Building the brutal reality of Urtagh, I realized there was a glaring hole in the worldbuilding: the spoken word. A world this raw, entirely built on the absolute domination of men, couldn’t just rely on standard speech. The language itself had to reflect that disparity. The tongue of men had to differ significantly from the tongue of women.
I remembered a scene from James Clavell’s “Shōgun”, where Mariko explains to Anjin-san that the female vocabulary simply lacks certain commanding forms. That was my spark. I followed that trail, but I refused to just lazily copy Japanese. It had to be unique. It had to be the language of Miko. The true voice of Urtagh.
I laid down the core foundations. There is a faint echo of Japanese in its roots, yes, but I wanted a comprehensive, living system. I wanted a real language. Knowing exactly what it had to be, I needed the machinery to bring it to life and a translator to make it work in the comic panels. I fed my concepts and strict rules into the AI. “Let’s build a language,” I directed. We went through a massive grind of iterations – tweaking the syntax, the exact placement of hyphens, the harshness of the phonetics. It took countless corrections to get the sound right.
But we nailed it. I forged the Miko language and built a dedicated, functional translation module. It is alive. And it works perfectly.
But then aren’t you concerned that your readers will miss nuances in the men’s personalities?
Very often speech can carry not only an emotional but also an erotic dimension.
Thanks for the comment. The answer is – no. And here is why.
The female protagonist will eventually begin to learn the Miko language. I want the aspect of her isolation and complete confusion, combined with a total lack of understanding, to be very distinct. I spent a long time thinking about how to solve this. I even considered something like a translation layer. But no. In the narration, there will be room for understanding the language and its nuances.
Most importantly, despite the strong erotic aspect, this will not be a typical erotic comic. It will be a comic where erotica and enslavement serve as a very significant – yet still – background. The plot is designed to surprise the reader, and it has been planned thoroughly. As for the language, well, it is not so essential to understand what is happening. At least for now.