Tafkar

Tired & Exhausted Character Traits

 ˙⋆✮ Reading the same sentence four times and still not absorbing it

 ˙⋆✮ Losing track of a word mid-sentence and just trailing off

 ˙⋆✮ The specific clumsiness of bumping into furniture that's always been there

˙⋆✮ Forgetting why they walked into a room and standing there deciding whether to care

 ˙⋆✮ The way emotions become unreasonably huge when exhausted

 ˙⋆✮ Staring at a text for minutes and then forgetting to reply

 ˙⋆✮ Laughing at things that aren't funny just because the filter is gone

 ˙⋆✮ The way sarcasm sharpens when someone is running on nothing

 ˙⋆✮ Falling asleep in any position that isn't fully horizontal

 ˙⋆✮ Asking a question and immediately forgetting the answer given

 ˙⋆✮ The squint at a screen that's been at the same brightness all day

 ˙⋆✮ Rubbing eyes until colors appear behind eyelids

 ˙⋆✮ That slight delay before responding like the signal is lagging

 ˙⋆✮ Eating whatever requires the least effort regardless of hunger

 ˙⋆✮ The way a tired person's handwriting changes completely

 ˙⋆✮ Nodding along to a conversation they've fully checked out of

 ˙⋆✮ The misdirected irritability that lands on whoever's closest

 ˙⋆✮ Forgetting whether they locked the door and being too tired to go back

#savestargate

Which means. There could totally be an earth based mystery episode plot where there are two groups who both know about the gate but think the other group hasn’t been read in, who spend the entire episode unintentionally sabotaging each other by hiding whatever alien evidence they find and covering for any weirdness.

I’m picturing like, a pair of former SG team members who are now park rangers and an active SG team posing as FBI agents, on a murder mystery in Yosemite or something. And neither group can put together enough evidence to solve the thing because look we thought we’d figured it out but if we’re right there should be a damn ring transport here and there isn’t—

[cut to the ex-SGC park rangers hauling the rings away in a pickup truck the previous night]

Until of course everything culminates in a dramatic shootout, the fake-FBI team pulls zats while the park rangers reveal an alien stun grenade and after the random goa’uld murderer or whatever is down both teams are just like

For once I'm not actually doing a bit; those "any resemblance to real persons living or dead" disclaimers genuinely exist because of Rasputin.

original post

bonus:

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.

Q: I love how the quality degrades with each reply!

A: yeah my body was going into organ failure I didn't have much in me for art. which is why I made the post lol

Q: I can't rest / take care of myself I have something I HAVE to do first

A: you will get there faster and less destructively if you are taking care of yourself. rest doesn't mean "I need a full week of doing absolutely nothing" by default. give yourself a half hour to actually relax. even ten minutes. there are inevitably windows of time in your life that you are dedicating to stressing out about what you're not doing. use that time to do what you can to be gentle with yourself. and when you have the option to treat yourself, do so.

Q: I don't know what my problem is but I'm sure there is one because what the fuck else could it be I feel like shit all of the time