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KennethMorgan Since: Nov, 2010
Sep 22nd 2011 at 8:00:32 PM •••

In at least three episodes (specifically, "The General", "It's Your Funeral" and "Hammer Into Anvil"), we see Number Six acting to protect or avenge his fellow Villagers when Number Two et. al. unjustly harm them. What trope would this fall under?

PaulA Since: Jan, 2010
Sep 19th 2010 at 12:47:09 AM •••

Conversation In The Main Page. (If somebody can condense this down to a single unschizophrenic sentence, go ahead and re-add it.)

  • As Long as It Sounds Foreign - An Estonian with a Polish name and a (poorly faked) Russian accent in an episode, in spite of Estonian not being related to either language.
    • Hearing an Estonian speaking Russian back in 1967 (or nowadays, for that matter) wasn't exactly uncommon. Same thing goes for Russians with Polish sounding names, Poles with Lithuanian sounding names, Lithuanians with Slavic sounding names, et caetera.
      • Estonians speaking Russian, yes. Estonians having a Russian accent when speaking English, no - Estonian is a Finnic language, closely related to Finnish, Estonian accents sound more Nordic than Slavic. And while loads of Estonians have Polish (or Russian) surnames, I've yet to meet an Estonian called Nadia or Nadezhda (for which Nadia is short in Russian) - this last name is unpronouncable for Estonains, as Estonian lacks the "zh" sound.
      • There was actually a thing in the interwar period - in which this character would have been born - where Estonian communists gave their kids Russian names unpronouncable for Estonians. That the makers knew about this is unlikely, though - they just wanted something that sounded "eastern". And, this would not explain why the actress is faking the wrong accent.
      • Thanks to their somewhat nordic accents that Estonians mostly never got rid of when speaking Russian either, Estonian actors were actually typecast as Germans in Soviet cinema.
    • Poland at the time was a de facto Soviet republic in all but name.
    • Another annoying thing about this whole thing is how 6 is not aware of the difference between Estonians and Russians. Pre-war Estonia was a close ally of the UK, and Estonians played a not insignificant role in the post-WWII spy games, thanks to their loyalty to their former ally, and lacking loyalty to the Soviet Union. Britain had also been a strong supporter of the Estonian anti-Russian resitance. While the viewer - today, or in the 60s - would not know these things, a cold war era spy should have.

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