#(gabe replies)

Tumblr is being fucky about this. I couldn't click on the notification directly and it says that the reply is from myself in a trenchcoat 😂 it's not

THIS IS QUESTION OF ALL TIME TO ME IF I'M HONEST!!!!

In order to answer this, we first have to understand that I am a stickler for accuracy where I can get it because I KNOW that someone out there knows more than me on any given topic, but I would like at least to not be glaringly wrong when I write. With that in mind, know that I have looked into the making of linen during medieval times so I could be accurate for quite literally a two sentence dialogue between a nameless NPC and a main character before.

I really enjoyed researching the (british) peerage system and that's probably the knowledge bank I draw on the most often now. I love an AU and knights are one of my favourite topics of all time, so peerage and nobility + their respective social standing was fascinating. So was looking into the policies around the rehabilitation of Scottish heritage buildings, especially when coupled with the geological work I had to do to figure out what kind of slate my character would have needed. But neither of those probably take the cake as the most interesting. The honour would have to go to Scots (the language).

I did probably a full month of nothing but looking into Scots, consulting various dictionaries, literary works, and people of interest surrounding the language. It's one of the national languages of Scotland, and yet so many people around the world just straight up don't know it exists. I knew I wanted to have a character speak it, but the more I learned, the more I felt it would be disingenuous since I'm not a fluent Scots speaker myself. Like the majority of languages, anyone can learn it and the more speakers of it the better, but it felt cheap of me to use it without further study. As I was writing to a deadline, that was time I didn't have and I wasn't about to guess at spelling and the intricacies of grammar. A hallmark of Scots is unique spelling but I didn't want this linguistic feature to be mistaken for a cop-out of 'writing an accent' in the way that English writers have been known to do. Think of that old trope of monolingual writers badly writing a bilingual character and then apply that to accents. Scots is genuinely a fascinating language and is distinct from the Scottish English-speaking accent, so I didn't want the two to get conflated and confused. I guess this also counts as the thing I learned that made me change my mind! In the end, I opted for the character to use certain Scots words and turns of phrase, but not to write her dialogue lines in Scots spelling itself.

ㅤ ㅤ He couldn’t figure it out; why Saemus cared for him so much. Out of everyone that deserved it, Gabe didn’t consider himself to be on that list of people. Yet, there he was. Doing his best to convince him that he didn’t care if he didn’t believe him or not, regardless, he still cared for him. Deeply too, at that. It made Gabriel's’ heart race within his chest. So much so that he couldn’t even find the words to tell him how much his own meant to him. Instead, he swept him up in a tight hug, muttering ‘thank you’ over and over, holding onto him as if he’d float away if he let go anytime soon.

YIPPEEE I LOVE SONG ASKS!!!!!!

In Bloom - Lilas Ikuta

Tank! - Seatbelts

Unskinny Bop - Poison

I Wanna Get Better - Bleachers

you fool. I never left!!!

@after-the-end-times

Ah, there it is! I saw a post like this the other day and I could not, for the life of me find it back, so I'm glad I get to share my thoughts about this after all (not that anything would've stopped me) Prepare for the essay, I never keep things short!

The Rockrose and the Thistle, is in my opinion a love song of sorts, but a different kind of love song that Extraordinary Things is, focused on the first part of it. Both songs are very similar in more ways than just recurring notes. Both songs are written in Dminor. (wheras Extraordinary Things has Minor Melodic elements that raises the 6th note to create the G major chord he plays when he sings the lyrics ‘extraordinary things’ and sings an A on top which sounds really pretty and immediately caught my ear) 

The notes everyone is referring to are in the intro of Extraordinary Things, D C D E F E F G A B♭ A G A  (I put it on a scale because I can and I’m a nerd. I also love the harmonies)

And it doesn’t just come back in the Rockrose and the Thistle, there’s two other songs written in Dminor in the Horror and the Wild and that is The Horror and the Wild, where the repetition of these tones are beautifully audible in Madeleine’s ‘You are the son of every dressing up box’ and Farewell Wanderlust, where they immediately accentuate that B♭ (which is the 6th note of the Dminor scale) in instrumentals. In Farewell Wanderlust they also play with more chromatic elements as they add a flat second note and a flat seven. The use of chromatic elements (half note distances) isn’t new for Joey and Madeleine and in my opinion it just adds a lot to the musicality of it all, it’s clever, it immediately catches my ear, it’s subtle things like that that make me keep coming back to their music. Rather than a melodic minor scale, Joey could’ve just added that half note distance to add a major G chord to his scale, because the use of major chords in minor scales is just chef’s kiss in my musical opinion, especially in combination with the words he sings. The notes he uses are not uncharacteristic for Joey’s music.

NOW LISTEN, I LOVE this ask because it means I can break down every aspect of what I love about Joey’s singing and what different things I love about Jaskier’s singing. Because oh my god the TALENT, to still make people go ‘wait I just found out that Joey Batey sings both in the Amazing Devil and as Jaskier in the Witcher’ to this day astonishes me and I’m never surprised when someone stumbles upon that realization. The breathiness he uses on his voice in both the Rockrose and the Thistle (and more TAD songs) and Extraordinary Things blows my mind. But there’s a difference to the way he uses it in both songs, let me try to explain. He sings with an aspirated voice (Which means to sing with a breathy voice) in The Rockrose and the Thistle, but in Extraordinary Things, it feels like sometimes he is just breathless and it’s so beautiful and small and soft and intimate, considering the words he’s singing. We, as singers at the conservatory, were taught to make our breaths as inaudible as possible, to remove as much breath from our voices as possible, when singing on record. So needless to say it is a DELIGHT to hear Joey just put his whole heart and soul into every breath he takes, he’s considerate of every syllable, the volume of his voice, the clearness or lack thereof, the shakiness of his breaths fucking kill me dead… ALSO what astonishes me the most about the difference between his TAD songs and his Jaskier songs is the change in vibrato. Jaskier uses more vibrato in his voice than Joey does in the Amazing Devil and I go INSANE about that because my teachers have always said that vibrato is a hard thing to control and requires a lot of training and he’s just out there, mending it to his will as if it is no big deal, like :-) King? I’m jealous, hello?