眼鏡と紅茶

behind the scenes vs the scene

"The Apothecary Diaries (Kusuriya no Hitorigoto)" upcoming anime movie new visual & PV unveiled

Release Date: December 11

Character designs:

An all-new original story by Natsu Hyuuga.

i wish i had the time to write out the full meta on this that lives in my brain but the short version is this: his english is really fucking good

i have been an EFL teacher for 20 years and he's better than 98% of the people i've taught. Don't be distracted by the occasional missed article or word he needs to double-check in the dictionary, this boy has been dropping advanced grammar like it's nothing from the very beginning.

the very first thing he says to shane,"You will not be so nice when we beat you," is grammatically perfect and contains:

a modal verb indicating the future (will)

correct negation and base verb form (not be)

an adverb of degree modifying an adjective (so nice)

a relative pronoun introducing a defining relative clause (when)

an idiomatic use of the verb 'beat'

and this is when he'd barely spent any time among english speakers! By the time he's been with boston for a few seasons, his english is genuinely outstanding, easy and fluent and grammatically complex. Yes, there will always be some things he doesn't know and yes there will be times when he struggles with it (stress, exhaustion, frustration, all of these are factors in the ability to produce a second language) but when you're writing his dialogue here are some vital points to remember:

ilya himself is a very unreliable narrator when it comes to his english abilities. He canonically hates his accent and sees its existence as a personal failing. He has insanely high expectations for what he should be able to do in english but feels he can't. This is, and i cannot emphasise this too strongly, *very normal* for high-level language learners. The more you learn the more you realise you don't know, and the more you try to express complex ideas and run up against your own roadblocks the more frustrated you can become. People are genuinely very bad at assessing their own foreign language ability and ilya is no exception.

the show itself tells us repeatedly that ilya's english sucks even when it very clearly does not. Shane's comments about it rolling off his tongue and asking him if he used google translate have zero basis in reality. The show tells us he's bad while showing us he's good, believe what you're shown.

i'm gonna bet that neither rachel reid nor jacob tierney has any practical experience with english second language learners that could guide them in making ilya's english more authentic to the standard learner experience. This is fine, since his language ability is in no way the point of the show but it does mean that the disconnect between what's told and what's shown isn't intentional. Which means that fic writers absolutely could choose to ignore what's shown and write ilya as having more difficulties with english than we witness him having. But! If you do this, please, please do it with intent. Do some research on what russian speakers actually struggle with in english*. Don't just have him leave off every single article and call it a day. And if you are a native english speaker who speaks zero other languages, check your prejudices and actually listen to what he says and how he says it before you start typing.

seriously. This fandom has so many good fics already, like genuinely outstanding ones, but i can count on the fingers of one hand the ones i've read that represent ilya's english accurately to how it's portrayed in the show. Let's do better.

THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN WRITING ILYA DIALOGUE:

the BIG THING: ilya never gets verb tenses wrong. Like never never. He also never leaves off the -s on the third person singular.

What Not To Write ❌: “Scott Hunter lose to Montreal yesterday. He always play very badly because he is old.”

CODA to the Big Thing: by the time we get to the cottage episode ilya’s grammar is hella complex. For example: “Your phone has been ringing all morning.” Present perfect continuous, a tense that gives headaches to EFL students worldwide. Ilya doesn’t have to think about it. Consider also: “She would have loved you.” Third conditional, universally reviled by english learners. Not ilya rozanov.

in short, Do Not Write him making basic grammar errors. He does not.

so what does he do?

ilya:

✅ occasionally omits articles. More frequently the indefinite one (a,an) less frequently the definite one (the). Articles are a PIA for people whose native language doesn’t have any (russian) but they of course are taught them when they learn english and especially would have practiced cases such as superlatives (the best hockey player in the world) and teams (the boston raiders) just as two examples ilya is unlikely to get wrong.

✅ misses out contractions. So he says will not instead of won’t, I am instead of I’m, you are instead of you’re, etc. Please note that this is significantly reduced by episode 5.

✅ omits the impersonal subject pronoun “it”. This is the most striking characteristic of his speech and something absolutely to include to make his dialogue sound authentic to him. Example: “Hollander, is okay. Do not panic so much.”

the SECOND THING: ilya and vocabulary.

again, his vocabulary is wide-ranging. Please remember that he knew the meaning of compatible in ep5, he just looked it up to double check. He would not forget basic words. Please do not fall into the heffalump trap that HR pushed grigori into, eg “He is, how you say, lazy.” That line is cliche and frankly dumb. No one talks like this.

(i also firmly believe ilya knew what “narrative” meant, he was just being a bitch because shane woke him up)

HOWEVER it is a very real, very valid thing that external factors such as tiredness, stress, overstimulation, etc can affect a person’s ability to produce a second language. This DOES NOT MEAN they are bad at speaking it. Ilya not understanding the convoluted question at the press conference and his inability to express complex feelings when he’s stressed AF after his father’s funeral, these are not indicative of a general low level of english. So if you write ilya sliding a bit in times of heightened stress or even pretending to be worse than he is to fuck with people, that is frankly very sexy of you and him.

You say in your tags that 'characters who casually unnecessarily murder people should get jail not redemption' and yet that... also simply isn't true of the original cartoon? Iroh was a general in the Fire Nation army for decades. He held Ba Sing Se under military siege for over two years. He starts the show redeemed, heedless of the trail of bodies left behind by his military conquest&career, to the point where we're supposed to cheer him on for opening up a tea shop in Ba Sing Se at the end like realistically everyone in that city wouldn't have very good reason to want him dead or at least tried and hanged.

The cartoon never really grappled with the realities of Iroh's past, though--because it was aimed at seven-year-olds. NATLA is doing very different things with his characterization and his place in the world and that's because it's no longer aimed at seven-year-olds and seems very interested in filling some of the gaping holes left unexplored by the source material.

And it's funny that you call this 'juvenile and obvious storytelling' when Azula (and Mai and Ty Lee) has far greater depth to her characterization here--while also grappling with the realities of who she is and the consequences of her behavior--than the OG cartoon where she was very much holding that flashing neon sign saying 'bad guy' and we only get hints at something deeper while Mai and Ty Lee remained extremely one-note. I'm a lot more excited to see the breakdown of their relationship here and the consequences of their betrayal and the effect it will have on her than I was in the cartoon, where I didn't really care about them except insofar as they looked pretty cool and were fun to watch on screen.

"you hearing this shit honey? 😶"

****

Of course, I'll draw this scene again 🥲

OMG GAOSHUN AND HIS PENGUIN!🤣🤣🤣

Even Jinshi's spirit plushie needs to do paperwork!! Again look at Gaoshun though!!!

Gyoukyou be like sharing that tea!!