Emi has strong opinions on the common trope of Pokemon who speak English just replacing every mention of "God" with "Arceus"

It's so obviously just a thing of "every mythology ever is just christianity painted over"

But I'm not a Pokemon so I dunno how much weight my opinion has here

@socks it really is like an… “English-speaking religious language with find and replace” thing, isn’t it. you go “Arceus damn it” but you don’t explore why it would damn something, what it means to do that, what it looks like to worship Arceus in daily life, and least of all what the average person really thinks Arceus is!

hell, there’s plenty of evidence for at least christianity and buddhism existing in the setting already. you can just… not

…but to me this feels like a level of worldbuilding that I really don’t blame people for going like “man, I don’t wanna get into those weeds, if I fix one problem it’s gonna cause four more and now I’m gonna need to hire a sensitivity reader” lmao

@gardevoir Yeah like, I don't think people NEED to do that amount of work just to write some Pokemon fiction

But at the same time. You can just say "God". Nothing's stopping you. Lots of real life language leaks into fiction and no one thinks twice about it. If I need to reconcile that problem I just choose to assume that people in-fiction aren't actually speaking English and that works like this are just a translation of whatever fictional language they speak, and that artifacts happen because translations are imperfect

I get that authors probably just see it as a funny little detail but for me it's more immersion breaking than anything