#also the idea of a unified hoenn is a modern concept

[horizonboundtrainer]

Projecting our own ( very America-centric ) societal problems 1 to 1 onto Hoenn ( or most fantasy settings is kind of pointless because it isn't our world. And 75-80% of its people aren't Japanese. Or white ( just ignore the absurdity of whiteness meaning anything in the Pokemon world. Call yourself white and May will make vampire jokes because she isn't from our world and wouldn't understand )

Hoenn has outdated gender roles. It has religious and ethnic tensions. But it isn't our sexism and racism. Like... there's Draconids who still believe that men shouldn't be in leadership roles because they've never been a mother in a matriarchal culture. ( If they're really conservative, they might even believe that non-single parent men shouldn't be allowed to write at all. ) And there's places where barren women are ostracized due to being precieved as having been rejected by Groudon.

And there's those who want their own ethnostate—Two of the people who collectively raised Zinnia were pretty much a Draconid supremacist who wanted to turn her into a sacrificial messiah. ( ...Zinn being alive throws a wrench into those plans. ) And there's also Maxie who still occasionally entertains the idea of ousting Wallace's people from Sootopolis so humanity could finally make use of the wellspring underneath the Cave of Origin. He knows it'd be a gross violation of the Sootopolians' spiritual beliefs and doesn't care. May is quick to call him an idiot ( even if she agress that Wallace is a failure of a guardian... and a failure at everything )

( This was actually inspired by a post I saw on reddit. I also think how certain published writers just dump our own racism, sexism and homophobia into a setting with dragons ( as if it'd be the same in a world where marginalized people can have you burnt alive for treating them like shit ) is boring asf. I love dark fantasy but at least make it interesting. )