User:RD/9k/Ace Attorney without lawyers (Q64,49)
Main entry
- Ace Attorney is copaganda
- Ace Attorney without trials
Background
Ace Attorney is copaganda
[1] -> 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.- 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. Materialism aids The Cops
/ Phoenix Wright aids The State specifically through practicing Materialism, and this is bad because there shouldn't be a State -> so, I like these games ever since I found out about them recently, but they leave me meditating about what the concept of Enlightenment reason or Liberal-republican reason they revolve around is "doing" in the setting. if you'd actually think about things, you'd realize this is one of the best ways to phrase the "copaganda" argument: Ace Attorney depicts Materialism, and lawyers and detectives (= nonviolent cops) using Materialism. cops are not an idea, police departments actually are a physical thing that has been created, and there's no need to invoke some esoteric idea of "reification" to explain that. Liberal-republican societies are physically created out of monarchies or freeform imperial colonies, and then the physical creation of Liberal-republicanism physically generates The Cops. people notice the Liberal republic as an overall material process at the small points of contact with the edges of that process that they run into, which could in some cases be The Cops. The Cops do not have their own motivations beyond what a particular city usually values as a population, or what the people who called them value. so why do people think otherwise? one reason is the nasty influence of these horrible contortions of Western-Marxism that are like, shovel generate consciousness smash whole shovel shovel bad. I saw that applied to the US military today, I see this applied to The Cops, for some reason people really think that individual institutions inside Liberal republics are these totally independent objects functioning as their own separate societies when they aren't?
so, anyway. you can say with some confidence that Phoenix Wright is a weapon of The State. or more specifically, that logic is his weapon. a defensive weapon is still a weapon with its own destructive power. so what then? is this unacceptable? if you were Lenin, you'd say no, because the process of logic or mathematics or Materialism can be used to track the bourgeoisie and keep them out of an emerging workers' state. if you were Stalin, you'd also say no, because Materialism can be used to thwart Trotskyite conspiracies that are unnecessarily trying to destroy the central party and replace it with a different Marxist party. even if you were Trotsky, you'd still say no, because you use Materialism to show how the central party supposedly "became deformed" and how Stalin could not save it. Trotsky doesn't want Stalin's Marxism to be legal, and he wants to set up a Trotskyist state to get rid of it so it won't threaten Trotskyism. Trotskyism, as insane as it was back in 1936, still makes so many times more sense than anarchism, and like, on paper I would pick Trotskyism over anarchism every time. if you really really have to get rid of Stalin that's the way to go.
Materialism aids the The Cops. but it doesn't destroy society. it is something of a defensive weapon to secure the edges of society against external threats. which aren't always present. but sometimes they are, especially when there are unavoidable conflicts between different ideological factions, and because they're entering into a war with each other and each attempting to become a nation you absolutely can't I-believe-that-everybody Stalin-followers or Trotskyists into just working together and not believing in a state; states follow natural divisions between populations where they are failing to become friends and becoming hostile as people, and whether there is a state is not something you adopt as an Ideal or that you choose. any more than you can choose whether or not one of the criminals in the Phoenix Wright games kills somebody, that just happens. now I'm going to make a very spicy statement: any group of anarchists that has ever said the word "fascism" believes in a state. the moment you have to repel fascism you have a state! it's possible you could cease to have one once that threat is over. but really, "The State" and "a state" are not even necessarily different things. once Liberal capitalism ceases to exist they tend to just collapse back into being the same thing, that "The State" exists when two "states" exist in plurality and hostility. this does not happen, as anarchists have often asserted over the centuries, because people choose that specific condition of things to exist. if that were the case, you could argue that Tibet really is causing problems for China by not choosing to get rid of the authoritarian border between the two societies and officially becoming a province of China that just happens to contain Tibetans. that is the ultimate conclusion that Bellegarrigism pretty much inevitably leads to — that colonialism isn't real and apartheid states aren't real and hierarchy formed by coercing people together instead of separating them is impossible and cannot exist so nobody needs to worry about it. this is pretty much falsified by now. it does exist. factional borders are an instrument of freedom that is used to fight hierarchy and domination despite being The State. ...wow, this was quite a ramble to get into on an Ace Attorney page.
okay. so anarchists overrun the Ace Attorney setting and they ban courts and lawyers. Phoenix Wright is now the defensive weapon of the anarchists against anything that isn't anarchism that attacks anarchism from the outside. because a group of anarchists doesn't poof in out of nowhere; it's formed out of a particular fraction of people and so it has an outer border and is countable. the whole world can't become anarchist at once, it starts at a particular center and everything outside it threatens to destroy it. (there could be a dynamic like is hypothesized for Trotskyism where anarchism pops up at several centers and then forms bridges in the middle and gets bigger, but that doesn't change things much. the area of anarchism is just bigger instead of smaller.) but when anarchism is created one of the first things that happens is Phoenix has to decide whose side he's on and if he's going to protect the anarchists. whether anything he does to protect the anarchists count as State activities in the sense that him being a lawyer would, or in any sense, that very moment right there is the creation of a state, because it's the creation of the border to a countable society. this statement is false because anarchists not having a state is physically impossible. anarchists can call themselves anarchists all they want but to pull it off they need to be way more specific than they've ever been about what The State is.
Scenario
Ace Attorney without trials
/ Ace Attorney without lawyers / Ace Attorney but there are no lawyers / Anarchist Attorney (motif) -> so. I said that "Ace Attorney is copaganda" was a stupid proposition unless you find the most "ace" anarchist who actually has a decent exmat and can actually argue their points in a non-stupid way. but. as I wrote that down, I realized that if you tried to redesign the Ace Attorney universe around the constraint of what those people apparently want rather than what they literally want... it would actually be a weirdly fun challenge. if we're thinking about this in terms of a hypothetical game it would definitely be difficult to draw up a set of core game mechanics that would feel appropriate to the original series while at the same time more or less rewriting everything. but in terms of just writing a story around some characters, that would probably be quite doable.
I think the best place for this to start would be at the beginning, with the original two incidents. when Phoenix is a child lawyers exist and he sees the young Miles Edgeworth stand up for him, everything is the same at that point. then when he's in college he learns the law department is shutting down, or maybe it isn't shut down at that time but people are occupying buildings and there is a lot of chaos and he doesn't quite know what's going on. I don't know what Mia is doing, she might actually be defending anarchists in a court trial or something weird might be going on like that. Phoenix was originally in college for theater. [2] so he would be studying the humanities and honestly I'd realistically expect that he would run into some odd people who are absorbed in schizoanalysis or other Existentialist nonsense philosophies that behind all the spaghetti strive to promote moral progress and empathy. he's a bit conflicted because I assume based on the central themes of the original series that he is fairly logical but none of this stuff makes any sense, it's more like a weird little mystery that he can't quite piece together. (gosh, he's already become relatable.) I guess the vignette of Phoenix in college is quite literally just him trying to solve the mystery of what is going on with the law department and sort of mentally putting together a "corkboard" of everything for his own peace of mind. he runs into Mia as she is investigating the incident she is supposed to be defending, in the traditional way lawyers always do in the games for some reason. and I guess because he wants to solve this thing he like, takes up the secretary / counsel role and decides to help her? we have the dynamic of Phoenix and Maya but literally reversed. of course, I feel like for thematic consistency we have to stick to the most important rule of this AU of there being absolutely no trials. Mia thinks there is going to be a trial but the commotion continues and it gets held up and doesn't happen. anarchists level the courthouse, I don't know. the anarchists try to get rid of the police department and the detectives' involvement in things. so the two of them are having to figure out how to "defend" the anarchists in a new environment where the anarchists are sort of making all the rules now. they quickly figure out that one of the best things they can do is simply learn to parse out what people are on the anarchists' side and what people aren't, and quickly report "the wrong people" so that at any particular "venue" or event they don't get in. at the end of this story arc Phoenix looks at a campus newspaper and learns that as he is graduating the law department really will be abolished. he is stunned. he looks back at the clipping he found about the 'demon prosecutor'. he has no idea what is going to happen to this man in the coming years, but knows that whatever happens it is now his duty to be a part of it. hoping he will not have to defeat his new enemy with violence, he vows to help bring Edgeworth down.
Stalin's Marxism versus anarchism
Communist Franziska von Karma
/ Franziska von Karma becomes Communist theorist / Franziska von Karma as "the Stalin"; as esteemed Communist party theorist (sense) -> yeah, no, if anybody is going to be the Stalin of this setting it's going to be her. weapon or no weapon, it's that notion of her being way too dedicated to being a prodigy at 18 and trying to be better at what she does than anyone else, and not really wanting to let anyone get in her way if she can genuinely do something better
I didn't really like this character until I thought of this, which is just so funny I can hardly explain it in full here. it's the collision of an anarchist-styled Ace Attorney timeline where The State is banned and presumably Communism is considered evil too, with the notion of von Karma showing up and being totally unlikeable but possibly being good at it and challenging all the anarchists' assumptions about anything. it's quite an "animal farm" scenario to drop on them where likely none of them is going to get it right but they might or might not all be wrong and it could be that one of the subjectively most unlikeable characters in Ace Attorney becomes the best one
lawyer characters becoming Lenin + Ace Attorney = Franziska von Karma becomes Communist theorist.
Related
Ideologies or fields
- / alternate premises (AUs; fiction)
- / alternate timelines (fiction)
- / Ace Attorney (series)
- / metatransitional literature
- / anarchism
- / Stalin's Marxism