!!!UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!
When I began developing Arkhea's merfolk for Starfish Out Of Water, I soon had to figure out how to show the difference and alien-ness of Star's psychic language, especially primal darkspeech, a version meant for instinctive, primitive flashes of empathic connection. I was limited to text, and I didn't want to simply state Star's moods and feelings objectively; Jōtarō was meant to slowly learn how to interpret Star's telepathy, and I wanted the readers to also experience that intuition-based discovery.
I thought about emoticons and emojis, and about how many emotes in Animal Crossing are somehow universal, and I began pouring over the Unicode characters available for my use, at least on most systems and browsers. I started building up a small compilation of "mood-glyphs" for Star to use when he was communicating with primal darkspeech, basing it off of Animal Crossing's emotes, common emojis, and the resemblance between a character and the meaning it's meant to convey.
~Neo Qwerty
- ☠
- Death, destroying (with a scorched earth/salt-the-earth result), ruining, poison.
- ♪
- Happiness, joy, amusement, laughter.
- ゆ
- Hunting, killing, food, prey, hunger, eat.
- ♥
- Romantic love, romantic affection.
- ⭜
- Lust, arousal.
- ⚣
- The act of mating, between mermen.
- ~
- Playful tone (as a suffix), playful whine.
- ♛
- A Queen, a King, a Queendom, a Kingdom.
- ?
- A question, confusion, requesting (as a suffix).
- ⚭
- A permanent romantic psychic bond, a soulmate.
- ♒︎
- The surface of water, surface waves, a merine.
- !
- Surprise, startlement, amplifying (as a suffix).
- く
- Talking, speech, vocalization sounds.
- ✴
- Victory, triumph.