Wei Wuxian might tease Lan Wangji with “Lan-er-gege” but no one will take him seriously if he starts saying “Second Big Brother Lan”; Lan Wangji’s own register is so formal that he could probably get away with calling Lan Xichen “Brother” or “Older Brother” in English, but it still sounds a lot more natural to me for him to say “Xiongzhang.”
Seconded the WWX part, but for Lan Wangji, the jury in my head is still out, precisely because 'Brother' conveys his formality so well, and non-Chinese readers would pick up on that easily.
Zhao Yunlan, annoyed with Shen Wei (for absolutely justifiable reasons, granted), nastily calls him the honorific 您 instead of the usual 你 second person, making Shen Wei protest “Don’t be that way.”
I had to deal with that when going over the subs, and I resorted to ZYL facetiously calling him 'Sir' because there was just no way... Now if I'd translated into German, and they were on the informal 'you' by that episode (which I think they would be from ep 14 onwards), he could just easily switch to the formal version. Alas, English...
My go-to explanation for non-Japanese speakers about the difference between the two male first-person pronouns “boku” and “ore” is “Luke Skywalker versus Han Solo,” and it usually gets through.
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Seconded the WWX part, but for Lan Wangji, the jury in my head is still out, precisely because 'Brother' conveys his formality so well, and non-Chinese readers would pick up on that easily.
I had to deal with that when going over the subs, and I resorted to ZYL facetiously calling him 'Sir' because there was just no way... Now if I'd translated into German, and they were on the informal 'you' by that episode (which I think they would be from ep 14 onwards), he could just easily switch to the formal version. Alas, English...
That's a great way to explain it!