- 08 - Justice -

historical - Justice - now this is a card that's our friend.  Though it's only ever really personified as the usual "blind lady with scales and sharp scary sword" justice is something that people believe in more than many of the old gods.  Justice is Karma, justice is the damnation of sinners after death, justice is... the faith that people will get what's coming to them.  Eventually.  And that's rather universal, non? See - she's waiting to kick your pansy ass right there...

card - Justice, with the whole scale motif, is concerned with weighing events and assigning consequences as well as with simple balance in the world itself. 

justice meaning - Reason for it's own sake - a clear relationship between cause and effect.  Law, balance, and fairness. 

justice reversed meaning - Injustice or imbalance.  Bias in judgement or unfairness.  A disruption in the relationship between cause and effect. 

persona wielder - Katsuya Suou, as if it wasn't obvious.. (here there be spoilers )

Right then. Of all the card parallels here, I'd have to say that by far Katsuya is the most intriguing.  And no, that's surprisingly not just the deranged Katsuya fangirl in me talking (well.. mostly).  See, Katsuya is the one that doesn't get "fixed".

Fixed, you say?  Nay, my friends.... we do not wish to spay or neuter Katsuya.  Those sexy Suou genes must live!  What I mean is that as far as personal growth goes, Katsuya doens't find the fun happy unreversed state that his couterparts do by the end of the game.  Which is why it sucks to be him.  And probably also why he takes up smoking in a daring, Spike Speigel-like move of taboo coolness.

... I mentioned that I can't really be all that impartial when it comes to Kat, right?  Right. 

Right then.  So.  Beginning Katsuya is our usual card reversed.  And injustice in the key word here.  Katsuya gives up his dreams of chef-dom to keep his family together, playing the role of Perfect Older Brother and Heir.  Simple enough.  Things should turn out okay. Except the rest of his family refuses to play the way the rules were made.. .with Tatsuya more rebellious than looking up to him in any way, his father voluntarily stuck in jail instead of waiting to be sprung, and mom kind of ineffectual and not really helping.  But Katsuya, poor boy he is, just keeps on plugging away - and keeps on getting burned.  Birthing the bitter, nasty, "why does the world not make sense, it's not fair and why are things never about my needs"  Katsuya that makes up his shadow.  He has no particular attachement to his job, his justice.  He just wants to be happy, and life just ain't being fair. 

Well, yes and no.

End Katsuya is just as bitter as beginning Katsuya, except he hides it less.  Yes, he does get his little brother back and kinda sorta looking up to him.  But he's still not happy.  He can't, after all, have Maya... and things haven't really paid off that much.  End Katsuya isn't so much unreversed as he is aware.  If anything, he knows that he'll never really get justice or good karmic payback or any of those things... and he understands it.  He also understands that he doesn't need to play the rigid role he was trapped in.  In a world that doesn't really make sense not-quite-perfect might just be good enough (hence the smoking) - when he'd been assuming the rest of humanity was striving for the same sort of traditionalist perfectionism that he was.