I once remember reading: If you are doing your worldbuilding right there will be a lot of stuff you can't actually show in the main story. Stuff like this for example. Hopefully at some point in the far future we get some sort of Twokinds Encyclopedia with all the useless curio we wanted to know, but we were afraid to ask, about Mekkan.MuonNeutrino wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2019 6:18 pm Today we have more information than you ever needed to know about Natani, in the:
Natani Ref Sheet
Personally, I can't get enough of this sort of background info/lore, I love this stuff.
The bit about him having a very good singing voice that he doesn't use due to it coming out feminine is something I found particularly interesting. A neat thing in real life neuroscience is that singing seems to be processed quite differently in the brain than normal speech. There are people with aphasia (difficulty with language processing, often due to brain damage from e.g. a stroke) who can't coherently string two words together when trying to talk normally, who can nevertheless sing completely fluently. Natani had to train himself to speak like a male - Tom once mentioned that the keidran language indicates gender by adding 'male' or 'female' inflections to speech (as there's no inherent tonal difference between male or female voices like with humans), and that Natani's trained himself to speak this way for so long that he'd actually find it hard to speak with female inflections now. (This was in 2007, but I see no reason to assume it's changed.) However, I could totally see this not having extended to singing (or howling, which is kinda similar I guess) if he hadn't specifically trained for it, given how differently singing appears to be handled by the brain. I don't know if Tom did that on purpose or if how it fits with RL neuroscience is just a coincidence, but it's still neat.
The similar note about body language is also kinda neat. This comic was a joke, but I wonder if Raine actually *would* have 'weird' body language due to having grown up in isolation and never in her keidran form.
Also, I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again, but *man* wolves are huge. That's gotta be a bit intimidating to be around, at least for your 'average' human who's already conditioned to think of wolves as dangerous.
The part about Nat's voice is interesting. After all pitch is based around the physical characteristics of the throat windpipe mouth etcetera but since all those are flexible structures changing the voice is completely posible. Althoguht considering wolves, are freaking huge I would imagine even the most feminine Keidran voice would sound deep and gutural for us. Besides I am not sure a human could hear the difference. I deal with a lot of dogs, strays mostly, and honestly I can't tell one howl/bark from another.
Then there is the body language part. I know that for most social animals there are some behaviour that are clearly used to communicate but for most us humans those cues are very hard to tell unless you deal with a lot of animals, like a vet. On top of that a lot of animals use odors and chemical signals for comunication. So it would be expected for a race of humanoid canids to develop very subtle but clear, for them at least, body language to convey a lot of stuff, from everything from social status to gender.
Also even real wolves are pretty damn big . A somewhat large wolf would be my same volume and mass and that alone is enough to make them scary. Now imagine a 2 meters tall 100 kilogram walking wolf! And of top of that Natani is a profesional, albeit not that good, assasin.