When Does a Fake World Become Real Part 1

Major Spoilers for Persona 5 Royal

Would you leave the Matrix? 

What would your dream look like in the Infinite Tsukuyomi? Would you want to leave it? 

Would you ever want to leave a perfect world that you know to be an illusion in order to truly live in reality? 

If you answered yes to those questions then congratulations, we are of the same mind. A well crafted illusion, no matter how good it feels, surely can’t be worth more than actual reality. But then, why do we feel that way? Why do we feel the need to escape that which we know to be fake, even if it feels so much better than reality? I don’t know that I have a perfect answer for that, but with some help from Persona 5 Royal, I think we can take a crack at it.

Persona 5 Royal is the extended version of the incredible game Persona 5, adding a third semester to the game, assuming you meet certain criteria before reaching the original Persona 5 endgame. After defeating Yaldaboath and preventing the fusion of the cognitive realm and material world, Joker (The player) will suddenly find themselves in a strange version of the world. Here, all of the ills and problems they had just spent months dealing with…never existed. Coach Kamoshida and Madarame were never abusive, Wakaba Isshiki is alive, Kunikazu Okumura is a good father, and generally anything that had caused pain or suffering is simply gone.

You soon learn that this is the work of unassuming school therapist Takuto Maruki, who had awakened his persona Azathoth and had essentially remade the world to ensure everyone’s ideal world was created. You also learn that one of his early test cases of this power was young gymnast Kasumi Yoshizawa, who is, in reality, her sister Sumire Yoshizawa. As Sumire was overcome with guilt regarding Kasumi’s death, Maruki rewrote her cognition so that she would believe she was Kasumi, to the point where even if other people correctly called her Sumire, she would instead hear Kasumi. Maruki presents this as a kindness done, even as it completely overrode Sumire’s life with a near unbreakable delusion.

Throughout the third semester, Joker is given a choice: Allow this rewritten reality to become the true reality, or attempt to break free of Maruki’s illusory world and restore things to how they truly are. While you can technically choose to stay in this false world, to actually play out the game as written, you must choose to break free. So the question becomes: why? Why is this presented as, in my experience playing the game, the only correct option?

It all comes down to pain, and more importantly, the growth that comes from it. As you awaken your fellow Phantom Thieves from this illusory stupor, they remark on how, when immersed fully in this new world, they felt their friendship and connection with Joker weakening. After all, if none of the problems in the first section of the game had occurred, the Phantom Thieves would never have formed, and there would be no reason to have the relationships the group was built upon. None of them would have ever been forced to confront their true selves and awaken their Personas. They could simply coast, never having to concern themselves with discomfort or pain. 

It is in this realization that all of them decide to break free of the illusion. It is because they value the people they have become because of their hardships and failures. To take those away is to take their very self away. Humanity is built upon failure. We are constantly evolving, changing, growing, becoming better and more complete people, and we can only do that by failing, hurting, suffering, and eventually coming out the other side. 

Mind you, the other thieves do not choose to restore reality because they think they deserve pain. They choose it because the love they built in the wake of suffering was worth more than the superficial happiness they felt in the illusion. There’s a rather well-known quote from Critical Role character Caduceus Clay, played by Eldritch Horror Taliesin Jaffe: “Pain doesn’t make people. It’s love that makes people. The pain is inconsequential. It’s love that saves them.” It’s an idea I believe in wholeheartedly. The pain we endure is not what defines us, even if it is necessary for our growth. It is the love that other people extend to us in those moments, allowing us to heal, that makes us who we are. It is the love we extend ourselves, giving us the permission to grow and not simply wallow in the pain, that defines us.

None of this is to say you need to suffer immense pain to grow as a person. While the events of Persona 5 are truly traumatic and contain some horrific examples of abuse, it is important to remember that it is a story. It utilizes the extreme to articulate a point clearer than if it bowed to a more realistic world. The game is not saying that one has to endure the abuses that Ryuji and Ann suffered under Kamoshida, or those that Yusuke suffered under Madarame to become their best self. Ideally, no one should ever have to suffer the majority of the circumstances faced by the Phantom Thieves. There is a limit to how much pain we can actually take and still grow positively from. You don’t need to have eight counts of physical and emotional trauma to reach self-actualization, and honestly, it’ll probably hurt the process a lot more than it will help. 

What we need is the ability to fail and to hurt, and to grow back stronger and more confident in ourselves from it. You need to bomb on stage, write that shit draft, and have those relationships that just don’t work out. It is then, and often only then, that the love and the trust and the help that others can give you will be able to find you.

 In a strange way, it reminds me of watching football, or really any sport. The games you remember watching usually aren’t the blowouts and the dominant victories. They’re fun sure, but they’re not the kinds of games that define eras. No, it’s the comebacks, the nailbiters, the ones that could swing either way that stick in our brains forever. Sure it’s fun to watch Josh Allen run over the Dolphins again and again and again (No one talk to me about the second game this past year, it’s not real and can’t hurt me) but watching the Bills come back from down 15 in the last 7 minutes of the 4th against the Ravens? Exhilarating. There’s a reason we immortalize things like The Helmet Catch, the Comeback, or the Immaculate Reception. There’s a reason the city of Buffalo just went haywire for the Sabres finally making the playoffs after 14 years of failure. It’s lower stakes obviously, just sports at the end of the day, but the idea is the same. We must know failure and loss to truly ascend to the heights we are meant to reach, because without the lows to contrast, the successes mean so much less.

Taking away suffering is a noble, noble goal. Maruki is not like Kaguya Otsutsuki in Naruto or the Robotic Overlords in The Matrix, draining people’s lives and simply giving them a fantasy to distract them. He genuinely wants people to just be happier. But what he fails to consider is that to take away our ability to suffer and to fail is to take away the ability of love to save us. Maruki, in his quest to make everyone feel better, forgets that it is in the friction we experience, when life does not go our way and we must face discomfort, that we truly know what it is to be human. It is in the bonds we forge, the love we share, and the grace we extend to others and ourselves when things are at their lowest that we discover who we truly are.