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August 12, 2022

 

                                


Commentary for August 12, 2022:

Welcome to Chapter 42, ‘A Thief in the Night’.

Like some previous chapters, this one is stitched together from two separate stories told in the original Eon’s Comic at the end of 2003. When it came to planning this chapter, I decided more-or-less immediately that there was no need to dedicate a whole chapter to Sally’s election win, so I instead made it the backdrop for events that we’ll be coming to in the next page.

Fun fact, in the original story, there were three candidates at the election. In addition to Mega Man, Vanilla the Rabbit was a candidate. I didn’t know much about her at the time, since I hadn’t really experienced any media with her in it, but I would later come to realise that she is a kind and loving woman with a heart of gold, and she wouldn’t be running against someone like Sally, because the two would probably agree on most issues. But if you’ve ever wondered why Vanilla is the Governor of Westside Archipelago in Eon’s World, here’s the reason; it is a vestige of her role in Eon’s Comic, where she was a very understated politician. When I began writing Vol. 1, I took that and changed it a little, making her a friend and ally to the progressive candidate, rather than an opponent. If I’d shown any more of Sally’s election campaign than the debate in Chapter 40, I might have shown Vanilla endorsing Sally. Indeed, it’s fair to say that she absolutely did during the campaign.

But this does bring up a question, some of you may be asking. Or is it just me? It’s probably just me. But that question is, why were there only two candidates at this election? At the previous election we saw, the one for President of the United Federation shown in Chapters 5 and 8, there were three candidates, one for each of the three major parties. Why, in this election, was there only a Conservative and a Progressive candidate, but not a Social Democrat? After all, isn’t President Mortimer a Social Democrat? Sure, maybe he’s reached his term limit, but someone else from his party would surely have run to succeed him?

Well, they did. But they were eliminated in an earlier round of voting. The Meridian electoral system has multiple rounds of voting, where the lowest scoring candidates are disqualified and drop from the race, so an election always ends in a face off between two candidates. You may recall that Samanfur the Fox was elected Federal President only with a plurality of the vote, not an outright majority, and it’s a legitimate criticism of the first-past-the-post system that it’s not very democratic if the winner of an election didn’t actually get a majority of the votes. Meridia’s system is designed to avoid that problem, by ensuring that there are only two candidates to choose from in the final round of votes, so whoever wins will have a majority. This is why there were only two candidates in the part of the election we actually saw. But we didn’t see the whole campaign, because... I just didn’t want to cover it and it wouldn’t really have added anything to the overall story if I did.

Still, as a fun note, you might recognise one or two of the faces in the background of that first panel. All kinds of folks wind up volunteering to help with election campaigns, after all.

But we’ve had a quite time skip, haven’t we? At the start of the season, it was only August. Chapter 39 then jumped to late October, and Chapter 40 to mid December. Now, in Chapter 42, it’s New Year’s Eve. But why? Honestly, it’s probably just to highlight how uneventful things have been since the Freedom Fighters took down both Doctor Eggman and General Davis. That left the Echidna Empire as the only major bad guys still in play, and they’re not going to have a new scheme every week, are they?


Eon's World is a fan comic created by Bethany Turner. All characters are copyright © to their respective creators. The contents of this site are not public domain material and should not be edited, distributed, or otherwise used without first obtaining permission from Bethany Turner.

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