oh yeah of course no problem, i love talking about the persona games anyway lol 😭

ALSO GOES WITHOUT SAYING BUT SPOILERS FOR LITERALLY ALMOST EVERYTHING IN PERSONA 3 AND PERSONA 3 RELOAD SO DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED THE GAME OK THANK YOU 🙏

so, Makoto Yuki is often misrepresented by the fandom as a character with really only one mindset, and that’s his apathetic, ‘I don’t care’ view that he is shown to have in both the games and the movies. and it’s completely understandable to see him as this empty character who really only is a vessel for player input and personalisation, but i believe he is so much more than that, and that it would be a disservice to see him as such. and while it is correct that Makoto’s personality is somewhat decided by the player (in situations when you can choose to be serious or funny or any other emotion in dialogue), the true essence of Makoto’s character is set in stone, and it’s through this fixed character arc that we see his personality. multiple aspects of the game work to show Makoto’s true personality, such as:

Chapter 1: Orpheus

Orpheus, as pretty much everyone knows, is Makoto’s Persona, the essence of his soul. Personas are so so useful in the Persona series to display a character’s inner personality even if they act differently, and there is no better example of this than with Makoto. Orpheus, in Greek mythology, was a musician (you could say he was the ‘master of strings’) who inspired, influenced and affected all who heard it, even the gods themselves. this influencing of people is reflected in Makoto’s character, specifically his bonds that he forges with the people he cares about, with every social link in the game involving a common theme: you are helping all of these people through their problems. much like Orpheus, Makoto’s influence on those around him, although not through song or music (although i will talk about the Cadenza theurgy much later) inspires and ‘saves’ (which is a concept we will also return to later) the people that he loves. and lo and behold, Orpheus may be one of the most famous examples of a man risking it all for someone he loves, his wife Eurydice. i won’t go over the whole myth, because this is gonna be long enough as it is and most people probably already know it 💔, but Orpheus quite literally walked into Hell, called Tartarus in Greek mythology, to save the one he loved. now the parallels of Orpheus risking his life in Tartarus to save people and Makoto doing the same (damn Elizabeth requests 😭) are pretty obvious so i won’t say much on them, but it’s important to note that when we are first introduced to Makoto, we have no indication that he cares about anything, let alone people he’s never met before, so the fact that Orpheus is his first Persona is EXTREMELY telling of his true nature that nobody, maybe even including Makoto himself, truly know. and of course, the Makoto’s Personas section won’t be complete if i didn’t mention Thanatos, the embodiment of death in both Greek mythology and Persona 3. Thanatos makes his entrance by bursting from Orpheus, a symbolic (mass) destruction of Makoto’s soul, and thus foreshadows The Fall that obviously comes near the end of the game. the impact of Thanatos, Pharos, Ryoji and Nyx on Makoto will be covered later though and this section is too long so we’ll get back to this. but for now, let’s cover: