Wednesday DE: Me, Myself, and I

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Suggested by Cameo in chat:

What first-person Japanese pronoun would your character use for themselves?

Comments

[skyhigh_seance]

If I'm reading this right (which, omg, probably not, duolingo did not prepare me for this, halp):

Klaus: Boku or watashi, depending on the day/mood/prevailing wind

Cecil: Boku, generally.

Jon: Ore, most likely?

Plz correct if other ideas occur!

[configuration_birdwatcher]

TV Tropes has a more detailed page on the subject, for those who are willing to brave TV Tropes.

[inlovewithwords]

Lois: atai with actual good friends, atashi if casual but not in closest circle, and watashi in actual formalish or when trying hard not to have a fight with her dad.

R2-D2: might used jibun, strangely

Anakin: ore. Might actually use boku with Obi-wan and sometimes other Jedi masters, if he's being stiff watashi--when he's gritting his teeth and doing something he doesn't want to do.
Vader: ore, except with someone he is being forced to treat as a superior that day, in which case boku. Palpatine gets boku or watashi depending how delicate that relationship is that day.
Ghostderkin: Eh. Ore/boku depending how he's feeling, I guess. Possibly actually slips into watashi if he is having a Serious Discussion on philoshy, aka "look this is what I learned the hard way"

Derius: Mostly boku; starting to use 'ore.' Definitely has lots of formal contexts in which watashi is necessary/correct, and I think sometimes in conversation with his parents uses it as a way of formally noting his disapproval or discomfort or uncertainty but willingness to obey. Usually this results in deeper conversation. Sometimes it doesn't because one or both of them is going nope, gotta.

Tavi: These days, ore or watashi in formal contexts, pretty exclusively. With Kitai and the people who raised him and a few of the High Lords and Ladies who are older than him and he is on close terms with (by which I mean the Placidas if they're joking around) or very close friends he'll relax enough to use boku, but even some of them technically work for him, but look, he's emperor now, he tends towards ore.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato uses 'ore,' complete with a rolled r, pretty much exclusively, and has done since he was a kid. He's one of the only two Chosen who does, Taichi being the other one.

Eden uses 'boku' in normal conversation, but when he slips into dramatic, serious mode he switches to 'waga.'

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Watashi is a perfect fit for Bastion, since it's gender-neutral, it connotes formality to a moderate degree without being so formal that it stands out (and to someone who reads Bastion as male the formality would come through even stronger), and it's generally what non-native speakers are taught to use first which fits with the textbook-like speech patterns they got from having a bunch of off-the-shelf language packs dumped into their head when they were built.

Jibun is apparently the most popular pronoun for nonbinary Japanese people, and its connotations of distance work for Cirava since they like to keep people at arm's length ever since The Incident.

Aradia would probably use either atashi or watashi normally, but when she's dead she'd use watashi exclusively.

Thurlow I guess would use watashi, but might also use jibun for similar reasons to Cirava; they prefer to avoid as many markers of gender as possible, and there's a limit to how much informality they're comfortable expressing.

I'm not sure whether Wilson would use ore or boku, because he uses polite language fairly often when other characters in his canon don't bother and doesn't put much effort at all into asserting his masculinity, but he tends to be rude and abrupt otherwise. Maybe he'd switch between the two depending on whether he remembers his manners.