u/Alison_Bug

obviously spoilers ahead.

in royal, akechi seems to be aware for quite some time that defeating maruki will result in his death/nonexistence. he proceeds anyway. when joker is finally let in on this via maruki, akechi essentially shuts down any deeper discussion of it, telling him that he refuses to live in any type of "reality" where he is still being controlled.

but was he afraid?

I guess you could argue he has already died in the engine room, is aware he has already died, and is therefore less afraid. you could also argue that he doesn't even know if he is real, and therefore doesn't know if he is even inhabiting a real body that is actually able to die. both arguments would be 100% valid.

I just always find the scene on 2/2 between he and joker very interesting, because akechi seems so unwilling to engage with even the possibility of taking the deal that it almost seems like he is intentionally avoiding even thinking about it. that is sometimes my method of avoiding fear for something that I feel is imminent. I don't want to project, but it always made me wonder if he was afraid.

thoughts and different takes are welcome.

curious what draws people to this specific character. I'm sure everyone has their own reason. in all honesty this character changed my life and the way I look at the world. the most important things I know about myself were shown to me through his story first. I'd really like to know why everyone else here feels what they feel for him.

there seems to be a split in this fandom, one side of which argues that akechi is an evil psychopath who is incapable of connection or reflection, the other side of which argues that he is blameless and his trauma justifies every horrible thing he ever did. neither side is correct, and that makes people uncomfortable.

akechi is not a good person. he is not supposed to be. he is written to be selfish, jealous, possessive, emotionally repressed, and capable of a psychologically scary level of compartmentalization. his arc is not meant to reveal a secretly kind and gentle person underneath all the masks. that is the point. akechi's character forces the audience to ask if a person still has the right to choose their own life, even after they have done terrible things. royal answers yes. it seems most of the audience still answers no.

the spine of akechi's character is contradiction. not simply duality- contradiction. he is desperate for recognition, but terrified of exposure. he is disgusted with who he became, but does not appear to ever experience traditional remorse. he seeks connection, but tries to control the terms of that connection. he aches to be known and still chosen, but assumes he must manufacture the conditions under which that choosing can happen. these are all toxic cycles that feed off of and reinforce one another. he is not good at heart. he is a wreck. he is extraordinarily selfish. he cannot bond to another person in a healthy way.

but his story matters just as much as anyone else's. maybe, even more. so often in fiction, trauma is used as a plot device to propel the protagonist forward, making them stronger, more resilient, and more heroic. but in real life, trauma often does not work that way. usually, it just makes you worse. and akechi is a representation of that. he is absolutely responsible for everything that he does. he is also absolutely manipulated. both are true. neither erases the other. he causes catastrophic harm, while simultaneously being used, degraded, and dehumanized by a coercive system. the harm he causes does not make him an evil person. the harm he suffers does not make him a good person. he sits in an uncomfortable middle. not a clean villain, not a clean victim. he is both, at once, and neither cancels out the other.

I made this post because I feel like (with some rare exceptions), I see a lot of the fandom splitting his character into these binaries. but in doing so, the larger point of the character is being missed. akechi himself is such a clean representation of duality that causes an unstable and fractured identity. that is why his two personas fusing on 2/2 is such an important piece of symbolism. it shows the beginning of integration. for the first time, it shows him being able to accept both sides of himself as real, without having to claim the other was a lie. for anyone who has ever struggled with unstable identity, this is an existentially important moment. akechi insists on accountability, not because he feels bad, but because he knows that letting anything erase the things he did removes the only authorship over his life that he has left. which brings us back full circle to the main questions that I believe royal asks us about his character: how many bad choices does someone have to make before they become ineligible for personhood? how many terrible things must someone do before they forfeit the right to begin making different choices? royal seems to answer these questions with a question of its own: can someone who is objectively not a good person be capable of doing good? akechi's final refusal to allow his crimes to be erased answers yes.

let this be food for thought, because much of the fandom still answers no. and I think it is worth examining why, when the text repeatedly gives us evidence to the contrary. akechi does not have to be kind, or even inherently good, for his story to matter. I would argue that it might even matter more because he's not.

I want as many as you can give me. they can be huge things or tiny things that seem irrelevant.

I'll contribute one that I've had for a long time: akechi is colorblind. evidence:

* the overall look of loki screams colorblind, with all the black and white stripes

* I also believe shido to be colorblind, because the glasses he wears look just like colorblind glasses. this condition is hereditary.

* his black mask attire has red over the eye pieces which reminds me a bit of shido's glasses, perhaps serving a similar function.

* most namely, the takoyaki scene. it is a little out of character for akechi to commit a social faux pas like taking the special takoyaki. he also very clearly was not anticipating it to be spicy. the only reasoning that makes this make sense is that he didn't know it was red.

tell me your thoughts on my headcanon and hit me with your own!