(Kind of a ramble about the CUI in Worm? Please, if I made any mistakes or yall have your own opinions, let me know. I probably fucked up at least one fact or said something wrong, and I'm open to being told about that)
I wish that Wildbow did a better job with China in Worm. I don't have much room to stand on when it comes to authority on the topic, being a white dude from the midwest, but I think simplifying the entirety of China (or, as Worm has it, the CUI) into a xenophobic nation with a cape team that is meant to be evil and a weird metaphor for communism???
Until the Yangban show up in that one Interlude, I genuinely do not think the CUI was mentioned before in the story. And the concept of how the Yangban's powers work is sick. A group of parahumans who split all their powers amongst each other? Lays the groundwork for amazing sequences and ideas and everything! "Oh, but they're xenophobic and evil and all that. They were right about the PRT though, but still Evil Chinese Parahuman Team".
I think one specific issue I have is that we don't even seem to learn how the CUI was founded in the first place? Why happened to make it suddenly switch back to being an imperial nation, let alone a "Union-Imperial"???
Also how anti-cape the nation supposedly is. According to Wildbow many nations in Asia are anti-cape, "esp. Russia, CUI".
However, despite that statement, we see that conveniently Japan is seemingly pro-cape like America, and India is even shown to have a whole different system for capes. But Russia and China are conveniently actually evil and anti-cape and they have these military cape groups instead of traditional heroes???
The whole thing reeks of minimal research/effort being put into it, and a use of modern day (circa 2010s) politics being used in a setting where said politics shouldn't exist in the same form. If the world split from our timeline in the 80s, why do the foreign politics and governments of Russia and China mirror their real life counterparts and not an actual alt-timeline?
(Note: None of this should be somehow taken as endorsement of modern Russian or Chinese governments. Russia's government sucks for obvious reasons (the war, for instance), and I have not done enough research to definitively take a stance on the modern day Chinese government, but from the bits I've heard (such as their mistreatment and potential attempted genocide of the Uyghurs) I don't see them in a very positive light)
