if you ever get the chance to read F3 (hopefully soon, as I plan to release my early drafts of the script to receive constructive criticism) you'll notice a striking lack of religion despite both settings being a hotspot for devout religious people (northern florida and central asia). religion is definitely present in the world but i tend to skip around it. there are two reasons for this.

1. religion just isn't a main theme in the story. F3 is not a story about religious trauma or anything of the sort. it's about other things.
2. i'm not religious and never have been. i grew up in a heavily southern-baptist region of the US but i was raised by two atheists, although i consider myself more agnostic/neutral than anti-religion. i tend to write what i know (whether it benefits me or not) and talking about religious trauma just doesn't feel like my wheelhouse.

this is why i treat religion like a footnote in the story. as such, i feel as if a lot of people are interested in baihu's mostly-unspoken identity as ethnically uyghur. most of the backstory i directly show of him involves his involvement in the mafia as a teenager and relentless abuse he faced as a young adult, but i don't talk much about his family or childhood. of course this is because you sort of have to choose your battles when writing a character, you can't typically inform the audience directly of every aspect of a character unless they're a protagonist written in first person. so why did i feel the need to include this detail? what purpose does it serve.

a character's ethnicity or religion doesn't have to serve a purpose of course. most people are just people regardless of where their ancestors are from or what god they believe in (or don't). but there were a few active reasons i made baihu and ruan specifically uyghur rather than han chinese (which they were originally), as well as a few reasons why i chose to make the two of them irreligious rather than muslim despite uyghurs widely being associated with islam.

much of the west tends to view china as a monolith full of pale, similar-looking east asians, quite ignorantly so. 92% of china's mainland is made up of han chinese people, the ethnic majority, however there are actually 55 ethnic minorities federally recognized in china, and many more who aren't recognized. seemingly almost every chinese character in western media is portrayed as ambiguously han chinese. and as F3 is a story primarily about central asians and turkic/mongolic people, it felt only natural to feature a character from the often-overlooked xinjiang reigion of china. china is a lot like russia in the sense that it is often considered to exist in one ethnic region of the world (east asia) but in actuality it's so large that it encompasses many different regions of asia. political borders aren't always built on cultural lines.

i am also well aware of the cultural genocide that the uyghur people have faced throughout the history of the modern PRC. while many believe genocide only occurs through direct killing and culling of people, the uyghur genocide has largely occurred in subtle silence. these do include horrible atrocities such as labor internment camps and forced sterilization, but also in ways such as being prevented from practicing islam, religious humiliation, boarding schools (akin to the indian residential schools of the US and canada that seek to forcefully assimilate indigenous children) and censorship of beliefs. these things are truly horrible in ways i cannot begin to describe and unfortunately it isn't something i can make the main focus of F3. i do make an effort to at least bring it up as a known-fact because it deserves to be talked about, but as F3 isn't a story set in china, it isn't directly relevant to much of the plot. from a social-awareness standpoint F3 has always meant to focus on issues that more directly affect me such as transphobia, ableism and recovery (although that doesn't mean i don't care or won't talk about issues that may not directly affect me).

this fact is one of the primary reasons why i made baihu, ruan, and their mother irreligious. they are still undeniably uyghur (as they are an ethno and religious group akin to many jewish groups), but their lack of religion is largely meant to be a survival tactic against cultural genocide. they also have the privilege of being paler and able to pass as han chinese to avoid discrimination. baihu and ruan do not have turkic names, another deliberate choice by their mother to make them ethnically ambiguous. clearly this is not something meant to be celebrated. it is not a triumph. there is nothing good about being able to escape discrimination through cultural estrangement. baihu recognizes this himself and actively wishes he could liberate his own people from suffering, but he's only one person. there isn't much he can do, especially since his father's government is quite economically supportive of the PRC.

this, of course, isn't the only reason baihu is vehemently atheistic. there's also the obvious factor of him getting the short-stick in life (to say the least). through neglect, abuse and social outcast he has become a cynic. life has fucked him over so badly he cannot fathom believing that something omniscient and omnipresent would cause him such pain and give no proof that it exists. this is why he takes on a much more anti-religion viewpoint than ruan (who is just agnostic due to not seeing it as a priority). this creates two layers of separation from his ability to reconnect with his culture. not all uyghurs are muslim of course, but i'm sure most people know that being an atheist in a family of heavily religious people will make you even more of a black sheep than you already probably are. baihu doesn't feel connected with any culture. he feels like a person from nowhere, constantly drifting. yet another reason why baihu feels more connected to machines than people.

this is all projected self-hatred of course. he hates culture and religion because he feels like he can never be a part of it.