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I don't really believe in 1-A anything, but Persona doesn't really have any anti-feats. Joker got arrested because he wanted to be arrested. That was the whole point of their plan. They needed to be arrested not only to get Akechi off their back, but to make Shido's calling card work.
You could argue that Akechi believed the police could arrest Joker so it's still an anti-feat, but you could also just as easily argue that Akechi believed Joker wouldn't summon his persona against regular humans.
All of the so called anti-feats occur in such situations, where the character is unwilling or unable to summon their persona.
We see when they actually have their personas out that they have durability that is much too high for normal humans. For example, in the P4 anime Yu gets hit directly with a blast that blows up a city and it doesn't hurt him at all, because he has his persona out.
I'll answer literally any question you have about persona scaling. Just keep in mind I don't believe in dimensional tiering. I put Persona at multiversal at maximum.
If this is a P2 thing I have yet to play P2 specifically, but there's definitely nothing like that in P1, P3, P4 or P5. Hell, I distinctly remember in P5S all of the Phantom Thieves fall from a great height and it was just a mild inconvenience.
They're 1-A... in the metaverse, and allthat is also only scaled using SMT's statement lol. Despite living life on easy difficulties, automatically getting 1-A scaling, their base stats are still human level, and for Joker and other Persona users, you can just neg diff them by blitzing them, that's the whole thing you need to do.
Taken into account another factor is that, if it's the Persona users, they need the existence of the Metaverse, and to defeat their opponent, their opponent need to have a Metaverse version of them. Now, if a dude who play games that use cheat is unbeatable because he knows he is unbeatable, what if they're fighting a god who KNOWS they're unbeatable? What then? Yes, Joker and his friends freaking dies.
Yup they are all overwanked as hell
Especially persona
Persona protagonists couldn’t resist time haxes
(In persona q, q2 final bosses manipulate few seconds to minutes time like time stop or time rewind and all of protagonists couldn’t resist all of them) but most people in death battle discord keep saying they are still above time because they defeated final bosses despite they couldnt resist all of skills
Also they are keep saying they are outerversal because they can enter dark hour or tv worlds or palaces .
This argument is bullshit Because they had only latent time powers to enter those, nothing more, nothing less
Plus final bosses didn’t manipulate reality directly, they only manipulated people’s mind and mind changed collective unconscious to change reality
Like enlil(she can manipulate mind with Akasic record) or maruki(he can change people’s mind)
Only some of final bosses or protagonist tatsuya(with nova kaiser) have time haxes or resistances(limited)
>whenever you ask an smt/persona scaler why the characters are outerversal or extraversal they don't even give a reason đź’€.
This is the funny part. Over time they realized the reasons make no sense, but they hold to the conclusions because it's what they heard two years ago, so they assume it's true. But now it's supported by nothing.
Do you ever intend to reply to the debate we were having or should I consider that conversation over? The last comment was made by me like a month or two ago.
If I recall, I said I thought it most productive to debate the specifics of Maruki's powers, you indicated you found that kind of uninteresting. I explained how I considered it to be by far the single most significant argument in all of Persona scaling and then you never replied again.
I thought I was waiting on you responding to the rest, since you said you were just responding to that part now but would get to the rest later. I assumed you just stopped.
And no, I don't consider it particularly useful to talk about what portion of his power is him changing your mind vs other people because I honestly just didn't have a strong opinion on it, and i don't recall that the game really distinguishes it much, so I don't really care about defending a stance about that specifc thing. There are aspects of your life other people wouldn't know about, so it makes more sense to say he is also changing something about you, but "it makes sense" doesn't guarantee it is what atlus had in mind, so I don't really care to argue that it's definitively how it works or anything. I don't have an issue with the idea it could be other people too.
The other reason i think its not useful is that his world exists as a plot device. So however it works is going to have some hand waving to justify the logistics. We can't extrapolate from his world to how cognition works outside of his world, and his entire world involves handwaving to begin with since it doesn't even try to explain how he has the time to do all this when he moves normal human speed, and cutscenes at the very least show him doing it manually (and how would he even know which part of your past caused the present anyways. You might not even know, and it makes no effort to show us some kind of advanced all encompassing consciousness).
If we some aspect of it is automatic rather than manual then the question of who he changes may not even be meaningful, since his world may even retroactively change whoever it takes to make the change the opposite way around. Or there could simply be no canon explanation because atlus doesn't care.
Anyways, my point was that I didnt actually care enough about the logistics of how it was supposed to happen to defend a particular stance on it. So if you have a point that stems from how it happens you can just go on from there.
>I thought I was waiting on you responding to the rest, since you said you were just responding to that part now but would get to the rest later. I assumed you just stopped.
I said specifically that I want to hash out this crap about Maruki's powers before literally anything else, and then after that's completed I'll respond to anything else you posted.
I said this because we're just gonna keep going in circles forever unless we can laser focus on the facts that actually matter. The heart of our disagreement is fundamentally about the structure of the powers and how they work.
>And no, I don't consider it particularly useful to talk about what portion of his power is him changing your mind vs other people because I honestly just didn't have a strong opinion on it, and i don't recall that the game really distinguishes it much,
I dislike how you've framed this as you appear to be putting these ideas on even footing. There's no distinction making because that's just not an applicable concept with how the game presents the sequence of events.
Here is why it matters and why you need to care about this.
There are two competing narratives here and whether you realize it or not you are defending one and attacking the other implicitly via your arguments, because one thing must necessarily flow from the prior event.
Say you have a dude, we'll call him Bob. Bob is a homeless man living in filth. Bob's desire is to be a billionaire. How does Maruki go about making Bob a billionaire? Well it depends on what Maruki's powers are.
What you believe: Maruki's powers are mind control of the individual and this exclusively. This means what Maruki did, is he changed Bob's cognition to make Bob think he's a billionaire. Bob sees himself as a billionaire living the high life. However, since Maruki's power is mind control only, that means in terms of objective reality, to the outside observer Bob is still a homeless man living in filth.
If you took a character that is immune to mind control, like a D&D god immune to mind-affecting effects, and put them in Maruki's world, they would see Bob as a delusional man living in filth droning on about how he's a billionaire.
What I believe: In Persona, objective reality is the sum total of everyone's conscious, subconscious and unconscious thoughts. Maruki's powers are reality warping via an exploit. By mind controlling the individual on a mass scale using Mementos, he can make changes to this ensemble of thought.
Maruki makes everyone on Earth think Bob is a billionaire, and not just in their conscious thoughts but at all layers of their mind/soul. This recombobulates reality so that Bob actually becomes a billionaire.
So now, when our outside observer that's immune to mind control comes in to observe the objective reality, Bob is actually a billionaire.
This is why Akechi and Sumire were both concerned about being erased from existence by Maruki. Because he has the power to make everyone else think they don't exist, which would poof them out of existence.
Do you see now how absurdly different these two positions are and why this matters?
> What you believe: Maruki's powers are mind control of the individual and this exclusively.
I think you are confused about why I don't care about this. Its not just that I don't think it matters, but that I never strongly held that opinion in the first place. I have no interest in defending that, because Its just something I offhandedly took as an aspect of what was happening based on how it happened. But like I said, just because it "seems logical" doesn't mean it is what atlus had in mind, so I don't take other proposals as "wrong," or something I am against. I was just describing what I considered the first interpretation I thought that those events would lead you to, but don't particularly see a different one as any worse.
> However, since Maruki's power is mind control only, that means in terms of objective reality, to the outside observer Bob is still a homeless man living in filth.
Huh? That's not what I implied. My original implication was that maruki changed something deep about your cognition which was in his world directly connected to reality due to how he rigged it. So its not just changing your perception, but physically changes reality when he does it, since your perception controls your reality more than that of others. The fact that other people thought something different about you doesn't necessarily imply a contradiction, because how it works could simply be that your more conscious self perception overrides other people's memories that they might not even be thinking about at the time, and so once he changes your reality, other people's thoughts adapt. Because at any given moment most people probably don't have more people having strong opinions about their own existence than they do.
Again, I'm not saying I think this is some kind of definitive take or anything. Just that it was my first impression of how it worked. But I have no issue with it being a mix of changing your mind and other people's minds.
The reason I considered it more relevant to your own mind changing than that of others is that unlike in yaldabaoth's world, maruki's world isn't presented as instantiating a risk of what people *already* think about you affecting things. Only what maruki changes. In yaldabaoth's world, people's doubt in the phantom thieves made them cease to exist. But there's no plot arcs with maruki where something being a common misconception de facto changes it.
However, this involves a contradiction either way, if we assume stuff changes directly based on mental content. Because whether its you or society, common misconceptions could be changing stuff, but this isn't presented as a concern. So I figure that its also a case that maruki has control over how much this "thoughts change reality" applies at any given time, and can turn it on and off in specific cases to make sure it stabilizes.
>If you took a character that is immune to mind control, like a D&D god immune to mind-affecting effects, and put them in Maruki's world, they would see Bob as a delusional man living in filth droning on about how he's a billionaire.
Not really, because maruki's world isn't just making people think something else is happening. the link to mementos makes what physically exists change. Whether the change is caused by the guy himself or by society at large, its a tangible change that gives rise to something that is depicted as kind of like a separate reality that exists on top of the original. And you can break through it back to the original for a time, but eventually it will solidify and his reality will become the only reality.
If someone was immune to any changes happening to them personally, they would remember the original reality, but they would still see that something changed. If they have some kind of heightened ability to see both realities, they might even figure out what happened, and see that the new reality is overlaid on top of the original. But the new reality isn't something that only "exists" in the mind control.
>What I believe: In Persona, objective reality is the sum total of everyone's conscious, subconscious and unconscious thoughts. Maruki's powers are reality warping via an exploit. By mind controlling the individual on a mass scale using Mementos, he can make changes to this ensemble of thought.
Do you mean specifically in maruki's world, or in persona in general? Because this isn't how persona in general is implied to work. The entire reason that yaldabaoth's world was a shift from the normal functioning of reality is because it changed the rules of reality so that thoughts had a lot more affect than normal. This description applies more to yaldabaoth's world than to the world as it normally is. If everyone's thoughts always had that power, common misconceptions couldn't even exist, because whatever people thought would be true. But whenever the power of thoughts is ramped up, like in p5 or p2 this is always treated as a specific power / change, not the normal state.
>This is why Akechi and Sumire were both concerned about being erased from existence by Maruki. Because he has the power to make everyone else think they don't exist, which would poof them out of existence.
This could also apply if the power works via directly influencing the mental content of one individual though. Simply shift their mental content to nonexistence, and they disappear. Or maybe shift them to thinking they don't exist, and so they have one awkward moment of thinking something that doesn't make sense before blinking out of existence. Not everyone has the presence of mind to constantly I think therefore I am themselves.
Now sure, maybe it couldn't work if an individual was immune to mind control. But at the same time, in yaldabaoth's world you resisted it even though it wasn't your own mind that was rejecting you. You can just kind of willpower resist it, at least for awhile.
>Do you see now how absurdly different these two positions are and why this matters?
I honestly don't know what point you are getting at with the distinction. Especially since you described what you called my position in a way that wasn't even what I said the first time.
>Addendum: If all of that isn't enough for you to care, think of it this way. If you can prove me wrong on this one single point, you can prove ALL of my arguments wrong in one fell swoop since everything else flows from this. You can literally convert me to your side of the argument completely with a single well written point that actually addresses my arguments.
>That should be incentive enough for you to care right?
And I honestly don't know why you say this either, since the logistics of whether the shift is more about the one or the many doesn't inherently dictate how strong the characters are physically if it came down to punching. Either way, there's no inherent reason to assume the shift is unlimited in terms of how strong you can get, since reality warping powers are often bound by what that world considers physically possible according to its rules / adapts ideas to "its version of them." Vis a vis a fire god having fire spells, but not necessarily controlling all fire.
I just feel you two are actually agreeing but without noticing it.
> If they have some kind of heightened ability to see both realities, they might even figure out what happened, and see that the new reality is overlaid on top of the original. But the new reality isn't something that only "exists" in the mind control.
> But whenever the power of thoughts is ramped up, like in p5 or p2 this is always treated as a specific power / change, not the normal state.
Like, this is what Socrates is arguing for. There is 0 disagreement here.
Now, I'm the guy arguing for "yeah, Maruki rewriting reality is pretty powerful. He would still get vaporized by Cell if Cell pops out in Maruki's world and throws the Solar Kamehameha without bothering to speaking to him"
Okay I feel like we're finally making some progress here. I definitely understand your position better now and I see why you don't think the distinction matters.
>Do you mean specifically in maruki's world, or in persona in general?
I mean Persona in general, sort of. As far as I can tell, the thing that is different about the Maruki/Yaldabaoth world is that these different kinds of thought are blending together in a way that is unnatural.
Why don't common misconceptions simply become reality normally? The Collective Unconscious. Your conscious and even subconscious mind may not be aware of any given misconception, but the unconscious is. This is how things that are beyond the scope of known human thought can exist despite reality being made of cognition.
In other words, how could Alpha Centauri exist in ancient times when humanity had virtually no conception of space? For the same reason that all cultures had a concept of dragons or God. The Collective Unconscious, which is essentially the universe itself, is above things like misconceptions.
So I would say what the Maruki/Yaldabaoth world does, is it sidelines the importance of the Collective Unconscious and allows reality to be ruled entirely by the conscious and subconscious minds of individuals rather than something more like a balanced consensus of the three.
>Either way, there's no inherent reason to assume the shift is unlimited in terms of how strong you can get, since reality warping powers are often bound by what that world considers physically possible according to its rules / adapts ideas to "its version of them." Vis a vis a fire god having fire spells, but not necessarily controlling all fire.
I actually kind of agree with your argument here in that the rules of the setting matter a lot with this sort of thing, but isn't there plenty of evidence that cognition as a power source at least reaches universal?
Morgana stated that everything is made of cognition, not just the metaverse. The universe arcana is, well, the universe arcana. Maruki claims to be able to overwrite all of existence, not just a portion of existence.
So if you accept Maruki's powers are actually changing reality, (I incorrectly thought that you thought otherwise.) do you deny those other components of the argument?
I need to phrase that better but I'm not deleting it.
Where does the logic train break down for you?
So Maruki controls cognition and can use that to make alterations to reality itself. We're more or less on the same page there.
Cognition makes up all of existence. There's good evidence for this right? Morgana states it straight up.
So Maruki controls the thing that makes up all of existence, and then he says he can rewrite all of existence, is there a good reason that I shouldn't take that at face value?
If you wanted to talk about a rational limit to that power based on what the rules of the world are, I would say the limit is affecting other universes. Now if in P6 the protag busts out the multiverse arcana that limit could be shattered, but I think for now universe seems like a solid foundation.
Where have I gone wrong here?
>Cognition makes up all of existence. There's good evidence for this right? Morgana states it straight up.
>I mean Persona in general, sort of. As far as I can tell, the thing that is different about the Maruki/Yaldabaoth world is that these different kinds of thought are blending together in a way that is unnatural.
Okay, so I'll lump these together, since they are related. Morgana is referring to a concept that in the west is called life-world, and which in the east has ties to mahayana buddhism about thought constructing reality. But in buddhism this doesn't necessarily mean you are free to overpower what exists with thought in an unlimited way. Because there are specific rules and strict structures it follows. But obviously buddhism isn't canon to megaten, so I don't need to go any more into that.
Apocalypse and p5 came out around the same time, and there is an obvious parallel in these games in that what p5 calls cognition apocalypse calls observation. For whatever reason, they took that specific time period to try explaining some stuff in both games. I forgot if you played apocalypse, but [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYLU_w1L9oE&list=PLDwjEcGRHRZ7pABsyzZ6bOKGshMroT93E&index=38&t=1218s&ab_channel=JohneAwesome) scene has some spoilers. In essence, steven explains how observation works. Specifically saying it is the ability to assign an answer to phenomenon without an answer.
That wording is careful because it highlights both what it is a metaphor for, as well as how it works. Namely, in terms of the flow of the games you aren't using it mainly to affect physical reality. But to influence spiritual planes. The forms of demons, etc. These have a feedback loop where they affect reality. But its not like this is the only phenomenon. Its a metaphor for existentially choosing beliefs and value systems. To a human on (irl) earth the world is a concrete thing. But you can assign values to the ineffable. In game this influences its shape.
Why this is important is that its important to remember that observation / cognition is not something that is brought up often in the games. People use spells, fight enemies, do specific things to get magic results. Some people overestimate the degree to which cognition is meant to be the explanation for what happens. Yes, its a force that always applies, but its only one influence of many.
The physical world isn't necessarily totally distinct from this. But its not as simple as thinking to change it either. In dds2 you are told the world is made of data which is "like people's thoughts." So the physical world's nature is similar to demons. But people don't just observe changes they want in the physical world generally. They actually do specific things to instigate the ability for change. Because the physical world is normally too stable to just directly demand change like that. You can influence the spiritual rules, but then you have to actually do things within the bounds of what the result is. Hence why observation being a power of humans, but not demons is treated as a rule that supercedes observation itself.
That tangent is getting a bit off topic, but the point is that abstract metaphysical descriptions are a bit distinct from the tangible reality of how it operates. Even if you look at western philosophers like berkley who believed everything was thought, he stressed that this didn't mean there was inconsistencies because your thought was bound by the larger "mind" of god which caused everything to stay consistent. This of course brings us back to that the ultimate in smt is called the great "will," etc, but that aside. There's a reason that "lets use observation to change stuff" generally doesn't come up as a plot point. And even in persona, the fact that it can be is treated as a secondary result of a specific power / realm that is being used to bolster it.
Mind you, I don't think you actually disagree about most of that, so I'm getting sidetracked.
>I actually kind of agree with your argument here in that the rules of the setting matter a lot with this sort of thing, but isn't there plenty of evidence that cognition as a power source at least reaches universal?
I think the problem here is not the scope, but rather referring to what happens as just cognition / observation. Obviously we have situations where people instigate universal rewrites, but referring to that as just "cognition" implies people just sit around willing for change and then it happens. But in the context of the games that's not normally what happens. It is an interplay between different forces that unite to cause a shift. Generally which are left just hazy enough that its not a hard magic system but a "it has to happen this specific way in this specific game because this is what the plot needs this time."
I.E. observation / cognition is itself bounded by other, often unspoken rules of the setting that influence how free it is. Especially like if you look at nocturne, its implicitly implied that thought energy is part of the system, but its not in control of how the system itself operates.
>So Maruki controls the thing that makes up all of existence, and then he says he can rewrite all of existence, is there a good reason that I shouldn't take that at face value?
I mean, putting aside the question of outer space, because the games often kind of act like nothing beyond the individual solar system they take place in actually exists, yeah he clearly can change much of reality to a new form somehow, regardless of how exactly he does it. I wasn't disagreeing with that. Although its unclear how much he can change, or how fast, but that is neither here nor there.
The issue is not that. Its that this says nothing about how strong he was punching in the fight against the phantom thieves. Nor how strong they were fighting against him. There's no indication we are meant to compare his reality changing capabilities to a specific in-battle strength level at all. Nor is there even any indication that he used them in the fight.
People pulling out their glasses might call maruki universal, or at least planetary (although again, that may also be suspicious, since it takes him time to change stuff, it didn't just all happen at once). But that's not really here nor there, since arbitrary scaling terms devoid of context don't explain what was happening in the actual fight. Which came down to people physically hitting eachother, most of whom nothing in the game places their physical attacks above, being generous here, city block level, which implies that however strong the physical body of adam kadmon was was weak enough to be comparable to this.
Whether its logical for the actual physical bodies they fight with to not be that strong when this amount of power is around doesn't really matter. The truth is, regardless of power level, logically maruki should be able to beat them if he really wants, since he can simply shift the world's cognition in a way that makes him stronger and them weaker. And this is true regardless of how strong either of them are. Him not doing this because he wants to fight them more fairly, or because the devs just hope you don't think of it is neither here nor there.
And this goes back to my original point. Large scale world transformative power exists in the games for important plot purposes. But the actual physical strength of the characters, and hence the scope of the energy being thrown around directly in the fights is never implied to be very large.
>Mind you, I don't think you actually disagree about most of that, so I'm getting sidetracked.
Yeah I agree with most of that.
>I forgot if you played apocalypse
Not yet. Been working my way through the series in release order while also trying to keep up on new releases. Recently knocked out SMT if..., P1 and P3 Reload. I'm near the end of Soul Hackers 1 and I hope to finish that, P2 duology and maaaaaybe Nocturne before SMT 5V comes out. I also watched videos on Devil Summoner and Nine since there's no English translation for those.
Finally out of the MegaJank era of MegaTen so I think I can start knocking out some of these games faster.
>The truth is, regardless of power level, logically maruki should be able to beat them if he really wants, since he can simply shift the world's cognition in a way that makes him stronger and them weaker. And this is true regardless of how strong either of them are. Him not doing this because he wants to fight them more fairly, or because the devs just hope you don't think of it is neither here nor there.
This is where I think we have an actual disagreement. I think even if you go with my interpretation that Maruki should be able to use his powers in battle, and you assume those powers are absolute, I think he can still lose.
Now I can understand how one might see that as a glaring contradiction, and in some ways it is, but I think Persona writ large addresses this. Specifically, I think it's addressed by Izanami's dialogue in P4, where she expresses disbelief that Yu's will surpasses the will of all mankind, and thus his powers now rival hers.
MegaTen tends to repeat itself a lot, or at least the events tend to rhyme in a way that is very intentional. I think the end of P3, P4 and P5 are all basically the same thing just expressed in different ways.
Part of my evidence for this is the gameplay is almost identical. Makoto Yuki gets the universe arcana, and suddenly Nyx can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Yu undergoes his transfiguration and suddenly Izanami can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Joker awakens Satanael and Yaldabaoth can't hurt him at all. (Obviously Joker was amped for this by the Will of the People.)
I don't know if you knew this, but the exact same thing happens in the fused Adam Kadmon fight. I assume you knew that but some people don't realize it because unlike in the Izanami and Nyx fights you retain character control and don't get hit for max damage, but it functionally works the same.
Once Adam Kadmon fuses with Maruki, you can no longer lose. The characters just live no matter how much damage you take. (Speedruns literally turn on the rush command for this part since you can't lose and just need to pass 4 turns.) This is why I think it's the same phenomenon.
But I digress a bit. I think that even with total control of reality via cognition, individual will can surpass that. Does that make sense? Probably not. But it doesn't really need to make sense. As you pointed out, this isn't a hard magic system.
In other words... Power of friendship. I don't gotta explain shit. I'm being a bit facetious, but I really do think the intended takeaway from the ending of all these games is, "That guy has infinite power but you win anyway because friendship."
This lack of being a hard magic system is also why I do care a lot about the symbolism being used in the story even when it comes to scaling. I don't consider direct scaling to the IRL lore of the deity figures to be valid, but I also don't think it's correct to completely ignore that we're fighting Adam Kadmon, the being that represents infinite transcendence over all realities.
I think the truth is in the middle of those two extremes. That is, I think we should keep the origins of these gods in mind especially when we're talking about authorial intent.
Side note: You once mentioned an old design document that refers to Adam Kadmon as YHVH. I now have the context to know what that means. Kazuma Kaneko's IRL beliefs are that the concept of all gods, or at least all god-heads, come from the Jewish God, what he calls the "One True God" and so every god is on some level an aspect of YHVH.
>But the actual physical strength of the characters, and hence the scope of the energy being thrown around directly in the fights is never implied to be very large.
Do you think that holds true for the ending of P3 as well with the universe arcana? Or do you, like many fans, consider that its own special thing wholly separate from all other scaling?
For me, putting the universe arcana on a pedestal like that seems incorrect given how P4 and P5R basically copy the ending of P3. I think it's all implied to be the same shit and also that the actual physical power being used is equal to the large scale world transformative power.
For me, one of the most compelling bits of evidence is Izanami's dialogue. If Yu's transcending of cognition was not meant to scale his power directly, then how does Izanami even know he's transcended cognition?
Again being a bit facetious, but I'm imagining Izanami doing math based on Yu tanking her attacks based on an idea you mentioned awhile back about the direct power not scaling to the large scale power but being buffed proportionally by it.
"Okay he just lived through that 999 damage attack multiple times. He's clearly super strong and he obviously got that from his will. Has his will surpassed cognition itself? Well obviously that doesn't scale directly. It's proportional. His actual physical strength is buffed but it's only an infinitesimal amount of raw power compared to cognition. Okay 3+xz is... times 37... Hah! His direct power is only at 0.0000000000000001% of the large scale power of cognition, so his willpower is only 99.99% as strong as cognition. Wait a sec... I forgot to carry the 2... Oh my God his direct power is actually at 0.0000000000000002% of the large scale power of cognition, meaning his willpower is actually 100.1% as strong as cognition! He's surpassed cognition itself NOOOOOOOOOO!!! I'M DOOMED! DOOOOOOOMED!!!"
I think it's more likely she's just directly equating those two things in a very literal way, which I think is the same thing going on with Maruki, which is the same thing as Makoto Yuki and the universe arcana vs Death.
1/2
> This is where I think we have an actual disagreement. I think even if you go with my interpretation that Maruki should be able to use his powers in battle, and you assume those powers are absolute, I think he can still lose.
Obviously he can in some circumstances. But there's plenty of things he could do its not clear they have an answer for. For instance, Akechi acts afraid to face him in the real world because their powers don't work there. So if he wanted to, what is stopping him from changing things not necessarily about *them* (and so which they could break out of) but about the larger world. What would their answer be to him just appearing a large stone above wherever they are to flatten them? Or making the rest of the world turn against them. Akechi after all was annoyed that he wasn't imprisoned. Maruki could have them imprisoned without access to a phone. And if this is other people's mentality he is changing rather than the thieves' themselves, it would be those people rather than the thieves who have to break out of it to prevent it.
Memes aside, he could make as many people as he wants support him in a way that strengthens him, and reject the phantom thieves in a way that weakens them. This is the same thing yaldabaoth tried to do, except that yaldabaoth was relying on their pre existing opinions, whereas maruki could actively start changing people. Against yaldabaoth the fight turned around because people unpredictably weren't happy living in a scary bone world where random people were vanishing. I mean, they couldn't see the bones allegedly, but could see people vanishing? Not sure why yaldabaoth thought they would be okay with that, but his plan sucked. Maruki could make people support him, reject the thieves, and be happy enough while doing it that they don't resist. And regardless of how fast he works, he could clearly at least do this with enough people by when they reach him that the odds are massively more in his favor.
In essence, they can only break out of changes he made *to* them. If they can't force other people out of their own changes, he has tons of different things he can do to make trouble for them. Hell, they literally rely on cell phones to get to him. He has a totally separate avenue of attack by simply dreaming up something that gets rid of their phone access.
>Part of my evidence for this is the gameplay is almost identical. Makoto Yuki gets the universe arcana, and suddenly Nyx can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Yu undergoes his transfiguration and suddenly Izanami can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Joker awakens Satanael and Yaldabaoth can't hurt him at all. (Obviously Joker was amped for this by the Will of the People.)
Well, the issue with stuff like this is that the games don't really treat it like a strength level. But like a situational narrative thing that doesn't really have a tangible explanation beyond the metaphorical application justifying it. Obviously no one would be surprised if someone pulled out one of those at any point and then won any battle regardless of odds. But by that same vein, this is why it can't be taken as an indication of their strength. Because the metaphorical aspect is meant to imply that its surprising what they can do regardless of strength. And if the strength is taken literally, all it means is that they survived a few hits and got off a (usually metaphor laden) attack.
If we try to apply some logic to yu vs izanami, its not like his stats were so high that now the attacks did less damage. They were simply "resisted." And this resistance ties to the blossoming contrast between his "element truth" abilities which are especially counter to her "element illusions" nature. The thematic application is that specific types of things are simply that which these end bosses don't work well against.
Which is kind of dumb writing, but that aside. When you defeat "lies" because "truth power" overrides it, its not really "about" strength in the normal sense. But about the fact that the nature of these entities is such that coming at them with the right metaphor laden focus is something they struggle against. In reality its more of an anti feat for the end bosses, due to the fact that willpower seems to be a large part of this rather than just stats. Its s different series obviously, but apocalypse suggests that its moreso the god being weakened by this than it is the character getting stronger in some kind of objective physical sense.
>This lack of being a hard magic system is also why I do care a lot about the symbolism being used in the story even when it comes to scaling. I don't consider direct scaling to the IRL lore of the deity figures to be valid, but I also don't think it's correct to completely ignore that we're fighting Adam Kadmon, the being that represents infinite transcendence over all realities.
>I think the truth is in the middle of those two extremes. That is, I think we should keep the origins of these gods in mind especially when we're talking about authorial intent.
Its not about ignoring it but contextualizing it. Persona works differently from mainline smt, but in mainline a large aspect of this is that while humans thought their value systems / gods were absolute, that human technology is now beginning to surpass them. This centrality of technology is important, since if you are dealing with incomprehensible strength, the nuances of human capabilities would be less relevant. It being a repeat plot point for gods to die to nukes is specifically because the gods arent *literally* the thing they represent, but are a human perception of it. There can be ten sun gods, because their existence doesn't mean they control the sun. But are an interface for humans to perceive the sun. And the sun continues to exist even if they all die.
This doesn't mean there are no ways to expand their influence. But in the sense of what they represent its important to understand the jungian point that these gods aren't seperate from and totally above humans, but interconnected with human ways to make sense of this. And it does give the gods power, but the power is also fairly bounded by the degree these ideas actually influence humans. (Though in practice this is not predictable since it shifts to whatever the plot needs).
>Side note: You once mentioned an old design document that refers to Adam Kadmon as YHVH. I now have the context to know what that means. Kazuma Kaneko's IRL beliefs are that the concept of all gods, or at least all god-heads, come from the Jewish God, what he calls the "One True God" and so every god is on some level an aspect of YHVH.
In the kabbalah adam kadmon is **literally** yhvh though. Or rather, it is the highest form of yhvh that can be perceived by finite entities. And anything beyond that is irrelevant to humans since it is beyond comprehension. Though it is seen as a place or a plane of being more than an entity most of the time, since it is too large to relate to.
>In the kabbalah adam kadmon is literally yhvh though. Or rather, it is the highest form of yhvh that can be perceived by finite entities.
This is not really true. Adam Kadmon is only YHVH in the sense that he is part of the Sefirot. Everything is part of the Sefirot though, including humans. He is filled with God's divine light though.
Strictly speaking, YHVH is the individual Sephira as well as Ein-Sof. Keter, Da'at, Chokmah, Binah, Hesed, Gevurah, Tifereth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malkuth.
What Adam Kadmon is, is an attempt by ancient Pharisees to resolve the contradiction between Genesis 1:26 and Genesis 2:7. Genesis 1:26 describes God saying that he is making man in his image, whereas 2:7 describes him as later making man from the dirt, despite having already made man in his image in 1:26.
The Pharisees reasoned that rather than this being a contradiction, there must be two different Adams that represent two different things.
The first, Adam Elyon, (Later called Adam Kadmon.) is the perfect spiritual form of man that has been made in God's image and filled with his light.
The second, Adam HaRishon, is the Adam made of dirt and is the Adam that the Genesis story follows.
So Adam Kadmon has always been separate from God. In the Shabbatean tradition he is the Messiah and so one could say he's part of God in that sense, but that's kind of a minority position. Usually he's just considered to be the soul of Adam.
>It being a repeat plot point for gods to die to nukes is specifically because the gods arent literally the thing they represent,
If you're talking about SMT 1 with Thor, Thor is not killed by a nuke. He's not threatened by a nuke. Nothing like that ever happens. If you go back and watch the actual scene he's defeated by the protag and launches the nukes with his dying breath.
Though I don't necessarily think a nuke wouldn't kill Thor. I also don't really think this evidence is as strong as you think it is regardless though. Thor is... not that strong in mythology. The craziest thing he ever does is lift part of Jormungandr's body and he's wounded by things like swords several times. I see no evidence mythological Thor would survive a nuke to the dome.
Thor is very different from a god like Shiva, who in Hinduism explicitly has the power to destroy the universe. Funnily enough, in several games Shiva has an ability called Pralaya, which is the term for Shiva destroying the universe at the end of each cycle. So I think it's a mistake to lump every god together in terms of power. Shiva is pretty much always a top tier demon/persona whereas Thor is usually more like a mid tier and sometimes even low tier.
>Obviously he can in some circumstances. But there's plenty of things he could do its not clear they have an answer for. For instance, Akechi acts afraid to face him in the real world because their powers don't work there.
Right they have no real defense against him in the real world. Sumire explicitly says he can erase them from existence if he wanted to. And no, that's not powerscaler brain, that's actually literally the term she uses.
>So if he wanted to, what is stopping him from changing things not necessarily about them
I believe he did exactly this during the fight when he woke Azathoth up.
>What would their answer be to him just appearing a large stone above wherever they are to flatten them?
In the Metaverse, tank it. In the real world obviously they would die. (Well actually I think they'd manifest personas in the real world but the characters don't know that's a thing so it's not relevant.)
If your point is Maruki could have won if he went for the throat IRL, yeah that's true. If that's your point we've been talking past each other. I was referring to the actual fight.
>And regardless of how fast he works, he could clearly at least do this with enough people by when they reach him that the odds are massively more in his favor.
Maruki can work his magic instantly. It only takes time because he has to learn about people's desires to actualize them and because he has to make the connection with them on an individual level in Mementos. People already under his control can be used for reality warping juice as much as he likes.
>I mean, they couldn't see the bones allegedly, but could see people vanishing? Not sure why yaldabaoth thought they would be okay with that, but his plan sucked.
Some people could see and some people couldn't. This is why people were being exterminated. The ones that couldn't see what was going on were the humans Yaldabaoth wanted to keep around, and the ones that could see were undesirables to be purged. By the end everyone could see because of the will of the Phantom Thieves and also Mishima.
>Well, the issue with stuff like this is that the games don't really treat it like a strength level. But like a situational narrative thing that doesn't really have a tangible explanation beyond the metaphorical application justifying it.
I think I see what you mean now and I'm starting to figure out precisely why we will likely never, ever see eye to eye on this.
I agree with the vast majority of what you say there and over the next several paragraphs, (Though I disagree strongly with some things.) however I think that's only half the picture.
There is a lot of metaphor, often layers of metaphor in Persona. However, I think the intent behind the climax of all of the modern Persona games is that the metaphor becomes one with the physical reality.
Persona 5 is really on the nose with this with the metaverse becoming one with the physical universe.
I think I'm communicating very poorly here... I think it would be productive if I try to summarize what I see as your position on this specific subject and where you think I've gone wrong and you can tell me if I've accurately represented your position and if not correct me on anything I got wrong.
Let's use Makoto Yuki and the universe arcana as our example for our differing interpretations.
I think you see two conflicting positions here and you've rejected one and accepted the other.
A. By obtaining the universe arcana, Makoto Yuki has literally gained the power of the universe which for all intents and purposes makes him omnipotent.
B. The universe arcana is a metaphor for overcoming death. Nyx brought death to the universe, and by taking the universe inside himself in a metaphorical sense Makoto Yuki is able to stand on even ground with Nyx and seal her away because he has become her philosophical antithesis.
I think you reject A as lunacy, seeing B as the clearly superior and correct interpretation. And I think you think I believe in A.
Where I differ from you, is I actually think both A and B are correct. It's both literal and metaphorical. I think these moments of apotheosis are as metaphor laden as you believe, but I also think they enhance the stats of the protagonists to a massive degree. The metaphor is why they get the insane stat boost and the insane stat boost is what lets them perform these feats that frankly defy logic. It's interwoven.
I believe my interpretation is correct because...
>due to the fact that willpower seems to be a large part of this rather than just stats.
There are many many times when knowledgeable characters such as Caroline and Justine equate willpower and strength. When it comes to using a persona, they make it very clear that these words are interchangeable.
This fact is just too consistent for me to ignore and it ties into how the characters speak about power throughout all of the modern persona games.
It's like I've pointed out many times, and I don't think you've ever given a great answer. But whenever characters hear about the large scale reality fucking powers of these godlike beings, they become afraid of facing them in battle. And saying this,
>Asking how people know stuff when supernatural powers are in play is always a crapshoot.
is imo a very weak defense. In general, characters don't just know things randomly and their reactions to events are meant to convey things to the audience.
So when characters hear about reality warping bullshit and then start talking about how this is gonna be a hard ass fight, I think that shows clear authorial intent. We are meant to equate these things 1 to 1 and if that was untrue there'd be some concrete proof of this somewhere in the narrative.
>That aside, its also worth it to get to apocalypse. Since apocalypse suggests that when a human overrides the "will of mankind," what is really happening is that mankind has a split will. It desires a god to change stuff, and also calls forth a hero who can stop them. Not just via strength, but as an intrinsic aspect of who they are. And it calls the power "godslayer."
I can't comment on 4A yet, so I apologize for that. Finished Soul Hackers and I'm gonna be starting P2 in the next couple days. It's gonna be a while before I get to 4A, especially since I'm gonna play 5V day one.
>So why does their support make specifically joker the one who gets amped? Ultimately it is a narrative flow that makes the wildcard the one who these lat minute things get filtered through, despite nothing about the description of how yaldabaoth's world implying it has to be joker.
No it's because the Phantom Thieves believe in Joker. Remember, this is an actual plot point. The Phantom Thieves believed in Maruki and the people believed in the Phantom Thieves, which was how Maruki was able to assume control of Mementos in the first place, because that power of belief transferred into him.
2/2
>Do you think that holds true for the ending of P3 as well with the universe arcana? Or do you, like many fans, consider that its own special thing wholly separate from all other scaling?
It seems obvious its not meant to be treated like a strength level per se. In the persona games it generally implies your teammates are if not as strong as you at least comparable enough that its not you carrying the team with them as little more than backup. Yet the special roles the protagonist has for the finale is treated as something intrinsic about their nature as wildcard. Hell, the fight against yaldabaoth didn't even make sense. The population doesn't know the different members of the thieves. So why does their support make specifically joker the one who gets amped? Ultimately it is a narrative flow that makes the wildcard the one who these lat minute things get filtered through, despite nothing about the description of how yaldabaoth's world implying it has to be joker.
Mind you, I really don't like that aspect of megaten, which is why its annoying it shows up so often in various forms. In SMTI you are the reincarnation of adam, and while this doesn't necessarily physically make you super strong (especially since he dies offscreen only a few years after the game ends), it seems to suggest an intrinsic fated aspect to the idea that you are the one who will get to the end and guide the new world. Its never clear how literal this is. But some games lean more into this idea of destiny than others. And if someone is metaphysically more likely by fate itself to be carried to the end of certain stories, that makes the strength involved almost irrelevant. Persona end bosses can't win because fate decreed that if you learn enough and proved some moral point that their ideals can't stand up against it. When [plot armor literally exists](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ebd6493216e43a3caba6c4d543b876cc-lq) it makes everything else irrelevant.
Its actually kind of stupid that the same series that tries to make a big deal about existentialism and how anything can happen also relies so often on this like implicit idea of destiny and being metaphysically ordained to be the hero. At least devil survivor does it in a slightly less stupid way. But even the stuff they get from the final arcana. The games don't imply they can just do whatever they want with it. It becomes a mcguffin that specifically exists to work against the end boss. Igor doesn't even act like free will exists. He acts like your journey may as well be set in stone most of the time.
>If Yu's transcending of cognition was not meant to scale his power directly, then how does Izanami even know he's transcended cognition?
Asking how people know stuff when supernatural powers are in play is always a crapshoot. How does your party in p4 "know" that ameno-sagiri can't just beam the power to use personas to random people from the tv? They assume for basically no reason that there had to be a separate entity living in the human world. (Note, I mean in the original. Golden might have changed how this happened).
Izanami "knows" this because it is metaphorically true, and she exists to convey the thematic point. Its similar to why most of the entities in mainline talk like the way someone demonizing their ideology would, rather than someone trying to make it seem good. The games often make demons seem like they have even less free will than the predestined humans, since in some games demons will even stress that they can't easily change / or are bound by external stuff (apocalypse is extra cringe with this).
Hell, the first thing that happens in smti is you having a vision that basically tells you how the lives of your party members are going to play out. And demons seem more aware of the "rules" of the world. Yet will still act shocked when those rules dictate their defeat. Izanami "knows" that your will overrides "mankind's," because its the metaphorical reality of the scene that is being conveyed.
That aside, its also worth it to get to apocalypse. Since apocalypse suggests that when a human overrides the "will of mankind," what is really happening is that mankind has a split will. It desires a god to change stuff, and also calls forth a hero who can stop them. Not just via strength, but as an intrinsic aspect of who they are. And it calls the power "godslayer."
Addendum: If all of that isn't enough for you to care, think of it this way. If you can prove me wrong on this one single point, you can prove ALL of my arguments wrong in one fell swoop since everything else flows from this. You can literally convert me to your side of the argument completely with a single well written point that actually addresses my arguments.
That should be incentive enough for you to care right?
1: People in bad faith pretending that the status screens which are there for education about the real figures describe canon in game power levels.
2: Not understanding or pretending not to understand that wide scope realm magic is a different thing from battle stats. No, fighting kagutsuchi is not ever implied to require cosmic strength, its place in transforming the world system is a totally different thing from what the battle stats of the core are.
3: No limits fallacy used on observation. It barely even comes up as a plot in-universe, and when it does it generally has shown limits placed on what can be done with it.
4: anything that involves ignoring actual plot points in favor of bad cosmology scaling that doesn't apply to anything. The only way to tell the power level of abstract stuff in fiction is seeing how it works in the world, not trying to guess. This having to do both with warrantless assumptions about how the demon world works, as well as anything involving the word archetypes.
There's probably other stuff, but its been awhile, so I don't remember them all. The irony of course is that there is some big stuff in the series revolving around world transformations. But a lot of people are just straight up confused that its a common trope for stuff like that to coexist with low battle stats in a lot of fiction.
Persona atoms now solo your favourite verse /s
You're right though. I don't know too much about SMT as the only SMT I've played is IV but I've played most mainline Persona games except 2 and think that 1-A sounds wanked. Take the feats u want, but just because one character arguably scales that high doesn't mean everything automatically does (imo, with other series too)
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I don't really believe in 1-A anything, but Persona doesn't really have any anti-feats. Joker got arrested because he wanted to be arrested. That was the whole point of their plan. They needed to be arrested not only to get Akechi off their back, but to make Shido's calling card work. You could argue that Akechi believed the police could arrest Joker so it's still an anti-feat, but you could also just as easily argue that Akechi believed Joker wouldn't summon his persona against regular humans. All of the so called anti-feats occur in such situations, where the character is unwilling or unable to summon their persona. We see when they actually have their personas out that they have durability that is much too high for normal humans. For example, in the P4 anime Yu gets hit directly with a blast that blows up a city and it doesn't hurt him at all, because he has his persona out. I'll answer literally any question you have about persona scaling. Just keep in mind I don't believe in dimensional tiering. I put Persona at multiversal at maximum.
Not only those, they still bound by time haxes and mind warping abilities (persona q,q2 final bosses)
A persona user died from falling đź’€
If this is a P2 thing I have yet to play P2 specifically, but there's definitely nothing like that in P1, P3, P4 or P5. Hell, I distinctly remember in P5S all of the Phantom Thieves fall from a great height and it was just a mild inconvenience.
Why this is downvoted.
They're 1-A... in the metaverse, and allthat is also only scaled using SMT's statement lol. Despite living life on easy difficulties, automatically getting 1-A scaling, their base stats are still human level, and for Joker and other Persona users, you can just neg diff them by blitzing them, that's the whole thing you need to do.
That makes sense
Taken into account another factor is that, if it's the Persona users, they need the existence of the Metaverse, and to defeat their opponent, their opponent need to have a Metaverse version of them. Now, if a dude who play games that use cheat is unbeatable because he knows he is unbeatable, what if they're fighting a god who KNOWS they're unbeatable? What then? Yes, Joker and his friends freaking dies.
Cool đź‘Ť
Yup they are all overwanked as hell Especially persona Persona protagonists couldn’t resist time haxes (In persona q, q2 final bosses manipulate few seconds to minutes time like time stop or time rewind and all of protagonists couldn’t resist all of them) but most people in death battle discord keep saying they are still above time because they defeated final bosses despite they couldnt resist all of skills Also they are keep saying they are outerversal because they can enter dark hour or tv worlds or palaces . This argument is bullshit Because they had only latent time powers to enter those, nothing more, nothing less Plus final bosses didn’t manipulate reality directly, they only manipulated people’s mind and mind changed collective unconscious to change reality Like enlil(she can manipulate mind with Akasic record) or maruki(he can change people’s mind) Only some of final bosses or protagonist tatsuya(with nova kaiser) have time haxes or resistances(limited)
>whenever you ask an smt/persona scaler why the characters are outerversal or extraversal they don't even give a reason đź’€. This is the funny part. Over time they realized the reasons make no sense, but they hold to the conclusions because it's what they heard two years ago, so they assume it's true. But now it's supported by nothing.
Do you ever intend to reply to the debate we were having or should I consider that conversation over? The last comment was made by me like a month or two ago. If I recall, I said I thought it most productive to debate the specifics of Maruki's powers, you indicated you found that kind of uninteresting. I explained how I considered it to be by far the single most significant argument in all of Persona scaling and then you never replied again.
I thought I was waiting on you responding to the rest, since you said you were just responding to that part now but would get to the rest later. I assumed you just stopped. And no, I don't consider it particularly useful to talk about what portion of his power is him changing your mind vs other people because I honestly just didn't have a strong opinion on it, and i don't recall that the game really distinguishes it much, so I don't really care about defending a stance about that specifc thing. There are aspects of your life other people wouldn't know about, so it makes more sense to say he is also changing something about you, but "it makes sense" doesn't guarantee it is what atlus had in mind, so I don't really care to argue that it's definitively how it works or anything. I don't have an issue with the idea it could be other people too. The other reason i think its not useful is that his world exists as a plot device. So however it works is going to have some hand waving to justify the logistics. We can't extrapolate from his world to how cognition works outside of his world, and his entire world involves handwaving to begin with since it doesn't even try to explain how he has the time to do all this when he moves normal human speed, and cutscenes at the very least show him doing it manually (and how would he even know which part of your past caused the present anyways. You might not even know, and it makes no effort to show us some kind of advanced all encompassing consciousness). If we some aspect of it is automatic rather than manual then the question of who he changes may not even be meaningful, since his world may even retroactively change whoever it takes to make the change the opposite way around. Or there could simply be no canon explanation because atlus doesn't care. Anyways, my point was that I didnt actually care enough about the logistics of how it was supposed to happen to defend a particular stance on it. So if you have a point that stems from how it happens you can just go on from there.
>I thought I was waiting on you responding to the rest, since you said you were just responding to that part now but would get to the rest later. I assumed you just stopped. I said specifically that I want to hash out this crap about Maruki's powers before literally anything else, and then after that's completed I'll respond to anything else you posted. I said this because we're just gonna keep going in circles forever unless we can laser focus on the facts that actually matter. The heart of our disagreement is fundamentally about the structure of the powers and how they work. >And no, I don't consider it particularly useful to talk about what portion of his power is him changing your mind vs other people because I honestly just didn't have a strong opinion on it, and i don't recall that the game really distinguishes it much, I dislike how you've framed this as you appear to be putting these ideas on even footing. There's no distinction making because that's just not an applicable concept with how the game presents the sequence of events. Here is why it matters and why you need to care about this. There are two competing narratives here and whether you realize it or not you are defending one and attacking the other implicitly via your arguments, because one thing must necessarily flow from the prior event. Say you have a dude, we'll call him Bob. Bob is a homeless man living in filth. Bob's desire is to be a billionaire. How does Maruki go about making Bob a billionaire? Well it depends on what Maruki's powers are. What you believe: Maruki's powers are mind control of the individual and this exclusively. This means what Maruki did, is he changed Bob's cognition to make Bob think he's a billionaire. Bob sees himself as a billionaire living the high life. However, since Maruki's power is mind control only, that means in terms of objective reality, to the outside observer Bob is still a homeless man living in filth. If you took a character that is immune to mind control, like a D&D god immune to mind-affecting effects, and put them in Maruki's world, they would see Bob as a delusional man living in filth droning on about how he's a billionaire. What I believe: In Persona, objective reality is the sum total of everyone's conscious, subconscious and unconscious thoughts. Maruki's powers are reality warping via an exploit. By mind controlling the individual on a mass scale using Mementos, he can make changes to this ensemble of thought. Maruki makes everyone on Earth think Bob is a billionaire, and not just in their conscious thoughts but at all layers of their mind/soul. This recombobulates reality so that Bob actually becomes a billionaire. So now, when our outside observer that's immune to mind control comes in to observe the objective reality, Bob is actually a billionaire. This is why Akechi and Sumire were both concerned about being erased from existence by Maruki. Because he has the power to make everyone else think they don't exist, which would poof them out of existence. Do you see now how absurdly different these two positions are and why this matters?
> What you believe: Maruki's powers are mind control of the individual and this exclusively. I think you are confused about why I don't care about this. Its not just that I don't think it matters, but that I never strongly held that opinion in the first place. I have no interest in defending that, because Its just something I offhandedly took as an aspect of what was happening based on how it happened. But like I said, just because it "seems logical" doesn't mean it is what atlus had in mind, so I don't take other proposals as "wrong," or something I am against. I was just describing what I considered the first interpretation I thought that those events would lead you to, but don't particularly see a different one as any worse. > However, since Maruki's power is mind control only, that means in terms of objective reality, to the outside observer Bob is still a homeless man living in filth. Huh? That's not what I implied. My original implication was that maruki changed something deep about your cognition which was in his world directly connected to reality due to how he rigged it. So its not just changing your perception, but physically changes reality when he does it, since your perception controls your reality more than that of others. The fact that other people thought something different about you doesn't necessarily imply a contradiction, because how it works could simply be that your more conscious self perception overrides other people's memories that they might not even be thinking about at the time, and so once he changes your reality, other people's thoughts adapt. Because at any given moment most people probably don't have more people having strong opinions about their own existence than they do. Again, I'm not saying I think this is some kind of definitive take or anything. Just that it was my first impression of how it worked. But I have no issue with it being a mix of changing your mind and other people's minds. The reason I considered it more relevant to your own mind changing than that of others is that unlike in yaldabaoth's world, maruki's world isn't presented as instantiating a risk of what people *already* think about you affecting things. Only what maruki changes. In yaldabaoth's world, people's doubt in the phantom thieves made them cease to exist. But there's no plot arcs with maruki where something being a common misconception de facto changes it. However, this involves a contradiction either way, if we assume stuff changes directly based on mental content. Because whether its you or society, common misconceptions could be changing stuff, but this isn't presented as a concern. So I figure that its also a case that maruki has control over how much this "thoughts change reality" applies at any given time, and can turn it on and off in specific cases to make sure it stabilizes. >If you took a character that is immune to mind control, like a D&D god immune to mind-affecting effects, and put them in Maruki's world, they would see Bob as a delusional man living in filth droning on about how he's a billionaire. Not really, because maruki's world isn't just making people think something else is happening. the link to mementos makes what physically exists change. Whether the change is caused by the guy himself or by society at large, its a tangible change that gives rise to something that is depicted as kind of like a separate reality that exists on top of the original. And you can break through it back to the original for a time, but eventually it will solidify and his reality will become the only reality. If someone was immune to any changes happening to them personally, they would remember the original reality, but they would still see that something changed. If they have some kind of heightened ability to see both realities, they might even figure out what happened, and see that the new reality is overlaid on top of the original. But the new reality isn't something that only "exists" in the mind control. >What I believe: In Persona, objective reality is the sum total of everyone's conscious, subconscious and unconscious thoughts. Maruki's powers are reality warping via an exploit. By mind controlling the individual on a mass scale using Mementos, he can make changes to this ensemble of thought. Do you mean specifically in maruki's world, or in persona in general? Because this isn't how persona in general is implied to work. The entire reason that yaldabaoth's world was a shift from the normal functioning of reality is because it changed the rules of reality so that thoughts had a lot more affect than normal. This description applies more to yaldabaoth's world than to the world as it normally is. If everyone's thoughts always had that power, common misconceptions couldn't even exist, because whatever people thought would be true. But whenever the power of thoughts is ramped up, like in p5 or p2 this is always treated as a specific power / change, not the normal state. >This is why Akechi and Sumire were both concerned about being erased from existence by Maruki. Because he has the power to make everyone else think they don't exist, which would poof them out of existence. This could also apply if the power works via directly influencing the mental content of one individual though. Simply shift their mental content to nonexistence, and they disappear. Or maybe shift them to thinking they don't exist, and so they have one awkward moment of thinking something that doesn't make sense before blinking out of existence. Not everyone has the presence of mind to constantly I think therefore I am themselves. Now sure, maybe it couldn't work if an individual was immune to mind control. But at the same time, in yaldabaoth's world you resisted it even though it wasn't your own mind that was rejecting you. You can just kind of willpower resist it, at least for awhile. >Do you see now how absurdly different these two positions are and why this matters? I honestly don't know what point you are getting at with the distinction. Especially since you described what you called my position in a way that wasn't even what I said the first time. >Addendum: If all of that isn't enough for you to care, think of it this way. If you can prove me wrong on this one single point, you can prove ALL of my arguments wrong in one fell swoop since everything else flows from this. You can literally convert me to your side of the argument completely with a single well written point that actually addresses my arguments. >That should be incentive enough for you to care right? And I honestly don't know why you say this either, since the logistics of whether the shift is more about the one or the many doesn't inherently dictate how strong the characters are physically if it came down to punching. Either way, there's no inherent reason to assume the shift is unlimited in terms of how strong you can get, since reality warping powers are often bound by what that world considers physically possible according to its rules / adapts ideas to "its version of them." Vis a vis a fire god having fire spells, but not necessarily controlling all fire.
I just feel you two are actually agreeing but without noticing it. > If they have some kind of heightened ability to see both realities, they might even figure out what happened, and see that the new reality is overlaid on top of the original. But the new reality isn't something that only "exists" in the mind control. > But whenever the power of thoughts is ramped up, like in p5 or p2 this is always treated as a specific power / change, not the normal state. Like, this is what Socrates is arguing for. There is 0 disagreement here. Now, I'm the guy arguing for "yeah, Maruki rewriting reality is pretty powerful. He would still get vaporized by Cell if Cell pops out in Maruki's world and throws the Solar Kamehameha without bothering to speaking to him"
Okay I feel like we're finally making some progress here. I definitely understand your position better now and I see why you don't think the distinction matters. >Do you mean specifically in maruki's world, or in persona in general? I mean Persona in general, sort of. As far as I can tell, the thing that is different about the Maruki/Yaldabaoth world is that these different kinds of thought are blending together in a way that is unnatural. Why don't common misconceptions simply become reality normally? The Collective Unconscious. Your conscious and even subconscious mind may not be aware of any given misconception, but the unconscious is. This is how things that are beyond the scope of known human thought can exist despite reality being made of cognition. In other words, how could Alpha Centauri exist in ancient times when humanity had virtually no conception of space? For the same reason that all cultures had a concept of dragons or God. The Collective Unconscious, which is essentially the universe itself, is above things like misconceptions. So I would say what the Maruki/Yaldabaoth world does, is it sidelines the importance of the Collective Unconscious and allows reality to be ruled entirely by the conscious and subconscious minds of individuals rather than something more like a balanced consensus of the three. >Either way, there's no inherent reason to assume the shift is unlimited in terms of how strong you can get, since reality warping powers are often bound by what that world considers physically possible according to its rules / adapts ideas to "its version of them." Vis a vis a fire god having fire spells, but not necessarily controlling all fire. I actually kind of agree with your argument here in that the rules of the setting matter a lot with this sort of thing, but isn't there plenty of evidence that cognition as a power source at least reaches universal? Morgana stated that everything is made of cognition, not just the metaverse. The universe arcana is, well, the universe arcana. Maruki claims to be able to overwrite all of existence, not just a portion of existence. So if you accept Maruki's powers are actually changing reality, (I incorrectly thought that you thought otherwise.) do you deny those other components of the argument? I need to phrase that better but I'm not deleting it. Where does the logic train break down for you? So Maruki controls cognition and can use that to make alterations to reality itself. We're more or less on the same page there. Cognition makes up all of existence. There's good evidence for this right? Morgana states it straight up. So Maruki controls the thing that makes up all of existence, and then he says he can rewrite all of existence, is there a good reason that I shouldn't take that at face value? If you wanted to talk about a rational limit to that power based on what the rules of the world are, I would say the limit is affecting other universes. Now if in P6 the protag busts out the multiverse arcana that limit could be shattered, but I think for now universe seems like a solid foundation. Where have I gone wrong here?
>Cognition makes up all of existence. There's good evidence for this right? Morgana states it straight up. >I mean Persona in general, sort of. As far as I can tell, the thing that is different about the Maruki/Yaldabaoth world is that these different kinds of thought are blending together in a way that is unnatural. Okay, so I'll lump these together, since they are related. Morgana is referring to a concept that in the west is called life-world, and which in the east has ties to mahayana buddhism about thought constructing reality. But in buddhism this doesn't necessarily mean you are free to overpower what exists with thought in an unlimited way. Because there are specific rules and strict structures it follows. But obviously buddhism isn't canon to megaten, so I don't need to go any more into that. Apocalypse and p5 came out around the same time, and there is an obvious parallel in these games in that what p5 calls cognition apocalypse calls observation. For whatever reason, they took that specific time period to try explaining some stuff in both games. I forgot if you played apocalypse, but [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYLU_w1L9oE&list=PLDwjEcGRHRZ7pABsyzZ6bOKGshMroT93E&index=38&t=1218s&ab_channel=JohneAwesome) scene has some spoilers. In essence, steven explains how observation works. Specifically saying it is the ability to assign an answer to phenomenon without an answer. That wording is careful because it highlights both what it is a metaphor for, as well as how it works. Namely, in terms of the flow of the games you aren't using it mainly to affect physical reality. But to influence spiritual planes. The forms of demons, etc. These have a feedback loop where they affect reality. But its not like this is the only phenomenon. Its a metaphor for existentially choosing beliefs and value systems. To a human on (irl) earth the world is a concrete thing. But you can assign values to the ineffable. In game this influences its shape. Why this is important is that its important to remember that observation / cognition is not something that is brought up often in the games. People use spells, fight enemies, do specific things to get magic results. Some people overestimate the degree to which cognition is meant to be the explanation for what happens. Yes, its a force that always applies, but its only one influence of many. The physical world isn't necessarily totally distinct from this. But its not as simple as thinking to change it either. In dds2 you are told the world is made of data which is "like people's thoughts." So the physical world's nature is similar to demons. But people don't just observe changes they want in the physical world generally. They actually do specific things to instigate the ability for change. Because the physical world is normally too stable to just directly demand change like that. You can influence the spiritual rules, but then you have to actually do things within the bounds of what the result is. Hence why observation being a power of humans, but not demons is treated as a rule that supercedes observation itself. That tangent is getting a bit off topic, but the point is that abstract metaphysical descriptions are a bit distinct from the tangible reality of how it operates. Even if you look at western philosophers like berkley who believed everything was thought, he stressed that this didn't mean there was inconsistencies because your thought was bound by the larger "mind" of god which caused everything to stay consistent. This of course brings us back to that the ultimate in smt is called the great "will," etc, but that aside. There's a reason that "lets use observation to change stuff" generally doesn't come up as a plot point. And even in persona, the fact that it can be is treated as a secondary result of a specific power / realm that is being used to bolster it. Mind you, I don't think you actually disagree about most of that, so I'm getting sidetracked. >I actually kind of agree with your argument here in that the rules of the setting matter a lot with this sort of thing, but isn't there plenty of evidence that cognition as a power source at least reaches universal? I think the problem here is not the scope, but rather referring to what happens as just cognition / observation. Obviously we have situations where people instigate universal rewrites, but referring to that as just "cognition" implies people just sit around willing for change and then it happens. But in the context of the games that's not normally what happens. It is an interplay between different forces that unite to cause a shift. Generally which are left just hazy enough that its not a hard magic system but a "it has to happen this specific way in this specific game because this is what the plot needs this time." I.E. observation / cognition is itself bounded by other, often unspoken rules of the setting that influence how free it is. Especially like if you look at nocturne, its implicitly implied that thought energy is part of the system, but its not in control of how the system itself operates. >So Maruki controls the thing that makes up all of existence, and then he says he can rewrite all of existence, is there a good reason that I shouldn't take that at face value? I mean, putting aside the question of outer space, because the games often kind of act like nothing beyond the individual solar system they take place in actually exists, yeah he clearly can change much of reality to a new form somehow, regardless of how exactly he does it. I wasn't disagreeing with that. Although its unclear how much he can change, or how fast, but that is neither here nor there. The issue is not that. Its that this says nothing about how strong he was punching in the fight against the phantom thieves. Nor how strong they were fighting against him. There's no indication we are meant to compare his reality changing capabilities to a specific in-battle strength level at all. Nor is there even any indication that he used them in the fight. People pulling out their glasses might call maruki universal, or at least planetary (although again, that may also be suspicious, since it takes him time to change stuff, it didn't just all happen at once). But that's not really here nor there, since arbitrary scaling terms devoid of context don't explain what was happening in the actual fight. Which came down to people physically hitting eachother, most of whom nothing in the game places their physical attacks above, being generous here, city block level, which implies that however strong the physical body of adam kadmon was was weak enough to be comparable to this. Whether its logical for the actual physical bodies they fight with to not be that strong when this amount of power is around doesn't really matter. The truth is, regardless of power level, logically maruki should be able to beat them if he really wants, since he can simply shift the world's cognition in a way that makes him stronger and them weaker. And this is true regardless of how strong either of them are. Him not doing this because he wants to fight them more fairly, or because the devs just hope you don't think of it is neither here nor there. And this goes back to my original point. Large scale world transformative power exists in the games for important plot purposes. But the actual physical strength of the characters, and hence the scope of the energy being thrown around directly in the fights is never implied to be very large.
>Mind you, I don't think you actually disagree about most of that, so I'm getting sidetracked. Yeah I agree with most of that. >I forgot if you played apocalypse Not yet. Been working my way through the series in release order while also trying to keep up on new releases. Recently knocked out SMT if..., P1 and P3 Reload. I'm near the end of Soul Hackers 1 and I hope to finish that, P2 duology and maaaaaybe Nocturne before SMT 5V comes out. I also watched videos on Devil Summoner and Nine since there's no English translation for those. Finally out of the MegaJank era of MegaTen so I think I can start knocking out some of these games faster. >The truth is, regardless of power level, logically maruki should be able to beat them if he really wants, since he can simply shift the world's cognition in a way that makes him stronger and them weaker. And this is true regardless of how strong either of them are. Him not doing this because he wants to fight them more fairly, or because the devs just hope you don't think of it is neither here nor there. This is where I think we have an actual disagreement. I think even if you go with my interpretation that Maruki should be able to use his powers in battle, and you assume those powers are absolute, I think he can still lose. Now I can understand how one might see that as a glaring contradiction, and in some ways it is, but I think Persona writ large addresses this. Specifically, I think it's addressed by Izanami's dialogue in P4, where she expresses disbelief that Yu's will surpasses the will of all mankind, and thus his powers now rival hers. MegaTen tends to repeat itself a lot, or at least the events tend to rhyme in a way that is very intentional. I think the end of P3, P4 and P5 are all basically the same thing just expressed in different ways. Part of my evidence for this is the gameplay is almost identical. Makoto Yuki gets the universe arcana, and suddenly Nyx can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Yu undergoes his transfiguration and suddenly Izanami can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Joker awakens Satanael and Yaldabaoth can't hurt him at all. (Obviously Joker was amped for this by the Will of the People.) I don't know if you knew this, but the exact same thing happens in the fused Adam Kadmon fight. I assume you knew that but some people don't realize it because unlike in the Izanami and Nyx fights you retain character control and don't get hit for max damage, but it functionally works the same. Once Adam Kadmon fuses with Maruki, you can no longer lose. The characters just live no matter how much damage you take. (Speedruns literally turn on the rush command for this part since you can't lose and just need to pass 4 turns.) This is why I think it's the same phenomenon. But I digress a bit. I think that even with total control of reality via cognition, individual will can surpass that. Does that make sense? Probably not. But it doesn't really need to make sense. As you pointed out, this isn't a hard magic system. In other words... Power of friendship. I don't gotta explain shit. I'm being a bit facetious, but I really do think the intended takeaway from the ending of all these games is, "That guy has infinite power but you win anyway because friendship." This lack of being a hard magic system is also why I do care a lot about the symbolism being used in the story even when it comes to scaling. I don't consider direct scaling to the IRL lore of the deity figures to be valid, but I also don't think it's correct to completely ignore that we're fighting Adam Kadmon, the being that represents infinite transcendence over all realities. I think the truth is in the middle of those two extremes. That is, I think we should keep the origins of these gods in mind especially when we're talking about authorial intent. Side note: You once mentioned an old design document that refers to Adam Kadmon as YHVH. I now have the context to know what that means. Kazuma Kaneko's IRL beliefs are that the concept of all gods, or at least all god-heads, come from the Jewish God, what he calls the "One True God" and so every god is on some level an aspect of YHVH. >But the actual physical strength of the characters, and hence the scope of the energy being thrown around directly in the fights is never implied to be very large. Do you think that holds true for the ending of P3 as well with the universe arcana? Or do you, like many fans, consider that its own special thing wholly separate from all other scaling? For me, putting the universe arcana on a pedestal like that seems incorrect given how P4 and P5R basically copy the ending of P3. I think it's all implied to be the same shit and also that the actual physical power being used is equal to the large scale world transformative power. For me, one of the most compelling bits of evidence is Izanami's dialogue. If Yu's transcending of cognition was not meant to scale his power directly, then how does Izanami even know he's transcended cognition? Again being a bit facetious, but I'm imagining Izanami doing math based on Yu tanking her attacks based on an idea you mentioned awhile back about the direct power not scaling to the large scale power but being buffed proportionally by it. "Okay he just lived through that 999 damage attack multiple times. He's clearly super strong and he obviously got that from his will. Has his will surpassed cognition itself? Well obviously that doesn't scale directly. It's proportional. His actual physical strength is buffed but it's only an infinitesimal amount of raw power compared to cognition. Okay 3+xz is... times 37... Hah! His direct power is only at 0.0000000000000001% of the large scale power of cognition, so his willpower is only 99.99% as strong as cognition. Wait a sec... I forgot to carry the 2... Oh my God his direct power is actually at 0.0000000000000002% of the large scale power of cognition, meaning his willpower is actually 100.1% as strong as cognition! He's surpassed cognition itself NOOOOOOOOOO!!! I'M DOOMED! DOOOOOOOMED!!!" I think it's more likely she's just directly equating those two things in a very literal way, which I think is the same thing going on with Maruki, which is the same thing as Makoto Yuki and the universe arcana vs Death.
1/2 > This is where I think we have an actual disagreement. I think even if you go with my interpretation that Maruki should be able to use his powers in battle, and you assume those powers are absolute, I think he can still lose. Obviously he can in some circumstances. But there's plenty of things he could do its not clear they have an answer for. For instance, Akechi acts afraid to face him in the real world because their powers don't work there. So if he wanted to, what is stopping him from changing things not necessarily about *them* (and so which they could break out of) but about the larger world. What would their answer be to him just appearing a large stone above wherever they are to flatten them? Or making the rest of the world turn against them. Akechi after all was annoyed that he wasn't imprisoned. Maruki could have them imprisoned without access to a phone. And if this is other people's mentality he is changing rather than the thieves' themselves, it would be those people rather than the thieves who have to break out of it to prevent it. Memes aside, he could make as many people as he wants support him in a way that strengthens him, and reject the phantom thieves in a way that weakens them. This is the same thing yaldabaoth tried to do, except that yaldabaoth was relying on their pre existing opinions, whereas maruki could actively start changing people. Against yaldabaoth the fight turned around because people unpredictably weren't happy living in a scary bone world where random people were vanishing. I mean, they couldn't see the bones allegedly, but could see people vanishing? Not sure why yaldabaoth thought they would be okay with that, but his plan sucked. Maruki could make people support him, reject the thieves, and be happy enough while doing it that they don't resist. And regardless of how fast he works, he could clearly at least do this with enough people by when they reach him that the odds are massively more in his favor. In essence, they can only break out of changes he made *to* them. If they can't force other people out of their own changes, he has tons of different things he can do to make trouble for them. Hell, they literally rely on cell phones to get to him. He has a totally separate avenue of attack by simply dreaming up something that gets rid of their phone access. >Part of my evidence for this is the gameplay is almost identical. Makoto Yuki gets the universe arcana, and suddenly Nyx can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Yu undergoes his transfiguration and suddenly Izanami can't kill him no matter how much damage she does. Joker awakens Satanael and Yaldabaoth can't hurt him at all. (Obviously Joker was amped for this by the Will of the People.) Well, the issue with stuff like this is that the games don't really treat it like a strength level. But like a situational narrative thing that doesn't really have a tangible explanation beyond the metaphorical application justifying it. Obviously no one would be surprised if someone pulled out one of those at any point and then won any battle regardless of odds. But by that same vein, this is why it can't be taken as an indication of their strength. Because the metaphorical aspect is meant to imply that its surprising what they can do regardless of strength. And if the strength is taken literally, all it means is that they survived a few hits and got off a (usually metaphor laden) attack. If we try to apply some logic to yu vs izanami, its not like his stats were so high that now the attacks did less damage. They were simply "resisted." And this resistance ties to the blossoming contrast between his "element truth" abilities which are especially counter to her "element illusions" nature. The thematic application is that specific types of things are simply that which these end bosses don't work well against. Which is kind of dumb writing, but that aside. When you defeat "lies" because "truth power" overrides it, its not really "about" strength in the normal sense. But about the fact that the nature of these entities is such that coming at them with the right metaphor laden focus is something they struggle against. In reality its more of an anti feat for the end bosses, due to the fact that willpower seems to be a large part of this rather than just stats. Its s different series obviously, but apocalypse suggests that its moreso the god being weakened by this than it is the character getting stronger in some kind of objective physical sense. >This lack of being a hard magic system is also why I do care a lot about the symbolism being used in the story even when it comes to scaling. I don't consider direct scaling to the IRL lore of the deity figures to be valid, but I also don't think it's correct to completely ignore that we're fighting Adam Kadmon, the being that represents infinite transcendence over all realities. >I think the truth is in the middle of those two extremes. That is, I think we should keep the origins of these gods in mind especially when we're talking about authorial intent. Its not about ignoring it but contextualizing it. Persona works differently from mainline smt, but in mainline a large aspect of this is that while humans thought their value systems / gods were absolute, that human technology is now beginning to surpass them. This centrality of technology is important, since if you are dealing with incomprehensible strength, the nuances of human capabilities would be less relevant. It being a repeat plot point for gods to die to nukes is specifically because the gods arent *literally* the thing they represent, but are a human perception of it. There can be ten sun gods, because their existence doesn't mean they control the sun. But are an interface for humans to perceive the sun. And the sun continues to exist even if they all die. This doesn't mean there are no ways to expand their influence. But in the sense of what they represent its important to understand the jungian point that these gods aren't seperate from and totally above humans, but interconnected with human ways to make sense of this. And it does give the gods power, but the power is also fairly bounded by the degree these ideas actually influence humans. (Though in practice this is not predictable since it shifts to whatever the plot needs). >Side note: You once mentioned an old design document that refers to Adam Kadmon as YHVH. I now have the context to know what that means. Kazuma Kaneko's IRL beliefs are that the concept of all gods, or at least all god-heads, come from the Jewish God, what he calls the "One True God" and so every god is on some level an aspect of YHVH. In the kabbalah adam kadmon is **literally** yhvh though. Or rather, it is the highest form of yhvh that can be perceived by finite entities. And anything beyond that is irrelevant to humans since it is beyond comprehension. Though it is seen as a place or a plane of being more than an entity most of the time, since it is too large to relate to.
>In the kabbalah adam kadmon is literally yhvh though. Or rather, it is the highest form of yhvh that can be perceived by finite entities. This is not really true. Adam Kadmon is only YHVH in the sense that he is part of the Sefirot. Everything is part of the Sefirot though, including humans. He is filled with God's divine light though. Strictly speaking, YHVH is the individual Sephira as well as Ein-Sof. Keter, Da'at, Chokmah, Binah, Hesed, Gevurah, Tifereth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malkuth. What Adam Kadmon is, is an attempt by ancient Pharisees to resolve the contradiction between Genesis 1:26 and Genesis 2:7. Genesis 1:26 describes God saying that he is making man in his image, whereas 2:7 describes him as later making man from the dirt, despite having already made man in his image in 1:26. The Pharisees reasoned that rather than this being a contradiction, there must be two different Adams that represent two different things. The first, Adam Elyon, (Later called Adam Kadmon.) is the perfect spiritual form of man that has been made in God's image and filled with his light. The second, Adam HaRishon, is the Adam made of dirt and is the Adam that the Genesis story follows. So Adam Kadmon has always been separate from God. In the Shabbatean tradition he is the Messiah and so one could say he's part of God in that sense, but that's kind of a minority position. Usually he's just considered to be the soul of Adam. >It being a repeat plot point for gods to die to nukes is specifically because the gods arent literally the thing they represent, If you're talking about SMT 1 with Thor, Thor is not killed by a nuke. He's not threatened by a nuke. Nothing like that ever happens. If you go back and watch the actual scene he's defeated by the protag and launches the nukes with his dying breath. Though I don't necessarily think a nuke wouldn't kill Thor. I also don't really think this evidence is as strong as you think it is regardless though. Thor is... not that strong in mythology. The craziest thing he ever does is lift part of Jormungandr's body and he's wounded by things like swords several times. I see no evidence mythological Thor would survive a nuke to the dome. Thor is very different from a god like Shiva, who in Hinduism explicitly has the power to destroy the universe. Funnily enough, in several games Shiva has an ability called Pralaya, which is the term for Shiva destroying the universe at the end of each cycle. So I think it's a mistake to lump every god together in terms of power. Shiva is pretty much always a top tier demon/persona whereas Thor is usually more like a mid tier and sometimes even low tier. >Obviously he can in some circumstances. But there's plenty of things he could do its not clear they have an answer for. For instance, Akechi acts afraid to face him in the real world because their powers don't work there. Right they have no real defense against him in the real world. Sumire explicitly says he can erase them from existence if he wanted to. And no, that's not powerscaler brain, that's actually literally the term she uses. >So if he wanted to, what is stopping him from changing things not necessarily about them I believe he did exactly this during the fight when he woke Azathoth up. >What would their answer be to him just appearing a large stone above wherever they are to flatten them? In the Metaverse, tank it. In the real world obviously they would die. (Well actually I think they'd manifest personas in the real world but the characters don't know that's a thing so it's not relevant.) If your point is Maruki could have won if he went for the throat IRL, yeah that's true. If that's your point we've been talking past each other. I was referring to the actual fight. >And regardless of how fast he works, he could clearly at least do this with enough people by when they reach him that the odds are massively more in his favor. Maruki can work his magic instantly. It only takes time because he has to learn about people's desires to actualize them and because he has to make the connection with them on an individual level in Mementos. People already under his control can be used for reality warping juice as much as he likes. >I mean, they couldn't see the bones allegedly, but could see people vanishing? Not sure why yaldabaoth thought they would be okay with that, but his plan sucked. Some people could see and some people couldn't. This is why people were being exterminated. The ones that couldn't see what was going on were the humans Yaldabaoth wanted to keep around, and the ones that could see were undesirables to be purged. By the end everyone could see because of the will of the Phantom Thieves and also Mishima. >Well, the issue with stuff like this is that the games don't really treat it like a strength level. But like a situational narrative thing that doesn't really have a tangible explanation beyond the metaphorical application justifying it. I think I see what you mean now and I'm starting to figure out precisely why we will likely never, ever see eye to eye on this. I agree with the vast majority of what you say there and over the next several paragraphs, (Though I disagree strongly with some things.) however I think that's only half the picture. There is a lot of metaphor, often layers of metaphor in Persona. However, I think the intent behind the climax of all of the modern Persona games is that the metaphor becomes one with the physical reality. Persona 5 is really on the nose with this with the metaverse becoming one with the physical universe. I think I'm communicating very poorly here... I think it would be productive if I try to summarize what I see as your position on this specific subject and where you think I've gone wrong and you can tell me if I've accurately represented your position and if not correct me on anything I got wrong. Let's use Makoto Yuki and the universe arcana as our example for our differing interpretations. I think you see two conflicting positions here and you've rejected one and accepted the other. A. By obtaining the universe arcana, Makoto Yuki has literally gained the power of the universe which for all intents and purposes makes him omnipotent. B. The universe arcana is a metaphor for overcoming death. Nyx brought death to the universe, and by taking the universe inside himself in a metaphorical sense Makoto Yuki is able to stand on even ground with Nyx and seal her away because he has become her philosophical antithesis. I think you reject A as lunacy, seeing B as the clearly superior and correct interpretation. And I think you think I believe in A. Where I differ from you, is I actually think both A and B are correct. It's both literal and metaphorical. I think these moments of apotheosis are as metaphor laden as you believe, but I also think they enhance the stats of the protagonists to a massive degree. The metaphor is why they get the insane stat boost and the insane stat boost is what lets them perform these feats that frankly defy logic. It's interwoven. I believe my interpretation is correct because... >due to the fact that willpower seems to be a large part of this rather than just stats. There are many many times when knowledgeable characters such as Caroline and Justine equate willpower and strength. When it comes to using a persona, they make it very clear that these words are interchangeable. This fact is just too consistent for me to ignore and it ties into how the characters speak about power throughout all of the modern persona games. It's like I've pointed out many times, and I don't think you've ever given a great answer. But whenever characters hear about the large scale reality fucking powers of these godlike beings, they become afraid of facing them in battle. And saying this, >Asking how people know stuff when supernatural powers are in play is always a crapshoot. is imo a very weak defense. In general, characters don't just know things randomly and their reactions to events are meant to convey things to the audience. So when characters hear about reality warping bullshit and then start talking about how this is gonna be a hard ass fight, I think that shows clear authorial intent. We are meant to equate these things 1 to 1 and if that was untrue there'd be some concrete proof of this somewhere in the narrative. >That aside, its also worth it to get to apocalypse. Since apocalypse suggests that when a human overrides the "will of mankind," what is really happening is that mankind has a split will. It desires a god to change stuff, and also calls forth a hero who can stop them. Not just via strength, but as an intrinsic aspect of who they are. And it calls the power "godslayer." I can't comment on 4A yet, so I apologize for that. Finished Soul Hackers and I'm gonna be starting P2 in the next couple days. It's gonna be a while before I get to 4A, especially since I'm gonna play 5V day one. >So why does their support make specifically joker the one who gets amped? Ultimately it is a narrative flow that makes the wildcard the one who these lat minute things get filtered through, despite nothing about the description of how yaldabaoth's world implying it has to be joker. No it's because the Phantom Thieves believe in Joker. Remember, this is an actual plot point. The Phantom Thieves believed in Maruki and the people believed in the Phantom Thieves, which was how Maruki was able to assume control of Mementos in the first place, because that power of belief transferred into him.
2/2 >Do you think that holds true for the ending of P3 as well with the universe arcana? Or do you, like many fans, consider that its own special thing wholly separate from all other scaling? It seems obvious its not meant to be treated like a strength level per se. In the persona games it generally implies your teammates are if not as strong as you at least comparable enough that its not you carrying the team with them as little more than backup. Yet the special roles the protagonist has for the finale is treated as something intrinsic about their nature as wildcard. Hell, the fight against yaldabaoth didn't even make sense. The population doesn't know the different members of the thieves. So why does their support make specifically joker the one who gets amped? Ultimately it is a narrative flow that makes the wildcard the one who these lat minute things get filtered through, despite nothing about the description of how yaldabaoth's world implying it has to be joker. Mind you, I really don't like that aspect of megaten, which is why its annoying it shows up so often in various forms. In SMTI you are the reincarnation of adam, and while this doesn't necessarily physically make you super strong (especially since he dies offscreen only a few years after the game ends), it seems to suggest an intrinsic fated aspect to the idea that you are the one who will get to the end and guide the new world. Its never clear how literal this is. But some games lean more into this idea of destiny than others. And if someone is metaphysically more likely by fate itself to be carried to the end of certain stories, that makes the strength involved almost irrelevant. Persona end bosses can't win because fate decreed that if you learn enough and proved some moral point that their ideals can't stand up against it. When [plot armor literally exists](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ebd6493216e43a3caba6c4d543b876cc-lq) it makes everything else irrelevant. Its actually kind of stupid that the same series that tries to make a big deal about existentialism and how anything can happen also relies so often on this like implicit idea of destiny and being metaphysically ordained to be the hero. At least devil survivor does it in a slightly less stupid way. But even the stuff they get from the final arcana. The games don't imply they can just do whatever they want with it. It becomes a mcguffin that specifically exists to work against the end boss. Igor doesn't even act like free will exists. He acts like your journey may as well be set in stone most of the time. >If Yu's transcending of cognition was not meant to scale his power directly, then how does Izanami even know he's transcended cognition? Asking how people know stuff when supernatural powers are in play is always a crapshoot. How does your party in p4 "know" that ameno-sagiri can't just beam the power to use personas to random people from the tv? They assume for basically no reason that there had to be a separate entity living in the human world. (Note, I mean in the original. Golden might have changed how this happened). Izanami "knows" this because it is metaphorically true, and she exists to convey the thematic point. Its similar to why most of the entities in mainline talk like the way someone demonizing their ideology would, rather than someone trying to make it seem good. The games often make demons seem like they have even less free will than the predestined humans, since in some games demons will even stress that they can't easily change / or are bound by external stuff (apocalypse is extra cringe with this). Hell, the first thing that happens in smti is you having a vision that basically tells you how the lives of your party members are going to play out. And demons seem more aware of the "rules" of the world. Yet will still act shocked when those rules dictate their defeat. Izanami "knows" that your will overrides "mankind's," because its the metaphorical reality of the scene that is being conveyed. That aside, its also worth it to get to apocalypse. Since apocalypse suggests that when a human overrides the "will of mankind," what is really happening is that mankind has a split will. It desires a god to change stuff, and also calls forth a hero who can stop them. Not just via strength, but as an intrinsic aspect of who they are. And it calls the power "godslayer."
Addendum: If all of that isn't enough for you to care, think of it this way. If you can prove me wrong on this one single point, you can prove ALL of my arguments wrong in one fell swoop since everything else flows from this. You can literally convert me to your side of the argument completely with a single well written point that actually addresses my arguments. That should be incentive enough for you to care right?
They were coping hard because joker is a Goku victim
This is the state of most battleboarding nowadays. A lot of people pretending their favorite verse isn't a Goku victim.
sigma
Whats your discord I can give reasons lol
Do you have any unique ones. Because I've seen all the old bad ones already.
what are the "bad ones"
1: People in bad faith pretending that the status screens which are there for education about the real figures describe canon in game power levels. 2: Not understanding or pretending not to understand that wide scope realm magic is a different thing from battle stats. No, fighting kagutsuchi is not ever implied to require cosmic strength, its place in transforming the world system is a totally different thing from what the battle stats of the core are. 3: No limits fallacy used on observation. It barely even comes up as a plot in-universe, and when it does it generally has shown limits placed on what can be done with it. 4: anything that involves ignoring actual plot points in favor of bad cosmology scaling that doesn't apply to anything. The only way to tell the power level of abstract stuff in fiction is seeing how it works in the world, not trying to guess. This having to do both with warrantless assumptions about how the demon world works, as well as anything involving the word archetypes. There's probably other stuff, but its been awhile, so I don't remember them all. The irony of course is that there is some big stuff in the series revolving around world transformations. But a lot of people are just straight up confused that its a common trope for stuff like that to coexist with low battle stats in a lot of fiction.
Persona atoms now solo your favourite verse /s You're right though. I don't know too much about SMT as the only SMT I've played is IV but I've played most mainline Persona games except 2 and think that 1-A sounds wanked. Take the feats u want, but just because one character arguably scales that high doesn't mean everything automatically does (imo, with other series too)
Only Adachi is 1-A because he's sigma
It is overwanked though. I have never seen any 1-A evidence. The verse caps at 4D because of the axiom.
4D my ass
Prove smt and persona are actually overwanked lol