the questions of our times: formality and vampires

[rm]

This, thanks to a discussion started by weirdquark. Please do visit the comments where you will learn many things including the many ways formality is structured in different languages (something my questions did not fully take into account, and I apologize for that), werewolf pack dynamics considerations, and whether there are vampires in France.

[Poll #1601631]

Comments

[weirdquark]

Being inappropriately formal could be considered rude. Or -- in Utena, before Saionji loses the duel, Anthy calls him Saionji-sama. After he loses the duel, she calls him Saionji-senpai. Saionji-senpai is a totally polite and appropriate way for her to refer to him given they're both in high school and he's older than she is (although since he's in the student government, it would be more polite to use his title); it also came across as massively insulting.

I remember people thinking that it was kind of weird and creepy that in Card Captor Sakura, Sakura's father used -san with his ten-year-old daughter. That's probably mostly a western thing though -- not sure how common that would be in Japan.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

*argh*

Native Speaker getting schooled by anime-fan.

Not happy.