12 and 37!
meme; currently accepting.
12. how does their education and intelligence – or lack thereof - reflect
in their speech pattern, vocabulary, and pronunciations?
emil isn’t actually educated. any memory he has of the past ( whether it be of school or history or his own past ) were revealed in the end to be fabrications, set so that he could ‘play the part more convincingly’. that isn’t to say he’s dumb or anything, no. he’s a fairly smart kid; & i’d say history would probably be his best subject, given ratatosk has been around some 10,000+ years. but there are plenty of times when his lack of an actual, formal eduction shows. such as instances where members of the group will reference past historic events, or major points, and emil will have no recollection of it ( or simply a hazy one at best, one where he is conveniently out of its reach ); which could likely be a combination of both emil’s false memories & the fact that ratatosk had, at one point, been in a deep sleep and therefore wouldn’t have been immediately aware of said events.
he tends to have a rather simplistic speech pattern, and speaks more directly than he’s given credit for at times; which again could be a combination of a fake past, but also given that we’re told in the game that emil is ( or believes he is ) only sixteen years old. but his pronunciations are actually rather clean. he doesn’t seem to have much trouble in that department.
37. how is your character’s imagination? daydreaming a lot? worried most of the time? living in memories?
i’ve actually headcanon’d before that emil is something of a daydreamer; though such daydreams usually consisted of hopes for a better life, somewhere nicer to live with nicer people, but sometimes he’d even think about what it’d be like to go on an adventure. to get out of luin and see the world for himself. course his fear kept him in place ( & sometimes i even wonder if at least part of emil’s fear was something planted, like his memories, in order to have the boy keep himself confined; and thusly keep ratatosk safe and out of reach of the wrong hands ). but that’s just my theory.
as for his memories, emil tended not to linger on them, but rather think of them distantly. he never questions them, not even when they prove to be hazy or virtually nonexistent – and later on, even when he’s told they’re fake, he refuses to accept it because they feel so real & have become so incredibly vital to his being – ( such as even events as substantial & scarring as the blood purge should have been ); something like that has to be terrifying right? it’s only natural for the mind to seal such horrors away. but it’s only after others start to bring it to his attention that emil starts to wonder if something’s amiss. such as in the manga which focuses on richter. aqua questions emil about his memories, about the blood purge specifically, after he mentions nightmares / visions of richter killing him. and emil ( and subsequently richter & aqua ) start to wonder if something’s not right; which later proves to be correct.
he still daydreams a bit, even now.
