so we know a lot of the ace attorney assistants take things with a brave face. they are strong, they are resilient, even and especially in the face of tragedy.
and that's what is killing me about ema. she doesn't do that. in aa4 she is decidedly not hiding the bitterness and the hurt inside her, because she can't. her attitude in rfta was all about how if she just worked harder and got more scientific about everything, she could solve the case. she could bring lana back from her distance. she could fix everything. what drove her was that she could act! she could do something!
and now she can't do anything. she can't help the man who saved her life, she can't live up to her childhood dreams, and she can't make any of lana's sacrifices worthwhile. her hands are tied and she sits and watches other people live out her dreams every day on every case.
Ema doesn't have a family name behind her profession like many other characters. she clawed her own way here out of her own passion and will, and look where that gets her. she takes the test and she fails and she fails again and she fails again and
This is obvious, but Ema for 1, 6, and 7 of the character questionnaire? :>
yayayayay its ok i love talking about ema this could never be a bad thing. I just answered 1 so I'll do the other 2 here! you picked some that i was really hoping someone would ask. the numbers are wrong on the answers but i can't fix them whoops
6. weave a web of dynamics through the cast for this character: which dynamics are you most interested in? both canonically and through extrapolation/speculation— which dynamics are the richest to you, and why?
In terms of canon, lana is of course my immediate pick for most interesting ema relationship. they're sooooo much more compelling to me than lots of the sibling pairs in aa actually, which I don't know if that's a hot take? I'd easily rank them above the gavin brothers personally for example. just....ema thought Lana gave up on her but really Lana was giving everything she had....ugh im gonna be sick....
in terms of speculation. ema and trucy don't have a solidly established friendship or relationship in aa4. However. Hear Me Out. so I like thinking that the aa4 crew got a lot closer with each other after the events of the game concluded, and I THINK!! that trucy looked at ema and saw someone who had lost their purpose. someone who didn't know where to go now. I think she saw Phoenix. I think trucy is the person who would start inviting ema to their hangouts, and doing stupid silly tricks, and watching Ema's reaction to try and do what she could. and ema does not pick up on this at all btw she's not great at recognizing stuff like that.
Ema and klavier is a duo that's been talked about a lot, and I agree that they'd make a killer comedic duo but I think it absolutely has to be the slowest platonic slowburn maybe ever, post aa4, and ema still has to find him godly annoying or else that's Not Right. ema dislikes him for reasons that run a lot deeper than just "glimmerous fop" and they'd have to unpack all of that before they made even a little bit of progress.
do you have particular niche takes on this character? defend those takes. (openly controversial takes are permitted, but also: hyper-specific headcanons which you believe in and no one else has considered enough to disagree with yet. pick a hill to die on.)
OK SO LISTEN. TONE SWITCH TIME. i have SUCH beef with her soj official art. literally try to tell me this impostor on the bottom is ema skye. you would be wrong. i made my header image specifically avoiding this picture of her like the plague. they did something to her, they sanitized her, i can't tell you what!!!! i can't tell you why!!!! i can tell you the TRUTH though. that's not MY ema skye.
let's do 1 and 2 for ema at first! I might ask more questions later if I'm not busy!
really want to hear your thoughts
ask game here
THANK YOU FOR THE ASK!!! always glad to talk about the best girl. this is...going to be long....i don't know if i exactly followed the questions, but if you want to hear my Ema thoughts these sure are my Ema thoughts...!
off the top of your head: notes for characterization? what are the most essential traits of this character to you (personality traits, important connections/dynamics, voice)?
Ema's such a funny assistant in RFTA that I feel people overlook. She's clearly got book smarts, and yet her actual common sense is, um. lacking. it usually wraps around to her being kind of an icon (i won't pay a single cent of my taxes!). But in general, it kind of kills me when I see how many people call RFTA Ema a copy of Maya. I always felt like Ema had more than enough differences besides just her science quirk. She was more naive, less snarky (her quips are usually funny because they're !!unintended!! on her part), and less emotionally mature than Maya. She can't put up walls and pretend like things are fine when they're not. tldr are we as a community aware that Peppy Teenage Girl is a descriptor that can apply to multiple different people? or is that out of our comprehension.
My favorite individual Ema Quirk (tm) is probably her habit of appraising objects. I think it's pretty funny. I'd also like to think she developed it partly because she has to live pretty frugally with Lana. god i love the skye sisters so much. if the most important person in the world to ema isn't lana you are doing something wrong, and ESPECIALLY vice versa. Obviously they have a complicated relationship but under all that is heaps of love. we know this.
YEAH SO SPEAKING OF LANA,., it's clear that Ema looks up to her so so so much. and so imo post RFTA, once Lana is behind bars, she was subconsciously looking for someone to be that rock for her again. Enter Phoenix Wright, who Ema ends up idolizing as her savior enough to make another move across the world back to the states to repay him. whichhhh makes the news of his disbarment even worse, which makes her state in aa4 even worse. it's like a domino effect.
In regards to AA4, I am. obsessed with how the forensics test impacted her worldview. she's not prepared to handle a world where things aren't black and white, right or wrong, a place where scientific objectivity isn't absolute. so she shoots blame onto klavier, repeatedly avoids talking about her failure (when she does, she blames others instead of realizing that sometimes, it's just not fair). SHE SAYS IT HERSELF ACTUALLY in a line I do think about alll the time
> "I can't stand it when things are vague… especially in a case." <
OUGHHH IM TEARING MY HAIR OUTTTT there's so much to talk about in that line....
in terms of her more visible characterization, of course i love her snackoo binging and her klavier hating is iconic. her, apollo, and trucy never get to a super fleshed out dynamic in my eyes during aa4, but i do like thinking about them getting close after it wraps. they're such a dysfunctional team i love them. i get sad seeing "aa4 group content" that's just klavier, apollo, and trucy....where's ema....she's such a necessary part of the dynamic to me... :(
I also think her habit of using "ah!" (both to start her sentences and to exclaim) is pretty cute and something i've found myself utilizing more often.
2. adjacently—do you think fandom does the above traits justice? why or why not?
I think Ema has been dealt a pretty good hand with how the fandom treats her overall, especially by the standards of a lot of female characters. The mixing with Maya thing like I mentioned before is probably one of her biggest ones, but a minor second is probably that a lot of people forget that ema's actually pretty chill in aa4 to apollo. i've seen some people think she's super mean the whole time and???? no, not really??? is she grumpy and kind of a mess? yeah, obviously, and it's the best, i love her. but after apollo and trucy reveal their connection to Phoenix she's all in on helping them.
also if someone says aa4 ema was bad and they're glad that soj "fixed" her character that is a massive red flag, and we should all go running for the hills. I think she's alright in soj. i like that they let her achieve her goal, but she is partially wiped of some of her charm. just because she got the job doesn't mean she's completely back to rfta ema. personally i would have found "ema who is really stressed because she's terrified of losing this job" to be a pretty funny direction.
I didn't get the send follow up asks cuz I suddenly got called on my day off but I really like your thoughts about ema so favorite flavor of dissecting ema?🎤
ask game here
YAY HERE WE GO. sorry this took forever i don't like answering asks on mobile and i didn't have access to my laptop for a while
5. ideal flavor of rotating for this character? crack them open and dissect them— do you want them tormented, pining, or being loved + comforted? do you have any specific scenarios you like to think about?
OK so something I haven't really talked about on this blog is that I'm an avid whump fan at heart. love seeing the faves get thrown around and beaten up. naturally being an ace attorney fan is...well an environment slightly less conducive to this because lawyers and co aren't exactly brawling on the regular. but when there's a will there's a way!! hope i dont sound insane rn. in ace-attorney land your best bets for my kind of whump are usually courtroom bombings and being targeted by past culprits/people related to them for revenge. and i admit to have imagined her for both of those. i just don't draw whump as much as I read it.
anywayssss i love tormented ema! haunted ema! i want to see her at her lowest point and then study her like a bug in a jar. maybe shake it around a bit. i like to (self-indulgently) imagine the aa4 crew learning about what went down in RFTA and being like hoooooly shit dude. and then she has to grapple with the people she's around now knowing all this about her. yikes.
i think she's also generally very dense when it comes to understanding her emotions and also romance. she's out here trying to get scientific and plot all this stuff on a graph and it's like. ema thats....thats not how that works. so that's also fun to bounce around in my head. yeah in general she's like my little study subject! i like to pick apart and find out how she tinkers. i'll read through her transcripts sometimes and a lightbulb will go off like OHHHH THAT COULD BE AN INTERESTING THEORY FOR THIS :] and the drawing her 24/7 part comes from this as well. also because her outfits are cute.... that's why i started liking her in the first place, which was actually only a bit over a year ago (april 2025) can you believe it???
