#altho tbh he's the one I'm least sure abt how i translated him

[elv-arts]

I put him in hl2 hope that's alright lol. Hl1 is his brother's territory I decided. Mostly I wanted him to beat the shit out of a metrocop :)

He'll probably be fine. He's survived his life so far including one end of the world and his nerd brother's mad science antics. What's a little more of the same old bullshit?

I was just gonna do one or two doodles cuz I couldn't think of much. But then i was having fun :)

@bbg100

[omentranslates]

Notes of ways I notice Genshin characters using Japanese in the dub that I find interesting and stand out to me

Various characters that don't have enough notes for their own thread compilation edition

i did single character threads of this for Xiao, Albedo and Paimon

Kazuha

-he's just kinda quirky

-I don't watch many old movies but I know a LITTLE bit abt like stereotypical samurai stuff and also like older classical Japanese and I don't hear him use most of it, he's perfectly understandable in modern Japanese (disclaimer he does use SOME just not a lot, nothing you’d have to look up or anything)

-like he says かたじけない (katajikenai, it’s like samurai thank you basically) and uses ぬ for his verbs a lot but that’s Mostly it. And it comes out mostly in his longer quest dialogues, not as much in his like voice lines and stuff

-most of the places he sounds noticeably different in are when he's speaking like poetically

-Beidou was not kidding abt the flowers thing Kazuha speaks almost like a romantic poem is written like at least half the time (romantic as in like era of poetry)

-it’s kinda hard to tell what’s supposed to be fantasy poetry language and what’s supposed to be him being a samurai bc tbh it works for both in some cases, altho I’m confident in my interpretation

-uses せっしゃ (sessha) as his pronouns which is essentially the samurai pronoun

-when he says "gozaru" all the time he's literally just replacing the usual だ or である at the end of the sentence with archaism

-it's the non-formal ending of gozaimasu which is a word I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with, but like said how he uses it is not used in modern Japanese almost at all I can't think of any situations where you'd need it and I'd never come across it in other media before him. If the situation isn't formal enough for gozaimasu you just use the other two or nothing at all

-in other words he's just kinda quirky

-I've seen the Japanese community clown on him for this too, I personally find it endearing and the general consensus seems to be between that and like mildly funny

-has one of the most noticeable speaking styles in the game, like he Really stands out. The others you gotta listen for it or it’s only a few things every now and then that will encourage deeper analysis as a whole, but like every sentence Kazuha says is like “huh what’s the deal this guy”

Raiden Shogun

-she's always kinda stuck out for me bc she speaks really respectfully

-like it's not really strong full on keigo or anything just like regular polite Japanese you'd use with someone you don't know well

-but it stands out bc she's a god and the direct leader of her country and both of those positions do Not need to do that

-she never seems to grow closer with the traveler through her language (her character I think does but it doesn't reflect much in her speech)

-she even speaks politely like this to the Inazuman citizens during her like date story quest

-she speaks even less like a god than Venti does

-my personal interpretation of his is that she doesn't feel like an archon and still sees herself as serving her sister, so she still speaks as if she's in the presence of her superior

-supporting this, during her story quest 2 cutscene Makoto speaks very casual and feminine Japanese like they're very close but Ei continues to use longform polite Japanese even with her

-I don't think the English translation that I read really goes into the dynamic between the sisters in the same way that the Japanese really shines in like that. The Japanese version implies a whole world of respect and admiration for her sister that the English misses that she would consider herself not even to be in the same class

-It also suggests that Makoto may have been older than Ei, like they were twins obviously but the younger twin will still use honorifics/respectful words with the older twin depending on their relationship

-altho that's not nearly as important as Ei's relationship with Makoto and how she thought of her, I thought it bared mentioning bc it would be exceedingly uncommon for an older sibling to use that kind of language with their younger sibling no matter how much they respect them

-there is a certain trope regarding gods speaking formally bc they’re just that removed from humanity and I went more into detail in the notes about how different levels of Japanese can be used to express distance rather than respect, and I do want to emphasize that it doesn’t feel like Ei’s respect is directed towards the player or Inazuman citizens or anything like that

-it does make her sound spacey but it doesn’t feel to me personally like that’s the case because then I would expect her language to change with her story, but that’s just one interpretation so I’m just leaving all the information I can think of

-tbh a polite, long form desu and masu speaking girl who wants to be guided through the human world speaks to Quite A Few tropes in anime so

Shenhe

-I don't have Shenhe but while I was playing her story quest I msged a friend saying that she was "detached and vaguely polite" and that she sounded like she worked in the Tower of Fangs

-pretty sure I meant that as in her speech structure is similar to the like fantasy tone of the mountain adepti, but stripped of all the like boastful self-aggrandizing flair

-so it's close in tone to just standard Japanese while still being noticeably removed

-that's why I compared her to Xiao in his post they both talk like wizards

-she had the distinct impression that she's used to speaking to superiors, but she mostly speaks to people in her quest like she's talking down to them and they're noticeably lower than her socially

Xinyan

-considering how strong her accent is in the eng dub I was expecting Kansai dialect

-I was wrong though she speaks very standard

-I remember a little dialect coming out at the end of her sentences during Labyrinth Warriors but I went back over her voicelines and. No it's just not there

-she uses あたい (atai) as her pronouns, which is not very standard

-when I researched this it's apparently associated with girls' biker gangs it's like the punk rocker girl pronoun

-so yeah apparently Japanese has a punk girlboss pronoun, tho it's largely out of style now (unfortunately)

-she speaks with a rough masculine flair that I'm not used to hearing on female characters

-she doesn't completely talk like "one of the boys" tho. if it serves comparison, she's not even close to Paimon's level

-I think the non-committal direction matches her like scary but cute on the inside thing she's got going on

Yoimiya

-this is where all of Xinyan's accent went

-was literally bashed over the head with Kansaiben when I started her story quest

-she sounds like the teacher lady in white from twin star exorcists and I could listen to her talk all day

Ayato

-another character of supposedly super high status who speaks politely to the traveler for some reason

-definitely sounds spoiled even if he's polite abt it tho

-I find it amusing that he and his sister use the same pronouns

-when people started clowning on his English chest dialogue I was surprised bc his JP version just ranges from like politely curious to grudging approval, when I heard his like smug ass English dub it was. A departure

-I expected him to be more like smug and vaguely patronizing like Yae but tbh he's more like. Feigning innocence.

-does not speak formally to Thoma (Thoma does with him tho)

Zhongli

-speaks more modern Japanese than most of his wizard friends

-the content of his dialogue sounds really chill and relaxed but his manner of speaking is like surprisingly forceful

-talks the most like an actual god out of the 3 archons

-if he wasn't a god he would sound like kinda pushy, his dialogue is full of really commanding sentences (what constitutes a demand in Japanese is a little more broad than English, so he can sound really demanding in spoken Japanese without the English subtitles giving it away)

Gorou

-he just always takes me off guard bc he sounds just like Reki but talks nothing like him

-very meticulous pronunciation like idk he just annunciates every sound extremely clearly even tho he speaks really fast

-you can tell that for his personality archetype they just wrote "soldier"

Yae

-she shares some quirks of speech with the adepti and I think that's funny for lore reasons

-she talks like an old person, like not like an ancient being just like a grandma

Cloud Retainer

-speaks like an object

-I do not know how else to describe this

-but it's a very important object

Fun Genshin Japanese fact if you for some reason read this entire thing: the word they use for "adeptus" in Japanese is 仙人, which is listed in the dictionary as "immortal mountain wizard" and I laugh harder every time I think about this.

There are now extra notes abt the shogun puppet, Venti, Kaeya, Diluc and more Ayato in the reblogs