website/content/posts/why-the-name-saya.md

title	date	draft	description	type	tags
Why the Name Saya?	2023-11-06T18:06:28Z	true	A stupidly long explanation of why the main character of the previous story is named Saya	post	fun long

In fifth grade, my parents bought me the book What If? by Randall Munroe, and it'd be an understatement to say that it changed my life. I still remember trying to figure out the deeper meaning of "There's a horse in aisle five." and "My house is full of traps."

It took me a while before I became a heavy xkcd reader (the webcomic by the same author), and additionally, a lot of the earlier xkcd comics are NSFW, but by the end of high school, I finally got through my backlog of all roughly 2500 comics at that time. My favorite is definitely 673.

But what's the most famous xkcd of all time? 1190? (No pun intended) 149? 936? 303? If you don't know all those numbers of the top of your head, you're not a true xkcd fan. Whatever. I'm going to go with 1053, and if you've not heard of it, congralutations, you're now the target of the exact joke in the comic. But the important thing for us today is the hover text, which mentions the Yellowstone supervolcano.

That thing is mind-boggling massive. When I visited Yellowstone a few years ago, one of the visitor centers had a diorama comparing the ash ejected by the latest Yellowstone eruption 640 thousand years ago and the Mount St. Helens eruption. If one of them was the size of the tissue box, then the other was the size of several people. The largest Yellowstone eruption blanketed the entire midwest and southwest with ash.

But why was I at Yellowstone in the first place? Well, of course because of the supervolcano! Not to see the supervolcano itself (apparently scientists couldn't find the caldera for a long time because they didn't expect it to be so big), but because the supervolcano is the reason for all of Yellowstone's wonderful hot springs and geysers and landscapes. Also, if you commit a crime in the Idaho section of Yellowstone, there's [supposedly a loophole in the Constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone) so that you can't get put on trial for it. In reality, you'd probably get a trial anyways.

My family drove to Yellowstone since our house is in St. Louis which isn't that far away, and also because there aren't any nice airports near Yellowstone. Along the way, we saw a lot of horses, antelope, and cows, but no Belted Galloways unfortunately, which we did see on a previous road trip. In particular, we passed by a group of particularly depressed-looking horses within 50 miles of Yellowstone, and my parents described the horses as {{< rawhtml >}}忧(yōu)郁(yù){{< /rawhtml >}} (ruby annotations in HTML are kinda gory), which is a term I didn't know at the time.

Later, I looked up 忧郁 on Wiktionary and one of the derived terms is 忧郁的台湾乌龟, or in traditional Chinese, the complete abomination 憂鬱的臺灣烏龜. Just imagine having to hand-write that. And then on the Wiktionary page for this insane term, there's a link in the further reading section to Moegirlpedia.

Ah yes, Moegirlpedia. So Moegirlpedia (萌娘百科) is a Chinese-language encyclopedia supposedly about anime and mange, but it also has a lot of helpful articles about Chinese internet memes and pop culture. As someone who's trying to improve my Mandarin, it's a suprisingly useful website, even if the article topics are mostly garbage.

Last summer, I was in Hong Kong for a few days and stumbled across a bottle of 珠江橋牌 soy sauce with an anime girl mascot. I found a lot more interesting information about this anime girl mascot on, yep, you guessed it, Moegirlpedia. And then this led me to a page about the anime girl mascot for some random high school in Guangdong, which led me to a page about the moe anthropomorphism of Guangdong.

OK, almost there. So I then tried searching up some other Chinese province's moe anthropomorphisms, and for some reason, I must have searched for "青海" instead of "青海娘", because the latter would have taken me directly to the page for the moe anthropomorphism of Qinghai. Instead, I reached a disambiguation page which informed me that 青海 is both a lake, a province of China, a district of Tokyo, and the first name of two characters in a video game and a manga.

The name of that video game is 沙耶の唄, or The Song of Saya.

So there you have it. But I'm not done yet. So after reading a bit more about that game, I would definitely not recommend anyone to play it unless they want to get seriously mentally scarred. Also, it's NSFW. Someone on Reddit called it "one of the most messed up games ever made". I'm surprised it still has a Moegirlpedia page since Moegirlpedia usually censors extremely NSFW or slightly political content. For instance, my cousin once called me a 傲娇公主, which makes no sense so I'm neither of those two things, but it turns out this is also the name of a hentai show (I'm sure my cousin wasn't aware of that, since she was 10 at the time), but that show doesn't have a Moegirlpedia page.

But anyways, this happened a few weeks before Halloween, which gave me the idea in the first place to write a psychological horror story which I've never done before. Another piece of inspiration was to make the character of Saya secretly be a monster on the inside. So yeah, I'm not entirely pleased with how the story turned out, since it's a little bit too serious and not funny enough for my taste, but in short, this is how the story came to be!