Weekly Update - 130 (Patreon)

See that up there?  That's a much better version of the Citadel than the last one!  It's still not quite finished, but it's a lot closer to what I hoped to draw.  I confess, while I didn't really spend my week off STUDYING art forms to make better backgrounds, but I did spend a good portion of it trying out some different techniques, which I guess is a form of study... artistic study can sometimes just be drawing things... can't it?

I dunno, did you all see how good Lofi Riley looks?  I'm so proud of that.

Comic this week?  Yes, it might be late on Wednesday but I'm currently full of determination and I'm pretty confident I will get it done.

Drawing: Page 150; Max character sheet

Playing: WoW again.

Ramble:

For today's ramble, I wanted to discuss a writing topic.  I know, right?

But last night I was thinking about writing dialogue and how accents are used, both in how I use them in my writing and how they are used in things I've read.

My primary observation is that accents are weird, in writing.  As a native English speaker, I am writing my story in English for an English-speaking audience.  For what reason would I use an accent, or a modified or different-sounding or potentially-more-confusing dialect of English in order to tell my English-speaking audience what my characters are saying?  Would it not make sense for me to just tell you in plain English what they said, and then describe their tone of speaking to you?  Well, yes, I think, but as with everything it isn't that simple.

For one thing, everyone has an accent of some form.  I have an accent.  It is my own individual version of English.  My accent comes from being born in California, in the US.  It is probably what most people would describe as the typical Californian or Hollywood accent.  If I was to go over to Australia or Britain or even several other places in the US, my accent would probably stand out, because of the words I would use and the way I would say them.  To many people in the world, my accent stands out in my writing as well.  I write how I speak, for many of my characters, and, just as an example, any time I spell the word "armor," instead of "armour" I am sure there are a few people following the comic who cringe at it. Now it's all in good fun to joke about which spelling is "right" and which one is "wrong," but to me, "armour" seems wrong because I can't help but pronounce it phonetically in my mind as ARMOOOURE, and that just isn't how I say the word aloud.  (Even my browser marks it as spelled incorrectly.) Whereas when reading "armor" in my mind I hear it more like ARMER, which is a lot closer to my own pronunciation and my general knowledge of how the word should be said, because that is how I was taught it should be said. Point being that everyone is different and has different expectations and different ways of speaking and spelling the world over.  Werf, languages!

Speaking of languages, the characters in Kuserra do not live on Earth, and would not be speaking English to begin with. They are speaking a language that they call "Shtago," (but even THAT isn't quite correct, since that is an English translation of whatever Shtago word they would use to name their own language, much like English has decided "Japanese" is the word to use for what the Japanese (Nihonjin) themselves call "Nihongo" or how "German" is the English word for what the Deutschers call Deutsch.) Everything they say in this fictional language of Shtago is theoretically first translated into English for me to understand it, so I can write it for my English-speaking audience.  ... have I mentioned how much I hate words?

But why use accents at all?  If everyone in Kuserra is speaking Shtago, why would some characters have accents? Well, again, because everyone technically has an accent of some sort. While there is a standard sort of regional accent or dialect for Kuserra in the places where people tend to gather and congregate and communicate with each other the most, some characters don't quite fit the mold that would apply to most. If we examine Donno, who is depicted speaking in a slightly cowboy-like/USA Southerner type accent, or Betty, whose voice I hear in a sort of stereotypical Asian grandmother type accent, what is even going on there with those characters?

The first (and more boring) answer is that it's me, and I am merely human, and my brain forms stereotypes for faster and more efficient recall of information and I have stereotypes in my head for certain character archetypes, and subconsciously I am beholden to what my brain allows me to know about those archetypes... hooray for metacognition. Some of those archetypes are associated with certain manners of speaking, based on the media I have consumed throughout my life. When one of my characters forms inside my head and begins speaking to me, I hear them speaking a certain way, and I do my best to write down what I hear to stay as consistent and genuine to that character as I can.  In some cases, for certain archetypes, my brain may skirt pretty closely to being TOO stereotypical, possibly even approaching the territory of what some people may find cliche... It's more of a subconscious thing, really, I'm not immune to my sources of inspiration and influence.

But there's another important storytelling reason to use accents in writing, as they are a fact of life and a concept that nearly everyone is familiar with in some form.  It is a signal to the reader that perhaps this character is not native to the region they are currently in. Accents can be used to suggest that a character is foreign to this region, that they grew up in some other place, or that they are a wanderer who perhaps does not settle down. And it's an important signal to have, especially if a character's past is not necessarily ever going to be revealed in the main story. Every character, no matter how detached they are from the main plot, should have their own story. It helps them all to feel like real people, when they each have their own lives to live.

Anyway, this ended up being a lot longer than I'd hoped, and I didn't even cover everything I had hoped to cover.  Hope you found it interesting... ima go draw.