Adachi's past Persona 4 Golden

[DuelaDent]

Everyone: “Hey, Adachi! What’s up? Cool binder.” “Hey, Adachi, want to come over to my house today?”
Adachi: “They all hated me.”

[SanctuaryADO]

Adachi is a blatantly horrible evil person, but this cutscene does a really good job of humanising him. It makes him even scarier, showing him to be this highly ordinary, pathetic sort of evil, driven to madness by the mundanity of the lives so many of us find ourselves in.

[dragonquestftw]

I can see why people say Adachi screwed it up for himself by purposefully locking himself up n the library by himself and turning down the opportunity to join clubs, but look at it this way, how often have you been subject to sayings like: 'when are you going to grow up and take life seriously?' 'you keep going the way you are, you'll end up as a loser.' 'friends come and go, use your time wisely and prepare for your future'.
We hear this from society in general; from the likes of corporate bosses, teachers, hell even our own parents, they want you to sit down study do a job that contributes something and nothing more and Adachi embodied that upbringing.
He did as he was told, he forgoed the simply pleasures of life to study for the life he wanted and what happened when he needed it all to pay off? It got passed onto someone who in his eyes did nothing to earn it and Adachi was left in a dead end job, who wouldn't snap after being made into a mindless machine?
It's easy to label Adachi as a degenerate piece of shit, but what people need to take into consideration is that all this is the result of real world upbringings and anyone unlucky enough to walk that path can end up becoming a psycho just like Adachi.

[Hastur_Carcosa]

AU where Adachi joins the tennis club and Persona 4 never happens.

[MrTheil]

Want to make a good villain? Make them human. Make them relatable

[dspace]

0:48 In my opinion, this was probably when Adachi felt the most happy. He finally achieved his dream and the expectations his parents pushed onto him. This was when he thought ''Finally, my life can begin".
And then, everything changed

[heavencard]

Biggest mystery; what happened to his glasses?

[godon]

Even tho Adachi was total psycho, i feel bad for him. He got sad life that made him become bad person.

[dc_dachi]

The saddest thing about Adachi is that he DOES have people around him who care about him: Yu, Nanako, Dojiima, the Investigation Team, the old lady—they all care about him, but he can’t understand that. When people try to reach out to him, he recedes, and when he feels the pain of loneliness, he rationalizes that being alone is what he wants. It’s a viscous cycle.

He’s been isolated his whole life, so he doesn’t see the truth that’s staring him in the face. Yu’s life that he’s so jealous of? That could be him right now if he could just reach out and connect with the people who are in his social network.

I think this is the ultimate message of his character: a lot of us are like Adachi, but all of us could be more like Yu.

[markohiosikhaii]

So the real villian of Persona 4 was either the society we live in or Adachi's parents

[Sarah-mfxt]

High school Adachi is so precious
Imagine if he'd been the Investigation Team's age and they'd befriended him and changed his view of the world and of people

[yaboijebus]

Funny how Adachi at first seems to be one of the most machine-like evil characters in the Persona series yet when you see HIS side of the story, it transforms him into easily one of the most human

[greencomet]

I reallly like this type of silent story-telling. Just letting the ambience and the scenes do the talking. It definitely encapsulates perfectly that feeling of isolation and loneliness.

[alecpheonix]

Easily the saddest part about his backstory is how we see Adachi genuinely cares for Dojima, but just because of the way he was treated and his own faults he just can’t seem to keep his real genuine connections

[debastiansebeste]

Adachi was feeling like he had found his own people in Nanako and Dojima, but from 1:42 and after he was probably thinking: "Look at that popular social butterfly. Look how every loser flocks around him. Look how easily Nanako and Dojima replaced me with him. So I never meant anything to them either, huh?"

It's like the Dojimas were his last string to sanity, in his own twisted way, then he felt that Yu was a hypocrite for acting like he cared about someone like him, after taking everything away from him. "First you destroyed the remains of my already ruined life and now you want to give me your pity?"

[orangeville]

The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth

[nathanielgarza]

I guess the real culprit is the friends made along the way

[dissmess]

The fact when Dojima tried to visit Adachi's jail cell during his birthday, but he pushed him away.

[dc]

Adachi was always alone.
No he could talk to, no one who understood him. Loneliness leads to depression.
Enough time depressed and sometime, you'll snap. For some people it affects their health, for others.... well, they become bad people.
His obssesion with Mayumi and violence towards Saki were probably repressed urges he kept from his High School days. I'm going to guess he never had a girlfriend and was probably a virgin (I know he says something about having had a girl during his Social Link but he could just be lying, he has no reason to be staight with Yu).
As for his "game", I think he really was having fun watching the case unfold and the Investigation Team's progress, and being a detective himself, probably saw a little bit of himself in Yu, and also admired his talent for making friends and bonds (hell, he even acknowledges this in Golden after you beat him, saying he should have been more like Yu).

[soul]

It's unfortunate how he's become a meme to the internet now despite him unironically being a good and sympathetic villian. Feels like the very same type of people he envied are the ones proving his point.