codemonki - Tumblr blog

codemonki · 15 days ago

Text

The Great Ace Attorney meta: The deterioration of Van Zieks and Holmes' relationship

I've seen a lot of fans describe the vibe between Van Zieks and Holmes as bitter exes, and honestly I can see where they're coming from; they do kind of have that dynamic. Still, I think what actually happened between them is a bit more nuanced than that, and canon actually offers a fair number of clues to a player who's looking for them. I'd like to offer my theory.

I'm using all the canon material we have available for this analysis, so there will be major spoilers ahead for both games. Seriously, don't read this unless you're completely done with both games. You have been warned.

(Cut for spoilers and length. Holy shit this got so long, I'm so sorry)

Let's start with what I assume was the factor that brought Barok and Holmes together on any sort of personal level: the three Japanese exchange students. Mikotoba tells Ryuunosuke during 2-4 that Genshin and Jigoku were his friends and that he’d known them for many years even before their journey to London. And they weren't just casual friends, they were his close friends, which naturally entails a fair amount of knowledge and understanding of each other, as well as trust. This fact is pivotal not only to the deterioration of Barok's relationship with Holmes, but also his later distrust towards the Japanese people as a whole, rather than just Genshin specifically.

We know that Barok was introduced to the three exchange students when Klint welcomed them to England in his official capacity as Director of Prosecutions. Holmes, of course, met Mikotoba at the hospital where Mikotoba would work and Holmes was conducting his aimless experiments. At this point, Barok and Holmes probably didn't know each other yet, and if they did, they'd probably only had superficial interactions at most. Even assuming that Holmes had already began his detective career at this point, as a private detective, he's unlikely to have had much business at the prosecutor’s office. Then Holmes and Mikotoba became roommates.

DGS 2 tells us that at this point, the exchange students began to form bonds with their London colleagues, and it's unclear how often the exchange students got together with each other after that. Mikotoba and Holmes began solving cases together and possibly making out, Genshin was getting chummy with the Van Zieks boys, and Jigoku was… getting evil, I guess, I don’t know. I didn’t really get the sense that he and Stronghart actually liked each other that much, but that's not important now. Whatever Jigoku was getting up to, he seems to have drifted apart from Mikotoba at least, because he never met Holmes even once in the six years they studied in London. This is made clear by the fact that Holmes asked Mikotoba to introduce them after they apprehended Jigoku on the ship in 2-5.

So what does any of this have to do with Holmes and Barok? After considering the evidence, I think that the two of them had a largely social relationship rather than a professional one. Unfortunately DGS 2 doesn't tell us a lot about what happened between when the exchange students arrived and their final month, but we do know that at the time Genshin was arrested, Mikotoba was still only an assistant coroner and Barok had yet to make his official courtroom debut. Ryuunosuke only heard from Dr. Sithe in 2-3 and had no idea that her daughter and assistant Maria even existed until he actually went to her lab in person. Additionally, Stronghart was completely ignorant of Mikotoba's involvement in Klint’s autopsy (recall that Stronghart was originally the prosecutor on the case and that he did the initial legwork). From these two facts, we can extrapolate that assistant coroners probably aren't typically asked to share their thoughts in the course of the official investigation. In spite of this, Barok told Ryuunosuke and Susato at the end of 2-3 that he "remember[ed Mikotoba] well."

If Barok and Mikotoba's relationship wasn't professional but social, then this creates a plausible social link between Barok and Holmes as well. Considering the closeness between Mikotoba and Genshin, and the fact that Holmes described Genshin as young Barok's closest companion, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that the four of them might have spent some of their downtime together on at least a few occasions. So does that mean that Holmes and Barok were friends? Canon doesn't make it clear one way or the other, but my guess is that they were neutral, or even slightly on the negative side of neutral.

Thanks to the insight Albert Harebrane provides in 2-3, we know that young Barok was unassuming and good-natured, but we have to look to the DGS 2 art book for insight into young Holmes's personality. Character designer Nuri's footnotes indicate that Holmes used to be "prickly," and that it took life with Iris to soften him up. Admittedly there is very little evidence to go on here, but given what we know about the contents of Iris’s Holmes stories and the fact that they're based on Mikotoba's firsthand account notes, it may be reasonable to imagine young Holmes's personality to be similar to what's shown in ACD canon: impatient, incredibly confident in his own abilities and unafraid of making it known, often lacking in tact, and eager to disparage anyone who wasn't as quick on the uptake as him.

If this assessment is correct, it's easy to imagine that arrogant, rude Holmes might have frequently trodden on Barok's toes. Perhaps Barok was too polite at the time to argue with Holmes, or perhaps not. Either way, it's hard to imagine that either of them particularly enjoyed or felt the need to seek out each other's company.

Genshin, his and Klint’s closest friend, is a serial killer and he murdered Klint.

Then the proverbial shit hit the fan; Klint decided that he was tired of being nice and that he just wanted to go a little apeshit, Genshin wasn't having any of that but ended up taking the L thanks to his opponent being force-fed the pieces when he wasn't looking, Stronghart saw the newly vacated Chief Justice chair and said "it's free real estate," Mikotoba and Holmes squinted suspiciously at the floating calculus equations only they could see, Jigoku prepared a gift of myrrh(der), and Barok put himself in every slot of the top 10 anime betrayals list. To further break this case down, here's what Barok sees happen:

Scotland Yard failed to identify the Professor before he could make a victim of Klint.

Mikotoba and Jigoku, Genshin's oldest, closest friends, either failed to see Genshin for what he was, or they had known but chose to do nothing. Either way, fuck these guys

Even now that Genshin has been caught and there's incontrovertible proof (as far as Barok is concerned) of his guilt, Mikotoba and Jigoku are trying to get this traitor off the hook. Jigoku testified so vehemently in court about Genshin's innocence that Barok is starting to suspect that this bastard was directly involved somehow. As for Mikotoba, he's not testifying at the trial, but he's obviously still in Genshin's corner. Barok may not have been close with these two exactly, but he'd had a positive impression of them until now, and here they were backing his brother's killer, trying to help him escape judgment. Seriously, fuck these guys

These three were the ones that the Japanese government had chosen as their very first student ambassadors to London. No doubt the government had checked their backgrounds carefully and painstakingly interviewed them to ensure that they found the students who would make the best possible impression. The sort of person who could commit such horrific crimes must have shown some sort of previous signs. At best, the Japanese government is stupid/incompetent for not noticing them. At worst, they sent Genshin intentionally so that he wouldn’t be their problem anymore. Either way, fuck those guys too

Come to think of it, where's Holmes in all of this? He and Mikotoba have gained some notoriety by now as a mystery solving pair, and Holmes was always prattling on about his own brilliance and the police's incompetence. In fact, Barok is pretty sure he saw those two poking around outside Klint’s estate, investigating. If Holmes is investigating, clearly he believes in Genshin's innocence, too. Is Barok in the goddamn circus? Does no one trust solid evidence anymore?? Well the joke is on Holmes, because clearly if he'd found anything to implicate a different killer then he'd be strutting into Barok's office with the evidence and an insufferably smug expression. Great detective, Barok's beautifully toned ass

Thus Holmes and Barok's mostly neutral relationship took a turn for the worse. But it doesn't end there; I'm fairly certain it only continued to deteriorate with time, and not just because Holmes evolved into a gleeful troll and Barok became the Victorian Era version of that Ben Affleck smoking on the balcony meme.

Let's jump ahead to after Iris has begun writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, and they've taken off in popularity. At this point in time, of course, the only person in England who knows about the link between Barok and Iris is Holmes. His lips are sealed on the matter, but I think that a lot of his airheadedness is an act. He knows that Barok is alone and suffering, and he knows that Iris desperately wants to know more about her biological family. Since he can't tell either of them the truth, perhaps he decides to handle the situation by bringing Iris and going to haunt Barok's office under the guise of information collection and just making a general nuisance of himself. 'Say, Reapy, have you met my roommate, Iris? She's a real niece --erm, I mean nice-- little lady! Why don't you two get to know each other?'

But that's only a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. If he thought Holmes's reputation had taken off after he and Mikotoba had managed to solve a few cases back in the old days, it was nothing compared to his popularity now. He's in newspapers and serial fiction magazines, he turns up at crime scenes and in Barok's own office, and the public is enamored with him. When Barok has to interview suspects or get reports from police officers, everyone asks him if he's considered that trick that a criminal used in that one Sherlock Holmes story, or maybe they ought to try this sort of test at the crime scene, you know, the one Sherlock Holmes used in last month's issue. Has he hit a wall in his investigation, or found a clue that suggests something seemingly impossible? Sherlock Holmes has a great quote for that exact occasion! And of course the man in question is just lapping up the praise, as if he deserves a single iota of it.

How do these idiots not understand that his reputation is built upon fiction, dumb luck, and stolen credit, Barok must wonder as he barely restrains the urge to Leg these brainless sycophants right into the sun. If Holmes were anywhere near as good a detective as everyone seemed to think he was, then where the hell was Klint? How had those Japanese students fooled him? Obviously they had fooled him, because Holmes had never managed to produce a different culprit. Meanwhile, here was Barok, an innocent in that incident who had ensured that justice was done, all alone in the world, suffering under the weight of an unbearable curse…

And speaking of people who had fooled Holmes and gained fame that they didn't deserve thanks to those accursed stories, let’s talk about Gregson. Thanks to his performance in the Professor case (the one where he, you know, failed to identify the serial killer working right alongside him before Klint became a victim? Good work, Detective, well done), and the half-hearted praise that Holmes gave him in those stories, Gregson got a raise, a huge boost in popularity, and even a fan club. Not to mention that in spite of their bickering, Holmes actually does seem to see something of value in Gregson. Sometimes they even seem like something approached friends.

Barok, meanwhile, knows what Gregson really is: a central figure in the Reaper organization. The Reaper may see themselves as a legitimate branch of law enforcement, but they're murderers, and they're letting Barok take the blame for it. If Holmes spent less time preening for the public and more time actually trying to live up to his fake reputation, maybe he'd realize that he was putting his trust in the wrong person again. Unfortunately, Barok can't bring these two overhyped frauds' public images crashing down without concrete evidence, so until he can find some, he'll just have to settle for being the saltiest bitch at the Old Bailey.

So what are Holmes's feelings on all of this? They’re actually a little more difficult to pin down because I think a lot of the behavior he allows people to see is an act. However, I don’t think he would try to defend himself against any of the reasons Barok dislikes him, nor do I think the main reasons for that dislike would be news to him. In 2-4, just after Gina informs the Baker Street crew of Gregson’s murder, Holmes expresses his despair and frustration that a detective’s job can’t begin until a crime has already been committed, saying that his inability to prevent the crimes in the first place makes him feel powerless.

Clearly this isn’t the first time he’s had this feeling. Holmes’s inability to solve the Professor case before Genshin’s impromptu graveyard execution was likely quite a source of regret for him. Not only had his pride been wounded, but an innocent man had been put to death, Mikotoba, his crime-fighting partner, had lost a good friend, the corruption in London’s legal system had spread like a wildfire, and Barok was trapped in the darkness of his mistrustfulness and the Reaper’s web of lies. It’s unclear how much Holmes blames himself for the lack of resolution of that case or Barok’s situation, but I’d be surprised if he didn’t feel at least a little responsible. Therefore he endures Barok’s bitterness with minimal retaliation (but not zero retaliation; he doesn’t have that much self control), as he continues to gather the information he needs to blow the case wide open. And even though Holmes feels somewhat responsible for Barok’s current plight, he’s still going to gloat like hell when he solves the thing and gets to see the disbelieving and awed look on Barok’s face when he’s forced to acknowledge that Holmes is every bit as great as he always claimed to be.

334 notes · View notes

codemonki · 19 days ago

Text

Finished up some mane six redesigns!! and the CMC

Some thoughts I had about their designs under the cut

Rarity: I wanted a member to be green and since she and Twilight both had purple going on, and Rarity has the gem thing going on I put it on her to be green. I tried to lean into more emerald and turquoise tones,.

Sweetie Belle: In Cannon rarity and her look pretty similar already so I didn't feel like I had to diversify the pallet to hard between them. I did want to push her fun swirly hair more though bc it was fun

Fluttershy: I love love love when people make fluttershy carry characteristics of flutterbat and I wanted to keep it. Within my AU Bat-Ponies can be created or born, and she was one that was created. Shes a fruit-bat variant though due to the nature of how she got the sanguine curse (and therefore takes in nutrients like a certain bunnicula character!). She does have a glamour ofc bc I think she'd be very shy about her sudden changes and twilight would be willing to help. I do like to think that in later seasons she stops wearing the glamour as much.

Not pictured here: But just like how rarity has a sort of work mode, fluttershy does too. in it her hair is tied up in a bun with no hair in her face, AND her tail is also all bunned up to!

Rainbow Dash: She flies fast, goggles will help with the amount of times she's seen crying while doing that. Her hair wasnt rainbow until after the sonic rainboom, and has some Lichtenburg scars on her back legs from it.

Scootaloo: I already like scootaloos design for the most part, I just wanted to inverse the pattern a bit from rainbow by having her bottom be darker.

AppleJack: I wanted to give her, her mothers hair texture <3 opted for some more natrual looking marks since shes already pretty down to earth in comparison to the others, i did try to make her build look more stocky but i might have to push that more in other drawings.

Apple Bloom: I also like her design in cannon! Since I didnt do anything to crazy to applejacks pallet, i didnt have to shift things too bad for her. Just added an extra bow, and similar markings to AJ and voila.

Pinkie: I wanted to lean into clown a bit with her, i see others give her clown make up an I think she'd have fun with it. I can see her sometimes having mroe intricate/wacky designs on her face but for the most part she sticks to simple color blocking. Her coat is much more vibrant when she's not covered in rock dust! The yellow in her hair is tinsel btw, rarity helped her put it in her hair. (ie, she took her to the correct stylist). I also felt as if she's someone who'd want her hair out of her way when she's in the thick of it, but I can see her bun falling out all the time due to the band breaking :)

85 notes · View notes