Do you have any recommendations?

Use Affinity Publisher, Photo, and Designer instead. Looks like it’s USD $165 for a universal license at the moment. Very few of the more exclusive features Adobe provides are worth the cost of doing business with them. The only thing I missed at first is Photoshop’s timeline, but apps like Krita or Aseprite (if pixel art is your jam) have that covered.

Edit to add: one great feature of Affinity is that, if you have Publisher and at least one of the other apps, Publisher will unify the workflows of the others into the same screen. In other words, you can switch between Publisher, Designer, and Photo without minimizing or opening the other apps individually.

Art and design, regardless of medium, need not be gatekept by corporate goons to stuff greedy pockets.

Would “incognizant” fit the bill? Or, perhaps, the XY Problem?

Yes, so don’t be lookin’ at its quack

Lots of great suggestions involving story craft and the like, so I’ll target the “religious hangups” bit with a couple non-fiction books:

• Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey (great to get a perspective on consciousness and sentience that isn’t marred with religious doctrine)

• Determined by Robert Sapolsky (a primatologist with a knack for getting you comfortable with the notion that we don’t have as free a will as religion tells us)

And just to include a bit of fiction:

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (about life as we know it, or maybe as we don’t)

• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (deals with overwritten cultures. Also dragons.)