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? |
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