was kind of unprepared for how much I'm coming to enjoy manfred von karma's character now I'm getting into ace attorney again. and before anyone feels the need to write a comment I wanna be clear that yeah he's still a total bastard alongside the more tragic aspects of his character and I'm not defending his crimes - your honour he did do that and I have the metal detector to prove it - but he's an interesting bastard because weirdly I think he manages to be just as much of a human disaster guy as like, phoenix or miles or apollo or any other of the many wacky lawyers. putting a cut here because I'm bad at explaining why I think he's so interesting so this wound up frankly embarrassingly long
okay so he's rigid and perfectionist but also has zero impulse control when the things he takes to be fact - to take for the obvious example, his perfect record - are disrupted. obviously there's the impulsive, non-premeditated murder of gregory edgeworth, where he's reeling from his first ever penalty, but then there's everything else that comes through from that. he either adopts or at the very least mentors miles edgeworth for like a decade, seemingly on a whim, for surprisingly nebulous reasons. there's even decent evidence he gives a shit about miles, despite the later framing-for-murder deal; like he's doing it partly to ruin gregory's life and reassert his control, but he could've done that far more easily by teaching miles to be legendarily garbage at lawyering or to obviously present false evidence or the like, and instead takes time to teach miles the reasons for prosecuting manfred actually believes in.
and speaking of framing for murder, he goes completely overboard at the 15-year DL-6 anniversary, despite the fact that he's fully in the clear for the crime and there's no indication that fact will ever change. and you can attribute all that to a combination of perfectionism and spiting gregory, sure, but it's still kinda weird - for someone so controlled and seemingly put-together in nearly every aspect of his life, he's nonetheless completely hopeless at just leaving well enough alone, quite possibly because he's so tamped down on anything that isn't a part of being perfect at all other times.
he never does things by half measures; never fails to commit; never wavers even in ridiculously massive life-altering decisions like taking the goddamn child of a guy you killed under your wing. he makes really kinda spur-of-the-moment choices and sees them through to a ridiculous degree. his worldview wavers exactly once and the consequence is so disastrous that it never happens again. if not for the earthquake, if he'd just had time to internalise the lessons he could've learned from the loss of his flawless career, if he and gregory had talked - and I'm sure gregory would have wanted to - then he probably would have caught some unnecessary feelings of his own, with how utterly blindsided he was (you can interpret that as gay or not, I more mean the like disruption of worldview side of the feelings but also who knows? maybe he was gay as shit and that's why miles worked out that way. manfred von karma's love life is a deep mystery).
DL-6 defines the lives of so many ace attorney characters but I think it's easy to forget (or at least I wasn't remembering very well) how much manfred himself is included in that list, because unlike pretty much everyone else his career goes on the exact same way before and after, right up until the moment he chooses to jepoardise his innocence in DL-6. but his family doesn't, and his thoughts likely don't either, even if he's completely unapologetic for what he did. there's very little indication of what he's thinking and I doubt there's supposed to be, but that's what makes him interesting - he defines like most of the original trilogy through one connection or another but a lot of why is a mystery, beyond the obvious rage and resulting irrational haze of the penalty that caused him to kill gregory in the first place. so you get left with the contrasting impulsiveness and rigidity and calm and commitment and fury and a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. he has the supreme dedication to a cause of early-era phoenix, too, just in the exact opposite direction, a trait he passes onto miles and franziska but one they never quite match in fervour. he also has style; I feel like I gotta credit his fashion sense somewhere. cravat-wearing earring-having hair-slicked style king.
tbh in the end, what we see is composed of surprisingly relatable traits - perfectionism and the associated anxieties of breaking it; a desire to be in control of himself and also be perceived that way; and the seemingly uncontrollable impulsiveness - just amped up to 11 in the worst way possible. makes me want to write something with him in it someday, maybe even a fix-it, because there's a whole lotta nuance there that's honestly really interesting to me, and again, the potential to join the ranks of the Disaster Lawyers (by which I mean. like every lawyer in aa actually they are human tornadoes one and all), if only things had gone just a little different. and of course there's what did happen, which is fascinating in itself, and doesn't take away from his nuance even slightly. both routes are cool; what he was and what he could have been, the former of which is very very shadowed by the latter. he's just a really compelling villain beyond the obvious 'cold calculating mastermind' stuff - 'cause he's not even a mastermind, really, at all. he killed a guy in a fit of rage with no plan and got super fucking lucky getting away with it, and still managed to bungle it fifteen years on, entirely on purpose, and the fifteen years inbetween are frankly wild. he's an idiot. he's hopeless. he probably could have turned things around, once, but he never got the chance because he never gave himself one and then it was too late. 10/10 haunting-the-narrative antagonist, I think he's neat