#also i like how most of them are from tgaa lmao

[clockworkvampyre]

was drawing just now and thought of this

[ryutarotakedown]

susato for the character ask game! if she’s already been sent in then olive/viridian :^)

AAAAAAAH THANK YOU!!! im doing both because i feel like i say everything i think abt susato immediately on here lmao so i probably have more olive thoughts than anything

headcanon A: realistic

susato is autistic. sososo autistic. and as a result she learned most of her Way of Speaking (and english in general) from the herlock sholmes zine serials, which i think is actually pseudo-canon according to an interview with the localizer janet hsu? but anyway at one point she says something like “it is a great joy to know what emotions lie behind that cold mask” with the utmost politeness to, like, maria or somebody, and iris is like. ohh susie! i think i know where you got that from! ^-^ and susato has the delayed realization that half of her prepared lines were written by a ten year old

also susato has really good sea legs considering she's spent like [thinks] eight whole months at sea by the time she arrives in japan post-canon

i really like that one fanart with the headcanon that olive needs glasses!! i also think that she had severe anxiety as a teenager (and still does, it just manifests in a different way now) such that she had trouble speaking at all at times (selective mutism) which is how she got to be so fast at painting arrows on her palette thing. it's lessened a bit by the time we meet her but she likes doing it for emphasis anyway

headcanon B: while it may not be realistic it is hilarious

i cannot find the fanart for the life of me but please know i am always constantly thinking about that one comic where susato flies away with her hair loops flapping like a bird's wings. i am haunted by it.

on a more original note i think susato should consensually steal iris's smoke gun so she can go try to shoot her initials into the walls of the mikotoba mansion again. "the problem with the Real gun, naruhodou-sama, was the recoil! but this one should do the trick :)!" she succeeds and also dyes her father's hair blue in the process. hey at least he matches with sholmes-of-two-months-ago now

oh god let's see, do i have any good olive headcanons? i think her middle name is viridian and the difference between her original and localization counterparts is that viridian hates the color olive and olive hates the color viridian. they're both so glad their parents gave them two options.

headcanon C: heart-crushing and awful, but fun to inflict on friends

maybe i should have put this one in "realistic" but: consider the fact that susato arrives to london early the second time because she didn't get on the same boat as her father. consider that after they find out about him, both ryuunosuke and susato think it's possible that yuujin knew kazuma wasn't dead (even though this is disproved immediately after they tell him about it). consider susato running away from ryuunosuke after telling him she has to leave in 1-5. anyway i think avoidance is susato's main coping mechanism and she chose to spend 2 more months alone on a ship with no one she knew because she couldn't bear to look at her father for more than three seconds without making herself sick with wondering what he was hiding

i thought for so long about olive but the thing is. i genuinely don't think i could make her story more tragic than it already is without making it just, horrifically dark, you know? i thought a bit about whether she would be executed for attempted murder but i do think the system of tgaa is more lenient on that than the actual modern ace attorney universe, so. let's see — canon says she has parents and that she and duncan were waiting to graduate before telling them about their engagement, so i think they tried to talk to her after she dropped out but the selective mutism kicked in for like. a very long period of time. while she went to briar road every day, pretending not to hear them calling after her that this wasn't healthy. she heard them talk about possibly institutionalizing her behind her back and figured, what's another straitjacket. after she gets placed in prison they do come visit her and try to hide that they're horrified that she would ever go so far as to poison someone for that ross boy who they never did approve of that much, but she can tell. she doesn't speak much to them. they still visit every week.

headcanon D: unrealistic, but I will disregard canon about it because I reject canon reality and substitute my own.

i have said this probably a million times already but susato should have Exploded in 2-5!!! she should have blown up!!!! she should have had a meltdown!!!! why don't we have a susato breakdown sprite other than her trying to chuck her book into the ocean!!!!!!!!!! also she spills everything to haori once she gets back and they kiss about it.

ALSO also this isn't "unrealistic" exactly but it is unbelievable to me that susato & haori are not canonically childhood best friends so i am just. going to canonize that. one extra word. there

while in prison olive keeps drawing anywhere and everywhere and more and more people join in until it's a whole underground movement thing, and 200 years later textbooks will say that the term and practice of "art therapy" originated from a felon convicted of attempted murder whose name has sadly been lost to the annals of history (her signature was stylized in all-lowercase like "olive green" so as to be Emo, and so they thought she was just making a statement about color theory)

[oodlyenough]

with the apollo justice ports around the corner I finally made a concerted effort to finish AAI. there was a period where i thought i'd play both investigations games AND tgaa before now. lol. lmao even

fandom wasn't kidding that last case can long

miscellaneous spoilers and overall thoughts on AAI1. also it's very long

let's get some good stuff up top to start:

it was pretty funny

the pixel sprites were soooo cute, and most of the character art was nice in general

i liked seeing more of edgeworth and franziska together. this was 80% of the reason i played the game to begin with. stupid little details like the fact that she does, actually, still call him "miles" occasionally were nice to have, and i liked a lot of their bratty sibling interactions

callisto yew was the best lmao i loved her

kay's cute. i gotta disagree with the common fanon that she's literally edgeworth's daughter, on account of it's been two days and someone else has raised her to near adulthood, but being a teenager who shows up sometimes to bother him is a very funny thing for her to be, anyway

the yatagarsu actually being a toxic polycule was funny as shit lmao i love it. and kay at the end saying she wants to find 3 fellow teenage beauties to do it with her fhkldhglkhlfg yes girl end up on reddit queer housing discourse i believe in u babe

i didn't like lang all that much to begin with but once we got to the shih-na reveal i was all in, lmfaoooo. i joked "i hope he eats a poison necklace for her" and five minutes later he was taking a bullet. amazing. in all seriousness their relationship felt like much of what i enjoyed about dahlia and phoenix minus the stuff i felt was stupid. let's hear it for toxic workplace romances. edgey comes out of 3-5 like "well that was a lot" and then meets some new spiky weirdo to have homoerotic rivalry with only to discover that guy is also insane about some evil woman

cammy and ms teneiro were also great. lot of funny women in some of these cases. i like that.

this game could have attempted to sell me on some het romance for edgeworth -- it wouldn't have worked, but i wouldn't have exactly been surprised if it had tried, yknow -- but anyway instead it had miscellaneous women flirt with him while he was consistently baffled and/or oblivious and/or revolted. don't worry mr edgeworth i saw your magenta suit

i think broadly that covers the stuff I liked. which leads me to ... stuff I did not:

this game was... rough, imo. after i finished the trilogy this summer i was excited to play this, in particular because one of my few but key complaints with aa3-5 was that franziska and edgeworth just kind of disappeared and i was hoping this would give more exploration and closure to their characters.

that... did not happen. i felt like i was waiting for it to hit a point and get good for pretty much the entire game; it'd be like "well at least franziska is here soon" "well i want to meet kay" "well there's the baby franziska case" "well it's the finale surely it'll be fun!" and mostly none of that really materialized. largely i found it disappointing and anticlimactic.

i don't think i learned anything new about the existing characters -- edgeworth just kind of seemed to be reiterating lessons we already learned in the trilogy, and i felt they negated a lot of franziska's trilogy development and/or flanderized her a lot. the new characters are ok -- i LOVED yew/shih-na lmfao, and I like Kay, and I eventually came to like Lang once I saw him be unhinged about shih-na. but overall i felt the character work was weaker than I was expecting, and without the investment I have from the trilogy I doubt I'd have finished the game. the bratworth + baby franziska case was my fave of the game, because it was fun to see them together in that period of their lives, but even then I don't think how edgeworth was written makes any real sense with aa1 -- i think trilogy bratworth would take the easy conviction against gumshoe and be done with it. that was like. pretty core to the first three games.

I didn't find anything particularly emotional. I WAS interested in Callisto and her dead sister as compared to Kay and her dead father but, never mind, that was a lie. They tried to convince me KG8 was personal to everyone, but it didn't really feel like it for anyone but Kay -- who I like but met two cases ago, and whose connection to even Edgeworth is tenuous. Like they make it pretty clear Franziska is haunted by that case but ... why? Because she regards it as a semi failure I guess...? Like sure, I guess, but ... that's kind of remote. Compare to the trilogy finale stakes of defendant Edgeworth, Maya kidnapped, Phoenix falling off a bridge + Maya missing... the big threat here was that some guy we just recently met might go on to murder other people we've never met in foreign countries. Objectively yes that's bad, but it's not exactly emotionally gripping, imo.

I feel like the nature of the games and its place in the broader AA universe meant the stakes were off. edgeworth and his allies get accused of murder every five minutes in this game, but none of it ever feels real, because by "accused" they mean the police ask a few questions. in AA terms, this is nothing. there's no detention center or arrest or the threat of a 3 day trial and inexplicable death penalty. i've been saying for ages that i would love to see defendant franziska, everyone else got a turn!!, etc -- and technically this last case gave it to me except, well, she was one of about a dozen people accused over the span of the world's longest case, there's no real threat there, and frankly where's the fun in franziska being accused of murder if not for her to grudgingly accept phoenix as her representation. AAI's determination that everything happen pre-trial means that mostly none of it felt very serious; no one even gets arrested. maybe in a vacuum the threat of arrest would feel like enough, but in a series where you have Maya as Murder Charges Georg it just felt like nothing was really on the line -- what's the worst that happens, they get arrested and they hire phoenix? lol. don't threaten me with a good time!

this post is a million words long so I'll stop there. in conclusion, the worst ace attorney game I have played so far. fortunately(?) for AAI and unfortunately for me, i have not yet played dual destinies or spirit of justice, so stay tuned to see if it gets dethroned, lmfao.

i will, probably, eventually give AAI2 a try, if only to better understand everyone's fanfiction, but my hopes are pretty low.

[toasty-owoasty]

hi! i'm coming for your ace attorney/homestuck aus. you cannot hide in the tags. talk about them >:3

(only if you want ofc, no pressure, just a lot of interest)

lmao well if you insist~

(also shout out to my good buddy @jayljester / @jaylillustrates for being the main person I bounced ideas off of for this back in like.. 2020/2021 you should check them out their art is phenomenal)

so as I said before, there's actually three days. in order from least to most developed they are:

-attorneystuck

-turnabout alternia

-ace legislacerators

attorneystuck is your classic "what if x characters played sburb" story. have not thought much of it past that

turnabout alternia is a theoretical case wherein normal phoenix wright (and probably some other characters idk) get translated to alternia and have to defend one of the trolls (probably karkat) in a trial. I have no other details on this but terezi is probably either the prosecutor or the weird girl. think turnabout storm but instead of horses it's Homestuck.

ace legislacerators is the most developed & my favorite of the three. the idea behind it is sort of a rewrite of the ace attorney story line but on alternia? specifically an au alternia where humans and trolls live together. the impacts of this in society include reforms such as murder being actually illegal and frowned upon due to human influences, adults staying on alternia, trolls having actual family units, jobs such as legislacerator not actually being limited to one caste, etc etc. these changes are not pretty recent, probably being first implemented around/shortly before the tgaa era.

I feel I should also mention that by no means is the caste system gone. lower castes are still widely treated like garbage, and higher castes are still treated very well

for fun, here's a list of castes for the characters as I remember them bc again I have barely thought about this au in years :p (under the read more bc this post is already long)

Phoenix: indigo blood/human hybrid, explains why he's hardy enough to be able to withstand all the stuff he does

Edgeworth: Violet blood, he fishie :)

Larry: token human. just a normal guy.

Gumshoe: olive blood. I mean his jacket is already the perfect color

Von Karma: the von karma's are all teal bloods! they also hold the idea that as teals they are "natural hatched legislacerators" (aka Manfred is hemophobic despite not even being in that high of a caste)

Godot: as Diego Armando, he was a rust blood. but when he was poisoned they ended up filling him with teal blood! so diego=burgundy, godot=teal

Apollo: Apollo is a rust! he has normal horns AND hair horns so some people think he's a gold and get scared of his supposed psionics.

Gavin: If I recall correctly, the Gavins are both purple bloods. clown Gavins teehee. (klavier is probably more into the messiahs than kristoph, but I think both of them are very low-key about it)

Trucy: I don't actually remember trucy's caste but I *think* she was a burgundy? would make sense given. events. as well as her outfit as a kid being red.

Athena: She's an actual gold with psionics :) I never drew her, but my design concept for her involved her having four eyes, one for each color of the mood matrix.

Blackquill: I don't actually remember having one for him. Uhhhhh.. Ummm. Cobalt? yeah sure cobalt. taka is his "lusus" (even though lusii aren't actually parental figures anymore in this universe, they're more like pets but still have parental instincts)

Judge: purple blood. clown judge lol.

FEYS/KUHRA'IN ROYAL FAMILY:

so they're a special case. all people capable of spirit channeling or descendants of spirit channelers are a secret 13th caste... lavenders! in terms of hierarchy, lavenders would fall between violet and fuchsia (yes they are sea dwellers), but are generally unknown due to being mutants and also being a very very small caste. only some lavenders can channel spirits, just like how only some cobalts can mind control, only some burgundies have telekinesis, & only some golds have psionics. so yeah. all the feys are fish ladies :) (to explain why dahlia was able to cut ties from the feys, she simply just faked being a violet, shrimple as that)

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

Since you were talking about games, I know you're also a Dai Gyakuten Saiban/Great Ace Attorney fan (so am I! I followed you originally because you're into both it and BSD hehe), and I'm curious to know your thoughts on it! 💖 Who are your favorite characters/relationships/cases/parts? (My fave character is Benedict/Graydon. Yes I have a tendency to become obsessed with minor characters no one else cares about, oops) Did you play it with the Chronicles version (I assume so, like most people did) or are you an og who followed along with the fan translation like I did? One of the best/funniest parts of getting into that duology was coming across Souseki and being like "if I had a nickel for every time I've encountered a piece of media that had an anime version of real-life author Natsume Souseki, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice" lmao 😭

Since they're two of my favorite media, sometimes I try to imagine how a BSD/DGS crossover would work, and which characters would get along, though granted the only things they really have in common are detective work/mysteries, an old-fashioned aesthetic, and some similar themes lol... I just really love both of them a lot 🥹💖 Ryuunosuke and Atsushi being the exasperated straight men to the genius comedy duo that is Sholmes and Dazai? lmao (also Iris and Kyouka and their bunnies 🥹)

I need to play Hatoful Boyfriend. I've played lots of visual novels but that one is still on my to-play list (I don't know how seriously I'll be able to take it with bird sprites instead of actual human facial expressions, even though I fully trust that it is as good as its reputation says it is, but I'll just have to see for myself lmao)

Hsjfdnvskdf ok so I don't know what keeps happening to me with TGAA because I love it so much but I can't seem to write proper meta on it so. I just keep reiterating how much I like it lol. I got into it a bit later - I knew it existed almost since it came out in Japan but since I hadn't played original Ace Attorney, I avoided it for a long time. Then I saw a playthrough of the fan translation Case 1 and was hooked. By that point, I knew there was going to be a full English release so I waited for that because I wanted so badly to play it through! It's such a good game.

Oh, Graydon was interesting. That case was really fun, if it weren't for the fact that I figured out the key evidence really early and I kept trying to present it too soon aojsbsidhb. Graydon as a character was great because he's exactly as he appears but then there's just that bit more that fleshes him out and made him the slightest bit more sympathetic while not detracting from his actions. He was cool. (I actually had an idea for an after trial fic with him and the Skulkins but I don't think I'll ever get around to writing it :/)

Oh yeah I flipped out when I saw Natsume - my whole brain stopped (this was before my BSD obsession btw so this was very strange to me lol) and I shrieked out "NATSUME SOSEKI???" and my mom from the other room was just "???". yeah. And then he showed up again in BSD and I just said "...hi Natsume".

My favourites are the Mikotobas! Both Susato and Yuujin! They're such sweet people aghhhhh they deserve the world. But I really love all the main cast tbh. Ryuunosuke is such a dork but there's real personality to him, Sholmes is the perfect adaptation of that character, Gina should get all the puppies and friends she wants, and though I have some mixed feelings on him, I hope van Zieks gets a fucking break at some point (or just keep friendly tormenting him. I think it's good for him actually. unlearn your prejudices and relearn how to smile, you edgy vampire man.). Kazuma's arc was excellent and I wish so badly we could've gotten a true reunion scene with less of the baggage... actually, thinking about Kazuma for too long makes me ill. You essentially watch him break in the middle of court and it sucks. It sucks man.

And Iris was a standout character to me because her archetype could've so easily been bland or annoying but instead she's a realistic kid who happens to be a genius and she's kind and gets sad and angry and has depth and I would give her a big hug.

In terms of case specific characters, I liked Haori/Rei a lot, just because her dynamic with Susato was so silly and she's a cool gifted forensics student! She's awesome! I want to see her again!

However, my favourite was Olive. OLIVE. I adore her and I adore the twist with her. God she's so passive aggressive. Like damn. Have I mentioned that I adore her character? If Olive has only 1 fan then I am that fan. I wished we had gotten to consult with her again, even though that wouldn't have made much sense... just because she was interesting to me and I would've liked to have seen her character more fleshed out.

I'd really love to see a lot of these characters again. I've seen some people talking about Kazuma Asougi Investigations but tbh I'd really like to see Susato Mikotoba Investigations with Haori and Yuujin helping out! It'd be neat to see more Meiji Japan and Susato continue to grow as a character in her own right, since she started that journey in Chronicles. Oh well. I know that's a pipe dream but still.

Omg omg so Iris and Kyouka was such a sweet mental image that I had to doodle it!

I bet Kyouka would really find Iris's inventions fascinating and love to listen to how they work and stuff! I think they'd get along tbh. The idea of Sholmes and Dazai ever interacting terrifies me. Keep them away from each other. Please.

As for Hatoful, I am biased but I'd say it is well worth a playthrough. Given you like both DGS and BSD, I'd say you'll probably like it. My mom (who has also played it) and I were chatting about it recently and thinking that weirdly enough, BSD gives us a lot of the same vibes... like it's nowhere near identical, but that kind of desperate darkness where the characters are not who they appear to be at first and everyone has a different motive for doing what they do, but it's also not taking itself too seriously and it's still kinda silly... yeah. Same feel. It's better to go in with no expectations but I'm thinking of making a post later about why people should play that game... it's still one of my favourites of all time.

About the stock bird images: I know it's weird. I know it's weird that they're birds. But the best part of this game - to me, anyways - is that for as much as it is a gag, the story leans into it so heavily that you will quickly realize the main plot only makes logical sense if the main cast are birds and the player the only human. Like, it literally would not make sense otherwise. Please play it. It's wacky, it's zany, the characters have a good amount of depth, it's mildly traumatizing, it's one of the best things I've played and I feel it's become an inscrutable part of my identity. I am still obsessed with it many years later. That almost never happens to me. It's that good.

Agh this was long. I hope it wasn't overwhelming haha. Actually I'm curious: did you like Olive too? And/or what do you like about Graydon? :D

(Also if you ever decide to start Hatoful, please let me know your thoughts!!!)

[vonlipvig]

i just realized i never properly typed all my thoughts about tgaa2-5, or more accurately tgaa2-4 and 5, OR even more accurately, tgaa as a whole, so let’s do that quickly!

short answer: [EXCITED SCREECHING]

long answer:

i just...loved it, man. what a good game. it was SO refreshing to just take a step back from the lore-heavy world of AA and just start over with new faces and new stories to tell, and i think it was just what the franchise needed. setting the game in the late 19th/early 20th century was such a good idea (working with the technology and knowledge of the era was really fun, but also...it’s a period piece, how fucking cool is that?), and even though i’m a big fan of all the fake country bs, it was very cool to see it set in the real work (or well, as real as we can get lmao).

as for the game itself, i LOVEDDDD all the new aditions to the gameplay! they did not feel gimmicky at all, and truly felt like things that could be adapted and become staples of the franchise! yes, sholmes and iris did bring that much needed dose of wacky and fantastical that we still love with all the crazy gadgets and inventions, but all the new gameplay bits were so...normal! fitting! the dance of deduction bit gave the investigation parts something to make them more fun, the summation examination was very enjoyable (and i’m glad we could finally have a jury!), but i think most importantly, having multiple witnesses on the stand at the same time was SUCH a refreshing thing! (i’m pretty sure they did it in plvsaa? don’t remember much tho, but i’m glad it’s here). it made everything so much more interesting and dynamic, and i loved all the interactions that were allowed because of that. As for the pursuing bit, I don’t know if people think it was a bit too obvious, but I really think it would get so annoying and overwhelming if there wasn’t a clear indication someone was reacting? maybe they could go without the speech bubble, but keep the audio cue? idk, but i really loved the mechanic, AND it really payed off when you have to use it umprompted! (i think that was only with graydon and gregson, but that bit was GOOD).

ANYWAY THE LAST CASE, holy FUCKKKKKK. they really tied everything together in the end! everything connected with the professor case was an absolute ride, a lot of the revelations during the last trial REALLY surprised me (not because they weren’t set up right or anything, i was just going along with the ride and they REALLY hit, it was fun). kazuma and barok were very good, i really liked what they did with their characters (i only wish they could have given barok a smiling animation for the end, that could have been cute, but i get it, he’s truly processing a lot there lmao).

AND STRONGHART. hey, i loved the guy. was it predictable? hmmm, yes and no? sure, when i first saw him i said “yeah, this guy killed someone” (i mean, he does look like gant...also, his clapping animation, that’s a gant nod, right?), but then, was i right? yes and no! i love me some morally corrupt villains, and god his animations were CRAZY. him being the judge was the cherry on top, what a satisfying takedown.

but yeah, i don’t know what else to say, what a goddamn good game. the music? on point. the 3d animations? MUCH improved. the characters? my babies and beloatheds. it was just so so satisfying.

basically, play tgaa.