The problem with this comic isn’t politics. Any story can have political messages, or have politics as its main through-line, and be perfectly fine. I think the main problem is what the author is prioritizing in of storytelling. The author is prioritizing worldbuilding way too much.
Worldbuilding is a neat tool in an author’s arsenal. It can heavily supplement the quality of a story by allowing the audience to sort of ‘read into’ the story on a deeper level. When it feels like your story takes place in a world that could possibly be real, it stimulates the imagination and allows the readers to do some of the work of making your story better using their own brains.
However, there are things MORE important to a story than worldbuilding. I think the biggest thing holding this work back is the characters. Right now, they are barely more than just walking tropes. You got the Nervous Rookie, the Experienced Nerd, the Stern Ground Commander, the Zen Black Guy, Bubbly Girl, and whatever the griffon is supposed to be (he could be dropped from the story without much of a splash, which is bad). It’s fine to use those character templates of course, but you need to build on them.
The most we’ve gotten for each main character on the roster is the most basic setup for them. Concorde is arguably the main protagonist, and they’ve received the most attention so far, which isn’t much. I don’t know what they’re going to learn or accomplish, or what’s at stake if they fail. I don’t even know their hobbies, what their aspirations are outside of just their career, or what makes them special aside from taking a space cadet class once. This basically applies to every other single focal character. Think about the fact that you could replace them with any other set of characters, and the story would be basically the same (aside from new characters just expositing different backstories in service of the worldbuilding). That is not a good sign.
Characters are the lenses through which people see the world. So if the characters and their stories aren’t strong, we have no reason to care about the world. So I think when people complain that there’s “too much politics”, they’re really complaining that the story is focusing on the world rather than on the characters. I think if we let the world take a back seat and focused better on developing the characters, you could drop in worldbuilding and have less be more in that regard, WHILE still having a stronger core story.
And if the idea is to develop the characters later, then you’re just artificially limiting how much your characters can grow in that span of time. If I had to guess, we’re near the end of the first act. By now, much stronger works would have much stronger characters, but we have blown about 70% of these pages just… expositing.
“People like this” Buddy, if you can’t handle being criticized for saying something stupid or for badly interpreting a story… that’s a problem that lies solely with you and not anybody else in the room. I suggest going offline and taking some time to reflect.
Good sir/ma’am/whoever… not sure what pronouns or gender you use to identify but that’s besides the point, you understand that this story about space exploration and the necessity of it as a whole is inherently political because it decides who does or doesn’t benefit from it, who does or doesn’t have jurisdiction in space and about how it forces not just the EASA but any other potential organizations (even if not explicitly mentioned) to make decisions how they’ll collectively share resources, right?
If you do, then why are you saying “UwU no politics please” on an inherently political story that could very easily to ignore and not read? Make it make sense to me.
I actually beefed the transcription on the second line of that sign and missed two whole words: “Ua pani ʻia ka wahi ma muli o ka ʻāina i hāʻawi ʻole ʻia” (on top of a few vowels . As a result the message is now unrecoverable, and the original meaning (“Site closed due to unceded land”) ended up a little garbled by Google Translate anyway (“the site is closed due to land not being allocated”). I didn’t seek out help with the Hawaiian translation (though I did get help for the Hangul side of things actually), which would have been the right thing to do, especially for such a long and abstract sentence. I figured it would be okay if it was imperfect since it’s such a tiny detail in the grand scheme of things, but then I went and goofed it and now it’s a whole thing.
The point is it’s a protest sign against a construction on contested indigenous land, in an indigenous language, made to use the writing system of their colonisers. My apologies for mes the details.
@Dogman15
It looks to be Hawaiian written in Hangul, my working transliteration so far is
`a ’ohe mea nona ka lani
ua pani ’ia ma muli o ka ‘aena i ha’awi ’olae ’ia
The significance being that it’s probably in reference to the observatory built on a Hawaiian sacred mountain
“People like you” not “People like this”. But as you said, it’s the Internet and you can’t expect people to know how to read. XD
Go back and read 6 again until you get it.
Edited
I’ve read Sunjackers but it’s dystopian Cyberpunk. So I kinda expected that.
Have you just, never read any of the author’s previous works? Buddy it’s politics all the way down.
Do you want to update the image?
According to Google Translate, it translates to:
“And there is no one who owns the sky
It was closed due to the location that was provided”
It looks to be Hawaiian written in Hangul, my working transliteration so far is
`a ’ohe mea nona ka lani
ua pani ’ia ma muli o ka ‘aena i ha’awi ’olae ’ia
Edited because: Extra context
Edited