hey so why does everyone act concerned about ryo(u) bakura not being called ryo and not even???? remember that jounouchi is literally never called by his first name by anyone except for his mom to the point that 4kids made his new first name based off of his last name like???
jounouchi is his family name from his dad’s side
his personal name is katsuya. not even honda/tristan (that could be another rant tbh) and yugi call him katsuya. hes just jounouchi.
i might be missing something but?? i guess his names cool and all but youd think he’d be familiar enough with at least someone except for his mom (who is the only person as far as ive noticed to call him katsuya) to be able to be on a first name basis.
then again im probably just looking way too far into things and its just because his name as jounouchi is whats iconic for him idk.
Okay, I ain’t no expert in Japan and Japanese culture but there are reasons why Jounouchi, Honda and Ryou are called by their last names.
Firstly, Bakura. The main gang don’t know him very well (esp in the anime), so everyone calls him Bakura (w/ or w/o the -kun depending on who’s talking)
Now Honda and our main event Jou. I’m putting these two together because they are referred to by their last names by everyone else for the exact same reasons. Yugi hasn’t known Jou and Honda for very long, having only met them in high school, so being the polite boy he is he calls them Honda-kun and Jounouchi-kun. Yami Yugi adopts Yugi’s way of referring to his friends which is y he also calls them Honda-kun and Jounouchi-kun. Anzu is in a similar boat to Yugi, except she doesn’t think they deserve the respect of an honorific (initially) and calls them w/o.
So now that’s sorted, all that’s left to explain is Jou and Honda themselves. Despite knowing each other pre-high school, they don’t refer to each other via first name and there’s a simple reason for that- they’re bros. This is just my thoughts, but I think that there’s the connotation that referring to someone via first name is kinda sappy, esp for teen guys (case by case, definitely not everyone thinks this, might even just be a manga/anime only sentiment). Which also explains why they only call Kaiba, well, Kaiba. Girls are a different matter, and Jou and Honda seem to skip all the formalities and just call them by first name (as we can see with Anzu and Mai).
Yugi may seem to be an outlier in all this, but Jou and Honda call Yugi the way they do because they initially didn’t see him as a man (a manly man mind u). No doubt Ryou would’ve been given the same treatment if Jou and Honda hadn’t dropped their bullying act.
TL;DR: Jou and Honda are bros and it’s sappy to call bros by their first name hence why they don’t despite knowing each other for so long.
(You can bet your buttons that if Yami Yugi was the dominant/original personality, he be doing the exact same thing that Jou and Honda do (not to mention those two would call Yami Yugi ‘Mutou’ instead of Yugi)).