Thanks and shoutout to AKAM80 and Spoddetman for letting me adopt details and concepts from their entries into the Titan Clash Canon Project ^w^ namely "Front Row" and "Reverence/Revulsion".
After "Phillip's Plain", I shifted my focus onto what the other authors had created so far, and tiny bits here and there made me think. Since this is a Canon, I felt it would be interesting to establish more links between other entries. Hence, this entry here is not meant to do a whole lot of additional worldbuilding but is meant to… accentuate.
Titan Clash is an immensely hopeless world so far, and especially after reading Maxyfran73's great "Staring At A Blank Sky", I felt the need to ram in one beacon of hope. Since Europa - my home - hadn't been expanded upon so far, I decided to make this continent a true democracy.
However, in a world where corruption and despair run wild, there's hardly a way this does not affect even the most steadfast democrats and leaders. Ultimately, this is a short piece about what goes through the mind of a well-intentioned politician - yes that's a thing :D - when he faces that world.
I have been active in politics for a while and so I tried to present this agony as accurately as possible. Of course, there's also a reflection of the Ukraine-Russia war in there, which has shaken my continent immensely. And the questions of this story are not so different from the ones in this fictional war. Perhaps this lends additional context to the whole piece since it does not feature Kaiju as prominently as some other entries.
Fun-Facts:
- The former EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker slapped Prime Minister Victor Orbán of Hungary in the face in front of the press at a conference once, calling him a dictator due to his increasingly autocratic policies.
- The quote in the text originated from the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who insulted the President of the Bundestag (parliament) over a fuzz in the chamber back during the cold war. It's one of the most well-known quotes in politics in Germany.
[The picture used in the story was created by myself and released under CC-BY-SA 3.0.]