u/Uncommonality

This is a weird trend, but I'm sure you've seen it. A Harry who either becomes or is revealed to be non-human, and the story bending around him to portray humans as brutish peasants who can't do anything but be comically evil and stupid.

Stories like Harry Crow or The Lost Changeling are good examples.

Is there anything that subverts this trope? A world that's larger than just human wizards, but without making the humans comically inept? Like giving them their own unique flavor of magic which defines their culture, their own philosophy and worldview.

So, for example:

> If Fae are beings of the wild and the forest and the swamp and the unknown deep woods, Merfolk are beings of the deep sea and the unfathomable expanse covering most of Earth's surface, and the Goblins are beings of the caverns and tunnels and hidden treasures deep within the Earth, then Humans are beings of thresholds, domains, homes and keeps.

> Facing a human on the threshold to their own home is as pointless as facing a mermaid in the watery depths or a goblin in the deep tunnels, and like how the fae can steal your name if you're not careful, a human can trap you within a threshold, by creating the idea of an enclosed space around it. Trapping demons within circles of salt, limiting fae crossings to rings of toadstool or flowers.

> Internal expansion is one of the highest expressions of this quirk of humans, the idea of expanding a space beyond a threshold without affecting the outside, since it's outside, not inside. It plays into their psychology as well, always organizing things into neat partitions, ingroup and outgroup, mine and yours, trapping knowledge between pages, keeping their minds secure by standing on the border between it and everything else, keeping alive by hiding a piece of one's soul on this side of the life/death threshold, etc etc.

Something like that. Not that exact thing, but a story where the world is more expansive, other beings are more multifaceted, but without leaving behind the humans to be boring, lame villains.

I was fine with ignoring Essential honestly, it's annoying and corporate and super unethical in its business strategy (fleecing children by using fake currencies to hide the true amounts asked) but you could just not use it and it'd leave you alone.

But today I saw this:

https://www.reddit.com/user/Essential_Mod/comments/1t0yfs0/its_not_a_phase_mom_get_the_gothic_collection_in/

This is a reddit ad for an Essential mod cosmetic line.

1. First of all, what the hell? Why does this exist? Why is there a reddit ad for this?

2. Second of all, what money paid for this? Does Essential really make enough money from cosmetics for the corporation behind it (Spark Universe LLC) to pay for ads?

Reddit ads aren't that expensive (at least the lower tiers), but considering the common excuse for their predatory monetization tactics is that they need to pay for server hosting to host the things they sell and thus require hosting for (make it make sense), this kind of ruins that excuse. They appear to have liquid capital enough to waste it on web advertisements for their minecraft mod ingame cash shop.

Like I still can't get over his weird this is. Spark Universe LLC is a weird company anyways but this is beyond anything I've ever seen one of these bedrock/java modding monetization companies do

Take note of the way the ad is presented, it's not an ad for the essential mod's actual functions, it's for a cosmetic line, something that was allegedly a secondary function of the mod (imo it's the primary and the mod exists in service to the cosmetic shop).

A very strange thing to do. A very strange ad to pay for. All very strange.