Yes, it's Fucking Political

[baratron]

I wrote a really political story. I don't think it needs any knowledge of Ace Attorney, except perhaps the understanding that yes, this guy really is both a rock star and a prosecutor.

Why the Gavinners Aren't Playing at Pride This Year

Rock star Klavier Gavin is interviewed by his friend Jenny Lizst, a music journalist. She asks him about a rumour that the Gavinners wanted to play at the Los Angeles Pride Festival but were turned down. Klavier answers, but only off-the-record.

Set in 2024, during the Seven Year Gap. Inspired by real-life American and world politics in 2019.

Featuring awesome Gavinners OCs, bisexual erasure, mistrust of the police, young Klavier not understanding his own privilege, and a cheery discussion of how at least half the band would have been killed during the Holocaust. Also much gratuitous German.

(The German has not yet been checked by an actual German speaker so might be wrong.)

Comments

[thekumquat]

Having never heard of this fandom and wondering who Klavier was, I read this and enjoyed it - it seemed to be a plausible interview for a young intelligent guy who became an unexpected star very young.


Is he a pianist, BTW? The German is grammatical (except Gott sei dank not Dank - it's not a noun) but not always what a German would use. The one that leapt out was his use of 'Fräulein"as that word has died out for anyone over puberty (bit like Master for boys here), unless the user is the sort of patronising guy who clicks fingers for waitstaff, or its an in-joke from childhood.

Changing to' liebe Jenny' or Jenny Schatz/Schätzchen would work. Also if he's the kind of guy to say verdammt instead of Scheiss, then best 'keine Scheisse' rather than 'fick'. To make Denglish convincing you really need a couple compound nouns using Scheiss- as an intensifier, like bloody in English. I recommend ScheissNazis.

[baratron]

Ace Attorney is a series of games for the Game Boy Advance / Nintendo DS / 3DS in which you are a defence attorney trying to get your innocent client off the hook. Apparently it is based on the Japanese legal system, but if so it must be a heavily video game'd version of the same, since it's entirely reasonable for someone to become a lawyer aged 17-18.

It is also Super Gay. The implication is that every defence attorney becomes "partners" with the prosecutor they work with most often. Certainly, they become close friends and partners in court. Subtext suggests it goes further than that, and the original writer for the game series has basically given up trying to argue that the original pair, Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth, are Just Good Friends. Last year, a pair of rings were produced as official merchandise for them. Yeaaaahhh.

This CD cover is official art showing Klavier Gavin (tall, blond) with Apollo Justice (short, brunet). Where is Klavier's right hand?

Also, here's a compilation of Very Gay moments from the actual game.

Anyway. So, in the Japanese version of the game, Klavier is a Japanese guy who studied in the US and pretends to be American, dropping random English words into his sentences. In the English translation, he's an American who studied in Germany and has an outrageous "Eurotrash" accent. The game isn't voiced so we don't hear the outrageous accent, it is conveyed through gratuitous use of German in text form. The fact that he is Fake German was only revealed in an interview with the developers on their official website and a lot of fans ignore it.

In canon, the German words he uses are: ja/nein, danke/bitte, Auf Wiedersehen, Achtung (often paired with "baby") and Fräulein. I'm pretty sure that at least 50% of his uses of "Achtung" are out of context. All of the teenage girls who fancy him are "Fräuleins", but then so are all of the women he knows or works with (e.g. Ema Skye is "the Fräulein Detective"). Some people choose to write him as outrageously sexist as a result. Some people change the "Fräulein" to "Frau". Others leave him talking exactly how he would in the canon, which is the approach I've taken. We know it isn't right, but it's what he says.

You're right that the German is not, uh, properly German. My usual German beta has temporarily disappeared (working on her own fic) so I posted the story without it having been looked at by an actual German speaker. I have to say that German is a ridiculously complicated language which I have failed to learn three times, and Google Translate doesn't do very well with it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the kind of guy to say verdammt instead of Scheiss". Klavier swearing in German is my own personal headcanon, based on the fact that the worst word he says in the game is "heck", and that's after his priceless guitar has been blown up on stage while he was still playing it (!). All of the swearing has come from this website. According to that site:

Scheiß- prefix lousy, sh--ty, bloody (Br.), crappy, damned (thing). This prefix, like its cousin above, often should be translated as "damned" (thing), or something more mild than you might think.

For instance, when a German says So ein Scheißwetter!, it only means that the weather is really bad: "Such awful weather!" By the same token, Diese Scheißpolitiker! means "These damned politicians!" (a universal complaint).

So I would take that as "ScheißNazis" not actually being strong enough for "fucking Nazis", but I don't know. He needs the worst possible word because we're talking about Nazis!

I looked up "Gott sei dank vs Dank" before (can't find the website I used, I'm sure it was somewhere on stackexchange) and the internet seems to think that if you leave it as three separate words, it's capital-D but if you squash it into a single word, it's lower-case D. iirc, how you say "thank God" is highly regional. Wish I could find the argument now, it had Germans from all over Germany arguing that other Germans were wrong :D

Oh, and he's not a pianist. Or at least, he doesn't play the piano in his band. He's a guitarist. Capcom gave him a K- name to match his brother, Kristoph. In the French translation he's "Konrad" and in German, "Kantilen".

[thekumquat]

Okay, now I have that guy from Eurotrash in my head... I'm familiar with the Japanese let's-put-gay-in-everything trope.

So keeping him in character with himself, might as well keep the Fräuleins, but lose the 'fick' as being too strong for him. There's a general rule that if you want your non-native German to sound more German, make some compound nouns using Scheiss... Yes, it's not as bad as shit in English, but context is everything. Adding an intensifier to Nazis would show emotion. (or a euphemism - the lady from Nuremburg chatting to me in 2016 could only refer to 'the bad times, the late 1930s')


I have some sympathy for this chap - thanks to three spelling reforms since I left school, and my very upright German teacher, I'm told I speak German like a little old lady. Only my crude vocab comes from my exchange partner's football-hooligan son, so I've been trying to learn phrases to cover the middle ground between, "I'm terribly sorry, but I think I was here first" and "oi, get out my fucking way, you arsehole whore cunt"...