I need to talk about Denmark’s human name. I never liked the fandom name Mathias Køhler, because I have some personal beef with the name Mathias, and I’d rather have a -sen last name to represent him, since those are way more common in Denmark. But hey, it’s a fandom name, so just use some of Himaruya’s suggestions then, right?
Well.
Everywhere you look for Denmark’s human name in the English-speaking fandom, you’ll find something along the lines of this:
So first name, use one of those, last name, Densen, case closed, right? Except, no. It’s not. As a Dane, Densen (I’ve seen it spelled Dansen on occasion) is SUPER rare. It doesn’t read as a real last name to me, and if I go to the Danish statistic site for names, there’s only four people with Densen as a last name, and ZERO with Dansen. So it never sat right with me. That, and this misconception that Andersen, Arnesen, and Christensen could work as a first name just seemed wrong to me – the -sen suffix means “son of”, and is never used in first names unless your parents hate you or something. That’s why I dug deeper.
I clicked the source.
Now, my Japanese is pretty bad, but there’s this nifty little thing called website translation, so I translated it to English, and this was the results:
And I thought, “huh, that’s weird? Where’s that horrible Densen?” I can guess that “Anelsen” is a poor translation of Andersen and “Anasen” is either a different spelling of that or Arnesen. “Mikel” should be spelled Mikkel (which Hima does spell it as). But clearly, something was missing. In the whole translated page, there was nothing about Densen. So I sent it back to Japanese and searched for デンマーク to get to the right spot:
There’s no デンセン or anything close to it. It doesn’t exist. So I came to the only conclusion I could – it’s a mistranslation/add on made by the translator. I don’t know if it was done with bad intent or not, but either way, this Densen-thing is wrong! I remember coming across someone speculating it might be a bad translation of Dinesen, the pen name of a Danish female author, but it never even existed in the first place!
So please stop using Densen/Dansen as Denmark’s last name with the justification that Himaruya liked it. You can use it as a fandom name (and I’ll think you’re silly for it), but don’t say it has any canon justification, because it doesn’t.
It does make me wonder how many other odd translations there is in the English-speaking fandom…