Do you eat bread with crust?

But I mean, you shouldn’t just be able to just choose whoever you want in a private group, I mean your literally saying a group of high schoolers should be able to choose who’s right and wrong...

But I mean, you shouldn’t just be able to just choose whoever you want in a private group, I mean your literally saying a group of high schoolers should be able to choose who’s right and wrong... well I understand that. But everyone they target they know are bad. To even have a palace you need to be bad. So can’t they not even steal normal people’s hearts?

Yeah...As cool as the idea of the Phantom Thieves of Heart is it only works in game form. In real life, leaving it up to a group of highschoolers to decide what's right and what's wrong? I barely trust highschoolers not to steal my car when I go to the store so that's a no from me. Also, Mementos, they can change your heart for having even the most mundane negative thoughts.

Yeah...As cool as the idea of the Phantom Thieves of Heart is it only works in game form. In real life, leaving it up to a group of highschoolers to decide what's right and what's wrong? I barely trust highschoolers not to steal my car when I go to the store so that's a no from me. Also, Mementos, they can change your heart for having even the most mundane negative thoughts. doesn’t stealing a treasure only remove their negative thoughts/actions though?

You steal their treasure in mementos by beating their shadow as well, I believe? Been a while since I played P5.

joker can steal my heart any day owo :wink:

joker can steal my heart any day owo :wink: fat same

There is no justice in this world. Except for mine

I believe they are, yes, it's not like they walk around in town and point at random people saying "I am gonna change their heart" they track palaces and follow requests from the very thing this site was modelled after, the Phansite,

Except there are no requests on this website, so to start with, one of those tools you say they have is already nonexistent

At the end of the day, no matter how you try to excuse it, they're essentially brainwashing people. It's sure presented as heroic from the point of view of the Phantom Thieves themselves, but if you take a step back it's pretty sketchy. The question is if the ends justify the means, really. I personally wouldn't trust anyone with that sort of power, it's too much for anyone, let alone a group of highschoolers.

They put their lives on the line to change their target's heart, when they do the person confesses their crimes, even if it were brainwashing they aren't making people confess to crimes they didn't commit, they are stopping criminals! Which would you rather? A man like Shido or a group like the phantom thieves?

I didn't say they weren't doing anything good. At all. Are their methods sketchy? Absolutely. Are they using those methods to stop people that are definitely worse than them? Sure. I was only presenting the possibility that the ends don't always justify the means. In the real world, not everyone is as cartoonishly evil as Shido or Kamoshida. Would it be okay for them to risk turning a real person into a vegetable and completely change the way their brains are functioning in order to force them into confessing to their crimes? Another point, who would even be considered a target for them? The bad ending makes it pretty apparent that they very much have the capacity to go trigger-happy with changing hearts. Who's to say that someone couldn't be targeted in Mementos just because he had a bad day at work and thought about really hurting his boss or something? Realistically, the Phantom Thieves are a completely independent, and anonymous group that targets who they want when they want to; and that's a very scary prospect if you don't know anything about them other than what they're doing to people.

I agree with everything in that essay on fictional characters

you're damn right you do

I believe the phantom thieves are just because the only risk of turning someone into a vegetable is if you kill their shadow, which was never part of their plan, plus they have saved people from others, and themselves when nobody could help them really like futaba, shiho, etc.

Plus they fought a malevolent god to save a society of people who willingly supported this evil, while the people denied the phantom thieves

I'd like to emphasise something hazzy said : you're not just turning them into nice people who confess their crimes. You turn them into vegetables unable to take on life like they used to. You steal everything they lived for. In the game, people who lose that end up in the depth of mementos, and simply become slaves to society. No free will, no motivation, no self-respect, no self at all. The game never really shows you what happened to the people who have changes of heart. Of course we know them to be incarcerated, but what happens after that? The first solution kamoshithead came up with was suicide. I wouldn't be surprised if the others simply went for the same thing. Stealing someone's dreams, hopes and will is casting them into depression.

If you ask me, they never really recognize the implications of their actions. Even when they met their targets in the depths of mementos, they were defensive about it. Iirc, Ryuji said "We were doing the right thing!" which basically means they don't care what happens to others as long as it furthers their own agenda. And, while they didn't directly kill anyone, they were responsible for the deaths of at least a few. And, their arguments weren't the strongest either. Most of the time, instead of refuting the villain they just ignore them completely.

You may see it that way, but think about Ann's friend, she tried to kill herself after what Kamoshida did to her, look at the pupil who killed themself because of Madarame, look at all the people asking, no begging for help, that girl that could have died had they hadn't acted, look at all the people they saved, all the justice they brought for victims of so many, tell me, even if Kamoshida killed himself, even if Madarame had no will to live, would that not still be justice for the girl who threw herself off a building because of what Kamoshida did? Would that not be justice for the pupil who couldn't take what Madarame was doing to them anymore and killed themself? Not only them though, all of the people who were put through hell because of that Kaneshiro, (pretty sure I spelled that right) and even further, all of the people who died because of Shido, wouldn't their immense pain be justice for all of the people who were hurt by them? Or do people like Shido and Kamoshida and Madarame matter more than all of the good people who got hurt by them?

Those are mere individual situations, though. The use of psychological warfare to solve personal issues has much graver implications in the world as a whole. Imagine if a terrorist organism discovered the Phantom Thieves the same way anyone else did, and used their very same methods against their own opponents the same way Shido does? They put the whole world at risk for their own personal gain, before even trying more moderate methods. Not to mention, they actually left some innocent people worse off due to their clumsiness. If the Phantom Thieves were smart enough to realize they were being tricked, they could've helped Okumura-san (an innocent man) and not make Haru an orphan.

The question isn't if their clumsiness is just it's if they are, everyone makes mistakes even when they are trying to help people, it's the way life is, and if some terrorist organization found out about it it wouldn't be the fault of the phantom thieves, it's not like they go around showing everyone how to get to the metaverse, they would have known there was a way to change hearts but they wouldn't know how unless they figured it out, not by the fault of the phantom thieves,

Still, a power like that, if viewed from an ordinary lens, is about the same as brainwashing. While there were few other choices in certain cases, there's also the whole debate over whether changing someone's heart is even ethical. Of course, that goes into a lot of moral debates, hence why the Phantom Thieves aren't black and white. Sure, their goals are just, but there's also that question of whether the means are. In the end, we could see it as a debate whether the ends justify the means. Of course, there are some situations where it's less ambiguous, such as when a certain hacker wanted their heart stolen. There's a thing of consent there, plus she, you know, didn't get her desires stripped from her or anything.

Spoiler alert, a certain someone did figure out about their methods almost immediately after they formed. And, saying it's not their fault is like saying the threat of nuclear warfare isn't the fault of those who pioneered it.

They didn't tell anyone how they did it except for the other members, it isn't their fault that another found out, but their justice is still so true, no matter what you say

It's still brainwashing tho... I get that they're targeting criminals and all, but they shouldn't have stuck their noses where they didn't belong in the first place. Yeah, it sucks that criminals can sometimes get away with their actions and it's not fair, but life isn't fair. That's the world we live in, and it's sad, but that doesn't justify brainwashing people for reasons that a group of teenagers might deem right. Everyone has different opinions on everything, such as this. There is no way to really say if their actions were just when they only took into account their own opinions and ignored those of others. What they did is actually kinda selfish if you think about it.

I don't agree that it's brainwashing. The way the system is set up, they are not deciding on what's right or wrong, they are solving an issue that's being problematic to individuals, that are by happen stance causing problem sin a whole. Brainwashing is the act of re-writing the brain to force it to act a specific way. What the PT do is just remove the limiter that's stopping it from working way it naturally wants to. What they do is they go into an individuals psyche to see what's going on. In the game, it's in a thematic sense that they are stealing treasure, but what they are literally doing is going into a personality and finding out what the root cause of the corruption is. They then proceed to remove the corruption, and then let the individual find it's own path. In these cases, it's the target's humility allowing their guilt to come forth, something their corrupt desire suppressed, denying their true personality from being able to work. It's a form of resolving a mental illness that the target never wanted, but needed help in removing. They are not forcing their ideology on anyone, but instead removing a negative aspect that has corroded an individual's personality, and allowing all their other emotions to no longer be held back by the one desire that became too much. In other people who don't have palaces, it's a case of them going into the collective metaverse and seeing if there's a shadow. If there is no shadow, there is nothing to resolve, thus it's not actually a case of "a bunch of kids deciding on what's right or wrong", it's literally the case of a single person's negativity taking shape into that of a violent shadow that's is disrupting who they really are. It's no different then calling pest control to remove the termites eating your house.

That explains a lot actually. Thank you, Mod Joker. Now buy me tuna.

Oh, is that you traverse the hearts of strangers, to help them? Because i'm sure bettering the lives of those you mark as targets really crossed your mind. Tell me, why is it you chose to become a Phantom Thief? Was it some lofty ideal of bettering society, as you say, or did you merely seek to better your own life? Maybe even make some friends along the way, go down in fame and all that. In the end, you're not all that different myself. I mean, defending one's personal interests should come first, after all. Wouldn't you agree?

I think so