#fingers crossed Tumblr compression doesn't totally obliterate the tables...

[sprinklecipher]

Ace Attorney Characters' Prominence In Game Canon vs In Fanfic

I got curious about how the amount of "screen time" Ace Attorney characters have in the games relates to how much fan fiction is written about them, so I crunched some a bunch of numbers related to characters' total in-game dialogue and how often they're tagged on Ao3*

*I acknowledge that neither of these are perfect measures of how much focus the series or fanbase puts on these characters, but they’re the numbers I can get :)

AA Characters With Much More Prominence in Fanfic (vs Canon)**

Here's a table of dialogue/tag totals for the 20 characters with the highest ratio of Ao3 tags to overall game dialogue:

**excluding characters with literally no dialogue

(LOTS more data below the cut)

A lot of the characters in the previous table have very little dialogue, so if you limit to characters with at least 500 words of dialogue, you get this:

(“Karma” is Manfred and “von Karma” is Franziska, btw)

AA Characters with Much Less Prominence in Fanfic (vs. Canon)

On the opposite side, here's the data for the 20 characters with the lowest tags: dialogue ratio:

Characters with Most Dialogue in-game vs Most-tagged Characters

Here’s some more tables, with the first showing the 20 characters with the most in-game dialogue and the second showing the 20 most-tagged characters:

Of note, Kristoph just barely sneaks into the top 10 most tagged AA characters (despite only having the 48th most dialogue), Manfred von Karma is the 16th most tagged character (vs 69th-most dialogue), and, most dramatically, Clay is the 20th most tagged character despite having less than 50 words of dialogue and a dialogue rank of just 165th!

On the flip side, the Judge doesn’t make the top 20 most tagged characters despite having the 4th most dialogue, and Justine Courtney / Verity Gavèlle is only the 109th-most tagged character despite being in the top 20 for dialogue (although the timing of the data collection played a big role for her in this data, since I pulled the numbers fairly shortly after the AAI Collection was released, and, glancing at Ao3 now, her total tagged fics has since increased nearly 7x since then)

Graphs!

For good measure, here’s a couple graphs that show the major characters’ Ao3-tag vs game dialogue data (including vs excluding the main protags, respectively):

The trendline basically gives an idea of the “expected” number of tags for a character based on how much dialogue they have: characters who are under the line have fewer Ao3 tags than expected based on how much dialogue they have, and characters who are above the line have more tags than expected. The further the character’s point is from the line, the farther away the number of tags is from what’s expected (like the poor Judge is VERY underrepresented lol)

Also, for any stats nerds reading this (hi!), there’s statistically a very strong correlation between characters’ in-game dialogue totals and how often they’re tagged on Ao3, R2 = .85, p < .0001. The main protags (sorry, Athena!) are driving a lot of that, however, so if you exclude Phoenix, Edgeworth, and Apollo, it drops down to just R2 = .39 (which is still a fairly strong relationship, all things considered).  

Data notes

For the dialogue totals, I included total dialogue across the mainline AA games (AA1-AA6) and the Investigations duology, but didn’t include PLvPW, since that has its own fandom tag in Ao3. The dataset is one I put together pulling from the AA wiki transcripts

The Ao3 tag data is as of 1/18/2025 (it took me a little while to write this up lol) and is for canonical character tags only

For the curious, here’s the whole data table in Google sheets

Note that there’s tons of identity shenanigans that goes on in AA that made it so that I had to use my judgment a bunch when deciding how to calculate the dialogue and tag totals, so if there’s an alter-ego-type character (or similar) that doesn’t show up in the data set, most likely I grouped their counts with the “base” character they’re associated with.