How the Persona 4 Writers Tried So Hard to Make Adachi Straight That They Accidentally Made Him Gay: Welcome to My TED Talk
Okay, so because of his canon characterization being a little all over the place, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to hash out Adachi’s motivations for a fanfic I’m working on. Too much time. Possibly (probably) more time than the writers. But it was during this hashing-out period that I realized a curious result of the writing of the scenes where he murders Mayumi and Saki, one that I’m sure was entirely unintentional. Somehow, in trying to make it seem as if he were a peak yandere when it comes to interacting with women, it actually comes off as completely the opposite - and forms one of the most compelling arguments for a character’s compulsory heterosexuality I’ve ever encountered. Since I love theorizing about Adachi, it was my time. My calling. My destiny.
In the words of a friend, whom I managed to convince of this theory’s accuracy, “We must spread the good word of gaydachi”.
So gather around, fellow fans, and let’s think this out. (If you're ready for a long read, that is.)
(Also, quick disclaimer: I have not played Ultimax, so I know little to nothing about the Adachi storyline therein, but I've talked to another friend of mine who has and they said my theory seems to fly, so I hope it's all right. Either way, just covering my bases, haha.)
Let's begin by trying to figure out what exactly the authors intended as Adachi's motive behind the murders. My guess is one of two things: a delusional, violently jealous attitude toward women he believes to know and love but actually doesn't know at all, or a stance as a misogynist crusader who kills any woman he believes doesn't live up to what he thinks a woman should be (which is evidently the perspective of much of the fanbase). Maybe they were going for a little of column A, and a little of column B. To put it simply, either a yandere, an incel, or both. Sure, it makes sense on the surface - both of those attitudes are certainly reprehensible and villainous - but when you take a closer look, these theories don't quite hold up to scrutiny.
For Mayumi Yamano, both of these theories make sense. The "stalker with a crush" angle is backed up by some of his yandere-adjacent dialogue toward Mayumi - acting like he knows her when she clearly doesn't know him, being incredibly upset that she had an affair, asking why he wasn't enough for her, etc. We can also lean into incel territory by analyzing the slut-shaming tilt of his anger at her - as if the fact that she had this affair makes her disgusting, almost subhuman, and unworthy of love or respect. If the murders had ended here, every box of authorial intent would have been checked, and I wouldn't even be writing this paper.
But it all falls apart when it comes to Saki Konishi.
If we hold up the yandere lens to her, it doesn’t add up. Not because Adachi had scarcely known her for more than a few days, because there are plenty of stalkers delusional enough not to consider that an issue. It's more that there is no real evidence that Adachi cared about Saki at all. Yes, like with Mayumi, he also asks why he wasn't good enough for her, but these words are not backed up by literally anything he does. After the reveal of his true character, he tells the protagonists pretty clearly that he was only interrogating her to both look like he was doing his duty as a detective, and to make sure she hadn’t gained any inkling of the crime’s true culprit. Had she been aware of his involvement, he probably would have thrown her into the TV, anyway. This is not indicative of affection, deranged or otherwise - this is cold and calculated logic, for the sole purpose of covering his tracks. Heck, when the investigation team brings her up, he doesn't even remember her name. If you had a fixation on someone so strong that you were willing to kill for it, would that seriously slip your mind?
If we take the incel interpretation into account, it makes a bit more sense, at least. Adachi, having jumped to completely incorrect conclusions, thinks he saw Saki “seducing” Namatame, even though she's only in high school and in his opinion should be studying. So, having deemed her unworthy of both womanhood and of life, he decides to kill her. But this perspective doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either - because I question why he would limit himself to only her and Mayumi.
Inaba is a very small town, so even though he's relatively new to the area, Adachi must know a lot of people, and there are plenty of characters that don’t represent a stereotypical traditional feminine woman. Take Ai, for example, who's had rumors spread about her and her supposed sugar daddies (untrue rumors, but considering what happened to Saki, Adachi doesn't seem to be super bothered by deep examination of the truth), or Eri, who struggles to love her husband and his stepchild, or even main characters like Rise, whose extremely sexually-charged Shadow he must have seen on the Midnight Channel, or Naoto, who depending on your interpretation is either a very masculine/tomboyish girl or not 100% a girl/not a girl at all. Sure, when it comes to the lead cast, they were part of Adachi's "game" and he might not want to risk discovery, but A. that doesn't explain why he didn't kill the minor characters and B. Adachi’s rage at the two women he killed seemed to defy his bored, rational side, so why would he make exceptions for them? Heck, everyone was so focused on the case that if misogynist crusading was really his goal, he could have just killed Rise and Naoto after they escaped. They had no reason not to trust him, so it probably wouldn't have been difficult to convince them to talk to him one-on-one. It's possible that he could even have set their bodies up like Morooka, and blamed Mitsuo Kubo, who would have happily accepted the charges because he was violent and desperate for attention. It would have been the perfect crime, but he didn't do it. So I'm not really sure that could have been his goal, either - especially since he doesn’t target or single out the girls in the IT when it comes to insulting and taunting the party, or ever say anything sexist to Nanako, or mention a hatred of women in his big motivation speech right before the final battle (and from what I've seen on the Internet, incels are not usually the type to quietly keep their views about women being the root of all evil, etc. to themselves), which suggests his motive isn’t pure misogyny.
(Bit of a side note based on the above, this is unquestionably not a popular take, but I honestly don't think that Adachi is much more misogynist than anyone else in the game - P4 already has a solid amount of casual sexism among the protagonists and others, whether internal, external, or both, so I think Adachi is what you get when you combine that with incredible paranoia, despising two specific women, and a general hatred of the human race.)
If we erase those two options, what do we have left? Fear of rejection is a possibility, but it still doesn't explain his disinterest in Saki. One I've seen a number of times is the suggestion that he's very jealous of Namatame, and it's true that even after every other aspect is disproven, Namatame is the last remaining shared factor between Mayumi and Saki. However, when he's discussing his murders and his motive for them, every last bit of his anger is directed at Mayumi and Saki. He is never upset at Namatame - in fact, Adachi has a line in there somewhere about how Namatame was going to succeed no matter what, and Mayumi and Saki were just gold diggers trying to bring him down. Those don't really strike me as the words of a jealous man.
...Well, not one jealous of Namatame, that is.
Adachi's greatest source of anger at the pair is tied to their association with Namatame - Mayumi's affair, and Saki's perceived attempt at starting another one. Particularly telling is the fact that he wasn't angry at Saki at all until he assumed she was pursuing him. When he confronts her, he doesn't even mention Yosuke, who Saki actually interacted with over a long period of time, or bring up the popular rumor of her having a college boyfriend - no, he only mentions her brief conversation with the emotionally devastated politician. If we combine these points with all the information we've gone over - his disinterest in Saki, the lack of evidence suggesting he was killing out of pure sexist rhetoric, yet his incredible vitriol toward these two in particular - it doesn’t seem like the authors were incorrect, per se, in their attempted portrayal of him as an unhinged celebrity stalker with a crush.
They just missed the target they intended, and landed slightly to the left.
Because all of Adachi’s behavior suggests an intense, violent possessive obsession not of Mayumi, not of Saki, but of Namatame.
Piece by piece, it starts coming together. His disinterest and disgust toward the women involved with Namatame, yet without any disgust aimed toward Namatame himself - because deep down, he's jealous of them, and sees them as being in the way. It might explain some of Adachi's delight at having been the person to pick up the phone when Namatame called, or his even greater delight that this “game” he’d caused had Namatame as the center of it - as his protagonist. (Since Adachi openly says that the truth is basically worthless and that it’s better to chase a lie because it’s less painful, I also wonder if in his eyes giving Namatame the fruitless goal of "saving" the people on the Midnight Channel might even have been a twisted sort of gift. It’s basically a win-win for him.) His only negative comment about Namatame is to say that he’s an idiot for developing a messianic complex - and that could be read both as a truthful distaste for the complex, as well as a distaste for him becoming a different person than the Namatame he’d “known" - but even that negative comment wasn't enough for Adachi to throw Namatame either into the TV or out the open window while he was hospitalized, even though A. he was probably well aware that the investigation team would eventually come talk to him and thus come very, very close to discovering the true culprit, and B. it would have been very, very easy to pass off as a suicide. Was his negative remark, as well as his earlier comment to the investigation team that he'd kill Namatame himself if he could, an attempt at convincing himself that he'd lost interest in Namatame's role in the "game" and didn't care about him at all, despite his actions going against it? The man's already proven himself to be a walking contradiction in many ways, so it's not unreasonable.
While I certainly don't think Adachi and Namatame really knew each other while they were both living in the city (or Namatame would likely have recognized his voice over the phone), Namatame's political campaign would place him in many public spaces - spaces that might be staffed with cops to make sure no one causes any trouble. This is spiraling into my own headcanons, but I have to wonder if he might have grown to admire Namatame as a politician, and then perhaps Namatame went slightly out of his way to be nice to Adachi one time because, y’know, he's a good guy - unaware of the effect that small action would have on the vaguely sociopathic young police officer who had been shown very little kindness in his life. If people can feel close to celebrities they've never even met in reality, imagine the power of a sliver of positive interaction on a lonely, misanthropic man with nothing to cling to!
Despite this, I don't think Adachi is fully aware of this fixation he harbors, or at least not of its true target, because I think back to a conversation with Yu in his social links. While I didn't finish them entirely myself, I've discussed my theory with those who have, and they more or less agreed that though he talks about wanting a girlfriend, it doesn't really seem like he has much actual interest in dating a girl - he only wants to have someone living with him who knows how to cook because he can’t cook for shit. Less interest in a girlfriend as a person, more of a mundane benefit they might be able to give him. As far as I can tell, it's unclear if Adachi even shows a sexual interest in women - especially when compared with the other boys in the game, whose sexual interest in women is rather overt (even when we consider that Kanji is canonically bi and Yosuke also - though probably unintentional on the part of the writers - comes off as bi, too).
A lot of times I don’t necessarily like some fandom arguments for a character's compulsory heterosexuality because it tends to feel like bi erasure. For example, in the Ace Attorney fandom, I’ve seen people invalidate crushes or even entire reciprocated relationships in order to suggest a character was 100% a lesbian despite having little proof to back up the theory. But considering the above evidence, if the authors were trying to make it seem like Adachi liked women, they did a really terrible job of it. While his skepticism and bitterness toward marriage was likely intended to be indicative of either misogyny or a general misanthropy, what it actually reminds me of is something a friend of mine told me a few years ago - that growing up, she always thought marriage sounded like a boring obligation you just had to go through and couldn’t possibly enjoy - until she realized the reason she felt that way was because she was a lesbian, and since gay marriage hadn’t yet been legalized, she didn't know girls were an option. (Unlike Adachi, this friend of mine did not turn out to be a yandere. Unless she’s really changed since high school.)
So ultimately, if we assume that his parents' marriage was seriously fraught, and he was very much isolated from his peers, thus stunting his emotional growth, Adachi likely has a very distorted concept of what love is and is supposed to be (not helped by the number of "crimes of passion" he probably saw and/or investigated while on the force in the city) - so when he was angry at Mayumi and Saki, he thought then, and still thinks now in his confusion, that it was out of love. Add a big dose of "it's Japan in 2011 and Adachi has internalized homophobia as a result", and his repression of his sexuality is several extra padlocks on the closet door - he confuses his feelings for Namatame for jealousy, convinced it's actually Mayumi he has a crush on in order to justify his emotions to himself. It's the one solution I can think of that checks every box, and explains every action - a messy mixture of love, denial, and violence that becomes the catalyst for the entire storyline of Persona 4.
If you have any questions, criticisms, rebuttals, or whatever, hit me up in comments or asks or reblogs! This pet theory of mine has been a long time coming, and I'd love to discuss it with others (or I wouldn't be posting a big long essay on social media, haha). Thank you for reading all this, and I hope that even if you disagree with my interpretation, it was at least an enjoyable thought experiment and character analysis! See you around!
