#and he canonically has a good memory for music. 'my entire mental john williams discography.'

[commsroom]

thinking about eiffel making hera a mixtape on cassette by recording over some old Goddard protocol tape he found in storage, but he doesn't have access to his tunes in a way he can transfer to a cassette recorder so it's just him singing out of key and getting lyrics wrong in a way that makes them more about Hera

this is soo sweet. he's such a massive ham; i love the idea of eiffel, like, dedicating the classical music they pick up to hera, or asking her to dance and dramatically - kind of awkwardly, in low gravity, but also just because he's not a very good dancer anyway - 'waltzing' with himself, or just... singing to her. pointing at her cameras. incredibly off-key. i love the thought of hera hearing some of those songs - the actual, non-eiffel versions - on earth for the first time, after all the times she's heard him singing them.

there's this interview gabriel urbina did a while back, where he was answering character-building questions, and said that eiffel once made someone a mixtape "in the way that only an obsessive 90s teenager can really make a mixtape"- like he really put effort into it, and really cared about it, and the person it was for didn't really appreciate it. and he never fully got over that. i think about that a lot, and how important music is to eiffel, how much is communicated through music... i think it would really mean a lot if hera could make a mixtape for him, someday. i think that's such a sweet sentiment, like a continuation of the way she gifts him music for his birthday.

[commsroom]

okay so in the Eiffel headcanon thing you mentioned that you think he has a good memory for music/lyrics which 1) I completely agree with and I think is supported by canon and works well with it on a thematic level; and 2) I want to talk more about because for a long time I've been thinking about the possibility of Eiffel having a really strong auditory memory, particularly wrt how he quotes and references stuff so much 1/2

2/2 I have a thing where bits of speech I hear in movies/tv/podcasts will get stuck in my head the way songs do, and while I don't turn that into lots of references, the only person I've met who that also happens to IS a person who makes a lot of references a la Doug Eiffel. I like the idea of Eiffel remembering/learning by hearing stuff (and by doing but that's not relevant) both as a character thing, and a thematic thing since he's a character in an audio medium

yes!! i kind of have a similar thing with phrases/dialogue/the cadence of words getting stuck in my head (also in a different way from eiffel, though) and i definitely think he has that with like... not just that he picks up what he's heard, but that he instinctively remembers the tone and cadence of it. he likes to do voices and sound effects so much; i believe there are some movies he could recreate more or less entirely from memory. and then you have things like, with music specifically, how much he seems to pick up on soundtracks as a component of those movies - teaching anne to play the jaws theme, the part in mayday where he's whistling the theme to the great escape and refers to his "entire mental john williams discography", etc.

i definitely agree that he learns best from some combination of hearing + doing things; i think he probably has a hard time processing information if he has to read it silently. he always has the impulse to read things out loud or have them read to him or otherwise engage with things in a more vocal and active way. part of it is that it's an audio drama, sure, but it's also the type of person he is and what makes him a good protagonist for this specific medium. i think it speaks to the type of intelligence he has; i remember gabriel urbina saying once that the way eiffel speaks is how he would speak "if [his] brain worked a lot faster" and i think that's just it like. eiffel is impulsive and lacks a filter and doesn't think things through before he speaks/acts, but he thinks very quickly and he's good at making connections that other people might not.

also like, there are a handful of exceptions, but most of eiffel's favorite things are movies or tv shows or music, all of which... obviously have that auditory component. and it's not just things he likes that he references! sometimes it's just... ads and slogans, or things he's heard said, or turns of phrase he seems to find amusing. and going back to the meta aspect of it, having eiffel remember things because he heard other people say them, in their own voices, is just... a good trick to have on hand for the format the show is in. there's a lot there.