CLOK BBS

Sooooo, in an annoying move that I should have seen coming, an intended throwaway character is currently the one I'm actually focusing on. Fun of it is I didn't have much of a plan for her overall. Luckily, I managed a couple of days before she really ran into anyone to kinda start figuring her out which is where my problem resides.

Me, as a person, am rather verbose and tend to overthink what I'm going to say. There's various reasons I could get into as to why that's the case but they're not really applicable. Atali? She's....not. Not trying to go the, how was it put, "Zugzug," route with her but more in that she's blunt due to an inability to actually articulate her thoughts into words. Haven't decided yet if she's actually better at doing so in Gigan or not but there's a definite issue with Common. Not that she's illiterate but more like there's just a translation issue from brain to voice.

So, in short, I'm asking for advice on how to give Atali her voice. It's something I'm probably going to struggle with for quite some time just because I've a minor OCD issue of making SURE I'm understood and well, that's just not going to happen with her, at least not for awhile.

Sooo, any advice?

Use words with two syllables or less most of the time, keep sentences as short as possible, and use as many contractions as possible. There could be other things as well, but this should keep your sentances short and to the point without going caveman speech mode.

Hrms...contractions should be easy for me to do, length and syllables are going to be a royal pain I must admit. Makes me hate my brain at times, easier for me to adopt different ways of speaking aloud than it is to tweak how I type.

Appreciate it.

I'd actually say avoid contractions. For a person not completely at home with a language, they usually have trouble with them. idioms can also give quite a bit of trouble to a not quite fluint speaker.

I would agree with that, if you are going for more foreign, rather than less educated or uncultured, avoid contractions. Also what may be more complex in one language, might be more simple in another, or the other way around.

Lavi wrote:I would agree with that, if you are going for more foreign, rather than less educated or uncultured, avoid contractions. Also what may be more complex in one language, might be more simple in another, or the other way around.

That's a decision I'm honestly struggling with. On one hand, I could have her be a bit more capable of expressing herself in Gigan, and just make it seem that her issue with Common's a straight-up language barrier. On the other, the idea of her just naturally struggle with making herself understood appeals to me. Admittedly, any character I've ever come up with tends to have some aspects of me in them. Atali, well I've always enjoyed the idea of just punching the everloving hell out of things(one of these days I'll actually get a punching bag) but there's something about her going the exact opposite route I took in trying to make herself understood that, well honestly, kinda feels right.

Thus, I think she's more the type of just say it and say it quickly, thus being blunt and more or less brusque as opposed to being uneducated.

I can totally see that, I play a character who doesn't really speak well, because of his being more not necessarily uneducated, but uncultured, so I try and make him seem that way.