🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌 (do not eat these Tumblr, they taste like nintendonswitch cartridges I promise)
Nine? NINE?! Wow, this friend of Tian’s must really love him (or hate Tobias) to be wanting Tob to say so many things about the Three Worlds original setting! Well, he doesn’t want to play along. Sorry, Sylv. You’re getting this instead.
“Here are nine things I really fucking hate about Tian’s original setting.
“So first off, a huge part of the plot is fighting for the rights of nonhumans, but so far, most of the representation among the main cast are either humans, human hybrids, human-looking nonhumans, or nonhumans with a human form. There are nonhumans that don’t fit any of these categories, but they are few and far between and they have little to no development because none of them are his blorbos. And to make matters worse, every time he considers a character to kill off, it’s always the nonhumans first on the chopping block because he doesn’t want to kill off ~human representation.~ He has often thought about whether hundreds of years in the future, aliens will see this and think of it as racist against nonhuman species, and as an alien from three hundred and fifty years in the future I can tell you, we absolutely would! Like come on. He already wrote in this setting that I did a fucking THESIS on how pre-spacefaring depictions of aliens in fiction affect how each species sees species other than themselves once they reach the stars. In his rush to try and represent literally every single human ethnicity under the sun, he’s forgotten that his work will also have an impact on human-alien relations once humanity takes to the stars--which it will. In terms of nonhuman representation, he gets one point out of ten--for the fact that his nonhuman characters aren’t sorted into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ species, but come on, that’s the bare MINIMUM. Check your fucking privilege, Tian!
“Second, in terms of both human and nonhuman cultures, there are only two that so far have gotten all the development: the Eldonai and the Draconids. Now, I think what he’s done with those two groups so far is great, but could he stand to pay some more attention to people who aren’t from those groups? You should know, actually, that the Eldonai are very directly Jewish-coded and he refers to the Draconids as ‘the Jews of the dragon world’--and when you really think about it, it’s true! So I’m just sitting here like, look, I get it, you love Jewish people. But as someone who is a quarter not Jewish or dragon Jewish in that universe, it’s giving off the vibes that you don’t really intend to devote your time and attention to anyone else. You keep saying ‘oh I’m too tired,’ ‘oh I’m too busy,’ but they say that one is never too tired or busy for things that they actually care about…
“You know what else annoys the fuck out of me? Basically every nonhuman in that setting is either a fox, a cat, or a dragon. ESPECIALLY a dragon. His setting is CRAWLING with dragons. And look! I’m a dragon! In both this universe and that one! Galra are dragons, and Draconids are too! It’s great to be represented! But I think you can see why I’m bitching because Tian claims he’s a hippie who doesn’t think that there should be a dominant race or species in global affairs when it’s pretty clear that dragons are kind of a dominant species in his setting and he doesn’t seem to have a problem with that…
“That’s to say nothing about the fact that oh boy, does the plot torture me! Now this isn’t something I find racist necessarily, it’s just--can there ever be a universe where I catch a fucking break? If you’ve seen her Pokéverse for me, you know what I’m talking about--but add on top of that the fact I slide off the deep end and kill two of my friends, then seek their forgiveness after their deaths and get violently rejected by one of them. And I mean, I think almost any type of character can be redeemed, and he still intended me to go through with a redemption arc, but the more evil stuff one does, the harder one is to redeem. Isn’t he aware that this might be pushing it?
“Oh yeah, and speaking of things I did that seem near-irredeemable, Tian made my other self fucking uh. Destroy the holy sites of another religion. Granted, that religion was Narseus’ religion, meaning that those were the ‘holy sites’ of a violent genocidal cult that exists solely to either forcibly convert or wipe out everyone who doesn’t follow their god, and who built those sites on top of the destroyed or profaned holy sites of other cultures that deserve to be restored. But for fuck’s sake! Doesn’t he realize that his whole problem with how to redeem me stems from the fact that he has me pull shit like this and hasn’t fleshed out my ‘exit strategy,’ so to speak? I can already hear him going ‘well if I had you do it in the way you wanted I’d be sanitizing your pain’--sanitizing my pain, my ass! How about not putting me in so much pain that I feel compelled to start killing people in the first place?!
“Moreover, it doesn’t criticize Western nations in the way that I would. Yes, the government that controls Western and Central Europe are some of the villains, and yes, I can acknowledge that it does a good job of showing how fucking nail-bitingly exasperating moderate liberals are. But Tian is a coward who decided to make her critique of the West a lot easier for wypipo to swallow by making the European government fundamentalist Christian-coded and a good deal more evil. And to that I ask: Weren’t the European governments of the 21st century bad enough? They may seem peaceful and humane to you, what with their zero wars--on their own soil at least--and their universal healthcare, but that doesn’t change the fact that they still maintain their former imperialist regimes by relying on slave labor and sweatshop factory work in Africa and Asia. The European governments of the 21st century in our worlds are still worthy of the Draconids’ heated opposition--and they don’t need to be following a violent genocidal cult in order to do it!
“And then there’s the fact that so many characters in his original setting are Aeons. If you don’t know what those are, those are characters who are born stronger than the gods. Like, I know that the age of Narseus’ fall is supposed to be the ‘age of Aeons’ or whatever, but here’s the thing…I’m an Aeon. Surrounded by other Aeons. The fact there are a bunch of people running around who are also Aeons makes me seem a lot less special. Come on. Aren’t Aeons supposed to be incredibly rare in his lore? Why does that have to change?
“What number am I on? Number…eight? Yeah, number eight. I’ll keep this one short, because I want to have time for one of the most egregious things I noticed about her setting, so. It’s that she doesn’t know what her Draconid language wants to be. Sometimes some parts of it sound Japanese. Sometimes when she pictures it in her head it sounds like the Na’vi language. Sometimes, it sounds like just random shit she made up that she thought would sound cool. Put that all together, my friends, and you do not get an aesthetic! Oh, and since I have time to squeeze one more in here--I think she pulled from way too many fandoms in her original work and it shows. Like, the whole thing is just a mashup of all her favorite parts of everything she’s ever touched, ever. It’s really not an original setting, it’s more of a crossover fic between Pokémon, Death Note, Star Wars, the Tanakh, the Bible, every history book she’s ever read and bits and pieces of James Cameron’s Avatar because she knows it’s racist as fuck and wants to show the world that she can do better. And it somehow manages to be about anarcho-socialism. Say it with me: What the fuck?
“And now, to my ninth and final piece of criticism of this multifandom trainwreck: It’s way too depressing. Like. The whole point of the plot is that the world before Narseus had no politics or government, and us heroes are trying to restore an age with no political leaders that’s basically in a state of anarcho-socialism. The main villain of the post-Narseus arc is someone who doesn’t like the fact that after Narseus dies there’s going to be no government, and who fights to keep governments in the new world. She says that our dream of utopia is futile, and that we’ll never get to go back to what the world was. Guess what, though? Even after she’s defeated, SHE’S LITERALLY PROVEN TO BE RIGHT! We do never get to go back to the good ol’ days! There are always going to be problems and political structures and some form of government in the world around us! Because Narseus fucked up the world so much with his shitdickery that the promises of Olam Ha-Ba--uh I mean the post-Narsean world--ARE NO LONGER ENTIRELY POSSIBLE TO ATTAIN! So, even after all that hard work and sacrifice, even after the world gets so much better after Narseus’ defeat, he still gets the last laugh because his taint is neither destroyed nor forgotten. So basically, in the end, after she puts me through so much fucking pain and misery, she’s saying that all of my sacrifices and everything I’ve dreamed of was at least partially in vain. Holy fuck. And I thought my life in this universe was bad!”
