rpanons | Make a Life Upgrade to Sony's PlayStation!

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

CONCERNS | RESOURCES

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

OK, so this is the first time in probably five years that I've actually picked up a character that lives in Japan, so I don't really remember the do's and don'ts of using honorifics. I'm a little worried about doing it wrong, so I figured I'd see what general feelings on the matter are. Is it okay to drop those formalities? Should I keep them in? How do I know when to use what honorifics? Do I have my character introduce themselves last name first or do I default to western name order?

Depends on the character. If honorific use is particularly important to their voice (super formal/uses "chan" in trolly ways/etc), I'd lean toward leaving them in. If not, I feel like they distract more than they do anything useful.

Introductions, similarly. They'll probably go last-name-first if they're living in Japan. If they're a character who could reasonably already be used to accommodating Western cultural understanding (international rock star, politician, journalist, w/e) they might be comfortable switching it around. Consider how your game handles the translation issue, too; if it's an "everyone hears everything in their native language!" setting you have a lot of leeway there for writing around things like name order and honorifics.

I use honorifics for my Edo-era samurai character; I don't use them for my savvy & successful artist from modern Tokyo.

You never want to incorporate Japanese sentence endings or random words into your dialogue (thank god the "na no da~"/"desu"/"de gozaru" trend is dead) but you may want to structure your English sentences in such a way as to indicate the quirkiness of the language. Your de gozaru's are going to be speaking formally and archaically; na no da can be approximated with a lot of "sure is, yep."

Basically, it's okay to write a person from another culture who speaks a different language in a way that takes into account cultural and linguistic quirks. You don't want to make it gimmicky or unreadable/meaningless to someone who doesn't speak Japanese, that's all.

agreeing with pretty much everything the anon said above me, but in general i don't think you have to introduce your character last name first. it depends on the game, but a lot tend to go with "everyone now mysteriously speaks the same language", so i personally just use western order for convenience and to match others. threading out a character asking mine which name is their first name over and over isn't something i'm interested.

also due to how games work like that, i think it's really up to you if you want to keep in honorifics like that. if a character is especially polite, i tend to leave them in because english just doesn't have a good way of getting across that degree of politeness without sounding stiff or awkward in my opinion. it also depends on what your character is like to know when to use honorifics, but -san is the standard for everyone, -kun for a boy that's around the same age as you and you're on good terms with (or you're in some kind of instructor/teacher position), and -chan for good female friends and little kids. like the anon above said though, -chan can also be used in a really condescending way.

tl;dr though, it's all essentially up to you! most people seem to be fine with both leaving the honorifics in or dropping them, so you shouldn't run into too many problems regarding them.

Make a Life Upgrade to Sony's PlayStation!

Japanese characters

Re: Japanese characters

Re: Japanese characters