hi, I just found your blog (crazy enough through official citation on the deltarune wiki??) and I wanted to ask about a couple scenes since I'm trying to do character analysis but don't know japanese nearly well enough to do so (I hope you're okay with people asking, I'm not sure if you still answer these)
mainly, I wanted to ask if there was anything that stood out in two scenes: the scene where tenna and spamton reunite and tenna doesn't recognize him (ie how spamton addresses tenna, vice versa, if the text shows tenna does recognize him and is just lying, how tenna refers to the pipis, basically anything that isn't conveyed in the english text), and I was also curious about the dialogue in the manhole dungeon on the secret board 3 where tenna talks about spamton? like specific verbiage and anything unique
if you take your time to answer this, thank you very much and I appreciate it a lot!! I've been struggling to find people doing genuine analysis of the japanese text of dr (and some of the translations you did do actually are making me think a lot)
(JP translations + transcriptions in Alt Text)
Something major that stands out about how Spamton addresses Tenna here is that he uses casual speech instead of keigo (honorific speech). For reference, Spamton generally speaks with the formality levels of a salesman, so pretty much every line Spamton says throughout the game is always in keigo. The fact that he breaks out of his persona here to address Tenna really emphasizes that he sees Tenna as someone who is an equal to him, and not just a potential customer.
His last line here is also interesting. He trails off, and because of how Japanese word order works, we don't know the specific verb he was going to say, but the no koto implies that it would describe how Tenna feels about Spamton emotionally. The English version of this scene of course uses the verb "care," so we could assume that that is also what Spamton would have said here, but the choice to leave it unsaid can also allow for other interpretations.
Instead of saying variations of "mamma mia," in Japanese Tenna repeats variations of "why," "how," "wait," and "it can't be," so it definitely gives a stronger impression that Tenna might in fact recognize Spamton here!
Once Tenna asks what Spamton is and appears to not recognize him, however...
...Spamton switches back into keigo, addressing Tenna as he would a stranger.
Tenna refers to the Pipis in pretty much the same way as he does in the English version, with one added detail. When expressing a number of something, Japanese uses grammatical particles known as counters, which correspond to the noun being counted based on the nature of the noun and often details like its shape. For example, if you're counting people, flat objects, and round objects, you would add a different counter to the number in each case.
Here, when Tenna says that he kept "one Pipis," he uses the counter 匹(hiki), which is the counter used when referring to small animals. This explicitly confirms that the Pipis is a living creature, or at the very least that Tenna believes that it is.
Something that stands out about how Tenna talks about Spamton in the manhole dungeon is that he directly quotes Spamton in this line. Spamton here again uses casual speech instead of keigo, and it's interesting that Tenna specifically remembers Spamton telling him to wait for him while he went to answer the phone. Whether you believe Spamton was being genuine or deceiving Tenna here, telling him to wait gives the implication that he was going to come right back after he took the phone call.
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