#✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ me quietly chuckling in a dark corner every time someone says they have a verse just for being on team strega }}

#i want every single one of you on team strega by the end just give takaya the biggest found family but evil and dying in a handful of years #just think! if junpei is on team strega chidori won't even move fdkhgdhds #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revolver-jesus]

Anonymous said: ⋰⋰   ❝ Idk if you're gone or not but your last reblog 'enjoy the silence' with 3 months of silence is so well timed if it was accidental. ❞

✞  ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧   (( GHJKSGFSF THAT WASN’T oN PURPOSE IT WAS JUST THE LAST THING IN THE QUEUE  lmao....  Sorry for the incredibly long inactivity, I am simply prone to that tbh, but right now I am very distracted with real world stuff and one of my other blogs that is just.   forever consuming my braincells apparently BUT    BUT BUT BUT I Have made this sideblog @nyx-gathering​ where i will be posting strega related art and other junk of them !! Mostly to move the art that clogs my notes from this blog. I got a tablet! I can draw digitally a bit better now and i wanted to draw velvet room takaya !!

I will inevitably be back to RP this guy when the opening comes, but i will definitely be lurking now on that blog ( instead of,,, not logging on at all lol ) and keeping track of what this side of the community is up to :’) ))

#✯ ✧ ✧ ask. ☾ ✞ ☽ #anonymous #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

How do you feel when people say that Takaya is just using Jin and Chidori?

{{ You mean like that one hot take that drove me up the wall? lmao I am going to give you the full blown dissertation here i go-- let's call this essay

The Most Commonly Misunderstood Thing About Takaya's Character: or Why Team Strega Is Not Literally A Cult lol

When people say that Takaya is just 'using" Jin and Chidori, what they're implying in most contexts is that Takaya is incapable of forming attachments and his motivations are fairly shallow-- essentially Takaya is not a complex villain and should be dismissed as purely selfishly motivated and malicious. He's a "simple" villain.

Now I realize....... that I might be biased as that girly that's written him on a dedicated blog for multiple years now, but purely objectively speaking, removing all my own headcanons, using only the information provided to use in canon? It's just thoroughly false, tbh!

First I'll go into why he isn't purely selfishly motivated and then I'll explain his relationship with Strega because I can prove the motivation with just Reload as an example, let alone the novel. Takaya, in Reload especially but even in the original game, I would argue has a full blown character arc off screen. At the start of the game he does appear to be more selfish, he has no real motivation and is just living out the last of his life doing underhanded assassin work-- nothing's really challenging him. But as the story progresses, Takaya begins to express a meaningful ideology-- he develops a greater concern for the world around him and expresses a full blown motivation. He says, in protest to the choices of the protagonist in one of his social events, and I quote: " Choosing to turn a blind eye towards your own power, to the grief of the fallen, to the unchosen and the unloved." Its clear he is not talking about himself here, as he mentions grief for the fallen. Takaya is expressing that he feels grief for something-- he is sorry about something that has happened to someone else, and it bothers him enough to nearly scream about it.

I think, often times, people dismiss what Takaya says as insincere almost automatically without any indication that he doesn't mean the words he's saying besides perhaps being vain and dishonest in other scenes, but these social event scenes are clearly meant to be interpreted as him being unusually earnest. By the end, Takaya is not just trying to keep his own power, but, as he says " this is not just my will but the will of all people. " which all culminates into Takaya's final character arc moment, where, in his final boss, he says the line " I will throw away my pride! " before using an evoker instead of trying to summon without help, implying that he is finally sacrificing his ego to better fight for what he believes in. If he was fighting for a positive cause, this would be a heroic moment, but it is still concrete evidence that his motivation is no longer meant to be seen as purely selfish. He is now fighting for " the will of all people ". He cares about the " the fallen, the unchosen and the unloved."

So what about Jin and Chidori? To put it simply, Takaya is not some puppet master that breaks them down emotionally and treats them like tools. They're his friends, and he happens to have a leader's personality, so they follow him, much like the protagonist he is designed to mirror. Its a lot easier to guess how he feels about them when you don't assume the worst and look at all his canon interactions with them. And even easier to tell if you can manage to read any english translated pages of their strega-focused novel ( which we can assume is fairly canon since Reload references it with the child turned into a large shadow ).

In the novel, as far as I've seen ( its only partially translated ), team Strega is extremely informal and lighthearted around each other. There is no sign that they fear Takaya, as they are willing to tease each other and disagree. The opening scenes of the book quickly establish a sort of family-like dynamic, with Takaya having an older brother-like role. He teases Chidori ( in a bit of heavy handed foreshadowing ) that she will understand why people fall in love when she's older-- of which Chidori sort of says gross and "as if" and rolls her eyes at him. Jin, being the narrator perspective, shows no sign of intimidation when around Takaya, something that would bleed through into their every interaction-- especially the establishing scene introducing the cast-- if that were the case. I feel, even if the novel is not canon, the writer would be instructed not to write Takaya so friendly if he was meant to be a heartless manipulator regardless.

In the game, the most manipulative thing he ever does to either is when Chidori is pulled back into Strega. Takaya tells her that there is nowhere else she can go and reminds her that death is not to be feared in a way that sounds like he's repeated this mantra often enough he knows she can guess it. This seems spooky, but the tension is immediately alleviated by the flippant and kind of sassy way that Chidori assures them she remembers Takaya's advice. This is not how you talk to your cult leader and this is not a cult, this is something closer to a gang or a club-- at worst, a coven of witches ( considering their team name is "witch" in italian.). They simply have an in-group and out-group sort of mentality, a shared since of identity, and a shared view of the world to go with it, which is to be expected when you've been openly shunned and mocked by the average person ( as seen at the start of the first scene with Shinji ) But this scene, when compared to all their mundane and lighthearted interactions, doesn't imply anything more severe than the leader of your misfit club reminding you why we don't hang out with the normies. You're "one of us" and a level of loyalty and commitment is expected when you otherwise always act as a group.

Yes, he is very cold and indifferent to the sight of his team members getting hurt-- or hurting themselves, for that matter, but the reason for this is obvious. In Reload, Takaya plainly expresses that he is feeling attachment ( for the protag at the moment ) but is avoiding his own capability for attachment intentionally. That scene was meant to establish that he can feel attachment, that he isn't as cold as he pretends to be, to encourage the viewer to see him with a little more nuance. What causes a man to force himself to be colder than he really is? What can cause an avoidance toward emotional attachment? Maybe...... watching 100 children die after being orphaned and stolen away to live underground for years? lmao

And so, when Takaya watches Chidori do self harm or literally sacrifice her life, for one-- he's not going to parent her, they don't have that kind of relationship, and he would be a hypocrite if he tried to encourage her not to do what she wants to to her dying body-- and two, of course he doesn't mind if Chidori dies, he's expecting that to happen anyways. His one greatest gift is his uncanny ability to accept death and the death of others. Mourning you openly is not how he expresses emotion. Especially when he sincerely believes death is a blessing. Its just the way she died that he's a little annoyed by. ( And why shouldn't he be honestly-- the girl threw her life away on the first nice guy she met at the mall just to make his work harder from his perspective, lmao ) BUT. In the comic version of that scene, Takaya does let himself be cut across the chest purely because he hesitated to shoot when he saw Chidori's spirit protecting Junpei. So... that might imply something.

However, if there is any greater evidence against any who claim that Takaya does not care about Jin especially... Takaya's final words, in multiple renditions of the story including the movies and Reload, are to say that he wishes Jin was with him as he died. If there is anyone that Takaya cared for, at least one single character in the entire game, it is above all Jin Shirato.

In the movies its very obvious, with the sad closeup shot of him looking beaten and washed up as he wishes Jin could be here to see it all end with him. I have the scene as an icon ! Look at how emotional the framing is !

So yeah, that's how I feel, it just drives me crazy when people remember Takaya as just Some Asshole lmao-- he IS an asshole! But he's no Chairman Ikutsuki, he has a lot of complexity to him beyond being the guy who killed Shinji, and not everything he does is black and white. There is highly plausible reason to believe Takaya cared for both of them in his own way, but the ever loyal, best friend, Jin Shirato, especially so. }}

#{{ putting this in the tags since i was advised to spread takaya propaganda more lmao }} #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #✯ ✧ ✧ headcanons. ☾ ✞ ☽ #jin shirato #takaya sakaki #chidori yoshino #persona 3 #long post

[revclver-jesus]

{{ definitely not here because im vibrating with the need to disagree with strangers on the internet about a hot take on a jrpg character i-- dsjkgdsghaas

LOOK I KNOW Takaya is not the most beloved of the persona franchise but my man does have a little nuance okay-- }}

#{{ im not bitter sdjldjljhds }} #{{ im going to try to write hhh }} #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ WAIT HOLD ON SOMEONE PICKED THE QUESTION

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA He's so funny your honor i'm going to combust

HE'S LAUGHING AND LIKE? ALMOST FLATTERED YOU'D ASK? TAKAYA

He's really here at night with this guy he tried to kill earlier like oh?? 👀 does my skin distract thee makoto?👀👀 DSGHKDKS

i'm losing my mind this doesn't feel real-- }}

#✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #{{ I found a handy dandy compilation of the new strega scenes instead of having to keep 20 tabs open looking for them lmao #and they just happened to pick the meme option thank god }} #persona 3 reload spoilers #spoilers #takaya sakaki

[revclver-jesus]

(( Tomorrow, going to try to work on my verse pageee uhh

I know I need the main future verse to interact with p4/p5 characters and I'm prob going to change it to vaguely predict how character development will be with the p3reload stuff. He might be just slightly less antagonistic lmao but I also know I want the Velvet Room Attendant AU ( that one will be very funny please write it with me lmao- )

SEES member AU, where Takaya is this unknown older SEES member that just says he's here from the Kirijo group and appears to have 0 connection to the real world outside of the dark hour

But then there's the weirder AUs like crossover ones-- Would a pokemon au be silly lmao its just that I see so much pokemon on my dash and the phrase 'You are challenged by Team Strega Leader Takaya' keeps flashing in my mind-- dgsjsd idk I'll see ))

#always hmu if you ever want to write in a diff verse with me ! #or ask that verse takaya questions #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ OK i'm not liveblogging a let's play video i swear i will shut up but

YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THIS IS AN EMERGENCY--

He's feeling?? Attachment?? For Minato????? He's feeling??? Attachment????????? For Minato???????????

*Dwayne Johnson eyebrow raise*

TAKAYA. TAKAYA! Jin is RIGHT there he just told you how special he thinks you are!!! what is this love triangle forming oml this is not the direction i anticipated-- }}

#✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #✯ ✧ ✧ reload rambling. ☾ ✞ ☽ #persona 3 reload spoilers

[revclver-jesus]

{{ Imagining Takaya "helping" someone face their shadow and by that he means be utterly consumed by it so that you have shadow eyes like he does and he just holds your chin like " There. Isn't it freeing? and what gorgeous eyes you have! " }}

#terrible influence bad opinions only he's the devil dhgkdhks #{{ im sorry i'm not super fast with replies right now btw! i still have low blood pressure haha.... }} #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ this post is about nothing in particular i just love him your honor dfkgdskhg

How did they bake so much insanity into his natural resting face istg the constantly quirked brow but to also then make him look like he hasn't slept in 200 years and he's so tired like he looks like he is straining to keep his eyes open, i think he literally is his eye bags are so deep and also gucci and the way his hair flips when he turns I-- }}

#i'm trying to make icons from the new content forgive me hhhh #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #takaya sakaki

[revclver-jesus]

{{ just obsessing over his in-game model ignore me this man has legs for days like i knew he was tall but istg he's such a beanstalk fdskhgsd }}

#steadily going crazy as the days tick down lmao #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #takaya sakaki

[revclver-jesus]

{{ What I love about strega au verses with most is the thought that Takaya is in charge not because he's necessarily the strongest-- though he is strong and uniquely weird for being able to face his shadow and survive-- but he's sincerely just the eldest and most responsible for them all lmao

like I feel like takaya isn't just intimidating he's also the eldest who had to make the mundane but awkward phone calls for these extremely insular, traumatized kids, and to find a living source of income, and find a hideout, all while trying to manage a life threatening disease

like he was born with insane social confidence and a gift for public speaking, tell me he is not in charge because he's the one who most often spoke up when the other kids stood behind him whenever somebody tried to talk to the group lmao }}

#{{ also he has his cult leader-isms but yKNOW its the mundane un-glamorous bits that fascinate me-- }} #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #✯ ✧ ✧ headcanons. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ HELLO I am BACK HELLO Sorry for the wait on replies hhhh :') }}

#✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ IM ALIVE I'M ALIVE I'm here-- }}

#{{ i'm fine ! i just wasn't feeling great the brain fog blood problems cause you does Not make for good writing lmao }} #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ i'm cackling just picturing takaya at the end of days after realizing he had a crush on the protagonist like

well i'm glad i could find out i was gay before i die that might explain some thoughts i've had about jin too Oh well, thank god this is the end and i don't have to analyze this-- }}

#GHKDDS IM KIDDING but its KIND OF CANON AT THIS POINT #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #takaya sakaki #< i am putting this in his tag because its true

[revclver-jesus]

{{ me doing the ship tier meme but i just gently place all of takaya's ships on the highest tier regardless of all rational reason }}

#listen................... im not saying you should ship with this disaster bUT-- #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽

[revclver-jesus]

{{ Do you think the hype has died down in me, because it hasn't, it refuses, it lives in my head rent free, unfollow me now because this is all i'm going to talk about for the next 5--

I have replied to all my threads ok, let me talk to myself in the corner--

I really feel like people misremember a lot of Strega sometimes, which I cannot blame, its definitely like a game of telephone, fandom echo sort of effect. But people seem to remember Jin as being so much more subservient and more naive than he was. One of the things I look forward to is them really hammering in just how much on board he was with what team Strega was doing, that he's not the kind that was going to get convinced out of it like Chidori. Takaya and Jin were side by side in levels of intensity, they just have different priorities.

I mean-- I remember years back when one of my friends told me they totally forgot the scene where Jin takes Takaya's wrist and makes them walk off a bridge like- Me, local Strega obsessed person: That's my favorite part???fgdhksfd Cause its so fascinating that Jin was written to do that? Jin is the one to hold Takaya back-- even when he's visibly frustrated by the gesture, and then its Takaya that backs down!! And Jin is the one to give the speech, talks about the two of them as a single entity, declares their shared purpose and Takaya trusted them enough to fake-out their suicide without saying a word. Like, these two are on equal respect in each other's mind, but its so easy to just remember that Jin was the openly devotional one and Takaya was a cult leader. It requires so much reading between the lines to get these guys were actually close. In reload they really gotta convey what their dynamic is like more clearly so its more memorable to even people not paying these dorks any attention, and it looks like they're going to so!! i'm just sitting here kicking my feetsies }}

#BTW if I have missed your thread let me know! #✯ ✧ ✧ o.o.c. ☾ ✞ ☽ #takaya sakaki #✯ ✧ ✧ jin shirato. ☾ ✞ ☽ #persona 3 reload