The world of Arknights is insane (its on pc now so I can play). This is not the post I was intending to create today, but my other projects are taking longer than expected. Anyway, I absolutely adore when fiction steals names wholesale from the real world, maybe changing a little bit like a letter or two but overall keeping them identical. And Fire Emblem does this a little bit with places like Macedon, but Arknights is so unsubtle its crazy. I'm not sure if it's an English localization specific thing but there is just so much.
I'm sure there's plenty of stuff my Euro/American-centric education did not prime me to catch, but there's also stuff that I'm not sure most people anywhere would catch. There's the blatant stuff like Rhodes Island being the name of the land ship and also just a really weird way to make the US state a plural noun. There's also Columbia, though I haven't really seen what it's about. Or more stereotyping things like Siracusa being run by the mafia or Iberia having a fucking inquisition. Some are less obvious, but Aegir is seemingly named after the Aegean Sea, or Chernobog and Chernobyl. Some I haven't figured out, like Laterano, or seem to be thematically named rather than ripped whole cloth like Ursus effectively meaning bear but seemingly being the Terran version of Soviet Russia.
Anyway none of that prepared me to see, as one of the first things I saw in the game, the name Raythean. On some digging through the wiki I learn that the company Raythean Industries is a fucking arms manufacturer. Now, for a lot of people I'm sure they didn't blink at this, but I immediately recognized the name because Raytheon is a real life arms manufacturer and a very common hiring point for fresh mechanical engineer graduates. Naturally, I found this really fucking funny. Because it's one thing to lift the names of regions or places and make overblown facsimiles of the iconic parts of their history, its so very different to just drop a real company in the world and change a single letter. I want to know what the fuck else there is here, will I encounter other thinly veiled references to the military industrial complex? What about big pharma? Will I find Pfuzer, the competitor to Rhodes Island? This game is a fucking riot.
