oh god YOI Badfic Friend found the dark side of "let me write you a treatise on Pernese embroidery motifs." A soulmate AU which starts out with a chart of the percentage of ~soulmate bonds~ by country and age, and it is quite possibly the worst chart I have ever seen. Spoiler: I don't even know where to start listing the problems with this
....NO. USE THE SAME AGE INCREMENTS. COME ON. Also that last row has a ridiculously large grouping and how the fuck is it that everywhere has a 100% rate of everyone soulbonding except for those areas, where it is apparently quite rare? And also how is everyone counted under countries - what if your soulmate is from a separate country? Also why is north America paired with Australia and South Africa with both 'african countries' (which are all basically the same, right?) And South Asia(ditto)?
ALSO correct me if i am wrong but I feel like north Korea is not usually the most forthcoming? Or cooperative? So getting accurate statistical data out of them seems like it would be difficult.
Don't forget the random inclusion of "Kazakhstan" with "Japan, S. Korea, Philiphines" (sic), the complete exclusion of the Middle East, Central America, and most of Oceania, and multiple entire continents being shoved together while North and South Korea are very carefully put in separate boxes. EDIT: And the fact that all percentages >5% are perfect multiples of 5, and usually of 10.
I can't stop looking at it. I'm imagining Belarus putting every child in the country on a huge conveyor belt so they can look at each other and see if they're soulmates.
ALSO x2 combo, why is it in increments of 7 at random. most of these don't even correlate to what I think are standard age groupings for stats, if you're not going to stick with sensible multiples of five.
85% of people find soulbonds before age 10 in Russia? I.... what? The person I was as a child bears very minimal resemblance to the person I am now, and the idea that more than six out of seven kids in just this ONE PART OF THE WORLD find their soulmate before they got puberty is just creepy as heck. Especially given the South Asia ~suuuuuper rare~ thing, which is extra ridiculous because these two parts of the world mush up against each other. The reason South Asia is South Asia is because Russia IS North Asia. And North Korea and South Korea being separate at all is an incredibly recent development, tell me why if one of them has the 85% thing and the other one has basically NEVER. I'm calling it now, Victor at the EXTREMELY ancient age of 27 is an outcast, nay, a pariah for failing to soulbond by that incredibly advanced age. And Yuri is going to be a delightfully subtle ("subtle") parallel outlier for making a soulbond at all when nobody in that part of the world EVER does the thing. Remember kids, if you don't find your soulmate by the time you hit puberty, you're basically unmarriageable.
Is the implication that under communism, soulmates will be distributed by the government or something? Because that is the only goddamn reason I can think of for having 85% of the population ~soubonded~ under the age of 10.
Like i'd sort of buy it if they just said "fuckit i don't give a shit about these other countries" and just had the bottom group say "data unavailable" or something. But also i'm annoyed that they didnt look at a census and just copy the like, population age distribution part? Edit: oops this sounds like a non sequitur re russia But uh yeah, what the fuck is the belarus situation even Edit edit: oh my god, self, clarify. By population distribution i mean, the random age groupings. Go like grab the census data for like vancouver or something, it's right there. Also the census things tend to break this stuff up by legal gender, so the author couldve gotten even more cutesy and specific about their ship by listing numbers for men vs women (oh shit how do legally recognized third genders affect these things)
Now look, I'm not saying that chart was made by someone who thought the charts in FATAL were really informative and useful, but… Also, I can't help thinking "Philiphines" is just some guy named Philip Hines. He's a nation-state unto himself.
Unless it was like, shown to someone in the fic, a chart describing soulmate bond age percentage is probably the worst way to introduce that information.
I feel like they may have accidentally omitted a few of the smaller countries. Ya know, like Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world. Yeah you can probably just omit that whole region, no one really lives there right?
Yep, they pretty much left out all of Oceania other than Australia. They also left out most of the Middle East. Between that and lumping all of Africa and South America together with "South Asia" and only giving priority to countries in Asia which main characters come from, it's a bit "NO RACISM HERE NO SIRREE."
Yeah....... also Brazil is the fifth most populous country and one of the top ten world economies. But they're less known for their white people, Asian media, or prominence in the movie Borat.
