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This article is under construction. While it is not short, it still needs expansion as outlined in the manual of style. The article most likely needs expansion near the end of the tagged section or sections. Note: The editor who added this tag has specified the following areas of improvement: Biography is missing information about her encounters with Phoenix and Apollo during the investigation chapters |
| Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in |
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Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in was the de facto Queen of the Kingdom of Khura'in from 2005 to 2028. Her most well-known and far-reaching act as queen was the passage of the Defense Culpability Act, a decree ordering that anyone who would defend a criminal received the same punishment.
The fire
- Main article: Assassination attempt of Amara Sigatar Khura'in
Prior to her ascension to the throne, Ga'ran served as a prosecutor and the Khura'inese Minister of Justice, while her sister, Amara, ruled as queen. Because Ga'ran possessed no spiritual powers, she developed a deep envy towards her sister, which culminated in a plan to replace her.
She set her plan into motion by starting a fire at the Amara's residence during Jove Justice's performance. To the public, this seemingly killed Amara, allowing Ga'ran to take her place as queen. The truth was that Amara survived; Ga'ran went in to save her in order to use her to deceive the public. However, during this she ran into Jove, who had been invited to stay in the royal quarters and was also trying to rescue Amara and his son, Apollo, and Ga'ran killed him with a blow to the back of the head. After her "rescue", Ga'ran tricked Amara into staying hidden and helping her when needed, by convincing her that the assassination attempt was perpetrated by Amara's husband, Dhurke Sahdmadhi. Dhurke was then formally accused of having caused the fire. Ga'ran prosecuted the case, causing an unjust guilty verdict and leading Dhurke, his son, Nahyuta Sahdmadhi, and Apollo, whom Dhurke had saved from the fire, to go into hiding. Eventually, there was a widespread discrediting of defense attorneys, which led the occupation to become dangerous and borderline illegal via the Defense Culpability Act.[1].
Eight years later, Dhurke rescued Amara from Ga'ran's clutches. However, Amara was soon recaptured, along with her newly born daughter, Rayfa. As Dhurke had informed Amara about the assassination attempt, and she was now aware that Ga'ran was the true culprit, Ga'ran used Rayfa's safety to blackmail Amara into doing her bidding. When Nahyuta was forced to become a prosecutor rather than a lawyer as he had initially desired, she recognized him to be a threat and decided to force him into compliance by threatening to expose Rayfa's true parentage, forcing her into the same status as a pariah he had suffered for being Dhurke's son and making him become the embodiment of the draconian legal system she forged. Unlike her husband, Minister of Justice Inga Karkhuul Khura'in, she never truly developed a soft spot for Rayfa, seeing only her despised sister's image in her niece, and her neglectful and abusive behavior ended up giving Rayfa a high-strung and overly perfectionist attitude that would torment her throughout her life.
On the throne
With Inga in the royal audience chamber.
For the next twenty-three years, Ga'ran ruled over the country, Amara taking her place when her spiritual powers were needed. Despite having found an excellent way to fake having powers of her own, Ga'ran knew her exposure as a fraud would result in her quickly being deposed and still remained incredibly envious of Amara. Having heard that the Founder's Orb could give spiritual power to its bearer, she became obsessed with using it to make herself a medium in truth. Inga learned of this, and having grown to despise the relative lack of power he had in Khura'in and having never even liked Ga'ran, began to seek it himself as part of his own coup attempt.
The foreign attorney
- Main article: The Rite of Turnabout
Downfall
- Main article: Turnabout Revolution
Having somehow gotten wind of Inga's plan, Ga'ran planned for his removal. As a part of his plans to secure the Founder's Orb, Inga had kidnapped Maya Fey and held her captive in Amara's Tomb. Dhurke had been killed by Inga in an attempt to rescue Fey, and his body was held in the tomb's empty sarcophagus. Fey subsequently escaped by channeling Dhurke to break free, but Inga kept up with the facade in order to exchange Fey for the Founder's Orb.
The faceless figure Inga saw in his final moments.
While Inga waited for the prisoner exchange, Ga'ran planted herself in the tomb. Putting on Dhurke's clothes, Ga'ran stabbed Inga in the back; as Inga suffered from prosopagnosia and was unable to recognize faces, the last thing he saw was a faceless silhouette of Dhurke. Ga'ran subsequently coerced Amara into channeling Inga and enter the tomb, during which she was witnessed by Rayfa. This threw off Inga's time of death, making it look as if he were still alive for the prisoner exchange. As Amara, disguised as her sister, was performing a channeling at Inga's actual time of death for a neighboring king, this effectively gave Ga'ran a solid alibi. Through the investigations that followed, Rayfa learned of her true parentage and confronted Ga'ran about it, which Ga'ran did not deny, referring to it as her "disciplining".
Assuming her old role as justice minister, Ga'ran prosecuted the case of Inga's murder against Dhurke, Nahyuta acting as an unwilling assistant. In her role as queen, Ga'ran was able to change the laws by simply writing them into a manual of hers. Apollo, with his mentor, Phoenix Wright, slowly began to figure out the truth: both Dhurke and Inga were dead at the alleged time of murder, and Amara had been disguising herself as "Nayna". Still under Ga'ran's blackmail, Amara tried to claim full responsibility of the incident. However, Apollo detected that she was hiding Ga'ran's role in everything; in response, Ga'ran had one of her royal guards shoot Amara before she should admit the truth, and coerced Nahyuta into claiming responsibility instead. Once Justice figured out her leverage over Nahyuta, however, Nahyuta turned against her; Ga'ran responded by changing the law to treat any challenge to her authority as treason, and threatening to have Nahyuta, Justice and Wright executed under the DC Act.
Lying unconscious in the Pool of Souls after the failed channeling.
Backed into a corner, Apollo figured out the truth behind Ga'ran's lack of spiritual powers, which nullified her royal and legal authority. Calling her bluff, Apollo challenged Ga'ran to summon the Holy Mother. Unable to back down, Ga'ran attempted to channel the Holy Mother's spirit, only to have the attempt backfire, causing the royal guards to turn on her, and sending her into a catatonic state and dropping her into the Pool of Souls, dazed. She was subsequently arrested, now left in a delusional state as a result of the failed channeling and her obsession over the Founder's Orb, believing herself to be the Holy Mother.
Personality
Mugshot.
In her guise as queen, Ga'ran gave the impression of being a wise, benevolent ruler and a caring, if strict, mother. She did act in a slightly rigid and cold manner toward defense attorneys, but claimed that this was due to her sister's death at the hands of one. As is typical of some monarchs, she referred to herself using the plural pronoun "we".
Once she began to act in her capacity as a prosecutor, however, she revealed her true colors: as a vain, conniving, selfish woman who could not resist flaunting her power. She had no real affection for Rayfa, callously informing her of the fact that she was not her real mother simply as a means of punishing her, and later showing no qualms about insulting and humiliating her in front of an entire courtroom despite the princess' already fragile emotional state.
In Ga'ran's view, being queen made her the embodiment of the law and thus gave her the right to alter it for her own benefit, causing her to regularly issue royal decrees during Dhurke's trial for the sole purpose of weighing the odds in her favor. Her dislike of defense attorneys was solely because of the obstacle they presented to ensuring her grasp over her country, and she would take great pleasure in watching them beg for mercy under the Defense Culpability Act. Her inebriation with her own power was such that she would draw out trials long past a point where she could have easily won purely for the pleasure of watching her opponents flounder. Despite this, Ga'ran's confidence was entirely dependent on her belief that her position made it impossible for others to stand up to her, and she ultimately revealed herself to be a cowardly individual who completely lost her nerve the moment the legitimacy of her rule was called into question.
Ga'ran had a fondness for spiders, keeping images of them as her personal sigil and even styling her hair to resemble one. Nahyuta alluded to Ga'ran's similarity with spiders, referring to her grasp over Khura'in as a web.
Attire
Ga'ran at the prosecutor's bench.
In her duties as Queen, Ga'ran seemed to dress with the intention of seeming regal and harmless. She wore a heavy white robe with red and gold trim, along with a golden ministerial hat and her hair styled in extremely tight buns. As with her kindly persona, this was a mask; underneath her robes, she wore a customized prosecutor's uniform: a far more revealing, skintight purple dress and a necklace of Magatamas, with a bindi head jewel, large hair clips, and mascara to give herself a seemingly perpetual sneer. When removing her royal robes to reveal her dress, she would also undo her buns, allowing her hair to fan out into stiff coils and bangs that resembled a spider's legs and mandibles. She grew her nails long and painted red, and carried a large red and purple fan, which she used to blow at the defense when making her claims, as well as a book about Khura'inese law, which she would slam the desk with or rewrite when issuing her decrees.
Name
- "Ga'ran" most likely comes from 伽藍 (Japanese: Garan, from Chinese: Jiā Lán), which is short for 僧伽藍摩 (Japanese: Sōgyaranma, from Chinese: Sēng Jiā Lán Mó), which comes from Sanskrit सँघाराम (saṁghārāma) meaning "temple".
Development
- Her outfit, design, and fan may have been inspired by the Princess Iron Fan from Journey to the West.
- Ga'ran seems to resemble Darklaw from the crossover title Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Both appear witch-like and serve as the prosecutor of the last case of their respective games.
- Ga'ran can be compared to Manfred von Karma. Like Manfred, she is a corrupt prosecutor who tries to convict someone else for her own murder and is responsible for much of the other party's darker actions (more directly, in her case, as Nahyuta has become a merciless prosecutor because he was being threatened by her), and during the final trial regularly directs its general flow (although Ga'ran has actual authority over the judge, as opposed to Manfred, who is merely too intimidating to gainsay).
- Ga'ran can also be compared to Morgan Fey. Both were powerless women from a family of mediums driven by envy of her nobler sister, both married a man who only agreed to do so in order to achieve power, and both manipulated her daughter (adopted, in Rayfa's case) to be her political pawn against her enemies. Interestingly Morgan and Ga'ran are distant relatives.
- As she is the queen and thus law enforcer, she acted as a judge in her trial. Making it the first time a judge was found guilty of murder.
- Of all the characters to possess a close-up animation, Ga'ran uses hers the least, on only one occasion.