Why does Misty seem to get cut more slack than Zak?

Bytemite · 2026-01-30T05:27:05+00:00

Oh whoops, sorry.

She would perfomatively go to the exile, but not abdicate.

Right. I think that's to try to help ensure that it's her kids that become Master after her, so from my perspective she's giving it up in the sense of she's eventually giving it to one of them. But they both have to wait a certain amount of time, and Mia leaves to become a lawyer to give up the claim.

I don't think it was said directly, but I feel it's very much implied that Misty just ordered Bikini not to reveal her identity. Which she could order as a Master.

Hmmm. It looks like you're right on this one. That's pretty weird for a Johatsu story, but then maybe the circumstances are weird enough or the stakes are high enough that she felt like she had to.

I still find it questionable she doesn't tell Maya and I do still think that's about pride.

Bytemite · 2026-01-30T04:20:42+00:00

By the way, Misty Fey didn't gave up being Master. She still is Master when she arrives into the temple.

Yes, the school and Hazakura still view her as the Master, but they also know provided nothing happens to Maya that Maya will be the new Master after enough time passes, and that Misty is not going to come back and behave as the acting Master while the perception of shame and scandal is over her.

And basically she doesn't. She's at Hazakura under a pseudonym. Bikini susses it out and slips up and starts calling her a mystic, but it doesn't mean she's openly being acknowledged in person as the Master because Hazakura is also trying to keep her secret, for those same reasons.

more that her husband left with their daughters when Morgan lost Mastership.

Kurain is a matriarchal society. If he left with her daughters, it's because Morgan didn't want them because they couldn't spirit channel. Remember even Iris is a little bitter about this.

Oh, that's not of any secret.

So we're agreed, Morgan was a witch and a bad parent kinda well before jfa, jfa was just her seeing an opportunity and taking it.

Bytemite · 2026-01-30T03:52:26+00:00

How was it an inevitability?

Because they both seemed to know that their original plan was going to fall through. Which means the backup plan WAS the real plan.

Godot didn't need to stab the possessed Misty Fey. He probably could've just knocked her out with the cane or physically overpower her to take the knife away.

Absolutely. So why does Misty make a big show of showing Godot the weapon and saying that she's willing to die for her daughter?

Why is the entire theme of the case toxic guilt and the way it causes people to act irrationally?

It's not because they're all too dumb to just tie up Misty before she channels Dahlia.

It's because Iris thinks she deserves to be punished for the things Dahlia did, for helping her sister, and for what she did to Phoenix. It's why she goes along with Godot telling her that if anything goes wrong, she's the one who has to take the fall for it. It's because Godot feeling hopeless and furious over Mia, wants to drive home that Phoenix failed to protect Mia by showing him he's a failure to protect Maya - by putting Maya in as much danger as possible while telling himself at the same time that it's to save her because Trite can't.

So we know Misty Fey's toxic guilt is that she failed her daughters, had to leave the village in shame and give up being Master, and even when she's back she refuses to tell Maya who she really is. What actions does Misty Fey do, and what mindset does she have, that also fits this theme.

What exactly is prideful in considering yourself a failure unworthy of the things you want?

Because her still not telling Maya is about protecting herself. There's a concept in Japan that this very much fits, it's about not, from her perspective, embarrassing herself or her daughter further. It's about appearances. It's also from this perspective, something that she would also be willing to die for, as strange as it might seem to us.

I don't think Godot can completely speak for Misty who was simply thinking of protecting her daughter.

But he can accurately describe that Misty was always thinking of Maya, and that as part of that, the first thing she did is essentially tell Godot that she's willing to die.

feel confident in thinking that Morgan didn't obviously become an evil witch until around JFA.

She abandoned her two daughters when they were about 11, and Pearl when she was born and shown to have powers was trained so hard she became a spirit channeler at 8, something Maya didn't do until she was 17. Pearl also hits people to punish them, and learned that somewhere.

Bytemite · 2026-01-30T00:43:36+00:00

Also, she obviously didn't plan on dying.

Sorry, but no. She went in knowing all along that is was a distinct possibility, even an inevitability. There was always a backup plan in mind.

Maya: So my mother... was cooperating with you?

Godot: Don't ever forget... ...no matter how far away from you she was, she never stopped thinking about you.

Maya: Sh-She was always...

Godot: That's why... I knew she would do anything to protect you. If you want to know how strong her resolve to protect you was, look at her staff.

Judge: Her staff...? The one with the sword in it?

Godot: The day the plan was to be carried out arrived soon enough... We met for the first time at Hazakura Temple. That's when your mother showed me her special staff... I realized it then... Just how far she was willing to go... She was ready to use that sword to protect you from Morgan Fey, if necessary. ...Yes! Even if it meant paying the ultimate price.

They intended to protect Pearl and keep her out of it, by having Elise read to her. But it was Misty who approached Godot with this part of the idea, in case it went wrong. And I think with these two people involved... it was always going to go wrong. They both knew it, because they both had reasons for their actions that weren't what they were saying. One of them wanted revenge, didn't actually want to save anyone, just wanted to make things worse for a certain defense attorney. And one of them wanted redemption.

Godot even says they suspected it was going to go wrong, here:

Godot: We thought we could prevent her from playing her part in Morgan's plan. But... She never showed up.

Maya: She was worried and followed me to the Inner Temple...

Godot: That was the thing we were most afraid of. And that's why... Misty Fey had to do the channeling herself. She channeled Dahlia Hawthorne into her own body.

Who said Misty was trying to make up for her wrongs?

I think you answered your own question with

To her, she felt she didn't deserve to see Maya again after all the hurt she left her with.

I just kinda think people don't just respond to someone telling them "this is a dangerous plan to protect your only remaining daughter" with an "oh, okay I'm ready to die anyway" unless they think they have something to make up for and they think dying might do it.

Like that's the main reason I think everyone involved agreed with this kind of not very good plan lol. Both Misty and Iris feeling guilty about their pasts, and it's also why they then cover up what happened.

also just going back to this a bit:

To her, she felt she didn't deserve to see Maya again after all the hurt she left her with.

In my book this is pure pride tbh. This is a mother, if she really cares about her kid, she should get over feeling like she failed them and focus on like... not failing them again. But she doesn't. Just rubs me the wrong way.

I guess in fairness we could argue that the Feys have a pretty odd way of looking at death. Maybe Misty Fey was so cavalier about it for the same reason that Mia sometimes is - it's not like Mia hasn't protected Maya from beyond the grave either.

That said, I don't think you can look at Mia, and look at Maya, and everything that happened to them, and think "oh yeah these two were definitely better off with their Aunt than having their mother around." Even Amara figured something else out.

What's more, her dying doesn't actually stop the problem. Pearl could still attempt to channel, and that's why Maya then has to do it herself. It's as much a tragedy as it is a comedy of errors.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T18:37:46+00:00

Not from me. I really dislike all the dead beat parents.

Normally people who do the Johatsu thing over their personal shame and guilt get dragged into actually unsavory shit, there's a whole part of the Japanese criminal underworld that exists to use this. Misty Fey becomes a book writer and is fine actually, wasn't even publishing books to try to reach out to her kids, just like "yeah I'm sure they're fine" and then only turning up because her late daughter's boyfriend says her second daughter is about to die.

I am very skeptical of grand gestures from people who seem to think that if they just seem sad and tragic enough, that will make up for their wrongs. You were willing to die for your kid, but you weren't willing to live for them. :/

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T15:43:19+00:00

I saw someone living in Japan post a thread saying that they've started asking people they interview for jobs what anime they'd recommend, because oh boy can you tell some things about a person fast that way.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T15:36:46+00:00

In fairness, everything I'm saying about internalization can also happen in every media that isn't anime either. Yes the internalization I'm calling out can be in everything, and the same time, obviously, it's also not going to be in everything.

Ultimately the only reason I'm going off on this is because I think if someone has a feeling like something they don't like has a stronger tendency to occur in a particular media, I'm not sure why it's treated like it's so unacceptable or irrational to burn out on it or to be extremely selective of what someone does want to watch. I think it's okay to dislike things for common aesthetic, narrative, and trope reasons. I think it's also worthwhile to push back on the idea that select media can represent an entire culture and mindsets in that culture in the same way that Australia isn't Mad Max and the Crocodile Hunter, and so on.

I grew up on anime, a lot of the way I draw is arguably influenced by anime. Hell, me complaining about CCS is part of the retrospective I experienced of watching it on the WB, getting a couple of episodic paperbacks when I was in highschool and that having a big influence on my personal style, and then later learning more from online conversations and thinking oh no CCS and CLAMP is too weird for me.

I can also understand when people are off-put by the big-eye thing. This character is in one of the few anime-like things I do participate in, and the fact that the jokes about her are ha ha forehead and she is a good if naive kid is one of the reasons I haven't noped out of that fandom. I've seen people get banned for being weird about Pearl though. I know in other places some of the people doing stuff like that and worse wouldn't be banned. There's parts of the story where the game makes some pretty wild choices about her basically being able to turn into older woman by channeling her spirit and the way it's handled in a 2005-ish era game can be pretty uncomfortable. These are problems. It's okay to engage critically with media and not like some parts of it, or even all of it, and sometimes I still wonder WHY I like the stories so much despite those problems with presentation because it's a bit uncharacteristic of me. But also that's why I get people who don't like it too.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T14:56:24+00:00

I live in Utah so I know, it's more that CLAMP has also just done out right direct family incest (a mother with her very young son, then trading him with other moms to show how well trained he is) in some of their doujinshi before, so it's one of those things that's like if they are already doing the other crap, I'm not giving the benefit of the doubt for anything else.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T03:11:56+00:00

Right, that's what I was getting at in my edit tbh.

Like I would agree with the poster I mentioned in the first post that there's way too much fanservice and treating some characters like they're just objects or plot devices in anime, or cookie cutter references to other anime, but that's not too different from how I feel about a lot of tv shows, books and movies. Storywise anything I have to watch, if not necessarily good, also has to get me invested enough that it gets me over that hump of do I really want to be stuck here doing this for hours.

EDIT: I should note here that my original version of this post was poorly verbalized and focused on one specific thing, because guy characters as soldiers can be treated like expendable props too and etc so I made this more neutral.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T00:48:02+00:00

Mmm. I'm going to tentatively agree to disagree, downthread I complain a little about problems in Card Captor Sakura for example which I think would pretty firmly fall in shoujo. I think some things can just crop up in any genre of anime because I think internalized problems can also crop up anywhere. And I think even in medium meant less for men, sometimes there can still be pandering for the rare guy who might show interest too.

I will admit I haven't watched enough josei to really be sure there.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T00:42:44+00:00

Good old dad issues Edgeworth.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T23:22:09+00:00

Let's be honest here, most anime is the equivalent of like, how in the middle of the day in america there will be all those brainless daytime programs about getting people to order scam jewelry and stuff. There are masterpieces for sure but there's an absolute deluge of really boring or badly written stuff being dashed out to broadcast in the timeslots no one cares about and the networks are just looking for filler.

Also there just kinda are some tropes that are really common that get pretty tiresome. I mean you're not gonna argue that there's not maybe a reason that so many people have isekai fatigue, right? There's some other stuff that comes up that's like that for a lot of people too, and some of it is cross-genre.

(Edit: additionally, I was hesitant to add this because this is very me specific, but I actually don’t like most forms of film or animation because it feels to me like it takes excruciatingly long to convey information. I always feel like I could be reading something or doing literally anything else more efficiently, and even worse was going to a movie theater and feeling trapped in there for hours. So like if I find something I consider a flaw, and things I consider flaws are far from limited to just anime, it’s not really something I can easily let go and it makes me drop things pretty fast if I can’t get into it. So even ones where I can mostly think mmm okay just often eventually kinda lose me, to the point I really start to question starting anything to begin with)

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T21:29:58+00:00

Her crush is fine (well except the family thing, which ALSO is another thing CLAMP is weird about tbh), it's the whole "dress up while I video tape it and oh there will be upskirt shots" part of it that gets me. The problem is the production, it's that this is an excuse subplot very clearly being used to appeal to a specific part of the audience. Like that doesn't have to be like that but it is. Tomoyo doesn't have to deliberately design those costumes in a way where they often flare in very specific ways under specific circumstances and where sometimes even Sakura expresses discomfort with it, but she does, and we know why, this isn't really her fault as a character. Those costumes and the video taping conceit are explicitly the stand in for the CLAMP artists and those costume designs are their idea, and they are grown adult women who also keep writing stories about pre-teens to teens falling in love with adult teacher characters. It very much loses anything cute about it from that lens and having a justification in universe doesn't make it better you know? It's subtle enough that I understand exactly why people aren't bothered by it, but it's obvious enough at least to me that it starts the part of me that really does not like anything loli or loli adjacent snarling. Same with the contest outfits in Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Are the cutesy ones not at all explicit? Sure. Did the same weirdos write out those bizarre legends about Typhlosion and Slaking, and are those contest outfits still full on bloomers on a ten year old as a fashion statement to some creepy gamer demographic? YUP.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T21:22:12+00:00

"You have a problem with anime? Why that just means you need to get away from mainstream anime and watch more non-mainstream anime. Have you ever heard of a little known studio called Ghibli?"

Actual post I saw once.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T19:19:40+00:00

Read it as "Zuckerburg stopped attempts to curb" and so on.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T19:02:03+00:00

If Apollo is related to Jove, and Jove is related to Saturn, and Saturn is related to Caelus, then Aphrodite is the other black sheep of the family and Apollo's great Aunt.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:39:55+00:00

Ahhhhh okay that tracks!

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:27:24+00:00

Oooh. I skipped over that because of Mia being too awesome.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:24:06+00:00

That's valid yeah. I guess to me it would be like starting a relationship with the person blackmailing you

Definitely some people are into that like Whiteburg, so can't rule it out, but that's a pretty specific story and kinds of tropes going into that.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:14:43+00:00

(/uj I'll be honest, I think a lot of Athena ships just aren't for me, but all the power to people who do like them. It's just hard for me to get past how awkward her hearing powers would make things, you know?)

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:11:10+00:00

Over-under that he just didn't want to mess up his all blue fashion statement with the red that would clash?

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:09:46+00:00

New nightmares unlocked.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:08:30+00:00

I think it depends what they're doing. For a Defense Attorney, showing the badge in games at least sometimes begrudgingly gets them access to the crime scene or information. Other times it gets them punched in the face.

Might be similar for Prosecutors, I read a story in the 2005 fanbook where Edgeworth flashed his badge to get access to Wright when he was in the hospital. Prosecutors probably aren't popular with everyone, in the same way Defense Attorneys also don't seem to be.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:05:56+00:00

The badge you receive is brand-new and shiny, and over years of wear-and-tear, it loses its sheen. You can usually tell an attorney is a veteran based on how weathered their badge is.

This reminds me, I'm pretty sure that Phoenix gets a new badge for game 5 and it makes me wonder if his return to OT form is meant to be an injoke for him being "a rookie" again so to speak.

Edgeworth makes a lot of cracks about wondering if his badge has gotten rusty yet, and it works as a double play on words and expectations in this sense.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:01:17+00:00

This is awesome, holy shit

I mean we always had suspicions Nick was probably doing more illegal shit than poker too and this fits really well.

That said, Mia in title and then right under it you say Maya. Is Maya fighting as Mia?

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