#also idk what happened but I can't figure out how to do those indent things here anymore. that's bugging me a bit

[rivalsforlife]

Tell me your thoughts on Kay Faraday

KAY FARADAY love that kid. She's one on the list of characters that I did like my first run through but started liking more and more after going back to the investigations games; before she was still a character I liked but probably lower on the tier of characters I enjoyed but now has become one of my favourites.

I feel like there's a lot of depth to Kay that tends to be easily passed over and quite possibly is something the writers didn't intend; I pretty frequently see her listed as people's least favourite assistant character, and plus, her being in the investigations games which are some of the most obscure ones, fewer people are familiar with her in contrast to say Maya or Trucy. One of the most common complaints about her is her frequent "I'm gonna steal stuff! >:3" attitude that she doesn't actually follow through on; a lot of her dialogue is like that, and I totally get how that could wear people down.

At the same time though... we don't know much about Kay's life between the flashback case and the investigations games, which is kind of an outlier among the other assistants. From what we do know, she lived with her mother's relatives who lived far away, but it's never explained who she's staying with during the investigations games, or where. In addition to that, once she gets amnesia, and presumably is missing for a good portion of the day, nobody ever calls her (despite her having her phone with her, as we see in the Grand Turnabout which takes place immediately after,) and it's not until the afternoon that Karin finally takes her to the place on the business card, despite having found her the night before. That suggests that there's no one out there really looking for this kid.

Her amnesia characterization is also something I find pretty interesting because of how different it is from normal Kay. In other situations like 2-1 with Phoenix's amnesia, even though he had no idea who he was, he still had some subconscious memories (knowing when to object, knowing what to do in the courtroom, etc) and his personality didn't change much. Everything about Kay changes when she gets amnesia right down to the way that she speaks, and she frequently sees herself as a burden, or a horrible person, and is genuinely baffled by the fact that someone believes in her and wants to help her. And she does still have some subconscious memories, as evidenced by the one part where Edgeworth tries to do some word association tests with her:

Edgeworth: Hmm... It seems you have also forgotten the names of objects. This might be helpful for recovering your memories. Just repeat after me. Bookcase.

Kay: ...Broken safe.

Edgeworth: Stained glass.

Kay: ...Stolen goods.

Edgeworth: Books on the law.

Kay: ...Crooks on the lam.

Edgeworth: Statue of the goddess.

Kay: ...Snatched loot of the Great Thief.

Edgeworth: (Are all her mistakes biased towards a certain way...?)

Overall, this does point to an overall trend that somehow for one reason or another Kay subconsciously thinks of herself as a burden on others, and by losing her memories, she loses any reason she has to hide that from other people.

Like I said before, we don't know much about her home life after Byrne died until Investigations, and similarly, we don't know much about her personality. A lot of her personality in the games is based around being a "Great Thief" and a "Hero of Justice", both of which are things she adopts after reading her father's notebook revealing him as part of the Yatagarasu. We have no idea what she was like before that, orphaned and sent to live with distant relatives and without her central "purpose" in life.

My takeaway from all of this is that in the investigations games, Kay is desperately trying to cling onto the persona of her father, or who she thinks her father used to be, to give her purpose and courage in life. AAI2 in particular has the theme of parents and children, and how children can either follow in their parents' footsteps or deviate from them: Miles choosing in the end to live as a prosecutor instead of a defense attorney like his father, though set on the same overall goal; Sebastian opting to stay as a prosecutor, but with different goals than his father; the main antagonist rejecting his father in every way and yet in some ways still ending up just like him. Kay similarly fits into this parallel. She spends the whole game searching for a three-person team just like the original Yatagarasu, but at the end, decides to follow her own path:

Kay: How should I put it...? Until now, I've always been chasing after my father... ...so that I could become a Great Thief, just like him!

Edgeworth: (Like the previous Yatagarasu, I suppose...)

Kay: But... watching you, Mr. Edgeworth, made me think. Maybe, instead of chasing after my father, I should find my own path. ...I mean, you didn't become a defense attorney either.

Edgeworth: (Chasing after a parent's shadow isn't the only path in life for a child, after all...)

Kay: I'm going to aim to be a hero in my own way!

It's a little hard to imagine what Kay's life would be if she isn't a Great Thief, and besides, she's still a kid, and has lots of room to grow and become something completely different than she expects. Unlike the other assistants, the ending of aai2 seems to imply that she may not stay in her chosen career (like Maya going back to Kurain, or Ema continuing her forensic training, or Trucy continuing on as a magician). I think that's a pretty interesting thing I rarely see explored (though of course I definitely don't mind seeing Kay in a Yatagarasu-adjacent position in the future!)

Overall, yeah, I really like Kay, the more I think about her the more interesting things I can come up with. I think a lot of her personality has deeper implications than initially appear on the surface, and it would be super neat to see how she grew up in the post-7yg timeline (... though I doubt I trust capcom to do that in an interesting way haha.)