Oh man XD I FORGOT ABOUT THAT LINE. (wiped it from my memory?) But when I was flipping back through the cdcf trying to place this, I found a spot where I looked at the way scottish people actually modify things phonetically, which is still really interesting to me. Spoiler: kind of irrelevant
I WAS GONNA SAY Wasn't that Ray's fic>> You want to accurately transcribe Scottish, spend a week reading Scottish Twitter posts.
My only unshakeable tf2 headcanon is that the Spy is actually from like, Iowa or something. Maybe Canada. Definitely not france
Hey now, Brian Jacques was a rite of passage. Never got all the way through Homestuck, but neon leetspeak was nothing next to molespeech.
The Seer Test for appropriate ship tagging: A ship tag passes the test if the two characters (or however many) from the tag Are each mentioned in the fic Are aware of or acquainted with each other If either of these criteria are not met, you probably didn't need to tag that ship.
otherwise good fanfic: repeatedly uses incredibly dumb nickname or terminology me: hey! wow! that's cool. *clicks word replacer extension and creates new entry* a more specific example: otherwise good and cute megarod AU where the robots are harpies because Why Not: uses the words "smol" and "bara" to refer to two subtypes of harpy, without any outward indications of irony me: edit: i mean. i still read it, but now they say "bantam" and "broadwing" instead
unpopular opinion, but I actually like a very light degree of transcribed accent writing, because I enjoy being able to hear a character's accent in my head, but I have a lot of difficulty doing so if I don't have a little bit of a cue. if it's too heavy, though, then it's slow to read and it's obnoxious.
I get where you are coming from, but this can be done with word choices and minor, very minor, spelling tweaks, like replacing the final g in some verb forms with apostrophes, using 'gonna' over 'going to' if that's how the character actually talks, and so on. Examples, all my own: Liuterin Ataniell, when angry: "Don't you dare--" Her mother, Tharinna Ataniell, who is a poet and an orator and often uses the archaic forms of their language more naturally than not: "I tell you now, do not you--" Her friend Justine from the Terran Federation: "Don't even think about it!" Her friend Ufthang, from the Blood Games: "Just how badly do you wanna die?" (None of them are actually speaking English except Justine, but the point gets made. I would no more write out words phonetically according to another character's accent than I would write my character dialogue in High Selkeren.)
TBH i would never have guessed any of the above were speaking in an accent? Id put those down to personal speaking quirks.
Hmm, I get where you are coming from and it probably makes more sense in context, but...one of the things accents do, in addition to tell you how things sound (even in a language the story's not in) is to also tell you something about the background and social status and the like, of the character. This is why transliterating phonetic accents can, in English, come off as very, very racist or classist, if not done carefully. (I suspect in other languages it might be different.) This is why evil nobility often end up sounding British, for example, it's not so much that Americans think Brits are evil, but rather that the British accent is associated with high social status.
I don't mind mild amount of phonetic accents--actually, I do like it when there's nods in the writing to someone having a drawl or a stutter or any of the above. And I've read books with very heavy phonetic accents before (like the Wee Free Men :P) but I think the big thing is that, if you're going to write out an accent... make sure it corresponds with how the person sounds. Which was always the big problem with TF2 fic. The accents are comical enough in the game, but a lot of fic would be nigh-incomprehensible with how hard the authors turned up the phonetic accents. (Semi-related: people who try to write Southern or Texan drawls without actually listening to speakers from those areas make the weirdest mistakes. And both of those are different accents from Creole drawls too--but there's a lot of writers who seem to thing it's a unified accents across the board in the South and it really... isn't.)
I mean there´s nothing wrong with just describing someones accent in narration. Just for the above, for me at least, you would have to do that so I´d know.
I’d probably hear them all in my head as various U.S. speech patterns except “I tell you now” but I’d get the idea that region and/or class was not the same. I often don’t hear non-U.S. accents in my head unless there’s a phonetic element in the writing, I’ve heard the character being voiced in the accent, or it’s an incredibly specific speech pattern represented heavily in U.S. media. I can still appreciate the flavor of more subtle word and grammar choices though. Like characters in Transformers comics written by James Roberts often use very British expressions. I don’t hear the accent in my head even with that (especially with the mishmash of international language habits of my internet friends, where accent and phrasing aren’t necessarily going to correspond regionally) but I sure do enjoy reading it. I think phonetic accents can probably be filed under “use sparingly”. It’s bound to annoy some readers, some will enjoy it, and a great many will probably decide how they feel about it on a case by case basis.
Phonetic accents done well can be charming, but a lot of the problem comes from lack of familiarity with the accent beyond the sparse media representation - see your 'Scottish', 'English' and 'American' accents. There's a lot of variation not only in pronunciation but also timing and phrasing, and if you hit a bum note on any of those, it can really throw the reader out of the narrative.
