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Revision as of 11:57, 1 May 2026 by Reversedragon (talk | contribs) (Ace Attorney is copaganda)

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  • Full game spoilers — Ace Attorney (#1)

Main entry

  1. Ace Attorney (metaseries) -> I had no reason to add this until suddenly I was watching it just for context on 'cross-examine the parrot', and then was like, oh wait, this game is about logic. it's not actually about real court procedure as much as it's about an abstract concept of "reason". which... makes it surprisingly relevant to a wiki about logic. ok. time to code it.
  2. Ace Attorney -> field: fiction; field: Kantianism

Motifs

  1. lawyer of justice -> intuitive, because it's at least vaguely what their stated purpose is.
  2. lawyer of injustice -> it's rarer you see this in fiction and yet Homestuck catapulted the idea into popular consciousness.
  3. objection! (motif)
  4. objection! (motif) -> "objection maker": [1]
  5. narrative parallel
  6. Are narrative parallels admissible in court? (Ace Attorney; secular philosophy against religion) -> the answer should be no, but Phoenix, unbelievably, manages to use them in the only way that's acceptable.
  7. See through one lie, and their whole testimony falls apart / Lies always beget more lies. See through one, and their whole testimony falls apart (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney tutorial) [2] -> you know what joke I'm going to make.
  8. The unpredictability of Subjects will save the world / you are the most unpredictable defense attorney ... I cannot deny the possibility of what you say -> at this moment Phoenix is having a 'revelation' from a ghost who should be only as helpful as he is but is an undetectable inner experience.
    I'm not going to say this shouldn't be in there or deny this kind of thing makes stories more interesting, but I do have to say, we're getting into a sizable degree of unnecessary Kantianism here; the work is departing from reality on its 'realistic' society model before it departs from reality on fictional rules.

Motifs (AA2)

  1. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice For All [vol. 2]
  2. One purpose of the bourgeoisie is to mediate international trade and make overseas products available locally -> it's always funny when a proposition about capitalism comes up in the middle of something not about it, but I'll take it.
  3. Edgeworth's dialectic -> motif examined in Ace Attorney 2. [3] [4] Edgeworth collides with Wright. he has a particular way of thinking which is 'a problem' to Phoenix Wright. Wright continues to push on 'in authenticity'. after the incident where somebody tried to frame Edgeworth (following inside the recurring theme of behind-the-scenes fights between the criminals and the lawyers or detectives) and the Judge(?) reminded people of his actual violations of procedure, Edgeworth leaves. when he comes back, he gives Wright some very cryptic advice about 'knowing what it means to be the defense' after he 'discovered what it means to be the prosecution'. at the end it becomes clear Edgeworth did change. as much as he still seems reluctant to say it out loud he seems to have been jarred by his encounters with Phoenix and realized there was a need to to also collide the two of them together mentally and transform himself into something else.
    this motif is... a mixed bag. in some ways it's a good thing — it's always great to see a character re-evaluate themself. in some ways it's a little yucky because it reminds me of Fukuyama's dialectic but somehow applied to people. in Fukuyama's dialectic it's asserted that improvement and moderation are inherently tied together such that there's not really any such thing as change, only restoring the perfect. and here, you can almost see a nasty undertone that Edgeworth had to rethink himself because his personality was "not moderate" and "had to be moderated" while Phoenix, in being defined by authenticity and a kind of purity of character, is characterized not by actual striving for self-improvement but by inherent perfection. Franziska von Karma is obnoxious but like, as much as this isn't my favorite kind of 'character development', at the very least she did work hard to get where she is. meanwhile the game ultimately seems to knock that concept of improving through effort, and after thinking about it a while that's a little unsettling honestly. it's like Edgeworth didn't improve morally because he tried to do that — the form of effort that is relevant here and possibly more important — but because he regressed to the mean, he fell back to the Ideal. that concept is the thing that bothers me.
    Socratic dialectic + ?? = Edgeworth's dialectic. Fukuyama's dialectic + character development = Edgeworth's dialectic. Miles Edgeworth + authenticity (Lacanianism) = Edgeworth's dialectic. Miles Edgeworth + The unpredictability of Subjects will save the world = Edgeworth's dialectic.

Characters

  1. Phoenix Wright
  2. Miles Edgeworth -> I'll use the dark swatch because of the weird motif that came up for a bit of potraying prosecutors as horrifying killers.

Works

  1. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001) [vol. 1] [5]
  2. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice For All [vol. 2]

Theories

  1. Ace Attorney is a series about Liberal-republicans fighting brown anarchists -> there is a really solid theme of direct oppression running through the first game, where various people hire somebody to do harm to somebody that they think is violating the established local rules of their career or business — in effect, businesses or Artisanal practices acting like tiny governments.
    the moment the Steel Samurai came up I couldn't help but think, this character must be very thematic. he has a color timer on him for no reason, which connects him to Ultraman series. but Ultraman series is futuristic. while Steel Samurai is deliberately medieval; it's based in these principles of feudal orders with emperors, dukes or counts, and knights. I think that contrast is intentional and meant to frame Ace Attorney as feeling like it doesn't take place in 2001 because the characters' values are stuck hundreds of years before. now, you could have gotten that much from a magazine article; it's well known that the games are based on something called the ritsuryō system. [6] but when you get into the subtext of that is when things get really interesting. the ritsuryō system as a whole dates back to about the year 700; this places the characters' values approximately 1300 years before the game was made. 1300 years ago there was no United States. there was no global empire in its modern form (although Greek Egypt happened in about 300, so imperial colonies were already invented in more of a feudal form). Liberal-republicanism being an empire did not exist yet. Liberal-republicanism did not exist yet. we have to appreciate how different the world was in 300 — the whole dynamic of the United States and Japan and Germany and China fighting as powerful republics didn't yet exist. so then, what is the significance of Phoenix Wright and Edgeworth coming in and applying these very Kantian or Liberal-republican values to a world which is stuck in the 700s? it's a symbolic transition to Liberalism — they are taking feudalism and attempting to transition it to Liberal-republicanism. but more than that. because all the characters have to be superficially modern to make the setting truly feel shocking, all the peripheral characters live in capitalism. they exist within corporations and skilled practices and "Careerism". the peripheral characters may come out of something of a self-selected sample of people who have been near crimes, being detectives and witnesses and criminals, etc, but within them, you see a very clear theme pop up of almost all the lawbreakers suspect or not clearly trying to enforce particular rules themselves instead of letting the overarching republic do it. each lawbreaker, whether it's Redd White carrying out blackmail that is probably not legal or von Karma trying to get Hammond shot and Edgeworth in prison, always has a particular notion of what order and justice are; the most offensive thing to them is not getting to perform direct oppression and having someone else "hierarchically" meddle in their affairs. this weirdly positions the criminals of the Ace Attorney series as some kind of anarchism. definitely not one of the best kinds of anarchism, it goes without saying that most charcoal anarchists would hate it. but that by itself isn't to say it isn't an anarchism. blue anarchism almost certainly exists. orange anarchism may exist. brown anarchism may exist. so the only question that remains is what kind of anarchism Wright and Edgeworth are fighting.
  2. Ace Attorney is copaganda [7] -> this..... god this really shows where people probably but not definitely in the United States are at. I find it funny this would even be a concern when anybody with a brain can see that this game revolves around the lawyers. not the judge. not the detectives or the cops. as much as I know that's not the criterion being used; the point is of course for anarchists to try to isolate forms of force brought down by The State, so in theory violent cops count, but the Judge issuing a verdict and putting people away would count, and in context of the series von Karma hitting everyone with her whip almost certainly counts. anyway. the games pretty much never depict sentencing or the court piling on more charges — a very important scare tactic in real life. it's all about Wright and Edgeworth and a couple other prosecutors. the games really focus in on the concept of reasoning and the notion of law being a thing of effort and expertise, as much as medieval settings try to put similar qualities onto knights or occasionally onto nobility. these games are really actually "liberal-republic-aganda", if that were a word. they do subtly push an "agenda", but it's not an agenda of state force, it's an agenda that liberal republics are built on "reason" by hardworking people that if not necessarily good are at least complex and not bad. it's like.... these games are not defending killer cops but they are kind of defending Benjamin Franklin. so, your mileage may vary on how bad that is; George Washington did own slaves, so, yeah. there's also that bit of weird subtext connecting the lawyers back to feudal Japan, but if you wanted to figure out how that connects back to Japanese empire or Japanese reactionaries I feel like it would take stepping out of these games and unpacking a couple of Kurosawa movies or such to really get a grip on the cultural context, and I really don't feel like doing that at the moment so personally I'm just going to let it go.
  3. Ace Attorney is copaganda -> so when I searched up the link I really saw somebody say the phrase 'police investigation' in a negative tone. this is just it, people have these really negative experiences with cops directly that teach them the little they know, and want to live in a world without laws, but simultaneously want to live in "a democracy" and practice nonviolence and like have the entire thing operate exactly like a Liberal republic but with the tiny change that every individual is, I dunno, magically given a shock collar that zaps them if they violate some defined list of Bad Things that Make Clusters of Minorities Unhappy. kind of like the early Zootopia concepts if the shock collars actually meant there weren't any cops.
    I try so hard to steelman anarchists and not present their points and concepts as just stupid if I can possibly think of a way they could make sense, but the anarchists themselves are always dropping the ball. trying to defend anarchism always feels like when Phoenix has a witness who just goes on the stand and claims they did it while Phoenix is standing there like no! no! no! you didn't have to say that.

AUs

  1. hold it! you call that Leninism? / Ace Attorney but in the context of a Communist party or Communist International -> I was watching these games for other reasons, and in my mind, they had nothing to do with Communism. until Mia had to go and say 'once you see through one lie the whole thing falls apart'. that really got my mind gears turning because I started imagining a fictionalized version of the Moscow Trials which was in over-the-top Ace Attorney format. which is just, a vastly more historically accurate way to adapt that event than the ominous trial of doom trope you see in works like The Twilight Zone; Trotsky himself is almost as weird as an Ace Attorney character, and even among the people they actually dragged in, the arguments or narratives were just about as bad as some of the witnesses give in Ace Attorney games. like, Trotskyites are giving Larry Butz level of testimony, persuade me otherwise.
    then my mind started to wander to other possible angles, like a party meeting over an issue but being really divided on it and they start having a heated argument and banging on their desks. 'Left Opposition versus Right Opposition' kind of thing. that has so much comedy potential. and it could be a bit legitimately educational too. I kinda love the idea of these somewhat self-contained scenarios where a party is meeting over strategy on how to get through a particular problem in a particular country's revolution and there is a lot of tension because bad things happen to the working class when you get it wrong and they're going back and forth in these heated arguments to try to prove or disprove something. it almost sounds more interesting than Ace Attorney in some ways because like, you don't just have the fake opposition of the prosecutors and defense attorneys, you have more of a radial opposition of various factions and between different meetings the two sides could be anybody. it has a certain meta-Marxist appeal to it, in a weird way.
    Ace Attorney + Leninist variant of fictional place = this.
  2. hold it! you call that Leninism? -> though it's not very serious (and is not finished) I have a "demonstration" of this now

Related

Ideology codes

  • (none)

Subpages or related pages

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