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Thinking of Maya, Dahlia, and converging at the same point
(Well, now that I'm mostly all set up on here, time for some actual nerding out)
Spoilers for Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations
There's an inexhaustible amount of things that can be said about Bridge to the Turnabout, and about the intricate family and character relationships that make up the Fey storyline, but one of the things that have obsessed me the most is that: in the end, it was Maya who channelled Dahlia. And this is revealed at, and as, simultaneous critical moments in both of their stories, in which they feel the full weight of what their lives have been up until then bear down on them all at once; that is, the burden of all the violence they've known and experienced, most of which points back to the Fey Clan as a place of origin; that is, their family, and who they've been in relation to it; that is, all that happens to be their sense of selves.
I consider Maya and Dahlia to be two characters whose defining struggle is the threat posed to their sense of selves, by which I mean their sense of being human, of being a fully realized person with full control and autonomy over that personhood. This is something that has been, in both their cases, threatened by the Fey Clan; not only as a family — and by extension, the duty one conventionally owes toward one,— but as an institution associated with Kurain Village and the Channeling Technique, where traditions of hierarchy are firmly entrenched and one's worth is determined by her spiritual power. All of who Dahlia is comes back to having been abandoned by her mother for her lack of said power, and all of what Maya suffers is the result of tradition demanding that she be next in line for leadership. Their human dignity is disregarded for the sake of a power dispute*.
And they've both responded to this at opposing extremes: Dahlia is always jumping from one act to the next, always in a position where she's performing and deceiving and has never settled into her own skin in the way of a stable identity; meanwhile, Maya could not run from her own body if she tried, and so she tries instead to live as herself without restraint nor apology.
Though, ironically, Dahlia conceives of herself as doing this too. It's two forms of embracing a sort of selfish disorder in order to take control of their own lives: Maya does so in hedonism, and Dahlia becomes excessively egocentric. It's a "fuck you" to their circumstances, because Maya IS a person in control of her self, and not a stepping stone to bring Kurain to whichever ideal of balance its adherents imagine, so she'll eat all the good food and watch all the shows and indulge in all the hobbies in the world that make her happy that she wants; Dahlia IS a person in control of her self, and not a worthless child undeserving of the love and security that a family should bring all because she wasn't born lucky, so she'll live like she's the only person in the world that matters, finding purpose in each subsequent victory she has over the people who would prevent her from it.
So to come back to the actual moment of channelling: what drives me insane about it is that the purpose of Dahlia being channelled after her death was so that she would kill Maya— but it's Maya who ends up channelling her, and in doing so saves her own life! Death is the ultimate blow to one's personhood and autonomy, because it ends the functioning of the body, and thus one's full control over it. This is true even for the Feys, because even if they have the possibility to visit the living after death, they are not in control of their ability to do so: that remains entirely at the whim of those spirit mediums with still living and breathing bodies. Dahlia is terrified when her soul is released from Maya's body, because she knows that there's no way she's coming back.
Both of these women, whose greatest battle is against the forces that would devalue them completely, arrive at the same exact point and place, in the same body, blended together and not quite themselves as a result; though in the end, Dahlia is the one who loses herself entirely, while Maya has taken back her life and her control over it**.
My point is that in many ways, Dahlia is Maya's dark mirror, which is what makes their arc convergence very satisfying (and heartrending). Like Maya, the primary source of Dahlia's suffering is her family, but unlike her she deals with it in a very "tries to do away with it entirely; lives as an inversion of it, thus continuing to refer to it indirectly" sort of way. Dahlia tries to act like she's a staunch nihilist who's above it all, but she still has a moral reference point that she holds to strongly, which is contempt for gathering power and status, which she sees as exemplified in her mother. Dahlia's attempts at escaping everything that leads her back to family have all failed: she barely makes it to the end of the year as Melissa Foster before she's revealed as Dahlia Hawthorne again — by Mia, a Fey like herself,*** — she acts like Iris' betrayal has made her entirely worthless to her and yet she relies on her for help once more, and she still knows her sister so well inside out that she can pose as her convincingly, and at the end of her life she's once again caught up in the violent power disputes typical of the Feys, as a tool for the mother who never even wanted her to begin with.
Maya's never had a break in her life being about Kurain and the Feys, and in fact, she's often personally involved in trying to keep the whole place together: she's actively preparing for the possibility that she would become the new Master, she takes on an older sibling role with Pearl, she's concerned for the reputation and standing of Kurain and the Channeling Technique so she helps advertize the place in any way she can (like agreeing to the Kurain exhibit that Adrian suggested), she connects her self-worth to channelling so strongly that she's shown herself to be passively suicidal when she's useless at it (although this is definitely connected to her feelings of being useless in general, but I felt that her ability to channel features in it strongly enough that it was worth mentioning).
Neither of them, due to a combination of internal, psychological factors and external, circumstancial ones, could have ever extricated themselves from the Feys in any way that mattered, but Maya at least had the luck to be put in a position where her empathy and will to improve her circumstances put her on a path toward healing and a greater handle on her life, while Dahlia found it too difficult to look at her suffering at its source, all the while still drowning in it, and couldn't find a way to live her life without constantly running from the feeling. And she died, while Maya lived.
The most important aspect of all this to me is how power and authority and its pretexts (in this case, family and tradition that institutionalize themselves) have shaped these young women's lives for the worst, and how terrible it is to see how those forces have such similar, dehumanizing results that they make it so that even in all the ways that they appear distinct, Dahlia and Maya's story have so much in common. Although, personal agency is still at play here in a not-insignificant amount, and at the end of the day, there was simply no way that Dahlia could truly live her life while constantly running from it, regardless of whether she even believed she could stop. Which I find incredibly tragic.
( footnotes )
Spoilers for Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations
There's an inexhaustible amount of things that can be said about Bridge to the Turnabout, and about the intricate family and character relationships that make up the Fey storyline, but one of the things that have obsessed me the most is that: in the end, it was Maya who channelled Dahlia. And this is revealed at, and as, simultaneous critical moments in both of their stories, in which they feel the full weight of what their lives have been up until then bear down on them all at once; that is, the burden of all the violence they've known and experienced, most of which points back to the Fey Clan as a place of origin; that is, their family, and who they've been in relation to it; that is, all that happens to be their sense of selves.
I consider Maya and Dahlia to be two characters whose defining struggle is the threat posed to their sense of selves, by which I mean their sense of being human, of being a fully realized person with full control and autonomy over that personhood. This is something that has been, in both their cases, threatened by the Fey Clan; not only as a family — and by extension, the duty one conventionally owes toward one,— but as an institution associated with Kurain Village and the Channeling Technique, where traditions of hierarchy are firmly entrenched and one's worth is determined by her spiritual power. All of who Dahlia is comes back to having been abandoned by her mother for her lack of said power, and all of what Maya suffers is the result of tradition demanding that she be next in line for leadership. Their human dignity is disregarded for the sake of a power dispute*.
And they've both responded to this at opposing extremes: Dahlia is always jumping from one act to the next, always in a position where she's performing and deceiving and has never settled into her own skin in the way of a stable identity; meanwhile, Maya could not run from her own body if she tried, and so she tries instead to live as herself without restraint nor apology.
Though, ironically, Dahlia conceives of herself as doing this too. It's two forms of embracing a sort of selfish disorder in order to take control of their own lives: Maya does so in hedonism, and Dahlia becomes excessively egocentric. It's a "fuck you" to their circumstances, because Maya IS a person in control of her self, and not a stepping stone to bring Kurain to whichever ideal of balance its adherents imagine, so she'll eat all the good food and watch all the shows and indulge in all the hobbies in the world that make her happy that she wants; Dahlia IS a person in control of her self, and not a worthless child undeserving of the love and security that a family should bring all because she wasn't born lucky, so she'll live like she's the only person in the world that matters, finding purpose in each subsequent victory she has over the people who would prevent her from it.
So to come back to the actual moment of channelling: what drives me insane about it is that the purpose of Dahlia being channelled after her death was so that she would kill Maya— but it's Maya who ends up channelling her, and in doing so saves her own life! Death is the ultimate blow to one's personhood and autonomy, because it ends the functioning of the body, and thus one's full control over it. This is true even for the Feys, because even if they have the possibility to visit the living after death, they are not in control of their ability to do so: that remains entirely at the whim of those spirit mediums with still living and breathing bodies. Dahlia is terrified when her soul is released from Maya's body, because she knows that there's no way she's coming back.
Both of these women, whose greatest battle is against the forces that would devalue them completely, arrive at the same exact point and place, in the same body, blended together and not quite themselves as a result; though in the end, Dahlia is the one who loses herself entirely, while Maya has taken back her life and her control over it**.
My point is that in many ways, Dahlia is Maya's dark mirror, which is what makes their arc convergence very satisfying (and heartrending). Like Maya, the primary source of Dahlia's suffering is her family, but unlike her she deals with it in a very "tries to do away with it entirely; lives as an inversion of it, thus continuing to refer to it indirectly" sort of way. Dahlia tries to act like she's a staunch nihilist who's above it all, but she still has a moral reference point that she holds to strongly, which is contempt for gathering power and status, which she sees as exemplified in her mother. Dahlia's attempts at escaping everything that leads her back to family have all failed: she barely makes it to the end of the year as Melissa Foster before she's revealed as Dahlia Hawthorne again — by Mia, a Fey like herself,*** — she acts like Iris' betrayal has made her entirely worthless to her and yet she relies on her for help once more, and she still knows her sister so well inside out that she can pose as her convincingly, and at the end of her life she's once again caught up in the violent power disputes typical of the Feys, as a tool for the mother who never even wanted her to begin with.
Maya's never had a break in her life being about Kurain and the Feys, and in fact, she's often personally involved in trying to keep the whole place together: she's actively preparing for the possibility that she would become the new Master, she takes on an older sibling role with Pearl, she's concerned for the reputation and standing of Kurain and the Channeling Technique so she helps advertize the place in any way she can (like agreeing to the Kurain exhibit that Adrian suggested), she connects her self-worth to channelling so strongly that she's shown herself to be passively suicidal when she's useless at it (although this is definitely connected to her feelings of being useless in general, but I felt that her ability to channel features in it strongly enough that it was worth mentioning).
Neither of them, due to a combination of internal, psychological factors and external, circumstancial ones, could have ever extricated themselves from the Feys in any way that mattered, but Maya at least had the luck to be put in a position where her empathy and will to improve her circumstances put her on a path toward healing and a greater handle on her life, while Dahlia found it too difficult to look at her suffering at its source, all the while still drowning in it, and couldn't find a way to live her life without constantly running from the feeling. And she died, while Maya lived.
The most important aspect of all this to me is how power and authority and its pretexts (in this case, family and tradition that institutionalize themselves) have shaped these young women's lives for the worst, and how terrible it is to see how those forces have such similar, dehumanizing results that they make it so that even in all the ways that they appear distinct, Dahlia and Maya's story have so much in common. Although, personal agency is still at play here in a not-insignificant amount, and at the end of the day, there was simply no way that Dahlia could truly live her life while constantly running from it, regardless of whether she even believed she could stop. Which I find incredibly tragic.
( footnotes )