sadhoc:
honestly, my favorite thing about persona five? like the big thing it did right? was madarame and yusuke.
bc madarame is unquestionably an abuser. the way he treated yusuke (and natsuhiko and yusuke’s mother and all of his other students) was unforgivable and the man is responsible for at least two deaths and he exploited so many people to destroy their lives. everyone acknowledges this about him, including yusuke, after he finds out what madarame did to his mother
but yusuke also loved madarame, because madarame raised him and took care of him and was the only father he ever knew. and he spends so much of his confidant route grappling with that, with the guilt of having loved someone who was a horrible person, with his own memories, with not trusting himself or other people, with sudden independence he was never prepared for.
and then at rank ten, yusuke learns from a former friend of madarame’s that madarame had genuinely cared about him and worried over him. and honestly at this point i was scared they were going to go for a whole “see he wasn’t bad” thing but they didn’t! instead, yusuke accepts this as just another facet of who madarame was, but neither yusuke nor madarame’s friend try to say that that madarame was somehow not abusive. instead, madarame’s friend validates yusuke’s difficulty trusting him and backs off while still offering to pay for his education.
the culmination of yusuke’s arc doesn’t force him to say that madarame is one or the other, father figure or exploiter, lovable or abusive. the game validates that both can be true, and neither negates the other.
fiction has a real problem with presenting abusers as completely hateable monsters with exactly 0 positive traits, and while that’s considerably easier to do, that isn’t a lot of people’s reality. so i really appreciate that p5 gave madarame and yusuke a more nuanced relationship
