Page 06-14
It’s a good thing Rava is one of those kinds of people who can’t stay upset at someone for more than a few minutes, because he keeps inviting Anor’s wrath every time he opens his mouth.
In that first panel of dialogue, you’ll notice Rava saying Anor-san, which might need some explanation if you’re not familiar with Japanese honorifics. The suffix -san is roughly equivalent to calling someone Sir / Ma’am or Mr. / Ms. While this is completely appropriate for their current relationship, Anor isn’t generally used to being addressed with that level of respect (or really any respect at all), so it makes him uncomfortable.
Last week I played a really cute little RPG on my phone called Cat Quest, where you guessed it: everyone’s a cat. It had a lot of charm and never takes itself seriously, so it stayed lighthearted through the whole adventure. The controls worked pretty well for a phone game, but the best part: NO micro-transactions, which is getting to be a rarer and rarer thing. It did have some serious balance issues; dungeons were labelled according to level, but some could be 10 levels below you and whoop your ass, whereas some that were 10+ levels above were a breeze. The final boss was also annoyingly unbalanced. His final phase was probably 20-30 levels above his first phases, and even at level 85 (level cap, I think, is 99), beating him felt like a lucky crapshoot. I think I faced him 20+ times, and winning came down to hours of grinding rather than any amount of skill on the player’s part. But all-in-all I quite enjoyed it, despite some moments of serious frustration.
The “san” is a lot easier than most languages, which use variable forms of you (all those “thee” and “thou” bits from the King James Bible to you educated English speakers), and it comes across well even to our history-avoidant generation.
Nicely done.
It certainly helps that, with how popular anime and manga is, most people who read webcomics read manga and therefore have already been exposed to the Japanese honorific system. It’s probably even more recognisable to the monolingual English speaker (at least here in America) than the formal/ informal variations of ‘you’ in romantic languages. As you pointed out, English used to have variations with thou (singular) and you (plural), but somewhere along the line ‘you’ became the one-size-fits-all.
It sometimes feels like a challenge writing the dialogue in this comic and making it clear that these characters are all speaking different languages by inserting words or little details like this, but have it feel recognisable (or at least easily deducible) from the context. I’m glad it came across all right in this page. 🙂