#bc he's exceptionally fluent in mandarin

[mjjune]

for the oc name ask game: danny!

Ah, yes, the ever-elusive 5000 year old vampire from somewhere ambiguous in Asia. How did that guy get named Danny?

Well, long story, so I'll put it under the cut~

So when I first invented Danny, in 2019, I actually shopped him around a bit and did some roleplaying with him—this was back when I was still actively doing forum rps, which I haven't done since then—and originally, he was from a specific dynasty in China. So, I began looking up ancient Chinese-based names. Even if I never used it in the rp itself, I thought I would have it for my own backstory of him.

I don't remember the specifics, but I came across an old surname Lu and I was going through Chinese characters for his given name that had to do with sun/dawn meanings (because a vampire with a sun name is fun) and one of those characters, if pronounced in today's version of Mandarin using Pinyin, was spelled "Dan."

This of course would be pronounced with a long "a" sound like "don", but regardless, he was called Dan for a while. Over time, I found that his closest companions called him Danny.

Even though he changed a LOT between the rp and actually writing avof, the name Danny stuck and I couldn't wrap my head around changing it. That's just... who he is. Regardless of his thousands of other identities he's taken on, Danny is the one he considers the closest to him and only people who really know him use it.

PLEASE NOTE—Danny is not Chinese in AVOF. This original form of Danny was very different, he wasn't genderqueer, he was a hell of a lot younger, the vampire lore as different, he was from a specific Chinese historical time period, and he was actually quite bitter in an Old and Tired™ kinda way. Other than basic physical features and some sarcasm, there is nothing similar between them, but this is where the name Danny came from.

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

headcanon #004: languages

word count: 538 words

according to bc entertainment, ash can speak korean, english, japanese, and mandarin. according to ash, he’s lucky to be able to say he even speaks two of those: english and korean.

english is ash’s native tongue and he’s most comfortable speaking in it by far. whenever presented with the opportunity to speak in it or any other language, he’s going to choose english. he sometimes finds himself stumbling over words and having to think to figure out what he’s trying to say now because his brain pretty much operates in korean mode most days. this actually upsets him since he doesn’t want to feel like he has to put effort into speaking both of the languages he can speak when english at least had always been natural for him.

currently ash’s korean skills go, in order from best to worst: writing, reading, speaking. he’s a lot better at putting his feelings down into writing than anything else. partially because he can look words up when he forgets them while writing and partially because he has the most practice doing it. when he was first learning korean, he was afraid to speak it and make mistakes, so his speaking fell behind for a while until he was able to. most of his practice went into late nights up in the trainee dorm writing out journal entries of his day in broken korean until he got good enough that he’d scrawl down little snippets of poetry and song lyrics. he learned that he found it easier to pick up the intricacies of the language through reading books and song lyrics and practicing by writing his own of the latter, so his approach to the language reflects that, with his vocabulary choices sometimes sounding unintentionally poetic or musical (or cliche) even now that he’s fluent.

japanese is his third best language, but is a far cry from his english or korean abilities. bc has pushed him into extra japanese classes for the past year or so, in part because of knight and white knight’s activities in the country, and in part because they see a potential marketable future for him in the country by himself (despite him being more popular in china). unlike korean, he’s better at speaking japanese than writing it, but his understanding of other people speaking it is still pretty limited. when he speaks japanese, it’s very clear he’s a foreigner, though he’s reached the point where he can string conversational sentences together off of the top of his head and carry on a basic conversation.

lastly, the language bc claims ash knows better than he does: mandarin. in elementary and middle school days in san francisco, ash was required to take mandarin lessons, so he knew the basics of the language even before becoming a trainee. his progress has been exceptionally slow, though, in advancing past a very pedestrian understanding of the language. he can still pretty much only write and read what he remembers from school and he has no confidence whatsoever speaking it without a script, though if he does have a script, his speech is sort of understandable to someone who speaks the language, thanks to bc rigorously drilling his pronunciation during his lessons.