Ace Attorney fan animation sparks community debate over a beloved character

gamesradar.com:

Last week, YouTuber speedoru posted an animation based on the Ace Attorney games. It quickly reached more than a million views. But not everyone in the Ace Attorney fandom was pleased with its portrayal of some of the game’s characters.

The video runs a little under three minutes, but the contentious part - coming in just after the one minute mark - is brief. The 20 second or so fragment involves Geiru Toneido, a clown lady from the sixth game in the series, Spirit of Justice. In the game, she’s jokingly sexualised – one of her animations involves snapping her suspenders over her jiggling breasts, which later turn out to actually be balloons. Because she’s a clown. Get it? It’s juvenile and a little crude, but for better or for worse, that’s how Ace Attorney is.

Speedoru’s video makes the same joke, but it’s not the idea of a hot clown that has some members of the fandom disappointed. Instead, it’s the fact that fan-favourite character Miles Edgeworth instantly objectifies Toneido.

Edgeworth doesn’t really express attraction to anyone in the Ace Attorney games, and there are specific instances where he ignores or rejects women who come onto him. Because of this, he’s commonly considered gay and/or asexual by many members of the fandom. It’s not explicitly canon in the games themselves, but with the lack of representation of LGBTQ+ people in media, particularly when the games first released in the early 2000s, it’s understandable how this would become a very common and beloved fan interpretation.

Some of these fans were vocal about their dislike for the animation. “Edgeworth” briefly trended for me on Twitter over the weekend (although that’s probably biased by how many times I’ve tweeted about him myself). One