i’m thinking about mvk right now wtf happened to him? why is he like that? who did this to him? what do you think his tragic backstory is i know he has one and i need to know right now
oh anon you're gonna wish you didn't send this ask.
what i think people often forget when trying to understand certain characters is that characters are a part of a story first and a person second. to understand manfred and some other related things, let's look at this from the beginning, specifically, from the first "evil" major character we get introduced to (and by evil i mean someone the protagonist opposes) - miles edgeworth.
miles edgeworth is introduced to us as the demon prosecutor, the guy who uses dirty tricks in court, is famous for being ruthless and thinks everyone should be punished, a guy who strives for perfection is his job as a prosecutor. that brings us to a point where we think miles edgeworth represents something the justice system overall should not be - biased, devoid of empathy, driven by a perfect record and a desire for a good career instead of the genuine desire to find the truth. the story could as well have made us defeat edgeworth because of that - that approach is not needed in the court, so we expose him for some kind of crime and get him fired, goodbye, who's the next character going to be? however, the writers make the decision to humanize him, make him not just a character that represents a wrong idea but a person who has a backstory and some good in his heart, a person with a pretty good moral code, actually, a nerd, a friend, a man. this is where we start to question what exactly made him like this - this is why miles gets a tragic backstory. he is meant to be explained, he is meant to be human, he is meant to be more.
so manfred von karma becomes the answer. he is the reason, he is the influence, the part of miles's life that made him like this and the part that he starts to oppose. manfred von karma is an asset, a tool we are given to understand edgeworth better and draw some conclusions: "hey, maybe the guy wasn't, like, evil and demonic, he was manipulated as a kid, you know". manfred is like a mirror of edgeworth, which is a tool one can see frequently in ace attorney writing. there are characters that represent one character trait of another character, hyperbolized and extended. damon gant is edgeworth's authority mirror, representing what could happen if miles went from cutting salaries to grabbing more and more power to himself. manfred is miles's perfection mirror (self-explanatory).
what do we get from this, then? manfred von karma is undeniably linked to a more important character, appears for one single case (if we don't count aai) and serves one purpose - get the idea across. "don't get too focused on perfection, kids! this is a job that determines other people's lives, and to manipulate the verdict in order to serve your own selfish purposes is yucky!". manfred is a symbol first, person second, that's why he doesn't get a backstory.
manfred von karma is not just a man - it's what every prosecutor could become. a prosecutor gets a high salary, which the game establishes, and that salary depends on the amount of cases won, or, if i'm wrong, one's reputation depends on that, and the reputation causes bias. in such an objectively terrible system any prosecutor would slowly go from "i'm going to find the truth!" to "i'm going to win", and manfred went there a little too much. manfred's backstory is his habitat, he is the product of the system. with every case won and every close call, every paycheck earned, with all the competition in the field empathy and common sense leaves him - it gets to a point where a penalty causes him to commit murder. he is not a sane person at the moment of the crime - he is quite literally delusional thinking it was some kind of fate that the gun was there. he is what happens when a man loses himself in his career, what happens when the law is about money and success and not fairness, what can happen to anyone and should not happen.
so, to me, manfred does not need a backstory, apart from the one i mentioned above - he on his own is one.
but let's imagine this is the real world for a second and ignore the fictional, ideal aspect of it all. it's quite definitely possible manfred was somehow abused, but do i think it HAS to be so? no. a person does not need to be traumatized or a victim to grow up shitty. he could simply be spoiled, actually, with all of the wealth he clearly has. to prove my point, imagine a scenario where you raise a child with nothing but praise. you give it all the love and care, feed it, cherish it, but a child is curious by nature. eventually, it will do something bad, like pinch you or hit another child. you, the universally loving parent, still give it love and feed it candy after it does the bad thing, and you continue to do so. with nothing but love and care, the child will grow up with a defected sense of right and wrong, selfish, entitled, unempathetic.
point is - i don't find a tragic backstory to be a necessary thing for manfred's character. i don't think he needs a backstory at all.
however, that is not to say i'm somehow trying to prove anon wrong. theorizing and coming up with explanations IS fun and good. i'm just giving my personal view of his character here.
