#p4ta

✧₊⊹ Persona 4: The Animation New Year Postcard (ft. The Investigation Team) ⊹₊✧

[ Retouched photo + back scan and Missing Info below the cut ]

Unfortunately, Tumblr has a 20 MB file size limit so I can't post the full size scan. The image above has been scaled down (0.9).

Full size scans (Google Drive link): X

Sike.

This is actually the final episode of Persona 4: The Animation.

I think it’s super interesting how they choose to tell this side of the story and I think they did the best they could in communicating the Izanami creature to the audience in a way that didn’t feel random and alienating. Yu Narukami effectively suffers a mental breakdown where he seems forced to repeat the farewell party thrown for him. He gets a letter from Adachi in one instance where he atones for everything that he’s done but expresses how he is still bothered by the origin of the midnight channel rumour because neither him nor Namatame can remember where they first heard it.

This seems like a medial and useless plot point at first like, why would you want to ask that question at all if they’ve already defeated Ameno-Sagiri. But they all muse on the fact that Yu Narukami, Tohru Adachi and Taro Namatame never had to face their own shadow to get their powers. The way each of their stories are told, it seems as though they all conveniently bumped into encounters with the channel which is where the intrigue lies.

Yu Narukami extrapolates that it must’ve been on his first day because that’s when he had a strange dream where someone spoke to him in a mysterious way. I mean, he was right but why he was so sure was anyones guess. Chie Satonaka went on about the midnight channel in his first day at school but whatever. His day resets and then he demands that Nanako tell him what happened on his first day here and she remembers that they went to the gas station. I do get that it’s implied that this was wiped from Yu’s memory because Adachi and Namatame can’t seem to remember either but it does seem awfully lucky that a seven-year-old was able to remember a seemingly unimportant event from nearly over a year ago.

That’s right. The source of the fog and the source of the midnight channel was a minimum wage worker at a gas station. For some reason, the animé adaptation changed the character from a woman to a man. I have no idea why. He tells Yu that he wanted to spread the rumour about the town and picked three random strangers. Then, he ascends.

What’s really interesting about Izanami conceptually is that their character calls into question what the solution to the problem of detective mystery fiction really is in quite a simple way that really works with the themes of Persona 4. Essentially, Yu Narukami hasn’t got to the root of the problem and he knows that he hasn’t which is different for Persona. It also taps into the Yu Narukami character that this animé has built which is different to the game. His character arc comes to his climax here. Izanami reveals what is actually happening to him beyond the literal and metaphorical fog.

Everyone is being sucked into the ground by shadows and Yu Narukami is being left by himself. Izanami tells him that the truth is more than he bargained for and it’s not necessarily what people want and that is what the fog actually offers people. The farewell party was just a big illusion of what Yu wanted for him because he just wants to be with his friends. Given this information, Yu actually prefers to be stuck in his farewell party and I love the weird and creepy way that this is done.

The shots of the farewell party highlight all the long-running clichés of all of the characters; Yukiko and Chie being dangerous cooks, Kanji being shy and coy about his hand-crafted decorations with Naoto and Rise Kujikawa being romantically obsessed with Yu Narukami. The protagonist plays with the repeated routine with abandon whilst all of the characters grin and laugh with creepy music in the background. It’s so great at portraying the surreal nature and I think everyone around me knows that I love psychadelic, reality-bending stuff that achieves unsettling undertones. What happens next is one of my favourite scenes in this whole show.

Because Yu Narukami is point-blank refusing to complete the task, Margaret decides that she’s going to beat the shit out of him with all the personae in the compendium. It’s a neat and natural way to incorporate to the battle with Margaret in the game and actually give it a bit more of a reason to exist. You hear everyones voices of support of Yu Narukami which is different from the game because that’s supposed to take place in the specific fight with Izanami which, in my opinion, is fairly inconsequential and it does fit into this big display of all the personae. Apart from a few wonky frames of animation - which is a running theme of this show - I thought this fight with Margaret was directed perfectly.

A nice surprise twist is that it shows off Yu Narukami’s shadow and displays all of his flaws. You could say that this is slightly pandering and is bordering on fanservice levels of self-fornication but I would disagree to a certain extent. It still shows creativity on the part of the animé adaptation to create a real and believable character for the self-insert protagonist that takes place in the game. There is a calculated story at play throughout the show and that is commendable among the other beanstalks that this adaptation has grown from their own seeds. Yu Narukami acknowledging that he had no need to find the truth and just wanted to thrive on the human connection that the Investigation Team give him.

The music choices here are unbelievably good and create an un-matched cathartic sensation to conclude the velvet room saga. For once, they actually rely on visual storytelling as opposed to saying everything out loud which, if there was any time for that, it was in this scene. Margaret gives him the magic orb that deletes all the lies and illuminates the truth and thus, he returns back to his reality and his confrontation with Izanami.

The cheesiness is back because all the shadow hands are trying to reach up and grab him to pull him down but they just can’t because he is just too powerful and epic. He throws off his glasses which is a pretty big moment from the game but I feel like, because of the sound design, it was underwhelming and slightly flat which is a bit of a shame. The choppy animation and the clunky sound of his glasses on the floor just made it seem a tad tacky.

He summons his evolved persona which is imaginatively called izanagi-no-Okami which basically means Izanagi except he’s a God now in English (I know it lines up with mythology and all that shit okay don’t @ me). He then beats Izanami almost instantly which, no doubt, caused some Persona fans to piss themself that the fight wasn’t 30 minutes long like the game and to them, I say this:

This entire episode effectively tells the entire story of the fight in the best possible way it can do whilst achieving the angle they were going for with Yu Narukami and squeezing in the fight with Margaret to help bolster that. There is enough with Izanami that you wouldn’t feel dissatisfied. What this animé goes for is displaying this like the “secret ending” the way it is in the game and for a slightly longer episode, I think it does just fine in my opinion. Izanami decides to leave like all the Gods do to reveal what the TV world looks like now. The whole gang are there including Teddie who says that the remembers this place because it was like this before. Technically, it’s no longer a “TV world” at all but simply a metaphysical plain where Teddie comes from.

I’m not sure if all that was too necessary but it was a nice and easy way to make sure that Teddie is a fulfilled character by the end not like the way they copped out at the end of a certain other game. Now that I think about it, they would just have the same hurrah scene shown in the previous episode so that they had to do something a little different. Igor says thanks for the memories but it’s time for him to go because the task has been completed.

They all say goodbye at the train station whilst the iconic credits music “Never More” plays over them chasing the carriage and with that, Persona 4: The Animation comes to a close. I don’t want to say too much about it just now because I’m going to be writing an overall thoughts post like I did with the first season of Re:ZERO.