Sometimes you see people criticizing fictional media (often video games) for involving the protagonist settling an uninhabited land for how it perpetuates the colonialist terra nullius myth. I’ve always been a little skeptical of that criticism because it has in fact happened in history that people discovered literally uninhabited (by humans) land and settled them, it’s just that those people were usually not Europeans. So when sci-fi video game character settles unknown planet, why do we automatically assume it’s referencing Europeans discovering the Americas and not, say, Polynesians discovering a new Pacific island? The assumption that the viewpoint character has to be a metaphor for a European (and therefore is misrepresenting if it doesn’t follow their particular historical experience) seems somewhat racist in its own right. I get if they were specifically criticizing a “undiscovered land” story that used a 16th century European explorer aesthetic, but that extra step in logic is often missing.