Hello, I binged a bunch of your Megamind fics last night (best mistake of my life 🥲). But since I'm not an old Megamind fan, or even an old fan of yours, I don't really know how did you come up with the bird-like singsong language headcanon and not sure where to look for answers either. Megamind with gills headcanon is pretty intuitive, but this? Tell me more, please ~
Thank you for your work. Megamind is a masterpiece, but even DreamWorks couldn't begin to explore all the implications of the story.
Omg I love this question, thank you for asking! And I'm so happy to hear you enjoyed my writing 💙👽💙 I hope you can nap today!
The short explanation is simply that the way I see it, if Megamind's species can live underwater, the language spoken in his culture of origin cannot work the same way our languages do. The primary mechanics of human languages, air flowing out through our mouths, will not work for an aquatic species unless their language is bubbles. So I needed something else, and...I like birds a lot. When I wrote Swansong (I think Swansong was my first fic in which Megamind speaks any Punktsyk), I honestly wasn't thinking about it very much, except "birds whistle and chirp, and so do dolphins and whales, so Megamind sounds like birds and dolphins and whales."
The long explanation of how I got to the fully-developed headcanon for his language as I currently write it is below:
The long explanation is that Megamind's specific combination of birdsong+whalesong was developed over a long period of time. I like birds a LOT, lol. I've also always loved the idea of a Megamind who looks more or less human-shaped, but is otherwise very very alien. So (years & years before I started writing him with gills) I wrote him as making some bird-like sounds very early on in my writing. 2012, 2013 or so, I think. I also wrote him mentioning a syrinx, which is a vocal structure some birds have. Just for fun, because at that time I was avoiding writing very much about his homeworld. And I wrote Swansong, which...as far as I know is the first appearance of Megamind with gills, so I didn't have much inspiration other than "I like birds" lmao. But I needed him to speak to Minion underwater, and I have no idea how Minion manages aquatic English, so I gave Megamind a different voice and leaned into those bird noises I had mentioned in passing before, in other stories.
Aaaand then I got depression and didn't publish anything for a couple years... and THEN I got on new meds and came roaring back to life with new inspiration, thinking, Fuck it! We've had no new information in years! I'm gonna do what I want! Gills! A new language! Let's go let's go let's go!
First, I needed a reason for Megamind to actually be fully fluent in his parents' language, so I gave Minion inherited memories. With the way I was writing Minion's biology, it made sense that his species might be able to do something like that. I thought, okay, Minion lives in an orb underwater, how long would it have taken him to learn any human languages? So Megamind is fully fluent in his parents' language because Minion could really ONLY speak that for a long time.
And THEN I sat down and started trying to actually figure out the language itself. I had already had the thought (several times, over the years) that if those bird noises I gave him are natural for him, there was no reason any of the languages on Megamind's homeworld would sound even remotely human. I was really sad about this, because I had hoped to write something Roxanne could eventually learn to speak, but...it just wouldn't work in my head. I was writing Dive and fully committing to Megamind as a fish-man, so his language needed to make equal sense in water and air, and for that, it needed to be something truly alien.
Like I said, I had written him singing already. This was just his language from Swansong, but more developed. I wanted a deeper song for him, too, like a whale, so I wrote long chambers along his spine, to run air back and forth and sing the emotion underlying the birdsong "words." I also gave him a kind of rolling "vocal loop" to keep air flowing through his syrinx without letting go of it through his nose or mouth, so he can sing underwater as well as in air. I think he probably also has structures he can work behind his nose, for clicking. He can make a LOT of noises, lol.
If I'm remembering correctly, I was still thinking maybe he had a different language out of the water while I was writing Dive. It wasn't until a couple months later when I wrote Wake Your Sleepy Soul that I decided it was a single language. I imagine it sounds a bit different underwater than in air, but the language itself is the same.
There is more I can tell you about Megamind's voice, but I think that's everything for why I wrote his language the way I do! and I must sleep. Thank you again!! If you (or anyone else reading this) have any other questions, please ask away, I LOVE talking about this stuff.
(Oh and go watch Megamind Rules if you haven't seen it yet! I think it is actually very cute and earnest. Wonderful show for kids, I really enjoyed it and hope they release the second half soon.)
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I need. Adult sized playgrounds. I did rock climbing for a bit until I got injured and chalk gives me sensory ick anyway, I did trampolining as a kid, but that's not enough really its not the same its too Sports coded. I need to go to a big softplay and run around with my friends and get into social bonding fights with other people there. I need to go play on the swings. I think it would be good for society generally if there wasn't a cutoff age on Going To Play on the proprioceptive stimming machines and hurtling benevolently and haphazardly into things. Running around used to be so Fun. I don't wanna do rock climbing again even a fraction as much as I want a jungle gym yken? I don't wanna swim laps I wanna play on the big floating inflatable obstacle courses and go down the flumes and it's much harder to do that as an adult
Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds)
So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles
birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily.
But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles?
I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.
It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification.
And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals.
So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing.
Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this
The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators.
This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.
Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.
“I’m not going to do the thing because I don’t view it as important.” ← Conscious decision made of your own free will.
“I want to do the thing because I view it as important, but trying to get myself to do the thing creates the same reaction as trying to put my hand on a hot stove would.” ← Executive dysfunction, a physical health problem that doesn’t answer to your own free will.
“Trying to get myself to do the thing creates the same reaction as trying to put my hand on a hot stove would. This must mean I don’t actually want to do the thing and I’m just tricking myself into thinking I do.” ← No, that’s still executive dysfunction, but you’re having brainworms about it.
I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
I SEE WHAT HAS HAPPENED. SOMEONE HAS SOLD OUT. OR IF THEY HAVEN'T YET, THEY'RE GOING TO.
HMMMM I AM GOING TO HAVE TO SEE WHAT ROXANNE CAN PUT TOGETHER IN TERMS OF PROJECTED PUBLIC RESPONSE TO ME BUYING A "SOCIAL MEDIA" WEBSITE. I AM TOLD BUYING "SOCIAL MEDIA" WEBSITES ON A WHIM IN ORDER TO CHANGE THEM TO YOUR BIZARRE PERSONAL SPECIFICATIONS WITH NO THOUGHT TO BRAND OR PURPOSE IS ALL THE RAGE THESE DAYS. WELL AT LEAST I WOULD HAVE A PURPOSE IN THIS HYPOTHETICAL ENDEAVOR AND IT WOULD BE THE EXTREMELY SIMPLE PURPOSE OF PUTTING MY STUFF BACK WHERE IT WAS.
