(from Gabi Belle's video "How Dropshipping Ruined Online Shopping")
YES OMG. I went to an anime convention a few months ago and saw SO many cheap bootlegs being sold as if they were authentic items. Being an experienced collector, I have a good eye for bootlegs so it didn't affect me, but I couldn't help but think of all the people who were duped into buying a crappy $30 bootleg that they could have gotten on Aliexpress for like $2.
i desperately wish gw2 had more food-centric lore. i think about asura food more than is probably particularly reasonable. they're sort of implied to like molecular gastronomy in the lvl500 chef quests which is fitting and makes sense, but surely not every asura is eating bespoke Pea Spheres day in and day out right? i think my favorite angle on them is a sort of 50s-80s american-esque food style where there's a huge emphasis on things being Convenient and Scientific, so you'd get a lot of absolute slop tv dinners and canned items that have labels boasting how they were nutritionally fortified and contained your day's complete vitamin intakes and so on. a lot of jellied things. i do also fully believe they would have + eat soylent.