BlackHeart Biohazards

beevean:

blackheartbiohazards:

beevean:

blackheartbiohazards:

Oh, wow, woof, yeah. “Conflicted” is about how I would sum up my feelings on SOJ as well.

I kind of hate the plot and the themes of it. Basically every case has something to say on the theme of hereditary legacy, and what it says in every single case is “hereditary legacy is objectively good and we should work to uphold and perpetuate it.” and I hate that. 

I hate that because in absolutely every case the hereditary legacy has unquestionably damaged and fucked over the kids inheriting it, and the narrative wants them to accept it on their shoulders like its a good thing. It damaged and fucked over Trucy, it damaged and fucked over Maya, it damaged and fucked over Geiru and Bucky, it sure as fucking hell damaged and fucked over Apollo, Rayfa, and Nahyuta. Hell, it fucked over Gar’an as well!

And the narrative wants them to uphold their abusive family legacies, and holds them doing so up as a personal triumph, rather than the obvious perpetuation of a broken cycle that it is.

I mean they literally spell it out in the narrative. The tradition in Kura’in is that “the sins of the father are visited on the children.” But instead of the narrative saying “actually that’s fucked up and we shouldn’t believe that” the narrative instead says “that’s okay because your father was actually free of sin!”

It’s immensely fucked up thematically.

And that’s not even getting into unpacking the uh, uncomfortable exocticism (and sometimes outright racist tropes) that are jam packed into the portrayal of Kura’in.

But Nahyuta.

Oh Nahyuta.

I spent the entire game repeatedly saying “I hate this guy’s attitude” and “this guy makes me really uncomfortable”, because I wasn’t comfortable saying “I hate this guy”. Because I was sure the trauma backstory was coming.

And oh boy did it come.

There is nobody who has been more immensely fucked over by inheritance than Nahyuta, oh boy.

And suddenly in the very last couple hours of the game it puts all of Nahyuta’s extremely annoying preaching and holier than thou attitude into perspective. Because it’s a direct result of religious abuse perpetuated against him, and and his own way of coping with the basically fucking doomed abusive situation that he’s put himself in.

Here is a young man who has been raised as a tool and a weapon by his insurgent father. Nahyuta is a “defiant dragon” to his father first, before he is ever a son. And Nahyuta desperately wants to please his father, but he doesn’t agree with his tactics.

So he trains his whole life to go and fight the battle in his own way, to do things the way he thinks is right– and he’s immediately trapped and blackmailed into a situation from which there is no escape.

I love Nahyuya and I want so much better for him. Having him and Apollo and Rayfa stay in Kura’in is an absolutely tragic bad ending for them, where they’re all forced to continue living out the pantomime of their father’s shadow.

In my imagination, (and one day in my fic) six months after Spirit of Justice there is a schism in the Defiant Dragons between the monarchists and the socialists, and Apollo, Nahyuta and Rayfa end up having to back to go LA and pick up their lives and deal with the trauma of their crushing family legacy.

Interesting perspective!

I haven’t really engaged with SoJ since 2016, so the details are blurry in my mind. When you put the narrative in that way, it’s kind of fucked, especially since other AA games are so good at showing the dangers of legacy – hello, Fey family?

Also yeah, the Khura’in setting is… not great. It’s one thing to have a world where the legal system is corrupted and defense attorneys are shown less respect than prosecutors. It’s another to have a whole mystic country where defense attorneys are executed, and only because there was an evil queen in power. I feel it’s outside the scope of the series.

(then again, as much as I love The Great Ace Attorney, I have similar reservations with how the narrative about the arrogance of the British Empire and its institutional power that fucks over certain people was eventually funneled into “it’s all this guy’s fault”…)

As for Nahyuta, I didn’t expect this response, but it’s fair. I personally find the “oh he was good all along, he was blackmailed into being a jackass 🥺” twist a bit cheap considering his behavior through the entire game (including deliberatley riling the gallery against Athena, taking advantage of her sensitive hearing, to make her give up), and less interesting than Edgeworth’s or van Zieks’ palpable character development. But I totally understand your perspective! His situation is tragic. I think a lot of discourse could have been prevented if Nahyuta acted differently depending on the country, signaling that something was wrong, or if he had a poignant heart-to-heart scene, or maybe if the twist didn’t happen so late in the game. But yeah, I understand what you like about him, and it might just be that I don’t relate to him as others do.

There is a big part of me that would love to beg you to rewatch/replay SOJ so we can scream about the awful, tragic themes together. SOJ absolutely wants you to believe that inherited legacy is pure and good and it goes about saying so in the most twisted and awful way possible XD

To say that the political story that SOJ chose to go with is outside of its scope is an understatement. The cultural politics in the Ace Attorney game are… bad. They’re bad. Ace Attorney as a series engages in a LOT of cultural exoticism, and nowhere is it more present than in SOJ. The names of the Kura’inese characters and their portrayals made me *intensely* uncomfortable– esspecially “Tarust Inmee” when he was being channeled by Maya. Like, really?? did we have to do that??

And the political discussion of TGAA is… woof, that’s a lot to unpack there too.

Regarding Nahyuta, I need to be clear that Ace Attorney is a game that I’m forced to engage with on a Watsonian level first, and a Doylist level second.

From a purely Doylist/narrative text perspective Nahyuta sucks as a character. You’re absolutely right that the last minute backstory trauma excuse is a complete ass-pull. It’s jarring in the narrative.

Throughout the whole rest of the game he’s an unpleasant character who’s a huge dick to all the characters that we like. He’s smug and insufferable not just in the usual way of prosecutors but in a viscerally uncomfortable way because of the religious angle.

Like imagine if he was Christian and it was all fire and brimstone?

He’s uncomfortable, he’s unpleasant, the narrative wants us to like him at the very end and it doesn’t do a good job of selling it.

Unfortunately from an internal/watsonian perspective he’s a deeply tragic character with a ton of psychological issues. That doesn’t make him more pleasant, but it does give me much more leeway to understand where he’s coming from, and to desperately want him to put in the work of unlearning all of his abusive habits, and become more culturally open minded.

I don’t like Nahyuta as a character. I think he sucks and the narrative handles him badly and wants you to like him without putting in the effort to give you a good reason to.

Unfortunately I also love him like a brother to me, the stupid, smug idiot 😂 DO BETTER, ASSHOLE!!

Oh, DD and SoJ are begging for a revisit – I also miss my man Simon. Only issue is that those games are bloated lmao.

Ah, the Khura’inese names. When the writers just gave up on finding clever puns 😂 it’s a whole game of Deid Menn. And it’s no better in Japanese.

Mmh. I find interesting to compare Nahyuta to Barok, who in my opinion is similar but much better executed.

Barok is just as uncomfortable as Nahyuta, perhaps even more so. At least Nahyuta, even though he speaks like a stereotypical Evangelical fundie, technically comes from a fictional culture where lawyers are criminals deserving the death penalty. Barok? His japanophobia is real. All the stuff he says about the “Nipponese” being backwards and deceitful, those are real pre-WWII stereotypes he’s spouting. And while it is the theme of the duology, that the British Empire was massively racist, and ofc Barok would not be an exception, ngl you do get to a point where you just want him to shut up.

But Barok is a character outside of that. He is immensely funny in his quirks, from him acting like Dracula to him slamming his leg on the desk to object to his witty lines (“To your future career in the circus”). And on top of that, he is one of the most honest, helpful prosecutors in the series! Sure, it takes him a long time to get to that point, but he always helps Ryuu by the end of a case. And there is this dissonance, then, between how honest and principled he is, and the virulent xenophobia he spouts every ten seconds, that makes him intriguing in a way.

And, in his case, I did feel awful for him. His backstory is given to us three cases before the end (and yeah he is helped by the fact that GAA is a duology, so he has roughly twice the screentime of every other prosecutor), and when he opens up to Ryuu, he even admits that he was aware that his behavior was uncalled for, but he just couldn’t snap out of that rage he had cultivated for ten years. And he more than apologizes for his terrible behavior.

… this is where I’m however forced to complain about how simplistic “japanese dude killed my bro, now hate japan” is lmao. And most tragically, it could have easily been made more realistic by putting emphasis on how xenophobic the society Barok grew up in was! A sheltered young nobleman who drank tea and white man’s burden every morning met a Japanese person for the first time when he was in his 20s, then that person killed his only family, then his work got so stressful he was forced to retire and live 5 years in complete solitude… yeah, developing an irrational hatred for all Japanese people makes sense. But it’s not as easy as the game presented it. While I think GAA is more ambitious and better thought than SoJ, it still fumbles in combining real-life topics and its own conventions.

(and perhaps it’s best if I don’t start on Stronghart here lmao)

But even if we admit that Barok was lucky to have so much screentime, Edgeworth managed to pull off what Nahyuta meant to do in a much smaller game. Bro even Franziska had a better twist in the very epilogue! I really do think that part of SoJ was mismanaged: I get the intention, but you can’t just recycle the Edgeworth formula and hope it sticks simply because we all love the og guy lmao.

and yeah I do think Nahyuta having virtually no quirks hurts him. AA is supposed to be a quirky series! In the second case he has a few funny lines where he awkwardly engages with modern American culture, and that would have been a cute running gag. But no, it’s all “putrid” with him : a shame. he could have been written better, for sure. I’m sure there are fanfictions out there that explore his terrible life in more detail!