...Eh-heh. Umm. Basically, I can't come up with any art concepts that aren't incredibly lame jokes. I think you know that by now.

Lightening the moment of big reveal...

I had wanted to make this joke so badly that I had a lapse in brain function and forgot the meaning of "step-".
I had typed up a hilariously elaborate script for a comic about Maya and Phoenix discussing wild GK2 theories, and ultimately concluding that Judgette Mikagami is both Franziska's sister and Mr. Payne's mysterious wife... meaning that Payne is Franziska's...brother! "Actually, Maya, that's..." ...a brother-in-law, in fact. Not a stepbrother. FAIL.
So then I had to grasp for any possible instance of actual "step"family in the series, and this was it.

...Isn't it kind of sad, in retrospect, that Apollo's first case as an attorney was about his sister's father's death?

...I-I've never made an OC before, and I don't plan to write any fanfics about her or anything...
But, ever since tossing in my guess at the GS5 Pick-Your-Prosecutor contest, it's been fun to try to develop the idea a bit more...
She turned out a little different from how I initially described her, but oh well.
The mini secondary design in the corner is more of a straightforward "anti-Apollo" as I first intended her to be -- and younger, with a more casual / less conservative clothing style.


WALL-OF-TEXT CHARACTER DESCRIPTION!

-Her color scheme inverts Apollo's red-on-white to white-on-red, and her two-pronged bangs are meant to resemble Apollo's antennas, except upside-down. (Maybe they'll briefly flip upward like Apollo's when she gets shocked in her damage sprite!)

-She actually wears her Prosecutor's Badge (uses it like a pin for her vest).

-Her hearing is impaired: that's an earpiece in her right ear. Thus, Apollo's Chords of Steel won't work on her, because she can switch it off and ignore him.

- Once she found out that Apollo was the attorney for her cases, she thoroughly did her research, studying even deeper than Apollo did with Phoenix Wright's cases. As a result, she knows a disturbing amount of detail about him, and addresses him in uncomfortably casual terms to psych him out. She has also become dangerously genre savvy, throwing out important insights in a seemingly careless and nonchalant manner.

-She wears a wedding band on the hand she objects with...although it's a rather plain design and it's not immediately clear that it's actually a wedding ring.

-Her husband was the victim of whatever big flashback event impacts the final case. It is revealed that she became a prosecutor for the sole motive of bringing down the person whom she thought to have killed her husband, but it turns out that she was wrong about the culprit the whole time. So, although she loses the case, she'll decide by the end that she truly likes the rewarding feeling of serving justice, and vows to continue practicing law more seriously.

Umm... And, she has some sort of connection to Lana Skye. I abruptly decided this only after I realized several things:
-that I need an explanation for how she was able to get the hookup to become a prosecutor
-that Lana NEEDS to be addressed in the AJ arc [Her character is totally underused -- and, hey, along with Ema, she'd be the perfect connection between the new and old AA arcs!]
-that Selena kind of reminds me of Lana in a vague way... ...Actually, before I put a bit of brown in so I could call 'em hazel, her green eyes made her remind me of a Lana/Gant lovechild... ._.;; Yeah, sorry; you're not gonna be able to unread that. Sh-she's not /supposed/ to be anything like that, though. She just got less and less original-looking as I went on... dangit...
-...and that Selena's initials are SL. =O It was a total coincidence, seriously, but it's almost making me want to come up with some big backstory linking Apollo's past with his present career through SL-9, S.L., Lana, and maybe even Apollo's "real father"!


Her name...actually has nothing to do with Psyche-Locks. (Well, maybe it could serve as a vague reference to that too. She certainly has some secrets, anyway.)
-"Selena" comes from "Selene," the Greek goddess of the moon (as opposed to "Apollo," the god of the sun).
-The main defining traits of Apollo's Japanese name "Housuke Odoroki" are the kanji for "law" and the word for "surprise." ...Selena is still involved in the law, but the opposite of "surprise" should be something like "inevitable" or "natural"...
So I thought: ...
Natural...
Law...
Natural Law...
John Locke wrote about "natural law"! (*shields face from the slaps I rightfully deserve for my terrible logic*)

The Japanese name is pretty simple...
It's taken from the word "atarimae," meaning "natural" or "obvious" -- although I tried to use drastically different kanji to draw attention away from the blatantness of that...
(...Out of sheer dumb luck, I stumbled across a kanji for "atari" which apparently can also mean "my spouse." WHOA YES. =D "中" usually means "inside," but...but...jisho.org also says "my spouse," so I'm sticking by this astonishingly appropriate name!!)
Then it's got the female suffix "-ko" to complement Housuke's male suffix "-suke"... So the two are like "law boy" and "natural girl."

Whoever it was that first came up with the "Redd White" connection wins all of my internets.
Even though it's a really serious thing in the game, Godot's vision is so much fun to joke about in the fandom!

--sketch version--

For an art trade with PESSTAR, I tried to draw her amazingly adorable anthro version of Miles's faithful dog.
I...hope I did okay...! I had a lot of fun drawing her; she's so cute...
Um, I didn't mean to make the expression look so much like...... xD; O-oops...

I did this a couple days ago out of inspiration from the Buddy Faith fan club, and figured I'd post it here too.
He's one of my favorite victims in the series... poor guy...

As you can see -- when Buddy plays with his jacket, it's much less obnoxious.

"When someone dies, they just become a star in the heavens." (~Regina Berry, "Turnabout Big Top")
A collage of every victim from the PW trilogy... who qualifies as a decent person. xD

Yeah, sometimes I decide not to draw eyes, and I convince myself and others that it's a stylistic choice... but the truth is probably just that I fail at drawing them.

Diego Armando (pre-T&T), Dustin Prince (2-1), Bruce Goodman (SL-9), Terry Fawles (3-4), Russel Berry (2-3), Elise Deauxnim (3-5),
Celeste Inpax (pre-JFA), Glen Elg (3-3), Ini Miney (pre-JFA), Doug Swallow (3-1), Turner Grey (2-2), Neil Marshall (SL-9),
Gregory Edgeworth (DL-6), Cindy Stone (1-1), Mia Fey (1-2)

was a tough one to decide on if he was good enough to be a star... Overall, though he's incredibly selfish and quite jerkish, he didn't really do anything evil, per se. His motivation was simply to maintain his clinic's reputation... and he didn't pull a gun until someone was already trying to kill him... and I don't think he really did that sleeping-pill thing... so yeah...
To be honest, I think I just felt the need to include him...as a personal apology to him. While playing through the beginning of 2-2 and being subjected to his incredibly obnoxious glasses-pushing, at some point I might have kind of sort of wished he'd go away. ...I felt a little guilty when he...um...did.
I only realized after I drew her that doesn't really fit in. I was planning to include all generally "dead" people, not necessarily only "victims," but it just so happened that everyone else in the picture was literally murdered, while Ini's death was just an accident. Oh well... I still feel bad for her...
Remaining murder victims Hammer, Hammond, Corrida, and Valerie Hawthorne -- and everyone who died by execution -- all did bad things and/or had bad intentions. No stars for you. (I guess Cindy shouldn't really have gotten one either -- she was a dirty cheater!) Besides that, I hope I didn't miss anyone important. ...
...Geez, there are a LOT of dead people in Ace Attorney stars in the sky over Japanifornia!!

This was the first AA-related thing I ever drew... x3 I started it right after finishing the first game, which explains why most of the characters are specifically from there -- but I had to throw Franziska and Maggey in later because they're cool too.

If nothing else, I kind of like how Maya and Gumshoe look, I guess... and the "Objection!"-style title...
...Er, yeah, major post-scanning color-adjustment abuse. xP I've gotta kick that lazy habit...

The friendly façades and the murderous reveals of Ini(Mimi) Miney, Matt Engarde, and Dahlia Hawthorne.

Yep, I live for lame puns~!

I wish the Blue Badger would be involved in a case that Winston Payne is prosecuting, because "unfair badgering of witnesses" is pretty much the only kind of objection he knows how to make! It'd be perfect!

I love the little fourth-grade future lawyers, and I really wanna draw them more often...next time, hopefully making Phoenix's hair (along with the rest of him) not fail so much...and making Miles smile more, since he really doesn't have much reason to be emotionally troubled at this age.

Phoenix clearly began practicing his finger-pointing at a young age, which explains why he's so good at it in the present.
...Now repeat the above sentence, replacing "Phoenix" with "Edgeworth" and "finger-pointing" with "making angsty faces."

...is ready. Naturally.

Mostly self-explanatory...

...except maybe that top-middle one of Nick and Edgey.
Nick has decisive evidence of Edgey's adorable preoccupation with their rivalry, but of course Edgey is too prideful to admit it outright. Looks like the "spikes" have the "edge" cornered now. xP
(The thing in Phoenix's hand is supposed to be the "spiky blue pawn" from Edgeworth's chess set. I've always wanted to see Edgeworth try to explain away the coincidence~.)

"...Geez, there are a LOT of dead people in Ace Attorney stars in the sky over Japanifornia!!!"

AHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHA