#lot of chucklefucks who have seen my video essay have started saying im conflating canons

[musashi]

Hiiii I'm resending this ask just in case it got lost--do you have any thoughts on why Manfred only calls Miles by his last name (as least from what I can remember)? It's something that stuck out as odd to me when I was playing Turnabout Reminiscence for the first time considering that's basically his adoptive son but as Tumblr's #1 Manfred Enjoyer I'm curious if you have any additional insights. Loved your Manfred video essay btw and I am very much looking forward to the Franziska one too <3

couple schools of thought here

sad edgy take: purposefully othering him and reminding him (and everyone around him) he is not truly a von karma

uplifting take: miles is, in all likelihood, the last edgeworth and he does it to honour the family name, to draw attention to its resilience, or out of (performative) reverence for gregory

neutral take: manfred himself has some level of discomfort with the whole situation and views miles as both an opportunity and a burden. to address him informally doesn't feel quite right, but to invoke his last name feels like salt in the wound. however, that is a wound he must bear, and so he does.

i honestly lean toward the latter two, surprise surprise. they're in line with anime!Manfred which imo is the best written version of him. in the anime, manfred von karma admits to himself that he feels guilty for orphaning miles--NOT, crucially, for killing gregory, but for the fact that miles wound up collateral damage in DL-6. for a while, this version of manfred questions if the reason he adopted miles had something to do with that guilt.

anime!manfred also performatively talks about gregory with an air of great respect. this is 100% ingenuine, obviously, but it tells us that manfred is the type to pretend like gregory was someone he considered great and peerless.

personally i think calling miles "edgeworth" is something that manfred does without examining it himself. i do not think he made a conscious decision to do that. i think it's just what he feels comfortable with and he has not examined that comfort or lack thereof. i guess if i wanted to headcanon about it and examine that myself itd be like... "miles" feels wrong because it makes him feel too much like he's fathering the boy. and manfred would not delude himself, thinking that. edgeworth stings, though. reminds him of gregory in a completely different direction. both options feel wrong.

but, like i said, a lot of his opinions re: miles are "i got myself into this mess, and i will see it to its end." i will forever be thinking about this line:

so i think the subconscious process is like

i should call him edgeworth -> fuck that name tho i hate that dead bastard -> yeah and who's fault is it that you have to raise his son now? -> goddamnit my life is a nightmare -> "edgeworth come to dinner your sister is clawing at the table like a wild beast."

i think manfred von karma contains a nonzero amount of self-awareness, but it is a fickle thing. he's not sitting down with these thoughts. that's what i'm here for.

THANKS FOR ASKING ME ABOUT BLORBO. I LOVE YOU

#wendy answers #relicsongmel #wendy rambles #im going to be real. i love papa and am good at analyzing whats IN canon #but when it comes to a lot of his thoughts/motivations he eludes me SO much #i feel like i ALMOST understand him. but never quite all the way #which might just be. the curse of being his daughter #lot of chucklefucks who have seen my video essay have started saying im conflating canons #so i just wanna say for the record #i know that the anime is a separate canon. i watched it #however #when it comes to multiple canons #we can use them to suplement each other where things are unclear #the fnaf fandom has this down to a science idk why aa fandom is so weird about it