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[russianguyreactstothings]

daredevil (2015): season 1

a surprise to be sure but a welcome one!

we’ve got the russian mafia as villains for our boy matt murdock (of course we do, all russians know is drink vodka commit crime and lie). there’s a lot of extras speaking russian with...varying degrees of success, but compared to the mcu at least the average pronunciation is actually very good!

i’m gonna go into 3 characters we’ve got so far in season 1, starting with this guy who has very few lines and dies in episode 4:

semyon:

when we meet him, he’s impersonating a cop and he speaks perfect english! good for him, girlboss. i like that they didn’t give him an accent for that (wow, russian people can speak english).

then he pulls out his phone, talks to his bosses in russian thats a little stilted, but overall understandable.

my favorite part about this guy is that when our boy matt ties him up and starts interrogating him via knife to ocular nerve this guy starts screaming and babbling in english...with a russian accent. this is a small thing, but i really appreciate it because, yeah, your accent gets a lot thicker when you’re scared/angry/emotional.

good job, sioma, gone but not forgotten. 8/10

next up, we have my beloved tweedle-dee tweedle-dum brother duo, anatoly and vladimir!

vladimir: 

my beloved! man of all time!

i’m not sure if the actor is russian/slavic or not, but his pronunciation is PERFECT. he’s so good. i love him so much. 10/10, no notes. i was so scared they’d kill him off but no! (not yet, anyway) every russian character should be like vladimir, i’m obsessed with him.

anatoly:

thats kind of an old-person name, but i cant judge. also picky thing but he calls vladimir volodya, which is nice, thats the right diminutive, but afaik vladimir just calls him anatoly, which is kinda strange, thats your brother, come on now shorten it.

anatoly tries his darndest (before he gets fridged). his russian’s not fantastic, but he tries and that shows. i can understand everything he says. if he wasn’t in a duo with picture-perfect russian man vladimir i probably wouldn’t notice the ways he falls short as much, but overall 7/10

overall: 

listen i dont love the fact that we get the russian mafia for the umpteenth time, but i’ll take my wins where i can get them (and there’s literally every other nationality of mafia in this show too so...equality, i guess). 

most of the extras sound like native russian speakers! and the main cast are actually understandable! this might seem like a small thing but goddamn does that often not happen. russian characters are usually just props for the main cast, so i appreciate all the effort the show put in. 

a solid 8/10 for daredevil as a whole on its russian characters, i had a lot of fun

[russianguyreactstothings]

black widow (2021): 4/10

i...dude.

my poor best friend had to sit next to me while we watched this and listen to me complain over every single “russian” thing the main characters tried to say. i don’t know how it’s possible, but i honestly don’t think marvel hired an language coach for scarlett johansson or florence pugh (and if they did, good for that person for scamming marvel bc they did Nothing for that paycheck).

accents:

scarlett johansson sounds passable. natasha romanoff isn’t supposed to sound particularly russian (she’s a spy, she speaks several languages, she’s fluent in english), so they didn’t have much to do for this one. she sounds like an american person. if i heard her speak in real life and she said she’s russian, i’d believe her. 

rachel weisz actually did a pretty good job! her character has a relatively thick russian accent, probably because they meet her in russia where she’s been living for a while (she’s also a spy like natasha but doesn’t have the same american accent...and all the characters speak in heavily accented english instead of just. speaking russian.. but of course you can’t have your american audience read subtitles for longer than 5 seconds or they might leave a bad letterbox review of a marvel movie so i digress). her accent sounds very good! she has the typical overpronounced vowels but she doesn’t roll her r’s or mispronounces the ‘th’ sound, which was very refreshing (most russian people who learn english do know how to say ‘r’ and ‘th’ properly but the overall cadence still sounds off for other reasons). she sounds like my mom honestly, id think she was russian

david harbour.....ehhhhh. he sounds like someone picked russian as the accent for their dnd character and is now just trying their best to get along. he ranges from passable to pretty fucking bad. (also, pet peeve but it’s aleXEI, not aLExei as everyone insists on saying it, dont mispronounce your own name mr guardian come on now)

listen i love florence pugh. she’s a great actress, she can do lots of things well, a russian accent just isn’t one of them. she’s trying way too hard to get the r sounds and it just sounds really overdone and fake. i still quote the “don’t say zat vai vould you say zat it was real to me!” line to my friends. just girl...stop

actual russian:

shoutout to the one extra who was slavic and had one line and pronounced it perfectly. there’s one in every marvel movie, i hope he’s having a good day.

the main cast??? no. absolutely not. the dialogue between natasha and yelena in actual russian was fucking incomprehensible, i wouldn’t have known what they were saying if it wasn’t for the subtitles and like. its supposed to be russian. i speak russian. come on now.

there were featured extras (like the guys in the prison admin) who spoke russian and i could understand it but it was very accented which just makes me wonder why marvel doesn’t hire actual russian actors for the extras like surely it doesn’t matter who the extras are, nobody cares (except me), just hire slavic people who can say the lines correctly. then again, i guess if the extras sounded good it’d bring more attention to how shit the main cast sounds

movie as a whole:

we’ve all seen this before. morally grey russian characters who are spies and working to take down the american government because cold war scary russians. their backstory is that they were raised by Evil Government Man in rooms with cement walls where little girls are taught ballet and how to put together kalashnikovs. 

i get it, russia works great as a boogeyman and a grey filter background for whatever kind of criminal activity past you wanna give the only slavic character on the avengers. but if you’re going to use russia as a backdrop to be Angsty and Aesthetic, at least do the due diligence and get the language right. i can understand not using any of the culture, maybe it wouldn’t have fit into the story, but the accents and the spoken language being wrong just makes this whole thing feel like an insult to me.

like “oh this is what russians are like” portrayed by people who clearly don’t care enough to put in the time to pronounce their 2 lines correctly? really? i know a lot of people are pissed off at russia, rightfully so, but you shouldn’t put your whole story in a country different from yours and then do it this badly. i really like black widow as a character, particularly in the comics, and i love me a russian superhero, this was just really disappointing.