[INFO] [with spoilers for AA5 case3]
Aug. 29th, 2014 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cardboard_journalismName: Myriam Scuttlebutt
Game: Ace Attorney Dual Destinies, case 3 only.
Description: She's a short (4' 9", 144 cm) schoolgirl who wears a cardboard box over her head, using it as a very conspicuous disguise and never showing her face, if she can help it. The boxes are quite big and stretch down to cover her torso. Underneath the box she has the appearance of a normal girl with indigo colored hair and eyes. She wears a black Themis Academy school uniform with black loafers and white socks. She has her hair in twin-tails held together with "bulldog" paper binder clips. She also wears white knee-pads and has numerous adhesive bandages on her legs and fingers.
Personality: She first comes across as anti-social and mean-spirited, but really she's just shy, sensitive, and socially awkward. The box disguise is both a way to hide her emotions and to spy on people for gossip. She's extremely devoted to journalism and can be quite clever, but not exactly cunning.
Short summary: She's a one-shot character who fills the role of "annoying reporter," like Lotta Hart or Spark Brushel.
Long summary: Myriam Scuttlebutt is a senior at Themis Legal Academy. She is studying under the judge course, but really she wants to be a legal journalist. (All students must study under the judge, prosecution, or defense classes.) She also attends what she calls "undercover reporter school" outside of the Academy. She is the sole member of the Newspaper Club, which means she does all of the reporting, editing, and publishing. She's immensely and sincerely prideful of her work, even if the paper is mostly gossip she made up. During the course of events in case 3, she appears as the first witness who makes easily disproved claims about Juniper Woods, who she seems to hate. It's later revealed she didn't really hate Juniper, but was jealous and wanted to be her friend. She had also embraced Professor Aristotle Means' theory of "the ends justify the means," only she applied it to journalism and installed tape recorders around campus to gather gossip and took photographs without permission. By the end of the case she has made friends with Juniper and (tentatively) agreed to help her and her friends embrace honest means to uncover the truth and bring an end to "the dark age of the law." She's still rather dysfunctional, as she refuses to abandon her cardboard box disguise and even tries to give Juniper and her friends their own boxes, and doesn't understand why they don't want to wear them. However, she also has accepted some new members to the Newspaper Club, and they catch her showing emotion over potentially graduating and leaving her new friendships behind.
Mock trial script: Scuttlebutt writes a script for a mock trial. The title is Rouge et Noir: Crimson Blood and Dark Judgment. The actual contents are not revealed, but it's stated this trial allowed special rules for both attorneys to pay bribes to the judge while court was adjourned. Each attorney could also bring up to three dollars worth of items with them to simulate fabricated evidence. The tagline was: "Welcome to the darkest mock trial ever, where the end justifies the means!"
Japanese name: Uwasa Atsume, which literally means collects rumors.
Head-canon:
* She keeps a pet hamster. (Implied when she says her newspaper makes a great hamster-cage liner.)
* She's enrolled in the Judge course because it gives the most broad study of the law, and so better prepares her for being a journalist. (She probably also thinks she can fall back on being a judge if journalism doesn't work out somehow.)
* She's a fan of mystery novels and detective stories and that's how she became interested in law in the first place. (Implied by her mock trial script.)
* Before she came along, the "Themis Herald" was a small newsletter put out by a handful of students in the Newspaper Club every three months. It had no pictures and was published on normal paper. This upset her "ace reporter" ambition, so she pushed to expand the paper: give it as many pages as a real newspaper, print it every day, and use actual newsprint. Her outrageous demands, the shocking decline in quality of stories from having to print something every day, and her unwillingness to compromise drove out the other members very quickly. Soon she was the sole member, and responsible for everything. That was fine with her, and she even started cultivating a "toxic" image of herself so no other students would try to join. (Though that changed as she got closer to graduation and realized the club would disband without any members.)
* The bandages are for paper-cuts and scuffs from falling to the floor to hide under her box.
* Cardboard boxes the size Scuttlebutt wears are actually relatively hard to acquire, unless you pay for them directly or order something that requires a box that big. Scuttlebutt acquires them the second way by placing bulk orders for ink, disinfectant, disposable cameras, and other things.
** They're also heavier than you'd think. Someone wanting to remove the box would have to expend some strength (and not have Scuttlebutt pulling back) to just pull the box off her.
* The game portrays Scuttlebutt as having all of her photos on file in her computer. The concept art says that Scuttlebutt's camera is a cheap disposable. Conclusion: Scuttlebutt not only takes all of her photos with a variety of cheap disposable cameras, she develops the film herself, and then scans it to her laptop.
* Scuttlebutt gets decent/above-average grades. Not 'prodigy-level,' but respectable enough to attend a high-end school like Themis. Where she really shines is her wholehearted dedication to journalism. The quality of the work might be low, but she keeps it up consistently and she knows what to do to stay relevant enough to keep people reading. Her assertion that "[the paper] is more popular than you think," is true.
* Scuttlebutt's obsession with journalism came from when she was a kid and she thought it'd be fun to play at being a "journalist" and make newspaper out of construction paper for her parents to read. Eventually Scuttlebutt graduated from drawing weird shapes for pictures and blank lines where the text would be to completely copying what was in the local newspaper, word for word, then trying to sell it to other people. She was told: "You just copied what others already said, there's no reason to read this." This inspired her solution: "Start making things up!" This dovetailed nicely with Professor Means' theories of "achieve the ends by all means," which she learned when she started attending Themis.
* Scuttlebutt's political opinions are still largely unarticulated, but as a law student she believes in the integrity of the judicial system and the importance of rule of law. She is also a strong supporter of the First Amendment right to Free Speech and a Free Press. Specifically, that she should be allowed to write and publish whatever she wants with no restrictions.
Misc. non-characterization notes (aka, I explain the joke):
* Her first box is labeled "Panda Ink, turns white to black!" This has several meanings. Pandas are known for looking cute, but in reality they're rather solitary and will attack humans out of irritation (but not aggression). The japanese version also writes "ink" as "INKI" with katakana, and this is a pun as the word "陰気" is pronounced "INKI" and means "gloomy/dismal/melancholic," like her personality. "Turns white to black," is also a metaphor for accepting falsehoods as true by overriding your common sense, and in the context of journalism specifically means portraying a positive event as negative, or vice-versa. Her box is also labeled "fragile," in reference to her sensitive personality, and "this side up" is printed upside down, indicating her assumptions are "turned around."
* Her second box is labeled "Wipe the past clean with Crime Cleaner. Get sparkling clean with brute force." A reference to her changed outlook after Athena forcibly corrected her and it foreshadows her laptop being wiped out. The note "danger: toxic" implies she still has the "abrasive" personality. God, that was painful to write. Explaining the joke is the worst. Most of this is obvious but not all of it though, so there you go.
Game: Ace Attorney Dual Destinies, case 3 only.
Description: She's a short (4' 9", 144 cm) schoolgirl who wears a cardboard box over her head, using it as a very conspicuous disguise and never showing her face, if she can help it. The boxes are quite big and stretch down to cover her torso. Underneath the box she has the appearance of a normal girl with indigo colored hair and eyes. She wears a black Themis Academy school uniform with black loafers and white socks. She has her hair in twin-tails held together with "bulldog" paper binder clips. She also wears white knee-pads and has numerous adhesive bandages on her legs and fingers.
Personality: She first comes across as anti-social and mean-spirited, but really she's just shy, sensitive, and socially awkward. The box disguise is both a way to hide her emotions and to spy on people for gossip. She's extremely devoted to journalism and can be quite clever, but not exactly cunning.
Short summary: She's a one-shot character who fills the role of "annoying reporter," like Lotta Hart or Spark Brushel.
Long summary: Myriam Scuttlebutt is a senior at Themis Legal Academy. She is studying under the judge course, but really she wants to be a legal journalist. (All students must study under the judge, prosecution, or defense classes.) She also attends what she calls "undercover reporter school" outside of the Academy. She is the sole member of the Newspaper Club, which means she does all of the reporting, editing, and publishing. She's immensely and sincerely prideful of her work, even if the paper is mostly gossip she made up. During the course of events in case 3, she appears as the first witness who makes easily disproved claims about Juniper Woods, who she seems to hate. It's later revealed she didn't really hate Juniper, but was jealous and wanted to be her friend. She had also embraced Professor Aristotle Means' theory of "the ends justify the means," only she applied it to journalism and installed tape recorders around campus to gather gossip and took photographs without permission. By the end of the case she has made friends with Juniper and (tentatively) agreed to help her and her friends embrace honest means to uncover the truth and bring an end to "the dark age of the law." She's still rather dysfunctional, as she refuses to abandon her cardboard box disguise and even tries to give Juniper and her friends their own boxes, and doesn't understand why they don't want to wear them. However, she also has accepted some new members to the Newspaper Club, and they catch her showing emotion over potentially graduating and leaving her new friendships behind.
Mock trial script: Scuttlebutt writes a script for a mock trial. The title is Rouge et Noir: Crimson Blood and Dark Judgment. The actual contents are not revealed, but it's stated this trial allowed special rules for both attorneys to pay bribes to the judge while court was adjourned. Each attorney could also bring up to three dollars worth of items with them to simulate fabricated evidence. The tagline was: "Welcome to the darkest mock trial ever, where the end justifies the means!"
Japanese name: Uwasa Atsume, which literally means collects rumors.
Head-canon:
* She keeps a pet hamster. (Implied when she says her newspaper makes a great hamster-cage liner.)
* She's enrolled in the Judge course because it gives the most broad study of the law, and so better prepares her for being a journalist. (She probably also thinks she can fall back on being a judge if journalism doesn't work out somehow.)
* She's a fan of mystery novels and detective stories and that's how she became interested in law in the first place. (Implied by her mock trial script.)
* Before she came along, the "Themis Herald" was a small newsletter put out by a handful of students in the Newspaper Club every three months. It had no pictures and was published on normal paper. This upset her "ace reporter" ambition, so she pushed to expand the paper: give it as many pages as a real newspaper, print it every day, and use actual newsprint. Her outrageous demands, the shocking decline in quality of stories from having to print something every day, and her unwillingness to compromise drove out the other members very quickly. Soon she was the sole member, and responsible for everything. That was fine with her, and she even started cultivating a "toxic" image of herself so no other students would try to join. (Though that changed as she got closer to graduation and realized the club would disband without any members.)
* The bandages are for paper-cuts and scuffs from falling to the floor to hide under her box.
* Cardboard boxes the size Scuttlebutt wears are actually relatively hard to acquire, unless you pay for them directly or order something that requires a box that big. Scuttlebutt acquires them the second way by placing bulk orders for ink, disinfectant, disposable cameras, and other things.
** They're also heavier than you'd think. Someone wanting to remove the box would have to expend some strength (and not have Scuttlebutt pulling back) to just pull the box off her.
* The game portrays Scuttlebutt as having all of her photos on file in her computer. The concept art says that Scuttlebutt's camera is a cheap disposable. Conclusion: Scuttlebutt not only takes all of her photos with a variety of cheap disposable cameras, she develops the film herself, and then scans it to her laptop.
* Scuttlebutt gets decent/above-average grades. Not 'prodigy-level,' but respectable enough to attend a high-end school like Themis. Where she really shines is her wholehearted dedication to journalism. The quality of the work might be low, but she keeps it up consistently and she knows what to do to stay relevant enough to keep people reading. Her assertion that "[the paper] is more popular than you think," is true.
* Scuttlebutt's obsession with journalism came from when she was a kid and she thought it'd be fun to play at being a "journalist" and make newspaper out of construction paper for her parents to read. Eventually Scuttlebutt graduated from drawing weird shapes for pictures and blank lines where the text would be to completely copying what was in the local newspaper, word for word, then trying to sell it to other people. She was told: "You just copied what others already said, there's no reason to read this." This inspired her solution: "Start making things up!" This dovetailed nicely with Professor Means' theories of "achieve the ends by all means," which she learned when she started attending Themis.
* Scuttlebutt's political opinions are still largely unarticulated, but as a law student she believes in the integrity of the judicial system and the importance of rule of law. She is also a strong supporter of the First Amendment right to Free Speech and a Free Press. Specifically, that she should be allowed to write and publish whatever she wants with no restrictions.
Misc. non-characterization notes (aka, I explain the joke):
* Her first box is labeled "Panda Ink, turns white to black!" This has several meanings. Pandas are known for looking cute, but in reality they're rather solitary and will attack humans out of irritation (but not aggression). The japanese version also writes "ink" as "INKI" with katakana, and this is a pun as the word "陰気" is pronounced "INKI" and means "gloomy/dismal/melancholic," like her personality. "Turns white to black," is also a metaphor for accepting falsehoods as true by overriding your common sense, and in the context of journalism specifically means portraying a positive event as negative, or vice-versa. Her box is also labeled "fragile," in reference to her sensitive personality, and "this side up" is printed upside down, indicating her assumptions are "turned around."
* Her second box is labeled "Wipe the past clean with Crime Cleaner. Get sparkling clean with brute force." A reference to her changed outlook after Athena forcibly corrected her and it foreshadows her laptop being wiped out. The note "danger: toxic" implies she still has the "abrasive" personality. God, that was painful to write. Explaining the joke is the worst. Most of this is obvious but not all of it though, so there you go.
