Niche rant: you know what’s really annoying about #fantasy audiobook narration?
Posh English accent = narrator, heroes, protagonists
Regional accents (as listed on narrator’s CV) = villains, comedy relief
Fuck off
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I noticed this with the two different narrators of Terry Pratchett's books. Nigel Planer made all of the stupid characters Scottish or Irish, but Stephen Briggs made the dumb characters various shades of English, and the cool characters regional/lower-class. Also, The Dwarfs, were Welsh, which I loved, because almost no one can do a good Welsh accent.
@meljoann Similar in German: If there is someone with a Saxon dialect, he is the stupid one.
@torstentorsten I knew there must be equivalents in other languages! In Germany, does that follow a historical rich/poor divide?
@meljoann yes, it might be. Saxon speaking live in the east, which is poor now compared to the west. I don't know what it was like 30 years ago.
@meljoann hello how are you doing?
@meljoann I had a phase of catching adverts for new Harry Potter audiobooks online (can't remember where). They were saying "Harry Potter like you've never heard it" and I was imagining RFK Jr as Ron Weasley, Brian Blessed as Hermione, Joe Pasquale as Harry, Alan Carr as Dumbledore.....
But I get your annoyance. There's a thing in advertising that "northern" accents (usually some generic Yorkshire / Lancashire crossover) are better trusted with focus groups.
@AndyIncarnate was just thinking that Game of Thrones was the only thing I could think of where at least some of the main character “fantasy nobility” had Northern English accents
@meljoann The only one that I can think of isn't even a main character - there's a necromancer in What We Do In The Shadows who sounds maybe Lancastrian?
@meljoann Same in video games and films.
It's been a thing forever but I think the LotR films really coalesced it as a cultural thing.
Anyone with 'noble blood', elves, wizards, protagonists, sophisticated people = posh english
Orcs & Goblins, criminals, the low-status untrustworthy = working class london
Simple/rural/bucolic folk = south-west rural england
Stupid/naive people, comic relief = northern england and the midlands
And dwarves = scottish of course.
@uoou totally. Very jarring. It’s just so weird to hear it being done on modern audiobooks, where there’s presumably a really small team. Do they know they don’t have to do the trope?!
@meljoann Oh yeah I get it. Honestly though, for audiobooks, I'm sure I'm in the minority but I'd prefer them to not do accents at all. The book describes the voice (whether explicitly or not), I don't need the reader to *do* a voice. It often just jars with how I think the voice should sound.
@uoou I agree. Using accents to differentiate characters might seem practical, but it usually doesn’t make any sense for the characters — as well as following these insulting tropes.