Kidd Commander!

I spend a lot of time thinking about language! The short answer is “it’s not important so don’t get hung up on it.” Here’s a long answer because language and its relationship with fiction is super fascinating and I really like talking about this stuff:

Hahaaa that gets kind of complicated when you think about it too much, fictional worlds’ languages get squicky when you break them down because so much of everyday lexicon is super rooted in our exclusive human history. I did study language in college and I realized there’s not really a point in replacing a few words with fictional ones because technically we shouldn’t be using any of our world’s language for anything in another universe. Like, yes, just the word “English” implies Anglo-Saxons existed. The existence of the word having the exact same meaning we ascribe to it implies their entire history must have happened in exactly the same way, that /every other/ language that English steals from must also exist with the same history, and also that these old English speakers’ cultures collided with all these other cultures in the same way. There’s absolutely no reason any fictional universe should ever be written in any language that we can understand, because no other universe could possibly reproduce the exact same chain of human development that our real one has.

I feel like there’s enough weird confusing shit going on in KC already that I don’t worry about making up cutesy keyboard-mashy names for things that we already have perfectly good words for, I guess? Commanders are commanders because they order stuff around, walkers are walkers because they walk places. Wizards are wizards, you know? I COULD make up a name for English because of our real-world understanding of the word’s history, but then why wouldn’t I replace the word “god,” our understanding of which only comes from early Christian homogenizing of different European tribes’ titles for their individual deities? It’s a huge rabbit hole and it jUST KEEPS GOING WHERE DO WE STOP?? It seems silly and needlessly complicated to slap a new nametag on something without changing anything else, I suppose!

If I include a new language in the story (some of the animal folks have their own unique languages) I’ll give it a new name, but the comic’s written in our English and Ulrich speaks our German, so I’m fine with calling them what they are for the sake of clarity (and I’ve always found fake mystical terms for otherwise normal stuff to be super corny tbh). I’ve got an in-universe lampshade explanation for all of this, but it’s so incredibly far in the future we’ll both have forgotten this conversation by then, so for now I’ll suggest not to read too much into it! None of these things have any major bearing on the story’s plot, other than English being the major language of commerce and spoken commonly across the civilized parts of the world.

I appreciate your attention to detail! And also your dedication, if you actually plowed through this mess of text I just threw out! Thank you!