#you intelligent: this is merely a retread combo wombo of dl6 and sl9

[jaggedwolf]

ok like, aa5 is not a Good TM game (it's possibly the worst structured aa game I've played so far, ignoring whatever the fuck the crossover was!) but i keep thinking about athena and simon and pondering whether they're my favorite protagonist-prosecutor dynamic since phoenix and edgeworth. bc it's like.

you're seventeen years old. you walk into your mentor's lab and find her bloody corpse on the robot disassembly setup, her equally bloody kid daughter next to her saying she tried to fix her mom and you just. you can't let this kid go to prison. so you frame yourself and smuggle her out and probably clean all the blood off of her. you don't say a word in your defense, even when it means you're going to death row, even when your older sister begs you to. you spend the next seven years in a cell realizing there's a real killer and trying and failing to find them.

you're eleven years old. your mother is murdered and everyone's convinced her student did it but you know he didn't, you know, but no one listens to you because you're a kid who doesn't remember anything and can't explain the emotions you're hearing (your mother would've been able to). his older sister who loved your mom, the adult closest to her - turns out she hates you, she thinks of you as a spoiled brat who did your own mom in and doomed her brother. you spend the next seven years speedrunning your adolescence to become a lawyer, because that's the only way to save this guy you know didn't hurt anyone.

obsessed with this.

I think what gets me is that this is not a Phoenix and Edgeworth situation. At no point are we told that Athena and Simon were close before the incident, and in fact I prefer the reading that they weren't. Obviously there is a baseline politeness, given Metis, but one was a withdrawn and often overwhelmed preteen and the other a bright older teenager at the beginning of his career.

It's that, when it all goes down, they both look at each other and go, I can't let this person take the blame, it's not fair. And this is key: During those seven years, they have no idea that's what the other person is thinking!