A new game in one of my favorite video game series is coming out this week!
Persona 5, the fifth game in the Persona series and the third in modern Persona formula. For those unaware, Persona is about a group of Japanese school-children who travel to spaces between spaces. These represent the collective subconscious of humanity to defeat cultists and murderers with weaponized versions of their own subconscious, to prove to various gods that humanity should not be destroyed in whatever Apocalypse de jour they have planned.
While they deal with that they also deal with typical high school issues: family deaths, choosing whether to grow into or reject the roles society has laid out for you, and coming to terms with one's gender and sexuality. The forms of the teens' subconsciousnesses take and the gods challenging them change with each game.
In the third, the Greek goddess Nyx tries to kill everyone after a nihilist cult sets up a few posters saying the apocalypse is coming soon, and that's super cool. In the fourth the Japanese goddess, Izanami decides that humanity needs to die, because a few hick-kids watch a magical television channel in which people battle caricatures of the parts of their personalities they dislike and suppress. The teams of schoolchildren use spirit guardians modeled after Greek and Japanese mythological characters respectively in the two games.
In the fifth game, interestingly, however their spirit guardians are modeled after characters from the Picaresque genre. The Picaresque genre chronicles the stories of various rouges as they bebop around Europe and America including Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. So, this upcoming game draws on literature from the 1700 and 1800's, which suggests that Popular literature and folklore has equal cultural traction as ancient myths. They have drawn from more modern mythologies for its big good vs evil over arching cosmic drama.
The game borrows this from two mythologies from around the end of WW1: pitting the paranoid racist nihilistic tendencies WW1 inspired. This is represented by Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology against the more optimistic idea that humans could draw from their collective past and from within themselves to make a better future in the face of great disasters like WW1. This is proposed by Carl Jung, as represented by the Jungian archetype of Philemon.
These two forces motivate the various apocalypses throughout the games, abstractly propelling the forces of apathy, hatred, ignorance, hope, love, and self discovery that drive these conflicts. So what does all this talk mean about Persona 5 god figure and motivation for an apocalypse our plucky group of teens will have to fight against? I don't know. Maybe Tom Sawyer is causing it to convince various rubes to paint his aunt's fence.
