#considering the manchu were ruling china during the opium wars/ww2

[augerer]

i’m like 40% of the way through the poppy war right now (so maybe the last 60% will surprise me?) but some of the political decisions the author has made are like.  mindbogglingly bad to me.

if i’m understanding this right, fantasy china has just fought two wars against fantasy japan (the poppy wars), of which an important factor was fantasy japan’s corruption of fantasy china through the sale of opium.  fantasy china nearly lost the second poppy war, before fantasy japan’s genocide of an ethnic minority previously conquered by fantasy china causes fantasy england to intervene, rescuing fantasy china.

at first i assumed that fantasy england did this to further its own colonial agenda in fantasy china... but now i’m led to believe that fantasy england has been entirely a non-entity in china since their intervention, not even sending ambassadors there, and so presumably genuinely intervened for humanitarian aims?

tell me what is wrong with this picture?  or well.  i can tell you, i guess.  i don’t want to downplay the violence and atrocities of japanese colonization, but one thing that was definitely not a part of it was the opium trade.  in fact, the opium trade (and the opium wars, which obviously the poppy wars are based on, in combination w/ the sino-japanese wars) was fought against........ EUROPEAN colonial powers... MOST NOTABLY BRITAIN!  they were triggered by china trying to crack down on sale of opium by BRITISH MERCHANTS!

i find it unconscionable to change the role of britain in chinese history from literally, “the country who incited the opium wars in order to maintain their opium trade and colonial interests in china” to “country that stepped in to rescue china from japan’s colonial interests and opium trade and is otherwise uninterested in china”

this is not even getting into stuff with the magic system/speer/hinterlands which i’m also unhappy with but am waiting to learn more about to discuss.  i mean obviously there’s a deliberate choice for many of the main characters to have a racist bias here but beyond that i am foreseeing having issues with the actual worldbuilding.