Wednesday DE: A voice like a porcelain doll possessed by a Victorian bride

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Continuing on from yesterday's theme of writing your pups: What distinctive body language or tics does your character have? How do they speak and what do their voices sound like?

Comments

[skyhigh_seance]

Oh geeze, there's like, a list.
- He uses the tattoos on his hands (HELLO, GOODBYE) as punctuation, without thinking about it. Really not thinking about it - if someone comments on it, he has to take a moment to realize what the heck they're talking about. Also I'm 1000% convinced he didn't put those there of his own free will - he's been running full tilt away from any association with ghosts since he got free from the Academy. Definitely dear old dad who had him marked up like an Ouija board.

- He doesn't really do walking in straight lines - at first I thought this was because he's pretty much always on something, but even the scenes where he's sober as a priest he's weaving. There's a fan theory that he's dodging ghosts because walking through them is distinctly unpleasant... which leads to questions about just how well he can still see those ghosts when high.

- He will most definitely babble on about anything to come to mind, and it will not always be crowd-appropriate (did I ever tell you about the time I waxed my ass with chocolate pudding??)

(No Klaus, no you didn't, also... HOW????)

- He's pretty much always on the move - like one of the first scenes, where the kids are trying to decide whether Reggie's death was suspicious, the rest of the kids are sitting fairly sedately in their chosen seats while Klaus shifts every second. If he's down and quiet, he has either taken something amazing, or he's really hurting.

- In general, even when he's being grumpy his voice is pretty gentle. He can definitely snarl and rage (OMG the vet bar scene, oh bebe) but it's not his go-to.

There's more, but I have an appointment I need to get ready for, so... tbc? :D

[i_am_your_host]

dear old dad who had him marked up like an Ouija board.

Holy crap, that makes so much sense.

[skyhigh_seance]

Right? Also explains why none of the others comment on them, though they comment on his medical bracelet he forgot to take off, the skirt he wears, etc.

Though they as a group also fail to comment on the tat he gets later in the week, so. There's that.

[milesy]

Except Five, the only one of them who pays any attention to anything. And then still be an asshole about it.

[skyhigh_seance]

True, but if he got from 'Klaus has a new tat and clothes and shit he had a suitcase' to 'oh crap how the hell did he survive', he never openly showed it. Or maybe he just figured '... welp, he's still alive, so moving on to more important things', because yeah, sorry, Five has an apocalypse addiction.

[milesy]

I think he totally figured it out, and only cared about the implications for the apocalypse. Klaus is expendable, after all. /s

[skyhigh_seance]

*looooooong sigh* Yeeeeeeeaaaah.....

Season 2 had better have at least one scene of Ben bitching out EVERYONE. Because LORD KNOWS this trash panda here ain't gonna complain himself.

[milesy]

I AM THERE FOR IT.

[skyhigh_seance]

*high fives*

[cute_bruiser]

...Oh Klaus, baby.

Molly and McGonagall would both like to have a Very Quiet Word with 'dad'. Not necessarily a very long word, but...

[skyhigh_seance]

At this point, I think there's a line. But that's okay, he's a resilient bastard, and there'll probably be enough of him left to make the Quiet Word still terribly cathartic.

(The tattoo scene makes me want to punch walls every time I see it. Holy shit, there's two adults and a robot adult-stand-in in that room, and no one is putting a stop to it. Burn. Them. With. Fire.)

[cottoncandypink]

So, originally, Wilford had a very pronounced and awkward speech impediment. Everything was kind of slurred together and forced, and any given sentence would be all over the volume range. I don't think any one part of his voice was specifically deliberate, since to do his voice, Fischbach dislocates his freaking jaw. Or did. I've seen in fic and other games where people try to get this across in text, and it's the most distracting, annoying thing in the world, and I've never done it. Initially, I tried to mention that it was a thing in threads, but that became tedious, and I just forgot. It was all still there, but I think only a few characters in-bar were ever aware of it, or properly understood what they were aware of.

Initially, Wilford was supposed to be about 80, and his first couple of videos leaned on that pretty heavily. He was kind of bumbling, and didn't understand anything 'these kids' were doing, basically. That aspect was dropped really quickly though, presumably because he just looked like a 24 year old pretending to be an old man. Instead of being an old man, he started to just act like one instead, and then he'd slip up and drop some spicy meme. I really like the idea that as a journalist, he acts like he has no idea what's going on around him, but is probably more aware of everything than anyone else in the room.

When he's Barnum, none of that is present. He's still loud and bombastic, but the whole speech thing was dropped. Instead, he has a heavy Mid-Atlantic accent. He also talks like it's 1920, with outdated slang. His very most recent appearance, and possibly his final one, is way more Barnum than it is Warfstache. It's a weird little bridge between the two, but it leans more heavily on the accent than it does the messed up jaw. A popular fan... joke? theory? is that after he gets everyone killed, Damien possesses the DA's body specifically to come back and break Wilford's jaw as payback.

He has two modes that was something I played with a little bit at the beginning, but it was like his voice - tedious to keep repeating, so I just kind of quit mentioning it. Depending on the part of canon, mode 1 is the unassuming mode, and changes up a bit. This Wilford seems kind of lazy. Camera angles and costuming paradoxically make him seem either heavier than he is, or much more slim, and he seems constantly drunk or high. Either way, he's just kind of stupid and bumbling and not much of a threat. Mode 2 is when he's pissed, or otherwise means business. That's when the guns and literal muscle come out. Sometimes there's no warning that this is going to happen, because he's pretty much always loud and slightly confrontational.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bastion's body language is much more sharp, stiff, and economical when their combat protocols are in control, moving only as much as they have to and thereby looking about 10000% more robotic than normal. Usually, they move fluidly and with multiple points of articulation at once rather than the minimum necessary for the current action, which looks a lot more naturalistic even before they reflect their mood moment-to-moment in their posture (shoulders drooping when sad, etc) or make an actual gesture.

Those two modes of body language do tend to meet in the middle when their combat protocols have priority for a long time without disengaging, as was more likely to be the case during the war; their level of singlemindedness tapers off eventually so as to devote more attention to things like self-maintenance and group coordination. This is where things like that bit in Honor and Glory with one random Bastion unit pausing to stare in shock at the pile of scrap metal that was a squadmate a few seconds ago, only for their hesitation to make them easy pickings for a young Reinhardt themself, came from.

It's really more of a bodily function than a body language tic, but instead of a breath cycle like the human (or partially-human) characters, they're always vibrating back and forth a little bit from various internal motors and moving parts, like an idling car.

[bjornwilde]

Jess always has an irreverent air to anything she says, both in tone and body language. If she's ever serious, either shit is going down or she is fucking with you. Hard to tell. Canon says she has an English accent, but I imagine she also has some of California in there also.

[takethatnature]

Wilson sounds like a Harmon muted trumpet, canonically. I decided not to take this literally because it would be ridiculous, but he still has the second highest voice out of the human male characters (after Wagstaff, who I think is a slide whistle) and by far the goofiest 'injured' noises, sounding like an upset squeaky toy.

So, I touched on this last time there was a body language DE, but in Don't Starve everyone draws from a communal pool of idle animations. (A few character-specific ones have been added in Don't Starve Together but Wilson doesn't have one yet.) Which ones they use depend on which way they're facing and in particular their sanity level, though there's also one to show low hunger. The default idle animations play when their sanity and hunger are both fine, so instead they express mild boredom by kicking the dirt if they're facing sideways or scratching their ears if they're facing the camera or their lower backs if they're facing away. At medium sanity they're moderately stressed out and easily spooked; side-on they hunch over and hold their heads with their eyes squeezed shut like they're nursing a bad headache, and from both the front and the rear they startle at nothing specific and look around in alarm. At critical sanity they've basically reached the point of a mental breakdown, so they grip their temples (with one or both hands depending on whether they have an item equipped) and rock back and forth whenever they're not running away from the now-solid hostile nightmare apparitions.

I don't have much else except that Aradia grins a lot in both a friendly and a schadenfreude-y way, Cirava shrugs often and is quick to laugh, and Thurlow rarely smiles unless it's at someone else's expense or the desperate fixed grin of a severely askew mental state.

[milesy]

> and by far the goofiest 'injured' noises

"MWAAAP!"

[angry_friendship_wolf]

- Yamato growls as pretty much his default tone of voice. His voice is somewhere around the bass-baritone range, and has a generally low, rumbling quality. He will sometimes pitch his voice up a little if he's trying to be approachable and non-threatening, because he's acutely aware that he sounds a little menacing.

- He's never exactly relaxed in his body language. He's not quite tense, but there's a deliberateness and readyness to how he moves, like he's expecting to either have to run or have to spring into a fight at any moment.

- His body language also isn't exactly human, insofar as there's a definite lupine quality to it.

- He and Gabumon mirror each other in their movements, often making the same gestures at the same time with a weird amount of synchronicity. This is even more pronounced when Gabumon evolves, and WereGarurumon, as the sole melee attacker amongst those evolutions, fights basically exactly like Yamato does, right down to the sharing the same tics and quirks.

[i_am_your_host]

Emcee has the gait of an alley cat; there is an effortless grace to him, but at the same time he's a bit rough and unrefined. He never sits properly if he can help it, always putting his feet up or tucking a leg under himself or splaying or sprawling. If he does happen to be sitting up straight, you can safely assume that something is wrong with him. By default he speaks English with a German accent (Berliner for those who can tell the difference), and his voice is the result of years of smoking, drinking, and singing, all wrapped up in crushed velvet. So if he's trying to seduce you he can really turn it on if he wants to. His tone is generally neutral, but more often than not it takes on a sarcastic or playful (or playfully sarcastic, or sarcastically playful) edge.

Annnnd this heat is making my brain melt so this is all I can manage for now.

[cute_bruiser]

Adult!Molly moves with a very specific long-legged ease, the kind you might get when you're athletic and know it, and you're very comfortable in both yourself and your surroundings, and you're also accustomed - by now - to being, not actually the boss, but in charge. So she stretches her legs out, leans rather than sits upright, and generally looks happy to take up a little more space than perhaps many other young women might - the first tell that she's actually rather older than she looks (i.e. nearly thirty, rather than in her very early twenties as people tend to suspect). When she walks, she's very upright, with a bounce in her step, and a tendency to scan her surroundings (she's not always aware she's doing this).

Child!Molly bounces when she's being watched or with her siblings, and has a much more teenagerly slouch when she isn't. She's the cute one and the baby! She's the distraction! Sometimes, what she's doing is distracting her siblings from the shit that's going on! When she's pissed off, though, she stands absolutely bolt upright.

When Molly speaks, she's very clearly California, though as an adult the time she spent with the X-Men in New York (and the X-Men's media training) has softened that somewhat. Even (especially) as an adult, she'll play it up more when she's deliberately being annoying (i.e. any time she speaks to Mr Lecter it should be assumed that she's so Valley Girl she might as well be popping pink bubblegum) or actually wants to be underestimated.

Whether a child or an adult, her verbal tics are 'dude' and 'freaking'. She almost never really swears beyond 'damn' or 'hell', partly because she's currently in loco parentis but mostly because she's American (one of the things I really noticed when we were in America is how much less adults swore amongst themselves compared to the UK).

With her powers on, she's very upright in the same way that she is when she's angry, and her hands are - if not actually curled into fists - then loose at her side and clearly moments away from becoming fists. Her face, which is normally bright and lively and sunshiny, goes very cold and much more still and hard. With her powers on, when she's invulnerable, she feels everything much less - she's much less kind, she's much less loving, and even her anger generally manifests as being very cold and very hard.