Don’t make me give it a name

30 Day Ace Attorney Challenge, Day 13 - Saddest moment in the story: Literally everything that happens to Simon Keyes/Souta Sarushiro

It was a tough competition between this and Godot’s exploding toasterface (and admittedly, due to my own biases, the phantom reveal probably could have beaten it out if Simon Blackquill had been allowed to show literally any reaction at all), but for me the saddest of AA moments is when Keyes starts spouting his ridiculously miserable backstory.

At that moment you realize not only the sheer extent of shit he has been wading through his entire life, but the simple fact that he can’t even imagine a reality that doesn’t run on the concept of the strong eating the weak. From his perspective, he’s just doing what he needs to survive; literally the only thing that he has ever seen any adult who was involved in his entire upbringing do. He was essentially raised as a sociopath and tormented until he snapped. Of course he’s gonna go around enacting elaborate chess-themed revenge schemes, I mean really. I found myself almost wanting him to be able to get away with it…

Tangentially, I also think it’s refreshing to have a genuinely sympathetic AA villain. Much as I love them, most of them are either dumb douches or unrepentantly evil, and even the ones I’m supposed to be feeling sorry for, I’m not (like Acro… why in the hell should I feel sorry for him? Yeah we all wanna kill Regina every now and then, but you don’t actually go out and try to do it, man).

But anyway, back on topic of sadness, the worst part was when you see his last words to Knightley, where he’s obviously having mixed feelings about it. And it’s like, he didn’t kill the guy because he wanted to. He killed him because he thought he had to. Because for him there was never an option not to.

К фанфику @nanisorero

Trying to prove you DON’T experience something is actually ridiculously hard especially when you are nowhere close to understanding what it is you’re trying to disprove.

It’s a lot like playing a game of Where’s Waldo, but you have no idea what Waldo looks like and you rely entirely on the partial description of him you get from other people.

Take this image, and find “Jeremy” in it:

At first you’re like, “Who tf is Jeremy? That’s a thing?”

And then from discrete descriptions you hear in the hallways, you find out Jeremy has a red shirt.

And so you point to everyone on that picture who has a red shirt like, “Hey hey, red, THIS could be him. Certainly one of these is him!”

But, alas, you’ve gotten it confused with someone similar, but not him at all. This happens when you mistake romantic attraction or aesthetic attraction for sexual attraction or, if you’re aro, platonic attraction for romantic attraction. You’ve misidentified him because he was wearing the same color shirt and looked somewhat like what others were talking about.

You go online and ask for more descriptions of Jeremy, and you may gleam a few details. People are like, “Oh no, Jeremy has stripes on his shirt, and a funky…I don’t know, over the shoulder scarf thingy. Look, it’s really hard to explain. Trust me, if you have seen Jeremy, you would KNOW him.” Which is like ??? confusing, although it is true.

If only you could prove Jeremy isn’t on your board you would know you’re ace//aro, but it’s hard to ever be 100% certain he isn’t there when you have no clue what he looks like.

Which is why it is important for aces//aros to just, forget about trying to be 100% certain and just identify anyways. That’s what helped me the most, knowing that I didn’t have to prove something, I could just assume, “Yeah, if I had felt sexual attraction, I would know. I don’t have to prove without a doubt I don’t in order to use the word.” It’s okay, you give yourself your own validation.