Character · Ranking of Kings
Bojji
The heir to a giant's kingdom cannot hear, cannot speak, and cannot lift the sword he was handed.
In Otakana the clue reads: Deaf prince who cannot lift a sword
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Ranking of Kings
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Bojji is the eldest son of King Bosse, a man the size of a building, and he inherited none of it. He is small, deaf from birth, and unable to hold a weapon properly, and the court treats his claim to the throne as an embarrassment to be managed. He is also relentlessly cheerful, which the early chapters use to set a trap for the reader.
The friend he makes is a shadow: a black creature with a wide mouth, a thief by trade, and the first person who bothers to learn his sign language. Kage is the one who explains Bojji to everyone else, a neat solution to the problem of a silent protagonist and the reason the series can be funny at all.
Sousuke Tooka published Ranking of Kings as a web manga from 2017 on Manga Hack, and Wit Studio adapted it in 2021 in a picture-book art style that fooled a lot of viewers into expecting something gentle. Bojji's fighting eventually rests on speed and on reading an opponent, since strength was never going to be available to him.
Spelling BOJJI
BOJJI has a double J, which almost nothing in English does. The Japanese is ボッジ, where a small tsu doubles the consonant after it, so the doubling is real and audible: hold the J for a beat. Five letters, two of them J's side by side, and once you find one of them the row is nearly solved.