ur post got me thinking, why do you think fjord hides his actual voice? why does he imitate vandren???
oh damn this got really long i’m sorry in advance for this essay …i think fjord probably learned pretty early in his life that the voice of another orphan kid in another port city doesn’t mean much, and in a city with so few half-orcs, his especially wasn’t heard. imitating those with more of a voice in society was a way for fjord to try and emulate the importance those people had. maybe if he spoke well enough, acted well enough, looked well enough, he’d fit in, he’d start to be heard —— ( side note: thats why fjord is very good at assuming the serious role or voice of reason in the m9 when actually he’s one of the goofier of the lot and more reckless in his curiosity and actions; he’s learned how to put himself in the shoes of someone without that reckless instinct, he knows how to switch that on when its needed because he knows what it looks like. )
the copying of vandren’s accent specifically is, i think, tied into fjord’s dubious sense of self, especially when he was younger. fjord was raised around southern* voices ( *here ‘southern’ meaning south of wildemount, not southern american, as compared to the much more ‘northern’ accent of the other half-orc, wursh, which was much more like the drawl fjord adopted from vandren ) and he learned them with the children growing up around him. i think fjord cut down his tusks and leaned into sounding as well-spoken as the humans around him, and adapted to exist in port damali ; but when presented with a way out, he had a split second to decide who he wanted to be from that moment — and he would have wanted to impress vandren — so he stopped being the well-spoken half-orc orphan from port damali, and instead put on a voice like that of this impressive individual who had taken an interest in him. a way of showing that the two of them perhaps were not so different.
i think took the accent up very early, if not immediately, into meeting vandren, and the captain probably knew fjord was good with voices, so would have either a) seen through it but not called fjord on it, or b) assumed the more typical empire accent that is fjord’s Actual voice was just the half-orc trying to fit in, and that he’d dropped it to impress him —— an ironic opposite of what fjord actually did.
after the ship sunk and vandren was presumed dead, fjord continued the accent as a show of respect and a reminder of where he’d come from. now he keeps it up because it’s kind of just… been too long to suddenly come clean about, oops……..
also: sabian, once they were close, was one of the only people fjord ever dropped the accent around.
