#pinevalley

10. Is your character street-smart, book-smart, intelligent, intellectual, slow-witted?

Yeong-Hui’s intelligence is... hard to define. I’ll get more into the reason in the next question, but Yeong-Hui is mostly more emotionally and linguistically intelligent than anything else - one of the precious few traits they share with Garis. Emotionally intelligent, in that they can understand and empathise with peoples’ emotions very easily, and if they put effort into doing so, can understand peoples’ motivations and intentions quite easily. Linguistically intelligent, in that they’re not only poetic and silver-tongued, but also have a keen faculty for learning new languages. Though Yeong-Hui themself only speaks Korean, English, and Mandarin, Garis can speak those three as well as Swedish, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

12. How does their education and intelligence – or lack thereof - reflect in their speech pattern, vocabulary, and pronunciations?

Yeong-Hui’s education is a complex matter - most of it took place when Iris fronted for what would become their system, so Yeong-Hui has no direct memory of it. Only the essential knowledge such as some languages, basic math, English, and home economics, were willingly transferred to Yeong-Hui once they became the host again. As a result of this, Yeong-Hui mostly takes their speech patterns from the kinds of people they associate with, rather than any formal ‘education’. Their vocabulary in day-to-day conversation is therefore rather basic and laid-back, mostly crutching on contractions and slang to get through a conversation - but they do know how to use much more flowery language when they turn on the charm, or when they want to write a poem for someone, for instance.

29. What is your character’s weaknesses? Hubris? Pride? Controlling?

Yeong-Hui’s main weakness is that they’re too self-absorbed, and too nonchalant about, well... everything, except for the things that they can be convinced to care about. This isn’t rooted in apathy, however - it’s more a result of a narrow, self-serving approach to life. If someone is in need, they’ll still do everything they can to help - it’s just that they’ll be more inclined to help if it benefits them in some way. This isn’t always the case, obviously - a huge part of their reputation as a model consists of their charitable donations towards homeless shelters and medical research - but it certainly is more of a motivating factor for them. And, as with some of their relationships, they end up being prone to stepping on other people, inadvertently or not, to rise above their own station.

32. How does your character react to stress situations? Defensively? Aggressively? Evasively?

Yeong-Hui mostly tends to be avoidant of any kind of stress in their life - if anything, it mostly feeds into and roots from their attitude as outlined in the previous question - they firmly believe that nothing in their life is permanent, and the quicker something that no longer affects them is forgotten about, the better. Of course, there are times where they just can’t avoid stress, whether it’s thrust upon them, whether it haunts them in the middle of the night, or in the rare occasion they find themselves in a life-threatening situation. In either case, they’re very much prone to receding into a dissociative state - which is when Garis is more likely to emerge out of defense for the system they don’t know exists.

If that happens, of course, Yeong-Hui retains none of the memories of it - and if it’s been dealt with and they wake up back at their apartment without explanation, they don’t deign to question it. They just move on, and try to forget it ever happened - whatever ‘it’ may have been.

49. What about voice? Pitch? Strength? Tempo and rhythm of speech? Pronunciation? Accent?

I hate this question because I only just recently came across a decent singing voice reference for Yeong-Hui but it’s from a fucking bingus video bc I can’t find the original audio source... here it is but god. god dammit.

For a more written description - when speaking normally, their voice is quite thin rather than strong, but with a moderately low pitch. However, they do not speak flatly at all most of the time - while their resonance is mostly consistent, their pitch fluctuates wildly, especially when they’re in public or talking at length about something they like, or something that’s interesting to them. They’re also prone to letting vowels ‘hang’ for a bit -- for lack of a better term what I mean by this is that they often say words like “so” as “sooooooooo”  in conversation - letting it drag out for a second or two for emphasis.