What in the Wylie Galloway...

[twozerofoxtrot]

I honestly thought the HC team had used AI to write his dialog at first because of the seemingly haphazard use of accented letter Es all over the place and the variety of random italicization.

Folks, what kind of accent do we think the author was going for, here?

 

 

He also has a tendency for verbosity that doesn't help him come off as uh... endearingly nerdy.

Brevity, Soul, Wit. Some guy who wrote things said once.

[Glacier Peak]

18 minutes ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

I honestly thought the HC team had used AI to write his dialog at first because of the seemingly haphazard use of accented letter Es all over the place and the variety of random italicization.

Folks, what kind of accent do we think the author was going for, here?

 

 

He also has a tendency for verbosity that doesn't help him come off as uh... endearingly nerdy.

Brevity, Soul, Wit. Some guy who wrote things said once.

French perhaps? How does one textualize accents anyways?

[Ukase]

33 minutes ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

what kind of accent do we think the author was going for, here?

Well, in my head, I was imagining Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

[Scarlet Shocker]

Pearheps it as whaart Sehth Efrickin, bet mehbe messeng sahm ixtindid vahwell sahnds 

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

I honestly thought the HC team had used AI to write his dialog at first because of the seemingly haphazard use of accented letter Es all over the place and the variety of random italicization.

Folks, what kind of accent do we think the author was going for, here?

 

 

He also has a tendency for verbosity that doesn't help him come off as uh... endearingly nerdy.

Brevity, Soul, Wit. Some guy who wrote things said once.

Yeah.  Didn’t he say “Briefly, in my soul i know you are half wits”

[Triumphant]

I struggled with this, myself.  French seemed the likeliest answer.  I haven't finished the mission chain yet, so keep the discussion specifically to the OP's topic, please- NO SPOILERS!  😁

[Arbegla]

The accent didn't bother me too much, but there are typos and spelling issues in some of his text. I had to read through it a few times to really catch what he was saying.

[BasiliskXVIII]

18 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

French perhaps? How does one textualize accents anyways?

If they're going for a French accent, not like that. This is the equ'alent of try'ng to simulate an Am'can ac'ent by sim'y d'pping ran'om le'rs and re'acing them with apo'rophes. The result isn't anything like the American accent and kinda makes a vaguely offensive caricature.

[knightowl - Pinnacle serve]

Kent : "You'll rue the day!"
Chris: "Who talks like that?"

[Neiska]

As I read it, I am imagining an Australian speaking in a Louisianan Creole accent. 

 

"Crikey, oh sa bon! Enpresyonan!"

[srmalloy]

On 11/26/2025 at 11:19 PM, BasiliskXVIII said:

The result isn't anything like the American accent and kinda makes a vaguely offensive caricature.

Minor correction -- "...isn't anything like any of the American accents..." -- New England, Boston, Maine, New York, Philadelphia, Southern, Midwestern, Californian, Hawaiian, Pacific Northwest, High Tider, Cajun, or Florida -- and even Midwestern has differences depending on where in the Midwest someone's from. Not as many as there are dialects/accents in Great Britain, but the US is not a monolithic accent, despite the general adoption of the 'Neutral Midwest' accent by newscasters.

[BasiliskXVIII]

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Minor correction -- "...isn't anything like any of the American accents..." -- New England, Boston, Maine, New York, Philadelphia, Southern, Midwestern, Californian, Hawaiian, Pacific Northwest, High Tider, Cajun, or Florida -- and even Midwestern has differences depending on where in the Midwest someone's from. Not as many as there are dialects/accents in Great Britain, but the US is not a monolithic accent, despite the general adoption of the 'Neutral Midwest' accent by newscasters.

The irony here is that the very thing you’re “correcting” me about, that American English isn’t a single uniform accent, applies just as strongly to French. Parisian French isn’t Occitan, isn’t Bretonnais, isn’t Lyonnais, isn’t Réunionnais, isn’t Algerian Maghrebi, isn’t Québecois, isn’t Acadian. No major language is a monolith.

But that diversity is beside the point. My argument wasn’t “there is only one American accent” any more than I’d claim “there is only one French accent.” The argument is that no accent in any variety of French produces the kind of orthographic butchery shown in the original text. It’s not dialect, it’s not idiolect; it’s just anglocentric misuse of a diacritic as decoration.

Every "é" in the original text, if we read it as French, sounds approximately like "ay" (there's no y-glide in French, so it's not entirely the same, but in IPA terms we're talking about [e] as opposed to [ei]). So what you should be reading is:

 

 

Quote

 

The Skulls’ trappings of death and daycay always seemed more aesthetic than anything sayrious to me. Mere decoration to stand out in a sea of criminals, the “upper-middle class blonday dyeing her hair black, drawing stitches on her arms, and writing about darknayss on LivayDiary” of gangs. Sure, they had powers which drew upon ne-gative energy, but lighting a match does not makay one the sun, after all…

Well, these latest developments have me most perturbayd, not the least because they stole my tomays! The gall of it all. Well, little do they know that I place tracking wards on all of my books just in the event someone absolutely foolish steals them! Rank am-ateurs, didn’t even try to dispel the enchantayments. Would you so kindly retrieve them for me?

 

 

That isn't a French accent.  It's also not the accent of someone speaking any language that uses "é" differently, such as Gaeilge [e:], Portuguese [ɛ], Vietnamese [e˧˥] (tone-dependent) or Icelandic [jɛ]. It’s the same kind of anglocentric disrespect you see when people throw Я, Ф, or И into English words to make them look “Soviet.” The creator isn’t thinking about language or phonetics. They’re treating someone else’s writing system as a novelty font. It doesn’t resemble Russian, it doesn’t resemble French, and it doesn’t resemble any real accent. It’s just aesthetic appropriation of symbols they don’t understand.

[Frozen Burn]

I read this and to me, the character comes across as more Creole / Haitian / Caribbean.  The writing is not any language specific (like French) but the author seems to use accents and italics to give inflection on how the character speaks, and sounding it in my head when I read it, it came out as Creole / Haitian / Caribbean.  Whether that is the intent or not, that is what I got from it.