CK2 AtE is more fun to be frank, the Reagan reference just seems to be just that, a reference, since Reagan was governor of California and whatnot, and the guy's even brown if you have the appropriate face DLC. The Sayyids almost never take over when controlled by AI anyways, and they have a heresy that's less syncretic with Ceticism (the California hippie-shinto-new age religion) and more Shia-traditionalist. The Sayyid start is fine since there's basically zero muzzies outside of Chicago (Which is owned by a Catholic duchess at the start) and Guyana (Which has a good chance of being conquered by Brazil or the Hindu 'jeets) and provides a nice challenge of conquering California and then the wider West Coast.
Well yes, I consider CK2
anything to be more fun purely on the basis that the game they're mods of is far deeper & more feature-complete than CK3.
I'd be more inclined to give the Reagan thing the benefit of the doubt if I didn't remember how pervasive and extreme the devs' liberalism could get (for one I 100% remember that the old tranny head dev, 9KBits, shilled hard for BLM and tranny causes when he was still active). Superficially, Ronald Carmine himself doesn't even seem like a bad guy based on his traits. But the lore still dictates that his dad took SoCal from the Abbas (Sayyid dynasty) via a coup where he kills his own sister and baby nephew, and unless he cucks out in his response to Zakariyya Abbas revealing this crime (either letting a hostile rival claimant live or outright abdicating his throne in guilt) he loses his most positive trait (Honest), so yeah. That the Carmines are 'brown' is nothing special since it's the default GFX for the entire Angeleno culture to which they belong (and their ancestor, Vivianne Flowers, is also 'brown' both in ATE and JATE).
My contention is that the Abbases shouldn't be in the mod to begin with, at least not in the ridiculously outsized role they have. For starters, Orange County being their home base doesn't make a whole lot of sense: it doesn't have the largest Islamic population in California even today (~100,000 compared to ~500,000 in LA and ~250,000 in the Bay Area), and that number was surely smaller still around 2000 when the apocalyptic Event happened (according to JATE, since founder Zakariyya was canonically alive to have witnessed it). As far as I can tell, the only reason they're from that part of California is that Sayyid (the creator) is too which, yeah, not exactly beating the idealized self-insert allegations there.
And secondly, I think the Mary Sueishness is really fucking obvious when theirs is a dynasty that has lasted 600 years in the male line, ruled the Kingdom of SoCal (a huge area stretching from LA/San Diego to Las Vegas) for like 570 out of those 600 years (Carmines only took over a generation prior to the start of ATE) and their specific form of Islam is pretty much an American liberal's fantasy of the religion, being far nicer and more tolerant than actual forms of Islam (ironically represented as heresies - actual Shi'ism being the Alawiyya heresy of wholesome 100 Californian Islam you mention, and real Sunnism being the Salafist heresy of the other main Islamic sect, 'Unitarian', whose lore explicitly describes it as somehow American Shias and Sunnis putting aside their 'minor' differences to unite against the rest of America lmao).
No other dynasty gets to rule that benevolently & prosperously for that long over the same chunk of territory, certainly not in California.
And yes, as said, they do have a heresy that's more like actual Shia Islam (as practiced by say, Hezbollah and the Iranian mullahs IRL) and aren't house niggers for the Cetic Emperor. The same is true of Californian Christians, they have both a sect that are the Cetics' Christian-flavored house niggers (Nazarene) and a more based one that isn't (True Cross, a heresy of Nazarene much as Alawiyya is a heresy of Imamite at game start). But I don't complain about that because at no point are any Christian Californian dynasties obviously marked out as a dev's GMPC and given the Mary Sue treatment as the Abbases are, in fact they're very few in number and don't have any significant history IIRC (I know there's an Orthodox Nazarene in Redding, and Salma Hayek's future reincarnation is the Countess of Joshua Tree who is a marriage option for the 2666 Zakariyya Abbas - add another strike to the Mary Sue column).
In fact, looking into the history files, Californian Christianity in general has had far less impact on the region than the Imamites' super speshul brand of Islam as well. They never even unify any of the four component kingdoms of California - Jefferson, Gran Francisco, the Valley and SoCal - for long like the Abbases did SoCal or the Romano-Humanist (Reddit atheists) Aureuses do for Gran Fran. The closest they get is when Joseph Gonzalez 'the Shepherd' briefly unites the Valley and he's Sagrado Corazon (ATE)/La Hermandad (JATE), which is to say, Cult of Saints rather than Christian mechanically (also, guess fucking who kills him and destroys his kingdom...yet another Abbas Imam of SoCal). Rather ridiculous considering how many Christians there still are in California, even today, compared to Muslims.
