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I write this story in honour of my mother, whom I understand will go into surgery tomorrow for cancer. It incorporates my job as a lawyer, oblique praise for mothers, and Berber vocabulary. I hoper that Miya Hikari's mother will appear in a future game - and that future games will appear in this series! Read it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39485280

I posted the following comment at a blog that I read, which you may find interesting also. @Legate of Mineta, this is meant to be praise for the game. So, in recent weeks, I have been reading, during my spare time (to some degree) fiction either written by Chinese people or set in China. I really like the fiction written by Chinese people, but the fiction set in China written by non-Chinese people makes me cringe with disgust because of how exoticizing and orientatilizing it is. At least Jack Vance was progressive enough to use fictional cultures/locations for his stories, but the same attitudes - of "see how strange and interesting and difficult to deal with people from this culture are" - becomes deeply uncomfortable to me when applied to real people/cultures. Barry Hughart's distortions of genuine Chinese history - whose references are numerous enough to make me think that he knew more about the subject than the average person - in order to make China seem more amusing/interesting as a setting are very unworthy of praise - to say nothing of his distortions of Buddhism. Chinese history/culture are already interesting enough to serve as bases for interesting fiction - both realistic and fantastical - as is proven by modern and ancient Chinese writers. So there is little need to value white people's spewing out words that are stereotypically associated with China as they write exotic tales of whimsy. There are two advantages of using the setting of Academagia as a basis for stories about "the exotic East" (not that I have, nor may I - although I have added to the setting with the developers' approval a Polynesia-equivalent and am planning a Bactria-Equivalent): 1. The entire setting is faintly whimsical and magical - so portraying strange customs of a China-Equivalent can be placed alongside the game's strange customs of its italy-Equivalent and Britain-equivalent. 2. The game's only Japanese-equivalent character is a compulsive56 liar56/storyteller who delights in making herself seem exotic/strange to others, so such exoticism, coming from her, makes sense - and may not be true. The game's major character who is hinted to be from the setting's China-equivalent is not prone to such exoticizing stories - although she (and her "brothers") are genuinely mysterious and creepy in their own ways.