The Yoylese Script
One of the many things that I have always been curious about, ever since I was a child, was fictional languages and especially scripts.
Don't get me wrong, I love conlangs, however one of the things that has always appealed to me about this type of thing is if they're unexplained and people have to figure it out themselves, and in the case of conlangs, this is unfortunately not that easy.
They're almost always either explained concretely somewhere, or go unexplained and are super hard to decipher. I mean we still haven't even deciphered Beanish yet, and serious kudos to those who somehow deciphered Phyrexian.
Because of this I have always been more into fictional or secret scripts, as these are somewhat easy to decipher, even if you don't actually have a direct reference for them. One of the first ones I was introduced to was the Pigpen cipher, which uses two basic grids and some dots to be able to hide messages and stuff.
Probably my favourite one, though, as it's from one of my favourite shows of all time, is the Yoylese script from Battle for Dream Island!
It first appeared in the episode IDFB 1, which came out on September 1, 2016. Most notably it was seen around the Science Museum in Yoyle City, with a lot of the signage being exclusively written in it.
Some people managed to decipher some bits of it from IDFB 1 alone, however it was never deciphered fully as some letters just never showed up.
Eventually the source files of IDFB 1 were leaked, which included an entire reference sheet for the script! And once BFDIA was revived in September 2023 and new episodes started coming out, the script started showing up sporadically in the show again!
Almost a year ago when I got my current notebook, I even wrote down a reference sheet of the script just so I could have it handy. I have this image in the top of this entry! But here is the much clearer guide from the .fla files.
Something I always found super interesting about the script, even before deciphering it, was that a lot of the symbols are extremely distinct (i.e. the A, P, R, and Z), however, a large part of them are the same but versions that are rotated or mirrored.
These clusters of flipped and/or rotated letters are G, K, T, and Y; B and I, D and F, E and M, H and J, L and W, N and O, and S and V. My personal favourite of these is H and J, as despite being rotated versions of each other they end up looking pretty different!
Also some of them are generally a little similar, such as the C and Q, whose only real difference is a line going through the triangle. These similarities, though, along with the general look of these letters, have always given me the vibe of old runes of sorts, which I absolutely love!
Now, I am mentioning this today in particular as BFDIA 23 released a few hours ago, and I really liked it! It's the longest episode yet, being the first one to cross the 1 hour mark, but honestly it went by extremely fast, and is one of my favourite episodes of the season and even the entire series as of now!
The animation, art, music, all of it was absolutely fantastic! And I wanted to bring this topic up specifically as the episode actually features Yoylese quite extensively! It pops up in a lot of scenes and, most notably, in the wonderful mural featured on the episode.
I don't know who made this mural yet, when I do I will edit this post to credit them properly, but this mural is just delightful. It reminds me of what Smash Bros Ultimate did with its characters! And it features some Yoylese text of the locations, also making it feel like an ancient map of sorts.
So yeah! I just wanted to shoutout this amazing bit of one of my favourite online shows of all time, and give Jacknjellify props for their worldbuilding and general creativity!
