The mystery of "Himmmm"

For those who missed it, I'm trying to be entertaining while playing video games again. My original plan was to produce a Let's Play of Final Fantasy II (JPN, the one for the Famicom -- or, more likely, the one re-released in Dawn of Souls) with running voice commentary. FF2j is an exceedingly boring game, but it's boring for interesting historical reasons, and provides some inoffensive background video for my usual ramble. I figured I'd hold forth on video game history and languages and all that while the damn thing devolved into Sim Travel Agent after the second or third town.

Sadly, I have found that my TV is unsuitable for any gaming that involves real-time interactions. I inherited a 42" Philips from a previous roommate who didn't feel like moving it when they left that apartment, and I have now discovered why: This thing is absolutely lag-tastic. I've gotten into the user menu and turned off every last bit of post-processing I can find, but there's still a noticeable pause between smashing a button and something happening on the screen. There's probably a service menu where I could lobotomize it further, but I can't get into it because I don't have the original remote. This eldritch throwback still thinks that overscan is a thing even when I'm plugged into it with a real live cable and driving it as a monitor, so God only knows what's going on in its tiny multi-legged little IC brain.

I tried running Dawn of Souls through VisualBoyAdvance, using the TV as monitor 2, and the delay made my little man walk into walls like a tiny pixelated drunk. No bueno. It's not going to get me killed in a game like FF2j, but it's still irritating as all get-out. In order to save what's left of my marbles, I've pivoted to playing Ace Attorney games, which require so little in the way of coordination that you could play them perfectly well by using the trackpad with your nose, and doing it live on Twitch, which forces me to sit down at a specific time and actually do this. I picked up the HD remasters of the original three games, plus both Great Ace Attorney localizations, on Steam for a song during their big visual novel sale a couple months ago, and so far it seems to be going pretty okay.

I am totally incapable of playing anything this text-heavy without making a million translation and context notes, which you'll be able to find over here on the Twitch channel landing page, Ratto Moon. (Why Ratto Moon? I dunno, why not? I have rats, the internet coughed up clip art, it was cute.) Ace Attorney is one of those series that takes both a lot of subtlety and a lot of pizzazz to bring across into English effectively, plus you have to retain any puns or wordplay that pertain to the cases. The Capcom people do a damn good job of it, especially considering the initial English scripts were basically just omake for the DS releases of the original trilogy.

On a more meta level, I find the Ace Attorney series interesting because it raises the questions of where you draw the line between queerbaiting and real representation. To a large extent, it depends on what kind of representation you're looking for. If you go into the BBC's Sherlock wanting a torrid gay affair between the leads, you're going to come out angry and disappointed. As representation of an M/M romance, it's absolute codswollop trash. On the other hand, if you take Sherlock at face value when he says that neither women nor men were "[my] area", his relationship with John might seem like a very good depiction of what having a life partner could mean for someone who identifies as aroace. 

[For those of you who run in slightly less bohemian circles than I do, I'd also like to point out that the whole thing where John and Mary plan half their wedding in Sherlock's sitting room, with Sherlock's help, and then invite Sherlock to be the best man, is what happens when polyamorous people get married and no one is a jealous asshole. As soon as Mary works out why John has just hauled off and punched their waiter, she treats Sherlock as his other serious partner, to the point of encouraging their relationship and specifically telling John to lean on Sherlock if she's ever not there. Dunno if Gatiss and Moffat set out to write it like that, but it is in fact quite accurate.]

Hard as it is to believe, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was once pretty difficult to find in the US. Capcom had not even remotely predicted the kind of sales it would do, and it took them a hot minute to get a second production run out. I ended up playing the second game first. Now, I'd seen all the 'big gay lawyer' memes about Phoenix and Edgeworth floating around, and I figured the internet was just internetting again, but it didn't take me long to wonder if they were kind of serious? Phoenix genuinely spends the first three-quarters of Justice For All behaving like he came home from work one day to find his boyfriend had moved out, taking the dog and most of the good DVDs with him. Anytime anyone so much as references the existence of Miles Edgeworth, he snaps at them and changes the subject. The big epiphany moment about why he stands in court comes at the end of the last case, and is explicitly tied to his feelings about being in court with Edgeworth. The internet does indeed go internetting right off the rails an awful lot (even other places in this same series *kof*Apollo/Klavier*kof*), but they actually did not do that here.

Word of God -- 'God' here being a guy named Takumi Shu, the creator/creative director/head scriptwriter for games 1-4 of the main series plus both of the Investigations spin-offs, and to a slightly lesser extent, a lady named Suekane Kumiko who was lead character designer on the first game, and got special thanks on the next two -- is that the relationship between Phoenix and Edgeworth was not originally intended to have romantic subtext. Shipping is at least as much a thing in Japan as it is here, however, and once Takumi realized that even a lot of fans who wouldn't think twice about it normally were going 'dude, these guys have clearly got some kind of a thing here', he made a conscious decision to lean into it. Suekane was probably doing it much more on purpose; she is known for writing several BL manga (mostly under a pen name), including a couple of extremely spicy gay romances, and she had significant input into how the characters developed. Phoenix's rival, for instance, was originally going to be much older than he was, and his story much more a 'toppling the old guard' thing, but Suekane said that the main prosecutor should be the same age as the protagonist, because the interactions would be livelier. 

[Yaoi vibes aside, Suekane was also responsible for the suggestion that Mia Fey be Phoenix's boss and mentor. She was always meant to be Maya's sister, but I'm otherwise not sure what her role would have been. Probably she was just the victim of Case 1-2. Ace Attorney is pretty good at making its female characters just as well-rounded and useful as the male ones, and some of the credit should go to Suekane.]

So, clearly this is not a case of the internet collectively hallucinating the ship they want to see. The subtext was apparently even more heavy-handed in some of the early versions of the scripts for Justice For All and Trials & Tribulations. Takumi tried to write a bunch of feelings-y stuff himself, but he wasn't really familiar with the conventions of the genre, and Suekane came back in for a bit to take the sledgehammer away. Word of God is that the player will never play through an explicit romantic subplot in an Ace Attorney game, because dropping that on the POV character would take too much focus away from the case. They do hew to this with Mia/Diego in T&T; they're clearly close, but if not for one passing comment from Grossberg about him being her "boyfriend", there's nothing to indicate it's specifically romantic.

"Doing it on purpose with no intention of payoff" is the definition of queerbaiting, and Western audiences tend to get pretty mad over it. What counts as 'payoff' for a romance is culturally-bound, though. In Japanese culture, the more intense the relationship, the more private a thing it's considered to be. There aren't a lot of Big Damn Kiss moments in anime. A romance plot that ends with the leads locking eyes for a long moment from across a room and then suddenly smiling might feel like an ambiguous copout to a Western audience. Will they or won't they? The scene doesn't say. A Japanese viewer might consider that a very satisfactory ending -- of course they will, they both just realized it. The unspoken nature of the feelings makes it seem more genuine, from their point of view. 

The extent to which the relationship is spoken in the game scripts is pretty notable, especially from a character like Edgeworth, who is reticent about feelings in general. By the end of the third game, he is extremely blunt about considering Phoenix an irreplaceable part of his life, and that he sees the two of them as an inseparable set. Localizations have a reputation for running afoul of the English-language tendency to assume all strong feelings are romantic unless otherwise specified, but none of it is less suggestive in the original. Japanese letsplayers all go snerk at the same bits.

The behind-the-scenes policy seems to be to write the two of them as if they are 'together' in whatever way the viewer chooses to interpret that. Takumi was busy with other things during the production of Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice, and passed the head writer/director position on to Yamazaki Takeshi, who has continued the trend, but, like, more. They face off in court in DD, where one of the witnesses comments that now he knows what they mean when they say 'close enough to argue'. They share an investigation segment in SoJ which is almost entirely the two of them swatting banter back and forth. It's heavily implied that, despite being based in Europe for most of a decade, Edgeworth has still managed to be around Phoenix and his gaggle of unofficial kids rather a lot. He's attended enough of Trucy's shows to be familiar with her act, and on the plane home at the end of SoJ, she's asleep on his shoulder. He seems fine with it.

In the end, as with all media analysis, your interpretation is your own. You can subscribe to 'death of the author', or not; you can count all the snarky comments the writing staff has made in interviews as canon, or not; and you can read whatever subtext you want into the script. Personally? I would consider Takumi and Suekane's 'no, we wrote it that way on purpose' to be pretty solid, and any ellipsis in the script to be a combination of Japanese culture and keeping focus on the actual cases, but I'm not going to sit there and argue with people who think otherwise. One thing I find particularly enjoyable about the Ace Attorney games is that there are many relationships in them that show the importance of close friends and found family; reading Phoenix and Edgeworth as hella stuck on each other isn't going to destroy the theme.