i am as usual having Von Karma family thoughts. Manfred loves his daughter and takes her out for pancakes and brags about her to his coworkers and read her silly stories as a kid but when faced with directing his attention towards her or the perfect revenge that is Miles Edgeworth, he chooses the latter. His whole Thing is that his selfishness and pettiness subsumes every other aspect of his life. He let DL6 poison and consume him until it rotted away all his other relationships. It's about the deterioration over time! It's about loving things and hurting them anyway! Franziska grows up but he's stuck in the past and he can never be what she needs him to be as long as he refuses to let it go!! It's not that Manfred wants to hurt Franziska, it's not that he hates her, it's just that he hates the Edgeworths more than he will ever love her!!
It's funny that people view Manfred as being completely evil when he's kind of a dork
And has shown Edgeworth and Franziska kindness on some occasions
Then there's his appearances in Investigations, that show the business partnership he has with Ernest, and a semi-friendly interaction with Kay
(from tvtropes)
REAL SHIT!!!!!
Honestly my favorite way to look at Manfred is as someone who genuinely loved his family and also just so happened to be one of the worst people who ever lived. He has his moments of kindness, there are times when he is sincere, but he's still Manfred, he's still the guy that tazes people in evidence rooms and puts undue pressure on his kids and frames them for murder and who killed a man in cold blood for something so petty it's almost laughable. And honestly to me that's where the best part of the drama lies
I don't want Franziska to be able to look back and say "oh my Papa was a horrible person all of it was a lie I just didn't understand" I want her to look back and have to reconcile that her father who loved his wife's cooking more than anything and who kept pictures of his daughter in his wallet was an irredeemable monster. I want her to see that the man who sang her lullabies in German or brushed her hair was the same person who didn't bother to show up for her first court appearance and who put his pride above his family, whose love for himself eclipsed his love of her. I want her to deal with the fact that the love and the hurt were both real were both equal and were both an intrinsic part of him. I want Miles to have to look back at the man who ruined his life and realize with sickening clarity that some of that kindness, however small, was real, that there might have been a part of Manfred that was actually proud of the Demon Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth for reasons beyond revenge, because that makes it Worse
If Manfred is a monster and nothing more, it's easy for the two of them to wipe their hands clean of him, to play all of it off as manipulation or disguised cruelty. But it's harder, SO much harder, to know that some of it was real, that the truth is messy and muddy and they'll never really know the Schrodinger's box of his mind. I don't just want the truth to be difficult and harsh, I want it to be impossible to figure out. I want that truth to die with him. I want Franziska and Miles to be left with more questions than answers, to dedicate their lives to pursuing a truth and knowing they'll never get one of their own
I don't want Manfred to be pure evil because it would be so, so much easier for them if he was
