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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2025

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  • Nice point. Capitalization of races in sci-fi or fantasy always struck me as based in nationality rather than species, probably because at that scale planets and races are the new “countries.” We don’t have anything higher than a national government, so we don’t think of ourselves as one group on a global scale. I think it’s also because if we can talk to it, we don’t consider the species really because, well, why wouldn’t it be a human? Instead of “humans” and “octopus,” i think a lot of these writers are thinking along the same cultural scale as, say “German” or “Bosnian,” and such names typically come directly from the name of the country in the language being spoken.

    All this to say i agree with you, but I can see how we ended up where we are.

    On thing I did wish they do, though, was at least try to justify why all these galactic races happen to speak perfect English (or whatever language the player is using). By default. My lore-starved, single-track brain can’t decide between “Welcome to the interstellar community. Kind of weird that you independently developed the galactic lingua franca, but that’s cool” and “Welcome to the interstellar community. In order to facilitate your transition to a higher level of civilization, we have all decided to learn and speak exclusively in your most popular language. And by ‘we’ I mean the galaxy. All of us.”