WARMTH LIKE HOME UNAWARES

So, I'm making a database of various information from UNLIMITED:Saga so I can eventually make a shrine/guide site with all of the data, using dynamically-created pages to make it super convenient.

Right now I'm just doing the data entry part, doing all of the monster stats. This is mostly easy, but I'm also putting the English, Japanese, and Korean names of the monsters. The Korean names are a complete mystery to me (I will see if there is a Korean guide out there, though, online somewhere, later, or else I'll have to go find all the monsters in the game itself) but the Japanese names are at least in the official guidebook.

The Japanese names often differ from the English, or sometimes the English name was just a transliteration of the phonetic version of the Japanese name. But I'm also writing the proper translations of the Japanese and Korean names. So like the English version uses "Bulak" or something for ブラク, which is actually Buraq, a creature in Islamic mythos.

So I got a bit "stuck" for a bit when I encountered ダハナシュ, which sounds something like "Dahanache" or something. My best guesses at what this would represent in roman spelling turned up no results, and searches in Japanese mostly turned up results about the monster in this game.

I did manage to find one result, though, that didn't have to do with unsaga, a short page without any context about カマル・ウッ・ザマーンの物語, "The Story of カマル・ウッ・ザマーン". Of course, I didn't know what any of this was, but it did say something about ダハナシュ comparing two princesses or something. So I had to figure out what カマル・ウッ・ザマーン was, and just guessing random Romanization was not helping, but thankfully a search in Japanese brought up the Wikipedia article for 1001 Nights, the Arabic collection of tales. Of course, the organization of the Japanese and English versions of the page were pretty different, but I gathered that my big string of Katakana was one of the stories in the collection, and went over to the English version of the article to try to find one that sounded the same.

The eighth tale, The Story of Qamar al-Zaman, fits the Japanese name perfectly, but there's no information on it on Wikipedia. So I search about it and find a blog that functions basically as SparkNotes for 1001 Nights that gives a summary of each of the tales.

Apparently one of the Ifritah named Dahnesh declares love for a princess and claims she's the most beautiful woman in the world, but someone objects and they bring these two women together to compare them to see who is the most beautiful or something. I don't. But there we go, and Ifrit named Dahnesh is the namesake of the Rank 10 avian monster ダハナシュ in UNLMIITED:Saga. Took me like a half an hour to input this one little node in my database lol.

... I have a feeling I'm going to learn a lot by the time I'm done with this. It's already thanks to unsaga that I am able to remember the name "Aspidochelone" without trouble LOL. Even though I always thought it was interesting and wanted to learn about it, I would never actually research the stories behind the names of all the creatures and stuff in games that I played. But actually being "forced" to do it now, I'm finding it indeed to be very fun, so I'll probably regularly look stuff up when I encounter new names and stuff from now on.

Well, I ended up reading this whole thing in almost one big marathon. But I got a little tired and distracted near the end and ended up finishing it up this morning. No pressure to anyone else, I realize I'm finishing this way early than anyone else and y'all have lots of things to deal with on your own.

Anyway, I don't have really any as-I-go thoughts since I read it all at once lmao. But I'll answer the little questions at the back of the book, too. Because I'm not good at creating my own talking points. But I'm also terrible at answering these questions, so...

( spoilies )