#hope yall can bear with how im basically the messiest member of the council

[team-council-two]

So how is Spy a special case?

*is excited*

(for context, in a previous post, i added the tags " i could write an entire book on how unfamiliar french people in medias seem to actual french people, spy is an odd case; ask me about him")

aiight, you know what you signed up for, get ready for one hell of a presentation, ft terminal verbosis frenchosis ! this will be in three parts, of course, because three is a good number and the mere concept of having 3 parts should give you all a headache (look ray i didnt add a n this time)

wait shit im not even sure mistral is a spy, hold on,

aw fck thats for real ones

anyways femme fatale trope, next question

HA gotcha, you didnt think id let yall go with just one sentence huh ? so. our fella is french. our fella is a spy. our fella is a huge piece of shit. extremely common, alright ? outright overused archetype. eeeexcept that the combo's execution here REALLY stands out. how so ?

well, let me ask you a quick question. do you think the fact that he is french, and the fact that he is an evil bastard, and the fact that he is a spy are linked ?

well ill answer that for you. nope. valve treated these three traits remarkably separately. the way he speaks french in game is relatively polite, and the insults he throws around are, i checked, exclusively in english. he is surprisingly free of the usual way medias make "being evil" and "being french" be a hand in hand thing, and similarly free of the one that seems to indicate that Because you are french Of Course you are a spy. in other words, rather than being a walking glamour stereotype of sorts or an obnoxious asshole the likes of which we have seen hundreds of, this is a godawful guy that also happens to be a french snob, and that also happens to be a spy.

compare with, say, our lady mistral above who has a shitton of taunts in french, who embraces that whole sexy lady deal, deliberately plays on it and so on. difference is miles.

and now if you followed you did catch i said french snob rather than just french, there is a reason behind this, so allow me to get on part 2, which i promise will be WAY more verbose-

so

im not sure why but american medias love to have peppy rich french fashionistas in their shit. theyre cute, hyper, sheltered as fuck, and the entire deal is weird bc these people seem like aliens to actual french people who tend to care about fashion in pretty normal amounts and definitely do not have that many grands to bust into it. *yes* we pride ourselves in having a pretty neat fashion industry, but in a similar way as the american and the german boast about their cars. we are NOT obsessed with it okay. anyways, sometimes writers have the decency of making these characters cunts, but not always. but what doesnt vary is the trope seems to play out like ah yes, your average french- which is fucking baffling. and is the part taking us aback.

see, we HAVE the evil breed of those characters too in our shit. comedic shit, to be precise. a rundown of our humor is it often is situational humor - stupid outlandish situations with equally stupid archetypal characters, their personality equally pushed into the absurd, all of that more often than not thinly veiling some pretty heavy social commentary. in other words, you often laugh at the evil cop/rich factory/big restaurant owner/politician/etc getting karma'd in mind boggingly bizzare and hilarious ways, while clearly showing them as evil for mistreating subordinates (and often getting shit for it sooner or later) and as simpering cowards towards literally anyone who has any kind of superior position to them whatsoever.

in other words, context matters. where in american shit they are often allies or friends or comedic relief of sorts through being french/annoying or just villains, in french shit they more often than not are *targets* of some kind of events and shown to be ridiculous through other means than their obsession for fashion or whatever.

am i saying that valve did this ?

...yeah. thats a very bold statement, but yes. i mean, cmon,

see, i am overall basing this on the fact that ingame spy is so fucking similar to many, many, many of Louis de Funès' roles, and even his face, it outright had me searching around the wiki for some kind, any kind of claim of inspiration from valve-

he reads exactly as one of them ! rich cunt obsessed with money, constantly mocking people, constantly complaining about everything ever, fakely polite, not opposed to doing vile acts to have his way, extremely menacing face, *the same fucking laugh*, and the fact that characters played by this guy have remarkably often have what we call a couillon de fils, a dumbfuck of a loser ass son, if you will.

the only differences really are from comic spy, who reads far less like this. he's still well executed mind you, but he (especially @miss pauling) reads as far kinder than this dude's characters usually are, and he is a bit more... stretched, both physically and in behaviour, than the actor's goblin build and attitude, as game spy seems to be unable to stand straight whereas the comic one seems to have no difficulty with this, and the similar range of expressiveness that also ports 1:1 is game exclusive as well. and finally, comic spy also was not given the occasion to cuss people out, so.

anyways my point mostly amounts to, if you manage to make french people think of an emblematic actor beloved by many, rather than just make us go through the usual whiplash of "how is that a normal french person to american people ???", you are probably doing something right.

in addition to this wall of text, i am begging you all to watch this, it should help understand what i meant by our breed of humor, and what i mean by "spy could have been played by this dude no problem"

now, onto part 3,

well once you said he is a pathetic wet cat man you summed it up really.

for all the class he has, for all the money he has, for all the. everything ? he still is pathetic. he still is simply seen as a mean as fuck loser either trying to drown his failures as a father with expensive tastes, or simply amoral and unsympathetic because of his concerns being about money rather than about humans. he still is headcanoned as stinking by most of the fandom. nobody respects the fucken spy. he comes across as haughty and it only makes people want to shit on him some more.

really, it is pretty much everything I explained in the two points above. the patheticness helps with making it so he is not a stereotype, and it helps making it clear he is supposed to be representative of rich pretentious cunts rather than of french people.

so, he is a huge bitch, and ironically, this makes him a blorbo to us, bc who doesnt love a good ole flawed character ?

his whole french deal is not shown as eccentric or what makes him a loser but just a coincidence, in a sense. and you'd be surprised by how much of a breath of fresh air this is to french people. shitty in a realistic way rather than a made up clown, and in a way we can recognize in our own medias. it also is neat from the, err, fandom pov ? because you get to develop his frenchness and assholeness and spyness separately, since they are elements implemented for the sake of themselves rather than as a stereotypical whole. you get to have *fun* with him.

SO i think i ran out of things to blabber about. hope it makes sense tho. but i guess it really is about. not *quite* representation because we do not see ourselves in spy, of course, but way more about our culture not being bastardized and being turned into a joke about eccentrics at best, or hatred about seductive women and effeminate/homosexual men at worst, + having a fresh execution on tropes that else usually would get our eyes rolling.

alpha, over and out