#so like yknow. if you hate stuff so much just. ignore the canon established by literal in-game fiction

[tumblunni]

AH FUCK I REMEMBERED IT AGAIN I swear its like clockwork, i keep making this post like once a damn year

OKAY SO THIS SCENE

now i like i never actually cried at persona 4, its actually my least favourite persona game cos it has so much bigoted stuff you have to ignore to get to the actual plot. At least those sorts of moments were sidequest only in P3 and P5 BUT THE ANIME ADAPTATION I knooooowww that the anime has a load of flaws but like I think I’m the only one who preferred it to the game. or at least this ONE SINGLE EPISODE was great, and SO GREAT that it was better than the anime and the game combined! and I never cried at anything in the game but this one damn anime scene made me sob like a happy equivelant of P3′s ending scene sobs... and now i end up associating this one particular remix of the boss battle theme with that scene instead of the game and GAH i cant hear it without being hyped!!!

so yeah TO EXPLAIN THE CONTEXT FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVENT SEEN IT In the game: shadow mitsuo is a tough boss fight but has no emotional story stuff around it, also is not very climactic at all cos its obvious from the start that he’s a fakeout final boss In the anime: THE OPPOSITE OF ALL DAT In the game: protagonist has no dialogue and no canon personality In the anime: THEY GAVE HIM A DAMN GOOD ONE In the game: protagonist never gets a Shadow and thus never gets any doubts or fears or triumph over them which unlocks super extra power and makes you cry like a damn bitch In the anime: GUESS WHAT THEY ADDED

And FUCK it is SUCH a good plot and I am SO angry that it wasn’t in the game cos now I have to tell people to watch a terrible anime adaptation just to see this one uncharacteristically impossibly universally good bit that somehow snuck in! It’s so great because they establish Yu’s personality as ‘the comically serious guy’ and he’s just so much more loveable when he’s quiet but not silent, and only pipes up when he needs to break his own badass rep with a really silly comic relief moment. I will forever imagine his anime personality as canon, it makes the game so much better! And like once you’ve got so attatched to him you get the surprise awesomeness of him getting a Shadow episode, which you weren’t expecting cos its just Game Rules that the protagonist is always infallable and voiceless.

And I love how they pulled off that surprise, too! They show the gang about to fight Mitsuo before the opening credits, and then afterwards it seems like we’ve flashed forwards to after the fight. And like, it being a bad adaptation somehow makes it work even better?? It wouldn’t seem out of character for them to have skipped some minor fights in a montage sequence. And then the episode just continues, and you’re expecting that any second everyone will find out that Mitsuo wasn’t really the real villain, but instead it just keeps rolling into a happy ending?? And it just keeps going AFTERWARDS, and shows it all turn sour and scary and Yu has to face his demons And its so relateable what his troubles are! his biggest fear is losing his friends and finding out the people he cares about don’t care as much about him, or that he’s useless and could be easily replaced by someone better. His bad ending isn’t anything big or supernatural, it’s just the ordinary anxiety of finishing high school and wondering how long you’ll be able to keep in touch. And it works so well as a love letter to the game?? Cos you see him struggling to get the words out, you see him slowly becoming actually silent, and becoming actually superfluous in his own life. You see him fading into the background as everyone else leaves and nothing would even be different without him. if anything IS different, its them being HAPPIER without him! So its a deconstruction of his original gameplay limitations, and also a dark subversion of the game’s happy ending of everyone finishing high school, etc.

And then its just SO GOOD and SO CATHARTIC in the end HOLY FUCK Cos you find out they’re ACTUALLY STILL FIGHTING MITSUO And Yu is trapped inside an illusion of his own shadow and you never even noticed it happening! And then he has his big triumphant moment of facing himself and moving forward and you see his friends reach through the illusion world and pull him back to reality and then he unleashes THE MOST WELL COREOGRAPHED BEATDOWN IN ALL OF HISTORY God, this gives me the same sort of feels as Garnet vs Jasper in Steven Universe! Its a similar moment of a normally unflappable character being defeated, then coming back stronger after an emotional sequence and winning in a rematch that’s synced super well to an awesome song! (tho an instrumental here, not as cool as having relevant lyrics!) But MAN the fight is so fucking cool even with the anime’s sometimes terrible animation and tendancy to have the friend characters not actually do anything, lol. That’s still a problem here cos it’s unintentionally comical how they stop fighting and step back to let Yu deal the final blow, but I mean it works cos its A REALLY FUCKIN GREAT ONE, and they still contributed more than usual by holding bac mitsuo offscreen while Yu was trapped, yknow? BUT ANYWAY THE SCENE AND WHY ITS MY FAVOURITE THING EVER AND I REWATCH IT WHEN I’M DEPRESSED TO KILL ALL SADS Yu does an epic rolling thunder of Every Damn Move In His Moveset All One After Another In An Animation Train (Holy Fuck This Explains How Every Other Episode Had Zero Budget) And cos of how the magic works in this setting he gets to dramatically call out all the names to the beat of the music and the english voiceactor fucking nails the exact nuance of the original and I am SO HAPPY cos he barely got to say two words in the original game! its just Good. its just Really Good.

anyway have a link its probably not as cool out of context or maybe its not as cool if you dont relate intensely to anime Yu’s neuroses or have a dumb bunni brain that’s easily manipulated by Cool Musics And A Guy Yelling Ara Mitama but have it anyway and now i am gonna shut up about this until probably twelve months later when I remember it again

i cry evertiem

seriously man i know that feeling of like.. the triumph of realizing a certain negative thing you believed about yourself is wrong, or standing up to an abuser, or conquering some part of your depression, or just generally a triumph over self hate against all the odds! And I really wish that i could get an awesome theme tune and gloriously animated boss battle actually blowing up those negative feelings and then they never return. But I guess that just means that real life people are even more badass, cos we don’t get one big epiphany moment, we keep fighting and defeating all those self doubt boss monsters throughout our lives. I’m like twelve yu narukamis! :D

#blunni thoughts #video #tho lol it also kinda kindles a few self doubt feelings too #the whole embarassment of admitting a very flawed scene in a very flawed animated show gave you such personal tears #and knowing that probably not many other people had the same moment cos it was very personal to you and the state you were #in when you first saw that episode #but like yeah even if you cant understand why i felt so much about this dumb scene i just hope you #have similar things that make you feel the same way in your own life #and its good to get feels about silly animated stuff sometimes cos at least its a thing you can rewatch whenever #you need a pick me up!