#More Than One Ace To Play

[profoundbondfanfic]

More Than One Ace to Play

More Than One Ace to Play by Cozaure Rating: Teen and Up Word Count: 57k

Cas, a 3rd-year biology student, is an introverted and very anxious guy. Full of insecurities, he doesn't need to add one more thing to worry about in his life (and certainly not his potential "asexuality"). However, one day, he meets Dean at a poker night his roommate Balthazar is hosting. Dean is Cas’ exact opposite : easy-going, confident, funny… and also, very flirty. They keep bumping into each other around the campus and, somehow, every time Cas is with Dean, all of his worries seem to go away… However, when Cas learns about Dean’s reputation as “the master of one-night stands”, he is certain that they are DEFINITELY ABSOLUTELY not compatible. Or, are they?

We’re back at it with another college AU. More Than One Ace to Play caught my eye thanks to the asexual!Cas tag. Always on the lookout for any ace rep, this fic didn’t disappoint even a little. One of the things I loved about it was how much it embraced Cas’s journey with figuring out his sexuality beyond knowing for sure that he’s gay. Not only does he come to terms with who he is, but he does so all while battling his anxiety, the portrayal of which I found accurate and compelling with the way the author wrote it. 

This story is told from Cas’s POV, but with that comes a great depiction of Dean as an easy-going college student, living a pretty damn good life when he meets Cas at poker night. The magic of fanfic finds them volunteering for the same program where they are immediately paired up as partners hosting afternoon activities and tutoring with young kids. They become fast friends and even though Cas doubts it at every turn, we the reader can tell Dean is interested in being more than just friends with Cas, even if they think it’s for different reasons. You can’t help but fall for Dean a little too, when he stumbles his way through asking Cas out on a date that Cas is convinced isn’t a date. You feel for Cas as his anxiety dictates his doubt in Dean’s flirting, and, as tagged, Dean’s constant winks. When they finally figure it all out, you’ll be just as relieved and delighted at the outcome, a very satisfying happy ending you shouldn’t skip. 

[maglorthecrab]

🌅 rainbowmiku Follow

Ok so who was going to tell me not ONE but TWO chief prosecutors for my district have been arrested for murder

💿 makosharko Follow

Hey op do you live in fucking night vale

🕰️ athelas Follow

I did the research for y’all in the notes going wild wanting to know where op lives (and also bonuses of being a law student yay) so the only area I can find where a chief prosecutor has been arrested for murder is L.A. then I reckon they said two because the present chief prosecutor for L.A. is Miles Edgeworth, who has been accused of murder twice but cleared of both charges

🔮 ghosthunters Follow

fellow LA denizen here, fun fact! chief prosecutor edgeworth is married to a defence attorney

🌅 rainbowmiku Follow

He’s WHAT

🎈skyrensics Follow

said defence attorney has also been accused of murder before.

🪜ladderhosen Follow

Oh yeah that defence attorney is Phoenix Wright btw- he defended me for a murder charge once

🎈skyrensics Follow

oh nice! he defended my sister once :) she got accused of murdering someone in her offices parking lot lmao

🛒guiltylove Follow

@skyrensics wait is your sister fucking Lana Skye

🫧 pearlescent Follow

The former chief prosecutor’s sister uses tumblr????

🦔 wrongbird Follow

*opens door of reblogs to whisper* the current chief prosecutor also uses tumblr folks

🐚 demaskmasque Follow

WHAT

🍄 magisteel Follow

apparently he likes the samuraiverse! I wouldn’t be surprised if he was lurking in fan circles on here. Evidence btw- he has a steel samurai figure on his windowsill + a signal samurai keychain.

🌅 rainbowmiku Follow

these updates just get wilder and wilder. I’m learning more about my city’s lawyers than I ever thought I would.

🔮 ghosthunters Follow

everyone really skipped over the fact that it seems like half of LA’s legal system is on tumblr. god forbid they find this post

⚖️ calidistrictattorneysoffice Follow

hey

🛒 guiltylove Follow

NO. THEY HAVE AN OFFICIAL TUMBLR???

🌻 wrightandcolaw Follow

Is this a good time to say hello?

🌅 rainbowmiku Follow

never did I think one of my tumblr posts would attract the literal state of California prosecutors office or the wright and co law officef ashnduhjsjkkshg

342,107 notes

[ashipiko]

You’re so delicate, so in the bubble ♪

[v3nuskae]

What do you guys think they're talking about?

[skunkes]

at dis point when i hear about a game i like coming to the switch (very rare occurrence) my only thoughts are damn thats going to be really awesome to play once the switch is old enough to be hackable with little to no consequence like the 3ds

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

I got the Ace Attorney Apollo Justice Trilogy for my birthday and I forgot how much of the game was like

Witness: “I went to the store on Tuesday.” Me: “sounds about right-“ Phoenix: “Objection!!! There’s a flaw in that statement. How could the witness be at the store on Tuesday… if SHE WAS IN HER LIVING ROOM!?” “Wait what-“ judge: “well Mr. Wright. If you can, you must prove the witness was indeed in her living room instead of at the store, otherwise I will send everyone in this courtroom into the incinerator.” “What!? How- how can I?” And then I look in my evidence and it’s like: my attorney badge. A photo of a cat. A used coupon. Two pieces of tinfoil wrapped together to look like a phone. A photo of my client stabbing a knife into the victim’s chest. A photo of the witness at the store dated on Tuesday. A stepladder.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Smile And Be A Villain

queer character-driven historical fantasy, reimagining Hamlet before the events of the play

follows prince Hamlet who has been sent away to Wittenberg after being caught in a compromising position, meeting new people and discovering magic

and Ophelia, back in Denmark, dealing with the rise of the corrupting by-product of magic

while a war is brewing, and they have to figure out how much they are willing to sacrifice to save their country

duology

bi hamlet, aspec ophelia

[arttsuka]

would you recommend ace attorney

Yes, definitely, absolutely

Some out of context screenshots from the original trilogy

[invinciblerodent]

VERY disappointed that my cringefail son Petyr is accidentally succeeding at everything he does.

I was expecting copious amounts of shameful failure, Benny Hill-esque antics, TPKs left and right, and Shadowheart slowly finding herself falling embarrassingly in love with an utter dweebus of a man because his unearned arrogance contrasted with his inability to successfully do anything (and his very secret soft heart) is endearing in the same manner a mean old streetcat pretending not to want pets is endearing.

turns out, a gloomstalker ranger is kind of OP as hell, i'm tearing through enemies I by all means should not be able to defeat, rolling incredibly well for all manner of checks despite not having the stats to back any of them up (I have not yet successfully failed a roll), and the guy is just. legitimately impressive. even his brusque manner is just a dry wit that makes him look effortlessly cool. him being blunt and still kind to kids is just actually charming, and on top of that, he's also as pretty as he is????

of fucking course she's gonna fall in love with him, he's the kind of asshole who knows exactly how good he looks, and I hate that, and I hate him, and I hate that I love him.

i need his ego knocked down several pegs, post-haste. part of me is tempted to just go tackle the goblin camp now at level 3 so he can fail in a sufficiently spectacular fashion, but chances are, he'll just dominate absolute ass there as well

[quietwingsinthesky]

extremely extremely funny to me that sacha dhawan is like one of the only people in existence who i find attractive without any prerequisites or anything, he just is, because now every time i see a picture of him i start BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BA

[1960z]

SOJ: Final Thoughts

So when I first played spirit of justice at 14 I remember really loving it, the new characters, the cases, just the whole vibe of the thing. however, that was towards the end of my ace attorney hyperfixation and because of that I had never revisited it. when I returned to the fandom recently, I began to realise that quite a good amount of people hold this game in relatively low regard; and while the positive feelings I had from my initial playthrough still lingered, I had to admit I didn't actually remember the game very well, and maybe there would be things about it that would bother me now that wouldn't have back then. and because of that, this was the game I was most excited to return to. and now that I have re-played it and been able to experience it with fresh eyes I can say that while I definitely have more nuanced thoughts surrounding the game, I'm happy to say most of the stuff I enjoyed about it still really holds up

one of my biggest criticisms surrounding dual destinies is that while I did enjoy almost every individual case on some level, it never really coalesced beyond the sum of its parts, leaving the overarching story unsatisfying and disjointed, not to mention uninteresting thematically. I did not have that same problem here! my theory for what happened with DD is that takeshi yamazaki attempted to mimic the style of pacing shu takumi employs more closely in a way that just didn’t really work, meanwhile in soj, I think the pacing is much more in line with what we see in the investigations games where everything takes place over a few days (or in soj, the better half of a month) and connects unlike other main series games that often have months long gaps between cases. characters and scenarios set up in the first case are deeply connected to the fifth and each case barring perhaps case 4 is quite focused on setting up everything that’s about to happen in turnabout revolution.

and turnabout revolution is an absolute monster of a case. its scope is extreme and its twists are insane and honestly I doubt it would have worked if the rest of the game didn’t dedicate as much time as it did to building up to it, but because it did, the payoff felt amazing. I understand that if you zoom out and look from the perspective of the whole series a lot of it may feel like a lot and out of left field and I get why that’s off putting to some people - but taking the game in its own singular context I actually think it does an amazing job of making each twist feel earned. like for example are they basically rebuilding apollo’s backstory from the ground up? yes. does it work well with what was previously established in aa4? no not at all lol. does it work within the confines of spirit of justice? I actually think in that context it works extremely well.

my love for nahyuta is pretty obvious but honestly I think the character that captures the true heart of this game is rayfa. seeing this naïve, sheltered kid go through the process of realising that basically everything she took for granted about her world, even who her parents were, was a lie, and having to deal with that was truly captivating to watch. her entire world being shattered and then still doing everything in her power to make sure the truth came to light, no matter how much it hurt her I think exemplifies a lot of ace attorney’s themes and ideals and I think having a young girl be the centre of that is really cool. my favourite character in aa is franziska and while you will NEVER catch me calling her underdeveloped, because the series does actually give you a lot of insight into her if you want to engage with it, what I WILL admit is that I don’t think she ever got as much narrative focus as the other characters. and to me, rayfa feels very much like what we could have gotten if the narrative had chosen to focus on franziska more.

as I’ve said before also I really theoretically love khura’in. I found myself getting genuinely quite invested in the people and culture and politics of this world that the writers had created. especially since spirit channelling has been a huge part of the aa world since the first game, it was cool to inhabit a legal system that just accepted it unconditionally. it feels like the opinion of the japanifornia courts’ opinion on channelling is that there is something to it but the logic of arguments can’t rely on it definitely existing too heavily and if it does, proving channelling can happen is part of said argument. and god forbid testimony of someone being channelled is used as evidence because of what happened in DL-6. none of these factors exist in khura’in. in case 3 for the first time we get testimony from a victim through channelling and it’s a huge part of the case and case 5 of course relies on channelling massively to explain its events as well and getting to explore these possibilities without having to worry about narrative justification as to why a court of law would accept this was a treat.

I think aa’s format also just lends itself to… for a lack of a better word isekai stories?? like learning about the rules of a world through how said rules can be manipulated for crime is an extremely interesting way to learn about and engage in a fictional world. you see this with plvspw and even fan made projects like that mlp-aa crossover from years ago. and while khura’in does exist in “our” world, obviously there are still a lot of supernatural elements that khura’in takes for granted that wouldn’t be in other places.

but this is were we have to address the elephant in the room and soj’s huge glaring flaw. the thing that went completely over my little 14 year-old-head but looking back now I go "holy shit, that is bad." and that is how soj treats khura’in as a country and the irl political implications of said treatment. from the get-go, khura’in is shown in a very othered and orientalist lens. their way of doing things is depicted as being “spiritual” and “folksy” at the best of times and “backwards” at the worst; and the plot centres around our leads, most of who are not from khura’in, showing the khura’inese people the “right” and “just” way of doing things. in the version of the story I assume most of us are familiar with the characters are american, in the original version they’re japanese, neither country has a good track record with imperialism. this is a colonialist narrative. and while it’s tempting to say that because khura’in is fictional, the implications while problematic still exist more in a vacuum, I think it is important to point out that khura'in borrows a lot of aesthetics from real life cultures such as tibet and india, and when you create a fictional country that is like khurai'n, one that is portrayed as spiritual but unenlightened, one that has a lot of distinctly asian but not distinctly japanese (sans the magatama) aesthetics, you are in fact reinforcing negative, orientalist stereotypes surrounding the real cultures said aesthetics come from which deserves to be called out.

and while yes, there are khura'inese characters who still very much engage in their culture while also fighting for revolution... when combined with the context of dd's overarching narrative that, imo was basically "there are no systemic problems with the legal system, the dark age of the law is simply a result of bad actors" it very much feels like there's this attitude of "revolution for thee but not for me." as if they're only comfortable with telling this story about revolutionaries that are often framed by their own government as terrorists if it takes place within a fictional country that players can paternalistically look down upon. I think this definitely undercuts the rest of the story and I can totally understand why this could all really fuck with a person's ability to engage with and enjoy the game.

in closing, I genuinely think there's a lot to love within soj, it fixed a lot of problems I had with dd. I love each case, I adore the characters, I was thrilled by a lot of the mystery and political intrigue it created. with that being said I absolutely believe reinforcement of colonialist ideas in the text needs to be called out. it didn't ruin the game for me but if it did for someone else, I couldn't blame them. despite all its flaws, I found the closure it provided for these characters both old and new very satisfying. it will always have a place in my heart.

[altruistic-meme]

i was trying to console myself about having to work tomorrow by reminding myself it's only 4 more days until the weekend. only to remember that we're working this saturday so not ONLY is it still 5 more days until i get a day off but i only get 1 day off instead of 2. im going to quit my job and hide in the mountains.

[petiteredlady]

I did not expect Assassin's Creed Revelations, of all games, to be a love letter to brutalist architecture.

And yet.

These levels were amazing.

[hikari-saito]

Friend: “Would you ever want to have any smart appliances?”

Me: “No.

Friend: “Why?”

Me: “Exhibit A:”

[chromotps]

Emmyyy that winged Ace art😭 it made me think of an icarus/apollo au, cause there’s a reimagining of the myth with icarus and apollo as lovers and icarus built wings to reach apollo, and i’m just imagining a sorta tragic au where luffy becomes nika, losing his humanity and becoming the sun, and Ace builds wings to fly up to him😭 anyways, i upset myself and wanted to share haha

Merry.... how could you do this to me, personally,,,, (lmao)

whatever you do don't imagine luffy watching what's happening, knowing that there's no way he can help as he is now, anymore... he sees ace falling into the water, right in the middle of a reflection of the sun--and ace says "it's okay, luffy" because, at least like this, he can "touch" luffy one last time as he breaks the surface

gosh i'm having to restrain every instinct in my body to let the AU stay tragic... you have to understand i have Trained myself to make things fluffy. this is me working against years of stubborn fix-it headcanons and happy, everyone-lives AUs 😂 but I'll do it for the symbolism... the poetry...

[skunkes]

i need more AC and Magicians Quest life sim "clones" in the way of like

I don't need realistic graphics!!! Just a simple cute player character and lots and lots of clothes (easier to put on simple characters!) and furniture...and I also think life sims with dating Now are kinda polarizing wrt art styles and (lack of) diversity which is why I do actually wish u cld date in AC and such (well not anymore since the franchise has gotten a bit sour to me)...

this isn't even just me "being a furry" since a lot of characters in magician's quest are like. living objects. i was dating a TV when I last played 😭 but ykwim...it's less about being a furry or w/e and more it's much easier to project traits onto "Universal" cute designs and silhouettes than hoping that 1. the art style for the human characters is pleasing to you 2. hoping there's a character that's your type 2a. picking between potentially samefaced characters 3. why's there always just one non white person 4. where are all the fat and old people 5. -