Love Conquers All games

Love & Order: Dorothy

Dorothy McCoy¹ is awesome. She’s easily my favourite pursuable character in the game, and basically the reason why it’s even happening: when I got approached to make this, her inclusion as a potential love interest was my biggest stipulation. And I was really delighted to see her character art; yeah, there’s also a bunch of pretty boys, that’s nice, whatever, the important thing is she is crazy cute.

Yeah, I’ve got my priorities straight.²

Anyway, Dorothy originally comes from a flash fiction story I wrote a year or so ago– easily my favourite, actually. This isn’t quite the same version of her, since the Love & Order world definitely does not have any supervillains or aliens or anything like that, and she’s definitely not short, but… well, she’s still pretty much the same character.

>Interview with the Supervillain Prosecutor
>John Rook | July 10, 2009 > >Dorothy McCoy is a woman of short stature and long dresses, and introduces herself in a carefully worded, soft-spoken manner. It’s almost hard to believe at first that this truly is the Crown Attorney who took down the most violent terrorist in our country’s history in a shockingly complex bench trial. I had the pleasure of interviewing Miss McCoy shortly after Mark Ross’s most recent appeal was rejected. > >John Rook: So, Miss McCoy, the press seems to love the nickname “The Supervillain Prosecutor.” Do you suppose you’ll ever live it down? > >Dorothy McCoy: [laughs] No, I don’t suppose I ever will. And I can scarcely blame them, really; for goodness’s sake, the man robbed a bank in a halloween costume, calling himself “Monstructo,” and destroyed half the Gardiner making his escape! I can’t blame anyone for calling him a supervillain. He’s even moreso in person; you should’ve heard his summation, it was like right out of a comic book. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. > >Rook: Do you think it was just part of his act? > >McCoy: It’s hard to say. He’s certainly antisocial, but as I found out in trial, that doesn’t mean he’s not a very clever man. No regard for the legal system at all, none, but he knew how to confuse the judge better than any attorney I’ve met; not a jury, anyone can confuse a jury, but a judge. It almost worked, too! > >Rook: Just how worried were you during the trial? Did the idea of what the National Post calls “the Shapeshifter Defense” actually gaining precedent scare you? > >McCoy: It scared me a whole lot more than that goofy mask, let me tell you. > >Rook: [laughs] > >McCoy: In all seriousness, it would never have gained precedent; if it had worked, I suspect we would’ve seen some new laws passing through Parliament very quickly. But it would look very bad, and while my job isn’t to make the Crown Attorney’s office look good, letting a man get acquited because we couldn’t prove that he wasn’t just an alien shapeshifter? That’d just be embarassing, for me, the office, and for the whole country. > >Rook: But he almost got the judge to buy it? > >McCoy: Well, here’s the thing: once you can get a highly respected scientific expert to testify that there really are alien shapeshifters out there, and it’s entirely possible that there really was one on Earth at the time of the robbery… well, what’s to say that it wasn’t one? > >Rook: But it’s so ridiculously implausible; why rob a bank, why pretend to be him, why blow up an expressway, why Toronto? It defies common sense! > >McCoy: Oh, of course it’s ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life. But in order to pull it off, he didn’t need to prove that there was an alien pretending to rob a bank in Toronto, that’s the thing. He just had to create reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt is a really tricky thing, just the alien story never would’ve if that was the whole crux of the defense. But it compounds. Add that to the fact that our eyewitness identifications were initially pretty sketchy, we had a very hard time proving that Ross even was Monstructo. And then the alien thing comes right out of nowhere. > >Rook: It’s one of those cases people will joke about for years– > >McCoy: Oh, of course. It’s like the twinkie defense for the 21st century. We joke about these things, too, but it’s not funny when you’re pouring over every common law case history on proving identities you can find, only to come to the sad conclusion that common sense alone won’t help you. > >Rook: Were you upset with Justice Laurence allowing the defense to present it in the first place? > >McCoy: No. > >Rook: Really? The Attorney General had awfully strong words to say about that ruling. > >McCoy: [pauses] I’m sorry, it’s hard to think of polite things to say about the minister. There are many who would characterize him as an imbecile. > >Rook: You’d call the Attorney General an imbecile? > >McCoy: Well, I didn’t say that, did I? But I will say that I believe Justice Laurence made the right call in hearing the arguments, and I would’ve done the same in his position, as painful as it may be. You don’t just get to ignore a defense because it sounds ridiculous. > >Rook: Are you satisfied with the results of the trial? > >McCoy: The Crown got its conviction, we avoided national embarassment, and mostly importantly, the killed officers’ families got a little bit of closure. It’s hard to complain about that kind of outcome. [long, thoughtful pause] But… something about the trial did set me the wrong way. > >Rook: How so? > >McCoy: I don’t think he ever wanted or expected an acquital. > >Rook: Then what? Was it the theatrics, or the spectacle of dragging out the trial as long as possible? > >McCoy: That’s what my office thought at first, but now I’m not so sure. [pause] It sounds so ridiculous, to say that a man dressed up in a halloween costume standing in front of a judge could be anything but amusing or sad. But between that, and his defense… to tell you the truth, I was scared that he might actually win. Digging through all those briefs, appearing in front of the judge just to say that no, I couldn’t find any precedent allowing for the exclusion of the most ridiculous legal defense in our country’s history; you have no idea how worrying that was. I think what Mark Ross wanted was to terrorize the entire court, the same way he terrorized half the city and the whole police force. And just for a moment– I think it even worked.

So I hope you like her half as much as I do.