this great post about changes in acting styles and accents over the 20th/21st century made me think about Nightingale’s accent, and how Peter – who’s English – thinks he sounds like ‘a Hollywood villain’ on first meeting him, and how p much everybody in fandom who listens to the audio books goes “whoa Mr Holdbrook-Smith that accent is a bit much’ before they get used to it. And how that’s because Nightingale has the old-fashioned upper-class accent mentioned in one of the posts in that reblog chain, which DOES sound like a parody to modern ears but absolutely isn’t (think, e.g., recordings of the Queen from just after she ascended to the throne.)
Twothree many stray thoughts leading on from this:
1) in the modern era I bet his accent is actually a genuine barrier to him doing police work – Peter talks about coppers deliberately practicing a certain style of speech which is Not How Nightingale Talks, and Nightingale doesn’t even talk like an average posh guy, he talks like a parody of one
2) if they ever do a TV series, they’re going to have to make a choice about whether to have the actor go full on Old-School Posh RP or just modern posh newscaster-ish RP, because having the audio effect of the full thing will have an effect on how audiences react to Nightingale, and I don’t think there’s a wrong choice here but I would be curious to see which one they made
2a) if they DO go Full-On Hollywood Villain, a TV fandom will put a LOT of time into theories that Nightingale is Secretly The Villain/Faceless Man, like way more than the book fandom ever has, and probably not quite realise why
3) Nightingale’s unchanging accent – vs., again e.g. the Queen’s – is a marker of how little fucking regular human contact he has had over the past seventy years, if he was talking to other people lots every day it would have started to shift (if you’re a migrant or know migrants, you’ll know how radically adult accents can shift in the right circumstances)
3a) probably starting in 2012 and going into the future of the books, he’ll come down to a more modern-style posh accent, only neither he nor anybody who interacts with him a lot will notice unless they listen to old recordings of him or something after a few years, because brains are weird that way
3b) I would love to see Peter notice this in the books but he won’t, because it hasn’t been quite long enough and also brains
insidious-intent said: Imagining Miriam taking furious notes on everything Nightingale says, while Seawoll silently weeps at the weird bollocks being taught
Wohooo, it’s the official release date of Lies Sleeping! So to celebrate I sketched a Peter – without whom London would be well and truly fucked. And you out there – have a lot of fun reading!!!
I cannot think this is a coincidence; Aaronovitch is too much of a history and architecture geek and has watched too many episodes of history documentaries not to have known this going in.
Those boat-shaped bulwarks around the piers of a bridge (seen above in the context of London Bridge itself): Are called “Starlings.”
“… a starling …is a defensive bulwark … surrounding the supports of a bridge.. Starlings are shaped to ease the flow of the water around the bridge, reducing the damage caused by erosion or collisions with flood-borne debris, and may also form an important part of the structure of the bridge, spreading the weight of the piers.
SO:
The bridge itself does not rest on the starlings… but the starlings protect the fundamental structure of the bridge from being worn away, or from being hit by debris from floods.
Peter is not only the “herald of the dawn,” but can we say that as “Nightingale’s Starling” he also came in just in time to keep the foundation of the Folly from being worn away by time, or damaged by the flood of new magical dangers?
Chapters: 7/7 Fandom: Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale, Beverley Brook/Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale, Beverley Brook/Peter Grant Characters: Peter Grant (Rivers of London), Thomas Nightingale, Beverley Brook, Mamusu “Rose” Grant, Sahra Guleed, Alexander Seawoll, Background & Cameo Characters, Background Relationships – Character Additional Tags: Returning Home, Trauma, OT3, Canon-Typical Violence, Panic Attacks, Hurt/Comfort Series: Part 3 of Reichenbach Falls Summary:
Peter Grant returns from the dead, and starts the longer process of returning home.
“You’ve never shown me a high order spell,” I said.
“Really?” said Nightingale. “We must rectify that.” He took a deep breath and then, with a curiously theatrical wave of his hand, spoke a spell that was at least eight formae long.
I pointed out that nothing had happened, which prompted Nightingale to give me one of his rare smiles.
“Look up,” he said.
I did and found that above my head a small cloud, about as wide as a tea tray, was gathering. It looked like a compact mass of thick steam, and once it finished growing raindrops began to fall on my upturned face.
I ducked out from under it and it followed me. It wasn’t very fast – you could stay ahead of it with a brisk walking pace – but as soon as you stopped it would drift to halt overhead and bring a little bit of the English summer to a personal space near you.
I asked Nightingale what on earth the spell was for and he said it was a favorite of one of his masters at school. “At the time I thought he seemed inordinately fond of it, though,” he said as he watched me dodge around the atrium. “Although I must say I’m beginning to appreciate its appeal now.”
Ben Aaronovitch. Whispers Underground. p. 94.
In any other fantasy universe a level eight spell would summon a meteor shower, or the hordes of the undead, or make time itself come to a stop. In this British Urban Fantasy universe, however, wizards use level eight spells to summon mildly annoying cartoon tropes. ♥
It’s better/worse than that: per word of god, the most complicated and difficult spell Nightingale (in fact any wizard) has ever done on page in these books is this one, from the first book:
“…[the dog] swung its head from one side to the other, barking continuously until Nightingale pointed his finger at it and muttered something under his breath. The dog immediately rolled over, closed its eyes and went to sleep.”
Because in this universe, large-scale physical stuff? No big deal – it’s just momentum and force, after all. Altering brain chemistry via magic? That’s HARDCORE.
Everybody in this fandom should think VERY HARD about what they’ve done.
Anyway, here is 12.5k of Peter and Nightingale discovering they accidentally got married eight years ago, per Tumblr’s latest favourite Imagine Your OTP scenario, and then trying their best to get divorced. Shenanigans, naturally, ensue.
Featuring cameos from Bev, Abigail, Molly, Sahra, Sahra’s lawyer sister who I made up just now and am already very fond of, and two of my three favourite OC apprentices (sorry Annie: you had to sit this one out.)
If I did write the Starlingale whoops-apparently-we-got-married-years-ago story, which I am way too busy to do, it would also feature Sahra Guleed’s lawyer sister and Peter and Nightingale being strictly instructed that whatever else they do, having managed to avoid sleeping together for the first eight years of their surprise marriage, they should keep on doing that, because it’s going to be way simpler when they file for divorce if they can truthfully swear they’ve never had that sort of relationship.
This turns out to be the worst version of the white elephant game ever.
“It had all
been in the name of data security anyway: we’d been fielding some very pointed
questions from, of all things, a student journalist who’d crossed paths with us
(a friend of Abigail’s, and don’t think I didn’t blame Abigail for that) and
she’d been particularly interested in how long, exactly, Nightingale had been
working for the Met. I blamed Nightingale, too, for making a casual reference
to the winter the waste collectors had struck under Thatcher – he still looked
about forty, but these days that meant he looked more or less like an average
Millennial. I’d told him that once and he’d taken about a week to forgive me.
For that I blame the Telegraph, which he still persists in buying ‘for the
crossword’ and which has adopted the sad habit of using ‘Millennial’ as a
shorthand for ‘young people of whom we disapprove’. And they definitely mean whom. “
FML
I sat down in the kitchen with a cup of tea
and a biscuit and did my best to come up with a list of entirely unreasonable behaviour
on Nightingale’s part that would be grounds for a divorce.
“Listen,” I said to Molly, who was sharpening
the knives – I’d almost left her to it, but she wasn’t doing it with any
particular zeal, so it seemed safe enough. “You’ve lived with him for, like, a
century by now. I’ll take suggestions. There must be something.”
Molly thought about this for about ten minutes
and finally indicated, via a combination of props and economical gesture, that
she was unimpressed at Nightingale’s habit of only drinking half of a cup of
coffee and then leaving the half-full cup on a table somewhere. Then she
shrugged, as if to say that was the best she had.
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Beverley Brook/Peter Grant, Beverley Brook & Thomas Nightingale Characters: Beverley Brook, Cecelia Tyburn Thames, Thomas Nightingale, Mamusu “Rose” Grant, Background & Cameo Characters Additional Tags: Angst, Grief, Presumed Dead Series: Part 2 of Reichenbach Falls Summary:
Olympia sits up and stares at her. “Bev. It’s been a month, and you’re still flooding the city four days out of seven. We can’t leave when you’re still like this.”
Abigail asks Peter questions because he’s her big cousin who’s into weird stuff and probably won’t rat her out to her folks
Accountability check: I wrote 1200 words of the arranged marriage AU today while waiting for someone to get back to me so I could submit a revised paper I’M NOT GETTING DISTRACTED FROM MY FANFIC GOALS
tora42's nonsensne 