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akechi's rank 3 is the gift that keeps giving because the intro before it starts confirms that:

and since he by his own admission doesn't really have any other close friends, this means that as his confidant progresses, his fanbase is undoubtedly like "who is this mysterious glasses guy who keeps hanging out with akechi? why are they hitting up popular date spots?”

and like, internet gonna internet. half his fanbase thinks they're dating. another faction ships him with the leader of the phantom thieves. akechi watches this go down while experiencing the full spectrum of human emotion. someone says ren looks kind of generic and akechi is seconds from penning a defensive response on his burner account before he's like "what the fuck am i even doing" and clears 4 floors of mementos in one go to cope.

forever thinking about royal’s bad ending. my thing with it is that maruki doesn’t necessarily give anyone what they want most, he gives them what’s most appropriate for them to want within a maruki-approved framework. iirc there’s a really interesting text sequence in the game where he just straight up changes someone’s career because they’re not “good” at it, regardless of whether that’s what they actually want. why struggle at all? ever? right?

and so ultimately i don’t think goro akechi’s greatest wish is necessarily ren. i think it’s a wish for sure, but his greatest wish is his own agency. despite any regrets he has and the fact that shido and yaldabaoth treated him like a pawn, he's generally pretty adamant about owning his choices and their consequences. he doesn't want that erased. and instead, you end up with pleasant boy™ if you take maruki’s deal. maybe maruki (incorrectly) thinks sanding off all of akechi’s rough edges will make him easier for ren to love. but the crux of it is really that maruki has to essentially lobotomize him to preserve the illusion of his perfect reality, because their ideologies are so diametrically opposed that akechi would spend every waking moment fighting back.

this isn’t to undermine ren’s importance to akechi btw — he explicitly acknowledges that he wishes they had met earlier, and there are countless moments throughout their confidant that underscore how much it means to him that they mirror each other so well. he absolutely does want more time with ren, just not under these circumstances.

and that’s also what makes ren’s choice on 2/2 doubly devastating. he knows that either way he loses akechi. and if he takes maruki’s deal, he loses him knowing that his last moments with the real akechi involved the two of them being unforgivably out of sync.

underrated part of mementos mission is ren being so effortlessly pretty that the casting director at ann’s photoshoot thinks he’s one of the models

i know he demurs in response but i do still like it as an unconventional postcanon career for him because first of all his face card never declines

but also it is deeply fun to think of akechi with a password protected folder on his phone with all of ren’s horniest photoshoots

concept: ren training himself to be ambidextrous so that he, too, can challenge akechi to a game of pool with his non-dominant hand.