this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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I'm not an expert on this, but I have a theory that the English are the dark souls style try hards of history.
English has a cold and dreary environment that's relatively hostile prior to literally terraforming it, every single edible plant in the isles comes from somewhere else, there are centuries worth of plagues that came out of the squalid living conditions, it's history is a revolving door of groups coming in to kill and pillage, and don't even get me started on the wolves.
It's basically centuries of playing on maximum hard mode. Then when you look at the people they colonized, India and the Americas were halcyonic in comparison. We're finding out that all the "wasted land" the colonials knocked over for fields in the US were massive, curated foraging gardens that could feed thousands for generations. They didn't realize they were knocking over the native equivalent to a free grocery store because they only ever used tree for murdering each other.
Now everyone is miserable because we let the guy that only plays regionally ranked mortal combat decide the rules we all have to play by when literally everyone else in the building wants to play animal crossing.
I say this as someone who has logged hundreds of hours in several games.
Please widen you sources of information, and, please, you need to go outside more.
Actually I game very little these days, but games are an excellent amalog for looking at complex behaviors in small, easy to digest ways.
I'd love some wider sources though! I'm no where near an expert on this matter and I'd love to learn more regardless of where it leads.
This is incredibly dismissive of not only native cultures that wiped themselves out (or at least wiped out large animal species) but also of the other European and Asian cultures that had their own imperialist expansion, some nearly to the same degree as the English.
I suppose I should say Anglo-Saxon Europe instead of England, though when of comes to the people behind the empire we're still talking about one and the same. It's been 40 people ruining it for everyone else for ages now.
I don't see how this is at all dismissive of your examples though. The Aztec practivced eugenics on a continental scale before Europe even knew the Americas existed. The Mongol empire was second only to the british in land and beat them out by 8% of the global population at their height. That's not even touching on all the countless cultures that died at the hand of their neighbor.
None of those things quite come close to the impact that Europeans have had on the world. We're not having this conversation in the Manchu of the Qing dynasty, Olmec, or Mongolian. Our grocery stores are not offering maze or horse as staple foods. If you go to a tailor for a traditional formal dress, you will not recieve a rubakha of Russian lineage.
I'm not saying that any of them didn't matter, I'm saying that my state of Kansas bases it's identity off of wheat, a plant not native to this content. The people from which the name was taken exist as generic echos. The land on which my house sits was once a marsh before it was terraformed by settlers for crop. The entire Aztec empire was 85,000 sq miles to Kansas's 82,300 sq miles and European's didn't just do Kansas. That's simply not an equitable scale. Europe specced hard to violence and power and everyone now lives with the result of that.
This made too much sense to me.
I don't care for it. I wish to go back to my previous levels of understanding.
This is a very fun but also anglocentric and supremacist story.
I would say it's the opposite. A nation of plague riddled, pale, orges who understood nothing but violence in all things overran countless far more adapt and elegant societies. Had they ever stopped to listen to those they destroyed they'd have found a far better way of living, but instead the killed the people, killed the cultures, killed the land they tread upon, and look back to wonder how these "savages" ever managed to do anything with all the bathing and lack of fields.