![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
This post doesn't have the Valentines you're looking for. Move along.
You know, of the e-Valentine I posted a while back, I think I only got one. It goes to show even when Valentines only involve a simple click of the mouse or a few taps on your keyboard, I am cursed to never have the sappy, romantic, or even merely friendly and chocolate-filled that is so widely adored.
That said, I wanted to post this because it's something that's been annoying the hell out of me for a long time, and I wish Yu-Gi-Oh fic writers would listen to JUST THIS ONE THING, if nothing else. I'm serious.
STOP CALLING JOUNOUCHI 'JOU'!
I think this may have been on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fanficrants a while back, but on the off-chance that some otherwise-excellent Yu-Gi-Oh writers on my FL are reading this, and find themselves shameful perpetrators of this BAD, BAD HABIT (you know who you are), let me explain myself so you don't get your panties in a twist.
(1) Despite the dub changing his FAMILY name from Jounouchi into his GIVEN name in the dub, "JOEY," Jounouchi is not and will never be the character's given name. His father's family name is Jounouchi. His mother's married family name was Jounouchi. Shizuka may have even been a Jounouchi at one time, but judging by the character guides, she legally changed her name to 'Kawai' which I assume is Jounouchi's mother's maiden name.
(2) In English, plenty of family names are shortened to be nicknames. Some people (depending on their comfort levels with their own name, their family, or the person referring to them by a nickname) don't mind this. Others do. For example, my mother's first husband had the last name of Smith. To this day, my mother refers to him as "Smitty," not "Michael," which was his given name.
(3) In Japanese, they do not do this. To shorten someone's family name for use as a nickname is often derogatory or downright rude. Sometimes making alterations to the pronunciation of someone's GIVEN name is acceptable-- for example, my name is Meredith, but I had everyone in Japan call me "Meri." As a joke, when I went bowling with my tutors, they nicknamed me "Meririn." That was fine with me. It implies a very friendly rapport between us. "Meri-chan" or just "Meri" was fine, if it was coming from someone I knew and was friendly with. Everyone else called me "Sweet-san."
For example, one would not call Yuugi "Mucchin" ("Mutou-chan" shortened; no one really uses the honorific 'chan' with someone's family name either; that sounds weird), nor would they call Honda "Honhon." However, someone calling Honda by his given name "Hiroto" could probably get away with calling him just "Hiro" or "Hiro-kun," depending on how close they are with him. And considering Jounouchi and Yuugi are two of his closest friends and THEY call him simply by his family name (Yuugi uses an honorific), I doubt anyone outside his immediate family calls him "Hiroto" or any derivation thereof. Were Honda to ever get a girlfriend, she might call him "Hiroto-kun" or even "Hiro-kun."
This whole nomenclature thing is actually a big deal, and it's easier to see in a series where family status MATTERS, so the way one refers to another can be telling of their opinion about that person and/or their family. The best example of this is actually Hana Yori Dango.
Throughout the whole series, you've got our poor heroine, Makino (family name) Tsukushi (given name). But she has her own personal nickname "The Weed," because her given name "Tsukushi" sounds like the Japanese word for "weed." When the nasty girls at Eitoku want to be rude to her, they pretend to be friends by calling her "Tsukki" or "Tsukushi-chan." The latter is actually a nickname Makino's REAL friends call her by, so understandably she's upset when these posers call her that. She's not friends with them at all, and thus them calling her by such a nickname, so familiarly, implies a closeness that is not genuine, or not there at all.
Further, you've got the rich boys of the series, the F4. In the beginning of the series, Makino crushed on one of them: Hanazawa Rui (again, family name comes first). After the series has progressed incredibly (the manga was 36 volumes long originally; now it's 20, with one special bonus act), when she's gotten closer with him, she's okay with calling him just "Rui." She probably wouldn't call him "Rui-kun," because he's older and socially superior to her, but "Rui-san" sounds too informal and distant. Sometimes the best compromise is to use no honorific at all-- but that's treading on thin ice, because it can also be extremely rude (as with Kaiba) or extremely telling of a VERY close, intimate relationship (as with Haruka and Michiru in Sailormoon; Minako and Usagi or Makoto noticed Haruka referring to Michiru without any sort of an honorific, and that's what gave them the idea that the two of them were closer than they appeared).
Then you've got Makino's "rival" and eventual love interest: Domyouji Tsukasa. His name holds a lot of weight throughout the series, similar to how "Kaiba" does in Yu-Gi-Oh. He's a powerful guy. His family is powerful-- rich, socially well-connected, etc. etc. When Makino first stood up to him and bluntly referred to him as just "Domyouji" without any -sama or even a -san honorific (despite his MUCH higher social status), she was saying "I don't give a fuck about your social status, your money, or your family. Your name means NOTHING to me." In other words, she was treating him as an equal. She refused to be a simpering underclassman who bowed to his every whim just because of who he was.
It's also very pointed how throughout the series, though their love develops, they consistently call each other by their family names-- no honorifics. In a way, it's romantic, implying that they really have no barriers between each other, but in another way, it's also saying there is still something preventing them from being truly close with one another-- they don't refer to each other by given names, the way many couples in truly close, romantic relationships do (look at Usagi and Mamoru from Sailormoon: she's "Usako" to him, and he's "Mamo-chan" to her. Anyone else using those nicknames for either of them would probably irk the other person-- the same way Usagi gets irked whenever Chibiusa calls Mamoru "Mamo-chan," because Chibiusa is his DAUGHTER, not his LOVER!).
A very well-done fanfic I read made a point of emphasizing how social barriers take a lot of time and willingness to change personally in order to overcome. In one Hana Yori Dango fic, it took the acts of finally getting married and making love for Makino to refer to Domyouji as "Tsukasa," a name that only his family and closest friends ever used with him before. But because of WHO the name was coming from, it makes all the difference-- why Domyouji would have WANTED Makino to use it instead of his family name made sense. He can't complain about his mother or sister calling him "Tsukasa;" they're family. Likewise, because he's relatively equal in social status with the other members of the F4, them calling him "Tsukasa" isn't rude or insulting. But having Makino say it is VERY intimate, because she's NOT a member of his family, and she's NOT on the same social level as he is. Were she to go running around calling him Tsukasa, he might be embarrassed, because it's implying they're very close to one another. When Shigeru called him "Tsukasa" in public, he WAS embarrassed, and he tried to ignore her-- because he didn't WANT to be associated so closely with her.
I hope that, even though I'm bringing in other fandoms like Sailormoon and Hana Yori Dango, you can understand the contextual use and importance of names and honorifics in Japanese culture. They're not just "substitutions" for Mr., Mrs., Ms. or similar. Western cultures have some fundamental differences between Asian cultures, and Japanese is no exception.
(4) In Yu-Gi-Oh canon, you can discern the kind of relationships the characters have with one another based on the names and honorifics they use for one another. In various posts across the Yu-Gi-Oh fandom, I've mentioned the following, which are made obvious throughout canon:
-Jounouchi and Kaiba are two of the rudest characters in the series, often intentionally leaving out honorifics such as "kun" or "san," which would be the most likely for them to use in reference to another person that they respect (but not necessarily someone that is socially superior to them). Kaiba, especially, uses insulting words (like "mediocre," among others) to refer to people, other than any names at all! Mokuba's actually not much better in this regard...
-Yuugi is all-around polite. He uses honorifics properly, and the only time he doesn't is in references to his closest friend: Anzu.
-On the other hand, Yami no Yuugi shows just how distinctly different he is from Yuugi: he doesn't use honorifics for Kaiba (while Yuugi does), Jounouchi (even though they're friends), Honda, or anyone else. He's actually rude in his own right! But in referring to Jounouchi, Honda, or Otogi without honorifics, he's not trying to be disrespectful to them (as Kaiba does when HE refers to them without honorifics, or when Kaiba refers to Yuugi by his given name and not his last name), he's just being blunt.
But no matter how much Pegasus might want to topple Kaiba, or how much Kaiba hates Yuugi, or how much Jounouchi hates Kaiba, they never use shortened nicknames. It's not something they do in Japanese culture (commonly). If anything, the "missing" syllables are added to: Minako (from Sailormoon) might be called Minappi, and that's got the same number of syllables as her full given name! No one would give her the nickname "Mina" without any honorific (that is to say, "Mina-chan" might be okay, but just "Mina" probably wouldn't), and no one would call her "Ai" as a shortened version of "Aino," her family name.
The same holds true for Jounouchi. He may not be as close friends with Mai, Anzu, or Otogi as he is with Yuugi or Honda, but NONE of them would call him "Jou."
And for the record Jou =/= Joe. Shortening family names is not the same as shortening given names, especially if they were reversed from the original to the dub! Sure, call him "Joe" if you're in the dub-verse, and in that, his given name IS Joseph. People call him "Joey" (a nickname of Joseph) all the time, and were someone to start calling him "Joe," he probably wouldn't have a problem with it.
But they do not do that in Japan, with Japanese names. Not once in my whole experience with Yu-Gi-Oh have I ever seen any character canonically refer to Jounouchi as "Jou." The only names I have seen used for him (and I do mean "names," not insults like Kaiba) are:
-Jounouchi (Honda, Yami no Yuugi, occasionally Anzu when she's mad)
-Jounouchi-kun (Yuugi, Anzu, Miho)
-Katsuya (from his sister, his mother, and once by Mai)
Here's a further way of pointing it out:
In Japanese culture, one's family name comes first in their writing. They also write not using Roman characters (that is, the alphabet I'm using now), but Chinese characters. For Jounouchi, those characters are:
εδΉε
The first character is pronounced "Jou" the second "no" and the third "uchi." However, were you to try and make a nickname from the characters using the pronunciation of the first character, you'd come across a stumbling block: the first character is pronounced "jou" when in conjunction with certain other Chinese characters, like the other ones in his name. By itself, it's pronounced "shiro," not "jou!" That's another reason why they don't have nicknames like that in Japanese; if they can't write them out, they can't use them in speech, either.
It's one thing to write "Mer" in English; I can understand it whether you say it or write it. But you can't write "Jou" as a nickname for "Jounouchi" in Japanese. His name is made up of a particular set of characters, and you cannot use the character pronounced as "jou" on its own.
(For the record, the character means "castle" when pronounced as "shiro". It's pronounced as "jou" when used in place names; so Osaka Castle might be "Osaka-jou." But again, it MUST be used in conjunction with other characters to imply that it's a name and not a word; thus, to just randomly say "Jou" would confuse someone-- because what are you doing, yelling about some castle? The second kanji is the one usually used for "kore," meaning "this," but it can also be pronounced "no," as it is in his name. To make things even more confusing, the third character means "inside, within," but it's pronounced "uchi," the same way the word for "house, family" is. So the meaning is "inside, within," but the pronunciation is "uchi." But "uchi" in this instance doesn't mean what your Japanese 101 teachers have taught you --house, or family. If you wanted to extrapolate a meaning from his name, it might be "this castle within," which would imply he's a very strong-willed individual. Japanese families tend to like names that show strength or prosperity for the future.)
THAT IS IT.
Even if you were smash drunk, you wouldn't refer to a friend or semi-friend so rudely. I can't emphasize just how rude it is to do that to someone's name. Because it's not just "personal" when you do something like that-- it's dishonoring the whole family. It's lazy writing. It's mis-characterization (the dreaded OOC shows when you refer to characters incorrectly!).
JUST DON'T DO IT.
That said, I wanted to post this because it's something that's been annoying the hell out of me for a long time, and I wish Yu-Gi-Oh fic writers would listen to JUST THIS ONE THING, if nothing else. I'm serious.
STOP CALLING JOUNOUCHI 'JOU'!
I think this may have been on
fanficrants a while back, but on the off-chance that some otherwise-excellent Yu-Gi-Oh writers on my FL are reading this, and find themselves shameful perpetrators of this BAD, BAD HABIT (you know who you are), let me explain myself so you don't get your panties in a twist.(1) Despite the dub changing his FAMILY name from Jounouchi into his GIVEN name in the dub, "JOEY," Jounouchi is not and will never be the character's given name. His father's family name is Jounouchi. His mother's married family name was Jounouchi. Shizuka may have even been a Jounouchi at one time, but judging by the character guides, she legally changed her name to 'Kawai' which I assume is Jounouchi's mother's maiden name.
(2) In English, plenty of family names are shortened to be nicknames. Some people (depending on their comfort levels with their own name, their family, or the person referring to them by a nickname) don't mind this. Others do. For example, my mother's first husband had the last name of Smith. To this day, my mother refers to him as "Smitty," not "Michael," which was his given name.
(3) In Japanese, they do not do this. To shorten someone's family name for use as a nickname is often derogatory or downright rude. Sometimes making alterations to the pronunciation of someone's GIVEN name is acceptable-- for example, my name is Meredith, but I had everyone in Japan call me "Meri." As a joke, when I went bowling with my tutors, they nicknamed me "Meririn." That was fine with me. It implies a very friendly rapport between us. "Meri-chan" or just "Meri" was fine, if it was coming from someone I knew and was friendly with. Everyone else called me "Sweet-san."
For example, one would not call Yuugi "Mucchin" ("Mutou-chan" shortened; no one really uses the honorific 'chan' with someone's family name either; that sounds weird), nor would they call Honda "Honhon." However, someone calling Honda by his given name "Hiroto" could probably get away with calling him just "Hiro" or "Hiro-kun," depending on how close they are with him. And considering Jounouchi and Yuugi are two of his closest friends and THEY call him simply by his family name (Yuugi uses an honorific), I doubt anyone outside his immediate family calls him "Hiroto" or any derivation thereof. Were Honda to ever get a girlfriend, she might call him "Hiroto-kun" or even "Hiro-kun."
This whole nomenclature thing is actually a big deal, and it's easier to see in a series where family status MATTERS, so the way one refers to another can be telling of their opinion about that person and/or their family. The best example of this is actually Hana Yori Dango.
Throughout the whole series, you've got our poor heroine, Makino (family name) Tsukushi (given name). But she has her own personal nickname "The Weed," because her given name "Tsukushi" sounds like the Japanese word for "weed." When the nasty girls at Eitoku want to be rude to her, they pretend to be friends by calling her "Tsukki" or "Tsukushi-chan." The latter is actually a nickname Makino's REAL friends call her by, so understandably she's upset when these posers call her that. She's not friends with them at all, and thus them calling her by such a nickname, so familiarly, implies a closeness that is not genuine, or not there at all.
Further, you've got the rich boys of the series, the F4. In the beginning of the series, Makino crushed on one of them: Hanazawa Rui (again, family name comes first). After the series has progressed incredibly (the manga was 36 volumes long originally; now it's 20, with one special bonus act), when she's gotten closer with him, she's okay with calling him just "Rui." She probably wouldn't call him "Rui-kun," because he's older and socially superior to her, but "Rui-san" sounds too informal and distant. Sometimes the best compromise is to use no honorific at all-- but that's treading on thin ice, because it can also be extremely rude (as with Kaiba) or extremely telling of a VERY close, intimate relationship (as with Haruka and Michiru in Sailormoon; Minako and Usagi or Makoto noticed Haruka referring to Michiru without any sort of an honorific, and that's what gave them the idea that the two of them were closer than they appeared).
Then you've got Makino's "rival" and eventual love interest: Domyouji Tsukasa. His name holds a lot of weight throughout the series, similar to how "Kaiba" does in Yu-Gi-Oh. He's a powerful guy. His family is powerful-- rich, socially well-connected, etc. etc. When Makino first stood up to him and bluntly referred to him as just "Domyouji" without any -sama or even a -san honorific (despite his MUCH higher social status), she was saying "I don't give a fuck about your social status, your money, or your family. Your name means NOTHING to me." In other words, she was treating him as an equal. She refused to be a simpering underclassman who bowed to his every whim just because of who he was.
It's also very pointed how throughout the series, though their love develops, they consistently call each other by their family names-- no honorifics. In a way, it's romantic, implying that they really have no barriers between each other, but in another way, it's also saying there is still something preventing them from being truly close with one another-- they don't refer to each other by given names, the way many couples in truly close, romantic relationships do (look at Usagi and Mamoru from Sailormoon: she's "Usako" to him, and he's "Mamo-chan" to her. Anyone else using those nicknames for either of them would probably irk the other person-- the same way Usagi gets irked whenever Chibiusa calls Mamoru "Mamo-chan," because Chibiusa is his DAUGHTER, not his LOVER!).
A very well-done fanfic I read made a point of emphasizing how social barriers take a lot of time and willingness to change personally in order to overcome. In one Hana Yori Dango fic, it took the acts of finally getting married and making love for Makino to refer to Domyouji as "Tsukasa," a name that only his family and closest friends ever used with him before. But because of WHO the name was coming from, it makes all the difference-- why Domyouji would have WANTED Makino to use it instead of his family name made sense. He can't complain about his mother or sister calling him "Tsukasa;" they're family. Likewise, because he's relatively equal in social status with the other members of the F4, them calling him "Tsukasa" isn't rude or insulting. But having Makino say it is VERY intimate, because she's NOT a member of his family, and she's NOT on the same social level as he is. Were she to go running around calling him Tsukasa, he might be embarrassed, because it's implying they're very close to one another. When Shigeru called him "Tsukasa" in public, he WAS embarrassed, and he tried to ignore her-- because he didn't WANT to be associated so closely with her.
I hope that, even though I'm bringing in other fandoms like Sailormoon and Hana Yori Dango, you can understand the contextual use and importance of names and honorifics in Japanese culture. They're not just "substitutions" for Mr., Mrs., Ms. or similar. Western cultures have some fundamental differences between Asian cultures, and Japanese is no exception.
(4) In Yu-Gi-Oh canon, you can discern the kind of relationships the characters have with one another based on the names and honorifics they use for one another. In various posts across the Yu-Gi-Oh fandom, I've mentioned the following, which are made obvious throughout canon:
-Jounouchi and Kaiba are two of the rudest characters in the series, often intentionally leaving out honorifics such as "kun" or "san," which would be the most likely for them to use in reference to another person that they respect (but not necessarily someone that is socially superior to them). Kaiba, especially, uses insulting words (like "mediocre," among others) to refer to people, other than any names at all! Mokuba's actually not much better in this regard...
-Yuugi is all-around polite. He uses honorifics properly, and the only time he doesn't is in references to his closest friend: Anzu.
-On the other hand, Yami no Yuugi shows just how distinctly different he is from Yuugi: he doesn't use honorifics for Kaiba (while Yuugi does), Jounouchi (even though they're friends), Honda, or anyone else. He's actually rude in his own right! But in referring to Jounouchi, Honda, or Otogi without honorifics, he's not trying to be disrespectful to them (as Kaiba does when HE refers to them without honorifics, or when Kaiba refers to Yuugi by his given name and not his last name), he's just being blunt.
But no matter how much Pegasus might want to topple Kaiba, or how much Kaiba hates Yuugi, or how much Jounouchi hates Kaiba, they never use shortened nicknames. It's not something they do in Japanese culture (commonly). If anything, the "missing" syllables are added to: Minako (from Sailormoon) might be called Minappi, and that's got the same number of syllables as her full given name! No one would give her the nickname "Mina" without any honorific (that is to say, "Mina-chan" might be okay, but just "Mina" probably wouldn't), and no one would call her "Ai" as a shortened version of "Aino," her family name.
The same holds true for Jounouchi. He may not be as close friends with Mai, Anzu, or Otogi as he is with Yuugi or Honda, but NONE of them would call him "Jou."
And for the record Jou =/= Joe. Shortening family names is not the same as shortening given names, especially if they were reversed from the original to the dub! Sure, call him "Joe" if you're in the dub-verse, and in that, his given name IS Joseph. People call him "Joey" (a nickname of Joseph) all the time, and were someone to start calling him "Joe," he probably wouldn't have a problem with it.
But they do not do that in Japan, with Japanese names. Not once in my whole experience with Yu-Gi-Oh have I ever seen any character canonically refer to Jounouchi as "Jou." The only names I have seen used for him (and I do mean "names," not insults like Kaiba) are:
-Jounouchi (Honda, Yami no Yuugi, occasionally Anzu when she's mad)
-Jounouchi-kun (Yuugi, Anzu, Miho)
-Katsuya (from his sister, his mother, and once by Mai)
Here's a further way of pointing it out:
In Japanese culture, one's family name comes first in their writing. They also write not using Roman characters (that is, the alphabet I'm using now), but Chinese characters. For Jounouchi, those characters are:
εδΉε
The first character is pronounced "Jou" the second "no" and the third "uchi." However, were you to try and make a nickname from the characters using the pronunciation of the first character, you'd come across a stumbling block: the first character is pronounced "jou" when in conjunction with certain other Chinese characters, like the other ones in his name. By itself, it's pronounced "shiro," not "jou!" That's another reason why they don't have nicknames like that in Japanese; if they can't write them out, they can't use them in speech, either.
It's one thing to write "Mer" in English; I can understand it whether you say it or write it. But you can't write "Jou" as a nickname for "Jounouchi" in Japanese. His name is made up of a particular set of characters, and you cannot use the character pronounced as "jou" on its own.
(For the record, the character means "castle" when pronounced as "shiro". It's pronounced as "jou" when used in place names; so Osaka Castle might be "Osaka-jou." But again, it MUST be used in conjunction with other characters to imply that it's a name and not a word; thus, to just randomly say "Jou" would confuse someone-- because what are you doing, yelling about some castle? The second kanji is the one usually used for "kore," meaning "this," but it can also be pronounced "no," as it is in his name. To make things even more confusing, the third character means "inside, within," but it's pronounced "uchi," the same way the word for "house, family" is. So the meaning is "inside, within," but the pronunciation is "uchi." But "uchi" in this instance doesn't mean what your Japanese 101 teachers have taught you --house, or family. If you wanted to extrapolate a meaning from his name, it might be "this castle within," which would imply he's a very strong-willed individual. Japanese families tend to like names that show strength or prosperity for the future.)
THAT IS IT.
Even if you were smash drunk, you wouldn't refer to a friend or semi-friend so rudely. I can't emphasize just how rude it is to do that to someone's name. Because it's not just "personal" when you do something like that-- it's dishonoring the whole family. It's lazy writing. It's mis-characterization (the dreaded OOC shows when you refer to characters incorrectly!).
JUST DON'T DO IT.
no subject
Happy Valentine's Day!
no subject
no subject
So, possibly, depending on the situation it could work, but an honorific is needed. Also would depend on what the name means, too. I could see it working in Sailor Moon because their last names are all related to who they are.
no subject
"Jou-kun" might be an acceptable compromise, but it still sounds strange. Why? Because unlike "Jou" as most ficcers use it, "Jou-kun" would really have to be said by a) a girl and b) someone Jounouchi is close with (but probably not his sister, mother, or Mai).
Why a girl? Because boys don't usually shorten full family names into "nicknames" *AND* use honorifics. Girls are the most common culprit of name-modifying at all (as opposed to guys, who either use or don't use honorifics, or use insults/other words to refer to one another), and they love to mash names together WITH honorifics to make them sound cuter, the way Tohru does in Fruits Basket.
Some syllables work better for this than others: ones ending in 'i' sounds (in English, that sounds like a long e) can be "doubled up" and ones with the second-to-last syllable ending in "a" (sounds like English "ah") can have their final syllable dropped and replaced with another one (like 'pi' for Mina-P, Osa-P, or Luna-P). A common way of showing affection (from guy to girl!) is to use this method: look at Usagi Tsukino from Sailor Moon. Her friends all call her Usagi or Usagi-chan, but Mamoru typically calls her just plain 'Usa' (Oohsa) or Usako (drops the 'gi' and ads 'ko' which is an affectionate term, from the word for 'child'; it's used a lot in girls' names).
Some names DON'T lend themselves to name shortening at all; ones ending in 'e' (eh) sounds are hard to leave short, so they're modified altogether. My roommate in Japan was Kazue; everyone called her Kacchin (Ka[zue]-ch[a]n), like "Kaching!" My other roommate, Midori, was called "Mido-chan." There are endless possibilities for names with certain permutations of syllables, but realize that almost all the examples I'm citing are GIVEN NAMES.
Much of the point of using nicknames is to imply a level of closeness, and using a shortened version of someone's family name doesn't do that. It seems to hedge on being polite (still using their family name) but friendly (shortening the name). Using a shortened version of one's family name with an honorific then implies both politeness, friendliness, and RESPECT for one's family. It can even imply a sense of humor or cuteness, as with Tohru from Furuba.
no subject
All your points are 100% valid and you do know a lot more about the way the language and the culture works than I do but I'm not exactly repentant. "Jou" isn't that bad, is it? If one just reads it in a fic like, say, "Foster Care" (where I'm sure it appears and I know that you've read it and liked it) it's not all that jarring on the eyes, is it? And most people don't actually know the finer points. They get a lot of the big ones right but something as small as Jou, I'd let it slide.
It is, of course, your right to grouse about something that is actually so wrong in you own journal and I mean you no disrespect. I just didn't really think it was such a big deal.
Anyways, Happy Valentine's Day! ^__^
no subject
In that context, all by itself, it really caught my attention, because well, what if it HAD been Jounouchi (then the fic would have ended TOTALLY DIFFERENT! BWAHAHA)? Would Anzu -older, wiser, drunker, possibly better friends with Jounouchi- call him that? I think she'd be more likely to call him "Katsuya" or some slurred rendition thereof to show that she's better friends with him; otherwise she'd use the same old "Jounouchi" or "Jounouchi-kun" that she always used in canon. If "Jou" had been her trying to make the effort at saying his whole name, and failing because of how drunk she was, that I could understand, but I didn't get that impression from the fic at all.
The thing is, it really *is* bad. The Japanese have a totally different way of referring to one another, and as I said in my original post, the way someone calls you by name can say a lot about that person and what they think of you. So, when a friend of Jounouchi (canonically) calls Jounouchi "Jou," I cringe, because I don't imagine Jounouchi himself liking that nickname. There have been a few times when I let it slide, but it has always irked me, because, as you said, I know the language and the culture. I think if people really want to use the names properly (and all the connotations that come with them), they should go for it 100%. I can easily read a fic with the Japanese names with no honorifics, but to read a fic that DOES use the honorifics but shortens the names "English-style" bothers me a lot. It shows a lack of respect for the cultural nuances behind names and references, IMO.
Happy V-Day to you, too. :)
no subject
These things aren't set in stone, Meredith. Although I agree that when people with absolutely no knowledge of the language use it without thinking about it, that's when it's annoying/frustrating.
no subject
no subject
I'd say if any of your friends have a good grasp on English, then they're probably aware that we say names as "given name, family name," and just to make things easier, allow you to shorten their family name, which comes first when they introduce themselves. In a sense, you'd still be distant from them, using a nickname version of their family name, so it would set you apart from others (in Japan) who use the honorific system.
But I don't know, I'm making assumptions here. Everything I wrote about was based on a) canonical knowledge of the series and b) my experience in Japan. I guess everyone's experiences are different, but I still think nicknaming 'Jounouchi' as 'Jou', even if it weren't as rude as I'm thinking it is would have to be contextually correct. You wouldn't call someone by their nickname one moment and by their full name the next, unless there was some very specific reason why.