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empatheias.
Player: Bayley
Contact:
Age: 28
Current Characters: Prompto Argentum (
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punshots)Character: Goro Akechi
Age: 18
Canon: Persona 5
Canon Point: 12/16, immediately following his death.
Background: [ various pancake memes ]
Personality:
Who hasn't heard of Goro Akechi? Brilliant, likeable, and charismatic, Akechi is the ace detective. A prodigy, a star, a heartthrob, a straight-A student. He is the public's darling, who stuck to his guns even when public opinion turned against him in favor of the Phantom Thieves. A paragon of justice, he has criticized the Phantom Thieves from the first for their methods in handling dangerous criminals. Akechi only wishes to know the truth, and to see those who have committed crimes brought to justice through the proper channels. He will always do what's right in serving the law.
Or so he would have you think.
To be sure, Akechi is brilliant, but this is about where the similarities between his public image and his genuine self end. Indeed, Akechi is not the friendly, endearing starlet that he appears to be; rather, he is cold, self-interested, calculating, and severely emotionally damaged. Akechi's public image is nothing more than a facade he has carefully cultivated over the years in order to make his end goals come to fruition. Akechi plays the long game, working for years in a partnership alongside the very man he has sworn to himself to taken down: his father, Masayoshi Shido. Akechi isn't interested in justice for anyone but himself, and he even went so far as to use his powers to cause others to go psychotic and then "solved" the crimes they committed. There is nothing off-limits if it means taking down his father right when he reaches the apex of his career. Making it to that moment is Akechi's singular motivation for every choice he makes, and it has made him into a liar, a manipulator, and a serial killer.
Born to a single mother well after Shido had left the picture, Akechi grew up with his mother for only a short time before she committed suicide after being ridiculed for giving birth outside of wedlock. After being passed around by foster families, the young Akechi become focused on obtaining revenge on his father, whom he blames for this direction his life took. From a very young age, Akechi has been bitter and resentful, and because of his upbringing he has never really formed any meaningful connections with another person before. At a certain point, he began to see other people as little more than pawns to be moved on a chessboard. No one has ever been there for him, and so his heart has never been opened up to such relationships before. Because of this, he fundamentally doesn't understand why the Phantom Thieves are so supportive of one another, viewing their camaraderie as weakness. Even after infiltrating their group, it mystifies him. Why would anyone risk their own safety and comfort on the behalf of someone else?
But of course, Akechi's emotionally stinted outlook doesn't excuse him from the crimes he has committed. When he gains his powers and unlocks his Persona, he does not use them for good the way the protagonist does. Akechi uses this power he is granted as a tool to further his plans to depose his father when he is at the height of his power. By the time the protagonist meets him, Akechi has already been using his powers to cause people to have psychotic breakdowns and mental shutdowns for about two years, and he displays no remorse for what he has done when he reveals his true self. He doesn't hesitate before shooting the protagonist point blank in the head, and when he faces off against the Phantom Thieves in Shido's Palace, he rejects offer after offer to turn a new leaf and befriend the others. The Phantom Thieves are willing to give Akechi a second chance and offer him friendship, even knowing everything that he has done, and yet Akechi still rejects it. He is so consumed by his jealousy and anger that he throws these offers back in their faces and uses every resource he has to try and kill them. At that point, it's no longer about taking down his father; he is just lashing out recklessly, more vulnerable than ever, unwilling to let himself take the inevitable fall and face everything he hates about himself.
In his final moments, Akechi seems to realize some of the gravity of the crimes he has committed, wondering what might have happened in his life if he had only met the protagonist a few years earlier. He reveals his jealousy of the protagonist and laments that he wasn't strong enough to see his plans through to the end. He sees all his efforts wasted, as well as everything he has built his so-called detective work on. He sees no way he can go on, and when broken down to his barest parts, his true wish becomes clear: acceptance, which he never received and never would receive from his father, and which he never believed he would receive from friends, even though the Phantom Thieves still offer it until the bitter end. Broken down as he is, Akechi has one final chance to do the right thing when the Cognitive Akechi in Shido's Palace threatens the Thieves. In the final moments of his life, Akechi makes a desperate gambit and throws his lot in with them, because he knows that they are capable of taking down his corrupt father. Whether or not his motives for doing this are because he finally supports the Thieves or because he just wants Shido taken care of are nebulous, but at this point, it's almost moot. Akechi still sacrifices his life to seal off his double from the group, effectively giving them the opportunity they need to finish their mission.
As evidenced by his complex web of lies and deceit, Akechi is highly intelligent and masterfully composed. He has long since trained himself to wear the face that he wants others to see, and so he comes off as a polite, well-mannered, benign young man that people can't help but like. Even with his detective work, Akechi still attends high school and devotes considerable amount of time to his studies. He maintains his perception as a people person, though he lives alone, and he doesn't have any contacts close enough he could label as friends, save for the protagonist. Akechi sees himself as the mastermind, and has buried his fears and insecurities beneath a mountain of deception that seems to even fool himself at times. But in fact, Shido has been pulling him by the strings all along and plans to dispose of Akechi as soon as he is elected as prime minister. Despite all the work he has put into his master plan, Akechi has never really been in control at all, though he is certainly still culpable for his actions. He just believed he was doing them for his own reasons rather than Shido's.
Similarly, for better or for worse, Akechi is persistent and hard-working. It took an incredible amount of tenacity and cleverness to get him to where he is, the right hand of a politician poised to become prime minister, and even the Phantom Thieves compliment Akechi on how much he was able to do all by himself. The tragedy, then, lies in how consumed Akechi became by revenge, that he couldn't realize his full potential, both as a person, and as a Persona user. Even so, he made his life count in the end, and no one would call Goro Akechi inexact. For all he is a mess of a human being, he is extremely organized and thoughtful. It only takes one inconsequential slip-up about pancakes for his entire scheme to fold like a house of cards. Otherwise, he very well may have succeeded in his pursuit, though whether or not that would have ultimately brought him satisfaction seems unlikely, given Shido would still have never acknowledged Akechi the way he longed to be acknowledged. In the end, he yearns for acceptance, even though he continually pushes it away, because with it comes confronting himself, as well, and that is simply something he does not know how to do.
Abilities: Like the protagonist, Akechi is a unique type of Persona user known as a wildcard, and thus able to use multiple Personas, though he is only seen to be using two during the game, and both are aligned to the same Arcana as himself: Justice. Personas are physical manifestations of psyches, and the two Akechi uses are Robin Hood and Loki. Robin Hood is only used while he is cooperating with the Phantom Thieves, possibly just to further convince the group of his supposed virtues. Robin Hood primarily uses Bless and Curse Elemental attacks, including skills that have a chance of instantly taking out enemies. Akechi's other Persona, Loki, makes his appearance second, but likely was Akechi's original Persona. His skillset is more varied than Robin Hood's, and includes various Curse, Almighty, status-affecting and shield techniques. Loki is evidently the more powerful of Akechi's two Personas, but also the more volatile. Through Loki, Akechi has the unique ability, "Call of Chaos", to cause people to have psychotic breakdowns. He uses this power on humans to cause them to commit crimes for him to later solve, but he also is seen using it on Shadows to turn them reckless and more dangerous. He even uses it on himself at one point, in a last, desperate act to destroy the Phantom Thieves.
Additionally, Akechi's ability to enter the Metaverse grants him snazzy outfits! Unlike the Phantom Thieves, he appears to be able to change the appearance of his outfit in the Metaverse at will. He also seems to be able to apply this same sort of glamour to the weapons he uses, as they are highly fantastical weapons like beam swords and ray guns that don't have real-world counterparts like the ones the Thieves use do.
Alignment: Elios. Though driven by his hatred for his father to seek revenge on him, what he really wants is to be loved and accepted.
Other: Since there's no Metaverse in Empatheias, I anticipate using Akechi's powers as though he is able to use them anywhere. Let me know if this isn't okay! Also, I'll be sure to get permission and plotting going if he ever uses his chaotic powers.
General Sample: TDM top level!
Emotion Sample:
[ After his arrival in this world, it immediately became apparent to Akechi that schooling his emotions would be of the utmost importance, though it has taken him some time to find a place to properly practice, given he would prefer this to remain...discreet. No matter what face he wears here, his emotions are on full display, if he is unable to rein them in. Fortunately, he is already practiced at composure; he only needs to learn to apply those principles in a new, more tangible way.
...Not that his efforts are proving successful so far. Deep within the forest, he sits with his back up against a tree, focusing on all his usual points of tension, and attempting to will them away. However, it's not...coming to him easily. The moment he conjures up thoughts of his father in his mind, of the Phantom Thieves, a cold anger grips him, and it grips the ground as well, frost trailing from his hands in the heather to the earth below and the roots of the tree behind him. Plants begin to wither, and once he begins, it's nearly impossible to stop it, like a train about to careen off a cliff.
At last, he stands, leaving the spot of dead and frozen forest behind to seek out someplace new to try. He will get a handle on this. He must. ]
Questions: n/a!