There's a new Persona shitposting mascot in town, and it's a shoulder-barging menace who serves as a terrible example of a very real problem.

The series' bad guys have always erred more on the side of caricature, and nobody exemplifies that more than Persona 5: The Phantom X's first villain—former baseball prodigy turned salaryman Takeyuki Kiuchi, who saunters around Shibuya Station referring to himself as the Subway Slammer.

I was streaming the game to a couple of pals in Discord last week, and we couldn't help but immediately clown on the guy. He's got [[link]] all the malevolent aura of a cartoon monster of the week—a watered-down version of Persona 5's Kamoshida—with some cripplingly cringe dialogue that is begging to be taken the piss out of.

Turns out we weren't the only ones who thought the [[link]] Subway Slammer was operating on some absolute buffoonery, as he's quickly become the hottest meme target for the community.

That's despite the fact that he's supposed to represent a serious real-world issue which has become especially prevalent in Japan in recent years: butsukari otoko, or 'bumping man'. The phrase describes someone who deliberately goes out of their way to shoulder-barge, push, or even punch others—most often women—using busy locations like streets or train stations to plead innocence.

People forget that the Subway Slammer beats Goku from r/OkBuddyPersona

To put it bluntly, it's assault, and Persona 5: The Phantom X tries to very heavy-handedly showcase this when the protagonist has a 'That's So Raven' moment and foresees Kuichi slamming into a woman pushing a stroller, sending her and her baby tumbling down a flight of stairs along with the implication that Kuichi kills the infant.

There are more sinister glimpses like this, but they would hit harder if the rest of Kuichi's characterization wasn't such a goddamn clown circus:

• His crashout almost entirely stems from a literal child being better at baseball than him
• Corny villain lines such as: "The whole subway's mine for the slammin'! Ahahahahahahahaha!"
• He bodychecks a teenage girl so hard she gets launched, fighting-game style, and catches airtime over a train barricade

I think it's partly thanks to this tonal whiplash—and what is either some poor writing or localisation to try and westernise what is mostly a very Japanese phenomenon—that has made Persona 5 X players go weapons free on the Subway Slammer.

"the whole subway's mine for the slammin'" is never going to leave my brain. I felt something break up there.

— @tftblpod.bsky.social (@tftblpod.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-02T14:53:45.047Z

There've been japes around the sandwich shop chain Subway—including swapping out Kuichi for Subway Guy Jared Fogle, who's a whole real-life villain himself—comparing Kuichi's far stupider motivations for being a corrupted little turd compared to Kamoshida, and even turning him into a Yakuza baddie. The shitposts have been goofy in a way that inherently pokes fun at the bad writing, not at the subject matter it's trying to deal with.

I'm still plodding through the game's first palace myself, but the Subway Slammer mercifully appears to be an anomaly in a story that I'm promised gets much better. Will that [[link]] stop myself and many others from endlessly memeing on a man who can't stop holding a grudge against a little girl's baseball pitch? Absolutely not.