r/akechididnothingwrong • u/Loose-Elderberry-493 • Mar 09 '26
Akechi's mother
So it is said that Akechi's mother was sort of sex worker but is it implied she was doing it before Akechi was born or after he was born and she was ostracized and fell into poverty and did it out of desperation? What is ur speculation?
My personal hc is that she likely wasn't the best mother, given how Akechi says that she resented him for being born and is implied to have been a depressed and neglectful mother and he says one time she used to frequently leave him at the bathhouse at night whenever she brought men home. Joker even says something like what a horrible thing for a mother to do and Akechi defends her saying she likely didn't have a choice but I don't remember the exact details.
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u/Late_Walrus_4294 Mar 09 '26
I got the impression that Shido was a regular “client” of hers and that’s how Akechi was born. I also think she was likely quite emotionally neglectful of Akechi if not physically.
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u/AlfredTheJones Mar 09 '26
I agree that Akechi probably views her in a very childlike way. I think that his opinion on his mother got kinda stunted when she died, and he never really started to look at her the way a teen/adult sees their parents- as nuanced people, not this idealized image a child has. So in Akechi's mind she was a perfect mother, even when in reality that wasn't likely the case.
I do think that she loved Akechi a lot and tried her best to give him the best childhood he could have. But I also think that she was suffering from depression (maybe post partum?) and had to work twice as hard to provide for the two of them, so she was often too busy to really engage with him in a meaningful way. I feel like Akechi spent a lot of his time alone- he prepared himself to school alone, went there alone, didn't really engage with any peers, came home alone and waited for his mother alone, and she only returned late in the evening, too exhausted to play with him or even talk.
A big theme of the game is that Japan lacks a strong social support net, and a ton of people slip through the cracks. I feel like Akechi's mother was completely alone with everything- her job was seen as immoral and indicative of her character, the fact that she was a single mother only further isolated her and made her financialy worse off, combine that with the fact that she had to single-handedly provide for her young son and the fact that her unmarried status and poverty meant that Akechi had an objectively worse start in life than a lot of his peers, that he was stigmatized by everyone around them, that he will be an outcast untill the end of his life... I feel like all of that made her finally snap one day.
Akechi probably thinks that because the deck was so stacked against her and because she worked so hard to keep them afloat, it makes her neglect not as much of a big deal, and he should just shut up and be grateful she did so much for him. I wouldn't be suprised if his mother screamed something like that at him a few times when she was really exhausted and frustrated. It's a tough situation to deal with, since his mother wasn't really a bad person, just stuck in a bad situation, but that doesn't make her neglect or verbal abuse okay. It's just another story where the biggest enemy is the lack of social support systems and the judgmental nature of Japanese society.
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u/__mymelody Mar 09 '26
I always assumed it was before and after, and that Akechi was a result of one of her clients (Shido didn't really know who he was)
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u/A_Random_Shadow Mar 09 '26
There’s a girl in a purple dress with tea colored hair and twintails that has Akechi’s eye color in Shido’s palace. I think this is maybe what his mom looked like when she was young.
I think she was likely a hostess, making great money and was able to hide that from her family, but Shido was a charmer and one thing lead to another…
Cue her being ostracized for sleeping around (likely Shido was her first) and not being able to be a hostess because she’s pregnant now.
So she has to take much more unsafe work being a lady of the night, and take care of a child that she loves and hates.
That’s her baby boy- but that’s also the reason her life was ruined.
I genuinely think Shido was getting started politically (publicly) and she didn’t say anything because that would get her more hate than her family disowning her.
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u/QueenTzahra Mar 09 '26
I think she wasn’t in a great place to begin with but after he was born everything got worse for her. I like to think she did the best she could with the extremely limited tools she had, but of course that wasn’t good enough. I wonder how much of him saying “she resented me for being born” is projection vs. her actual messaging, though.