It sounds cool as hell, which I don’t think was the intention Western media had.

Doc Ock also called his reactor an artificial sun so I guess it’s to invoke a negative emotion although it just makes it sound even cooler.

It’s not just western media. Official chinese media call it an artificial sun too. I suppose for chinese people, it’s just a cool sensationalized headline, but for westerners it’s scary sci-fi mr. Burns shit

They know their readers have no idea what the name refers to and probably are just reading the headline + first paragraph if anything past that.

Western reactors are called that too by the media I thought