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alto-tenure · 2 years ago

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A Dissection of the PL Mystery Girl Archetype

I mentioned this in a post I made about Espella a while ago, but there’s a very specific type of female character that exists in the Laytonverse. I call them the "mystery girl". The general purpose of a "mystery girl" is to linger around the edges of the story until their mystery is finally revealed as part of the climax of the story. Due to the mysterious nature of these characters, they aren't always the most effectively characterized, since their purpose is less to be a person than it is to be a mystery. This dissection exists to point out how prevalent this particular form of misogyny is in the entire Professor Layton series, and to show how though it has changed form and evolved over the course of the series, the core is the same.

With that being said, spoilers for all the games except Layton Brothers: Mystery Room, which is the only game that doesn’t have one (in my opinion), as well as Eternal Diva. And an additional content warning for discussion of attempted suicide, in relevance to Espella’s character arc.

Let's start with the first one: Flora Reinhold. This is specifically about her role in Curious Village, not in any of the other games. Throughout Curious Village, we hear about Flora a bit, and we even see her in disguise a couple times. At the end of the story, it's revealed that she was the Golden Apple all along and the key to all the riches. She doesn't really get much in the way of development in this game, due to only really turning up at the end. You get a little sense of personality, but Don Paolo comes crashing in to make her the damsel in distress, and overall we don’t learn much about her in this game particularly. (We learn more about her in subsequent games, when she’s no longer the focus of the game’s mysteries.)

In Diabolical Box, the mystery girl is Katia. I replayed the game for this analysis, so she’s currently on my mind. We start out not by seeing Katia, but by hearing about her. Namely, we hear that she’s leaving Dropstone, and that her father wouldn’t approve of it, but we don’t really hear about why. Katia spends most of the time dodging questions and avoiding others until the end, when she tries to get Layton and Luke out of the castle so she can have some alone time with her grandfather. At which point Layton takes over explaining her own family’s history and mystery, a point which has been much memed about within the fandom. Katia also happens to be the narrator for this game, because it’s her story, but the fact that she’s narrating adds to the mystery at first -- why is she narrating, and what does this seemingly minor character have to do with everything? She’s the center of the story, but at the end of the day, all we come out knowing about her is that she’s Anton’s granddaughter, the daughter of Dropstone’s mayor, persistent enough to go to Folsense (in spite of her father’s wishes), and very worried about the state of Folsense overall.

Claire does play into this trope for Unwound Future, but she's the best developed of them -- she doesn't have the most screentime compared to someone like Aurora or Espella who accompany us throughout the entire game, but with the screentime she does have she's very well-developed. It helps that we get to know her through flashbacks before she properly interrupts the plot -- every time she shows up in the present day before she introduces herself as Celeste, it’s accompanied by a flashback to Claire (and more specifically, Claire and Layton’s relationship). It also helps that the audience is capable of knowing the mystery’s answer before Layton, for once -- we know that Celeste is Claire before it’s acknowledged by the story. Usually in PL games, the mystery is something Layton reveals to the player, or is revealed to the player by another character (Katia in DB, or Descole in Azran Legacy) but here for once the roles are flipped -- we are able to come to the conclusion that Celeste is Claire much earlier than the game presents it. So while she is a part of this trope, being the mysterious one that lurks around the corners until she comes in to join the group, she also gets to exist beyond the mystery. We can see her as Claire.

Arianna Barde assumes this role for Last Specter. We don’t even see her at first -- she’s introduced to us as the “calamity witch”, but she’s really first introduced to us during the specter attack with the flute. She’s the one responsible for playing the flute, and tries to keep Loosha under control, and also has a chronic illness that is slowly killing her. Luckily, she gets cured when Loosha guides us to the Golden Garden, because Loosha cared about Arianna and wanted to save her. Arianna is the least mystery-first of these -- while the “calamity witch” and Loosha are major parts of the game, she herself is not the mystery. The mystery surrounds her father more than her. And we find out the keys to her mystery fairly quickly (aside from the part with the Golden Garden), so we can get to know her more as herself.

Even the movie managed to integrate this trope, twice! Janice and Nina are both mystery girls, but they’re mystery girls in different ways. Nina adheres more to the model of previous mystery girls in the series, where we don’t actually get to know her all that well before the mystery is revealed. Meanwhile, Janice is more the Aurora-Espella model of mystery girl, where she’s with us through the whole story so we kind of get to know her -- except not...really? Because she was Melina actually for most of the movie. @101flavoursofweird has a great post about Janice and Melina’s characterization that I recommend for additional reading. And speaking of the second model of mystery girl...

I’m going to talk about Aurora and Espella together, because they’re both a part of this trope, but they tie into it slightly differently, considering they spend most of their screentime accompanying the main characters and being a part of the “crew” of the game. In fact, an argument could be made for Darklaw being the “mystery girl” of Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright, given how much time she spends lurking and being broody and introducing us to the mystery, but I’m choosing to focus on Espella for this analysis, since Darklaw is an antagonist first (which is why she’s so mysterious). Espella and Aurora are both introduced at the beginning of their respective games and then subsequently get taken away from Layton, who works with his companion(s) to retrieve them. The fact that they accompany the Professor and crew throughout pretty much the entire game makes them different from the rest of the characters, and should give them more development, right?

Let’s go over our introduction to Aurora. We start off by seeing her trapped in the ice. Then we solve a puzzle to set her free, and pretty much right after that Targent snatches her and we go on the airship chase to recover her, but then she falls out over Kodh and we find the Azran dome. This is where we finally get to talk to her! She introduces herself as the Azran emissary, and when she’s in the state of “being the Azran emissary” and executing her programming, she doesn’t show much personality.

That’s not exactly a strong start. But let’s keep going, shall we? From there, we slowly introduce Aurora to humankind. She gets a modern outfit, which she expresses some apprehensions about but ultimately likes. She learns about humanity’s kindness and joy and love throughout her journey, culminating in the moment where she pleads with the Azran to save Layton, Luke, Emmy, Des, and Leon.

And this is a pretty good character arc! As the game progresses, we slowly see Aurora come more and more out of her shell the more familiar she grows with the Bostonius crew and humanity at large.

But really, who is Aurora? We should be getting to know her very well. But at the end of the day, all we know about her is that she loves us enough to save us. She wants humanity to live because she believes in their kindness. But who is Aurora?

From a surface level reading like this, it’s hard to determine. This is not to say that Aurora “has no character” or is “bland and boring”. She does, but you need to look closer, read harder. I’ll admit that “you think this character is boring because you’re not looking hard enough” is a mediocre defense of bad writing, but I do believe it’s the truth -- there is character and personality to be found, but it’s...harder.

Espella has similar issues. I won’t discuss her in as much depth as I discussed Aurora, because this is already fairly long, but in spite of the fact that she accompanies us through most of the game, her most significant decision is claiming that she is the Great Witch to end the system of witch trials in Labyrinthia, and she doesn’t really give that up, culminating in the ending of the game where Espella jumps off the bell tower in an attempt to kill herself, still believing herself the problem of Labyrinthia even without the existence of the Great Witch. And while Ace Attorney in general doesn’t tend to show characters recovering from issues like that (Adrian Andrews is the exception, not the rule), Espella strikes me as an especially egregious case because she bounces back from attempting suicide to making jokes about Eve and her cat having the same name. Espella was genuinely in a very dark place for the entire final court segments (and also for most of the previous investigation, when she believed she was responsible for Maya’s death), and that’s not really acknowledged after she and Eve are saved from dying. She does learn the truth about herself, but it’s a lot all packed into the end, and that stops her from really developing in a way that the game needed her to. Espella’s presented to us in the second case of the game as an assistant, someone who will help us. The “weirdgirl assistant”, to borrow terminology from the Ace Attorney side of things. But since she is deeply integral to the story and its mysteries, she ends up falling more into this particular Layton stereotype instead, and just ends up seeming flat due to the fact that she appears in all of the cases but her character arc is pretty limited. While she does go from “indifferent to the things Labyrinthia does to witches” to “proclaiming she’s the Great Witch to save Jean” and that is a noticeable development, after the truth is revealed there still isn’t much of an alteration to how she’s written. And this is partially something in Ace Attorney’s structure -- Ace Attorney doesn’t really have any characters like Espella, and the Professor Layton series has a history of letting down its female characters, so while there are some really strong moments for them (Maya and Darklaw/Eve especially) Espella gets the short stick as far as character arcs go. It’s still pretty significant that she goes from the pre-canon state of generally coexisting with the witch trial system to actively trying to stop it after being a defendant, and it makes a lot of sense with her character, but that decision pretty much starts from the second case, and having her not accept the truth...

I see some complaints on this site about both Aurora and Espella being bland/boring, that we don’t know much about them, and I really do understand them -- I’ve just spent the last few paragraphs explaining the rationale behind those thoughts, no matter how much I might personally disagree. I personally don’t find Aurora or Espella particularly boring, but I do think that even though they are with us through the entire game, they are still written like Flora in Curious Village or Katia in Diabolical Box in that they exist more as a key to the mystery -- what is the Azran legacy? What is the big secret of Labyrinthia?

They exist as keys to answering a question when they needed to be characters. They wholeheartedly deserve better, and I’m glad that a lot of the fandom has given them much-needed depth and development.

The misogyny of Professor Layton has been spoken about at length by people who have been in the fandom longer than I have. However, the discussion tends to focus on the fridging of characters like Claire, Rachel, and Des’s wife...and Flora’s sidelining. Both of these are important in the discussion of misogyny in Professor Layton, but I think there is more to discuss here, as I’ve spent the past almost 2000 words explaining. There are other aspects, and this analysis is not the final word, but I wanted to add to the discussion by talking about this trope -- it’s one of the defining factors that makes a mystery “Laytonesque”. I was brainstorming for a casefic where Layton and Maya solve a mystery together, and a friend brought up a list of main factors he thought of as things that made a PL game -- the town that’s to some extent fake, the mysterious girl, the extreme revenge plot. It’s a defining part of the series, so I wanted to take that defining part and look at all the examples to try and figure out what’s made it a staple, why the Professor Layton writers keep coming back to this theme. I don’t have an answer for that, but I do think this trope holds true throughout most of the games.

You may have noticed by now that there’s one mainline game that I excluded here. The first 3D game. The fifth game. The second prequel. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask. There’s one prominent non-recurring female character in this game -- Angela. However, I don’t think she fits into this trope. While there is a mystery card for “Angela is acting weirdly” and she does serve to introduce us to the plot, she doesn’t really fit the other parts of the mystery girl trope, and isn’t around throughout the entire plot even disregarding Descole taking her place. She’s there at the beginning, when we’re introduced to Monte d’Or, and she’s there at the end, to reunite with Randall. We see her a couple more times, but she doesn’t really haunt the edges of the story in the same way as someone like Katia does, and she doesn’t truly accompany us. I don’t think she fits because although she bears some connection to the mystery, she isn’t really connected to its cause. So yay for Miracle Mask for not having one?

Oh, and by the way, Sherl O.C. Kholmes is technically this trope for LMJ, but he subverts it by being a male character and also for the fact that his mystery isn’t critical to the plot of LMJ.

#professor layton #plvpw #flora reinhold #katia anderson #claire foley #arianna barde #aurora azran #espella cantabella #janice quatlane #nina pl #does she have a last name??#angela ledore #meta #i'm very very normal about pl as you can tell by the fact that i wrote over 2k here :)

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