Commentary on A Bluff to Remember
Dec. 16th, 2024 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neremanthThis is the first of my commentaries on my fics. I don’t know if anyone will be interested in reading these, but that doesn’t matter, because I want to write them.
This first one, on A Bluff to Remember, focuses a lot on how I came to be writing it and to be writing anything at all, but in future ones there will be more about why I made certain decisions, pointing out various things I did in the fics, and explaining what I had in mind where there wasn’t a place in the fic to say something explicitly. (There is a bit of that in this post too; if that’s all you’re interested in feel free to jump to the “Points of Interest” cut.) Some of this (in particular the pointing out things I did) may or may not already be clear to the reader. I want to comment on it because I honestly don’t know whether or not people will pick up on these things. (I welcome any “I see what you did there” comments on any of my fics, or on these commentary posts, so I can be happy to discover at least some of my readers did catch some of these!)
A warning: there may be spoilers in these commentaries. Obviously for my fics, but also for canon. With regards to Ace Attorney (which is the only fiction-based fandom I have posted for so far), I am currently not very far through Apollo Justice, and don’t envisage needing to refer to any of that (I will mention on the post in question if I do do so), but I may reference anything from the original trilogy.
My history with writing
I mentioned in my previous post that I’d been reading fic since 2010, so for almost 14 years by April 2024. But I never expected to write anything myself. I didn’t think I was good enough. I know of course that there is no minimum standard for fanfic, and that’s as it should be, but I couldn’t have brought myself to post anything I wasn’t satisfied was at least ok. I also (mostly) didn’t have any inspiration for any fics. I did have inspiration for an original novel series, which I wanted to be able to write sometime, even though I wasn’t at all confident I could do it justice. Indeed, I’d wished there was a way to get someone who was good at writing on board with a partnership whereby I provided the synopsis and world-building and they did the rest.
I hadn’t got any further with that than making some notes on the world-building, and I hadn’t done much else in the way of fiction writing either, beyond creative writing for English at school. The main exception is what I would now call crack self-insert historical RPF crossover with nineteenth century literature, which I wrote with a friend at university before I had any idea what fanfic was, taking it in turns to produce an installment, purely for our own enjoyment. We got up to 170K words before one of us (it was me) procrastinated indefinitely on writing the next bit. I was happy to write that because I was only sharing it with my friend and because it was silly so as long as it was funny and had interesting twists and turns it didn’t really matter if it was well-written (although I still tried to do my best with it).
Other than that, I tried to do NaNoWriMo one year because a different friend who wasn’t good at taking no for an answer pressured me into it. I didn’t have much inspiration or an outline of the plot or anything, so unsurprisingly I think I only got a couple of thousand words into that. There was also the fanfic in the form of a poem that I wrote in 2016 in reference to a Reddit post mocked on the blog We Hunted The Mammoth (which I posted in the comments on WHTM at the time and have now also posted on AO3). And then one time I did have an idea for a fic, after the appearance of Brain Ghost Dirk in Homestuck. I tried writing it, but it came out pretty bad, and I didn’t get very far with it before abandoning it.
The necklace
I started playing Ace Attorney in winter/spring 2024, and as I mentioned in the previous post, I was looking for fic before I’d even finished the first game. I knew that people shipped Phoenix and Edgeworth, but I also knew that people shipped a lot of things, so I was expecting “I guess I can see it; I’ll probably enjoy that ship among others but be as happy to imagine they don’t have any romantic feelings for each other”, not “oh wow, this is practically canon”. (Before I got to the part that triggered the latter realisation, I was actually vaguely shipping Phoenix with Gumshoe since Gumshoe seemed to like Phoenix enough to go out of his way to help him.)
I tried to avoid spoilers when reading fic, but inevitably there were some things that would come up that people had thought were too minor to warrant tagging; and even some of the summaries were spoilery. (It is hard to write summaries that don’t contain spoilers, particularly when your fic centres round some particular plot point!) I’d also already spoilered myself a little reading the Wikipedia article about the game, and reading some Steam reviews. I think between all of that and the game itself showing you what happened at the beginning of some of the cases, Turnabout Goodbyes was the first case where I didn’t have some idea in advance who the killer was (and I was spoilered about interrogating the parrot in that one); and after that only The Stolen Turnabout, Bridge to the Turnabout, and maybe (I can’t remember for sure) Rise from the Ashes and Turnabout Big Top. I knew Edgeworth hadn’t really committed suicide by the time I got to the part where it was suggested that he had. None of that is on anyone else but me, of course — I could have chosen not to look for Ace Attorney fic till I’d played all the games. At least, partly due to the things being referenced not always being spelled out and partly due to it not always being clear where something might or might not have been changed from canon, I often didn’t know for sure what was going to happen, or the details. Certainly I was still able to enjoy the games.
One of the things I was spoilered for was the necklace that appears in Turnabout Memories (along with Dahlia being a murderer). This was an example of something I didn’t have a clear picture of in advance. I’d seen references in around three fics, and knew that Phoenix ate a poisoned glass necklace but was fine, and that the necklace came from Dahlia, but I didn’t know he ate it in court to get rid of it as evidence, and I had formed the impression that Dahlia got him to eat it, whether through manipulation, force, or some kind of mind control.
Everyone seemed pretty unanimous in this being one of those Ace Attorney moments where they just casually ask you to believe something inherently implausible (which it certainly is!). Some of the fics were joking about Phoenix’s apparently superhuman powers to survive injury (taking this together with other incidents, such as his fall off Dusky Bridge). I guess I was expecting to see it pretty clearly spelled out in canon that he did eat the necklace, so that the possibility that the implausible thing actually didn’t happen had been ruled out, whether we actually saw it happen on screen or whether we were told about it in a context where we could take it the person wasn’t lying (such as Phoenix mentioning it while he is the player character, without going on to think something about how that didn’t actually happen), or whether there was some concrete evidence of it having happened (such as a medical report from him getting checked out at hospital afterwards).
Then when I played Turnabout Memories, the supposed eating of the necklace happened while Phoenix was out in the lobby while we, playing as Mia, stayed in the courtroom. After he came back and said that he’d eaten it, I was very aware that so far what we had seen was as consistent with that being a lie as it was with it being the truth, and as I kept playing I was half expecting something more definitive and half expecting that it would in a twist be confirmed to have been a bluff, even though I knew that couldn’t be the case if there were all those references in fics to this being something that actually happened.
But I got to the end of the case and there was nothing to make it any clearer that Phoenix did eat the necklace nor that he didn’t eat it.
Writing the fic
I really wanted to share the fact that the interpretation in which Phoenix didn’t eat the necklace fit canon just as well as (or maybe even better than) the interpretation in which he didn’t. At that time, my friend Onward_and_Upward hadn’t played Ace Attorney yet (I would introduce her to it when I visited her a few weeks later), so I couldn’t just discuss it with her. If I was still on Twitter, I might have tweeted about it, but probably not, because most likely none of my followers had played the game and even when I was tweeting about my usual topics I rarely got much response unless I was replying to someone else’s tweet. In any case, if I had done that it would have been seen by a few people around the time I tweeted it and then disappeared into the depths of my timeline.
I’m not sure what order these happened in, but (a) it occurred to me that a fic posted to AO3 which presented this scene from Phoenix’s POV, showing him lying about eating the necklace and explaining why he did that, would be a more effective way to get what was by now my headcanon in front of people: anyone reading the fic would likely have played Ace Attorney, so would be among my target audience, and even if it didn’t get seen much right when I posted it, it would remain discoverable by anyone who searched for the right thing; and (b) I found as I got ready for bed that I was already writing such a fic in my head, and actually I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d got it down.
So once I was in bed I got up the notes app on my phone and wrote it out. (I told myself I didn’t have to post it if I didn’t like how it came out, but it would give me the option and it would let me stop thinking about it so I could go to sleep.) At this point it was only 600 words, and went as far as Phoenix realising he’d have done better to pretend he swallowed it whole, and thinking that no-one was going to believe his story. It ended with “They totally believed it” in parentheses, which I guess was the voice of an omniscient narrator although up to that point it was in third person limited. (I might well have been writing in second person in my head, since that’s definitely what comes most naturally to me, and translating to third as I typed. I know I decided to go with third person for this fic because I wanted as many people to see it as possible, in order to get the headcanon out there, and I was aware second person is a dealbreaker for far more people than third person is.)
The next day I copied what I’d written into a text editor app so I could save it as a .txt file and transfer it to work on it on my laptop. In place of dialogue from the game I wanted to use, I’d written a brief summary of it in parentheses, since of course I couldn’t remember the exact wording. I knew I needed to go back and play through the game again so that I could replace those parts by the actual dialogue, and also check that everything I had written was consistent with what was shown. Fortunately, since the incident in question comes not that long before the end of the case, I still had a save file from shortly before it (actually, from the multiple choice spot right before Mia holds up the necklace, which is partly why I didn’t have the fic start any earlier, although that first draft started there too so it was where I wanted to begin things anyway). I played through again, as far as when Phoenix starts telling the court what really happened when he met Doug Swallow, and I took a screenshot at every piece of dialogue or other event, so that I could refer to it easily while writing.
(I’m sure there are Ace Attorney transcripts online, and I could have just looked one up. But for some reason I don’t want to do that: I want to screenshot everything for myself. By the end of the first episode of Bridge to the Turnabout I was screenshotting as I went on my first playthrough, which does make it take a lot longer since you have to stop every now and then and wait minutes for it to catch up with all the screenshots. But I’m very glad I did that, because it’s been really useful to be able to refer to them when writing some of my fics. I’ve also been doing that with Apollo Justice, which is one reason I haven’t got very far through it despite starting to play it six months ago: I think for example it took me three or four sessions of a couple of hours each just to get through the first episode of Turnabout Corner. I’ve also gone back to screenshot Turnabout Beginnings because I have a couple of fics very focused on that, and I’ve started to do it for Recipe for Turnabout because I needed to know for An Open Book just what it was Gumshoe said about being able to read Phoenix’s thoughts on his face. I’m planning to work through the rest of the original trilogy before getting back to Apollo Justice, which is another reason why it’s going to be a long time before I finish that. This also means that what I’ve posted so far, and what I will be posting in the near future, either didn’t/doesn’t need me to look through any of the cases, or only needs what I’ve already screenshotted: thus the preponderance of fics about Dahlia and Iris. I have various other things drafted that I can’t post till I’ve played through again and screenshotted some of the other cases.)
I played past the point where my draft stopped just to be on the safe side that I had everything I needed. I was pleased to note that what I had written did seem to be consistent with what happened in the game. However, I also noticed something I hadn’t when I played the first time: if you take it that Phoenix is lying about having eaten the necklace, it actually sounds like Winston Payne has picked up on this. When he says “Trusting your client is the most noble thing a defense attorney can do” and then “And it’s heartwarming to see that you placed this much faith in Mr. Wright”, that comes across as him subtly dissing Mia because it’s so implausible that Phoenix ate the necklace and Mia has ended up not even questioning this ridiculous thing because she really trusts Phoenix. I was surprised to find more canon support for the idea Phoenix didn’t eat the necklace (not that Payne’s lines don’t work if he did, but in my view they work even better if he didn’t), and even more surprised to find my interpretation now included Winston Payne having worked out what was going on (and had the good sense to play along) when Mia hadn’t. But after all, he must have some degree of competence to have won cases in the past (even against rookie defense attorneys), and it’s not like it would be that hard to figure out Phoenix was bluffing.
So when I edited my draft, I extended it to include this aspect, and that led to the discussion of trust towards the end of the fic. It was now more than simply a presentation and justification of my headcanon: it was the start of Mia’s and Phoenix’s friendship and in particular their mutual trust, it touched on the theme of attorneys trusting their clients which comes up repeatedly in canon, and it explained why Phoenix would finally tell the truth about his meeting with Doug Swallow shortly after Payne said that (which I had felt was a little unclear in canon).
Posting
Once I’d edited my draft, I had something I was happy enough with that I decided I did want to post it. I didn’t do that right away, though. I wanted to wait till 24th April 2024, which I see as a nice date and which was only a few weeks away. That was particularly important to me since for all I knew then this might be not just my first but my only fic; if I was only going to have one thing posted, I wanted it to be on a date I considered special. But this has continued to be my practice for subsequent fics: I don’t post something as soon as I’ve drafted it. Sometimes, as mentioned, I need to play through some part of the game again first in any case, and sometimes I know it needs more thorough editing after I’ve spent some time away from it. But even when something is theoretically ready to go, I wait. I like to post on a carefully chosen day, whether that’s the same date as it is within the fic, or a date that fits the themes (such as Halloween), or just a date that I find pleasing. In the first two cases, I will have in mind a specific date for a specific fic, often months or even almost a year in advance. (This year, for example, I was writing something in late October that had spooky elements, and I knew it wouldn’t be ready to post this Halloween, so I decided I will post it on Halloween next year.) In the third case, I’ll know in advance that I want to post something, and then as the date approaches I’ll choose from among the things I have ready to go.
I’m well aware that this might seem a little silly, because the date doesn’t really matter, particularly since AO3 is an archive and people will be accessing the fics on any arbitrary future date. (Not that I care when people read: this is about having a nice posting date displayed.) But it works for me, because not posting straight away (usually) makes me leave long enough between drafting and a final pre-post edit for me to be able to come to it with somewhat fresh eyes, while at the same time having a date in mind acting as a deadline means I do actually get round to posting at some point, rather than perpetually leaving it a bit longer because maybe it could get better with even more editing, or just not getting round to taking the time to do the final edit, choose tags, make a summary, and get the formatting in place. So I will be continuing to do this. (Always having a number of fics I’ve drafted but not yet posted also takes the pressure off, so when I write something new I never feel like I’m producing something just for the sake of producing something.)
Probably the hardest part of the posting process for this one was coming up with a title. (Though the summary and tags were also a little challenging, particularly since I didn’t want to have any spoilers in the summary.) My first draft didn’t have a title; the filename was TaT1Headcanon.txt (for Trials and Tribulations 1 Headcanon — when I created the file I couldn’t remember the name of the case). The first working title was Phoenix Wright: Ace Bluffer, reflecting the fact that the fic showed him already bluffing well enough to be believed before he’d even started the career in which bluffing would become something of a speciality for him. That was… not great, but at least better than nothing. I then considered something like Bluffing and Trusting, which captured the themes of the extended piece though not very excitingly. The final title, A Bluff to Remember, plays on the name of the associated case, Turnabout Memories, and refers to the fact that Phoenix would probably remember this bluff partly because it was so outrageous but also partly because it led into the beginning of his relationship of trust with Mia and of his understanding that it’s important for a defense attorney to trust their clients. It’s not among my absolute top titles, but I’m happy enough with it; it does the job. (And in a happy coincidence, not many titles would come before that alphabetically, so it’ll probably stay as the first folder in my Writing folder for a long time to come, which is nice when it was also chronologically the first one.)
After posting
I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of views; I told myself I’d be happy if 20 people saw it. I think it reached that in the first day or maybe two, so I was pretty satisfied with that. I also got some kudos and a comment, so that was cool!
I had a bit of a funny relationship with this one in the weeks after posting. I’d only got as far as The Stolen Turnabout at that point, and as I was travelling a bit visiting friends and family it was a while until I played right to the end of Trials and Tribulations. I don’t recall for sure whether I already knew this when I played Turnabout Memories (though I think not), but before I got to Bridge to the Turnabout I already knew, again from spoilers in fic I was reading, that there was someone called Iris who was possibly related to Dahlia, and that they had something to do with Kurain. So I knew Dahlia would come back up after Turnabout Memories, and (much like while playing that case) I was torn between worrying that at some later point we’d get definite confirmation Phoenix did eat the necklace, and worrying we’d instead get told he was bluffing (even though, again, that seemed unlikely given every reference I saw in fic to the necklace seemed to take it as certain that Phoenix really ate it; I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the bluffing interpretation made so much more sense and so it would figure that it was intended by the writers).
In the former case, my interpretation that he was bluffing would turn out to be invalid (unless you confined things to just Turnabout Memories and ignored whatever came later), while in the latter it would be kind of nice to have the interpretation actually be canon, but it would mean I hadn’t come up with something new, just worked out a twist that was coming before it was actually presented. Either way, I didn’t think it would make my fic worthless: if it turned out to be canon that Phoenix was bluffing, I was still adding something with a story that told that scene from his POV (well, unless we actually got that in canon in flashback, but I wasn’t expecting that), while if it turned out to be canon that he wasn’t, then I would have written an AU that was compliant with what we saw of canon up to the end of Turnabout Memories. So I wasn’t planning on deleting it. But I did feel either outcome would be a bit embarrassing, like I’d tried to be a bit too clever and ended up with egg on my face.
And then I read a fic which didn’t mention Dahlia in the summary or tags but had Phoenix getting suddenly triggered by making tea because Dahlia had used drugged tea to make him do what he wanted, and I took that to be canon and thought it was probably going to turn out that he definitely did eat the necklace, because Dahlia got him to do it while he was under the influence of that. So then I was just waiting for it to turn out that my interpretation had been wrong. I stopped checking how many hits I was getting on the fic because I didn’t want to think about all those people reading it thinking “wait till she finds out what happens later”. When I played Bridge to the Turnabout, whenever there was a scene that looked like it might conceivably be leading up to that revelation, I was bracing myself and sort of cringing a little in advance. I almost couldn’t believe it when I got to the end and there still hadn’t been anything to confirm or deny that Phoenix ate the necklace.
Once that had sunk in, I was able to come back to feeling proud of what I’d written. (I guess it’s always possible that there may turn out to be something in the second trilogy or the Investigations duology that makes the bluffing interpretation canon or not canon, though I don’t think it’s likely, but I’m not really bothered about that because if it turns out not to be canon, it’s still valid going only by the original trilogy, while if it turns out to be canon, it’s not as embarrassing to have presented as my idea something that we were only told in later games, and so which players of the game when it was first released wouldn’t have known.) I think if I could choose to have an Ace Attorney fan read just one of my fics, I’d make it this one, at least out of what I’ve posted so far, partly because I’m back to being evangelical about that headcanon, and partly because I think this is among my better works in terms of writing.
Second guessing
That definitely doesn’t mean it’s perfect, though! Both before and after posting there were various things that occurred to me as possible issues. One is Phoenix referring to Mia as “Miss Fey”. I had him call her that because I thought I remembered him doing so in canon in this case, but it doesn’t come up at all in the part I screenshotted, and everyone refers to her as “Ms. Fey” in Turnabout Beginnings, so I’m wondering now whether I got that wrong. (I’ll be able to check whenever I get around to replaying Turnabout Memories, and correct if necessary.)
The other main one was whether it was plausible for Phoenix to have the chance to hide the necklace. The way I wrote it, the bailiffs were inside the courtroom, and there were maybe 20 or 30 seconds between Phoenix coming out into the lobby and the bailiffs apprehending him, during which he was unobserved. But I’m not at all sure they wouldn’t stay outside in the lobby the whole time, where they’re shown in the background we see whenever there’s a scene in the lobby; and if they were inside, you’d think they’d run after Phoenix and be right behind him as he went through the doors, or even if they weren’t supposed to chase anyone unless told to, that they’d still not be far behind since someone shouts to them straight away to do just that. It’s also not clear whether, ignoring him possibly being within sight of the bailiffs the whole time, the elapsed time between Phoenix running out and being brought back is long enough for him to decide on a hiding place and put the necklace there, covering it up again.
That felt like a plot hole, and I pondered it several times as a possible reason for the whole premise of my fic not to work. But I kept coming back to the fact that according to the alternative interpretation, while he was in the lobby Phoenix first chewed the necklace into small pieces and then swallowed the pieces. That seems like it would take longer than what I had him do; and you would also think if he was being observed by the bailiffs during that time they would (probably successfully) try to stop him doing that, and if they didn’t manage to that they would report that he’d done it as soon as they’d got him back through the courtroom doors (or possibly that they would call an ambulance for him instead of taking him back into the courtroom). Ultimately I figure my scenario of what happened may not be 100% plausible, but if it’s more plausible than the version where he does eat the necklace, that’s good enough.
I also wondered, despite how well I think the bluffing interpretation fits a lot of what we’re shown in this case, and despite how it naturally leads into the part about trust, whether what I wrote here made sense with Phoenix’s behaviour elsewhere in canon. Would he really go on to so consistently and firmly trust his clients after he’d seen Mia being made a bit of a fool of by her trusting him when he told an absurd lie? Or would that be a reason to be more skeptical of what they tell him? This is already slightly an issue with what happens in this case regardless of whether you think Phoenix was bluffing about eating the necklace: he definitely lies about what took place between him and Doug Swallow, telling multiple inaccurate versions before finally volunteering the correct one, and so you would think he would be very aware when dealing with his own clients that they might not be telling him the truth. But the version where he bluffs about eating the necklace and Payne subtly throws shade at Mia for believing him does make it harder to reconcile. You could argue that his trust in his clients isn’t about assuming they’re telling the truth, but about assuming they’re innocent. That works better with either interpretation of what happened with the necklace; but you would think Dahlia having turned out to be a murderer who was trying to frame him for her crime would have made it difficult for Phoenix to be confident in anyone’s innocence in the future, and while that’s an issue either way, it’s more foregrounded in my fic so may stand out more as odd.
Why this fic?
Obviously the fact that I was struck by inspiration is a big part of why this was the first fic I wrote and posted. Lurking on the AO3 and FanFiction subreddits, I sometimes see people saying they want to get into writing fanfic but they don’t know what to write, and while they should absolutely do what they want, I always feel like that’s getting the cart before the horse: don’t start writing because you have a general desire to write, start writing because there’s something in particular you want to write. (I realise that’s not what works for everyone, though; I don’t really get on very well with prompt lists in general and I don’t think I could ever do something like Yuletide, but there are plenty of people out there who love that kind of thing.)
That’s not the whole story though. I’m sure I’ve been inspired before but not done anything about it (and then there was that one time I was inspired to write Homestuck fic and tried but it didn’t work out). I think a big part of why I felt able to go for it this time was that this was kind of a training wheels situation. The area I felt least confident about before writing this fic was dialogue — I didn’t think I was able to write anything that sounded like what normal people would say, never mind managing to produce something in the character’s voice — and I was also very unsure about being able to get people to act in character. With this fic, all the dialogue was already written for me (although I just picked a few key lines), and some of the characters’ actions were already determined in advance while others were constrained. The only character whose actions were not all shown on screen (besides the bailiffs) was Phoenix, and I’d already got the basic outline of what he did in place, so it was just a matter of filling in any blanks, and trying to get the narration not to sound out of place for his POV (though since it was third person, there was some leeway there — being in his voice would be nice but wasn’t absolutely essential).
As I continued to write fics, I was a bit hesitant with dialogue at first, but it turned out not to be nearly as difficult for me as I had thought. I don’t really worry much about it now. Maybe I was never as bad as I thought, or maybe this fandom is easier to get in a dialogue headspace for considering that canon is almost entirely told through dialogue. Keeping what the characters do in character is still a bit of a concern for me, but again not that much of a problem.
It probably also helps that I find the canon for this fandom on the less intimidating side, relatively speaking. I love Ace Attorney to bits, but it’s not exactly perfect in terms of everything that happens being completely plausible, character motivations always making perfect sense, and there being no plot holes. It veers into crackish at times (such as with Franziska having been a prosecutor from age 13, with no real discussion of how that was possible, even though they could have had her be just a year or two younger than Edgeworth and then she would still have started eyebrow-raisingly young, but not to this ridiculous degree). And as I understand it, the writers were working one game at a time, so that for example even though in the first game being framed for murder by Dahlia is part of Phoenix’s past, the writers didn’t have that in mind as they wrote. Playing the English translation adds the existence of typos (to a noticeable extent in Trials and Tribulations), which gives a less polished air, and the game being nominally set in the US but people and places ranging from slightly to very Japanese.
Taken together, this means that I can feel my work is good enough even if it too might have some things about it that are implausible, and that I (a British person) don’t have to try to show in my fics a setting that is completely authentically American or completely authentically Japanese. (I like the idea of the setting being Japanifornia; and feel that a year living in Japan around the time the first game came out followed by reading quite a bit of manga over the next two decades, plus a lot of exposure to US fiction media and lurking online in spaces where Americans are among the more prominent nationalities qualifies me to write that, whereas I wouldn’t feel at all able to write something set in Japan and would not be confident of doing a good job writing something set in the US.)
Some of this overlaps with Homestuck. (There are definitely plenty of crackish elements there too; and while Hussie had the major plot points mapped out well in advance smaller details mostly got determined as he wrote.) I find Homestuck’s prose tougher to live up to, though. I think the character voices would be trickier to get right; while they are more dramatically different from each other in some ways than the Ace Attorney characters’, which ought to help, that also means that if you miss it will end up sounding quite cringey, and they are also probably further from my own way of speaking than the Ace Attorney characters’, which seem, relative to the Homestuck characters’, fairly bland and neutral to me. I of course don’t know how much of that is the translation and how much that was in the original. There’s also more word play and careful word choice in Homestuck.
For me, Ace Attorney is also easier to find fic inspiration in. There’s a reason so many Homestuck fics are AUs: at least some of the characters don’t meet in person until quite far into events, and at that point they are limited in what they can do due to what’s already happened up to that point. Writing missing scenes or alternative POVs risked Hussie writing that himself at some later point. AUs are great, and offer a lot of scope for creativity, and I loved reading all the different worlds people came up with to put the Homestuck characters in, but they do require a certain amount of worldbuilding, and once you’ve gone to that trouble you’ll typically be writing something with a full plot, so that’s quite an investment of time and effort. For Ace Attorney, the world already exists in enough detail for one shots, and while I do have some plottier fics envisaged down the line, the ones I started with were all pretty minimal, and bounced off the existing canon plot.
Points of interest
I wanted to try and get this in Phoenix’s voice, at the age he is when this takes place. One feature I incorporated to try to achieve that was mixing some fairly advanced vocabulary words (particularly ones he might have learnt as part of his study of law, like “jeopardy”, used here in a literal as well as metaphorical sense) with some more childish phrasing, such as saying the Judge is “telling him off” (initially I had a more formal phrasing there, something like “he’s being rebuked by the Judge”), since he’s at a transition point here from childhood to adulthood. I also used the metaphor of coming up with the right answer but with the wrong working out in a maths problem, because I thought as a student at a US university maths is probably still part of his daily life.
The other thing I did with the voice was try to make it seem more frantic in the early part, and more deliberative (though with the occasional moment of panic since he is after all still on trial for his life) once he’s not on the spot any more and has a chance to think things through at his leisure. I’m not sure how well I pulled that off.
The part about Payne being taken in “maybe just for a second” is because although I think Payne’s words about Mia trusting Phoenix work really well with him knowing Phoenix didn’t eat the necklace, we do see a reaction from Payne after Phoenix makes that claim where he’s surprised enough that his hair has flipped up. (Of course, it could be amazement that Phoenix would say something so daft rather than momentary belief that astonishing thing actually happened.)
It was difficult to write Mia believing Phoenix ate the necklace while Payne isn’t fooled without making Mia look incompetent or at least making it look like Phoenix thinks she’s incompetent. I made sure to have him stress that it’s just because her trust in her clients is that strong, and to state several times that he thinks she’s good at her job. That had the nice side effect of establishing at this early stage of their friendship the admiration for Mia’s skill that we see from Phoenix elsewhere in canon.
At the same time, as I was editing it occurred to me that part of the reason Phoenix doesn’t initially tell the truth, instead saying what he thinks is the most likely to help him and Dahlia rather than being completely honest (at least with Mia in advance of the trial) and letting Mia handle things, might be some unconscious sexism on his part: maybe that’s why he assumes he knows better than a qualified lawyer even though he’s still studying. He’s certainly not the most sexist character in canon, but he has his moments, and at the end of the day he is a man living in a sexist society. I had him consciously realise towards the end that actually he doesn’t know better than Mia (although not why he might have thought he did). You could take his decision not to reveal that he didn’t actually eat the bottle even after he’s resolved to “give Miss Fey all the facts” as being a case of him still not completely trusting her to know better than him, due to sexism.
Or you could take it at face value that he’s assuming he’ll get another opportunity to talk to her in private before the trial’s over, and that he thinks that will be soon enough to let her know about that, and doesn’t want to make his lawyer look like a fool in court if he doesn’t have to. Either way, this was a tricky point to handle, because evidently in canon he doesn’t say at this time that he was bluffing about the necklace, but I’d written him having been shamed into realising he needed to be completely honest so Mia could do her job. This was the best reason I could come up with to explain that. (An earlier draft leant more into him still thinking he knew best when he decided not to say anything about the necklace, even though he thought he was trusting Mia at that point, but that was before the sexism angle occurred to me, so it wasn’t for that reason that I had it like that.)
The part about trusting Dahlia just naturally came up in explaining why he felt now that it was safe to tell the truth where he hadn’t before, and I thought it was nice. There is of course the dramatic irony that we all know Dahlia absolutely has done plenty of wrong things, and the whole truth will definitely make her look very guilty, because she is, and she will forfeit her life as a result of it coming out. But I also like the contrast: Phoenix has had a revelation about trusting two women in his life, and he’s absolutely right to trust one of them and absolutely not right to trust the other. There’s complexity here rather than a straightforward “trust people” or “trust women rather than paternalistically trying to do the best thing for them” moral (even though the part about not paternalistically trying to do the best thing for women is very much a good lesson to learn).
Bonus: the first draft
Since I still have my first draft (which is not the case for my later fics), I thought I might as well post it so you can see how much it changed. (Quite a lot!) It’s presented as-is, but I’m pretty sure I intended the first person parts to be italicised to show they were what Phoenix was thinking (the notes app doesn’t have formatting). Looking at it again now, I’m struck by what a large proportion those parts are. I changed most of it to third person when I edited; but I guess it being there originally was probably a product of my naturally writing in second person — these parts were probably easier to put into first than third person when I was converting as I went.
This first one, on A Bluff to Remember, focuses a lot on how I came to be writing it and to be writing anything at all, but in future ones there will be more about why I made certain decisions, pointing out various things I did in the fics, and explaining what I had in mind where there wasn’t a place in the fic to say something explicitly. (There is a bit of that in this post too; if that’s all you’re interested in feel free to jump to the “Points of Interest” cut.) Some of this (in particular the pointing out things I did) may or may not already be clear to the reader. I want to comment on it because I honestly don’t know whether or not people will pick up on these things. (I welcome any “I see what you did there” comments on any of my fics, or on these commentary posts, so I can be happy to discover at least some of my readers did catch some of these!)
A warning: there may be spoilers in these commentaries. Obviously for my fics, but also for canon. With regards to Ace Attorney (which is the only fiction-based fandom I have posted for so far), I am currently not very far through Apollo Justice, and don’t envisage needing to refer to any of that (I will mention on the post in question if I do do so), but I may reference anything from the original trilogy.
My history with writing
I mentioned in my previous post that I’d been reading fic since 2010, so for almost 14 years by April 2024. But I never expected to write anything myself. I didn’t think I was good enough. I know of course that there is no minimum standard for fanfic, and that’s as it should be, but I couldn’t have brought myself to post anything I wasn’t satisfied was at least ok. I also (mostly) didn’t have any inspiration for any fics. I did have inspiration for an original novel series, which I wanted to be able to write sometime, even though I wasn’t at all confident I could do it justice. Indeed, I’d wished there was a way to get someone who was good at writing on board with a partnership whereby I provided the synopsis and world-building and they did the rest.
I hadn’t got any further with that than making some notes on the world-building, and I hadn’t done much else in the way of fiction writing either, beyond creative writing for English at school. The main exception is what I would now call crack self-insert historical RPF crossover with nineteenth century literature, which I wrote with a friend at university before I had any idea what fanfic was, taking it in turns to produce an installment, purely for our own enjoyment. We got up to 170K words before one of us (it was me) procrastinated indefinitely on writing the next bit. I was happy to write that because I was only sharing it with my friend and because it was silly so as long as it was funny and had interesting twists and turns it didn’t really matter if it was well-written (although I still tried to do my best with it).
Other than that, I tried to do NaNoWriMo one year because a different friend who wasn’t good at taking no for an answer pressured me into it. I didn’t have much inspiration or an outline of the plot or anything, so unsurprisingly I think I only got a couple of thousand words into that. There was also the fanfic in the form of a poem that I wrote in 2016 in reference to a Reddit post mocked on the blog We Hunted The Mammoth (which I posted in the comments on WHTM at the time and have now also posted on AO3). And then one time I did have an idea for a fic, after the appearance of Brain Ghost Dirk in Homestuck. I tried writing it, but it came out pretty bad, and I didn’t get very far with it before abandoning it.
The necklace
I started playing Ace Attorney in winter/spring 2024, and as I mentioned in the previous post, I was looking for fic before I’d even finished the first game. I knew that people shipped Phoenix and Edgeworth, but I also knew that people shipped a lot of things, so I was expecting “I guess I can see it; I’ll probably enjoy that ship among others but be as happy to imagine they don’t have any romantic feelings for each other”, not “oh wow, this is practically canon”. (Before I got to the part that triggered the latter realisation, I was actually vaguely shipping Phoenix with Gumshoe since Gumshoe seemed to like Phoenix enough to go out of his way to help him.)
I tried to avoid spoilers when reading fic, but inevitably there were some things that would come up that people had thought were too minor to warrant tagging; and even some of the summaries were spoilery. (It is hard to write summaries that don’t contain spoilers, particularly when your fic centres round some particular plot point!) I’d also already spoilered myself a little reading the Wikipedia article about the game, and reading some Steam reviews. I think between all of that and the game itself showing you what happened at the beginning of some of the cases, Turnabout Goodbyes was the first case where I didn’t have some idea in advance who the killer was (and I was spoilered about interrogating the parrot in that one); and after that only The Stolen Turnabout, Bridge to the Turnabout, and maybe (I can’t remember for sure) Rise from the Ashes and Turnabout Big Top. I knew Edgeworth hadn’t really committed suicide by the time I got to the part where it was suggested that he had. None of that is on anyone else but me, of course — I could have chosen not to look for Ace Attorney fic till I’d played all the games. At least, partly due to the things being referenced not always being spelled out and partly due to it not always being clear where something might or might not have been changed from canon, I often didn’t know for sure what was going to happen, or the details. Certainly I was still able to enjoy the games.
One of the things I was spoilered for was the necklace that appears in Turnabout Memories (along with Dahlia being a murderer). This was an example of something I didn’t have a clear picture of in advance. I’d seen references in around three fics, and knew that Phoenix ate a poisoned glass necklace but was fine, and that the necklace came from Dahlia, but I didn’t know he ate it in court to get rid of it as evidence, and I had formed the impression that Dahlia got him to eat it, whether through manipulation, force, or some kind of mind control.
Everyone seemed pretty unanimous in this being one of those Ace Attorney moments where they just casually ask you to believe something inherently implausible (which it certainly is!). Some of the fics were joking about Phoenix’s apparently superhuman powers to survive injury (taking this together with other incidents, such as his fall off Dusky Bridge). I guess I was expecting to see it pretty clearly spelled out in canon that he did eat the necklace, so that the possibility that the implausible thing actually didn’t happen had been ruled out, whether we actually saw it happen on screen or whether we were told about it in a context where we could take it the person wasn’t lying (such as Phoenix mentioning it while he is the player character, without going on to think something about how that didn’t actually happen), or whether there was some concrete evidence of it having happened (such as a medical report from him getting checked out at hospital afterwards).
Then when I played Turnabout Memories, the supposed eating of the necklace happened while Phoenix was out in the lobby while we, playing as Mia, stayed in the courtroom. After he came back and said that he’d eaten it, I was very aware that so far what we had seen was as consistent with that being a lie as it was with it being the truth, and as I kept playing I was half expecting something more definitive and half expecting that it would in a twist be confirmed to have been a bluff, even though I knew that couldn’t be the case if there were all those references in fics to this being something that actually happened.
But I got to the end of the case and there was nothing to make it any clearer that Phoenix did eat the necklace nor that he didn’t eat it.
Writing the fic
I really wanted to share the fact that the interpretation in which Phoenix didn’t eat the necklace fit canon just as well as (or maybe even better than) the interpretation in which he didn’t. At that time, my friend Onward_and_Upward hadn’t played Ace Attorney yet (I would introduce her to it when I visited her a few weeks later), so I couldn’t just discuss it with her. If I was still on Twitter, I might have tweeted about it, but probably not, because most likely none of my followers had played the game and even when I was tweeting about my usual topics I rarely got much response unless I was replying to someone else’s tweet. In any case, if I had done that it would have been seen by a few people around the time I tweeted it and then disappeared into the depths of my timeline.
I’m not sure what order these happened in, but (a) it occurred to me that a fic posted to AO3 which presented this scene from Phoenix’s POV, showing him lying about eating the necklace and explaining why he did that, would be a more effective way to get what was by now my headcanon in front of people: anyone reading the fic would likely have played Ace Attorney, so would be among my target audience, and even if it didn’t get seen much right when I posted it, it would remain discoverable by anyone who searched for the right thing; and (b) I found as I got ready for bed that I was already writing such a fic in my head, and actually I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d got it down.
So once I was in bed I got up the notes app on my phone and wrote it out. (I told myself I didn’t have to post it if I didn’t like how it came out, but it would give me the option and it would let me stop thinking about it so I could go to sleep.) At this point it was only 600 words, and went as far as Phoenix realising he’d have done better to pretend he swallowed it whole, and thinking that no-one was going to believe his story. It ended with “They totally believed it” in parentheses, which I guess was the voice of an omniscient narrator although up to that point it was in third person limited. (I might well have been writing in second person in my head, since that’s definitely what comes most naturally to me, and translating to third as I typed. I know I decided to go with third person for this fic because I wanted as many people to see it as possible, in order to get the headcanon out there, and I was aware second person is a dealbreaker for far more people than third person is.)
The next day I copied what I’d written into a text editor app so I could save it as a .txt file and transfer it to work on it on my laptop. In place of dialogue from the game I wanted to use, I’d written a brief summary of it in parentheses, since of course I couldn’t remember the exact wording. I knew I needed to go back and play through the game again so that I could replace those parts by the actual dialogue, and also check that everything I had written was consistent with what was shown. Fortunately, since the incident in question comes not that long before the end of the case, I still had a save file from shortly before it (actually, from the multiple choice spot right before Mia holds up the necklace, which is partly why I didn’t have the fic start any earlier, although that first draft started there too so it was where I wanted to begin things anyway). I played through again, as far as when Phoenix starts telling the court what really happened when he met Doug Swallow, and I took a screenshot at every piece of dialogue or other event, so that I could refer to it easily while writing.
(I’m sure there are Ace Attorney transcripts online, and I could have just looked one up. But for some reason I don’t want to do that: I want to screenshot everything for myself. By the end of the first episode of Bridge to the Turnabout I was screenshotting as I went on my first playthrough, which does make it take a lot longer since you have to stop every now and then and wait minutes for it to catch up with all the screenshots. But I’m very glad I did that, because it’s been really useful to be able to refer to them when writing some of my fics. I’ve also been doing that with Apollo Justice, which is one reason I haven’t got very far through it despite starting to play it six months ago: I think for example it took me three or four sessions of a couple of hours each just to get through the first episode of Turnabout Corner. I’ve also gone back to screenshot Turnabout Beginnings because I have a couple of fics very focused on that, and I’ve started to do it for Recipe for Turnabout because I needed to know for An Open Book just what it was Gumshoe said about being able to read Phoenix’s thoughts on his face. I’m planning to work through the rest of the original trilogy before getting back to Apollo Justice, which is another reason why it’s going to be a long time before I finish that. This also means that what I’ve posted so far, and what I will be posting in the near future, either didn’t/doesn’t need me to look through any of the cases, or only needs what I’ve already screenshotted: thus the preponderance of fics about Dahlia and Iris. I have various other things drafted that I can’t post till I’ve played through again and screenshotted some of the other cases.)
I played past the point where my draft stopped just to be on the safe side that I had everything I needed. I was pleased to note that what I had written did seem to be consistent with what happened in the game. However, I also noticed something I hadn’t when I played the first time: if you take it that Phoenix is lying about having eaten the necklace, it actually sounds like Winston Payne has picked up on this. When he says “Trusting your client is the most noble thing a defense attorney can do” and then “And it’s heartwarming to see that you placed this much faith in Mr. Wright”, that comes across as him subtly dissing Mia because it’s so implausible that Phoenix ate the necklace and Mia has ended up not even questioning this ridiculous thing because she really trusts Phoenix. I was surprised to find more canon support for the idea Phoenix didn’t eat the necklace (not that Payne’s lines don’t work if he did, but in my view they work even better if he didn’t), and even more surprised to find my interpretation now included Winston Payne having worked out what was going on (and had the good sense to play along) when Mia hadn’t. But after all, he must have some degree of competence to have won cases in the past (even against rookie defense attorneys), and it’s not like it would be that hard to figure out Phoenix was bluffing.
So when I edited my draft, I extended it to include this aspect, and that led to the discussion of trust towards the end of the fic. It was now more than simply a presentation and justification of my headcanon: it was the start of Mia’s and Phoenix’s friendship and in particular their mutual trust, it touched on the theme of attorneys trusting their clients which comes up repeatedly in canon, and it explained why Phoenix would finally tell the truth about his meeting with Doug Swallow shortly after Payne said that (which I had felt was a little unclear in canon).
Posting
Once I’d edited my draft, I had something I was happy enough with that I decided I did want to post it. I didn’t do that right away, though. I wanted to wait till 24th April 2024, which I see as a nice date and which was only a few weeks away. That was particularly important to me since for all I knew then this might be not just my first but my only fic; if I was only going to have one thing posted, I wanted it to be on a date I considered special. But this has continued to be my practice for subsequent fics: I don’t post something as soon as I’ve drafted it. Sometimes, as mentioned, I need to play through some part of the game again first in any case, and sometimes I know it needs more thorough editing after I’ve spent some time away from it. But even when something is theoretically ready to go, I wait. I like to post on a carefully chosen day, whether that’s the same date as it is within the fic, or a date that fits the themes (such as Halloween), or just a date that I find pleasing. In the first two cases, I will have in mind a specific date for a specific fic, often months or even almost a year in advance. (This year, for example, I was writing something in late October that had spooky elements, and I knew it wouldn’t be ready to post this Halloween, so I decided I will post it on Halloween next year.) In the third case, I’ll know in advance that I want to post something, and then as the date approaches I’ll choose from among the things I have ready to go.
I’m well aware that this might seem a little silly, because the date doesn’t really matter, particularly since AO3 is an archive and people will be accessing the fics on any arbitrary future date. (Not that I care when people read: this is about having a nice posting date displayed.) But it works for me, because not posting straight away (usually) makes me leave long enough between drafting and a final pre-post edit for me to be able to come to it with somewhat fresh eyes, while at the same time having a date in mind acting as a deadline means I do actually get round to posting at some point, rather than perpetually leaving it a bit longer because maybe it could get better with even more editing, or just not getting round to taking the time to do the final edit, choose tags, make a summary, and get the formatting in place. So I will be continuing to do this. (Always having a number of fics I’ve drafted but not yet posted also takes the pressure off, so when I write something new I never feel like I’m producing something just for the sake of producing something.)
Probably the hardest part of the posting process for this one was coming up with a title. (Though the summary and tags were also a little challenging, particularly since I didn’t want to have any spoilers in the summary.) My first draft didn’t have a title; the filename was TaT1Headcanon.txt (for Trials and Tribulations 1 Headcanon — when I created the file I couldn’t remember the name of the case). The first working title was Phoenix Wright: Ace Bluffer, reflecting the fact that the fic showed him already bluffing well enough to be believed before he’d even started the career in which bluffing would become something of a speciality for him. That was… not great, but at least better than nothing. I then considered something like Bluffing and Trusting, which captured the themes of the extended piece though not very excitingly. The final title, A Bluff to Remember, plays on the name of the associated case, Turnabout Memories, and refers to the fact that Phoenix would probably remember this bluff partly because it was so outrageous but also partly because it led into the beginning of his relationship of trust with Mia and of his understanding that it’s important for a defense attorney to trust their clients. It’s not among my absolute top titles, but I’m happy enough with it; it does the job. (And in a happy coincidence, not many titles would come before that alphabetically, so it’ll probably stay as the first folder in my Writing folder for a long time to come, which is nice when it was also chronologically the first one.)
After posting
I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of views; I told myself I’d be happy if 20 people saw it. I think it reached that in the first day or maybe two, so I was pretty satisfied with that. I also got some kudos and a comment, so that was cool!
I had a bit of a funny relationship with this one in the weeks after posting. I’d only got as far as The Stolen Turnabout at that point, and as I was travelling a bit visiting friends and family it was a while until I played right to the end of Trials and Tribulations. I don’t recall for sure whether I already knew this when I played Turnabout Memories (though I think not), but before I got to Bridge to the Turnabout I already knew, again from spoilers in fic I was reading, that there was someone called Iris who was possibly related to Dahlia, and that they had something to do with Kurain. So I knew Dahlia would come back up after Turnabout Memories, and (much like while playing that case) I was torn between worrying that at some later point we’d get definite confirmation Phoenix did eat the necklace, and worrying we’d instead get told he was bluffing (even though, again, that seemed unlikely given every reference I saw in fic to the necklace seemed to take it as certain that Phoenix really ate it; I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the bluffing interpretation made so much more sense and so it would figure that it was intended by the writers).
In the former case, my interpretation that he was bluffing would turn out to be invalid (unless you confined things to just Turnabout Memories and ignored whatever came later), while in the latter it would be kind of nice to have the interpretation actually be canon, but it would mean I hadn’t come up with something new, just worked out a twist that was coming before it was actually presented. Either way, I didn’t think it would make my fic worthless: if it turned out to be canon that Phoenix was bluffing, I was still adding something with a story that told that scene from his POV (well, unless we actually got that in canon in flashback, but I wasn’t expecting that), while if it turned out to be canon that he wasn’t, then I would have written an AU that was compliant with what we saw of canon up to the end of Turnabout Memories. So I wasn’t planning on deleting it. But I did feel either outcome would be a bit embarrassing, like I’d tried to be a bit too clever and ended up with egg on my face.
And then I read a fic which didn’t mention Dahlia in the summary or tags but had Phoenix getting suddenly triggered by making tea because Dahlia had used drugged tea to make him do what he wanted, and I took that to be canon and thought it was probably going to turn out that he definitely did eat the necklace, because Dahlia got him to do it while he was under the influence of that. So then I was just waiting for it to turn out that my interpretation had been wrong. I stopped checking how many hits I was getting on the fic because I didn’t want to think about all those people reading it thinking “wait till she finds out what happens later”. When I played Bridge to the Turnabout, whenever there was a scene that looked like it might conceivably be leading up to that revelation, I was bracing myself and sort of cringing a little in advance. I almost couldn’t believe it when I got to the end and there still hadn’t been anything to confirm or deny that Phoenix ate the necklace.
Once that had sunk in, I was able to come back to feeling proud of what I’d written. (I guess it’s always possible that there may turn out to be something in the second trilogy or the Investigations duology that makes the bluffing interpretation canon or not canon, though I don’t think it’s likely, but I’m not really bothered about that because if it turns out not to be canon, it’s still valid going only by the original trilogy, while if it turns out to be canon, it’s not as embarrassing to have presented as my idea something that we were only told in later games, and so which players of the game when it was first released wouldn’t have known.) I think if I could choose to have an Ace Attorney fan read just one of my fics, I’d make it this one, at least out of what I’ve posted so far, partly because I’m back to being evangelical about that headcanon, and partly because I think this is among my better works in terms of writing.
Second guessing
That definitely doesn’t mean it’s perfect, though! Both before and after posting there were various things that occurred to me as possible issues. One is Phoenix referring to Mia as “Miss Fey”. I had him call her that because I thought I remembered him doing so in canon in this case, but it doesn’t come up at all in the part I screenshotted, and everyone refers to her as “Ms. Fey” in Turnabout Beginnings, so I’m wondering now whether I got that wrong. (I’ll be able to check whenever I get around to replaying Turnabout Memories, and correct if necessary.)
The other main one was whether it was plausible for Phoenix to have the chance to hide the necklace. The way I wrote it, the bailiffs were inside the courtroom, and there were maybe 20 or 30 seconds between Phoenix coming out into the lobby and the bailiffs apprehending him, during which he was unobserved. But I’m not at all sure they wouldn’t stay outside in the lobby the whole time, where they’re shown in the background we see whenever there’s a scene in the lobby; and if they were inside, you’d think they’d run after Phoenix and be right behind him as he went through the doors, or even if they weren’t supposed to chase anyone unless told to, that they’d still not be far behind since someone shouts to them straight away to do just that. It’s also not clear whether, ignoring him possibly being within sight of the bailiffs the whole time, the elapsed time between Phoenix running out and being brought back is long enough for him to decide on a hiding place and put the necklace there, covering it up again.
That felt like a plot hole, and I pondered it several times as a possible reason for the whole premise of my fic not to work. But I kept coming back to the fact that according to the alternative interpretation, while he was in the lobby Phoenix first chewed the necklace into small pieces and then swallowed the pieces. That seems like it would take longer than what I had him do; and you would also think if he was being observed by the bailiffs during that time they would (probably successfully) try to stop him doing that, and if they didn’t manage to that they would report that he’d done it as soon as they’d got him back through the courtroom doors (or possibly that they would call an ambulance for him instead of taking him back into the courtroom). Ultimately I figure my scenario of what happened may not be 100% plausible, but if it’s more plausible than the version where he does eat the necklace, that’s good enough.
I also wondered, despite how well I think the bluffing interpretation fits a lot of what we’re shown in this case, and despite how it naturally leads into the part about trust, whether what I wrote here made sense with Phoenix’s behaviour elsewhere in canon. Would he really go on to so consistently and firmly trust his clients after he’d seen Mia being made a bit of a fool of by her trusting him when he told an absurd lie? Or would that be a reason to be more skeptical of what they tell him? This is already slightly an issue with what happens in this case regardless of whether you think Phoenix was bluffing about eating the necklace: he definitely lies about what took place between him and Doug Swallow, telling multiple inaccurate versions before finally volunteering the correct one, and so you would think he would be very aware when dealing with his own clients that they might not be telling him the truth. But the version where he bluffs about eating the necklace and Payne subtly throws shade at Mia for believing him does make it harder to reconcile. You could argue that his trust in his clients isn’t about assuming they’re telling the truth, but about assuming they’re innocent. That works better with either interpretation of what happened with the necklace; but you would think Dahlia having turned out to be a murderer who was trying to frame him for her crime would have made it difficult for Phoenix to be confident in anyone’s innocence in the future, and while that’s an issue either way, it’s more foregrounded in my fic so may stand out more as odd.
Why this fic?
Obviously the fact that I was struck by inspiration is a big part of why this was the first fic I wrote and posted. Lurking on the AO3 and FanFiction subreddits, I sometimes see people saying they want to get into writing fanfic but they don’t know what to write, and while they should absolutely do what they want, I always feel like that’s getting the cart before the horse: don’t start writing because you have a general desire to write, start writing because there’s something in particular you want to write. (I realise that’s not what works for everyone, though; I don’t really get on very well with prompt lists in general and I don’t think I could ever do something like Yuletide, but there are plenty of people out there who love that kind of thing.)
That’s not the whole story though. I’m sure I’ve been inspired before but not done anything about it (and then there was that one time I was inspired to write Homestuck fic and tried but it didn’t work out). I think a big part of why I felt able to go for it this time was that this was kind of a training wheels situation. The area I felt least confident about before writing this fic was dialogue — I didn’t think I was able to write anything that sounded like what normal people would say, never mind managing to produce something in the character’s voice — and I was also very unsure about being able to get people to act in character. With this fic, all the dialogue was already written for me (although I just picked a few key lines), and some of the characters’ actions were already determined in advance while others were constrained. The only character whose actions were not all shown on screen (besides the bailiffs) was Phoenix, and I’d already got the basic outline of what he did in place, so it was just a matter of filling in any blanks, and trying to get the narration not to sound out of place for his POV (though since it was third person, there was some leeway there — being in his voice would be nice but wasn’t absolutely essential).
As I continued to write fics, I was a bit hesitant with dialogue at first, but it turned out not to be nearly as difficult for me as I had thought. I don’t really worry much about it now. Maybe I was never as bad as I thought, or maybe this fandom is easier to get in a dialogue headspace for considering that canon is almost entirely told through dialogue. Keeping what the characters do in character is still a bit of a concern for me, but again not that much of a problem.
It probably also helps that I find the canon for this fandom on the less intimidating side, relatively speaking. I love Ace Attorney to bits, but it’s not exactly perfect in terms of everything that happens being completely plausible, character motivations always making perfect sense, and there being no plot holes. It veers into crackish at times (such as with Franziska having been a prosecutor from age 13, with no real discussion of how that was possible, even though they could have had her be just a year or two younger than Edgeworth and then she would still have started eyebrow-raisingly young, but not to this ridiculous degree). And as I understand it, the writers were working one game at a time, so that for example even though in the first game being framed for murder by Dahlia is part of Phoenix’s past, the writers didn’t have that in mind as they wrote. Playing the English translation adds the existence of typos (to a noticeable extent in Trials and Tribulations), which gives a less polished air, and the game being nominally set in the US but people and places ranging from slightly to very Japanese.
Taken together, this means that I can feel my work is good enough even if it too might have some things about it that are implausible, and that I (a British person) don’t have to try to show in my fics a setting that is completely authentically American or completely authentically Japanese. (I like the idea of the setting being Japanifornia; and feel that a year living in Japan around the time the first game came out followed by reading quite a bit of manga over the next two decades, plus a lot of exposure to US fiction media and lurking online in spaces where Americans are among the more prominent nationalities qualifies me to write that, whereas I wouldn’t feel at all able to write something set in Japan and would not be confident of doing a good job writing something set in the US.)
Some of this overlaps with Homestuck. (There are definitely plenty of crackish elements there too; and while Hussie had the major plot points mapped out well in advance smaller details mostly got determined as he wrote.) I find Homestuck’s prose tougher to live up to, though. I think the character voices would be trickier to get right; while they are more dramatically different from each other in some ways than the Ace Attorney characters’, which ought to help, that also means that if you miss it will end up sounding quite cringey, and they are also probably further from my own way of speaking than the Ace Attorney characters’, which seem, relative to the Homestuck characters’, fairly bland and neutral to me. I of course don’t know how much of that is the translation and how much that was in the original. There’s also more word play and careful word choice in Homestuck.
For me, Ace Attorney is also easier to find fic inspiration in. There’s a reason so many Homestuck fics are AUs: at least some of the characters don’t meet in person until quite far into events, and at that point they are limited in what they can do due to what’s already happened up to that point. Writing missing scenes or alternative POVs risked Hussie writing that himself at some later point. AUs are great, and offer a lot of scope for creativity, and I loved reading all the different worlds people came up with to put the Homestuck characters in, but they do require a certain amount of worldbuilding, and once you’ve gone to that trouble you’ll typically be writing something with a full plot, so that’s quite an investment of time and effort. For Ace Attorney, the world already exists in enough detail for one shots, and while I do have some plottier fics envisaged down the line, the ones I started with were all pretty minimal, and bounced off the existing canon plot.
Points of interest
I wanted to try and get this in Phoenix’s voice, at the age he is when this takes place. One feature I incorporated to try to achieve that was mixing some fairly advanced vocabulary words (particularly ones he might have learnt as part of his study of law, like “jeopardy”, used here in a literal as well as metaphorical sense) with some more childish phrasing, such as saying the Judge is “telling him off” (initially I had a more formal phrasing there, something like “he’s being rebuked by the Judge”), since he’s at a transition point here from childhood to adulthood. I also used the metaphor of coming up with the right answer but with the wrong working out in a maths problem, because I thought as a student at a US university maths is probably still part of his daily life.
The other thing I did with the voice was try to make it seem more frantic in the early part, and more deliberative (though with the occasional moment of panic since he is after all still on trial for his life) once he’s not on the spot any more and has a chance to think things through at his leisure. I’m not sure how well I pulled that off.
The part about Payne being taken in “maybe just for a second” is because although I think Payne’s words about Mia trusting Phoenix work really well with him knowing Phoenix didn’t eat the necklace, we do see a reaction from Payne after Phoenix makes that claim where he’s surprised enough that his hair has flipped up. (Of course, it could be amazement that Phoenix would say something so daft rather than momentary belief that astonishing thing actually happened.)
It was difficult to write Mia believing Phoenix ate the necklace while Payne isn’t fooled without making Mia look incompetent or at least making it look like Phoenix thinks she’s incompetent. I made sure to have him stress that it’s just because her trust in her clients is that strong, and to state several times that he thinks she’s good at her job. That had the nice side effect of establishing at this early stage of their friendship the admiration for Mia’s skill that we see from Phoenix elsewhere in canon.
At the same time, as I was editing it occurred to me that part of the reason Phoenix doesn’t initially tell the truth, instead saying what he thinks is the most likely to help him and Dahlia rather than being completely honest (at least with Mia in advance of the trial) and letting Mia handle things, might be some unconscious sexism on his part: maybe that’s why he assumes he knows better than a qualified lawyer even though he’s still studying. He’s certainly not the most sexist character in canon, but he has his moments, and at the end of the day he is a man living in a sexist society. I had him consciously realise towards the end that actually he doesn’t know better than Mia (although not why he might have thought he did). You could take his decision not to reveal that he didn’t actually eat the bottle even after he’s resolved to “give Miss Fey all the facts” as being a case of him still not completely trusting her to know better than him, due to sexism.
Or you could take it at face value that he’s assuming he’ll get another opportunity to talk to her in private before the trial’s over, and that he thinks that will be soon enough to let her know about that, and doesn’t want to make his lawyer look like a fool in court if he doesn’t have to. Either way, this was a tricky point to handle, because evidently in canon he doesn’t say at this time that he was bluffing about the necklace, but I’d written him having been shamed into realising he needed to be completely honest so Mia could do her job. This was the best reason I could come up with to explain that. (An earlier draft leant more into him still thinking he knew best when he decided not to say anything about the necklace, even though he thought he was trusting Mia at that point, but that was before the sexism angle occurred to me, so it wasn’t for that reason that I had it like that.)
The part about trusting Dahlia just naturally came up in explaining why he felt now that it was safe to tell the truth where he hadn’t before, and I thought it was nice. There is of course the dramatic irony that we all know Dahlia absolutely has done plenty of wrong things, and the whole truth will definitely make her look very guilty, because she is, and she will forfeit her life as a result of it coming out. But I also like the contrast: Phoenix has had a revelation about trusting two women in his life, and he’s absolutely right to trust one of them and absolutely not right to trust the other. There’s complexity here rather than a straightforward “trust people” or “trust women rather than paternalistically trying to do the best thing for them” moral (even though the part about not paternalistically trying to do the best thing for women is very much a good lesson to learn).
Bonus: the first draft
Since I still have my first draft (which is not the case for my later fics), I thought I might as well post it so you can see how much it changed. (Quite a lot!) It’s presented as-is, but I’m pretty sure I intended the first person parts to be italicised to show they were what Phoenix was thinking (the notes app doesn’t have formatting). Looking at it again now, I’m struck by what a large proportion those parts are. I changed most of it to third person when I edited; but I guess it being there originally was probably a product of my naturally writing in second person — these parts were probably easier to put into first than third person when I was converting as I went.
Miss Fey is holding his necklace and saying it will prove Dollie killed - someone, he’s not sure who exactly, that part’s not important. All Phoenix can think is that he can’t let that happen. Grabbing it from her hand and getting out of there is a matter of pure reaction. He’s pushing through the courtroom doors before he manages to form a coherent thought.
Hold in, what am I doing? Dollie isn’t a murderer! This won’t harm her - quite the opposite, it’ll clear her name! I need to take it back so it can be examined and everyone can see there’s no poison in here.
His pace falters as he makes to turn back, before a further thought strikes him.
But what if... the real poisoner was trying to frame her? What if she knew she’d been landed with the poison container somehow and was panicking and then she saw me and knew I’d protect her? Ok, that’s pretty unlikely, this bottle is probably entirely innocent, but just in case - it’d be better for it to disappear than for it to turn out there *was* poison in there!
No-one else has come through the doors yet, and the lobby is deserted. There’s a trash can - he manages to drop the necklace in, cover it with some of what’s already in there, just enough so it isn’t immediately obvious, and be at the far doors, well away from the trash can, as the bailiffs burst out of the courtroom. (It’s a wrench to part with such a treasured gift, but what can he do? Keeping Dollie safe is more important.)
Ok, phew, I ditched it in time - but what now? They’re going to look for it and find it in about two seconds. It’s no good pretending I’ve still got it - they’ll search me, and when they can’t find it they’ll know I hid it and look for it anyway. What can I say so they won’t search the courthouse? Oh, I know-
(I ate it!)
Ha, brilliant, they can’t search *inside* me! Wait, no, that was a *terrible* idea. They’re just going to wait until it... reappears and *then* analyse it. Except when I can’t produce it after a reasonable amount of time there’s going to be big trouble.
...Unless they think they don’t need to analyse it? Yes, this could work - I supposedly swallowed it, so when I don’t suffer any ill effects it’ll be clear there wasn’t any poison in there. ... Oh, except the bottle was stoppered. So any poison wouldn’t have gotten into my system. Miss Fey won’t miss that. What if I said the bottle got broken? In any case, that makes sense, to get it down I’d have had to have-
(about chewing it into small pieces)
Oh crap, I just claimed to have *eaten broken glass*. There’s *no way* they’re going to believe that. Particularly not that I did that and am totally fine. And I can’t pretend to be hurt, they might think it was because of the poison. I should have just said I saw the stopper had come out before I swallowed it. Or even better, just pretended I swallowed it intact and by the time I had to own up to the lie the trash cans would have been emptied and they’d never find it, that was the obvious thing to do, why am I such an idiot?
(They totally believed it.)
