It’s Shadow Maki’s berserk form, in the same vein as the Shadow Kaito design I once did!
In short, this is a concept from Persona 4 in which a person’s suppressed thoughts and feelings manifest into an abstract, symbolic representation of their issues. I’ve made a couple of posts mentioning vague, general ideas about Maki’s Shadow before, but now that I’ve finally managed to piece together enough ideas for her berserk form in my head, I couldn’t not draw it.
Since I’m not going to be writing a fic about this like I did with Shadow Kaito (there’s no need; Maki effectively already faces her shadow in canon thanks to Kaito’s encouragement and support), I’m instead going to just talk about all of the symbolism involved right here.
The Shadow initially manifests as just a giant box without any holes, upright and closed, thudding and rattling like something inside is trying to get out. As it tips over and falls open, the Maki doll clambers out from under a huge pile of weapons. The hands appear before she can leave the box itself, their strings piercing through it to take hold of the weapons and stab them into Shadow Maki, keeping her trapped in there under their control.
A significant part of this design was based around the fact that I’d already decided that Maki’s Persona would be Pandora. Pandora got associated with all the bad things that escaped when she opened her box, but that shouldn’t be considered her fault – it’s the fault of the asshole gods who filled the box with those things and gave it to her in the first place, knowing she’d open it.
So that’s why there’s a box filled with weapons, and why one pair of shadowy hands is holding it. The hands represent the members of Maki’s cult who trained her, or perhaps also the rich assholes who hire her to kill people, so the box with all those horrible things inside really originated from them.
The imagery of the box also fits very well with Maki’s tendency to cope through compartmentalisation – she’s become very good at just shutting away the things she doesn’t want to think about so that she can do what she needs to do. In fact, Pandora’s myth also works really well here, because after letting out all the bad things, Pandora shut the box in such a hurry that she left Hope, the one good thing, trapped inside. That’s basically exactly what Maki did with her own hope – her wishes that one day she could escape this hell and have a normal life – in order to cope. Shadow Maki starts out trapped inside a box because she’s been firmly sealed away inside a metaphorical box by the surface part of Maki for a long, long time.
(This compartmentalisation idea also works for the weapons being sealed inside the box to start with, since Maki also tries to shut away and avoid thinking about all the horrible things she’s been through and done whenever it’s possible for her to do so.)
I am aware that actually in the original myths, Pandora had a jar, and it’s a modern(ish) mistranslation that made it a box. However, while the original correct version of Atlas worked way better for Kaito (he carried all of space, not just the Earth!), this time the misinterpreted version happens to fit a lot better for Maki – because toy boxes are a thing. Except oh god those aren’t toys those should not be anywhere near children.
That was the other main idea I had in mind for this, before I’d even figured out Pandora and knew a box ought to be involved: this sort of imagery that’d disturbingly juxtapose Maki’s child caregiver and assassin talents, because it is horrifying and heartbreaking that she was put through all this and turned into a killing machine as a child.
So it was a pretty neat bonus that Pandora’s box could also be presented as Pandora’s toy box. There’s some more symbolism in the idea of the Maki doll having been alone and forgotten at the bottom of the toy box, because Maki on the surface hasn’t allowed herself to think about her normal, happy life as a child in a long time. Meanwhile, the weapons piled on top of her get taken out of that box and “played with” by surface-Maki a lot more often.
Even if anyone did pick up the doll and try to play with it again, it’s broken and mutilated and can never be the same any more. Maki’s traumatic experiences have messed her up enough that she can never have that normal life back now in quite the same way.
And even if she did try to be free anyway and live her own life despite being broken, she still can’t actually escape that box that she’s shut herself in, because she’s being controlled like a puppet by evil outside forces beyond her reach. That puppet imagery was another thing I knew I had to do with this – fitting neatly with the child-caregiving image of the doll – because a lot of the tragedy of Maki’s story is the fact that she never had a choice. Everything she’s been through has all been her being controlled and manipulated by people who don’t give a damn about her.
The box also helps here in that she can’t even see the hands puppeteering her, because Maki doesn’t actually see her situation as herself being controlled and feels like she deserves to bear every single bit of the blame and responsibility for her actions herself. (And the owners of the hands can’t see her in there suffering either, because like hell any of those assholes care about that.)
I had the strings be attached to the Maki doll via weapons impaling her partly just as an efficient way to combine the toy mutilation and puppeteering motifs into one, but also because that control and manipulation is precisely one of the main things that’s been hurting her and messing her up so much. She’s technically holding those knives in her hands and could use them to kill someone like this, but doing so is hurting her just as much. And trying to break free of it would only hurt her more – so it’s easier for her to just stop struggling and give up.
hey i know you said that your idea of shadow kaito wouldn't have a palace but i just got an idea: the team navigator sets up a link with him wherever the hell he is in there, and throughout the palace he's constantly assuring the group that he's fine, don't worry, nothing you're hearing about here is worth worrying about hahaha
just the juxtaposition between how he is constantly saying he’s fine whille all the time you’re hearing how things are Decidedly Not Fine.
Hee, what a fun idea! Of course Kaito would do that. He’s totally fine, none of the stuff they’re hearing or seeing in this place is anything to worry about! In fact, none of it has anything to do with him in the first place; he doesn’t know why the hell he ended up in a weird place like this because it’s not like he recognises or relates to any of the things around him whatsoever!! And there may be this weirdo in the room he’s stuck in who’s like some kind of pathetic imitation of him, but that’s definitely got nothing to do with anything at all!!!
Also, if we’re going full-on Persona 4 here, then that’d mean that whoever’s coming to rescue him (which would obviously include Shuichi and Maki as well as some others) would be full-fledged Persona-users fighting their way past Shadows to get to him. So Kaito would probably hear the sounds of superpowered fighting going on in the background of the connection the navigator made with him, which would just make things even worse. Shuichi and Maki Roll are heroes who are on their way to save him? Nope, nope, that’s completely backwards to how things should be. Don’t worry, guys, Kaito is going to do something about this and can totally save himself; he’s grateful for the help, but you guys didn’t even really need to!
And if this is full-on Persona 4, then this wouldn’t be the first time that Shuichi’s group had done this kind of thing and saved someone from their Shadow, so they’d know full well that Kaito is lying and that everything they’re seeing and hearing is drawing off his inner thoughts. Imagine, during their long-distance conversation, Kaito gradually beginning to pick up on the fact that they’re not really buying his denial one bit and that they’re bound to realise the truth sooner or later and start asking him questions he can’t avoid and doesn’t want to answer. So out of a fear of having to do that, through sheer stubborn willpower Kaito somehow manages to cut off the navigator’s connection himself, on his end, and no matter how hard they try they can’t get back in touch with him. Which would then cause the team to worry if he’s even okay back there, or whether they provoked him so much that he’s going to deny his Shadow and turn it berserk already before they can even be there to protect him from it.
…Actually, that’s a concept that’d apply to basically any P4 TV world victim, since the whole idea behind those Shadow boss fights is that the victim always stubbornly wants to deny their issues. It’s not actually possible as far as we know in P4 canon for a navigator to form a communication link with the kidnapped victim like this, and having thought about it in this context with Kaito, maybe that’s a good thing. If the rescuers attempted to reassure the victim that, look, they know everything here is coming from their issues but that’s okay, it might be too likely to lead to the victim denying their Shadow too soon. Or, alternatively, they’d have to try and reassure the victim that things are going to be okay and they’re going to be rescued without ever directly addressing the issues part, having to lie that, yeah, of course you’re basically fine, of course none of this stuff around us is anything that we’re reading into at all, just to not push the victim into trying to outright deny anything too directly until they get there.
Ooh, ooh, also, not specifically a response to anon, but: while I’m here talking about Shadow Kaito-related stuff in a context even closer to P4 canon than the fic I wrote, involving actual Personas alongside Shadows, here’s something I thought about recently. So Kaito’s Persona is Atlas, and I also mentioned in a post once that I’d decided Shuichi’s Persona would be Prometheus, because something something pursuit of knowledge even if it’s bad and also he’s one of Atlas’s brothers. However, I could never figure out a mythological figure that’d fit for Maki’s Persona, other than that it needed to be Greek to match the other two. But now I have!
Pandora would be a great fit for Maki. She unleashed all sorts of horrible things upon the world and got associated with it and blamed for it, even though she never meant to or wanted to make anyone suffer. Yet hope remained trapped within the box, not gone, still there inside but unable to get free until someone opened it again. Admittedly this is a rather Danganronpa-esque narrative in general, but it’s particularly fitting for Maki, I think. Also, apparently Pandora is possibly Atlas and Prometheus’s sister-in-law? Which, since they don’t have any actual sisters, is the best we’re going to get.
Aaaand here's the logical conclusion of the Kaito/Persona 4 crossover content I seem to have been doing here. I definitely wasn't planning for things to escalate this far when I started out designing his hypothetical Shadow's berserk form. But since I then also designed a Persona based on that Shadow, and also incidentally had prior experience of doing this P4 Arena thing with a character from a different franchise but with a similarly competitive nature, there was suddenly very little reason for me not to do this. All I needed to do was come up with a proper Arena-style title for Kaito, since "The Luminary of the Stars" is great but not nearly awkward and uncomfortable enough, and decide on a weapon for him to use, for which a shield seemed like the obvious choice considering his appropriately defensive, protection-focused build in V3's bonus RPG mode.
(I had some troubles coming up with the design of the shield at first because I am not good at designing things from scratch without anything to base them on. So I decided to base it on a couple of things.)
(Also, there's a bilingual bonus in his Japanese title here, which is completely different from the English one because both "sidekick" and "luminary" don't translate directly.)
I would love to hear if there's a particular fic bit that you've been dying to talk about! :D
Well, at first my answer to this was, “nothing off the top of my head?”, since I reblogged that post less because I’d been thinking of anything specific recently and more because it’d been on my dash three times. But I’d definitely felt that way about certain parts at some point in the past, so I went and reread the fic (this is the Shadow Kaito fic I’m talking about, of course, being the most recent lengthy fic of mine and me being still mostly in V3-mode) to refresh my memory. And now the response is, “not one particular part. Several particular parts”.
I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m emphatically not, and I know you’re not going to complain about this either. =P
“But still… they were always gonna find out sooner or later, y’know? Hell, knowing Shuichi, he probably already figured it out a while back, right?”
Kaito’s gaze darted to Shuichi, his eyes flashing with alarm and… something else, something that made Shuichi reach for the brim of a hat that wasn’t there.
In the early conception of this moment, my mental simulation of Shuichi simply kind of flinched when Kaito looked at him here. As I tried to figure out why, I remembered that oh yeah, Shuichi has some issues with eye contact, particularly of an intense nature - and then it occurred to me that the way Kaito was looking at him here was actually directly connected to those issues. It’s not “hatred” - Kaito would never hate Shuichi - but it’s that same kind of hurt, accusatory “how dare you uncover my secrets, they weren’t yours to know” from the part of Kaito that’s terrified he knows everything, and it feels all too uncomfortably like the culprit from that one case. Since that was a very fun notion, I wanted to get it across, but only very subtly because Shuichi would never consciously acknowledge that Kaito had had that effect on him. So I was really pleased when I came up with the reference to his hat and his instinctive reflex to hide his eyes behind it when something like this happens.
“It’s so obvious who I am. Shuichi can see the truth, but all I can do is run away from it like a coward.”
Originally when I wrote this line that leads to Kaito fully denying his Shadow, I wanted to get across the idea that, since everyone can already see that the Shadow is obviously him, Kaito is only making himself look even weaker by not being able to face it (which just pushes him even further into desperate irrational denial instead of cutting his losses and accepting it). At first I couldn’t word that right and the Shadow was basically directly saying as such, until I managed to streamline it here into a line which implies it better.
But here’s the fun thing - I wrote this part before properly getting through the trial 4 section of my Kaito ramble and figuring out exactly what’s going on in Kaito’s head during that trial and what the root of the problem is. So when I did figure that out, it was pretty great to look back at this bit and realise that I’d already written Kaito doing pretty much the same thing without actually having known at the time that something like this essentially happens in canon, too. “Shuichi can see the truth, but all I can do is run away from it like a coward” is a perfect description of what Kaito is doing in trial 4, but I didn’t know that when I first wrote that line!
A bunch of other bits in this fic were deliberately drawing off things I talk about in the Kaito ramble - “Heroes aren’t supposed to be this way!” comes to mind - but I think this was the only bit where the parallel happened backwards by complete chance.
Shuichi doesn’t see the Shadow’s true form until quite late in the game and Maki sees it pretty immediately and more or less gets it straight away, but Kaito? Kaito also notices the Shadow’s true form quite early on - and then his mind just does a big NOPE on acknowledging it or thinking about it, because he’s totally got better things to be doing, like rescuing Shuichi, right. (But what he gets from it is not, like Shuichi and Maki do, that he’s hurting himself by taking on their burdens without worrying about his own problems - he just sees it as meaning he’s too weak to support them.)
There was in fact a far better way Kaito could have “saved” Shuichi - by believing in his ability to save himself and simply encouraging him to do that. Shuichi was too nervous to climb down on his own until he felt like he absolutely needed to, but Kaito could have talked him through it, giving him the confidence to do so and reassuring him that he’d be there to catch him if he messed up. Exactly like Kaito always should be doing for his sidekick! But not here, because this is chapter 4, and because everything Kaito’s just heard has made him desperate to prove it all wrong and show that he’s “strong” enough to very directly save Shuichi and be the hero.
“I always say that,” the Shadow said. “I tell everyone, ‘I’ll do something about this’, but I never have a clue what to actually do.”
“Shut up!” yelled Kaito. He flailed one of his arms at the lights as if trying to swat them away, to no avail. “Get outta my face!”
“I’m hurt. I’m scared.” The stars’ brightness intensified, and Shuichi hated how powerless he was to stop what was coming. “Heroes aren’t supposed to be this way!”
“Sh-Shut up!” Kaito tried to turn his head away from the stars, but they were all around him. He screwed his eyes shut instead. “Y-You don’t know a damn thing about me!”
In earlier drafts, Kaito’s protests and denial at his Shadow before it attacks him both times were pretty nondescript and interchangeable, but in editing I tried to tighten that up a bit. Now the idea is that each time Kaito’s reaction essentially reflects what the Shadow is saying about him and proves it right even as he’s denying it.
Despite all the pain relating to his own issues he goes through in this, the absolute worst and most terrifying moment of it for Kaito was when he thought his Shadow was about to kill Shuichi while he was powerless to stop it.
(The Shadow threatening to do that and Shuichi figuring out that it was a just bluff to hurt Kaito was actually one of the earliest ideas I had for how part of the “fight” might go, before I’d even remotely pinned down the Shadow’s berserk form. As a placeholder, I was picturing some vague giant shadowy creature picking Shuichi up in its hands and threatening to crush him or something.)
While Kaito was immensely relieved that Shuichi wasn’t going to die, he otherwise hated it when Shuichi figured out his Shadow’s intentions. That was Shuichi saving himself by using his intellect and realising that Kaito was the vulnerable one who needed protecting (and also that this Shadow definitely was him), none of which are things Kaito wanted to be true. The stubborn desperation to prove that all wrong was what gave him the strength to stand up again, even though he couldn’t a moment ago when Shuichi’s life was apparently in danger (because all that moment made him feel was utter terror at his helplessness).
It’s also not a coincidence that the moment at which Kaito clams up and stops saying anything for a while is just after Shuichi starts very directly protecting him. At that point, it seems indisputable to him that Shuichi knows who the real hero is and who’s really in need of protecting, such that there’s nothing Kaito can say to try to deny it any more, while he also still can’t bring himself to admit the truth. At first when I wrote this bit I wasn’t completely sure if my simulation of Kaito retreating into himself and being unresponsive for a long time was truly in character for him - it doesn’t seem very Kaito-like on the surface - but then it occurred to me that actually this is basically also what Kaito does in the first half of chapter 5 in response to a not-entirely-dissimilar set of circumstances, so yes, it definitely is in character.
“What you just said is that you don’t trust us,” Maki snapped. “You think we’d turn our backs on you if we knew about this.” Her mace crashed into the Shadow, harder than before. “How stupid can you be?” Fuelled by her frustration, she grew relentless, striking him over and over again. “How could you possibly think – after you accepted me for who I am – that I would ever not do the same for you?”
Part of the reason Maki gets so furious and relentless here is that as she’s saying all this, she’s realising that, oh, wait, her own offhand comments about Kaito being an idiot or a coward prooooobably did not help any with him trusting her not to turn her back on him, and she’s starting to feel rather guilty about that.
Maki first hits Shadow Kaito in the torso, which is the least weak part of him since he’s a statue, but later when Kaito’s accepted him and the berserk form just needs to be destroyed, Maki simply shatters his limbs to end it immediately. She could have done that the whole time - but what she was trying to do in the beginning wasn’t to force the Shadow to drop the pedestal, but rather to persuade him to choose to drop it of his own volition by making carrying it even more difficult. It occurred to me that the amount of time between Maki leaving and returning was probably a little too long for her to have spent just running all the way to her lab and back at full pelt. So then I decided that she paused for a while in her lab as she picked up the mace and pictured herself destroying something that looked like Kaito with it, which made her shudder and reconsider exactly what the Shadow was and whether attacking it would really help. She came to the conclusion that it’s essentially Kaito’s “enemy” and therefore she needed to help him fight it rather than just easily winning the fight herself.
Despite everything, Kaito was smiling. Not a huge, dazzling grin for the sake of others, but a quiet smile that was just for himself.
I wrote this line perfectly innocently, and then it occurred to me that there is in fact one time in canon in which Kaito smiles like this, and it’s when he is in SPACE. Then I had a lot of emotions.
“I’m alright now.”
This is just after Shuichi and Maki have encouraged Kaito to accept his Shadow; this is also exactly what Kaito says in the correct route of his Harmonious Heart when Shuichi convinces him to be okay about showing his weakness. Probably nobody was ever going to notice that, but I wanted to put it there anyway.
The lunar lander had landed, standing quite stably on the three legs that it had always had, as if those two statues on top had never really needed Shadow Kaito’s support at all.
That’s not true, Shuichi thought fervently as the implications of this sank in. How could even a part of Kaito have ever thought that?
There have been many points during my V3 commentary at which I have wanted to say “and that’s why the pedestal has legs.” But I couldn’t, because readers of the commentary may not have read this fic and would be very confused.
“I shouldn’t have blamed everything on you, when you’re no different from anybody else.”
At some point after I wrote this line, it brought to mind a line from the game Celeste, during Shadow Madeline’s explosion of rage, where she says, “You think you can blame everything on me!?” I thought that was a neat unintentional similarity. Don’t blame everything on your Shadow. It will just make them sad. They are weaker than you and need to be your sidekick.
(Reminder: if you are here for my Shadow-related content, please play Celeste.)
Kaito’s gaze rose to meet his. “Time for what?” There was a quiet urgency in his voice. “What are you going to do, Shuichi?”
The narration here was me doing my best to subtly get across the sense that Kaito’s really just desperately thinking, “Please tell me you can save me, Shuichi.” Shuichi really is his hero.
Kaito’s grip tightened just a little on Shuichi’s shoulder as he looked between them both imploringly. It might have been because Shuichi knew the truth now, or just because Kaito wasn’t trying so hard to hide it anymore, but Shuichi could sense something almost anxious behind Kaito’s usual confident gaze.
“I believe in you guys,” Kaito said. “Isn’t that enough?”
And similarly, this was me trying to get across that Kaito is really, really desperate for this to be enough. Shuichi and Maki are going to be figuring out a plan to escape and save his life with their awesome talents of deductions and fighting, but Kaito’s mind isn’t wired to deduce things like Shuichi can or come up with plans, and he’s not strong enough right now to fight. He so badly wants to be able to help somehow with them forming this plan and not be useless, to prove that he really can still support them after all despite everything, but all he can do is be his usual optimistic self and believe in them, and if that isn’t enough to help then he’s just got nothing else to offer and he can’t bear that thought.
I don't usually take my AU crossover ideas this far, but after designing the berserk form of Kaito's hypothetical Shadow, I already had a few ideas for the Persona he'd turn into. The great response I got for the Shadow post inspired me to properly finalise those ideas and draw him.
That sphere he's carrying represents all of space, which is what Atlas actually carries in the original myths and is wonderfully appropriate for Kaito. His clothes were very loosely inspired by the new SpaceX spacesuit; I wanted something that was technically a spacesuit but looked more sleek and cool than the usual image of one, to fit more with Kaito's idea of a hero. The dots and lines on the suit are meant to look kind of like a constellation but also be vaguely reminiscent of the cracks all over the Shadow's true form.
His element is electricity - that seems to be the element associated with manliness in Persona-users - and his physical attacks would be the Strike type and involve him bashing enemies over the head with that sphere. He'd also get a lot of protective and supportive skills, because he's Kaito.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
What if Kaito found himself face-to-face with a physical manifestation of the pain and weakness he’s desperate to hide, right in front of the two people he's most afraid of showing it to?
A minor AU set during the otherwise-normal canon storyline in which the phenomenon of Shadow selves from Persona 4 is suddenly a thing. Readers who don't know Persona 4 should still be able to appreciate this story as well, since none of the characters have any familiarity with the concept either.
I finished the Shadow Kaito fic! Finally!
This has been wonderfully timed with the fact that my original Shadow Kaito drawing happened to explode in notes about a week ago. If you’re one of those people who gave it a reblog or even a like, thank you so much - you helped inspire me to finish the fic even faster by proving that there’s clearly an audience for it out there! I hope you enjoy it, if you decide to check it out.
If you haven’t already seen my art of Shadow Kaito but you’re interested by the concept, then I actually recommend you read the fic first before looking at the art, for reasons.
Have you thought of anyone elses shadows in your p4au or just Kaito?
The short answer is no, and a longer answer about exactly why I haven’t can be found here.
But that’s not quite true, because while I mention in that post that Shuichi and Maki both essentially face their shadows in canon, I have thought a little bit about what those shadows would have actually been like if they’d been proper, physically-manifested P4-style Shadows.
Shuichi’s Shadow would of course be focused around his fear of facing the truth. He’d be constantly talking about how the truth is only ever terrifying and painful and so he’d rather just remain in ignorance about everything forever, and that all detectives do is hurt people and what kind of an awful person is he for being one. I don’t have anything close to a full design for his berserk form in mind, but he’d probably be wearing a blindfold, to symbolise him wilfully looking away from the truth that he should be able to see. His humanoid form would obviously wear the hat, and he’d make even more of a point of hiding his eyes with it than regular Shuichi does.
I’ve also decided that Shuichi’s Persona would be Prometheus. The whole thing about gifting fire to humans kind of symbolises the pursuit of knowledge despite potentially bad consequences, which is pretty appropriate for Shuichi - but even more appropriately, he’s one of Atlas’s brothers.
Maki, meanwhile, had to force herself to accept and become numb to being a child-slave assassin as the only possible way she could cope with it. Even so, the part of her that hates this and never wanted it is still there, just massively suppressed, so that would be her Shadow. In contrast to Maki’s stoic, cold demeanour, Shadow Maki would be an emotional wreck, crying about how she never wanted to kill anyone and she just wants to go back to the orphanage and have friends and be a normal girl but that’s no longer possible and it’s not fair. It’d be even harder for Maki to accept her than it would be in Shuichi’s case - while Shuichi accepts what his issues are in canon pretty easily and his main problem is just finding the courage that he knows he lacks, Maki’s problem is simply admitting to herself in the first place that this is how she really feels, and even with all of Kaito’s persistence, her opening up and accepting herself is a very slow, gradual process. That said, if she’d met her Shadow then maybe that would have forced things through a bit faster than they happened in canon, heh.
I don’t have a specific idea for her berserk form either, but there’d probably be something along the lines of what there is in the Maki piece in this post, which is a fantastic bit of art. The way it combines both her talents by having the children’s toys be mangled and murdered in various ways is the perfect way to show the heartwrenching contrast between her two lives, and that kind of messed-up imagery should absolutely be in her Shadow too.
[Edit from the future: I actually did end up drawing a berserk Shadow Maki, featuring the above-mentioned imagery and more!]
So your shadow Kaito was amazing. Would you ever consider trying it with other characters? You could maybe follow the plot of the game, but pick and choose who gets to fight their shadow and get that level of character growth.
I’m glad you liked my Shadow Kaito, and thanks for the ask!
The short answer is that I definitely don’t have time for a project that big and expansive - just the one-off Shadow Kaito fic already took me over three months to finish. Plus, if I were to try and follow the game’s plot, it’d get into very elaborate AU territory very quickly as soon as someone faces their issues in a way they don’t in canon. As you saw from the Kaito fic, things had completely diverged by the end of it, and that story would not continue remotely like the canon one did from that point on.
The other short answer is that there’s only a handful of other members of the V3 cast that I like enough and understand well enough to even potentially want to do this with (for example, here’s an answer to a previous ask where I explain why Kokichi is not one of those).
But even out of the characters I do like enough to have a sense of what their Shadow might be like, it’s just nowhere near as obviously warranted to do that for them as it was for Kaito.
(Obligatory warning that spoilers abound past the cut.)
For example, Shuichi and Maki? They both absolutely have massive issues that would fuel a pretty interesting Shadow - but the canon storyline already shows them discussing and facing and overcoming those issues of theirs. They essentially already face their shadows, albeit in a more metaphorical sense. That’s what Kaito’s talking about when he mentions the “enemy” that he’s encouraging them to fight. Himiko does the same thing too, for that matter. Writing a literal P4-style Shadow for them would be… okay, still pretty fun, but it wouldn’t produce a story that significantly different from canon that it really feels worth doing for me.
You could also describe what happened to Ryoma in canon as basically being the story of how he tried to face his shadow but failed to overcome it and it killed him.
I also love Gonta, who definitely has a whole host of issues that he never really overcomes in canon. But the interesting thing about him is that he’s so completely honest about his feelings, including his perceived weaknesses and failures, and he has basically no concept of trying to act a certain way in front of people to hide certain things about himself. I don’t think he would even have a Shadow, because a Shadow specifically draws off the things that someone is suppressing, and Gonta isn’t suppressing anything at all.
Then there’s Kaede. As much as I love her, one thing about her is that she doesn’t seem to have that much in the way of issues outside of the killing game scenario. There’s hints that maybe she never really had real friends because she was too much of a Piano Freak to make any, but that’s about it. Where Kaede really gets interesting is in how she responds to being put in a killing game. On the surface she remains constantly encouraging and optimistic, insisting to everyone that if they just keep working together they’ll defeat the mastermind and get out of here. But we also see inside her head, where, it turns out, she keeps doubting whether they’ll really manage to escape and whether she’s really any good at motivating and leading everyone at all. Since she makes an effort to make sure nobody else sees that from her, those doubts of hers would be her shadow. So the interesting thing about Kaede’s relationship with her shadow is that it’s actually because she listens to her shadow and the doubts it gives her, rather than suppressing it completely, that she ends up feeling like the only way she can save everyone is by committing murder.
Kaito, meanwhile, has such a huge mound of issues that he stubbornly suppresses the everliving hell out of to the point that he’s the perfect candidate for a story where he encounters his Shadow and is forced to face everything he’s trying to hide. Honestly, I started thinking really seriously about writing Shadow Kaito less because I specifically wanted to do a P4 AU thing with him and more just because I wanted to make some content about Kaito’s weaknesses and issues and how his friends would react if they knew about them, and the P4 concept of Shadow selves was just the right catalyst for that. A Shadow is practically the only way to get all those issues of Kaito’s out in the open without requiring some seriously elaborate buildup to reach a point where he’d actually be willing to express or admit to any of it on his own.
