I'm finally playing Final Fantasy XII after years of meaning to, and my best bro @whit, knowing the type of guy I am (a Prosody Guy) told me to be on the lookout for the character who speaks in iambic tetrameter. (Full credit: it was @ladysisyphus who first noticed the tetrameter.)
So basic'ly that means, to wit:
a character who speaks like this,
with words in pairs of stressed and not,
and four per line, no less, no more.
I kept checking the scansion of each new character as we met them and kept coming up dry, wondering if I'd missed them, but then they showed up and it was so brilliantly clear and so clearly deliberate I may as well have clapped and giggled like a happy toddler.
However, during this character's dialogue, they talk about another character who they call a "heretic," and in the next scene the heretic character shows up—
—and THEY arrange their syllables by fives,
instead of by the once-established four
prosodic'ly suggesting their disdain
for orthodox, and all tradition's ways
And at this point, reader, I fucking hollered.
The FFXII localization would have been an all-timer without this flourish. With it, I don't know. The greatest of all time, maybe?
