Hello! Thanks Neko for this awesome game and thanks Darth, Destiny and Tazz- for helping along.
Since Doctor has Russian accent (if I remember correctly), is this part of his lore-origin or something unimportant? (Like, maybe he was born in Russia or was influenced by their culture).
Sorry for any grammarly mistake. Again, love you guys, take care!
Hello, Darth here to answer this one— it’s actually a pretty funny story how Doctor ended up with his Russian accent!
It all started when I first discovered The Freak Circus and began recording/editing/posting my interpretations of Pierrot and Harlequin’s voices. I took a lot of direction from the details Neko posted about at the time, especially Pierrot with his lower, raspier texture. As the other characters were better introduced (Ticket Taker, Jester and Doctor) I wanted to try voicing them as well— but I ran into an issue!
As a single person voicing several characters, especially someone who is new to voice acting itself, it can be VERY easy for their voices to ‘meld’ together, and it was very important to me that the characters sound distinct from one another!
It was fairly simple for me to figure out a ‘place’ for Pierrot (deep and raspy), Harlequin (high and fruity full-bodied) and Jester (light, androgynous and airy), but Ticket Taker and Doctor were in an odd spot. I wanted Ticket Taker to be in the higher range and Doctor to be in the lower range, but a lot of my first attempts just made them sound too close to the other characters. I know that training could have helped a lot, since a person’s voice is very much like an instrument and can be refined with experience and guidance, but at the time I just wanted to figure something out that worked!
So I go to Neko randomly one day and, as a joke about Doctor’s personal preference for keeping alone or otherwise away from crowds (he’s a bit of a hermit), I ask him: “What if Doctor just grew up on movies and TV shows and decided ‘I like the way this accent sounds, it makes people intimidated, people are already intimidated with me, so why not emulate it?’. And it just becomes part of how he speaks— he loves confusing people!”.
The joke went on for a while, especially as I personally headcanon Doctor as being on the autistic spectrum (I repeat, this is a headcanon, this is not canonical information but is important to the answer) and as an autistic individual myself I love emulating and learning about accents, there’s something enriching about learning all the cool noises/phonemes/language sounds a person can make!
So in short, Doctor has a Russian accent (despite being from Brazil) because of an inside joke between me and Neko while I was developing his voice alongside the others. Its become an important part of his character in a fun, roundabout way and I like to think he’d have fun telling the MC this little fact about himself <3
Edit: And yes, for those interested to know, I do plan to try and be authentic for Pierrot as well since he *technically* should have a Brazilian accent himself as someone who doesn’t verbally speak as often. I’m still working on that! XD
