P4 & P5 Femc's, Suzume Asakawa & Rei Kurusu!

P4 & P5 Femc's, Suzume Asakawa & Rei Kurusu!

Info under cut

I wanted to try my hand at creating hypothetical femc's. Not like genderbends of the protagonists (though i always love seeing those), but entirely new characters with different personalities, kinda like Kotone Shiomi from p3p.

I had 3 main philosophies I tried to stick to when designing these gals; they should hypothetically be easy for the player to project themselves onto, they must have the opposite colour scheme of their male protag counterparts, & they must have the opposite personality of their male protag counterparts. Just like Kotone!

I'm kinda bad at explaining, sooo I'll just try to walk u through my design process. Let's start with Suzume!

for Suzume, since purple is the opposite of yellow, i decided to give her a purple colour scheme. Since purple is often associated with royalty, I thought she could be based on the himedere archetype in anime! & what else is the most himedere-hairstyle other than twin curls?

With her design now defined, I moved onto her personality. Im aware it's kinda a debate as to whether or not persona protags have personalities, but personally? i think they do, since they're characterised somewhat consistently across the animes/spin off games (chadrukami & joker having tons of troll dialogue options in p5 strikers come to mind as popular interpretations), so for the sake of making suzume more interesting, let's just say she has one.

Suzume is elegant, prideful, posh, regal, classy, vain, arrogant, & snooty. She takes a lot of pride in her appearance, & loves being the center of attention. Which, considering she's the leader of the investigation team, gives her the perfect excuse to continue stroking her massive ego

In the TV world, Suzume fights with a fencing sword. She accepts her role as the team leader very quickly, & leads her team in a way that can only be described as very.... um.... "authoritative". The best way I can describe her style of leadership is like this; she gets the investigation team to do most of the work beating up shadows, & then she swoops in to get the last hit & steals all the glory! She sucks so much, i love her <3

Suzume always strives to be the best at everything ever. She needs to be better than everyone around her, she always needs to win, because no one likes a loser. & if she's the best, most charming, charismatic, prettiest, & talented girl on planet earth, surely people will HAVE to like her, right? Surely, everyone will HAVE to turn to look at her.... right?

Despite how much she tries to hide it, underneath that perfect princess-like facade is a vulnerable & insecure girl who thinks she needs to be perfect all the time to make up for how unspecial she truly is. She grew up alone & detached from everyone & everything around her, which caused her to be isolated from the world around her. She's basically just drifting through life until she arrives in Inaba. Her princess-like attitude is a mask she puts on to try & get people to pay more attention to her. In Suzume's mind, all attention is good attention. Doesn't matter if people think she's the sweetest angel on earth, or a huge bitch, so long as they look at her. So long as she sticks in their minds forever. So long as they never forget about her again.

Also, she sucks at cooking. Like, she's really bad. Cooking is the one skill she just cannot seem to perfect. She tries to hide how bad she is, to great comedic effect, but. People find out eventually. & uh... it may or may not end with the entire investigation team getting food poisoning. Suzume's cooking is so bad she makes Yukiko look like Gordon Ramsey by comparison.

Ok enough about her, let's move on to Reirei!

Green is the opposite of red, so while I deffo wanted her to be green, i didnt just want her to be green. I wanted her to have more colours so that she wouldn't look too boring. So, I decided that the secondary colour could be pink! This gives her the spring colour palette, which I think fits her very well. I know pink is already one of Kotone's colours, but hey, surely she wouldn't mind sharing. it is caring, after all

Rei has basically the same backstory as the og protag. She was a normal girl, living a normal life, until she was arrested & falsely accused of assault for protecting a woman from a violent drunkard. But the difference between Rei & Ren is in how they cope with being sent away on probation. While Ren puts on the mask of an unassuming, stoic, & shy boy who tries to avoid conflict, Rei has a different approach. She elects to completely lean into people's perception of her, & dons the mask of a tough, ruthless, cold-hearted delinquent. Her design is specifically inspired by sukeban fashion, which actually hasn't been seen since the 80s , but I thought it was fitting for Rei. Plus, I actually have a reason for why she dresses in an outdated fashion style.

The true Rei Kurusu is extremely shy. So shy she can barely talk louder than muttering. She's always been very socially anxious & hates putting herself in the spotlight. She used to hide her face behind long bangs to avoid looking people in the eyes, before she cut them to look more tough & unapproachable (she still mostly avoids eye contact though). Due to her immense shyness during childhood, she didn't have any friends. She grew up with a fairly limited view of the world, & as a result, is behind on a lot of modern trends. This is the kind of girl who only plays retro games on an old console, & who actually still thinks female delinquents in japan dress as sukeban. Yeah, she's kinda stupid. I still love her tho <3 my stupid little gal.

While her inability to look at people when they're talking may come off as rude, Rei doesn't mean any harm by it. She always tries to be nice & polite to everyone, even those who are mean to her, she just... can never seem to get over the hurdles of actually interacting with people beyond simple pleasantries. She always holds people at an arms distance, never wanting to let them in.

Anyways, her facade fools everyone save for only a few; her fellow Phantom Thieves. As the leader, Rei doesn't want to hog any of the spotlight or glory. She thinks the other members are far more skilled, strong, & talented than her, so her leadership style is basically to give orders from the back, while letting everyone else get their chance to shine. She's fairly hands off, only stepping up to the challenge if her team is really knocked down, forcing her to take over & finish off a Shadow with her shinai. Otherwise, her amazing teammates can handle it themselves.

Also, Rei constantly apologises for the smallest of things. Knocking a glass over, or stepping on someone's foot, or just slightly bumping into them, she's always quick to blurt out a "Sorry!" first, even if she's the one who got bumped. Doesn't really help her keep up her delinquent persona, though, so her classmates fairly quickly figure out that she's not actually that threatening. Deep down, she's actually just a really sweet dumbass. A female himbo, if that's even a thing that exists.

ok thats all bye

(doodle reqs open!)