When rhyming is compulsory.

[flamebyrd]

Child of Light is an RPG in which all the characters speak in rhyme. I had been assuming that this was merely a narrative convention to make it sound more like a fairytale, until I met the one character who didn't.

The unfortunately-named Rubella will set up rhymes and and fail to follow through on them, at which point the other characters will correct her.

Rubella: Little lady, have you seen bright balloons nearby? Any unicorns balancing on balls or tents raised to the... stars?
Igniculus, annoyed: Don't you mean "sky"?

In fact, sometimes characters feel the need to translate for her:

Rubella: Bravo, you with the beard! Are you a magician?
Finn: Well, you might say 'at.
Rubella: Come to the circus and... try out!
Aurora, interjecting: She is inviting you to "audition".

How does this work? Is this a world-building detail? Does everyone in this world literally rhyme all the time? Is it this world/language's equivalent of using bad grammar? Does Rubella have a speech impediment*? Is she doing it deliberately because she's a jester and she thinks it's funny?

Is this just a running gag the writers threw in for fun and didn't think about?

* In which case the way the other characters react is not at all cool, come on! Actually, regardless this is not how one should react to someone making errors of speech.

Comments

[silverflight8]

I find this fascinating too haha. I totally have the same questions about what it means in-universe. Maybe they react so badly because it's like a taboo or something. I dunno. But I LOVE seeing books where there are eg alien culture and the writing reflects it in ways OTHER than just unreadable text/fonts and translations. (thinking Ancillary Justice in some ways - how the one-gender society of the Radch is translated by using "she" for everyone).

[flamebyrd]

Ooh, yes, maybe not rhyming your sentences is incredible rude in this world! I hadn’t thought of that.

Maybe it’s habit from reading a lot of translated works, but when reading fantasy/SF I often find myself approaching it like the author is attempting to render a story from another culture into one I’m more familiar with, and I get momentarily thrown off by puns and such that assume it’s written in English.

Reading a lot of Tolkien also probably contributed to this...

[cimorene]

It could be a grammatical feature that renders the un-rhymed sentence confusing or ambiguous in meaning, too. So an error, but one that technically changes what you're saying - sort of like dangling or misplaced modifiers can sometimes do in English. An unclosed rhyme could, for example, indicate that you're definitely not done talking and that you haven't reached the point you were trying to make yet, so that someone unused to this kind of impediment or someone autistic for example might be waiting for the conclusion and trying to guess what the rhyme was going to be. In that case the correction is more along the lines of "She means YOUR house, not the dog's" or "She means the pope and Mother Theresa in ADDITION to her parents".

[flamebyrd]

I like the sound of this! Makes a lot of sense both linguistically and in terms of how people would react to it.

[cimorene]

Maybe she's a non-native speaker of the language! This is a pretty cool feature.

[silverflight8]

I also like this interpretation!