plague-of-insomnia:

What’s In A Title?: Variations on “Master” in Black Butler

旦那様・当主・ご主人様・マイロード・様・坊ちゃん

Throughout the manga, we see various titles used for Vincent, Real Ciel, and Our Ciel, with these being more obvious in the original Japanese than in translation.

This post will focus on Sebastian and Tanaka and the various terms they use at different points within the story.

I personally am not an expert on keigo (the most formalized of speech that Sebastian speaks almost exclusively in in Japanese), so I am not really going to be going into the subtleties there. (Other posts have tackled this already, and probably with more expertise than I could.)

I also want to emphasize I am only now beginning to read the manga from ch 1 in Japanese (I’ve only read bits and pieces until the most recent ~25 chapters or so), so it is possible I am missing some examples or variations mentioned in other parts of the 200+ chapters not brought up here.

However, I think we can still look at these subtle differences even if you are an English speaker who knows zero about formality levels/humble speech in Japanese. And if you’re willing to take this journey with me despite these caveats, keep reading.

旦那様・当主・ご主人様・マイロード・様・坊ちゃん

Keep reading