don't reckon i know how old this post is, don't find myself caring to check when the instinct is more powerful then the mind to reinstate it's call, apologies anyways for uneeded onslaught of gibberish.
onto the point, i was rewatching some playthroughs of the ace attorney series and this specific interaction within AJ has my psyche equally screwed over — we've seen a fair share of his cynicism throughout the whole game, it ain't nothing new, but this specific brand of surreptitious suspension found in these interactions stood out a lot to me and thought fit the OP.
it's the matter of which this defeathered attorney laughs off his daughters biting remarks, a matter of trying to assert his willpower to change, he knows better, his daughter is a keen one to his tells so he shouldn't have no reason to keep “secrets,” but he cant relent to change just yet, wide eyed jocose woes subject to a narrowed nihilism right after he's smudged out by reality with apollo's inquiry.
‘s hard for me to word it here when the screenshots speak more then i can, i know AJ is much more bashed on then quite a few other novelties but it's just so interesting to see such a different side to what we once were familiar to.
did he want to save his own skin from being naively disadvantaged once more? keep an apprentice he barely mentors for out of his troubles? “how can any woman ever count on you for anything,” — phoenix translating that to “how can anyone rely on you,” why should anyone rely on him? the same man who keeps digging his own holes, who couldn't save his mentor, who almost got him and his mentors sister ‘erased,’ and then straight up subject to offensive galvanism that came from barging in with evidence blazing.
it's intricately depreciating how he's built by reliance to his own whims, he's danced that dance even before being disbarred, before entering the office, when he grabbed not a dahlia but a rose by it's thorns and thrust it in peoples faces to acknowledge the petals, didn't care about the digging into his hands, glass in his throat.
he's always done his best to keep others safe, not just himself, but he's not letting down walls, he's just opening windows in them, trying to deceive as illuminated by OP, to be able to disengage people with sleeze but don't seethe, make others seethe.
maybe he would've taken apollo on more then sparingly pre a.a.4 like he did with maya and pearls, perhaps our attorney of justice would've known as much as skye did had wright felt like he was competent enough, because for all the infelictous informality he trudges apollo through, he doesn't doubt em for one moment, instead prophesying as the one who shouldn't have guidance sought from.
makes me wish we could've gotten more insight into his childhood the way we got that wrung out of edgeworth's, trust has always been a large part of wright's choreography throughout the games and it would scratch my brain to see his own experienced development of bonds before stumbling on any of the ones in his school age.