\nThe more I play Ace Attorney the angrier I get that it’s like the only thing out there that’s doing its shtick. it’s the only fun, goofy, family-friendly story about defense lawyers out there, and there should be a bajillion more of them.
Defense lawyers are way, way, way more important to making sure Justice Is Done than any cop will ever be. Even if someone is Guilty As All Hell, they have the right to explain why it really isn’t what it looks like, honest. They have the right to try to argue their innocence- and a defense lawyer is the person who makes sure you can do that.
I can think of a million defense lawyers in media, sure- grey-faced little men standing between Our Heroes and the villain, telling the good guys that they can’t win. I can think of a million Heroic Cops and Heroic FBI Agents and Heroic Detectives.
…….I can only think of three heroic defense attorneys: Phoenix Wright, Atticus Finch, and Elle Woods.
Atticus Finch is a good and important character, but To Kill A Mockingbird isn’t exactly a fun, light-hearted story. it has its moments, sure- but you couldn’t really make a summer blockbuster or a video game out of it without it feeling massively disrespectful to the heavy stuff it’s covering. and while I haven’t seen Legally Blonde, I’m pretty sure that Being A Lawyer is not the core focus of who Elle is as a character and justice is not the main point of her arc- her story is about proving that she can be just as good as the guys, while being Femme As Fuck. and that’s a great story and a story that needs to be told, but you could tell it about building rockets or fighting mummies or climbing up the Eiffel tower and it’d be a very similar story.
Phoenix Wright is a defense attorney, and he is a good guy. That (plus being a bit ditzy) is the entirety of his character. Phoenix is a defense attorney because he is a good man; Phoenix is a good man because he’s a defense attorney. He believes in his clients. He fights for them, even when there’s no obvious way to prove they’re innocent. And he always, always, always saves them, even if he has to get them off on the most technical of technicalities.
we need as many characters like that as we need Good, Heroic Cops ™, if not more. Because defending justice, really defending justice, means standing up for people who’ve been accused of something wrong, even if everyone hates them and thinks they’re guilty. if there’s even the slightest chance that someone is innocent, justice demands you weigh that chance. you give everyone the fair shake you wish you’d have, because someday it might be you in that courtroom. justice requires defenders of the accused, not just protectors of the innocent.
… one of these days, I’m going to figure out how to make an exciting children’s legal drama where one of the major protagonists is a public defender, so help me gods
@huginsmemory reblogged this and said: #yes to all of this except we REALLY DONT NEED GOOD HEROIC COPS#there so much ‘good cop propaganda’ out there and honestly there should not be ANY good cop propaganda out there#since that system is corrupt and fucked up as hell
And, well, I want to touch on that for a second because this is a topic I feel really strongly about… and not in the way that a lot of people on Tumblr feel strongly about.
ONE: We should really, really, really save the term propaganda for Actual Propaganda, not just entertainment that upholds Mainstream Society’s Views in a harmful way.
Like. Definitionally, propaganda is misinformation created by a powerful entity to convince people that that entity is right. For something to be pro-state propaganda, it has to be made or funded, at least in part, by the state.
And like, there are plenty of cop shows that are propaganda even by the strictest definition. (In particular, the FBI and the LAPD are prone to paying off Hollywood.) Something like COPS? Straight-up propaganda. It’s worth acknowledging that.
But not all cop shows are propaganda. The cops and the Feds do not pay anyone who makes a show about police, heroic or otherwise. You really think that True Detective’s showrunners got paid off for their portrayal of the police as scum-sucking racist assholes? You think that the Feds paid for Twin Peaks, or Hannibal, or The X-Files? Even a lot of cop shows that portray the police in a noble light are not getting money from the state; they’re just copying the shows that are. Plenty of people think that the cops are good and right, after all.
It’s a lot harder to argue “hey, maybe it’s fucked up that the Army slaps propaganda on anything that holds still for long enough” to someone who knows that Leftists ™ think that Paw Patrol is cop propaganda. You really, really, really need to save the word for the cases where it’s true- because otherwise the word loses its bite.
TWO: At this point, the cop show is a clearly defined subgenre. Its conventions let you say something about the world in ways you can’t easily do in other media, and losing it wouldn’t just cut down on copaganda- we’d lose a lot of stories that are worth telling.
So like. when you’re talking about genre in terms of stories, a lot of the time a genre is a… set of socially defined questions the author is playing with. A romance asks, “what is love? what does love look like? what does love feel like? can love last?” A science fiction story asks, “what does the future look like? can we make the future better than the past? can we communicate with the Other?”
A mystery asks, “why do people hurt other people? Why are people cruel to each other? What would drive someone to kill?”
And the thing with subgenres is that they ask even more clearly defined questions. A regency romance asks, “what does love look like when it’s constrained by punishing social conventions?” A utopian SF story asks, “what does the brightest future possible look like?”
…A cop show asks, “what is the state’s role in dealing with human cruelty? how does power influence human cruelty? how can people come together to stop human cruelty?”
…and like, yes, there are other formats you can use to ask these same questions. The Anime Lawyer subgenre, the supernatural mystery with non-cop protagonists, things like that. But the cop show is particularly good for this, because it’s definitionally a team format and the protagonists definitionally are affiliated with the state. Even in the most braindead, shitty buddy cop show, usually you’ve got two different perspectives on how to Fight Crime.
And the more thoughtful the writers are about what they’re writing- in something like, say, True Detective or Se7en or Deadly Premonition- the more they use the language of the cop show to say things that your average copaganda show would never say.
Like, take Deadly Premonition. Deadly Premonition’s thesis is “human cruelty is caused by trauma, and specifically generational trauma. To fight human cruelty, you have to a) heal your own inner child and b) take on the systems that cause people to be traumatized in the first place (including the government).”
Not exactly the most copaganda-ish message, hm? Kinda the opposite? But because DP’s protagonists are a quirky FBI agent and a handful of small-town cops, it has the advantage of being able to use cop show stereotypes and cliches to make its point.
The example I want to use most is a fairly large spoiler, so if you want to avoid Deadly Premonition spoilers steer clear. One of the main characters of DP is a gruff, controlling, sexist muttonhead of a police chief. You’ve seen this guy before. He looks like Paul Blart in a cowboy hat. He’s a stock comedy character…. until you get to know him. You discover where that sexism and those controlling tendencies came from… and you discover exactly how fucked up they can get. The third act of the game, this character delivers gut punch after gut punch.
And that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if “well-meaning comedy sexist idiot police boss that the other characters have to work around” wasn’t already a trope. You think you know this guy, til you don’t. You think you know what this game is going to throw at you, til you don’t.
Having the language of the cop show to work with, subvert, and deconstruct means you can make some very pointed critiques of the world as it is, and particularly the justice system as it is. And those critiques have more power because they’ve got a whole lot of symbolism behind them, in the same way that, say, fairytale retellings do.
So no, I don’t think we should stop telling stories about heroic cops/feds. I think we need proportionately less of them- probably a lot less- but even if you’re a hardcore police abolitionist, there is still room to use The Cop Show to say something that’s in line with your beliefs.
if you want to see stories about injustice that aren’t cop shows? make more stories about injustice that aren’t cop shows, and support indie creatives who are already doing so.
I’ll say here what I always say about this: there are so many cop stories because “police” is a great story engine. How are our protagonists made aware of a conflict, why does it become their task to resolve, where do the resources and powers they bring to bear come from? Because police.
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