Dahlia's profile
Character: Dahlia Hawthorne
Series: Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations
Version: After she was hanged.
Age: 25 (deceased)
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Straight although I would not say that it would not be in her personality to pretend to fall in love with another woman or even willingly sleep with another woman in order to manipulate her.
Appearance: Dahlia knows that she is beautiful and appears delicate and often takes advantage of it to look like the angel she pretends to be. Her red hair, which flows past her shoulders has two plaits at the top of her head. Her eyes are brown, like her sister’s. She came to Paixao wearing a white, sleeveless dress with pink embroidery at the top of the bodice. She carries a pink shawl on her shoulders. On her feet is a pair of high-heeled white sandals with butterflies attached to them - all to make her look gentle and harmless, of course.
Finally, Dahlia likes to carry her white parasol. It has pink embroidery at the edges, which matches the embroidery on her dress.
Personality: On the outside, Dahlia appears to be gentle but very timid young girl who loves romantic things such as Japanese poetry, flowers and hiking out in the countryside. She is polite, gets frightened of thunder, appears to be terrified when she sees a murder or somebody fighting, cries when people are being mean to her, loves taking pictures of beautiful scenery and can be incredibly naive. She is some men’s idea of a perfect girlfriend - kind, beautiful, innocent and shy.
This sickly-sweet nature, however, is actually a facade. In reality, Dahlia is an intelligent but cruel, selfish, manipulative, vain and bitter woman. She knows this very well and feels no guilt for it whatsoever. For her whole life and during the time she was dead, she only cared about her own well-being and her own happiness. She would use her beauty and fake personality to trick others into letting her get her way and generally despised people such as Phoenix for their kind and optimistic nature.
This secret unpleasant personality of hers is probably due to the fact that when she was a child, she was abandoned by her mother and unloved by her father. As a result, she became very bitter towards them and grew up learning to rely only on herself. The only person in her family who truly loved her was her sister Iris. Dahlia, however, because of her upbringing, has very little understanding about what love actually is and feels that if other people really cared about her, they would be loyal to her and not betray her in any way. As a result, she despises people like Iris and Phoenix for not doing what she told them and blames them for her death.
In general, Dahlia looks out for nobody. However, if you do manage to make enemies with her and hurt her, she will use whatever tactics, be it manipulation or even murder, to make sure that you pay for it. Therefore, despite her frail appearance, she is still a dangerous woman and one would do best to stay clear of her.
Abilities/Weaponry/Strengths: As she has no weapons or magic (although she would use a weapon if she possessed one), Dahlia has to rely on her beauty and her manipulative nature to get what she wants. She knows how to put on her make-up and do up her hair to make herself look stunning and is very good at playing off the sweet, ignorant and stupid girl.
Despite the fact that she is physically quite weak, Dahlia is also quite a good swimmer. She was good enough to jump into the Eagle river and survive, despite its strong currents.
Weaknesses: While Dahlia is a very good actress, her act as a good-natured and innocent girl can be exaggerated at time and her overconfidence can get the best of her. This is, in a way, a weakness because while she has managed to trick most people, there are a few like Mia who are able to spot that something is not quite right about her or the stories that she has woven. And if somebody who suspects her confronts her and puts her under enough pressure, she may end up revealing her real personality, regardless of who is in the room with her, which may put her at a disadvantage.
Finally, even though she has successfully murdered people in the past, Dahlia is not a trained fighter, nor is she physically very strong. She will have to rely on mostly her charm and manipulation tactics to survive in Paixao.
History: When Dahlia was a young girl, she and her twin sister Iris were separated from their mother when their father, a wealthy jewellery store owner, left them, taking his children with him. Their mother, Morgan Fey, was from the Kurain village, a village in which the women were spirit mediums. Morgan Fey’s sister, Misty, was the Kurain Master and her children would inherit the title once she passed away. Morgan, however, wanted her own children to inherit the title and at first had high hopes for her two daughters. However, she lost interest in them once she found out that they had very little spiritual power and their father took his two children and left. Not long afterwards, their father (under Dahlia’s persuasion) sent Iris to be raised by nuns at the Hazakura Temple.
However, both sisters still kept in touch as Iris knew that her sister was unloved by her father and wanted to be of any use to her as possible. At first, Dahlia found her sister annoying and this was why she persuaded her father to get rid of her in the first place. However, she eventually realised that her sister could be of some use to her…
When she was fourteen, Dahlia decided to get revenge on her father by stealing a precious jewel. She cooperated with her twin sister, her stepsister Valerie and a man named Terry Fawles (whom she pretended to fall in love with as part of her plan) and planned a fake kidnapping in exchange for one of her father’s diamonds. The exchange would take place on the Dusky Bridge. However, Dahlia and Valerie betrayed Fawles and Dahlia jumped off the Dusky Bridge into the Eagle River (Iris, meanwhile, backed out of the plan - something that Dahlia never forgave her for). She survived, with Valerie’s help, changed her new identity to ‘Melissa Foster’. Fawles, meanwhile, was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death for Dahlia’s ‘murder’.
Dahlia’s second crime occurred when she murdered Valerie five years later. Fawles had escaped from prison and arranged to meet with Valerie in order to find out why he was betrayed. Dahlia, however, found out about the meeting and realised that Valerie was going to tell him the truth. In response, she followed Valerie at Dusky Bridge, stabbed her to death and hid her in the body of the car that Fawles had stolen. Fawles, who had gone off to do something important at the time, came back, met ‘Valerie’ (who was actually Dahlia in disguise) and left in the stolen car. He was stopped by the police and arrested for Valerie’s murder. He was tried again and this time, ‘Melissa Foster’ was his witness. Unfortunately for Dahlia, Fawles’ lawyer, Mia Fey, and her boyfriend, Diego Armando, knew that there was something very suspicious about Melissa Foster and nearly exposed her as the criminal. However, luck was on Dahlia’s side - during the trial, Fawles suddenly committed suicide, remembering a promise that he made to his girlfriend years earlier. The young murderess was able to go home scot-free.
Or so she thought. Unfortunately for her, Diego Armando had not given up the case and began to investigate her. A few months after Fawles’ trial, he arranged an interview with her. Dahlia then took some poison (which she had stolen from the laboratory of her then-boyfriend, Doug Swallow) out of a bottle necklace that she was wearing and slipped the poison into his coffee. She then tried to get rid of the evidence and found her opportunity when she bumped into an art student named Phoenix Wright. In order to get rid of the poison, she pretended to fall in love with him and gave him the poisoned necklace as a symbol of her ‘affection’.
However, Dahlia knew that leaving the necklace with Phoenix would not leave her safe for long (especially as Swallow had worked out who stole the poison from his laboratory and broke up with her as a result)- she had to get the necklace back pretty quickly in order to avoid suspicion and was prepared to do it by any means possible. Iris, not wanting her to commit any more murders, offered to go to Phoenix herself and persuade him to return the necklace. Dahlia, while still bitter about Iris’ betrayal five years earlier, decided to give her sister a chance.
Eight months passed, however, and Iris failed. Dahlia, seeing as her sister was never going to get the neclkace back, decided to take the matters into her own hands. And so, she stole some poison from Swallow’s laboratory once again in order to put some poison into Phoenix’s cold medicine. Swallow once again realised who broke into his laboratory and tried to warn Phoenix. Phoenix, refusing to believe that his girlfriend would do such a thing, pushed Swallow to the ground. Dahlia, who was watching at the time, realised that Swallow was now a real threat that had to be dealt with. Therefore, she waited until Phoenix was out of the picture and then silenced Swallow forever by electrocuting him. Not long afterwards, Phoenix was arrested on suspicion of murder and put on trial. Dahlia appeared in the trial as a witness in order to manipulate the court and get him convicted. However, Mia Fey was defending Phoenix and she managed to uncover Dahlia’s lives. Phoenix was acquitted and Dahlia was arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. She swore that she would one day get revenge on Mia Fey.
However, three years later, Mia was murdered by somebody else and therefore Dahlia was unable to punish the one who led her to her death.
Hope was not completely lost, however, and not long before her due execution, Dahlia met her mother once again. Morgan now had set her hopes on her youngest daughter Pearl to be the next Kurain Master and so she told her eldest daughter of a plan on how to get rid of Misty’s youngest daughter and heir, Maya Fey, so that Pearl could become the next heir. After Dahlia’s death, Pearl would take Maya to the Hazakura Temple and channel Dahlia’s spirit. Dahlia would then kill Maya herself and put the blame on Iris. Although Dahlia disliked her mother and thought that her plan was ridiculous, she agreed - there was one way to punish the dead and, knowing that Maya was Mia’s sister, she realised that killing the girl would cause great pain to the now deceased lawyer .And so, Dahlia allowed herself to be hanged for her crimes, as part of her mother’s plan, expecting to ‘wake up’ when she was in Pearl’s body and in the Hazakura Temple…
However, for some reason, when she woke up, she discovered that she was completely somewhere else….