#please be nice I'm neither Spanish nor English native

[atthebell]

Why do you think Roier and Missa are easiest to understand? I found the same thing as someone who's just learning Spanish, and I wasnt sure if it was because I've watched so much Roier content that it influenced my ability to understand him, or if there's a deeper reason due to some regional accent differences being easier for non-native speakers to understand. I'm curious about your thoughts since you have really good insights into linguistics, but ignore this if it's too much for tumblr lol!

neither of them talk super fast, and imo their accents are fairly easy to understand-- for me, missa is easy to understand bc he's from the north and that region has accents i'm more familiar with, and roier's accent is somewhat neutral although obviously still clearly mexican and he uses a lot of slang. i think that also helps-- roier uses a lot of the same vocab, so if you're still learning spanish, you can pick up that slang and then understand quite a bit of what he's saying because he swears literally five times in a single sentence. they both speak pretty clearly and, additionally, i think most non-native spanish speakers, especially U.S. americans, are most familiar with mexican spanish rather than other dialects. so that's why someone like rubius or spreen is harder for nonnative speakers to understand, unless they're more familiar with spanish or argentine dialects specifically.

for me it's hard to parse bc i understand most of what they all say regardless since i've spoken spanish for so long, but i think rivers is just difficult because she speaks very fast. mariana is pretty easily to understand as well, there's just less for me to say about him tbh idr where he's from and i don't really have a hard time understanding him, i just watch him less than anyone else really.

for quackity, his accent is more noticeable, and his spanish is a little weirder, in that he is so bilingual and if you're not familiar with that way of speaking it can be hard to pick up what he's saying sometimes. this is partially why i wish there were a few more latino americans on the server so people get more familiar with that type of bilinguality-- i think quackity is in a unique position that he doesn't full share with other server members (aside from mouse, in that she is also a latino who lives in the states, although from a content perspective she doesn't do the same kind of bilingual split that q does nor does she stream in spanish), and i would be interested to see more of that kind of diasporic latino experience on the server. that's me rambling and doesn't have to do with accents i've just been thinking about it for a while and i think it would be cool. but yeah q phrases things funny sometimes because he's thinking of the english way of saying something or vice versa, and he is by far one of the most fluently bilingual members of the server, so it's an interesting dynamic for people watching him who aren't super familiar with spanish nor the kinds of calques and things that end up happening with bilingual speakers.

anyway back to your actual questions i do also think exposure does tip the scales lol most of us watch more roier than anyone else and esp for people just learning spanish, you're gonna understand him better than anyone else because of that. which is nice in some ways bc you learn a lot of slang but also if you're going to speak spanish in any kind of non-casual setting please do not talk like roier he is a fucking crazy person who swears so much it's actually unreal

[famosoentrescalles]

Omar Ayuso for ICON – full interview, translated to English by me, under the cut.

It says a lot about Omar Ayuso, Elite and his viewers that, playing a gay and Arab character, he is not known as "the Elite gay" or "the Elite Arab", as it has always happened with minorities in the Spanish series. Ayuso is famous for himself, for better or for worse, and he has not only caught the attention of teenagers and not so teenage fans of the show, but of fashion industry greats like Armani or Loewe. As a famous person he is one who is enviable unclassifiable, and one who acts with an admirable dose of freedom in this age of calculated popularity.

Now, Omar Ayuso is commemorating the beginning of his adult life with the fourth season of Elite, which airs on June 18, and making his debut as a filmmaker with the short film »Matar a la madre«. At 23, the Madrid native has found his image. He is looking for his voice. Many people are waiting for what he has to say. Too much?

“I have realized during the last months that I started on a high note, in a Netflix series, with some advertising campaigns and a level of exposure that you rarely have at the age of 20. So now I try to face the next step in my career as flat as possible, because I don't want to give myself the bitchslap of my life ”, he confesses. That next step is a short film in which the singer Ana Fernández-Villaverde (La Bien Querida) and Palomo Spain also make their debut as actors.

Almodóvar is one of Ayuso's inevitable references, because he began to look at cinema in a different way when, at the age of 12, a friend lent him the DVD of Bad Education. But the truth is that »Matar a la madre« evokes more of a Xavier Dolan emulating Almodóvar. The experience has revitalized Ayuso's self-esteem, "[It was] blocked for years," as he admits.

“I saw writing or directing as something very distant, something that happens to other people. But the creative process has also been personal and therapeutic, I haven't enjoyed something this much in a long time. It has given me, and I know it will sound very tremendous, a lot of desire to live. Before I thought about getting older and I was scared, I was too lazy to have responsibilities ”, he recalls. This self-awareness, this constant analysis, characterizes Generation Z: those born after 1995 are reaching unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. And the main reason is that, unlike people with analog memories, Generation Z do not perceive the internet as a complement to reality, but as an extension of it.

“On a conscious level, of course I distinguish the virtual world from the real one. But I don't know if I have the degree of self-control necessary not to mix them up at subconscious levels. Of course, I am dedicating my personal work to it ”, says Ayuso. After the premiere of »Juro que« in January 2019, the video clip of him with Rosalía, he disappeared from the networks for three months and with his return he explained that anxiety had prevented him from enjoying the launch. "It was the video as it could have been any other event that generated all that self-demand on me," he recalls today. “I was going through a difficult time personally and it was not good for me to have that overexposure. It is something that I talk a lot with my psychologist: in my profession, we are not allowed to be wrong. We always have to be great. I have verified that, as soon as I am more inactive on Instagram, people ask me if I'm okay, what is wrong with me, they ask me to come back, not to disappear ”.  

Ayuso lives with his neuroses and talks openly about his progress in therapy (coincidentally, he shares a psychologist with Eduardo Casanova). And he lives calmer since he deleted his Twitter account. “Everyone looks for what they say about you. You don't want to look, but you look at it. And you laugh at it, but in the end it ends up touching your self-esteem. Without realizing it, you begin to build your gaze on yourself through how you think others see you. Knowing what people said about me on social networks generated anxiety, so I have totally eliminated it from my life," he says.

Days after the account was closed, he launched »Matar a la madre«. The short is set in a setting that also confuses the real with the unreal, a fancy bar where they serve fast food. There, one meets a mature woman and a young gigolo who she has hired. Beyond its perversity, its melodrama and its hyper-stylized aesthetics, it is a story about people unable to live with their past decisions. Ayuso has no choice: they remind them every day.

He became famous in a very specific cultural landscape. One in which the news cycles never stop and spin at full speed, so everything happens right away and nothing matters too much. But, at the same time, everything remains forever and everything matters a lot. “During the interviews for the first season of Elite, I said everything I wanted, I had a blast and gave my opinion on absolutely everything. Over time, I have added layers of self-censorship to protect myself. And it's terrible," explains the actor after meeting ICON a second time on his own initiative, since the first time he became excessively self-conscious, to avoid getting into trouble, and he went home worried about not having said anything interesting.

During his first months of fame, he dropped in an interview that his character in Elite was affected by his sexual orientation as much as by the color of his shirt. "I said that? So you can see what life is like... Today I don't think like that anymore. It's something I've come to realize over time. I had assumed that my sexual orientation did not affect me or my day to day life, that it did not involve any trauma. But then I understood that it conditions me in absolutely everything. I realized how stigma affected me because every time I saw a group of kids laughing, I assumed they were laughing at me, ” he confesses.

Ayuso is a queer artist integrated into mass culture. The aesthetic of his Instagram is artistic, performative and, at times, subversive: something unusual for someone with four million followers. He has posed in a jockstrap for »Interview«, naked on a motorcycle or making a sexual video call, but always more as an exercise in style than as a provocation. Despite everything, Instagram censored the image of the video call.

Was Omar naive or controversial? “I promise you that I didn't think they were going to censor it, because there was absolutely nothing to be seen. It wasn't a FaceTime call, it was a montage. I took a photo, I googled a photo of a torso and I pasted it with the PicsArt,” he clarifies. A few days ago he uploaded a video with his sister, in which they went out together bathing as children, to congratulate her on her birthday. It was also censored. The disturbing thing is that many will not see anything sordid in that image until censorship forces them to look at it with those eyes. "Sure! Sleaze is in the person who believes that it incites some kind of degeneration ”.  

At one point in »Matar a la madre«, the leading boy (Iván Pellicer) says that he is envious of older people "because they have already lived." Does Omar Ayuso feel like this? “The truth is that I heard the phrase from Alaska many years ago. It stuck with me. In moments of my life in which I have dealt with apathy and disappointment, I have seen older men and I have thought that perhaps they have the luck and the tranquility of having already removed all the bad things”.

At least some of the "bad" has come to Omar at an early age. At 23, he has already made a round trip in his own run of fame: following the Elite bombing, he became unable to go out alone. Apart from looks, whispers and impertinent selfies that did not respect any social distance, everyone around him repeated the most ungrateful mantra: "Don't change, keep being yourself." And he suffered. "How to remain yourself when your life circumstances change so abruptly?" He wonders. Right now, he's reached a point where his level of social anxiety about fame "is pretty low."

Although Ayuso insists on refusing to be Elite's “black sheep”, it is difficult to imagine many of his companions releasing such nuanced and sincere reflections point-blank. In the same way, it is difficult to imagine another young actor daring the fantasy looks that Omar wears on the red carpet (a shirtless tuxedo, shorts, blood red tones) or, of course, directing La Bien Querida in a short .