Quote Originally Posted by Zevox View Post
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And speaking of Palaces... Sae's. As a stage in a game, it's nice; thematically for her as a character, I don't get it. She's hyper competitive and a ladder-climber, so she sees the courthouse... as a casino? I mean, I knew that since I've played the game before, but it still seems awfully odd. Also, I'm not entirely clear on what's wrong with her per se - Aketchi claims she'd be willing to fabricate evidence to ensure the Phantom Thieves were punished if she catches you, but we've only got his word on that (which isn't worth much), and that doesn't really tie in with the whole casino thing either. Maybe it's deliberately supposed to be sketchy and unclear, considering the whole situation is Aketchi manipulating you into his trap, but still, I just can't figure out what they're going for with Sae's distortion.
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While I'm not an expert or anything, I do have a take on Sae's Palace. It's important to realize that she doesn't just see the courthouse as a casino; she sees it as a crooked casino where all the games are rigged in her favour, and that of the privileged few who get to cheat themselves. To Sae, the courthouse is a place where people wager their lives and livelihoods believing themselves to have a chance of victory, but in fact the rich and connected always win and the weak and poor always lose. She sees herself as a monster, who used her looks and her treasure (implied to be her father's casebook, which implies she maybe had some dirt on the police force she used to get into her profession) to achieve a position that guarantees her victory.

It's all a fairly straightforward metaphor to the Japanese court system. As a prosecutor, Sae is expected to have a perfect conviction rate, and the system is built from the ground up to ensure that. There are, relatively speaking, no innocent verdicts in the Japanese courts; a veteran prosecutor might have a single not-guilty verdict in their history, to go with a hundred convictions. Sae joined the prosecutors' office as a way to seek justice (in the same way that Makoto wants to join the police to do the same), as a way to honour her father's legacy, but once she got there she found there was no justice in it, only a system that presents the illusion of fairness and equality while actually being predetermined from the start. This is why she comes to see herself as a monster and her Palace takes shape.

Notably, she's also the only target in the game (except Futaba, and for similar reasons) who doesn't need to have her source of power stolen and a change of heart forced on her. Showing Sae that there is at least some justice in the world, that the underdog can win at least once in a while and that she isn't invincible because of the rigged system propping her up is enough to break her out of her twisted worldview and destroy her Palace. Because her distortion, like Futaba, doesn't present her as being better than the rest of humanity; she clearly sees herself as a horrible predator, something twisted and wrong from the very beginning (note how little Shadow Sae looks like the real thing, in comparison to most of the other bosses). Unlike, say, Kamoshida, her Palace doesn't exist for her own glorification. She's simply the corrupt manager of a corrupt casino, cheating the rules and ruining lives for somebody else's benefit because defeat is unthinkable.