Nihil & Marika's family is from Transylvania 🇭🇺🇷🇴
before the Sister Imperator comics released, i was the #1 champion of the "Nihil is American and his accent is fake" headcanon, based on the information we had at the time– the fact that the band was started in Los Angeles and Nihil has an American accent in the Dance Macabre music video.
but with the release of the Sister Imperator comics, it's revealed Nihil and his family are actually from Europe, and while it's not explicitly said that they're Transylvanian, there are a lot of hints that this is the case.
even before the comics, though, i already knew that the Papas' accent was actually always intended to be a Transylvanian accent (though it's really more of just a Dracula accent). Alan Ursillo, the actor who plays Papa Nihil, has said in an interview that he was specifically asked to do a "Transylvanian accent".
INTERVIEWER: The accent– was that your choice? Was that Tobias? Where did that accent come from? 'Cause it's distinctive; it's perfect. People try to mimic it all the time, the "Seestor", you know, kind of thing. It's adorable.
[…]
ALAN URSILLO: Yes, that's an accent that was given to me to do. So uh, you know, I– there was a lot of guys who interviewed for this. And when they came to me to say "Will you interview for a band and be this character?", I said "Sure." And they said "Well here's the accent you need to do." And I said "OK." And they said "OK, can you do it in Latin?" And so I said "Sure." I'm raised Catholic, so the Latin was easy. So you know, here I am doing my Latin-Transylvania accent. And they went, "You're in."
Clergy Talk Podcast interview with Alan Ursillo (Papa Nihil) (July 5, 2024)
anyway. in the comics, it's revealed that Sister Imperator was an American from Hartford, Connecticut, but she left the country and traveled to Europe when she was a teenager. she initially landed in Germany, but ended up "Somewhere in Eastern Europe" after being adopted by a touring circus family– the family of Marika (who later became Mr. Psaltarian's wife) and Nihil.
Marika tells Sister that she has four brothers, and while Nihil is still unnamed as of issue #2, it's revealed that one of their other brothers is named Farkus.
the names Marika (a diminutive of Maria) and Farkas (meaning 'wolf') are both Hungarian in origin (though 'Farkus' is an anglicized spelling of it), so it would seem that they are ethnic Hungarians.
however, they're not shown speaking Hungarian, and Marika calls their dad "tata", which isn't used by Hungarian speakers. "tata" is used for 'dad' in Romanian, though.
and if they're ethnic Hungarians who speak Romanian, it's almost certain that their family is from Transylvania.
i'm not going to explain the full history of Transylvania here, but basically, Transylvania was historically a region of Hungary until it became part of Romania in the early 1900s (only a few decades before Nihil and Marika were born), and it still has a large ethnic Hungarian population today.
so... yeah! i used to think Nihil's family was American and his accent was fake, but now the lore shows that his family is actually European and they are most likely Transylvanian!
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