#complete-idiot-inc

[p5x-theories]

I was chatting with a friend about the P5X teammates, when I think I noticed a trend.

After Wonder & Lufel, all the Phantom thieves alternate being composites of two thieves and being an alternate version of a canon thief.

Closer = Ryuji + Ann

Soy = Fox Alternate

Wind = Queen + Oracle

Luce = Noir Alternate

Of course these are generalizations and aren’t wholly perfect, but using this model, I think it’s more than likely that Aran will be some kind of composite of Akechi & Violet. How? Idk, but I think Sleeper Agent for some antagonist be it Magatsukami or someone or something else.

I personally disagree that Soy and Luce aren't a combination of two Thieves, actually. If you consider this from the perspective that each original thief can only be "used" once, I can see how you got here, but I honestly feel like Soy combines a variety of aspects of Skull that Closer lacks, so I'd consider him a combination of Skull and Fox.

Similarly, Luce's popularity reminds me a lot of Crow as we see him before he joins the team. He also... honestly doesn't really remind me of Noir that much, other than people making jokes about his forehead? Their personalities aren't very similar... though I guess you could argue their situations are, in that both situations have something to do with their family, and feeling forced to put on a specific role to make their parents happy. But he certainly doesn't feel like he's exclusively Noir to me; Noir didn't have anywhere near the fame that Crow did and Luce does, for one.

That said, I do agree that at least part of Aran seems to be Crow as well, in terms of both the detective work she's been doing around (and later for) the Phantom Thieves, plus (to a lesser extent than Luce) her fame, and then the general vibe of "Can we really trust her? What's going on with her?" around Aran in Chapter 4, too. I do think it's possible Magatsukami is planning to do something with/to her given the second opening animation, especially since we know she has a Shadow now, though I don't know if I'm expecting it to be like a "sleeper agent" situation, necessarily. I'd love it if her other part was Violet, though! ... And I'm only a little biased because Crow and Violet are my two favorite characters in Royal, haha.

[askvectorprime]

According to the marvel comics, the entirety of Optimus Prime's personality and memories could be stored on a 5.25-inch Floppy disk. So I was wondering how much storage space is needed for the average Cybertronian mind?

Dear Megabyte Medium,

I thought I had answered this question recently, but now realize I only explained the part of the process which would be novel to a human. To recap: in the universe in question, through mass-shifting, we are able to represent around 400 VB of Cybertronian mental data on physical substrate which normally would accommodate 640 TB of data (and like humans, most of the time we require only 10% of our mental capacity at any given moment, which is mass-shifted up into RAM). The rest of the downsizing is simple data compression, just as you would use!

Though we are a long-lived race, the highly repetitive nature of our experiences and language allows for extremely efficient lossy compression. Millions of years of life on Cybertron may be expressed in just a few hundred bytes, our most complex philosophies may be expressed in one or two common dictionary strings—such as "better to fight and die", or "it never ends". The oldest and most developed Cybertronians have complex and nuanced personality subroutines, logical reasoning algorithms and long-term memory, in addition to the unique speech engrams and transformation schemas I previously mentioned, which can all be represented in less than 720 KB. Zachary was thus able to store Optimus Prime's entire mind on a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk and I believe he had enough space left over for a copy of Zork too.

[p5x-theories]

SPOILERS FOR BEYOND THE SECOND PALACE!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read at your own discretion

Magatsukami / Kokoro is the Phantom X timeline’s version of Yuuki Mishima.

That’s insane and I know it is, but hear me out.

Mishima was the guy who created and admins the Phan-Site and Magatsukami is the admin of Divine Justice, which is extremely similar to the Phan-Site.

Kokoro’s cover was as a film maker, and at the end of his confidant, Mishima intends to go into film making.

The absence of the phantom thieves might’ve caused Mishima to go down a much darker path.

I mean, I honestly don't think that sounds that insane, heh. Magatsushin, the website (I guess it's called Divine Justice in the English translation?), has been compared to the Phan-site on this blog before, and even the SMT wiki includes the phansite in Divine Justice's "see also" section! So if everyone seems to be noticing the similarities between Divine Justice and the Phan-site, then it's not much of a stretch to wonder if Magatsukami is similar to Mishima, too.

I'm not sure I believe that he's literally Mishima, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear he has a similar backstory to Mishima but without the Phantom Thieves, or otherwise is generally sort of his equivalent, the way Nagisa is the equivalent of Joker, Lufel is the equivalent of Morgana, and etc. I'm not sure which of those two definitions you meant by "the Phantom X timeline’s version of Yuuki Mishima", since we also have literal instances of that with Chihaya, Takemi, and Iwai, heh, so I'm addressing both to be more clear.

This topic does make me wonder about Magatsukami's motivations, again, though. While it doesn't seem likely that he's all that good of a guy, given he had little problem making a homeless man kill Akashi when Akashi wanted to turn himself in, the pattern here is definitely that the antagonists have all had backstories explaining how they got this way, when they started out more good-intentioned, or at least less outright bad. If they're translating the name as "Divine Justice", and if he is the equivalent of Mishima, that makes me wonder if he did have good intentions at the start- after all, Menaces tend to be people the police can't/don't deal with. I wouldn't be surprised if things went downhill as Magatsukami learned about the Metaverse, or if the power just went to his head or something, similar to Mishima starting to ask the Phantom Thieves to deal with really selfish/inconsequential requests, but on a larger scale.

[p5x-theories]

So apparently, the term “Phantoms” as in the people causing trouble in Tokyo was translated as Menace and I find that hilarious because that means we can reasonably call these guys The Phantom Menace

( @lostamber Grouping your asks together since they're about the same thing!)

Huh, interesting choice on the translation team's part! They certainly say "phantom" in Japanese, so I wonder why the translation team didn't just stick with that?

Heh, I suppose the Star Wars joke suggested here is funny, though!

[p5x-theories]

I'm beginning to think that the Velvet Room is definitely compromised for Wonder. My main evidence for this is that Igor isn't the same at all between P5X & P3R. In X he sits like how Yaldabaoth did in 5 (Resting head on right hand, other hand on the table) instead of Igor's usual hands clasped posture. And between 5X & 3R the VA's change, (Hochu Otsuka & Bin Shimada respectively) but that is probably coincidence. he also does the welcome speech very differently than compared to 3 & 4.

Oh, that's true about the pose! I agree that the VA change is probably difficult to take into account here, but I'm not sure we can compare welcome speeches either until an official English translation comes out, or at least an official Japanese one?

Though I do think you may be right about something weird going on with his Velvet Room in general, between the precedent P5 set, and the strangeness with Merope. Whether it's Igor that's weird, or something else.

[p5x-theories]

Updated English VA Headcanons!

Wonder: Either Ray Chase or Jonah Scott, both are kinda underrated IMO. Cattle: Haley Joel Osment (Sora), I can’t picture a “cutesy” voice coming out from Cattle like how Morgana had one. Closer: Sticking to Luci Christian but I’m also raising Erica Mendez, but… if we could somehow manage to get Tracey Rooney back… Soy: Ben Diskin, no question, I can’t unhear him as Ben Diskin, plus imagine him eating the scenery as Mandrin during the awakening. Wind: Amanda Lee, I think she could pull off the “Unintentionally cold but really caring” type well. Kiuchi: I wouldn’t mind Kellen Goff, but, I also raise, Brian Hanford (Meloné from JJBA). Miyazawa: I think I hit the nail on the head with Richard Epcar, especially if he does a more “Ansem” for normal Hiromu and leans into his Joker experience with the shadow. Katayama: Lauren Landa, she previously shared a role with Aya Endo in PPMM, and I struggled to find a VA.

Oh, fun! We haven't had any VA headcanon submissions in a while, so it's nice to get an update of your last list, hehe.

[p5x-theories]

Trying to wrap my head around 磨我痛神 and my best guess rn is that it’s supposed to be the equivalent of the Phan-site, hosted by the “pain god”

What drives me to such a conclusion is that until we get a better understanding of just about everything involved in this exact situation, the translations for “磨我痛神” seem to be exclamations of intense pain rather than an actual title.

(In reference to this post.)

Okay, so I guess "pain god" is our best translation for now then, that's good to know. And that's really interesting about the website title, too! Whether it's because we're just not able to translate it as accurately, or if it actually is meant to be an exclamation of pain, interesting to me either way, haha! Thanks for looking into that.

[p5x-theories]

Do you think cognitive versions of the palace rulers/their shadows could become part of the gacha? (I only ask because of the card like portrait of Liuchi on the SMT wiki)

Oh, you're referring to these, right? (Letters S, A, B, C were present in the files).

Personally, I'd sooner guess that these cards have something to do with the fact that you can fight Palace rulers again after stealing their heart (maybe the (highest?) difficulty ranks for the fight? Though I didn't see them in gameplay videos when the fight's repeated, so that sort of weakens my theory) than them being part of a gacha. But it's not impossible! All I know is they certainly don't look like the teammate cards, so whatever they are, I doubt it's that?