Ramble: Persona 4’s Tohru Adachi is not a Sociopath

(Original posted on tumblr in 2016)

namimorino asked:

Has anyone asked you about how weird it is that Adachi pukes at the start of the game, at Mayumi's crime scene? I mean, she can't have been dead more than a day by that point, so he couldn't have been sick at the smell. He acts like a crazed psychopath/sociopath later on, yeah, and there's plenty of opportunity to make him out to be one, but then you have things like that, and it bugs me.

OK, I’ve spoken about that before, so I will again: 

Adachi isn’t a *Sociopath*. He acted the way he did during his battle because he’s just lost ALL his marbles when the full weight of what happened hit him. None of what happened during P4 was part of any sort of “elaborate master plan” of his, he never *had* any sort of chessmastering skills, and the only reason he acted like everything was all part of his “game” during his battle was because he was batshit insane at this point and had a delusional breakdown in which he tried to make himself feel more powerful and cool than he actually was.

And before you call me out on reinterpreting the events and making conspiracy theories, Your Honor, I can proudly say…

I have evidence.

So come on, my friends, follow me under the cut for a journey in the footsteps of one of the most pathetic, petty, human people in Persona history: Tohru Adachi.

Let us begin. First of all, we need to ask ourselves: Why did Adachi push Yamano into the TV? Why her, at this point in time, this way? If he had an unfeeling mastermind, wouldn’t he have already started screwing over other people long ago?

Now, let’s trace the events back a little. Adachi himself outright states that he knew about the Midnight Channel. He learned of it from the Moel Attendant (AKA: Izanami). This was also how he discovered his powers: By trying out the Midnight Channel Rumor, much like how Yu did. Now, however… This brings us to a piece of information that Adachi did *not* outright confirm, but which we KNOW much have happened, if he really did try to watch the Midnight Channel: He friggin’ watched the Midnight Channel display a person, shortly before he killed Mayumi Yamano.

And now, who do we know was on the Midnight Channel before Mayumi Yamano was murdered? That’s right: Mayumi Yamano. 

Adachi saw her on the Midnight Channel the night he discovered his abilities, much like how Yu saw Saki the night he discovered his. Even if you didn’t watch P4GA (which actually got this part surprisingly right), that much should be obvious. Now, remember what the Midnight Channel rumor’s wording was? Lemme remind you:

“If you stare into a turned-off TV at Midnight on a rainy night, your soulmate will appear on the screen.”

…Does Adachi’s wild entitlement-boner towards Yamano begin to make sense now? Yep, that’s right; In accordance with the rumor Izanami so “generously” fed him, Adachi was under the insane delusion that Mayumi Yamano was, in fact, his soulmate. 

And also, she was currently under police-protection for being involved in an affair. Joy. 

So yeah, there was Adachi. In a terrible mood because he hates Inaba and his life. Raised under the delusion that he deserves so much more than life has ever given him. Probably incredibly drunk on beer, too. The police leave him alone in a room with Mayumi Yamano, who, according to the Midnight Channel rumor, is his Soul Mate. A woman who’s been sleeping with a married man. Supposedly his soul mate.

He snapped there. After all, this was all just so *unfair*!! He deserved a fancy job, amazing pay, lifetime employment, a nuclear family and all this other crap his mommy and daddy told him about when they made him stay up late to study when he was a wee kid! And now, his soulmate was supposed to be a woman who’s best known for sleeping with men married to other women? Entitlement-Boner, go, go!!

When Adachi pushed Yamano into the TV, his intentions were definitely to *harm* her. He wanted to “punish” her for playing a part in life taunting him, and he also wanted to “exert control” over her, to feel like he has control over at least *something* in his life. That’s what people who feel like life’s been unfair to them tend to do: They try to force their control over something. In Adachi’s case, this happened to be Mayumi Yamano. However, at this point, Adachi had NO idea that the TV World was, in fact, deadly, so there was not yet any killing intent behind his crime here. Which means that this first killing of his doesn’t technically qualify as “murder”: It was Manslaughter. The crime of killing someone in an action that was done with the intent to harm that person. In reality, Adachi probably did no expect Yamano to ever show up again. He probably thought she would be trapped in the TV world forever (Possibly starve to death, but, meh), would never be found again, and he could just go about his business, watch her colleagues filling her as “Missing”, then forget about her and never think about what happened again.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, Yamano’s dead body showed up near the Shopping District the next day.

Now, when Adachi saw the body, of course, he instantly recognized the person. How couldn’t he? And that must have been when it hit him: 

“Shit, shit, SHIT, she’s dead, she’s dead and I killed her, I killed her, they’re gonna figure it out, everybody is gonna know, my life is over, I’m going to jail. I AM OVER.”

And that’s why he threw up. That moment, Adachi was terrified. Even if Yamano died (again, he was probably well aware that there was a good chance she’d starve to death in there at least), he never expected her body to ever show up. So when her body was found, it put him into a state of shock and terror. After all, as much as he hated his life and everything, he definitely did NOT want to spend the rest of it in jail. So he spent the rest of the day terrified, but struggling to disguise it as him just being disgusted by the dead body. However, as the day proceeded, they kept investigating and investigating and… nobody pointed their fingers at him. Nobody glared at him. Nobody stood up and said “You did it”. 

Slowly, Adachi realized that there was no evidence… Right, none. Nobody could figure out it was him. He did something terrible, something horrible, something unspeakable… And yet, nobody could figure out? The one time he actually DID something wrong in life (Something unspeakably wrong), and yet, *now* life decided to not punish him!? The confusion from that feeling drove Adachi further over the edge… And then, he made the decision that will brandmark him as human garbage for all eternity:

He had heard rumors that Namatame and Saki had “spent time” together. So Adachi was under the wrong impression that Saki was, in fact, a prostitute. If you’ve played Yosuke’s Social Link, you know that teenage girls selling sexual favors for money is something that isn’t *that* rare around that area, seeing how the, ahem “Part Timers” at Junes were joking about it too. Now, Adachi, trying to alleviate some of his stress (and maybe get onto a control-high again), approached this alleged “prostitute”, fully convinced that she did, in fact, sleep with Namatame.

…And she refuses him.

At this point, he was faaaaar beyond gone (you have to be when your solution to manslaughter-induced stress is to try and go get yourself a sex-worker), so what did he do? Get himself onto another control-high by killing Saki! He has the power, he can do that! It’s his force! Wow, how cool and powerful he is for being able to do that! Awesome, he can kill people without ever being found! He’s like, a super-villain! So cool!

…Except, slowly but surely, Adachi began to sober up from his power-trip and it began to dawn on him that, just because the police has failed to find evidence in *under a day*, it doesn’t mean they’ll *never* find evidence against him. Meaning he’s royally screwed up. Before, he’d at least have been able to claim Manslaughter and get off “Lightly” with just a decade or so of jail. 

But now, he’d killed another woman. Now, it was a serial killing. Now he was a serial killer. And if anybody ever figured out, his life would truly. Be. Over.

And then, Namatame called him.

And that’s when Adachi had an *idea*.

And no, unlike what he claimed, that “idea” did not involve a complicated game of cat-and-mouse. The “idea” was to simply get Namatame to kill someone, find the corpse, and pin the murder on him, be celebrated as the cop who solved the murder and get the case closed once and for all, leaving no chance of anyone ever figuring out what really happened.

Again, I have evidence:

• Adachi had no way of knowing about the IT at this point (it wasn’t even found yet), meaning he did not know ANYONE would save Namatame’s victims.

• I know, it’s easy to forget, but remember those short scenes that occur after saving a member of the IT from their Shadow? The ones with a figure in the fog walking through Inaba and being confused? Well, unused voice clips and models in both, Japanese and English, show that this “figure” is, in fact, Adachi in a raincoat. And if you think about it, there could only have been one thing that he was trying to do there in the fog: He was searching for the bodies of Namatame’s victims, so he could plant evidence and pin the whole thing on him. But since the IT was saving the victims, he never found anything, and if you watch those scenes, you will realize that this fact kept him bewildered for months, meaning that it took him a long time to actually figure out that the IT were actually saving the victims!

In fact, it probably took him longer to figure out than it took Naoto, given when he started sending his charming “Do not rescue anymore” notes to Yu. 

So much for his claims of “toying” with the IT all along then. It’s difficult toying with someone you don’t even realize exist. 

The only reason Adachi kept “leaking” incorrect information to the IT was because he was trying to spread rumors that would point away from him, towards other suspects, to keep the public busy guessing until Namatame finally goddamn killed someone so he could pin it on him. That’s why he said “Well, that settles it then!” when Naoto found Namatame’s notes. He was mentally going “Wheew, finally!” because the crime was finally pinned on Namatame, meaning Adachi was out of hot water once and for all (or so he thought.)

And then, Naoto confronted him. That moment, the shaky house of cards Adachi had been desperately trying to hold up for months came crashing down onto him. That moment, he felt like everything was really over. 

So his mind shut down. He stopped caring, he stopped thinking, he stopped paying attention to anything and all. He threw himself into the TV, and remember, he didn’t actually *know* how the victims were saved, so that means for all he knew, this could possibly have been his death. So he was either not thinking at all, or actually intending to die at this point. (The former is more probable, given Yukiko points out how Adachi is still clinging to life despite all.) So yeah, beyond out of his mind there.

By the time we find him in the TV World, he has a nasty problem with Shadow Eyes flickering on him already, and, as Persona Q proved, Shadow Eyes are not some symbol of “supreme evil” or “in-tune”ness, but they simply mean that you’ve been overwhelmed by your Shadow and can’t control it anymore, meaning it’s running the show in place of your ego.

In other words, all that stuff Adachi spouts there? That’s not his brain talking. That’s all the insane emotions and thoughts he’s kept bottled up for months, bursting out and making him just ramble and ramble without a filter. And we all know that, regardless of what Shadows say, what they embody is *not* the “real truth”; It’s just a distorted reality, run through the encryption of fear, anger, hatred, and so on. Of course that part of Adachi would try to make everything he did sound as cool and badass as possible: This was the childish part of him, who knew no responsibility and consequences, and just wanted to be seen as someone “awesome”, regardless how. So of course his recount of the events was skewed to make it look like he was in full control of everything that happened.

But he wasn’t. Never. Not a second. He was never in control, because he never *took* control. Adachi never took responsibility for his actions, just clinging to his sense of entitlement and dragging himself further and further down into insanity.

That’s why him finally admitting defeat in the end and being truthful during the interrogations AND in writing his letter to Yu are such important things and signs of true character growth: By taking responsibility for his actions, Adachi is finally, after all this time of living in deluded entitlement, truly putting himself in control of his life and fate. 

It may have been too little, too late, but it still was something.