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June 12, 2013
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Commentary for June 12, 2013: Readers of Eon's Comic may recognise Merlin, leader of the Jovian resistance, and his comrades, General Caradoc and Elizabeth Wildman. As high ranking members of the Jovian resistance and, subsequently, the Jupiter Alliance's government, they were bound to show up again. As for Raphael Marcellino, I came very close to throwing in a bunch of gratuitous Italian in his dialogue, after the fashion of Ezio Auditore da Firenze from Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations, but I felt that I didn't have the balance right. In any case, Marcellino is a member of the United Earth Council, which is the lower chamber in the United Earth Parliament -- comparable to the House of Representatives in the United States government of the real world -- and he represents the Earth state of Italia. In case you're wondering (and I'm sure you are), the flag pin he is wearing is the flag of Italia, which is based on the flag of the real world Italy. Addendum for October 3, 2019: In order to bring the format of the earlier chapters into line with Chapter 7 onwards, I’ve made an updated version of this page, which is larger, with clearer text. Hopefully, this will make the earlier chapters easier to read. I also made a substantial change to Marcellino’s speech here. Originally, Marcellino was a much more progressive, leftist candidate, with a strong emphasis on social justice and redistributive economics. His original speech could have been something a Jeremy Corbyn, a Bernie Sanders, or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might have said -- in other words, something I’d mostly agree with. He was to be the forlorn voice of democratic socialism, without a prayer of winning against the liberal and conservative candidates. At the time, I planned to write a much more involved political story surrounding the election and the candidates. When the liberal candidate would go on to win the election, she would approach Marcellino and invite him to join her cabinet, promising to adopt some of his policies (like a universal basic income) in exchange for the socialists voting with the liberals in order to neutralise the conservative vote in Parliament -- kind of an inversion of the UK’s coalition government at the time, where liberals, rather than siding with conservatives for a taste of power, would side with socialists for the greater good of society. That kind of story may have worked in Eon’s Comic, where 36 panels went online every week, so a lot more story could be told in a short space of time. But I soon realised that a West Wing style political drama was never going to work in this comic, and all this information was relegated to the background, where only I would ever know about it. So Marcellino’s original speech was setting Eon’s World up for a story that was never going to happen, which would have made it seem like the candidate who wins the election is a moderate centrist. That wasn’t what I wanted, but without telling a more involved story, how would anyone know? So I changed it. I re-wrote this scene to re-cast Marcellino as the moderate centrist, the one decrying the left/right dichotomy as extremist, and talking about building the middle class and supporting working families, while very pointedly not talking about the unemployed, the disabled, or the harms of capitalism to society in general. I figured this is in line with how I’ve recast the Social Democrats for Eon’s World Vol. 1. They are the Democratic Party, Labour under Tony Blair, or the Liberal Democrats. They’re not as bad as the Conservatives and they offer some pleasant overtures to the working poor; but they do little to address the root causes of economic injustice, because they are ultimately still capitalists. This is also part of why I tweaked Mister Crag’s dialogue in Chapter 1, to have him name drop Sally Acorn as the unambiguously leftist candidate. In this way, I hope I’ve simplified the politics at this election, leaving no doubt that it is (spoilers), ultimately the most progressive candidate who wins the election, paving the way for a better society that is dismantling capitalism in favour of a better economic model to take the Terran Union into the future. |
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Eon's World is a fan comic created by Bethany Turner. All characters are copyright
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