what really kills me about ace attorney is the time. the length. the lasting effects of it all. seven years of disbarment. fifteen years of believing you killed your father. how long was simon imprisoned? how long did lana skye have to live in fear and obedience? how long was diego armando in a coma? we remember the numbers, but are we as aware as they are of how much that time has blended into their identities, how it's now at their cores, the most horrible parts of their lives being so big and important, not just something that can be let go of and erased. they all fucking came back wrong and they will never be the same but the game goes on and they live to the best extent of what they can be now. ace attorney reminds me to say "it is what it is" more and i think that's beautiful
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So like a year ago, I made a post asking why Dorian confessed to murdering Basil in the 1891 edition of the book, but not the 1890. For the last few months, while working on tlg and the comic, I’ve on and off again worked on a small animatic for the ending of TPODG. Because of this I’ve had to reread the ending conversation with Henry again and again. And a thought occurred to me:
Is Dorian’s ‘desire to be good’ actually an attempt to stop being objectified?
Dorian’s ‘desire to be good’ is obviously horseshit, even to himself, but why does he do it? "To feel something new" is a lazy explanation especially when the book literally says that “[h]e felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood”. He doesn’t want something new, he wants what he had before. But it’s not the innocence of his youth, nor something material he desires—it’s the way people treated him before Henry and Basil.
The thing that always stood out to me was this exchange (occuring after Dorian’s confession):
“There is someone at White’s who wants immensely to know you—young Lord Poole, Bournemouth’s eldest son. He has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite delightful and rather reminds me of you.”
“I hope not,” said Dorian with a sad look in his eyes.”
While many modern adaptations either forget this line or give a charitable reading, to me it reads as though Dorian realizes he’s replaceable. Even though he has a magic portrait and eternal youth, he still is a dying relic of a changing world. He will never be anything more than the innocent, youthful doll society and Henry treated him as.
His confession, to Henry of all people, was a final plea to be seen as more than the dumb youth, as an innocent angel—he is begging Henry to look at him and see that Dorian Gray is a person. That he feels more than youth, or beauty, or idolatry. That he is capable of great violence and even greater crime, like any other man and through that can be capable of evolving with the time like any other. He doesn't want to live as a passing fancy of perverts and naive young people.
But Henry breaks all of that in one simple line:
“You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be.”
But, Lord Henry was never going to see Dorian as a real person. Because Henry himself isn’t real. ‘Lord Henry’ is a role he plays, one that consumed him far before the first chapter. In many ways, his cynical philosophy is his own defective portrait. He hides any semblance of a person in his role of ‘cynical hedonist’ and denies any change. He too is a dying relic of a changing world.
When Henry denies his attempt to change, Dorian seeks Basil’s portrait of him. I think it's quite telling that even after he murder him, Dorian seeks implicit comfort from the man who had idolized his rose-white purity. Basil was the only relationship that was closest to what he had before. But the sad truth is laid bare:
No one ever saw Dorian Gray as a real person.
He was always a role being played.
And he dies tragically discarded.
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