So, I’ve had an OC for years that I’ve not really nailed down a “voice” for, and while I admittedly wasn’t trying that hard I just had the realization that the reason why is because he...
Just doesn’t communicate.
Not just “doesn’t talk”, though he’s physically capable.
He doesn’t communicate period.
He can write, and can do whatever this world’s version of sign language is, but he refuses to use those, either.
The most you get is a gesture and vague sound to indicate “yes”, “no”, and “maybe” and you rarely get “yes” or “no” at that.
Mostly it’s because of a lot of emotional and mental fuckery going on resulting in him feeling like nothing he ever has to say could be worth wasting the time of the people around him, that he doesn’t have a right to express himself or that he doesn’t even really have a right to have opinions.
The sad thing is that it’s entirely due to internal nonsense, he’s had his entire life with people trying to convince him otherwise, but refuses to believe it.
(Eventually it turns out it’s because he was cluing in, without realizing it, on the fact that a fragment of his soul was originally the partial soul of the greatest force of destruction to ever exist, and he’s feeling guilt and fear of becoming a monster because he’s picking up on that. It takes the World-Spirit himself saying “Hey, I purged the corruption from that soul-fragment myself and let it go back into the world with the express intent of it being reborn as a full soul able to live a proper life, you’re not to blame for a past existence you had nothing to do with. Besides, it couldn’t help but be what it was, would you think a shark evil for biting a swimmer?” before he finally started to at least consider maybe he wasn’t destined to be a monster.)
The good thing is that he’s immortal, so he has an eternity to work on his issues. Eventually he gets... Well, he’s never chatty, but he learns to communicate his ideas and opinions and feelings and that he can have them and wants and needs and he can communicate them and it’s alright.
It helps that, as a greater elemental spirit, he can communicate thoughts/feelings/emotions telepathically with the other--greater and lesser--elemental spirits.
He still relies more on that, writing, and signing than actually verbally speaking to communicate most likely, though there are some that he speaks to more that others I feel like.
(Of course getting to live his worst nightmare several centuries later probably sets him back to square one, ahahha... Poor guy.)
