Thursday DE

[needsmoreresearch]

What's your character's voice/speech like? Are they a mile-a-minute talker? Slow and careful? What's their accent? Interesting habits?

Comments

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bastion doesn't use figures of speech if I can help it (they understand the concept of figurative language, and common idioms were included in their preloaded English/German/etc dictionaries, they just don't usually use those themself). They also use as few words as they can to communicate their intended meaning precisely without being grammatically incorrect. These don't have to be short words; the important part is that none of them are redundant or filler. Bastion doesn't really distinguish between common and uncommon words, since they learned their whole vocabulary at the same time. They only occasionally and with provocation swear, because I was tired of the trope of unintelligible characters being secret potty-mouths.

Their voice is best described as beepy. It's not uncommon for the audio beep to be much shorter than it would take to say the data transmission associated with it out loud in English.

Bonus round: The voice I imagine their English dialogue in bounces between 'turret from Portal', 'defective turret from Portal 2', and 'training bots, also from Overwatch'. That last one opens with some weird getting-damaged noises so maybe listen with headphones.

[have_no_mercy]

Tess has a husky voice and speaks very deliberately, choosing her words carefully. Unless she's surprised, then she can babble a bit until she gets her bearings back.

Rose has a soft, higher pitched voice and she tends to talk quickly.

Kylo has a deeper voice and tends to say what's on his mind, very deliberately. He'll get his point across with as few words as possible, though.

Creed has a deeper voice than Kylo and sort of growls a lot. He's blunt, to the point (usually) and doesn't have much of a social filter. He uses a lot of contractions and drops the ends of words because he is an Uneducated Brute.

[death_gone_mad]

There was a brief moment when the developers of Runescape were experimenting with voice acting, and they found it to be really restrictive when it comes to developing or fixing quests, not to mention expensive. The first thing they found was how badly players reacted to hearing their player character's voices (it clashed with most player's headvoices), so they stopped that, but continued to voice NPCs, so we get weirdness like this video which is a walkthrough of one of the two quests in which Amascut received voice acting. The voice acting was only ever done in British English.

In summary, Amascut has a usually low-pitched, sultry sing-song voice with a generic middle-easterner-speaking-british-english accent, and she will start doing an odd choir of voices thing when she wants to intimidate.

The Fairy questline was wrapped up by the time the experiments with voice acting happened, so Fairy Fixit never got voice acted. But, her manner of speech is obvious from canon, at least. Very talkative, full of technobabble and abbreviations, and she thinks out loud. She likely has a higher-pitched voice that is sort of flat and matter-of-fact.

[holdingacat]

Technically, Cecil is all voice - other than a couple of books, his entire canon is the podcast and live shows, where he's voiced by the awesome Cecil Baldwin.

Cecil definitely has a wide range of cadences- from decidedly fluttery when talking about Carlos to his normal smooth deep voice to a very dark 'here be dragons' voice he only pulls out when things have really gone to shit or he is trying to drive home a point. His verbal formality varies wildly as well, from a very professional radio announcer to 'so, like, I said hellooooo, like I don't have called id...'.

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka: CW-era, is enthusiastic and at times playful, and a little impatient. Rebels-era, she's calm and patience, as if she has all the time in the world for whomever she's speaking with. There is an innate serenity to her that is unmistakable.

Sabine: Sure and perhaps cocky. Also, her mood tends to be pretty clear in her tone.

Viv: Calm and polite, yet inquisitive. In fact, here's her voice actress reading lines from the Avengers Academy game (Soundcloud link), which is exactly how I hear Viv.

Danny is quick and decisive, and at present, a little tense or angry. He's going through things. If one could imagine an element in a voice, Danny's would be fire.

Dog: I am honestly still feeling out Dog's exact voice. I've had two different narrators for the books (Tim Curry and Heather Wilds), so I'm trying to clear my head from them, as they conflict. I do know that almost always there is a hint of amusement to Dog's voice, as if there's a joke she just heard and can't get over.

Jessica Drew, whom I haven't brought in yet, tends to come across as impatient, begrudging, grumpy, or edging into mocking. When she is being sincere however, there is no doubt at all of her intent. She also has hints of the UK and California in her accent, and to hell with modern canon.

[cottoncandypink]

In earlier parts of canon, Wilford has an amazing speech impediment, caused by the actor dislocating his jaw. Lately that’s been swapped out for more of a Mid-Atlantic accent (probably because doing Wilford’s voice sounds painful as hell). Either way, he’s the loudest person in the room.

He’s never been very consistent with cadence and which era his slang comes from. The character has always been older than the actor, but even that’s changed from retirement age to maybe a decade or so older. I choose to believe that sometimes Wilford just decides it’s 1920 or something for no damn reason other than to throw people off and confuse them.

[i_am_your_host]

In going to resist linking to YouTube clips even though I fell down a bit of a hole looking for good ones (I just love all my pups and their distinctive voices so much, haha).

Emcee speaks English with a German accent that has a bit of a raspy edge (and ideally not the campy German accent that you typically hear in movies and TV spoken by people who aren't actually German). Though he's fluent in English, he still may fall back on little idiosyncratic syntax nuggets like, "You are coming to the party, yes?" Or the use of 'most' as in, "It was most wonderful." He's a thoughtful speaker and enunciates clearly, as he's used to speaking in public and addressing crowds. For the stage, he can have a bold ringmaster's voice; or an actor's musical cadences, which often carries over into his normal voice when he's feeling playful or upbeat.

Pam has a slow Southern drawl. Now, I'm not an expert on Southern accents (and neither were the actors on True Blood, ba-dump-bump), but it's definitely not a Texas twang or as deep as the Bayou, and neither is it a "plantation" accent like Civil War era Bill Compton has. So whatever northern Louisiana sounds like, that's what she has. But it's not real. She just picked it up after living there for twenty years or so, and it's how a vampire adapts. She completely loses the accent when she speaks to Eric in private. Her voice is usually low and sultry, and she rarely ever speaks quickly, preferring to make every word clear, especially if she's describing how she's going to kill you.

Cassidy has a peculiar Irish accent that comes from the actor himself having a very thick Lancashire (Northern England) accent, which creeps through. I've read comments from Irish people about him not sounding Irish at all, and others saying that he does. In any case, Cassidy has lived in many places over a very long period of time, so I'm going to say that his Irish accent has changed over time. Sometimes it's hard to understand him, but I think it's one of those things where if you spend enough time with him, you get to understand him better. Kind of like Chewbacca, I guess. He often speaks fast when he's excited about something, and tends to ramble on, but it's always fascinating to listen to him.

Floki's voice is like that of a storyteller's, light and lilting and musical, even when he's not telling a story. Thus his speech is never hurried, almost chant-like or sing-songy. In Milliways he wouldn't be speaking English, but Old Norse, so with the translation field he'll sound like he has a prominent Scandinavian accent.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

I wouldn't pass up the YouTube clips, tbh, I haven't seen any of your pups' canons and I'd be interested in which clips you consider the best.

[i_am_your_host]

Cool! Well, these are the clips I thought provided the best examples (and they give bonus insight into the characters' mannerisms and personalities as well).

For Emcee, he speaks the most during the introductory song, Willkommen: https://youtu.be/53fmKTDmLqg

Seven minutes of Pam being a sassy beeitch (lots of profanity): https://youtu.be/4l_S8eQaCyU

Cassidy being ridiculous: https://youtu.be/bFHTwxCvdzw

I tried to find a good compilation of Floki scenes, but most were way too spoilery or the music was too loud, so here's the first time we meet Floki in the very first episode: https://youtu.be/I0jM7yHNLrA

[childofrebellion]

I have a Broadway mix cd that I was listening to on my way home and it included his version of Money and good lord, Alan Cumming's voice.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato's voice is kind of ridiculously deep, and it has a natural growl to it (very slightly when he was eleven, and very overtly so now that he's eighteen), but it's counterbalanced a little by the fact that unless he's giving orders to someone (which tends to see his voice get quite harsh), he's usually quite soft-spoken. He doesn't tend to raise his voice in everyday conversation, even when he's angry -- instead, that tends to be signified by his voice dropping even deeper and growlier.

In terms of speaking style, though, the novels describe his way of talking to people as being very disconcerting, although a lot of that comes down to word choices and linguistic markers that get lost in translation: He tends to default to 'anta' when addressing women, and 'omae' when addressing men -- both are informal (and 'omae' is very informal) and somewhat aggressive and confrontational, and that tendency carries over to both his second person pronouns (he tends to use 'soitsu' and 'aitsu' depending on distance, both of which are really informal and carry an undertone of contempt), and his first person pronouns (he uses 'ore,' which is quite overtly masculine but not exactly unusual -- Taichi and Jyou both use it as well).

Combined with that is that he tends to roll and overpronounce his 'R' sounds, which is a linguistic marker in Japanese that is usually meant to indicate both informality and anger; and he slurs his vowels just a tiny bit -- slurred vowels are considered kind of rude and aggressive, but usually at levels a bit more pronounced than Yamato does it.

So the combined effect is that Yamato's whole style of speaking is really hyper-informal, and carries an undercurrent of just constant distaste and anger that's only really offset by the fact that he's quite quiet. He's kind of a nightmare to talk to, and the translation field in Mways is doing him a ton of favours in that regard.

[for_everyone]

Kanan and Hera both speak in a not-too-fast, not-too-slow pace of Characters In a Children's TV Show That Need To Be Understood.

In the scheme of Star Wars accents, which really don't make any sense, Kanan has a Standard (American-sounding) accent. As opposed to a Core (British) accent (but he grew up on Coruscant? But other Jedi have Core accents? But clearly non-Core characters have that accent, and Corellia and Alderaan are also Core planets but don't???? ehhhn). His voice is a little deep, and he can generally sound self-assured even when he's really not feeling it.

Hera also uses a Standard accent, but her native language is Twi'leki and she also has a Ryloth (French-sounding) accent. She very rarely uses her Ryloth accent when speaking Basic, however - generally it's only when she's intentionally disguising her voice, or if she gets angry or emotional, and even then only among other Twi'leks. Even when speaking to other Twi'leks, she usually won't use that accent when speaking Basic. My headcanon is that Hera found picking up the Basic accent fairly easy, and finds it's useful in being understood, and when disguising that she's a Twi'lek if she's speaking over a comm. She actually likes what she thinks of as her "Basic" voice, in addition to her "Twi'leki" voice - but at the same time, she feels resentment at having to have this separate "non-Twi'lek" voice, at having to sacrifice this aspect of herself, as well as uncomfortable with her own feelings of actually liking her "Basic" voice so. It's complicated!

In A New Dawn, Kanan's POV describes her voice as "warm" and "almost melodic", and he starts following her initially just because of her voice, so uh, he might be slightly biased. In our headcanon she does have a nice singing voice, though that isn't heard very often. Generally she sounds matter-of-fact, and sometimes she raises her voice in anger or frustration – but it's really not loud Hera you have to be afraid of.

[moisturewave_aesthetic]

As for the rest of my pups: I don't have a very firm voicecanon for Aradia or Cirava aside from, y'know, sounding young. Cirava's apathetic attitude tends to come out in the tone of their voice, all the more so when they're high on psychoactive bug farts, and the timbre of their voice isn't distinctly male or female.

Thurlow has an androgynous voice as well, though they're an alto, so they sound more feminine than masculine. Their accent is half Received Pronunciation, half Liverpool, since the Fallen London player character is canonically from somewhere else in Great Britain rather than being born and raised in Fallen London, and that's the city I somewhat arbitrarily picked.