User:RD/9k/Ace Attorney (Q64,30)

Content warnings

• Full game spoilers — Ace Attorney (#1)

Main entry

6430. 6430Ace 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.
6430. 6430Ace Attorney -> field: fiction; field: Kantianism

Motifs

6429. 6429lawyer of justice -> intuitive, because it's at least vaguely what their stated purpose is.
6437. 6437lawyer of injustice -> it's rarer you see this in fiction and yet Homestuck catapulted the idea into popular consciousness.
6431. 6431objection! (motif)
618. 618narrative parallel
618. 618Are 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.
4413. 4413See 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) [1] -> you know what joke I'm going to make.
5102. 5102The 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.

Works

6441. 6441Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001) [vol. 1] [2]

Theories

618. 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. [3] 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.

AUs

618. 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.

Ideology codes

• (none)