So far I recall it can, so I don't think it looks different due to the model. Maybe star eyes wouldn't be something that would normally exist in a Persona world though?
Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]
- Thread starter Baughn
- Start date
- Crossover
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
It can; I deliberately removed them.
She's based loosely on Shokuhou Misaki from A Certain Mental Isekai actually, but no, you don't need to read that story now. Although it's a great read.
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I knew the latter, but... you removed them on purpose? Is that just because literal shoujo eyes don't make sense, or is there a deeper meaning behind that?
(Speaking as someone who's tried to coax an AI art model into doing weird things like that before and failed, I think my assumption that "the AI couldn't do it right and the writer just left it at that" was a fair one, but clearly I was incorrect.)
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Totally fair. I was quite surprised that it could do the star-shaped eyes, because nothing else I've tried could do that! Here's a demonstration, just because.
She's having fun.
So, I suppose... it's partly because literal shoujo eyes don't make sense, yes. But it's also because eyes are meaningful here.
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*Dispenses baps of righteousness since Nero now Snowfire aren't here right now*
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Some brief observations:
1a - Our main advantage in this version is additional skills, training time, allies, and to a very limited extent XP over all the incoming arcs.
(Previous quest got XP much faster, but we couldn't actually use it iirc.
Resolving the Manticore issue and/or getting more juicy lore seems like a decent Long Term Goal(s)?)
1b - Our next advantage is hopefully being able to get the interpersonal conflict/socialisation out of the way early, so we don't run into so many landmines when things start going down further.
2 - Our main disadvantage however, is lore/Lore/Occult, as it was spoonfed to us by the nature of being an Exaltation last time, but this time we really, really need to find out ourselves and/or convince Hotsuin and co to share info before it's too late for us to use it to try and prevent Conception or something.
3 - There's also a smaller benefit in having more time to acclimatise to the weird things that will go down later
...but the above benefits become null and void if we face plant or adversely have our personality changed even before we reach the starting point (a real possibility, IMO)
(Baughn, I imagine the first time you got caught in PMMM quest style time expansion, where 1 day takes 1 update, 6 hours take 2 updates, 3 hours takes 4 updates, ...?)
1a - Our main advantage in this version is additional skills, training time, allies, and to a very limited extent XP over all the incoming arcs.
(Previous quest got XP much faster, but we couldn't actually use it iirc.
Resolving the Manticore issue and/or getting more juicy lore seems like a decent Long Term Goal(s)?)
1b - Our next advantage is hopefully being able to get the interpersonal conflict/socialisation out of the way early, so we don't run into so many landmines when things start going down further.
2 - Our main disadvantage however, is lore/Lore/Occult, as it was spoonfed to us by the nature of being an Exaltation last time, but this time we really, really need to find out ourselves and/or convince Hotsuin and co to share info before it's too late for us to use it to try and prevent Conception or something.
3 - There's also a smaller benefit in having more time to acclimatise to the weird things that will go down later
...but the above benefits become null and void if we face plant or adversely have our personality changed even before we reach the starting point (a real possibility, IMO)
(Baughn, I imagine the first time you got caught in PMMM quest style time expansion, where 1 day takes 1 update, 6 hours take 2 updates, 3 hours takes 4 updates, ...?)
Utau is a character I wouldn't mind playing as the MC tbh, she's just missing a Psionic face punching skill to have an viable solo build with enough XP. And her skills are heavily oriented towards support/morale, though her trauma with using them offensively somewhat gimps their potential during combat of whatever form.
In particular, given a certain skill that eases casting magic in K-physics, wouldn't a Exaltation be particularly useful for her? (Glances at the number of times in the previous quest where metaphysics caused us problems)
I've played with a similar character concept for PMMM before, shouldn't Utau have Integrity 3 already by the virtue of having seen many sides of herself and being used to recovering from various mental maluses? Or does she lack a foundational truth/motivation/fallback for that to work?
(And does Integrity cover normal psychological integrity, and if it does does seeing a psychiatrist technically count as training Integrity?)
As for the current vote...
On one hand, unironically what's the worst that could happen?
On the other hand,
I'm going to assume that JPs, who does not have our current option, can resolve this matter by punching (if not necessarily in a way we'd like because Government Agency).
We currently have an Investigation (esoteric too) focused team rn, and will have a beatstick team + Navigator soon (Hikaru, Ami); and because of Biokinesis its far easier for physical wounds to be recovered from than mental wounds?
Like, the worst that will happen is that we have to resolve this the Persona way instead of whatever's going on rn?
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Her backstory is why she has two dots, and is also why Amu has two dots.
In general, two dots represents the "competent adult" level of a skill. For someone's profession, 2.5 dots is the average level of expertise; 3 already means you're highly capable, and most people only ever reach that as a specialisation, if they do at all. Three dots is a respectable level when you've worked the job for twenty years.
You know. For their profession.
For something as "optional" as mental integrity, one dot is already well above average; most people live life with zero, but then never face an event that would invoke it. Or if they do, it's something like a romantic entanglement where the failures are relatively survivable; it's not like they'd have zero dice even without the ability.
So, for Utau to have two dots at sixteen is quite an indictment her previous guardians.
===
It does also cover regular mental integrity, and yes, a good psychologist would be a valid teacher. Good luck finding one good enough to build on someone who already has two dots, especially in Japan.
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Sounds about right, though given what's coming up I kind of want to hold an Integrity Training Party (Hikaru, Ami or whoever has 1 dot in Integrity) once Amu gets to 3 dots in Integrity...
(Doesn't make sense for the others to go to a psychiatrist, except maybe Hikaru?)
Does this ring any Persona bells, for those more familiar with the franchise?
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So, was rereading and decided to grab quotes that jumped out at me:
To try and figure out why Precog isn't working so well these days we'd need to know what's going on with Conception, and also the mechanics/physics of any Precog ability - I don't think its possible with the information we have rn.
(Uh, considering how Amu wants to sleep for 14 hours if she strains herself too much by manifesting Charas physically, is Ami sleeping all the time a sign of her forever straining herself?)
If Kana and co don't have Charas, then are they running on Persona paradigms or something else entirely?
(And a clue into what actually happened in our timeline?)
Also, Aoi has yellow and faintly luminescent eyes too; was Aoi distracted because of heavy Precog usage?
1: We know that Overgrowth is reduced by Charas; and Overgrowth rolls against Integrity sometimes.
2: Messing around with Charas strains Integrity (this applies to Utau too, not just Amu, but Utau has more practice)
3a: Stress and/or Dreamwalking makes her eyes more yellow, but assuming a different identity and/or loading a Chara appears to make it brown again?
3b: Amu's base self wasn't always a Shadow until something happened?
Thoughts?
There's our hard deadline it seems?
To try and figure out why Precog isn't working so well these days we'd need to know what's going on with Conception, and also the mechanics/physics of any Precog ability - I don't think its possible with the information we have rn.
OOC, what do we know about the Conception/Dragon Stream?
Who? (Interesting how this sense doesn't quite seem to be range-limited, up to a certain extent - Utau and co weren't aware of the D-events that happened in another country. Where were Utau and co relative to the position of the Rift, anyway?)
This mean anything to you guys?
Pretty strange how Ami (3 dot Mind Control) can listen in to mental conversations when even Kana can't?
(Of course the shadow pool feels like home, since Amu's base self is a Shadow. Interesting how the Yui incident mentioned elsewhere also involved a shadow pool, huh)
A compilation of current info regarding whatever's going on with Ami now.
(Uh, considering how Amu wants to sleep for 14 hours if she strains herself too much by manifesting Charas physically, is Ami sleeping all the time a sign of her forever straining herself?)
No family name... would be interesting if we could use Investigation to figure out who these actually are, and then try and track Manticore down by following the paperwork?
If Kana and co don't have Charas, then are they running on Persona paradigms or something else entirely?
Man, this group is REALLY used to killing people :/
(And a clue into what actually happened in our timeline?)
Stuff that may be relevant in upcoming updates (does 10pm mean anything in Persona?)
Also, Aoi has yellow and faintly luminescent eyes too; was Aoi distracted because of heavy Precog usage?
Considering the information from the previous update about a possible Bad Ending for Kana being betrayed by a doctor she treated as her parent...
1: We know that Overgrowth is reduced by Charas; and Overgrowth rolls against Integrity sometimes.
2: Messing around with Charas strains Integrity (this applies to Utau too, not just Amu, but Utau has more practice)
3a: Stress and/or Dreamwalking makes her eyes more yellow, but assuming a different identity and/or loading a Chara appears to make it brown again?
3b: Amu's base self wasn't always a Shadow until something happened?
Thoughts?
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- Location
- Laniakea
Yes. Alice.
Her signature attack is Die For Me, exclusive to Alice and summons a bunch of toy soldiers to murder the enemy with sharp weapons. In Persona 3 and 4, these look like the Queen of Hearts' playing card soldiers from Alice in Wonderland. In Persona 5, they are stuffed bears with dynamite tied to them. Her signature look is blonde hair, blue dress and an evil smirk.
She's appeared in multiple SMT games, including as a bonus boss in Devil Survivor 2. And since she's meant to represent Alice In Wonderland's protagonist, she's often associated with stuffed animals and rabbits (as in, follow the little white rabbit). She carries a stuffed rabbit in her Devil Children artwork and according to the wiki, the white rabbit she was chasing in Strange Journey described her as "a human girl beloved by demons who was unexpectedly driven insane by the magics she inherited from them". In Persona 4, Teddie dressed up as her for a cameo and his true form is a teddie bear. In Persona games starting at 3, her Arcana is also Death, which is tied to the moon in P3 and also in this quest according to the QM. Guess what's in full view in the background of Ami's profile picture.
For the fog and the puppet strings, Kuni-no-Sagiri.
That boss in Persona 4 which spawned from a crazy guy absorbing a crapton of Shadows in desperation. He turned into a giant ugly puppeteer-looking thing whose boss fight gimmick was to seize control of your party members and physically manipulate their bodies with puppet-like movements. Named after the Japanese spirit of fog and in this case, the particular crazy guy who spawned it also had connection to the main villain/deity responsible for flooding Inaba with cognitive fog.
Yes.
My money is on Alice. QM says Ami didn't eat anything connected to murderous deities, so if it isn't Rei, it's probably Alice.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him/Ey/Em
Oh, almost definitely. Still, there are literally learnable supernatural powers called Songs, and driving your audience to depression or madness sounds like the Song of Ethereal Entropy to me! The Songs of Affinity (tracking), Healing, and Light would be more her speed nowadays.
There is a third option. I think In the original version of the quest, all the Primordials and their Daevas had ceased to exist, but we don't know if that's the case this time. Amu might've actually contacted a spirit born from one of the imprisoned architects of Creation. (Maybe the Primordials themselves are gone, but First-Circle refugees form part of Makai's population.)
- Location
- Laniakea
As for the rest of these questions:
1. Calcinating Circle: My guess back then was that it was linked to Hikawa's attempt to activate Conception and destroy the world by conducting mass human-sacrifices to demons, hence all the D-events. That the "circle" is the deliberate wide-scale ritual he's doing. In fact, the first thing I thought of was Fullmetal Alchemist and how massacres in certain areas of the country were actually blood-sacrifices to fuel a country-sized transmutation circle.
2. Yukari: One of the next-generation Guardians at Seiyo Academy, but an OC for the quest, not from Shugo Chara. By the QM's description:
3. web-whirlpool-starry-cloud-pattern-thing: Likely the Sea of Souls. Souls in Persona can be connected to each other, expressed in gameplay mechanics by "Social Links" so if Amu could see/feel those, it would probably look like a web. Dia's ability is to navigate an extratemporal dimension in Shugo Chara known as the Road of Stars, which is where Charas come from and allows Amu to access other people's memories too. My bet is the the Road of Stars and the Sea of Souls is the same thing in this quest.
4. Ami: I mean, I've said a lot about what I think about Ami by this point. Though I don't remember it being specified anywhere that Kana can't wiretap other people's mental conversations like Ami. I'd think that she can. The boy she saw in the Dreamlands that had Ikuto-like hair I speculated at the time was probably the Persona 3 protagonist, still guarding the Seal. Especially since Ami was "chasing the moon" at the time - the P3 Protagonist is only there at the Seal, because he's meant to be stopping the moon from falling. So if she chased it, stands to reason she'd find him holding it back.
5. Scavengers: I remember it being said that the only one of the Scavengers who would be able to recognize Smol Miki was Kana, from Amu's memories. So they don't know about Charas. If they have to use Persona Suppressants, they are likely Persona-users. Basically Strega from Persona 3, but with a few more members, a less religious leader and kill using psychic powers instead of shooting people with plain guns during the Dark Hour. "Anti-Penumbrals" were mentioned, so they are likely not just on Persona Suppressants, but also Shadow Suppresants.
My current theory in regards to them is that their Personas are unstable and switch between being Personas and degrading back into Shadow Selves. A further guess is that when Yui Dreamwalks, Shadows are attracted to her like they are to Amu (and likely Ami) during the moments when her Shadow Self is in a degraded non-Persona state, but then attack her during the moments when it stabilizes. So Kana needs to watch her and can usually bail her out when it happens - but my guess is that what may have happened this time was that Yui failed her Overgrowth v Integrity check and attracted the wrong Shadow and then ended up absorbing it, causing her Shadow Self to go completely out of control.
In other words, if Ami is a ticking timebomb, Yui is one that already went off. Ami is arguably more stable, being 50% Alice at least makes her strong enough that it allows her to pick and choose which other Shadows she wants to eat.
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Hm... I wonder how these mix together?
- Location
- Laniakea
Amu and Eyes: ......Hooh.
OK, so here's what my own current speculation is in regards to Overgrowth and Charas. This one really is mostly just guessing, but here we go.
I think Overgrowth refers to the "overgrown mass" of a person's Shadow Self. We know a non-Psionic has Overgrowth rank 0, even a Persona-using non-Psionic. Kids who are very young might even have negative Overgrowth - their sense of self is so underdeveloped their Shadow Self may not have fully formed properly yet, even one technically exists for them. And if one exists it usually "doesn't appear" because it's too thin to properly manifest or say much.
At least, I think this WAS the case, prior to Ikuto Tsukiyomi.
At some point, something happened in the Collective Unconscious. Whether it was just human overpopulation or some deity's meddling or maybe some deity (Kagutsuchi) no longer being able to tolerate the burden, something started adding more mass onto human souls. Ikuto and Utau were among the first to be "fattened" and gain their Overgrowth levels.
Whatever phenomenon "added mass" to everyone, the process resulted in people like Amu having any budding Personas torn to shreds. Personas are meant to help keep Shadow Selves suppressed and masked, so if the Shadow Self gets too big, logically it will break free and probably break the Persona in the process. This wasn't much of a problem before Overgrowth, as nobody had overgrown Shadow Selves. But then people got fat.
Somebody (inclusive of, but we know not limited to Ikuto's father, Tadase's father and Tsukasa) realized this was happening and tried to make the Chara System to address the problem. Charas are essentially liposuction. They are meant to siphon off the excess fat from an overgrown Shadow Self and store it instead inside a separate "want-to-be-self" called a Chara. When you have Charas containing only bite-sized chunks of Shadow Self - you now once more have chunks of Shadow Self small enough to be capable of forming Personas without breaking them (maybe different Personas between the shrunk base self and their Chara offshoots).
Miki has an Overgrowth rank of 1, because that's what she took from Amu when she was first created as a Chara. Probably permanently removed it from her when she split off. If Amu had no Charas, she'd have an Overgrowth ranking of at least 7 and I'm willing to bet 8 or more. I bet most Charas are only meant to eat up a single rank of Overgrowth, but Amu had so much, Dia needs to pull double-duty and is responsible for suppressing at least 2 ranks of Overgrowth, causing her to sleep often.
Ami and Micchan and Hikaru might not even have had the chance to ever have had a Persona before they got fattened up. My feeling is they didn't get theirs torn to shreds, because they've never had any. For as long as they can remember they'll just have had a big fat Shadow Self that represents them. They will only get any chance at forming a Persona after birthing a Chara and reducing their Overgrowth to a manageable level.
My guess is a "manageable level" is probably dependent on the Integrity stat of the particular character and a person can probably naturally maintain a Persona over a Shadow Self so long as their Integrity is the same as their Overgrowth level, give or take a dot.
I'm thinking the Scavengers likely have Overgrowth levels vastly exceeding their Integrity and in lieu of having any Charas, are reliant on dangerous drugs to make up the difference.
Saaya, too, likely has an Overgrowth level in excess of her Integrity except she had no Charas or drugs to help her. We saw what happened to her - she got unstable and had a breakdown, which I think was meant to be representative of what happens if your Shadow gets out of control and you can't properly form a Persona. It ends up collapsing under its own weight, manifesting as a mental breakdown.
OK, so here's what my own current speculation is in regards to Overgrowth and Charas. This one really is mostly just guessing, but here we go.
I think Overgrowth refers to the "overgrown mass" of a person's Shadow Self. We know a non-Psionic has Overgrowth rank 0, even a Persona-using non-Psionic. Kids who are very young might even have negative Overgrowth - their sense of self is so underdeveloped their Shadow Self may not have fully formed properly yet, even one technically exists for them. And if one exists it usually "doesn't appear" because it's too thin to properly manifest or say much.
At least, I think this WAS the case, prior to Ikuto Tsukiyomi.
At some point, something happened in the Collective Unconscious. Whether it was just human overpopulation or some deity's meddling or maybe some deity (Kagutsuchi) no longer being able to tolerate the burden, something started adding more mass onto human souls. Ikuto and Utau were among the first to be "fattened" and gain their Overgrowth levels.
Whatever phenomenon "added mass" to everyone, the process resulted in people like Amu having any budding Personas torn to shreds. Personas are meant to help keep Shadow Selves suppressed and masked, so if the Shadow Self gets too big, logically it will break free and probably break the Persona in the process. This wasn't much of a problem before Overgrowth, as nobody had overgrown Shadow Selves. But then people got fat.
Somebody (inclusive of, but we know not limited to Ikuto's father, Tadase's father and Tsukasa) realized this was happening and tried to make the Chara System to address the problem. Charas are essentially liposuction. They are meant to siphon off the excess fat from an overgrown Shadow Self and store it instead inside a separate "want-to-be-self" called a Chara. When you have Charas containing only bite-sized chunks of Shadow Self - you now once more have chunks of Shadow Self small enough to be capable of forming Personas without breaking them (maybe different Personas between the shrunk base self and their Chara offshoots).
Miki has an Overgrowth rank of 1, because that's what she took from Amu when she was first created as a Chara. Probably permanently removed it from her when she split off. If Amu had no Charas, she'd have an Overgrowth ranking of at least 7 and I'm willing to bet 8 or more. I bet most Charas are only meant to eat up a single rank of Overgrowth, but Amu had so much, Dia needs to pull double-duty and is responsible for suppressing at least 2 ranks of Overgrowth, causing her to sleep often.
Ami and Micchan and Hikaru might not even have had the chance to ever have had a Persona before they got fattened up. My feeling is they didn't get theirs torn to shreds, because they've never had any. For as long as they can remember they'll just have had a big fat Shadow Self that represents them. They will only get any chance at forming a Persona after birthing a Chara and reducing their Overgrowth to a manageable level.
My guess is a "manageable level" is probably dependent on the Integrity stat of the particular character and a person can probably naturally maintain a Persona over a Shadow Self so long as their Integrity is the same as their Overgrowth level, give or take a dot.
I'm thinking the Scavengers likely have Overgrowth levels vastly exceeding their Integrity and in lieu of having any Charas, are reliant on dangerous drugs to make up the difference.
Saaya, too, likely has an Overgrowth level in excess of her Integrity except she had no Charas or drugs to help her. We saw what happened to her - she got unstable and had a breakdown, which I think was meant to be representative of what happens if your Shadow gets out of control and you can't properly form a Persona. It ends up collapsing under its own weight, manifesting as a mental breakdown.
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- Location
- Laniakea
Here's my vote, though it's probably too late to make a difference.
Probably the only way this gets carried out is if it gets collapsed into the general "Trust Me" vote under the assumption that most people who voted "Trust Me" weren't intending for Amu to absorb the Shadow into her own body.
[X] "Trust Me."
-[X] The fox is a collection of broken fragments. Create a receptacle of some kind separate from yourself to collect the fragments. Ask Utau for help creating it if needed.
I acknowledge that this does probably go the spirit of the vote, which was likely intended to be a simply binary "yes-or-no" proposition for learning Eat Shadow, not an opportunity to try and learn "Make knockoff Shadow compendium".
EDIT: If Amu just ends up eating the Shadow, I am also still going to keep pushing the "Shadow compendium" idea at every possible opportunity, to try and get Amu to dump back out the Shadow she absorbed into something she can just access more situationally and won't be permanently stuck with, that Ami can also stuff Shadows into instead of digesting them.
It's probably too late to convince her to disgorge the Alice part, probably too integrated by now, but I'd like to dissuade her from increasingly destabilizing herself by continuing to absorb more Shadows.
Probably the only way this gets carried out is if it gets collapsed into the general "Trust Me" vote under the assumption that most people who voted "Trust Me" weren't intending for Amu to absorb the Shadow into her own body.
[X] "Trust Me."
-[X] The fox is a collection of broken fragments. Create a receptacle of some kind separate from yourself to collect the fragments. Ask Utau for help creating it if needed.
I acknowledge that this does probably go the spirit of the vote, which was likely intended to be a simply binary "yes-or-no" proposition for learning Eat Shadow, not an opportunity to try and learn "Make knockoff Shadow compendium".
EDIT: If Amu just ends up eating the Shadow, I am also still going to keep pushing the "Shadow compendium" idea at every possible opportunity, to try and get Amu to dump back out the Shadow she absorbed into something she can just access more situationally and won't be permanently stuck with, that Ami can also stuff Shadows into instead of digesting them.
It's probably too late to convince her to disgorge the Alice part, probably too integrated by now, but I'd like to dissuade her from increasingly destabilizing herself by continuing to absorb more Shadows.
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Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
A Shadow being benevolent is generally a really bad sign for the mental health of the whole. Much as I like Best Remora, her Shadow being as helpful as she was indicated that seeking help or acknowledging the truth that her mother's death wasn't her own fault was being actively rejected by the core self.
Meanwhile, Amu's soul is apparently inside-out, though apparently the Humpty Lock stabilized her until she was able to fully adapt.
[X] "Trust Me."
-[X] The fox is a collection of broken fragments. Create a receptacle of some kind separate from yourself to collect the fragments. Ask Utau for help creating it if needed.
Since "No" has no chance of winning, and I do not believe the risk of adverse mental changes is worth in this literally-no-other-stakes scenario...
-[X] The fox is a collection of broken fragments. Create a receptacle of some kind separate from yourself to collect the fragments. Ask Utau for help creating it if needed.
Since "No" has no chance of winning, and I do not believe the risk of adverse mental changes is worth in this literally-no-other-stakes scenario...
While your thinking is interesting and could be right, there are a few things one could debate a bit still I think.
For instance Saaya might not fit in to the structure at all, instead potentially being a person that was just self destructing themselves in general.
Also it is possible that one could invert some parts of the reasoning you gave and still be able to get roughly the same kind of observed outcomes. The reasons for why it is would be fairly different then though. For instance Persona could be something Kagutsuchi uses to restrain humanity, and now that overgrowth is getting so out of hand it no longer can be made to fit on them. Thus allowing humanity to grow far more powerful then it should be. In this light Persona would then be a way to get a human on a relatively small 'soul' or what ever one wants to call it, while with a large overgrowth you can get a human like person anyway, even if say the base was a shadow.
- Location
- Laniakea
Depends on how the canons have been implemented and merged in this quest.
In Persona 3: The Answer, the nature of Shadows and Personas is explained by Metis as this:
"Personas and Shadows are the same thing. That's why you're able to fight them in the first place. Did you all think Shadows were mysterious invaders or something? Shadows are the lower parts of the psyche everyone has... Suppressed human thoughts given physical form. When people are unable to face their darker selves, they break loose, free from all control. But sometime, humans with special awareness can tame their Shadows... Those are Persona-users."
So by Persona canon, Shadows and Personas are explicitly "the same thing". Personas are tamed Shadow Selves and as natural (or artificial) as Shadow Selves themselves are.
Buuuut.... this is apparently not quite the case for this quest.
Baughn has indicated that, here, Personas are considered separate parts of a person from their Shadow. They are things that are used to suppress them, but aren't the same things as being "suppressed Shadows" themselves, like Metis says they are in canon. If they were, there's no way Amu could have hers torn away and missing and not be a vegetable, as then by definition she'd be missing her Shadow Self too.
Now, my impression in regards to Persona series canon was that everyone has a Shadow Self (except maybe for children too young to have a proper sense of identity) but that those Shadows are usually "calm". You don't usually need a Persona to suppress them, as they don't usually act up enough to actually need much suppressing. So most people don't have Personas and aren't Persona-users. But when somebody is under extreme stress - or if their mind is deliberately aggravated by external forces, like in Persona 5 when Call of Chaos gets used on someone's Shadow to give them a psychotic breakdown - then a person needs to take special measures to "tame" their rampaging Shadow. If they succeed, the Shadow becomes a Persona of the kind that Persona-users have...... otherwise they just get eaten by their own Shadow (or suffer a psychotic breakdown).
But here, for this quest, it sounds more to me like Personas get formed over Shadow Selves, like a ribcage over a heart. And that everyone, even non-Persona users, are supposed to have one, just not necessarily able to weaponize them in the way Persona-users ordinarily summon them out to whack things like Stands from JoJo. Here, a "Persona-user" is not just one who has a Persona, but one who weaponizes theirs.
So my running assumption based on Persona canon is that they are still meant to be as much a natural part of a human as their Shadow Self is. But given that they've been separated out from Shadows in this quest, yes, I suppose there is a possibility they may be artificial aspects enforced on people by Kagutsuchi. Would depend on how the QM has decided to handle it.
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- Location
- Laniakea
Yeah, that's why I said "as natural (or artificial)".
Again, it depends entirely on what aspects of Persona canon have been implemented for the quest and in what way they've been interpreted.
According to the Persona 3 Club Book, Shadows themselves are "fragments of Nyx's psyche" and wouldn't even exist in humans if Nyx hadn't shown up -- and according to the Club Book, Nyx is a moon-sized alien. By that definition, Shadows in Persona not only aren't natural, they aren't even from Earth. They are bits of extra-terrestrial alien soul that, over eons of infesting the planet, grew to develop a parasitic-symbiotic relationship with all living things on the planet to the point of such strong interdependence that ripping them out of a modern day human turns them into a vegetable.
But in the first version of this quest, Nyx's alien backstory was apparently nixed in favor if it being just an aspect of Nyarlathotep (you found the very quote when we were talking about him before). And IIRC, Nyarly was apparently considered a natural part of humanity then.
So if Shadows still come from Nyx and Nyx is still part of Nyarly, they are "natural".
But we have also been told Nyarly's backstory is now different. So that's not necessarily the case anymore.
What the case is now I have no clue, but my default is to assume the QM still doesn't favor the alien backstory.
Again, it depends entirely on what aspects of Persona canon have been implemented for the quest and in what way they've been interpreted.
According to the Persona 3 Club Book, Shadows themselves are "fragments of Nyx's psyche" and wouldn't even exist in humans if Nyx hadn't shown up -- and according to the Club Book, Nyx is a moon-sized alien. By that definition, Shadows in Persona not only aren't natural, they aren't even from Earth. They are bits of extra-terrestrial alien soul that, over eons of infesting the planet, grew to develop a parasitic-symbiotic relationship with all living things on the planet to the point of such strong interdependence that ripping them out of a modern day human turns them into a vegetable.
But in the first version of this quest, Nyx's alien backstory was apparently nixed in favor if it being just an aspect of Nyarlathotep (you found the very quote when we were talking about him before). And IIRC, Nyarly was apparently considered a natural part of humanity then.
So if Shadows still come from Nyx and Nyx is still part of Nyarly, they are "natural".
But we have also been told Nyarly's backstory is now different. So that's not necessarily the case anymore.
What the case is now I have no clue, but my default is to assume the QM still doesn't favor the alien backstory.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
It also may be helpful to distinguish between a persona and a Persona.
They haven't forgotten anything. Well, Hikaru didn't know very much in the first place, but Utau and Amu did give him a basic overview once they were reasonably confident he was stable. Amu knows quite a lot, both about how they behave and how they're created. Not to mention what they could be used for, if you're sufficiently evil.
Is this a request for information about x-eggs, or about the characters?
They haven't forgotten anything. Well, Hikaru didn't know very much in the first place, but Utau and Amu did give him a basic overview once they were reasonably confident he was stable. Amu knows quite a lot, both about how they behave and how they're created. Not to mention what they could be used for, if you're sufficiently evil.