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off the top of your head: notes for characterization? what are the most essential traits of this character to you (personality traits, important connections/dynamics, voice)?

Lana is great because the case recontextualizes her behavior as it goes along, so there's a lot of extrapolating and theorizing to be done about her. and it makes looking back at her actions sooo tragic. like for example, her sprite of turning her back to the player character. obviously this feels cold and intimidating when you first see it - she feels above everyone in the room. but after you've unveiled the truth, you realize that her turning around feels more like Lana desperately trying to conceal her emotions when things get tense. she seems like a very genuine and caring person under her mask. the only thing that drives her to keep up appearances is her overwhelming loyalty to others.

Right so. the biggest trait of hers that sticks out to me is her self-sacrificial nature. she'll do anything to keep ema safe - she never bothers thinking about herself. and this is what wraps around and hurts her in the end. to help the people you love, you have to help yourself too. she's trying to wear a burden self-righteously, trying to make herself a martyr, all the while pushing past the fact that ema is being hurt by all of this. ema doesn't know what's happening. all she sees is her sister drifting away from her for seemingly no reason at all. lana thinks that she is shouldering the pain, but really, she's accidentally multiplying it.

um but in a more general sense, pre-RFTA lana is pretty interpretable because we don't get to see a lot of her in freedom. as long as Ema is her no.1 priority, and she's a kind and caring person (as per Ema's own words) then you've got her pretty much down pat in my eyes.

6. weave a web of dynamics through the cast for this character: which dynamics are you most interested in? both canonically and through extrapolation/speculation— which dynamics are the richest to you, and why?

6. weave a web of dynamics through the cast for this character: which dynamics are you most interested in? both canonically and through extrapolation/speculation— which dynamics are the richest to you, and why? In terms of canon, lana is of course my immediate pick for most interesting ema relationship. they're sooooo much more compelling to me than lots of the sibling pairs in aa actually, which I don't know if that's a hot take? I'd easily rank them above the gavin brothers personally for example. just....ema thought Lana gave up on her but really Lana was giving everything she had....ugh im gonna be sick.... in terms of speculation. ema and trucy don't have a solidly established friendship or relationship in aa4. However. Hear Me Out. so I like thinking that the aa4 crew got a lot closer with each other after the events of the game concluded, and I THINK!! that trucy looked at ema and saw someone who had lost their purpose. someone who didn't know where to go now. I think she saw Phoenix. I think trucy is the person who would start inviting ema to their hangouts, and doing stupid silly tricks, and watching Ema's reaction to try and do what she could. and ema does not pick up on this at all btw she's not great at recognizing stuff like that. Ema and klavier is a duo that's been talked about a lot, and I agree that they'd make a killer comedic duo but I think it absolutely has to be the slowest platonic slowburn maybe ever, post aa4, and ema still has to find him godly annoying or else that's Not Right. ema dislikes him for reasons that run a lot deeper than just "glimmerous fop" and they'd have to unpack all of that before they made even a little bit of progress.

do you have particular niche takes on this character? defend those takes. (openly controversial takes are permitted, but also: hyper-specific headcanons which you believe in and no one else has considered enough to disagree with yet. pick a hill to die on.) OK SO LISTEN. TONE SWITCH TIME. i have SUCH beef with her soj official art. literally try to tell me this impostor on the bottom is ema skye. you would be wrong. i made my header image specifically avoiding this picture of her like the plague. they did something to her, they sanitized her, i can't tell you what!!!! i can't tell you why!!!! i can tell you the TRUTH though. that's not MY ema skye.

off the top of your head: notes for characterization? what are the most essential traits of this character to you (personality traits, important connections/dynamics, voice)?

Ema's such a funny assistant in RFTA that I feel people overlook. She's clearly got book smarts, and yet her actual common sense is, um. lacking. it usually wraps around to her being kind of an icon (i won't pay a single cent of my taxes!). But in general, it kind of kills me when I see how many people call RFTA Ema a copy of Maya. I always felt like Ema had more than enough differences besides just her science quirk. She was more naive, less snarky (her quips are usually funny because they're !!unintended!! on her part), and less emotionally mature than Maya. She can't put up walls and pretend like things are fine when they're not. tldr are we as a community aware that Peppy Teenage Girl is a descriptor that can apply to multiple different people? or is that out of our comprehension.

My favorite individual Ema Quirk (tm) is probably her habit of appraising objects. I think it's pretty funny. I'd also like to think she developed it partly because she has to live pretty frugally with Lana. god i love the skye sisters so much. if the most important person in the world to ema isn't lana you are doing something wrong, and ESPECIALLY vice versa. Obviously they have a complicated relationship but under all that is heaps of love. we know this. YEAH SO SPEAKING OF LANA,., it's clear that Ema looks up to her so so so much. and so imo post RFTA, once Lana is behind bars, she was subconsciously looking for someone to be that rock for her again. Enter Phoenix Wright, who Ema ends up idolizing as her savior enough to make another move across the world back to the states to repay him. whichhhh makes the news of his disbarment even worse, which makes her state in aa4 even worse. it's like a domino effect. In regards to AA4, I am. obsessed with how the forensics test impacted her worldview. she's not prepared to handle a world where things aren't black and white, right or wrong, a place where scientific objectivity isn't absolute. so she shoots blame onto klavier, repeatedly avoids talking about her failure (when she does, she blames others instead of realizing that sometimes, it's just not fair). SHE SAYS IT HERSELF ACTUALLY in a line I do think about alll the time > "I can't stand it when things are vague… especially in a case." < OUGHHH IM TEARING MY HAIR OUTTTT there's so much to talk about in that line.... in terms of her more visible characterization, of course i love her snackoo binging and her klavier hating is iconic. her, apollo, and trucy never get to a super fleshed out dynamic in my eyes during aa4, but i do like thinking about them getting close after it wraps. they're such a dysfunctional team i love them. i get sad seeing "aa4 group content" that's just klavier, apollo, and trucy....where's ema....she's such a necessary part of the dynamic to me... :( I also think her habit of using "ah!" (both to start her sentences and to exclaim) is pretty cute and something i've found myself utilizing more often.