Junessic Land (ジュネシック・ランド*)? is the second Labyrinth of Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth.
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A reality in the movie world whose name is a fusion between Junes and Jurassic Park. It is a movie reality where genetic manipulation has created a wilderness inhabited by dinosaurs. It is a world where the strong, carnivore dinosaurs (Appearing as F.O.Es in the Labyrinth) rule over and terrorize the weak Herbivore Dinosaurs, who constantly run away from the carnivore dinosaurs. To make matters worse for the Herbivore Dinosaurs, they are subjugated by a rule where the decision that the most amount of them agree with is the only and final decision, regardless of how nonsensical or detrimental it is.
Persona Q2 New Cinema Labyrinth Junessic Land Opening
Junessic Land trailer.
The party first enters the movie as they clear the previous dungeon and get the key from Doe to break one of the locks at the Cinema exit. Shortly after entering the Labyrinth, they were confronted by a hostile P4 hero, who briefly clashes with the P5 hero, with both in even hands. The navigator, Rise Kujikawa was also poisoned by wounds inflicted by the plants in the area. The rest of the P4 and P5 cast saw this and were at first shocked, but quickly settled with each other and most of the P4 cast joins the party, with the exception of Yosuke Hanamura, who was found missing. It was revealed that at an exploration trip to the Midnight Channel, when the P4 cast entered the TV, they entered a strange dimension leading to a movie screen instead of the supposed Midnight Channel.
The second time the joined Persona users enter, they encounter a dinosaur with Yosuke's head. Despite the fact that the P4 cast think he is Yosuke, he does not know what humans are. It was seen attacked by Shadows while the other dinosaurs fled and left him alone, and the party helps him fend them off. After the party helps him do so, he introduces himself as Yosukesaurus and befriends the party, in which he began to learn more about humanity. He also mentions a place called "Paradise" where no carnivores can supposedly reach, and the Dinosaurs are fleeing to there.
A carnivore F.O.E taking the form of a T-Rex now shows up and grabs away a herbivore, but none of the other herbivores wanted to save her and thus she was eaten. the real Yosuke Hanamura is now seen defending a herbivore from a carnivore dinosaur and the party helps him to distract and trap and carnivore. Via a unison attack by the P4 hero and P5 hero, the carnivore is fainted and trapped in an electric barrier. However, after neutralizing the carnivore and retriving Yosuke, the herbivore dinosaurs began to vote lynching the party, with all of them agreeing and Yosukesaurus joining the vote. The dinosaurs fled from the Persona users and Yusuke Kitagawa proposes a retreat to the Cinema.
Midway when exploring the Labyrinth, the party finds a slab of dinosaur meat in a frozen chamber. They prepare it and made it fine and red, but Chie slaps a green, strange sauce on it. The sauce is made of dinosaur eggs and carnivorous plant sap, so Yosuke berates them for creating Mystery Food X again. Thankfully, the sauce was delicious and thus averting a hunger crisis in a movie world.
The party reaches the Isle's End and found out that the dinosaur's "paradise" is actually a dead end clearing and the entire dinosaur herd is trapped there. The herbivores all put the blame on Yosukesaurus for misleading the pack into a non-existent "paradise" and force him to attack the party against his will just because he read a human book depicting it as humans written the book and the Persona users are humans. All of them unanimously agreed with the decision and also threatened him that if he does not, they will lynch him out of their group. Driven berserk by his "friends," transforming into a carnivorous dinosaur that resembles Shadow Yosuke and attacks the party. During the battle, he calls the other Herbivore Dinosaurs for help, but all of them were defeated. After the other dinosaur's defeat, the Herbivore Dinosaurs and Yosukesaurus regret their actions and apologize to the party, but at this time the carnivore F.O.E. appears and attacks everyone else, human or dinosaur alike. Despite Yosukesaurus was swiftly defeated by the powerful oppressor, the Herbivore Dinosaurs finally listened to him and they repay the party by severely damaging the carnivore F.O.E, allowing the party to force it to flee.
Yosukesaurus then thanks the party for defeating the carnivore F.O.E. and the dinosaurs all agreed to build actual friendships with each other instead of simply acting as a hive mind and calling it friendship. The movie ends and the staff credits roll, with Hikari and Nagi watching the movie. After the end of the movie, Nagi congratulates the party for realizing the true meaning of friendship and Doe creates the key to break one of the locks at the Cinema gates with the same violent reaction as before.
Connection with Hikari's past
Later on, it was revealed that Junessic Park is formed from one of Hikari's traumas that resulted in her extreme depression and low self-esteem. When she was in secondary school, she helped a student known as Miyuki to clean her desk when bullies drawn insults and dumped trash on her desk. She befriended her and asked her out to watch a dinosaur movie, which had a group of herbivore dinosaurs teaming up to rescue their friends from carnivorous dinosaurs, where they defeat their suppressors in a clutch situation by gathering their power, and she was touched by the movie. She asked the other girls that act as her friends to watch the movie, but they all refuse. At the next day, she got insults written on her desk and trash put on top of it, making her a target for the bullies. The girls returned to lynch Miyuki out of the friend group because they do not want to be bullied alongside her, but Hikari did not want anyone to be lynched. Therefore, her friends responded by lynching Hikari instead. Miyuki did not want to join the other friends to lynch her out but was forced to do so out of peer pressure. The girls then call her a weird girl and an outcast. The traumatic events had resulted in Hikari barely having any friends in secondary school and high school and she also became triggered when other people bring up the idea of friends.
The appearance and title of the Herbivore Dinosaurs are based on the girls that lynched her out of their friend group because of their egotistic self-preservation, with the dinosaur with a bobcut and glasses representing Miyuki, and the other dinosaurs representing the unnamed girls. In fact when the girls appeared in the musical, they have the same title as the Herbivore Dinosaurs in the movie. Effectively, they are cognitive existences created by Hikari. Yosukesaurus is also a cognitive copy of Hikari, who was able to take Yosuke's form and gender as his form was simply an actor, so he can be a completely different entity from the person that he is based on while only inheriting the same perception as her. The girls that bullied Hikari and Miyuki appear as the carnivorous dinosaur F.O.Es in the movie.
The plot of the movie reality is based on the dinosaur movie that Hikari liked to watch, but in her movie reality, instead of gathering their power to defeat the carnivore dinosaurs in a clutch situation, the Herbivore Dinosaurs in the movie simply acted because they unanimously agreed with each other without thinking of any consequences and shunned anyone who didn't agree with them, and are also unwilling to go against the carnivorous dinosaurs despite the carnivorous dinosaurs are threats against their friends, much like how Hikari's primary school friends decided to kick her out of their friend group because they did not want to be involved with the bullies.
It also constantly builds up the strong carnivore dinosaurs as dangerous threats while the weak herbivore dinosaurs are the actual threats towards themselves and others around them, making them the real oppressors of the movie reality. This reflects itself in Hikari's past where the people that helped broke Hikari are not the bullies in her school, as they do not bother with Hikari until she began to befriend Miyuki. Instead, those are in fact her former friends, who lynched her out from their friend group for the sole reason of her insistence to be friends with Miyuki.
Much like the other movies, its original name is not "Junessic Land" and it is initially a distorted negative film that Hikari watches alone to feed her negative impulses. The cognitive dinosaurs are not supposed to exist in the movie, as they were added in by Doe to make the movie come to life so Hikari can be rehabilitated.
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Trivia
- Junessic Land represents a modern society problem, continuing the Persona 5 theme. In this case, it represents a lack of will to think for oneself and the blind belief that democracy is the solution to all, regardless of the viability or appropriateness of its decisions. The opinions of the minority does not matter when the majority has the voice, effectively turning it into a tyranny comparable to dictatorship and fascism. The Herbivore Dinosaurs in the reality constantly make inappropriate or outright nonsensical decisions, such as refusing to help their comrades from the clutches of a carnivorous dinosaur F.O.E or even forcing the friendly Yosukesaurus to attack the party against his will, just because the majority agreed with it. This form of democracy has no mercy or tolerance against anyone who share differing opinions or think for themselves instead of the majority.
- The "different" dinosaur is also chosen as Yosuke Hanamura in a setting known as "Junessic Land," which refers to the establishment of Junes in Inaba resulting the shutdown of many stores in the Central Shopping District, and the people of Inaba start to consider Yosuke an outcast not because he had any involvement with the shutdown of their stores, but simply because he was the son of its manager. Effectively, the "democracy" representing the majority of Inaba has outcast the "oppressor minority" Yosuke without any substance behind it.
- The trauma that formed Junessic Land bears striking resemblances with "Bacterial Contamination" by Daijoubu P, as they share the theme of students isolating themselves from a bullied girl in fear of being bullied themselves, causing the bullied girl to be inflicted with severe depression.