work. Language isn’t as simple as switching the words and shuffling grammar around; Different languages carry completely different meanings and things within words and grammatic constructions that have superficially similar purposes. So when you try to translate literally, you’ll (counter-intuitively) almost always lose a LOT of actual meaning in the process, if not destroy the meaning outright. 

I know a lot of people love P5′s translation, but personally, I find what I’ve seen of it quite lacking. It lacks so much of the charme and personality of the original script, precisely because they *did* try to translate literally, rather than carry over the meaning of the text by rewriting the lines. That’s how many characters’ individual speech-styles, such as most notably Morgana’s, were lost entirely, when other games, such as P3 and P4, would have tried their damndest to retain them with a fitting equivalent (even if said equivalent was quite a bit of a failure in Teddie’s case...)

Sort of, yeah! 

Basically, a “distorted desire” as those seen in Persona 5 are base desires that become so incredibly overstated and exaggerated that they change a person’s perception to the point of ruling their understanding of the world. Like, for example, if you want to be an E-sports champion so badly that nothing else seems to matter, your entire world suddenly spin around gaming and your priorities would become entirely screwed over by this.

I think these feelings were definitely not unintentional on part of the writers, and I believe how you end up feeling on Adachi depends on your personal experiences in life so far, and how much you can emphasize with the overflowing optimism of the Investigation Team or the defeatist attitude and worldview of Adachi. 

You’re not weird, I try to keep a balance as well. I try to keep my faves in the team, but I also try to train everyone to approximately the same level. The only real exception is in Pokemon, because who has the time to train all their Pokemon the same, but I at least try to build a balanced team there with tons of Fairies. 

In Persona 3, this actually caused me to rage when Shinjiro died. All that diligent training to get him on the same level as the rest of SEES, down the toilet...

In Persona Q, I had serious trouble keeping everyone balanced, so by the end I fell into using a fixed team consisting of Yu, Yosuke, a changing member, Aigis and Yukari or Ken

I also remember that I had one run in Persona 4 where I ended up nicknaming Teddie “Bear Jesus”, because I somehow managed to get him so over-leveled, he overtook even Rise-