>>91449>Doesn't like Changelings as GermansWhat the fuck are they
supposed to be like?
Did you know that German culture is one of only two cultures on the entire planet to have Changelings as a deep part of their mythology? Yes, that's right, Changelings are a subject of German folklore
and not many other cultures. They have fairies that exchange human children for their own children. You can get Changelings to give you back your child by abusing the changeling, causing them to swap it back, and one way of discerning a Changeling from a regular child is by placing the suspected changeling in an oven. Changelings have a place in German culture, and they even have a word for it: "Wechselbalg." The only other culture with a strong Changeling mythology is Ireland. But in this universe, the Ireland parrellel is already taken by Greneclyff, and Ireland doesn't exactly make for a good, imperialistic, militaristic, hegemonic Empire. The only other culture with any serious Changeling mythology is Norway, but those are technically trolls, and in any event, Olenia is the Norway Parallel.
Whether you like it or not, and whether you want it or not,
this is a WW2 based universe. That means that the antagonist must parallel one of the big empires of WW2. Germany and Japan are obvious, because they are hierarchical with strong leaders, collectivistic, aggressive, expansionistic, and Imperialistic. Using the Soviet Union wouldn't work as well because the role of Soviet parallel is already taken by Stalliongrad, and the Changelings, unlike the Soviet Union, are unashamed and upfront about their imperialism and hierarchy.
In some ways, Japan is a closer match for the Changelings than Germany. The ideology of the Changeling conquest is fairly close to Japanese style Imperialism, and they are also more "alien" to the main races in the way that the Japanese were to the Americans. But there was no way I was going to use Japanese as the language of teh Changelings. The reason is because I knew damned good and well that for dialogue, I would be reliant on Google Translate. I don't trust google translate as it makes many errors, and I cycle every translation through it many times to make sure that it actually says what I want it to say. I do not trust Google translate to very accurately translate english into a non-indo-European language and back again. Japanese also has the further problem of not using Roman lettering, which makes it harder to manually single out words to try to manipulate translations. So I figured that the best language to use would be an Indo-European langue that uses Roman lettering, because anything more foriegn may have translation issues. I can read and sort of understand Spanish, but in Texas, Spanish is a language of poor immigrants, a connotation that I can't easily shake from my mind, so I wasn't going to use that. Nothing seemed more appropriate than using German.
And yes, the Changelings in the mod are German. they use German tank models, German aircraft, and they even have a national spirit called "Canterlot defeat" which is a parallel to the national spirit in the vanilla game that represents the German defeat in WW1.
Further, there is a fascinating line in the Equestria at War mod that stuck out to me. It said that Chrysalis is from one of the northern hives, and "united all of the other hives." This makes it sound like the hives of the Changelings were were like the states of Germany, disunited into hundreds of little states, until one very strong, very aggressive, militaristic northern state - Prussia/Chrysalis - forcibly united all of them into a single superpower.
The Changeling hives, in that way, are like the German Kaiserreich. Many smaller states united under the hegemony of a monarch and a culture that is Imperialistic and Militaristic.
And if you don't like that, propose a better fucking solution that is actually logical, would work, and is interesting.
\r