Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in

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 receive 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 his foster son, Apollo Justice, 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. .

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 Inga, 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.

The foreign attorney

 * Main article: The Rite of Turnabout

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.

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.

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 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.

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
When first encountered, Ga'ran seemed to be a wise, kindly queen, if a bit rigid and cold toward defense attorneys, which she pretended that was due to her sister's death at the hands of one. In reality, she disliked lawyers only because of the obstacle they presented between her and greater power. She was a vain, conniving, and utterly amoral bully who could resist flaunting her power and mocking her opponents, especially when serving as a prosecutor. In her view, being queen made her the embodiment of the law and thus privileged to alter it to her favor, regularly issuing royal decrees during the trial of her brother-in-law for the express purpose of weighing the odds in her favor. Ga'ran was also a profoundly spiteful and egotistical woman, regularly bribing defense attorneys with promises of lighter sentences if they should beg her for mercy, getting a detachment of the Royal Guards to slavishly reaffirm their devotion to her at all times, and once ordering the Plumed Punisher series off the air to punish Rayfa for having gone against her. As a final insult, she publicly claimed part of the reason for cancellation was to "avoid disappointment" when people saw the real Rayfa instead of the actress playing her on the series, which explanation was heavily implied to be a slight against her surrogate daughter's beauty, height, and bust size.

She had no sense of ethics when winning a case or shoring up her political influence, even resorting to manipulating her sister into hiding. She even entered a loveless marriage (and later murdering Inga) to tighten her stranglehold on her country. She was also somewhat cowardly, immediately losing her nerve when she realized she was being forced into the impossible task of spirit channeling, even hypocritically calling for her own defense attorney. She was also somewhat unstable, given over to megalomania and histrionics, in particular narcissism that drove her to continue the trial long past a point where she could easily win purely out of the desire to truly crush her opponent. It ultimately pushed her over the edge following her defeat, deposition, and arrest, as she apparently began to believe she was the Holy Mother. She also had a great affinity for spiders, keeping images of them as her personal sigil (Nahyuta's spider-emblazoned glove was something she forced him to wear over his Defiant Dragons tattoo as a symbol of ownership) 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.

Appearance
In her duties as Queen, she seemed to dress with the intention of seeming regal and harmless. Ga'ran 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".
 * One of Ga'ran's Royal Guards, Lah'kee, comes from the word, "lackey," which means a servant.

Development

 * While in her guise as queen, Ga'ran generally speaks using the royal "we". She drops this and consistently speaks normally once she reveals her true colors in court, likely because she was ostensibly not acting as queen in that instance.
 * 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).
 * Additionally 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.
 * Of all the characters to possess a close-up animation, Ga'ran uses hers the least, on only one occasion.