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welcometohermitcraft · 5 days ago

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You’ve mentioned idiolects a few times now and how you’ve gotten really familiar with Scott’s, and I find this kind of stuff incredibly fascinating — the way different people have their own little habits and tells in how they talk is genuinely so fun to examine. I’d love to see a longer analysis on Scott’s way of talking (and any other characters’ you want) if you ever feel like making one!

when analysing characters’ way of speaking, there are several things I take into consideration. the most important of those is striking a balance between canonical register and narrative functionality. fictional characters don’t usually speak exactly like real people having a real conversation, for many reasons (not least of which is that seeing all the vocal fillers spelled out like that would get very irritating—scott also understands this, which is why he tends to edit those out of his own pov half the time), but walking the line between ‘perfectly polished dialogue’ (often overly quippy) and ‘hyperrealism’ (super annoying) is tricky.

also, when fictionalising roleplay characters’ dialogue (not exclusive to mcrp), how much of the actor’s personal style of speaking do you want to preserve? you can get really meta with it too. does scott actually have a scottish accent in the minecraft universe if the country itself doesn’t exist? should references to real-world evils that don’t exist in the video game, such as cell phones or christianity, be considered ‘canon’? I don’t personally want to have these characters mention jesus but I’m fine with them saying oh my god, for instance. everyone’s lines will be different here. figuring out those details is half the fun of writing dialogue imo.

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for scott specifically: a lot of how he talks is dialectical. half the server is british, half american, with a few outliers; different dialects (different englishes, if you will) often interact and intersect. for example, the americans would mostly say ‘it’s you who’s got the new one,’ while the rest would mostly say ‘it’s you that’s got the new one.’ you don’t have to know all the intricacies of this though. does anybody remember britpicking? there used to be a whole cottage cabin industry around that for fic writers.

none of this is meant to be a hard-and-fast rule for How Scott Talks; scott doesn’t always do all of these, but these are all idiolectic quirks I’ve noticed whilst (<- british) or while (<- american) spending a frankly embarrassing amount of time transcribing scott’s dialogue.

repeating himself

this has been such a pain to transcribe, honestly, because scott will very frequently start saying something just as someone else begins speaking; either he’ll repeat himself (often with slight variations in word choice or phrasing) until he steamrollers the other person into letting him talk, or he’ll wait until they’ve said their piece and then repeat what he’d been initially trying to say.

for instance (LiL ep 5):

usually scott will talk over someone, or someone will talk over him, but you can see how he says the same thing multiple times.

another example (PL ep 3):

here scott interrupts what etho’s saying (this is difficult to notate when transcribing; I usually put a flag off to the side saying ‘crosstalk’ which is a nicer way to say ‘people being fucking rude and not waiting their turn’ lol), but etho doesn’t pay attention, so scott just repeats what he was trying to say. again, he does this all the time.

shortly thereafter, in the same conversation, this exact situation happens again (PL ep 3):

(as a bonus: scott starting to say ‘is’ instead of ‘has,’ another substitution he does pretty often.)

of course, everyone does this pattern of interrupting and being interrupted, to an extent, but scott does it A Lot. he’s a very forceful conversationalist. he’s good at commanding a narrative, and it shows in the way he speaks, not just his word choice or phraseology.

confusing past participles/past tense

scott will frequently use past participles in a way that is technically incorrect (3L ep 1):

this is actually a great example of how scott talks overall when he’s not trying to curate his dialogue: saying ‘I’ve just ran’ instead of ‘I’ve just run’ (‘I have ran’ vs ‘I have run’); the format of ‘I was like, [example of what he was thinking]’; interrupting his own sentence partway through to insert a related thought (‘it means—thinking ahead, when it comes to like, third life, it means...’); dropped articles/dropped words in general (‘when it comes to like, third life’ vs ‘when it comes to [when everyone is on their] third life’); word substitution (‘you can only attack from two sides’ vs ‘you can only be attacked from two sides’)... all of these are things he often does when he’s excited and talking quickly.

in 3L scott trips over his words the most (whether in his own pov, where he will edit his dialogue to make himself sound better, or in other povs) when he’s talking to jimmy. make of that what you will. personally I think it’s actually kinda cute.

dropped auxiliary verbs

another thing scott does is drop auxiliary verbs, most commonly for the verbs ‘be’ and ‘see’; he’ll say ‘you seen me’ or ‘I been over there already’ instead of ‘you have seen me’ or ‘I have been over there already.’ often this manifests in phrasing that is commonplace and recognisable, phrasing that wouldn’t be out of place in anyone’s mouth (‘how you feeling?’ instead of ‘how are you feeling?’). what’s more specific to scott is his use of ‘been’ and ‘seen’ independently of auxiliary verbs, although even this is not unique to him; martyn also does it, notably.

[edit: this is also a dialect thing, and is actually more likely overcorrection rather than elision. he also does the tense switching with ‘come’ vs ‘came’ and ‘went’ vs ‘gone.’]

for instance (LiL ep 2):

I consider this one a bit of a cheat code to writing accurate scott dialogue, honestly. he does this a lot, e.g. (LiL ep 7):

here you can also see that he interrupts one sentence (‘I didn’t know ... you got the kill count for grian’) to start to say something else (‘and obviously I didn’t—’), which makes the actual statement nigh incomprehensible if you don’t know what he’s intending to say.

on a related note, scott will also leave off words (usually not the main S/V/O of a sentence, but the rest of it) if he’s speaking quickly or has something he considers important that he wants to say, e.g. (DL ep 2):

multiple false starts + a sentence fragment. classic scott dialogue. he’s so eager to talk shit about jimmy that he forgets how to speak.

‘I was gonna say—’

this is a bit mean of me because I also say this all the time and I do recognise that it is annoying. the way this typically happens is that someone else will say something, and scott will jump in to point out that he was thinking the same thing (3L ep 4):

here, you can see that grian says something that could be interpreted as him suggesting jimmy (now a red name) will leave scott in favour of going to the desert; scott interrupts to say his own piece. was he actually ‘gonna say’? resolving that question is not really relevant imo.

or here (3L ep 5):

scott switching up which verb he’s using mid-sentence, often only a slight variation (‘get’ vs ‘buy’), is also relatively common.

or here (DL ep 1):

or here (LiL ep 7):

or here (SL ep 5):

if he’s not saying ‘I was gonna say,’ he’s saying ‘to be fair’ in the same context. or sometimes just ‘I said’ (LiL ep 7):

usually scott goes for the ‘I said’ when he’s being impatient or fed up though 😅 in this instance he was annoyed because jimmy was paying more attention to something else (figuring out where grian and joel were at) than to scott; hence also the suggestion that jimmy push him off the bridge.

just not finishing his sentences

scott mostly does this with martyn or cleo, people he knows very well and trusts to understand what he means without him having to spell it out. (contrast this with how he talks to jimmy.)

everyone will do this to some extent, and ending one’s sentences with ‘so...’ or ‘you know...’ or ‘like...’ is hardly unique to scott.

word substitution

this is really common for people who’ve undergone speech therapy for stutters (I do not know if Real Scott had a speech impediment as a child but I would not be surprised). scott will occasionally trip up and say the opposite of what he means, e.g. saying ‘you should pay for that’ instead of ‘you should charge for that’—antonyms but both words that are related to the subject at hand. or he’ll say ‘you’re on three lives’ when he means ‘you’re on your third life.’ for example (3L ep 6):

note how, even with the corrected phrasing (‘third life’), he drops a possessive pronoun (‘he’s on [his] third life’).

scott usually catches these and corrects himself mid-sentence, or just cuts up the line of dialogue and edits out the mistake if he thinks he can get away with it.

or this (DL ep 3):

this is a classic moment of scott insanity but for once the jimmy bashing isn’t actually what I want to focus on. scott’s freudian slip of starting to call jimmy his soulmate (because he’s talking to pearl, so he’s thinking about soulmates, so he says the wrong word) is another good example of this kind of word substitution.

(I’m hesitant to make fun of most linguistic quirks for the above reasons, and this is also definitely one that’s very relatable.)

laterally relevant: scott will also sometimes combine two related statements into one sentence, resulting in something that doesn’t make sense per se. usually he corrects himself when this happens. frequently he edits it out of his own pov, such as (DL ep 5):

‘it was such a good shot’ and ‘it was too good a shot not to [take it]’ initially got combined into ‘it was such a good shot not to,’ which scott then says correctly a moment later; he cuts out the (insubstantial) bits of the conversation between his initial statement (‘I shot him’) and the ‘corrected’ sentence (‘it was too good a shot not to’), thus splicing together both pieces into one smooth line of dialogue.

using people’s names a lot

this is a fun one because it speaks to his manipulator nature <3 no that’s mean of me, I shouldn’t be mean. when speaking directly to someone, scott will use their name to address them more frequently than anyone else whose dialogue I’ve looked at. I don’t have statistics, unfortunately, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one. pay attention next time you watch him; he uses names a lot. honestly scott and joel do this to each other all the time (LiL ep 7):

really it’s just a good social strategy. it makes a lot of sense in a group setting to clarify who you’re communicating with, and it makes sense in a one-on-one setting because people tend to like hearing their name. it’s a good way to command focus. other notorious manipulators like grian and gem also do this a lot, usually with ‘their’ person (scar and pearl respectively).

side note: ren also does this quite a lot! but how different people use names is a topic for a different post.

recounting what happened via invented dialogue

I love when he does this, I actually think it’s so charming, although I also understand that it is very annoying. for example (3L ep 4):

that is of course not what scott said verbatim earlier! but scott loves to do this: ‘so I was like...,’ ‘then they said like...,’ etc.

relatedly, he also loves to tell people about his day and what he’s been doing (LiL ep 4):

this is less an idiolect thing and more of a personality thing. scott is generally very chatty and likes to talk about things he’s experienced or things he’s interested in. as you can also see, he will often remove those conversations 😅 personally I think he gets embarrassed or self-conscious about it, especially when his collocutor has a lukewarm response.

another example, also featuring some classic scott phrasing (LiL ep 6):

and a more recent one (PL ep 3):

you can also see that scott once again splits up a sentence (‘it’ll be the last ... time you play the game’) with an extra phrase (‘that’ll be the end’).

saying things out of order/dividing sentences with random clauses

this has already been mentioned in various other sections, but it’s something scott also does quite frequently. he almost never does it during his monologues to camera, it’s nearly always when he’s speaking with someone else, so I suspect he does it a lot more than we actually see onscreen. another great example (PL ep 3):

he gets ahead of himself and the things he wants to say (‘it was nice in episode one when me and etho were together’) get all jumbled together. again, I find this charming! he has a lot he wants to say and tries to say it too quickly and trips over his own words. it’s cute.

occasionally, very occasionally, this will translate into fucking up an actual word, e.g. in PL ep 5 (ren pov) scott said ‘memorance’ instead of ‘remembrance.’ but genuinely he doesn’t tend to do this; he had no issue with ‘serendipitous’ for instance, or ‘rumpelstiltskin,’ or any of the other words the rest of his team were fumbling around with.

scott is actually quite well-spoken when he wants to be, when he’s making a point, but he’s not as articulate when he’s excited or scared. he’s also not as articulate as he wants to be (or wants to think of himself as), hence why he’ll often chop up his own dialogue to remove filler words (‘I was like,’ ‘um,’ ‘it’s kinda like,’ ‘you know,’ ‘so...,’ and of course the classic ‘I was gonna say—’):

this (LiL ep 7) is a great example of what inspired me to start the spreadsheet in the first place. I find this kind of thing fascinating.

fun fact: the only other person whose dialogue he occasionally gives this treatment is cleo (DL ep 3):

he’ll do microedits on other people’s dialogue all the time, but that’s often to present a certain narrative rather than to make them seem more articulate. for instance (3L ep 1):

or, y’know, to lie via selective editing. but that’s a topic I’ve covered elsewhere in great detail.

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there are a lot of other things I could say, but I think most of them would stray into analysis of tone of voice and inflection, and that’s trickier to do when you’re working off spreadsheets instead of video clips. for instance, scott tends to say ‘oh my god’ when he’s surprised or appalled (e.g. if something scary has just happened) and ‘oh my goodness’ when he’s flattered or pleased (e.g. if someone has just complimented him), but typing that out mostly just makes me look insane without actual hard evidence to back it up... just trust me here.

anyway! this is predominantly about how scott talks in general; the way scott speaks to people (which of course varies depending on the person and his relationship to them) is a post for another time. again, I have no hard stats to back me up here, this is based purely on vibes, but I’m pretty sure scott has said jimmy’s name more than anyone else’s. (close contenders include everyone else he’s been teamed with, and also joel.)

in conclusion, I believe the most stereotypically scott example of dialogue I can think of at the moment would be this (DL ep 2):

shortly after this he threatens to kill himself just so he can mess with jimmy. fun character! love how he talks. hopefully this has been helpful or at the very least interesting. I have spent so many hours of my life writing down things this man says.

#this is some amazing analysis op #so so cool #scott smajor

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