so alie helped me put to words something about the pokemon game i want to capture. the really horrifying thing about living in a totalitarian world is precisely what is normal and every shitty dystopia book needs to include elements of things that arent normal to the societies they exist in for the average reader to even realize something is wrong. this is fucking lazy and a cop out and doesnt actually help people realize how fucked the world around them is, instead looking at the difference and thanking History that things arent like that. so i think the real way to show how horrifying things are is to make the society pretty normal, but have it contrast with something better. as said before, i really like the idea that orangutans can speak, they just dont so they dont get made to work and one of the strongest ways to signpost to that there's something wrong in this game will be pokemon being able to talk with/interact with the player more in the beginning of the game which isnt properly civilized and wont talk at all in the later sections of the game. that should signpost to the slow players that there's something wrong without running into the issues stated before. there's a lot of other things though that will just keep changing as the player gets closer and closer to the heart of the beast, stuff like people generally being more fearful and lazy, the selection of wild pokemon changing, eventually turning into only trainer battles at some point in the places that are almost completely paved over, and the introduction of the money resource in the mid-game as a replacement for a more interesting resource system that isnt universally exchangeable combined with a noticable change in behavior of vendors and adjacent things to show the violence behind the transaction.