#to all my followers who know kazuma and ryunosuke through playing dgs themselves or following my main and being like yeah yeah these two 🙄

[delta-syrup]

@doughcatball This is really making me laugh. I included a screenshot of the part of the vid you're talking abt just for clarity but YEAH LOL that's Kazuma (on the left, with the headband) and Ryunosuke (on the right, looking so scardies). They're two of my favorite characters evar... They're the ones who inspired Kazuki and Blue respectively...! I love Kazuma's hair so I pretty much just stole it for Kazuki's design LOL. Blue's hair is also inspired by Ryunosuke's hair, but I think it's a much less obvious rip off fnejfnsifn

This really made me giggle tho, it's funny to think that someone would see Kazuma and think of my silly shark guy who was inspired by him. It makes me rly rly happy :) I love my funny guys...! so sorry abt the meteor strike and the dying and all that tho o7

[4ragon]

Hey, I would love to hear your Kazuma Asougi essay

Hey guys. You'll never guess what just happened. :D :D :D

Y’all Ready For This [loud techno music]

I'm finally done with my replay of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, and it has been quite the trip getting to re-learn who the characters are and what makes them tick. I feel like ALL of my thoughts and opinions have changed since the last time I finished DGS all that time ago, on every single one of these characters (in part because it was really hard to find a translation I could follow when I first went through DGS the first time).

So without further ado:

Kazuma Asougi.

Asougi Kazuma.

A man after my own heart.

(Btw this is mostly going to be spoiler stuff so putting it under the cut)

Wow is Asougi a complicated character to parse down. Because there’re so many different parts and pieces to him that can feel so gosh darn contradictory at times, that have to be put together to create one guy, and I think it’s hard to look at all the pieces in one playthrough and fully understand just who he is.

As a writer, I like looking at characters through a couple of different lenses. Sometimes it’s stuff like how they talk, how they move. You would not believe how many times I’ve gone into the AA wiki to just look at the spritework and figure out how they hold themselves, or just glance at the transcript to try to get the cadence of how they talk.

But at the end of the day, the most important factor is trying to understand Who this character is. Who are they? Why do they make the choices they do? Not just character motivations, but at the core of their being, what makes a character who they are?

And I think that part of why I love Asougi so much is that he’s got so many extremes to him, tugging him in different directions. He’s intelligent, and confident, and well spoken. And he cares so much about Ryunosuke, so much that he was willing to risk everything to save him.

But he’s also the most arrogant motherfucker on the planet.

I’m not willing to call him an outright bad person for all his ridiculous machinations. He said many times he was never planning to actually hurt anyone. Because he was Kazuma Asougi, and he could handle everything himself. He thought he had the upper hand the entire time. He was going to go along with an ASSASSINATION PLOT to right all the wrongs he’d ever experienced, and he never once thought about the danger to himself or to others because of course he could handle it he was Kazuma Asougi.

He had no idea that the assassination plot was what almost killed his best friend before they even stepped on the boat.

Like, man, he was so sure he could handle things. He was so sure he was the one pulling the strings. It was him vs the world, him vs all the corruption and lies that killed his father, so sure of himself that it didn’t occur to him that he was being played.

And honestly? Given what we know about Asougi’s background, I understand how this came about?

In case 2-1, the journalist Mamemomi tells Susato that no one in Japan knows about what happened to Asougi. And I just keep coming back to this because it really sort of drives home an interesting point: Asougi has no family, but he also has no friends other than Ryuunosuke.

And I should clarify, he has the Mikotobas as family, and I do not want to discount that. HOWEVER, as much as he clearly cares deeply for them, I think the discovery that Yujin lied to him absolutely destroyed so much trust that Asougi had.

He’s had to rely on himself for ten years of his life. He couldn’t go to Yujin about the anger festering in him, because Yujin had betrayed his trust, justified or not. And he certainly couldn’t go to Susato, considering she’s a sixteen year old girl and was probably still in the single digits when Asougi got that letter. (I think? Can’t find the exact year he got that letter. Someone fact check me, I can’t find a transcript.)

So he bottled everything up, and spiraled down this horribly disastrous path, relying only on himself, caring only about avenging his father’s death. And he didn’t have time for interpersonal relationships, didn’t have time for friends. How could he, when his entire being was serving thing higher purpose?

And to that point, just think about his plan. Go to England pretending to be an assassin. Avenge his father’s death. And then...what? You were hired as an ASSASSIN. If they’re willing to send Asougi, we have every reason to believe they’d hire someone else to silence him when he stabbed them in the back. But he agreed to this plan anyway, with no regard for his own safety, because he didn’t care about anything past getting justice for his father, not even Having A Future.

And then he met Ryunosuke. The one person he almost threw away everything for. The one person he felt like he could rely on.

I’m going to put a pin in that though because I think if I start talking about their relationship I’m going to write another fucking essay because I have SO MANY FEELINGS ABOUT THEM

anyway

The point is, I think Asougi is such a massively interesting guy. Because at his heart I DO think he’s a good person. The Asougi we met in 1-1 was not some sort of mask, it was just one piece of a very complicated guy. He’s a good guy, with a sharp wit and strong sense of justice, and life circumstances took those traits and twisted them until he almost brought everything he cared about to ruin. And that is such an interesting character.