#theorphanmaker

oh good luck! I wanted to romance her but someone else tempted me later though and it all kinda turned into a mess bc of my bad decisions fhdngj

ohhh let me know how it goes!

ah yes the plentiful langues of "eastern European" and "Russian" love those categories

I’m not sure if this was meant jokingly or sarcastically but it’s a good opportunity either way to talk a little bit about the challenges of describing and figuring out accents that I ran into here. They’re in part due to the limits to my knowledge and experience, in part due to the incredible diversity of accents in the real world even within the same language, region, or city, in part due to the limitations of even a talented voice actor, and in part due to the fact that Exandria doesn’t have a Britain, or Russia, or Europe so we’re using accents that exist in our world to describe accents in a completely different and fictional universe.

(obligatory disclaimer that I’m a hobbyist, not an accent actor nor a linguist, and if you have specific and actionable constructive advice I welcome it).

Before I start, those specific, verbatim categories of “eastern European” and “Russian” were picked in part because of the notes Matt tweeted out here. Also Russian is a language? So to address what might be going on here...

Eastern European isn’t a language - this is true. The words we use to describe accents are not always a perfect one-to-one match with languages. If you asked most people to tell you what accent Percy had, for example, they’d probably say “British”, which is true. British isn’t a language. Neither is Texan (Fjord’s put-upon accent).

Eastern Europe is indeed a tricky definition and the exact makeup of eastern Europe is itself a subject of debate but it’s also an accent actors would see on call sheets; people from that region of the world have different accents but on the whole there are some shared traits among said accents. I've seen a lot of discussion on where exactly Jester’s accent is from and honestly, I couldn’t tell you (nor could most people, because it is probably something of a compound accent that doesn’t match up exactly with any specific country or language) - but it sounds eastern European in its traits (the ‘ih’ sound when stressed becomes more of an ‘ee’ sound, her ‘r’ sounds tend to be fronted, the ‘a’ in Traveler sounds closer to an ‘eh’ sound, and so on). These are qualities her accent shares with Kree, who Matt noted had an eastern European accent, even though they don’t have identical accents. For the most part, everyone has a few individual accent quirks anyway (referred to as idiolect).

(sidebar - while I don’t think it’s a perfect match the accent I’ve heard that sounds closest to Jester’s is Romanian. Jester doesn’t have final obstruent devoicing - listen to how the ‘d’ in “Fjord” is pronounced as a ‘d’ when she says it, vs how Caleb says it almost as a ‘t’ - and neither does Romanian, but many languages spoken in that region do devoice final obstruents. I also think the coastal nature of Nicodranas evokes southeastern Europe - I remember someone drawing comparisons between Nicodranas and Dubrovnik (I don’t have enough familiarity with Croatian speakers; I did a quick search and some dialects have this feature and some don’t so if anyone reading this can speak to Jester’s accent being Croatian with some level of knowledge, let me know!)

Anyhow: using a regional descriptor of accents even when many different languages are spoken therein (eg: an Indian accent)- or using regional descriptors of accents even when they’re within the same country and people with that native accent speak the same native langage (eg: a Texas accent and a Boston accent) is pretty normal. People from the same geographic area can have different native accents based on socioeconomic/cultural factors: to use the TV show The Wire as an example, most of the characters are supposed to be natives of Baltimore, but the working class white accent is not the same as the African-American accent.

Another possible point here was that Russia is (at least partially) in Eastern Europe: this is also true. We can refer to accents very specifically (eg, “Percy has a Moderate Received Pronunciation English accent”) or very generally (eg, “Percy has a British accent”). If I had to speculate re: Matt’s notes, it might be that he wanted to clearly distinguish Kree’s accent (eastern European) from Oremid Hass’s accent (Russian). As mentioned above each language has some distinct features within the accent. Because Russian was specifically used as a descriptor I broke it out from the larger Eastern European accent group.

I’m not sure if an implied point here was that Russia is a language spoken across a huge country with a multitude of regional accents in which case this falls under the same case of, for example, Texan accents not being the same in every single part of Texas. Houston isn’t going to sound like El Paso.

Next: actors have limitations! We’ve seen this with Taliesin specifically trying to develop his Irish accent work. Sometimes it’s a learning process, but also sometimes people pick a collection of traits often seen in a broad accent category but that are unlikely to be seen within the same accent of an individual: for example, using non-Rhotic (not pronouncing all the ‘r’ sounds after vowels) pronunciation found in many London accents with the vowel sounds of a West Country British accent, which is Rhotic. It’s not a realistic accent you’d be likely to find in the real world, but it is a consistent speech pattern with internal logic. This is why a lot of dialogue coaches recommend that people listen to a single speaker and imitate them if they’re trying to get familiar with a specific accent. However, because this is Exandria, not Earth, if you mix and match your accent patterns and come up with something new, that’s okay! Jester’s accent might not fit an Earth category other than “kind of eastern European sounding” because again, Jester isn’t from the Ukraine or Romania or Belarus, she’s from Nicodranas.

wish i'd be tossed like a salad by jiu :(

[nods sagely] indeed...

it was included, but apparently got removed? some people had it happen where they bought the album on iTunes and had over the sky, and then checked back later and it had been deleted

yeah i swear i saw it and like. now it’s not on my itunes and i got very confused that i just dreamt it was there fjshdkj

theorphanmaker replied to your post “did i hallucinate and read that over the sky was supposed to be...”

i think it's just a glitch i heard in some places the album was totally gone for a bit

we love a glitch

dctchr replied to your post “did i hallucinate and read that over the sky was supposed to be...”

it's there on all the korean sites, i think it's just like apple and spotify etc where it's missing

i Really admire your persistence tbh it's kinda motivating me to try and play it...

aww thank you for the support! i mean i whine a lot because i’m a big chicken and because it’s easier to focus on my mishaps as a gamer than elaborate on how deeply it’s affecting me, but it really is a game worth playing and finishing. plus i’ve grown attached to my daughter Senua more than any LP could ever prepare me to, and as stressful as this game is i feel it’s too late for me to drop it lol i’m too invested and i need to see her through this mess