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dramallamadingdang · 5 years ago

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Time for replies!

These be for @princesspiratecat, @jennamaxon, @criquette-was-here, @nimitwinklesims, @eulaliasims, @greatcheesecakepersona, @alienbirthqueen, and @niamh-sims...

princesspiratecat replied to your photoset “Tree’ing a bit. :) Mostly to break up the monolithic terrain texture...”

This actually reminds me of where I live, Lake Arrowhead in Southern California when it's dry. Except I don't see a lake.

alienbirthqueen replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

this is so gorgeous!! it reminds me a lot of northeast california/nw nevada, which is where i grew up of course haha

Yeah, it’ll work pretty much for any desert-y place in North America. Like, anywhere from the Okanagan Desert in Canada, to the less mountainous parts of Montana down to New Mexico and west to the more interior parts of California, Oregon, and Washington in the US, and then down into interior northern Mexico. Mostly my inspiration for the look of the place is the Great Basin (so Alienbirthqueen is right on!) and Chihuahuan Deserts, though. Not so much the Mojave or the Sonoran because those are generally flatter (and lower in elevation and therefore much hotter/drier) and the vegetation is different. Like, there’re no saguaro cacti, which is the signature plant of the Sonoran, of course. But the Lake Arrowhead area (or the Lake Tahoe area) can work, too, given that I’m adding pines to break up lot-view textures. :) In that, it resembles my home turf in SW Colorado, as well.

Except yeah, no water. The place may or may not have some on-lot water, though, which wouldn’t be big enough to be a lake. I’ll imagine it/them to be springs magically stocked with fish. But I haven’t decided on that yet. I mean, I DO like to build my fishing spots, but I’m trying to go for some authenticity here, trees notwithstanding. ;)

Anyway, basically any higher desert area that’s not a “sandy” place will do, at least with the season set-up I’m giving the place. (Which of course can be changed to make it whatever anyone wants.) It has spring and autumn...mostly because I like to use season-enabled trees/shrubs so that there’s a visual change with the seasons. I get kinda visually bored, if you will, otherwise. :)

jennamaxon replied to your photoset “Tree’ing a bit. :) Mostly to break up the monolithic terrain texture...”

Rest rather green - much better in the second pic. For a moment, I thought you were frowning at the rubbish cart

Well, if we’re being all green and environmentally-conscious, rubbish is bad, right? :) But no, just frowning at the uber-green trees, I’m afraid.

criquette-was-here replied to your photoset “Tree’ing a bit. :) Mostly to break up the monolithic terrain texture...”

Oh, this neighborhood makes me want to create this type of climate setting too! Somehow it feels like a place from a good old 90's road movie. Love the new texture for the pines. Looks way better!

Well, that would certainly be different for you! All your neighborhoods and pics are so green and European and pretty. Which isn’t a bad thing, of course, but I’d be very interested to see what you’d do with a more desert/wasteland sort of environment....

nimitwinklesims replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

Cool cool cool! It looks so much like your photo!

That’s what I was shooting for. But I tell you what, it was hard! I couldn’t figure out how TS2 decided which terrain images from the terrain default to paint where. It just seemed kind of random, and in some of my attempts, when put into TS2, the terrain was only using 2 (of the four) images in the terrain default, which looked really weird. So in the end, I put in an existing terrain, and then redid the road structure and resculpted most of the hills and such. Then, I still had to edit the terrain default to rearrange the images to suit this particular terrain to get it to look how I wanted. So it was more complicated than I’d envisioned. I could’ve probably put more time into figuring out what was going on with all that, but I just wanted to get ‘er done so I could start building.

eulaliasims replied to your photoset “Aw, c’mon, you didn’t really think I wouldn’t do rocks, did you? :)”

oh, this looks fantastic. I love the scrub--that's always something I've felt some desert neighborhoods need. it adds a lot!

niamh-sims replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

That looks fantastic! I love the scrubby scrubs- perfect for that environment!

Yeah, for this kind of desert -- the American kind, as in all of North and South America -- there’s gotta be scrub. Pretty much the only American desert that doesn’t have scrub is the Atacama in S. America, since it’s like the driest place in the Americas. :) But even it has some scrub in places. I mean, this ain’t the Sahara or Arabian deserts!

The lack of scrub really, REALLY bothers me in Strangetown, since that’s obviously supposed to be inspired by Roswell, NM. I am still going to play that neighborhood one of these days, but it has to undergo major terrain/deco renovation before I’ll be able to look at it without screaming bloody murder. :)

greatcheesecakepersona replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

Lovely! Now all that's missing is the Breaking Bad van :)

HAH!. Yeah, I’ve never watched that show (though it’s on our list to watch), but I know that it’s set in New Mexico, though I don’t know if it’s actually filmed there, so...yeah. :)

nimitwinklesims replied to your post “You sound like such a cool person! It's really nice to hear about...”

I often have a hard time keeping the classical composers apart (I'm embarrassed to admit), but Smetana's Ma Vlast always makes me cry -- it was played at my Czech grandfather's funeral... It's heartwarming to read that you like the Czech composers a lot. I'm Dutch but because of my děda I have a fondness for Czech things as well. Also, sort of related, I have played Händel's Harp Concerto at one point (when I was still taking harp lessons).

Yes, Ma Vlast is one of the best pieces of music ever written. IMO, at least. :) I’m not a person who’s into patriotism/nationalism, but I do tend to love music that has a concrete feeling for place, both physically and emotionally, and Ma Vlast has both. It’s why I love stuff that incorporates folk music from a particular country or area, because of that sense of place and time, and the Eastern European composers tend to do that really, really well, which is why I find myself drawn to them. Aaron Copland did that well, too, for American themes. Appalachian Spring (with its incorporation the Shaker “Simple Gifts” song) and the Billy the Kid and Rodeo ballet music and whatnot. Great stuff. I think that this is why I was ultimately drawn to film/TV scores, both in terms of performance and my own compositions. Film scores are designed to have a sense of place and character and sometimes history about them. So I guess it’s not surprising that that’s where I ended up spending more time, professionally speaking.

That said, for all that I am a classical musician, I’m not a walking compendium of knowledge about all of classical music. Certainly not now that I’ve been away from school/academia for *cough* like 30 years now! I have forgotten much of what I did once know, but frankly my knowledge was always pretty specialized. I know much about the body of work of specific composers in whom I have an interest, but much of the rest...I don’t care to know about it, frankly. All the baroque stuff? Meh. I mean, there’s bits of it that I like -- Handel wrote lots of good stuff, for instance -- but much of it just sounds all the same to me, and I’m just not interested enough to know more. Like, while I appreciate his technique and innovations and all that, I just don’t much like Bach’s music, for instance, and I took/take a lot of ribbing for that, but...I like what I like, and the rest of it I’m content to ignore. Which is pretty much my attitude in general, when it comes to music. *laugh*

jennamaxon replied to your post “You sound like such a cool person! It's really nice to hear about...”

The Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis is an outstanding piece of music. Real hair on the back of your neck stuff. If you like 20th C English choral - my recommendation would be Holst's The Evening Watch. I heard (and sung) it first at college. I was breathless after the first listen.

You know, Holst has a lot of good stuff that no one seems to know about. :) If the average person knows any Holst at all, their knowledge tends to begin and end with Mars and Jupiter from The Planets. Which is a shame. I need to listen to more of his stuff, myself, now that you mention it.

#princesspiratecat #jennamaxon #criquette-was-here #nimitwinklesims #eulaliasims #greatcheesecakepersona #alienbirthqueen #niamh-sims #replies

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scarlettlawyer · 6 years ago

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Part 4 of my commentary of @renegadewangs‘ fanfic series Phantoms and Mirages.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Now, onto Haunted Specters! God, I love Haunted Specters.

It’s such a pivotal and crucial stepping stone. Just about all the major actors on the playing board, and in fact, the playing board itself all get rearranged in a careful balancing act that sets the scene anew.

It is, or at least it was, SUCH an incredible struggle for me to reconcile the phantom from the previous fic with the phantom we see in this one (and subsequent instalments, even) upon taking a step back, and with good reason, although for me the divide ran a little deeper, as it completely boggled my mind how this was somehow the same character being written by the same author, let alone belonging to the same fic series that somehow had a line of continuity where it made sense for these characters to end up in these situations – this situation.

I don’t merely refer to the phantom’s characterisation – what’s so great is that you can totally get away with writing him in this manner and have the audience accept it, seeing as he’s suffered a traumatic brain injury from the fall. It allows for a great amount of freedom for what direction to take the character in that would have been absent before.

No, I also refer here to (of course) the dynamic he shares with the other characters, the way he is portrayed and positioned by the narrative, and lastly, my own personal approach to reading and my feelings towards – level of investment in the character as he is in this series. As I’ve rehashed many times, I wasn’t very absorbed in or on board with this series’ version of the phantom for a lot of the previous fic when I first read it, at least until the end. But now, going into this fic, I was fully invested in especially seeing and learning what changes and impact the fall had made on him, and there was a new, thrilling level of unpredictability attached not only to the character, but to the plot itself.

By all accounts, the series so far had set me up to want to see how Blackquill and Bobby were finally going to take down the Big, Bad, Evil Phantom once and for all. How they would, against the odds, track him down and apprehend him against his will in what was bound to be an epic showdown. I was ready for that. It’s what I wanted to see. When I previously mentioned wanting – yearning for a “slightly lighter take” in my first post? That was gone now. I was ready for some pizza, at last. It’s what I had been conditioned to expect so far, so I was like, why not? I was like, heck yeah, let’s do this.

And yet, the narrative didn’t hesitate to seem to want to throw all of this out the window altogether. My expectations completely and utterly thwarted, I found myself realising I really had no idea what direction this could possibly be going in (or why my expectations had been thwarted so thoroughly like this). I well and truly had no idea what would happen next most of the time, because I couldn’t fathom where things could possibly go, and that had me hooked to reading, so eager to know what would happen next since it was such a mystery.

Rereading Chasing Phantoms as I have done for these commentary posts was helpful in truly establishing in my mind that yes, that was the same phantom, the same phantom, the same man that is present continuously within this series. That needed to be reconciled not just with regards to portrayal, but also my own misconceptions outside of that about how the story and character were constructed back then.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, so let’s start off with looking at the first few chapters.

Haunted Specters, Chapter 1

…You know, right off the bat, I know/figure this series was mostly (if not wholly) written prior to the release of SOJ, and yet. I could be wrong but it looks like all of the provided dates still seem to match up in order to make it remain fully compliant to ace attorney canon. As in, there’s nothing directly contradicting it. And if that really is the case, well that’s just pretty damn awesome all around. AA7 will surely come along in future and ruin the fun of that I’m guessing, but for the time being, you can’t tell me all of this stuff wasn’t happening in the background even as AA6 was going on. AA6 all seems to take place prior to chapter 1, anyway. God bless timeskips!

...Wait, wait, coming back to edit this much later: scrap that. Apollo’s presence throws a spanner in the works. Ah, well. We can work around that, I’m sure. I’m gonna play around with it in my mind until it fits, somehow. :P Even later edit: Oh also Gaspen.

When Simon left the office, he couldn’t quite keep the broad grin from his face, nor the light skip from his stride.

This is so cute oh gosh happy Simon!

Save it for a more appropriate time- that was what his therapist had taught him.

Oh? Oh really? Is that so? Who might that be? No one important? Oh you mean? You mean the courtroom sniper? Is that right? You mean the phantom’s future

Boyfriend?

Nah, that can’t be right. Carry on then.

Hah, don’t worry, I’m not complaining. Lang Zi says: A man who cannot keep his own affairs in order lacks the competence to be having affairs.” “… No offense, Lang-dono, but at times the suspicion dawns on me that perhaps you’re making some of these sayings up as you go.” “This coming from the man who has a thousand and one prison anecdotes to share?” Lang paused for a moment, then his voice took on a much more serious note. “Anyway, I’m not calling for idle banter.”

“Haha, yeah, good one, so anyway, there’s a good chance your boyfriend might be dead.”

Haunted Specters, Chapter 2

“No! Hold it! Mr. Butz had no reason to kill anyone!”

I WAS WONDERING IF THE DEFENDANT WAS SOMEONE WE KNEW SKNJSDNKJ

“So tell him to hold off on ordering another useless gravestone with my name on it. In fact, tell him to stop looking for me while you’re at it.”

ANOTHER- god I love how completely wack some of these characters’ lives are/have been.

“… I gave him your regards. I gave him your regards, and then some.”

Me, known phantom fangirl trash: OH GOSH IS HE OKAY???

Me, knowing full-well that Bobby would be 100% justified acting in self-defense against a known emotionless killer, therefore also with somewhat mock concern: OH BOBBY PLEASE TELL ME YOU DIDN’T HURT HIM

(Oh, but he didn’t. I needn’t have worried.)

Ah, I’ve been sitting here, wondering what I can say to this. How his assessment is completely aligned with reader expectations and further sets them up only to be subverted, how far off his guesses are… I just… “even the tiniest glimpse of him” they’re… they’re sharing an apartment… Yeah. We’ll get there. I couldn’t find an appropriate reaction image to the above block of text, really.

Haunted Specters, Chapter 3

Okay this is extremely pernickety, and I apologise, but…

And, mind you, I usually pay no attention whatsoever to these things, and it honest to goodness makes no difference at all in the end – if the narrative says it’s Tuesday, then it’s Tuesday. Simple as that. I merely looked it up out of curiosity and because I’ve annoyingly taken it upon myself to micro-analyse everything in this fanfiction series like a little pest. I also kinda figured because you are picking out the dates and actively calling attention to the day of the week, that you would have some kind of system that you are sticking to for it (and the vast majority of details added into your fic was done so meticulously). And maybe Google is off on the calculation and you got it right, heh. But yeah, I definitely paid no real mind to this at all when reading it the first time around.

But then… Even if Fulbright was now avoiding help from the people close to him, that didn’t mean there weren’t any people close to him. Similarly, the Phantom could never quite work alone.

Okay, okay. I know this is a direct lead-in to re-introducing Domestique into the mix, but… oh my gosh. You really just went right ahead and… Hm! The phantom can never quite work alone. He is working with Bobby right now, as a matter of speaking.

Also. I really like Domestique’s dialogue when he’s forced to face Simon, gosh. Just so unabashedly in-your-face, so dotted with swears, it’s kinda great, really.

I ESPECIALLY LOVE THIS LINE FROM HIM:

Because honest-to-goodness, it’s kinda funny how direct it is (and the “THAT’S TWO DIFFERENT COUNTRIES” asdgd), but also rings really true in a “this is exactly what someone like this would say in this situation” way – exactly how they’d phrase it.

…

Oh, I love. This meeting between Bobby and the phantom at the end of the chapter. It’s – aaah. Very good. With the way it’s set out, you’re somewhat kinda like, oh, huh, is it really him though? Could it really be him? But the narrative goes right ahead and keeps dropping explicit hints. It still doesn’t outright confirm it, leaving the slightest hint of plausible deniability that perhaps this is a New Character we’re being introduced to, but… :D

Haunted Specters, Chapter 4

Even the revelation that the Chief Prosecutor had helped uncover a mole who’d been hiding right by Lang’s side was a story that’d spread through hearsay only.

Second reference to the Her 👀 (yes, I’ve been paying attention to that on this readthrough).

“Coupons. Ambassador Palaeno sends me a considerable package of these things every year, yet I find no use for them. They’re redeemable only in Cohdopia itself, so I’m sure you see my problem.”

Bro. Bro you keep making vague references to characters only for them to actually become super important and plot-relevant later on. I’m blindsided every time.

Me, reading this for the first time: Haha nice reference to a minor ace attorney character, yes, Edgey would totally still receive coupons from him. I can see that. He’s totally unrelated to this story though.

Me later: THIS SUCKER WAS ALREADY BEING REFERENCED AT THE BEGINNING OF FIC 2.

The Chief Prosecutor received gifts from the Cohdopian ambassador? Honestly, everyone was intertwined in one way or the other, weren’t they?

Good work. This is very true of the ace attorney universe and it’s cool that Simon takes note of it here like this. But it’s also very true of this fic series as well, helping reiterate that fact. Oh, Simon, you don’t even know yet how intertwined everyone even is…

You set the scene so well upon Simon arriving in Cohdopia. Really depict the atmosphere and everything super well!

So then, Simon arrives at the address, and he finds… Bobby? And it’s like, wait, wasn’t that supposed to be the phantom’s address? Why’s Bobby here? Aint that hugely coincidental…? How did Bobby find… Well, he did cross paths with the phantom, so I guess he also managed to track him down to this place somehow and he just so happens to be arriving at the same time as Simon (?!) and then some other stranger that Bobby seems to know arrives and…

…

…What?!

I love how there was still plausible deniability up until the very moment Bobby says it outright. Like, the phantom’s apartment might have been abandoned years ago, and this “stranger” is completely unrelated, and took up residence there some time after it was abandoned. Yeah – a stranger that will be an important ally and help them on their quest to bring the phantom down! Right? But Bobby’s behaviour, and then he… that’s… that stranger is no stranger at all…

Simon waited, all sorts of hypotheses dawning on him, each more ludicrous than the next. As it turned out, one of the theories he’d dismissed almost immediately on grounds of being too farfetched turned out to be truth.

LITERALLY ME

Haunted Specters, Chapter 5

“I warned you, Simon. Now back away,” Bobby hissed, grabbing him by the arm to pull him away from the faux Cohdopian.

“Faux Cohdopian”… Well,

Anyway. Well. Wow. What can I even say about this chapter? Most of it’s all contained in Simon’s POV narrative itself.

First off, you have the obvious, “whoa, this is how the phantom is being formally re-introduced to the narrative? I really don’t know what I expected but it sure as hell wasn’t this.”

This chapter, this situation, the characters, are all so incredibly volatile and it plays out, it really plays out with that constant volatility.

I, kinda immediately suspected that something was off in that the fall had done some damage to the phantom’s mind in an important, meaningful way.

Bobby’s behaviour is so surreal. Just like it is to Simon. There’s so much going on, so much to process all at once.

“I think that even you, Phantom, would agree this is nothing short of folly.” A moment of silence followed. Sam didn’t so much as blink at the question. He merely downed the pill he’d been given by draining the water in one go. “… Sam doesn’t speak English,” was all Bobby said.

Now THINGS LIKE THIS, are what made me think, well, the narrative seemed to be encouraging this viewpoint that maybe, at this point the phantom doesn’t actually remember being the phantom. Maybe he lost all his memories, and he’s just wandering around as some poor confused amnesiac who genuinely thinks he’s Sam Specter. (That doesn’t explain a couple of things, but it was only a temporary thought of mine as I read through). But this viewpoint allowed Bobby’s behaviour to make sense in my eyes. It raises a very interesting dilemma. That the phantom is still despicable and needs to be brought to justice and what have you, but how? The phantom is completely absent now, if this man has no memories of any of that. If he genuinely thinks he’s Sam Specter, an innocent civilian who has done no wrong, and for all intents and purposes is trying to live his life as such, reacts as such? Then Bobby would probably bear no ill will against “Sam Specter”. That perhaps, well and truly up until a certain point, “Sam’s” act was not an act. Or it, at the very least, was much less of an act than it would usually be. It’s… quite convincing. In which case, Bobby wouldn’t want harm to come to innocent civilian “Sam Specter”, even if he used to be the phantom. But now? Now he’s just some weak, frail man with a serious mental condition.

The attempts to affirm the personhood, to what extent there is one, of “Sam Specter” is a very interesting point of contention.

With this in mind, as Simon went after the phantom trying to get him to come out, I kind of expected it to consistently not work. That Simon would just keep pushing and pushing to be faced with that murderer once more, only for “Sam Specter” to never break character, perhaps because there is no real character to break from at that point, so caught in a delusion. For Bobby to want him to stop because at that point he’d just be needlessly harassing “Sam Specter”.

But then he does break character, so that theory kind of goes out the window.

He’d been cornered, faced with the truth and forced to drop the charade.

But. It’s still not revealed to what extent the phantom was impacted by the fall. And I kind of got the impression that the phantom was “holding onto” the act… more than usual. More than he usually would. He only broke character under duress, so there are still a whole bunch of questions raised here about just how much he was immersed and caught up in the role of Sam, exactly. Also. Yes. On a second readthrough he reacts fiercely and breaks character specifically after the asylum comment and I just – oh my GOSH.

Also: Peacekeeper Bobby…

Bobby’s gaze moved from the broken glass to Sam Specter, who was once again cradling his head with both hands. Who was rocking back and forth on the couch, muttering to himself. Obviously not listening to a word they were saying.

Oh gosh, he really… Yeah. A fall from an apartment building can certainly do that to you.

Haunted Specters, Chapter 6

What if… What if this was a mistake? What if he’d just freed a common criminal?

Well, UM.

“Oh. Oh, right. That makes sense.” A moment’s pause. “…Wait, wouldn’t I be walking backwards then, making your six my twelve?” “…” “Or uh… I’ll just turn the clock around and make my twelve six so it’ll still be right side up for you.” “… I doubt this conversation would be any different if I were having it with a young child.”

Oh my gooosh. He’s really like this huh. He’s really just Like This.

“Oh. … Well, that’s good! That nobody else is stuck here, I mean, not the… the selling.” “Stop wasting time on such trivial sentiments and prepare yourself.”

“Trivial sentiments”… I just… He’s really always Like This. Your version of the phantom is so talkative, something I noticed pretty early on, but I love it, honestly. He could have easily just ignored the statement and continued to tend to the task at hand here, not saying anything, and Bobby would have easily taken that cue and also started to focus more and not really said anything further, but oh, no, the phantom just had to throw in some kind of remark. Not replying would have conveyed the same meaning, but this guy? He’s absolutely gonna say something. He didn’t have to equate Bobby to a child either, easily could have chosen to say nothing. BUT HERE WE ARE. I love it.

Two strangers, guarding each other with their lives on the gamble they’d both make it out in one piece.

Incredible. Incredible!

“What…? Friendship?” For the first time since they’d met, the man’s voice showed more than a stoic nature. Some sort of subdued confusion. “… Wasn’t it… justice?”

THIS MOMENT IS GOLDEN. Yes, YES.

And, you know, his brain’s all muddled, he’s missing huge chunks of his memory… And he really is kind of blurting this out at this point? Like a knee-jerk reaction. He’s reaching for a – for a memory that just comes to him even if he can’t quite put it in full context, or even if he CAN, he really says this without thinking. Because even if he was suffering from this confusion, I am very certain that he would not just blurt it out like that under normal circumstances. No. This man is half out of his mind! He must know that Bobby doesn’t recognise him and he has no real reason to tip him off otherwise right now (because it could backfire very easily if Bobby freezes up or freaks out as a result!), to ask him like that... Haaah. I’m so here for really-not-all-there phantom.

Still, even through their little exchange, Sam looked blissfully lost. As if he truly didn’t understand what they were discussing about the Phantom. About him. What a pathetic little farce.

This really did have me genuinely uncertain what to think. Like, how much of “Sam Specter” is a farce? How invested was the phantom into that role? The phantom understands English perfectly, but because Sam supposedly doesn’t… Was it possible at all that selective hearing was truly at play? That the phantom gets so deep into the role that he tricks himself, his brain, into not really understanding English properly – refusing to process it? At least, that’s what I thought at the time. Bobby makes the requests for the phantom in Cohdopian, after all. He doesn’t just casually sit there and say “hey phantom, come out” in English. Switching between “Sam” and “the phantom” evidently takes… some effort for him. And mind you, I was putting all of this (selective hearing etc.) down to the results of the fall as well. I mean, if the phantom was “Sam” under normal circumstances before the fall he’d be able to understand English perfectly well, he’d just pretend he couldn’t, and also that he’d be able to switch in and out and between personas quite easily. But that the fall did things to his mind to make it all more difficult, for him to now be able to engage in this selective understanding, is what I figured.

But… maybe Simon’s right. Maybe he still really does understand everything they say, and is just faking it. He’s such a good actor that it really is hard to tell.

And maybe the simple fact is that it’s still easy for the phantom to switch between personas, it’s just difficult to switch out of them since he has so little sense of self. And maybe that’s just the way it always has been and the fall didn’t actually change that.

Sam’s personhood hinges on how “conscious” the phantom is while Sam is in place. The less the phantom is actually present (selective hearing etc), the more “Sam” is just Sam. But it’s later implied (more than once I think) that the phantom really is just, conscious while he is Sam, and that being “brought out” is not such an immense struggle as it otherwise could be. And yet, at the same time, the narrative seems to want to tilt us in favour of acknowledging Sam as a… a person, his own person. Of sorts. And… I guess it makes sense(?). During the whole of Dual Destinies, even if every action taken by “Bobby” was consciously chosen by the phantom… Those actions were all taken for a reason, all matching up to the consistent persona “Bobby Fulbright”. Both “Bobby” and the phantom would make a choice or engage in a behaviour for the most part, even if the reasoning was different at times they were united on the action itself. Sam is… kind of the same? He is the spitting image of what used to be a real human being, all of his outward actions and behaviours (are intended to) replicate that human being. By cobbling together some approximation of a real person like this, it is perhaps easier to treat them like a real person if they behave in all intents and purposes as such. Especially considering the circumstances. There’s a constant duality going on which I guess is what we’re supposed to settle on? The phantom never really goes away, he’s always there behind the scenes. But Sam’s there too, and we gotta treat him as real or things kinda just fall apart, really. There’s also much to be said for how Sam’s personhood is as much constituted to the extent that it’s acknowledged by those around him, too. We can’t just look at it on its own. It’s also something that’s made more “real” by others treating it and to an extent acknowledging it as real. Even if, in the very end, there might be nothing truly behind it.

THERE IT IS. Right off the bat, I just gotta say: the phantom is really channelling his inner Franziska. XD. Addressing characters by their FULL NAMES. I noticed it quite a bit in the sense that it is, very consistent within his speech pattern, almost making it a kind of “character trait” of a man who himself claims to have no real character. But of course – it makes it stand out all the more when switching to “Prosecutor Blackquill” instead.

”If you attempt to lay a hand on Sam Specter a second time, I will not hesitate to interfere and protect him.”

Here it is, the phantom himself almost treating Sam like a completely separate person… I… don’t think he would have taken this approach before the fall. Hmm. BUT ALSO. Here he’s also implying that he is conscious enough while behaving as Sam to be able to “not hesitate to interfere and protect him”. Hmm!

“Watch your tongue before I cut it off,” he hissed. “I would never lay a hand on Fulbright.” “… See that you don’t.”

Me: I WELL AND TRULY DO NOT UNDERSTAND AT ALL, WHAT IS GOING ON, the phantom is protective of Bobby, well and truly his brain was influenced by that fall.

Simon really is/was in the exact same boat, honestly.

Now we have the smuggling ring brought up, the March 2019 exposure referenced, another reference to how there was a mole in interpol before… And I was kind of like, “hm! You know! There’s a certain character this brings to mind, yet unfortunately they’re nowhere in sight. Kinda really sucks they’re not a character in this fic series, honestly!” Yes, such a shame, really.

”[…] That’s why we need to expose the involvement of Lex Luster […]”

Me, reading this for the first time: Wait. Lex… Le…x. Huh. That’s… for some reason, that name rings a bell. Ah – that’s right. This “Lex”, he’s quite an important character, isn’t he? From what tiny random scraps of information I’ve seen about this fic series (from years ago!)… Yes. I’m pretty sure that this “Lex” character will be showing up quite a lot going forward.

...Well, I wasn’t wrong.

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