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wise-rainfalls · 5 months ago

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The Professor Case - The Two-Faced God

While Stronghart provides an exquisitely satisfying resolution to the game, one cannot help but ask if it were necessary for him to exist. In some ways, it’s clear that Stronghart’s existence is in service to the game’s resolution: he very much symbolises the flaws of the British judicial system. In this way, defeating Stronghart both stands in for fixing those flaws, while obscuring their continued existence by effectively twining correlation with causation. The British judicial system both produces and allows men like Stronghart to thrive. Stronghart did not single-handedly create every problem in the British judicial system at once (no matter how much it might feel like it for our main characters). It’s a striking sleight-of-hand at the last moment from a game that had otherwise been consistent in examining how the failures of the justice system are exactly that – failures of the system. It is especially interesting in how this sleight-of-hand interacts with our perception of another contentious character: Klint.

Looking back at the case, there was a specific point where it struck me that the Stronghart reveal could have been omitted without breaking the logic of the story itself. This is the point just preceding the reveal that Klint himself was blackmailed by Stronghart. Two discrepancies are left in the case: Klint’s will and Barok’s denial that Klint was capable of killing his own mentor. Only the first one really holds up to scrutiny: after all, Gina thought Gregson could never be the Reaper while Kazuma swore his father to be incapable of killing another man. Both were proved wrong, why not Barok also? Especially on the tail of the Professor reveal itself. Stronghart’s story rings true: we could easily imagine a world where Klint is the final, unexplained root of darkness, his motivations forever shrouded behind the veil of death.

Yet that’s not what happens. The reveal that Klint was being blackmailed by Stronghart, on closer examination, functions slightly differently from the other reveals of the case. It doesn’t, in fact, change the information known to us. In the case of Genshin and Gregson, each reveal further clarifies what they did do and didn’t do: Genshin didn’t kill the other four nobles, Gregson was involved in the Reaper cases, Genshin killed Klint, Gregson collaborated to fake the autopsy. Here, however, new information is uncovered. Klint still killed four men by ordering his dog to rip their throats out. The sole purpose of the reveal is to re-apportion blame from Klint to Stronghart. Stronghart acts as a lightning rod for the darkest possibilities that Klint contains, cementing the fact that within the narrative, he is Klint’s shadow; the second face of the same body.

While Stronghart may have capitalised on Klint’s inexperience in covering his own tracks, the original impulse – the belief that the justice system was insufficient for a crime heinous enough, and should be supplemented by a vigilante act of violence – that stemmed from Klint himself. The first murder was Klint’s alone. The Professor was born in Klint, not Stronghart. It was Klint’s actions that gave Stronghart the opportunity. Rather than the issue being that Stronghart forced Klint to kill, it’s that Stronghart forced Klint to kill people he didn’t think were the ones that needed killing. That is a quibbling difference of opinion that has already ceded the frankly vast ground that anyone should have the right to be killing at all. Both characters have as a base assumption that the failures of the justice system cannot be fixed by actually improving the justice system, and continue onwards from there. In other words, both Klint and Stronghart are symptomatic, symbols and products of the British judicial system’s impotence.

When comparing the Reaper and the Professor, the former is clearly an iterated improvement on the latter. As Barok points out, a serial killing conspiracy of this nature can only have such longevity if it were an organisation. The Reaper’s ability to organise means that the figurehead for the organisation always has a bulletproof alibi while the murders themselves are nondescript, disguised with few defining marks. Shared suspicion means more easily deflected suspicion, especially with Barok present to divert the lion’s share of it. Meanwhile, Klint acting alone with such a distinctive signature weapon is exactly his downfall: it allows Stronghart to catch him out, not to mention Genshin. Even Barok suspected. As Genshin points out, the primary shield protecting Klint was his reputation, but even that shield was never going to last forever. Accordingly, the Professor had only four true victims spread out over about a year, whereas over the course of five years the Reaper takes over a dozen lives. Stronghart perfects what Klint begins, bearing out to its bitterest conclusion the ideals that caused Klint to take his first life.

In this way, Stronghart reflects the man Klint would have needed to be for eliminating those beyond justice through private means to be sustainable. Crucially, they are different points on the same path. We begin with Klint, and end with Stronghart. Klint’s nobility cannot be divorced from Stronghart’s grasping cruelty: the two of them are manifestations of the same root object, seen from either the light or the shadow. To reject one is to reject both: it’s why with Stronghart’s fall and the truth come to light, Barok must allow Klint, as well, to be no more.

But let’s backtrack to the Professor case. It’s from this first miscarriage of justice that, narratively, every other miscarriage follows. While Klint treats Genshin’s offer to duel him to the death as an act of mercy from a close friend, we must remember that Genshin only went ahead with this personal deliverance of justice after the judicial system proved utterly unresponsive. It wasn’t consideration for Klint’s reputation that brought Genshin to Klint’s manor, but the belief that there was no way other than the personal through which Klint could be stopped.

Stronghart: The Professor?!

Asogi: Yes, beyond all shadow of doubt. You must issue a warrant to search his home at once!

Stronghart: ...Don't be absurd. The man comes from one of our country's most illustrious families. He's a paragon of justice here in the capital.

Asogi: Yes, that's the point! That's why none of you British can see it! He's using his noble status as a diversion whilst he commits these atrocious crimes behind the scenes!

Stronghart: ...Do you have evidence?

Asogi: ......... Nothing definitive as yet. But he keeps an enormous, savage hound on the estate. We need the full support of the judiciary for this! We're up against a member of the aristocracy!

Stronghart: ...So a large family estate has a fierce guard dog. You should know that's commonplace here in Britain. I'm sorry, but I can't possibly put Scotland Yard onto this based on the tenuous accusation of a visiting student.

Asogi: ...!

Certainly, Stronghart is narrating here, which means we likely should take this with a grain of salt. However, considering that everything else Stronghart says is damning enough – considering that he’s admitting to an entire list of crimes at this point – I don’t see why he would lie about this fairly innocuous exchange. Especially when it fits in so well with what we know of him being unwilling to prosecute the Professor (due to, of course, being half the Professor himself). The belief that the Professor is a beneficial, in fact, necessary piece in the justice system, and thus should be outside of the justice system (not to mention the personal benefit to Stronghart himself) is what causes Stronghart’s reticence. It’s this reticence that spawns Genshin’s own extrajudicial killing, from which follows the fabrication of evidence by Gregson, and from there, the entirety of the Reaper. Far from being increasing the reach of the justice system, Klint and Stronghart create the space from which an ever-wider system of private murder has room to operate parallel and parasitical to the justice system.

The outcome of this idea is made fully apparent in Stronghart’s final appeal to the judiciary. Stronghart’s entire manifesto is that the justice system is not enough to actually deliver justice: that he, Stronghart, will step in where the system fails. That is a damning indictment of every single person in the room, since they themselves comprise the justice system. Yet far from viewing it as an attack on their ability, or seeing it as a call to reform so that the need for Stronghart is eliminated, the entire gathered judiciary rally around the cry for Stronghart’s name – and implicitly, the Reaper. It is an abject surrender of responsibility by a judiciary inculcated into complacency. In codifying the Reaper’s existence as necessary, Stronghart renders the entire justice system a toothless joke.

It's for this reason that the game escalates the stakes to Queen Victoria. While I have my quibbles about the decision, I can see how it fits into the general thread the game weaves. Stronghart and Klint are characters centred around grappling with the idea that the justice system allows heinous crimes to go unpunished due to reasons of status and influence. It is fitting, then, that Stronghart is the final monster struck down by an extrajudicial hand, when he himself has acted as that hand for the last ten years.

Within the game, the rumour that the Reaper is Klint’s ghost, come to reap justice for his little brother, appears again and again. From a literal point of view, this is a narrative Stronghart actively disseminates to cultivate the view of Barok as some sort of supernatural being, or at least the Reaper killings being divine justice. The reality is, of course, that the Reaper is just Stronghart and his many arms. However, from another point of view, this rumour is true. The Reaper is Stronghart – and what is Stronghart but the twisted ghost of Klint, the man who Klint would have become if he lived?

#tgaa #the great ace attorney #dgs #klint van zieks #klimt van zieks #mael stronghart #hart vortex #dai gyakuten saiban #anyway akio = stronghart dios = klint and anthy = barok

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