MAJOR SPOILERS for Persona 3

Minor spoilers for the Arena games and Persona Q2.

Ok. Where do I begin.

So my experience with Persona 3 is Portable. More specifically, FeMC's route, since I preferred her SLs more than MC's (replacing Kenji and Moon Kid was great).

I never got to play FES, and as a result I felt that I didn't get to experience the story the best way due to P3P's limitations.

Because it's been so long since I last completed a P3P run, and due to the fact that I felt I had gaps in experiencing the story, I've been going over lore videos and reading the Megami Tensei wiki summary.

I came away realizing I had a lot more questions than answers regarding what is canon. And not just from FES (including The Answer), but from bits that I remember of the Arena games and Persona Q2 (neither of which I've touched in a long time, so my memory's blurry).

To begin with, I have to assume that MC's story is what is canon. That means that Shinjiro does stay dead canonically. But does that mean Chidori stays dead? I thought I'd heard that she stayed dead originally but one or more of the later versions of the game had her come back in the end.

And then there's The Answer. I know it's divisive and now that I've gone through the story, I can see what people like about it and what people dislike about it. But is it canon? Because it comes loaded with a lot of important stuff for the lore, like Erebus and everything to do with Metis, as well as going deeper into space-time powers of the Shadows.

Then we got FeMC. I know the theme of P3P is the Butterfly Effect, so I always got the impression that FeMC's route is a "What If" that mostly keeps the core of the story the same (unless you save Shinjiro). And so I never really thought too much about it.

...until I heard of the alteration to the story where MC and FeMC were siblings, and in the main route MC survived the Moonlight Bridge battle / was selected by Aigis to have Death sealed away within them rather than FeMC. In FeMC's route it was the opposite.

It gets worse when FeMC appears in Persona Q2, and she's the first party member outside the Phantom Thieves that you meet up with in that game. I only played maybe half of Q2 but I have to wonder how the hell FeMC and MC felt when they met or if this was clarified at all, but what I've seen is that FeMC's existence in Q2 is stated as her being from an alternate timeline, thereby cementing her existence as a) canon and b) being from an alternate timeline.

I never tried to think too much about the alternate timeline thing when it came to the Persona games, but I guess now we gotta. We got Persona 4 and 5 alongside their updated versions, which have pretty vast story differences when you look at the stuff that was added or changed. I was never a big fan of Marie but I've been made to understand she is canon now, meaning the original Persona 4 story no longer is. But that's an entire other conversation.

And now, we come to Elizabeth and Theodore.

It's been a long time since Arena, but I remember Elizabeth's involvement including the fact that Elizabeth has found herself on a quest to somehow rescue MC from his fate as the Great Seal, even with her finding herself with the Fool Arcana, to signify the start of her journey to do so. This is pretty massive to me, and it's essentially never touched on again, nor does it have anything to do with the main story of either Arena game. So what's going to happen with that, if anything?

And Theodore's existence is also confusing. If I remember right, he's not involved at all in MC's story, meaning he's part of FeMC's canonically-dubious timeline. YET he's in Persona Q, even though FeMC is not. Plus it's up to FeMC if she unintentionally chooses to have Elizabeth or Theodore as her Velvet Room attendant, meaning there's two divergent paths in FeMC's own timeline as far as Elizabeth/Theodore goes.

Is any of this clarified anywhere

Would anyone be able to point me to... anything that helps clarify this stuff

It really breaks my brain