Hub of Puzzles and Mysteries

I thought you'd come. I knew you would.

[turnabout-picarat]

intro post time

@batteryacidlover ‘s Profesor Layton and Ace Attorney sideblog. River. She/they.

Posts are tagged based on series/game/characters/ships featured and type of content. Im a bit loose with how I use some of these tags, especially on original/critical posts.

Original posts are tagged #mine

I have played all of the mainline Ace Attorney games (barring the dlc cases), plvspwaa and the original Professor Layton trilogy but I have not yet played/watched playthroughs of the prequel trilogy, the investigations dualogy, and the great ace attorney games.

Spoilers for the games are currently not tagged, so browse at your own risk.

Background is from Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, avatar is by trucygramarye on tumblr

[seagiri]

(FLASHING COLORS) Girasol

[turnabout-picarat]

something really funny about how simon "master of psychology" blackquill never realized uendo's plural despite being friends with them for years meanwhile athena realized after talking to them for like 30 minutes. the toneido system's never letting him live that down

[knightsickness]

currently thinking really hard about the character arc klavier could have had and how well the phantom could have worked as a joint villain with kristoph (the trilogy big bad) in a potential apollo justice trilogy

so the characters of apollo justice, ESPECIALLY the gavin brothers, absolutely deserved more than one game of focus - klavier had the potential to have a crazy-good arc, and kristoph’s a great villain with a ton we don’t know about him

i think that there’s a LOT you could do with the fact that klavier’s main support system has been taken away and not replaced, regardless of how much they deserved it. what i’m saying is we could have had a klav near-corruption arc and it would have gelled perfectly with his established circumstances. what’s going on with the other gavins? if klav is the anomaly, and the rest are like kristoph, does he get closer to them in the absence of his band? what effect does this have on him? is he aware of it? the gavinners are gone, so is he pursuing a solo music career, or something different? has his public persona changed at all? there’s so much they could have done if they’d given klav edgeworth-level focus for a whole trilogy!!

also i think that kristoph going to double-jail at the end of the first apollo justice is fine, there’s still a ton you can do with that. my focuses personally would be on the effect that his guilt has on klavier personally, and on kristoph’s own plans for revenge, which is where the phantom comes in

what i’m saying is that the way you keep kristoph as the actual brain behind the events happening (and as the actual overall villain) is by having him work with the phantom. it makes perfect sense that they’d know each other (kristoph is rich enough and evil enough to have hired the phantom’s services before, and the phantom is currently working in and around a prison where he has extremely easy access to him), and they cover each other’s shortfalls as villains very well. kristoph is a brilliant schemer with interesting and obscure motives, but lacks physical power or freedom. the phantom can make a boring villain on his own, as his only motive is self-preservation, but he’s extremely skilled, extremely physically dangerous and has the agency that a jailed kristoph lacks. kristoph is extremely led by emotion and vengeance, but hides it behind false composure, whereas the phantom is necessarily completely objective and pragmatic, but hides it behind exaggerated emotion. i also just think that there’s a lot of potential for a really fun dynamic between them

tl;dr i’m never going to not mourn the potential that apollo justice had to be an excellent trilogy as opposed to one entry in a fragmented trio. also the jury system thing was cool they should have done more with it

[camriod]

new drip who this

[knightsickness]

the feminine urge to give rayfa a half-decent design

[foolish-fran]

Dahlia Hawthorne's name was based on the short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, about a young woman who was poisoned by her own family and became poisonous herself as a result. I finally got my hands on the book, so I wanted to read it through the lens of "what does this story say about Dahlia?"

Thoughts:

- Beatrice Rappaccini is a beautiful young woman, the daughter of an affluent scientist and the member of a noble family that has fallen into ruin. She has spent her entire life in an idyllic garden of flowers, which was once prosperous and thriving, but has fallen into decay and disrepair as the years have passed. This reflects how Kurain Village was once prosperous, but the village and Fey Family's reputation has crumbled since DL-6.

-It's clear from her dialogue that Beatrice knows nothing of life outside the garden. She is incredibly sheltered, having never left the garden before and knowing nothing of worldly things outside of her small bubble. Similarly, most spirit mediums in Kurain (Pearl and Iris in particular) have never left Kurain Village, growing up sheltered.

-Beatrice is beautiful, delicate, and virtuous, but anything she touches, whether plant, animal, or human, will decay and die by poison. She doesn't *want* to be this way, but her nature cannot be changed. Even when she attempts to take an antidote to her poisonous breath, it fails.

-The author goes out of his way to depict Beatrice not as a monster but as a product of her environment. Beatrice does not *want* to be dangerous, but she was *made* this way by her father, who kept her confined to his garden and used her as a pawn for his own schemes. Her father Giacomo Rappaccini raised her not as a daughter but as a tool, a pawn, a weapon for his own plans and experiments, and turned her into who she is today. Cough cough Morgan Fey

-There is a beautiful purple flower in the garden that Beatrice considers her "sister”. The two have an almost symbiotic relationship, with the protagonist noting that Beatrice and her “sister” seem as if they could be two sides of the same coin. Sounds like Irissss

-The protagonist of the story, Giovanni Guasconti, is a young man who falls in love with Beatrice despite her lethal nature. Through it all, he is desperate to believe in her, hoping against hope that the relationship can work out and that Beatrice is truly good despite the deaths he’s seen her cause. Hmm, a man who wants desperately to believe in people even at the cost of his own life….Feenie?

-Giovanni’s mentor, Baglioni, holds a longstanding grudge against the senior Rappaccini, and Beatrice by extension. He fears for Giovanni’s safety if he keeps seeing Beatrice, but his main priority is seeing Rappaccini fall for the sake of his own revenge. He's a good person, an intellectual with years of experience in the field of science. But his anger consumes him and leads him to harm both Beatrice and Giovanni, seeing them as tools in his plan rather than anything else. Godot?

-When Beatrice asks her father why he made her poisonous, he responds that the poison can function as a defense mechanism. If Beatrice is poisonous, than nobody can hurt her. It's better to be dangerous yourself than to be vulnerable to danger. It’s just like Dahlia!

-This whole exchange:

“”Wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?”

“Miserable! What mean you, foolish girl? Dost though deem it misery to be endowed with marvelous gifts, against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy?” Reminds me of how Morgan and the Feys saw spirit channeling as a gift, but Dahlia and Iris seem to see it as a curse

[knightsickness]

thinking about how if will powers hadn’t been in aa1 he would 100000% be any player’s suspect no. 1 in farewell my turnabout. everything he does is kind of weird and suspicious in a way you forget the moment of the engarde reveal but on replay it’s bizarre?? like he’s the one who brought you here in the first place, he’s the one who gave you the de killer transceiver, he later claims he left he group at some point and saw a crucial thing and didn’t tell anybody but you never see him do that at the time. when he does, it seems like it’s partially to get the attention of being a witness, to get involved in a big scandal case because he loves gossip but is never part of it. he’s an irritating witness despite being otherwise nice, and his repetition of his being a poor, underpaid action star is obviously supposed to read as self-centred and absurd as opposed to actually sympathetic. he has more obvious motive than anyone else involved (it’s really telegraphed in phoenix’s internal notes that matt and juan are both in will’s way in terms of popularity and roles, so killing one and framing the other benefits him more than anyone) and a really weird relationship with matt? he claims it’s a mentor-student thing, identifying himself as matt’s mentor in a sworn testimony, and while matt is vaguely aware of him, he doesn’t think of him that way (it’s possible he’s lying about this for matt reasons, but it’s a weird thing to lie about given his total indifference to him - his only possible motive would be ‘i think this guy’s ugly and desperate so i pretend i barely know him’, but i digress), and everything will knows about matt and his relationships doesn’t read like close friend information, it reads like fan information. will also has a crush on adrian which is never relevant, and seems to be under the impression that the matt-adrian-juan thing is a love triangle, which could easily be a secondary motive. tl;dr while i think farewell is definitely better off with the villains it has, i think it’s genuinely bizarre how rarely i see will raised as a suspect. he’s not even considered a red herring in game despite being so obviously suspicious

[knightsickness]

i KNOW that in the ace attorney universe there’s a 20-hour quinton reviews youtube documentary on the rise and fall of the steel samurai franchise, from signal samurai to nickel samurai (with a jammin ninja detour) and watching that would be the only reason i’d want to live in that world. like it’s the perfect overlap of nostalgic lost media true crime and celebrity gossip no one would even know how to act

[clownowo]

[cattoru]

ace attorney is so good i wish law was real

[doubleflowered]

back in april i had a vision of desi dee vasquez and spent like 40 hours on this.. I fear I may never reach this point ever again

[koiryuuga]

oww little one.

[ihatelawyers]

We’re going back in time to prevent Takeshi Yamazaki’s Ace Attorney

[samioli]

sometimes i feel like the fandom forgets that Phoenix is good at his job

[turnabout-picarat]

i want to have a phoenix+maya tag on my blog but i don’t know what to make it help

[haejoon]

two little random comics of phoenix and maya moments as i replay aa1 (for the 100th time)

[cornertheculprit]

okay kind of long post incoming because i've just now figured out how i want to word this. i made a little post a while ago saying that i think maya started to consider phoenix her family when he insisted that he would help her in 2-2 despite her thinking that she killed someone and gave him her magatama and that i think phoenix started considering her as his family when he realized she was kidnapped and his vision started going gray and blacking out in a way it hasn't ever done for any other character and while i could make an entirely separate post detailing maya's side of things i'm going to focus on phoenix for now. i don't know if this is a proper analysis or something i'm just rambling lmao

okay. as we all know. phoenix does not believe in people unconditionally unless they have given him prior reason to do so (like edgeworth and mia). this exchange that happens in aa1 is, i think, the biggest example of him admitting it out loud:

Phoenix: I'm going to believe in you two until the end.

Larry: Us two?

Maya: Edgeworth and... who else? You mean me right?

Larry: Nah! He means me! Right, Nick?

Phoenix: Yeah, you, Larry.

Maya: Not... me?

Maya: ...

while it clearly hurts for maya to hear i think it makes sense. they've known each other for a very short time at this point and phoenix does, at this point, have more reason to trust in larry than he does maya (even though that trust seems pretty much revoked by the time aa3 rolls around because of larry admitting he was the one who stole the lunch money that caused the class trial at the end of turnabout goodbyes but i digress). while they're still in the process of quickly becoming good friends and while maya does seem to have grown attached to phoenix more quickly than phoenix to her (presumably because phoenix had defended her when no one else would) it's clear that phoenix isn't quite at the point she is. HOWEVER! according to rfta he also gets so depressed at the fact that she went back to kurain village to train that he literally doesn't take a single case for two months until he meets someone (ema) that reminds him so much of maya that he can't say no. fast forward to aa2:

Phoenix: What's wrong?

Maya: Are you sure? I mean, I'm guilty! I'm a murderer!

Phoenix: No one's decided that yet.

Maya: But I did! I killed that person... with these... two hands...!

Phoenix: That's enough, Maya.

Maya: It's hopeless! If you defend me, you'll lose, I'm sure...

Phoenix: Stop it!

Maya: ... ...Help me... Nick, help me... I'm scared...

Phoenix: Don't worry, I will. When is the trial?

this exchange is interesting to me because it's at this point that maya holds him back from leaving and gives him the magatama. their friendship, even though they've only just been reunited, is strong enough that phoenix insists that no one's decided WHO the killer is yet even in the face of maya admitting she thinks she's done it. but the thing IS—phoenix doesn't explicitly state he BELIEVES she hadn't done it. and when the topic of belief does come up later in the case, this is what ensues:

Maya: Um, Nick...

Phoenix: Yeah?

Maya: Why do you believe in me? Why do you think I didn't kill Dr. Grey?

Phoenix: ...Because of something Mia told me.

phoenix says out loud that the reason he believes wholeheartedly in maya's innocence (NOW, mind you) isn't because of his belief in maya's character, it's because of mia's words: spirit mediums can't dream when they channel. and he wholeheartedly believes in mia, which means that he now wholeheartedly believes in maya's innocence by EXTENSION.

and then farewell, my turnabout happens. and again, the minute he hears that maya's been kidnapped, his eyesight goes grayscale and starts fading like it doesn't do for any other character in the series:

Phoenix: (M-My sight... Everything's fading away... Maya... Maya... Maya's been kidnapped!)

and suddenly, phoenix is doing everything in his goddamn power to try to get her back. it's to the point that even the people of the gallery start turning against him when he attempts to pin the blame on adrian andrews to buy some time. it's even to the point where MIA, of all people, starts looking at him with seemingly genuine disapproval and not just her usual exasperation when he fucks up in court. and the only thought running through his head?

Phoenix: (This is to save Maya... This is to save Maya... Even if the whole world turns against me, this is one fight I can't give up on!)

Mia: ...

and then the case is over, and maya and phoenix have this exchange (as well as the happy little picture which always make me want to combust so i'm putting it in this post because look at them):

Phoenix: M-M-M... MAYA!

Pearl: Mystic Maya! Mystic Mayaaaaaaaa!

Maya: Oh, Nick! I knew you would come through! You got Engarde convicted, like I knew you would... And on top of that, you even rescued me!

Phoenix: Well, of course I did! You know I would never desert you!

and it's DIFFERENT when phoenix says it this time. when he told her he wouldn't abandon her all the way back in aa1 it was different. it was when she thought she'd been abandoned by everyone and phoenix compared it to his own past and made the decision to stay by her side through that trial partly because of that (and partly because of the fact that she was mia's sister). this time, when phoenix says he would never desert her, he EXCLAIMS it and states it like it's a simple fact of life. he would never desert her! that's all there is to it! and from then on things change. aa3 is known for its phoenix&maya moments for a reason: the banter is hilarious, the dynamics sublime, and if you didn't really see it before, you REALLY start to notice that you're getting hit with the wacky friendship/sibling-like shenanigans (maya whacking phoenix over the head with the shichishito is, of course, the first thing that comes to mind, but there's so so so many more moments) now. the conversation of "belief" between them starts in the stolen turnabout, where pearl starts crying and tells phoenix she'll never forgive him for taking ron delite's case. but when he asks maya about it?

Phoenix: And what about you...? Are you OK with me taking Mr. DeLite's case...?

Maya: Y-Yeah... I'm fine, Nick. I believe in you.

Phoenix: ... *sniffle* (I think I'm going to cry.)

she believes, wholeheartedly, in phoenix. and later, of course, bridge to the turnabout happens. you see how phoenix quite literally knocks larry (who he once said he'd always believe in) out of the way despite larry's very rational protests that the burning bridge was too dangerous to try and cross in his effort to reach maya on the OFF CHANCE that the murderer had fled to the other side. despite the fact that phoenix, just hours earlier, had been so terrified of the bridge that he needed literal time to recover after crossing it. and when dahlia-as-iris starts trying to pin the murder on maya....

Dahlia/Iris: I saw her commit the crime with my very own eyes... And then I cleaned up the area to try to protect her.

Phoenix: OBJECTION! Th-That's ridiculous! Maya could never do such a--

INSTANT dismissal. INSTANT refusal. it's not at all like his rationalizations (and his trust in mia over maya) in 2-2. he BELIEVES, wholeheartedly, in maya. in the fact that maya could never kill anyone. and the thing about it is that his belief in maya didn't come from some grand showcase of saving him like mia and edgeworth did—it was the product of years of friendship. throughout the entirety of the time that dahlia tries to pin the murder on maya, phoenix refuses to even CONSIDER the idea:

Phoenix: (I still can't believe it... The idea of Maya cornering someone at knifepoint! It's just silly!)

bridge to the turnabout even ENDS with maya saying that phoenix is one of the feys now. she calls herself his big sister TWICE and the only objection he has to it is that she was trying to claim that SHE was the older one and not the other way around. he (as shown by the end credits) literally ended up sitting under a freezing waterfall with her for the special course spirit training despite not being a medium at all. it's very clear by the end of the trilogy that phoenix and maya are absolutely irreplaceable in each other's lives, no questions asked.

so. overall. i think the moment that the dynamic between phoenix and maya shifted from "good friends" to "family" is actually different between the two of them. for maya, it was near the beginning of jfa, when she gave phoenix her magatama after he refused to let her admit she was guilty without a fight. for phoenix, it was near the end of jfa, when maya was kidnapped and he realized that he'd do anything to save her. and i think this shows throughout the entirety of trials & tribulations. i don't have a proper ending to to this or anything they're just my blorbos and i love them so much