The false beard
originally written December 28, 2015
A particular and horrible evil as rightly portrayed in the Ace Attorney / Professor Layton story
and as wrongly idolized among its so-called fans
The following contains major spoilers for Ace Attorney: Phoenix Wright and Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Miles Edgeworth – Prosecutor’s Path. It also deals with the issue of sexual abuse and violence, including that towards children, so be warned.
And whosoever shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea. – Mark 9:42
“And what the hell is the deal with the fugly beards?”
I suspect it’s two-fold:
1. The desire to cover their faces for shame, because they know their deeds are evil.
2. Trying to appropriate ancient symbols of wisdom and veneration. These people dearly wish to be held in high regard for their sick ideas. This is why they CAN NOT restrain themselves from writing about it and even giving interviews affirming it. – rycamor, commenter on Vox Popoli
In college, one of my graduate symposium research presentations was on “The Moral Portrayal of Immorality in Fiction and Art.” At the beginning thereof, I described two erroneous positions: One: the idea that creative works are immune from moral judgement; and Two: The idea that some immoral acts may never be portrayed, that is it immoral to even mention them.
The axiom on which I based my opposition to position two was thus: The correct view of the Universe must address every thing in existence.
And the correct view of the universe is the Catholic Faith. That’s right I said it, and I am basing everything I’m going to say upon this idea. Everything I ever say is upon and within this idea, and that is my point right here.
Every human being has a religion, i.e. what they believe to make sense and give meaning to reality. It is not the church you attend, but the universe in which you live, as Chesterton said. It is not one part of one’s life, one’s “faith life” that stands alongside one’s social life, work life, etc., even though many people, including professed Christians, think of it this way. Even priests preaching talk about one’s relationship with Christ as though it were just one of various relationships, not the all-defining core of one’s existence, which it is.
So also, Catholic fiction, as Flannery O’Connor and J.R.R. Tolkien knew, is not just a niche genre of pious stories. It is all fiction subcreated by people with the correct view of reality. This is not to say that stories made by non-Catholics cannot show forth the correct view of reality, that is to say, the Truth. Very very many of them do, and are to be glorified for it. And insofar as they are True, Good, and Beautiful, and many many are, they are not in conflict with the Catholic view of existence. The Faithful of medieval times cherished the stories of the Greek gods; they just knew they were not to be worshiped in place of the True God.
So those people, often pious and well-intentioned, who think that some issues of immorality should never be mentioned in stories, are wrong. They are often confusing what is moral with what is appropriate for children, because they are tainted with the modern notion that fiction is really just a time-waster for children.
Fiction is about Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, and as such as it is about Truth, it must be able to confront all of reality. So everything must be able to be dealt with, but it must be dealt with rightly.
However, for a long time I doubted the ability of fiction-makers to deal with some issues rightly at all. I knew of many cases where they messed it up terribly, either communicating the loathsome opposite of the Truth, or treating the matter with the wrong focus or without the right sensitivity, subtlety, or compassion.
One issue where I thought this to be the case was rape. An example of bad treatment of it is an episode of the eighties show The Equalizer: the teenage daughter of a family visiting New York is kidnapped and trafficked for sex. There is a scene where she’s chained to a bed and the customer, a big, threatening, bearded man, leers and then approaches. She screams and the scene cuts. Her father goes to the Equalizer, an ex-spy who helps people under threat, for help. The horrible thing is, it then becomes all about how the father had never been a real man: he wouldn’t stand up to his domineering wife, and that now he can learn to be. And when they rescue the girl and hear what happened, he bursts out to the wife: “There’s nothing left of her to heal!” This is awful.
I mean, sure a guy could learn manly courage in the need to save his child, but the way it was focused on, how the daughter herself didn’t seem to matter except as a means through which he could learn this, was all all wrong. The point is to save the person who is victimized, not what you get out of the process.
I particularly thought superhero comics were incapable of rightly dealing with the issue of rape, because I read of so many times when they did it all wrong, disgracefully making it a pornographic opportunity for titillating the reader, thereby making the writers and artists and readers parties to the violation of the characters, rather than expressing the horror and injustice of such crimes.
But then I read the Batman arc right before A Death in the Family. Many people know that Jason Todd, during his time as Robin, possibly killed someone. This someone was a rapist. I won’t rehash the story, because I didn’t put this in my spoiler list, but the way it is dealt with is subtle enough to avoid being party to the violation of the victim, and properly emphasizes the magnitude of the evil, the horror, and tragedy, without being glib about the moral gravity of the possible (likely) murder of the rapist either. And the fact that the following arc, which may possibly be the most morally devastating thing that has ever happened in fiction, deals subtly and truthfully with abortion, fits with this terribly compellingly.
So, I had now seen that superhero comics could deal rightly with rape. But there was another evil that I was still very doubtful that any fiction could rightly portray: the sexual abuse of children.
Pedophilia is one of the few sexual perversions that most people still regard, rightly, with hatred and disgust. But the assault against this moral standard is getting going. Articles with titles like “I’m a pedophile but not a monster” are appearing in major publications, and the LGBT activism front is turning towards getting it off the mental disorders list. UPDATE: We can certainly see this assault has advanced greatly in the intervening years!
And for years, the practice has been idolized among female fans of various stories. They ship men with boys, often characters with whom there is absolutely no basis for such insinuations. They fetishize the idea of child molestation between characters who, in truth, share compelling and innocent bonds of friendship, mentoring, and sacrificial love. These rotten women have so infected the fandom of my most beloved video game series of all, Professor Layton, that I never go looking for fanart of it, because doing so inevitably finds images of this disgusting, false, and evil fantasization. Still, it is only a fantasization, and can be ignored and abjured while immersing in the story.
In a landmark crossover, the Professor Layton story joined with that of Ace Attorney. Now it is established the characters and events inhabit the same universe, and one cannot fully appreciate either story without the other, thereby meaning: they are one story. This is wonderful.
Both these series, now one, have an ongoing theme of the hero saving people. This is very normal, you say. Ah but it is more deep than that. Not just saving people from danger of death, or from false accusations, or from labyrinths of illusion, though there is lots of that. But saving those with souls mired in bitterness and wrath, revenge and lies, and bringing them into peace and joy, justice and truth. Drawing them out of the darkness of evil by non-self-conscious example and the relentless will for their good. By the way that last thing is the definition of Love.
A shining example of this is Phoenix Wright thus saving Miles Edgeworth. This then creates a bond of reciprocal friendship and common striving for Truth. It is intensely moving how Phoenix becomes for Edgeworth a figure of inspiration to whom he has an intense gratitude, and leads him to, in turn, do the same for others. This is how Light and Love spread.
Too predictably, the same sort of female fans also wish to pervert this relationship to suit their fetishistic fantasies. They seek to twist a masculine friendship into a homosexual concubinage. An objection to the idea, besides the simple outright rejection it deserves, is that men with homosexual inclinations overwhelmingly have certain psychological things going on that are nowhere in evidence with these characters. Here we go now; we will see if some SJWs try to get me banned for “homophobic behavior” for what I’m about to say.
Homosexuality is not the other side of the coin of heterosexuality. It does not work the same way. Heterosexuality is the biological reality of the human reproductive system. If someone has homosexual tendencies, something is psychologically out of order. It is not always the same, but there are a lot of issues that vast numbers of homosexually-inclined people share. For men, this often includes issues with one’s father and, tragically, frequently, having been sexually abused in childhood.
This brings us back to the issue that I doubted any fiction could deal with rightly. The Ace Attorney & Professor Layton story is amazing in its portrayal of Goodness, as aforementioned. It, particularly the Ace Attorney part, is also amazing in its portrayal of evil.
In Ace Attorney Investigations 2, Prosecutor’s Path, one of the spinoff games with Miles Edgeworth as the protagonist, we meet a young prosecutor named Sebastian Debeste. At first it seems like he’ll be a arrogant jerk type, but as it turns out he is comically stupid and downright adorable. He has clearly been shielded from the fact of his own ignorance and incompetence by coddling and flattery, but as the game progresses he starts trying to learn how Edgeworth is making deductions and finding the facts.
Then, we meet his father, Blaise Debeste, one among the most evil villains in the series. He turns out to be an orchestrator of a black market auction of crime evidence, murderer, falsifier of evidence, blackmailer, and part of a conspiracy for assassination. He also says several intensely creepy things with a strong pervert vibe.
Blaise continually calls Sebastian an idiot, while Sebestian strives in vain to help him and win his approval. As it becomes clearer that Blaise is guilty of a murder, the crucial evidence is that he is wearing a false beard, something Sebastian realized before anyone else, because he knew him best, but ran off before revealing.
After Blaise’s crimes, and chin, have been uncovered, Edgeworth and Kay Faraday, his assistant, discover Sebastian having been kidnapped by Blaise’s men and tied up in his garage. Then follows an exchange between Edgeworth and Sebastian in the final iteration of the “Logic Chess” minigame, usually a battle of wits to get someone to reveal secrets, but in this case, an effort to lead Sebastian to find the path out of despair.
After this, Sebastian is the one to, at the crucial moment, rediscover the evidence that his father tried to destroy and prove his guilt in court. When he enters the courtroom, there is a moment that is very disturbing, but then, turns around to be triumphant. Blaise steps forward to threaten Sebastian with a line full of sexual menace. But Sebastian withstands, and orders him back to the witness stand. At that moment, because of what Edgeworth said to him earlier and the confidence and purpose drawn from it, he doesn’t need anyone else to save him now.
I didn’t want to accept it, but after my second playthrough I have to say I do believe that Blaise did somehow sexually abuse Sebastian at some point in his childhood. As described above, it is a subtle implication, so I can respect someone interpreting otherwise, but that is what I think. Thus I think the way in which Sebastian was saved by Edgeworth is important in expressing the truth of the hope of healing from such an evil. Unlike in The Equalizer, the victim isn’t reduced to the means through which someone else learns manly courage, it is learning manly courage that allows the victim to heal.
As Joseph Sciambra, former gay porn star, writes, homosexually-inclined men are always yearning, for acceptance and for masculinity, and many of them suffered from unloving fathers and/or sexual abuse. They seek in their homosexual relationships the love and the embodiment of masculinity that they didn’t get or didn’t perceive from their fathers, but it never truly fulfills those needs. It was not in disordered sexual acts, but in the true Love and masculinity of Christ, that Sciambra finally found peace, and all real Love will reflect Christ, even fictional. Edgeworth gave Sebastian an example of a purpose-driven life in pursuit of Truth, in a very masculine way. In the end of the game, Sebastian speaks of Edgeworth much as Edgeworth speaks of Phoenix, in inspiration with gratitude. The rescue from an abusive relationship has forged a new bond of true friendship.
The perversion of the sexual powers, meant to give life and create families, especially using them to victimize children, is a great evil. To craft fantasies of sexual exploitation about characters is not an act of love toward a story, but one of desecration.
But evil should not remain hidden in darkness, the truth of its deeds must be exposed to light. That is what Prosecutor’s Path is all about. It is a master stroke that the character who embodies the maxim, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” is actually the master villain of the game. Thusly, we should not refuse to portray such dark matters in fiction, as long as it is done so with Truth. Thus readers and players too can be drawn by its Beauty further into Goodness, where we all may live in Love everlasting.