#“something something morgan feeds dahlia and iris poison so they become poisonous”

[nemaliwrites]

i finally got around to reading "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne and now i have Dahlia Thoughts™

Rappaccini's Daughter, according to the Ace Attorney wiki, is where the inspiration for Dahlia's last name comes from. I read it with my Fandom Goggles on, and not to get too english class here, but....we're about to get pretty english class

For those of you who haven't read it, it's a gothic short story abt a medical researcher whose experiments with poisonous plants result in his own daughter, Beatrice, becoming poisonous. The man who falls in love with her slowly learns the truth about her nature and struggles to cope with it.

"Am I awake? Have I my senses?" said he to himself. "What is this being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?"

A large portion of our MC's internal narration heavily revolves around the idea of one's appearance vs their nature. He refers to the garden as "an Eden of poisonous flowers". When he shuns Beatrice for what she is, she tells him that even though her exterior is poisonous, her soul is pure.

This is a direct contrast to Dahlia, who Phoenix refers to multiple times as an "angel". And, needless to say, her soul is quite the opposite.

But the one thing the story makes clear about Beatrice is that she is, at the end of the day, a victim of her circumstances - in the same way that Dahlia arguably is as well. The MC's realization of the truth comes like this: he realizes that because Beatrice has been raised in the presence of poison, she has become poisonous herself -> i feel like I don't even need to relate this back to Dahlia at this point, it kind of slaps you in the face.

Beatrice confronts her father, too, and asks why he inflicted this miserable curse on her; but he is adamant that he hasn't done anything wrong.

"Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?"

He claims it's anything but misery to be as terrible as you are beautiful, to have the power and strength against which no enemy can prevail -> does that not give you big Morgan vibes

At the end, she takes an antidote given to her, believing that it will cure her of her poison - but because she's been so inextricably tied w the poison, there's no curing her anymore.

To Beatrice,--so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini's skill,--as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death

The comparisons to Dahlia are interesting, I think, in that the 'poison' can be used as a metaphor for literally anything else. If we stick with the whole 'you can't escape from your nature and whatever you are raised in the presence of is something you can't separate from yourself anymore', then in a way Dahlia is the exact opposite of Beatrice. One actively fights against and rejects her nature, isolating herself from the entire world, while the other accepts it wholeheartedly. It also can be used to draw further comparisons between Beatrice's father and Morgan: one purposefully molded his daughter to fit his desired image, while the other actively was not involved, but still led to the same end result.

Beatrice's tragedy is that she's aware of her poisonous nature and hates it. She tells Giovanni, her love interest, "I am poisonous! I am deadly! I am like the fatal basilisk that slays with a glance!" She's a prisoner of her father's making, a living weapon who longs for normalcy. Dahlia, on the other hand, embraces her poisonous nature. She uses her charm like a weapon, manipulating everyone around her. There's no longing for normalcy with her; she revels in the chaos she creates.

"Thou hast filled my veins with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself--a world's wonder of hideous monstrosity!"

And, unwillingly, Beatrice ends up passing on her poisonous nature to Giovanni - and now he's forced to live with this curse. What, then, does that say about Phoenix...?