Hooking something quick here because this one intermittently annoys me, lol: a lot of people diss Akechi's plan because "he could just have killed Shido at the outset, duh. Is he stupid?"
The plan is stupid for many reasons—it's just that this isn't one of them. Akechi not killing Shido right away is telling you something about him:
He's not a killer by nature. That's not too significant given what he becomes, but it is significant if you want to understand him. He doesn't just kill Shido at the outset because that is not yet how he does things. In fact, the fact that he tries to spare the Phantom Thieves on 11/20 indicates that it isn't "just how he does things" until the very end;
Akechi's original skillset doesn't include murder. He shows up with Call of Chaos. That's the first thing he does for Shido. He doesn't kill Wakaba Isshiki—who Sae suggests was the first shutdown case—for months. And we know the fact that killing someone's shadow would put them out of action in real life was part of Wakaba's research. We know Shido talks about how Akechi couldn't properly use his power without him, that "the proper way to use the Metaverse" is to eliminate people when necessary.
A lot of people who say shit like this have paid so little attention to the game that they think Akechi intends to kill Shido, and so they don't understand why he doesn't just kill him right away:
Like, don't make me annotate screenshots and underline "living hell" three times, it will be embarrassing for all of us.
Akechi agrees with Ann that there are things worse than death—you can see that clear as day in the third semester, in the way the engine room ultimately plays out. But I think it's pretty clear he didn't originally kill Shido because a. it was never his intention, b. he probably doesn't know how, and c. he isn't a murderer yet.
He goes with murder when Shido asks it of him, and according to Cognitive Akechi (who is a bit of Shido's subconscious, let's not forget) he commits to it pretty enthusiastically—at least, to all appearances. But he becomes a monster; he isn't born one.
There was clearly an inflection point where it became clear he could either cut short his plan by killing Shido, or continue maiming and killing whoever else Shido required him to. That's the real villain moment IMO, when he makes that choice. Yet it isn't really an idiot ball, is it? He's already killed Wakaba, and given what her research says, her death likely wasn't predicted. Maybe Shido was immediately like "cool, kill these twenty people next", sure. Or maybe there wasn't another request like that for weeks or months. Because you can always tell yourself this is the last time, that it won't happen again, that it's just a few people. And then you wake up one day two years later and crash a subway train without blinking.
Plus, if you think Akechi was going to "just kill" the one family member who needed him, who praised him—no matter how he consciously feels about him or what he intends—then you don't know him very well. You simply don't get led along like a dog on a leash by someone whose praise means nothing to you.
There's a whole story in how Akechi became a killer, and it's underscored by the need that drives him—not for attention, though attention-seeking is its toxic form, but for connection with others. But "he just murders people for fun because he's a psycho lol" is a boring story, and a boring opinion, held only by truly boring people.
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