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Goro Akechi 「 ᴊᴜsᴛɪᴄᴇ 」

I have nothing left to prove'cause I have nothing left to lose.

May 2024

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Goro Akechi 「 ᴊᴜsᴛɪᴄᴇ 」

I have nothing left to prove'cause I have nothing left to lose.

May 2024

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031 

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March 1st, 2024

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PLAYER INFO

Player: Kei
Age: 25
Invited by: Cam
Contact: [plurk.com profile] begleiter
Current Characters: N/A


CHARACTER INFO

Character: Goro Akechi
Canon: Persona 5 / End of the final boss fight in Royal
Age: 18

Background Information: Akechi @ the Megami Tensei wiki

Personality:
warnings: mentions of murder, suicide, parental abandonment

Everyone has a mask they show the rest of the world and a true self that they keep hidden beneath it. For many people the masks they wear are subconscious ones, and not necessarily dissimilar from their true personality. Akechi, however, is someone who wears his mask deliberately, and who carefully constructed it to be extremely different from his true self.

Most people that meet Akechi will judge him to be a pleasant, mild young man. He's friendly and a touch teasing, polite without being too stiff or formal, and stands by his convictions even in the face of overwhelming criticism. His sense of humor is overall mild and inoffensive, bordering on banal when it isn't just cheesy. In many ways he's the ideal young adult.

Of course, even when Akechi is acting there are parts of his mask that are genuine. He's prone to getting lost in thought, even in situations where he should be paying more attention. Akechi can come across as downright awkward at times, especially once a conversation strays beyond the boundaries of polite chatter. While it's not exactly common, it's not unheard of for him to eavesdrop, butt into other peoples' conversations, and even overshare (for example, telling someone he'd only met a few times before about his mother's suicide). He's shown to be more in his element interacting with professional adults than peers his age; his closest acquaintance at the start of the game is Sae Nijiima, a public prosecutor several years Akechi's senior. Even then, it's important to note that while Sae trusts Akechi and relies on his insight, she doesn't seem to particularly like him.

But that's exactly what Akechi is hoping for. Akechi takes an extremely transactional view of relationships. He gives someone something they want, and they give him something he wants, and that's a 'friendship'. He doesn't get relationships where the benefits to both parties are intangible things like company and companionship, and even dismisses them as self-righteous and false. The world has shown him again and again that if he doesn't make himself valuable to the people around him, those people will discard him.

Thus, the mask. In his own words, Akechi was 'extremely particular' about his life, his grades, and his public image, all in the name of making the people around him see him as someone worth keeping around. He falsified crimes, then 'solved' them to gain the trust of the police. Even his fashion sense and taste in hobbies are carefully selected to make him palatable and appealing to the people he works with. And while his methods haven't made Akechi any friends, they have earned him fame, recognition, and acknowledgement from the police and the public alike.

While Akechi fabricated many of the crimes he then solved, it's worth noting that Akechi is genuinely intelligent, clever, and resourceful; such as when he outplayed a casino that was blatantly cheating, while managing to keep his plans secret from both the casino and his allies. These are skills he's been forced to cultivate in order to survive in a world that vehemently did not want him. His father, Masayoshi Shido, walked out on his mother before Akechi was even born. The stress and shame of being a sex worker and unmarried mother eventually lead Akechi's mother to kill herself. After that Akechi was left to the mercy of the foster system, where he was passed from foster home to foster home without more than the bare minimum of care for his well-being.

Rage at how he and his mother were treated has driven Akechi to take drastic measures in order to seek revenge against his father. In order to gain Shido's trust (in order to better hurt him later), Akechi ruined lives and murdered innocent people on his behalf. While he's acknowledged that these methods were mistaken, he never shows any genuine remorse for them. He doesn't believe in forgiveness, not for others and not for himself, and makes no secret of the fact that he thinks death is the most some people deserve. When his plan for revenge requires him to murder the closest thing he has to a genuine friend, Akechi doesn't hesitate. When he goes all out in combat he's extremely violent, and when he drops his mask he's blunt and unpleasant to the people around him.

Akechi himself would insist that this rage is the true core of who he is as a person, but even that isn't entirely true. It's outright stated that the murders weren't Akechi's idea in the first place, and a fellow conspirator remarks that a specific assassination plan seems 'too brutal' to have been Akechi's idea. Even when Akechi isn't hiding his true nature from the Phantom Thieves, there are moments where he's softer than he claims to be. He's (relatively) patient with Yoshizawa's efforts to adapt to the Metaverse and mentors her, he thanks the Phantom Thieves for dealing with Shido when he couldn't, and engages in casual chatter with the rest of the group.

Because despite dismissing genuine, sincere relationships as meaningless, the truth is that Akechi is incredibly lonely and desperate to be needed and loved. His need to be needed is a powerful motivator—so powerful that it can also be a deadly tool when used against him. He's far easier to manipulate than he realizes. Even his hated father managed to keep him in line with a combination of threats and praise, to the point that Akechi didn't realize he was just a pawn to eventually be disposed of until he was flat out told as much.

This contradiction serves as a throughline for much of his behavior. He acknowledges that his life would have gone down a much better path if he'd met Joker earlier in life, and even seems to lament that such a thing never happened. Yet he's unable to trust the intentions of others long enough to accept any genuine gestures of friendship, or admit to the sincerity of his own gestures. He turns himself into the police to spare Joker from jail and dies to save Joker's life, then insists that both of these acts were simply an effort to pay back a debt.

Akechi is tired of being manipulated, and hates that he was ever so desperate that it happened to him. Now, he'll do anything to avoid it—literally anything. Akechi was resurrected by someone else's attempt to create a perfect world, and his life was used to try to pressure Joker into accepting the idealized reality. No one protested this more vehemently than Akechi himself, who said that a life lived to satisfy someone else wasn't a life worth living in the first place.


Abilities & Inventory: • Persona: Akechi has the ability to summon the a Persona, a supernatural manifestation of his personality. Even among other Persona users Akechi is somewhat unique in that he has the Wildcard ability, meaning he can summon multiple Persona instead of just one. While in theory this allows him to obtain well over a hundred Persona and keep a dozen of them on hand, Akechi is only ever shown to have three: Loki, Robin Hood, and eventually Hereward. All three are capable of using physical and magical attacks, but these skills still put a strain on Akechi himself. He can't use them over and over again without wearing himself out.

• Call of Chaos: This is a non-combat skill unique to Loki and Hereward). Akechi is able to put someone (himself included) into a sort of berserk state, causing the target to abandon all inhibitions and go on a rampage. While the actual results of this vary according to the target (Akechi himself went on a traditional berserker rampage, complete with enhanced speed, endurance, and power, whereas a different target simply stripped off all his clothes in the middle of his shift and continued working the grill) the effects aren't permanent. The berserk state seems to last a few hours at most, though the targets can be snapped out of it sooner than that.

• Outfit Change: Persona users that gained their Personas via the Metaverse have an unusual skill to go along with it: they undergo temporary outfit changes when summoning their Persona. This grants Akechi no extra skills but (debatably) looks cool. Robin Hood and Loki/Hereward each come with their own outfit.


ARMADA SELECTION

Paladins. Truthfully, Akechi tends to express a great deal of contempt for the Paladin's core tenets of justice and order, having seen just how often those ideals are rendered hollow and meaningless by the power structures propping them up. Regardless, his skill sets and experiences will make him an easy match for the Paladins. He has extensive experience working as a detective, he's familiar with the inner workings of many formalized power structures, and he excels at reconnaissance.

All that said, Akechi is well suited to either Armada, and I won't have problems playing him in either! OOCly, I ultimately favor the Paladins because I feel it's the faction that's more likely to force Akechi to work with others.


SAMPLE

Test Drive Sample: TDM top level

Questions: None!