A note on Drone Commander Politics, Values and Story Telling

A classic mistake in modern media especially is for writers and directors after injecting their politics into the franchise and to 'Speak The Truth' , is to tell the fans don't like it, "then they are dumb for following in the first place."

I'm an average person, as I grow up my opinions change, they don't always 'evolve', sometimes they go back to where they started. That's life, so what are the chances that my opinions today are all correct? Pretty low, maybe 0%

A good writer acknowledges that to make a good story, they need to get out of their own head and take inspiration from the world. Some of the best writing, is an impartial (but passionate) commentary of the world as it is, including the fear expressed by different sides; one such example is with Legends of the Galactic Heroes. The story telling and Nuance places it as a cornerstone of Japanese media culture.

If you want a different non-Anime example, then Game of Thrones or even Lord of the Rings (to an extend), both present commentaries reflecting history from different points of view. In fact, the 'noble and righteous' didn't always succeed...for the most part, they lost.

However, all of that said - my personal approach is to go beyond this, it would be silly to directly map Neph is a fascist, Morrigan a communist and Fel a freedom loving westerner. Whilst these ideologies may appear in the game, we're dealing with aliens here - values don't directly map one to one.

That said, Fel is highly compatible with Straker, precisely because they share a few overlapping values of "doing the right thing", Classic WW2 western thinking of 'lets build a united team', so "everyone can play their part." Fight for your Freedom and so on.
YET, they differ drastically in other areas, precisely, rights of Men; even Fel struggles to accept the high level of autonomy that all human males have.

Another huge one is the right to suicide, because humans haven't struggled with Gene-Engineering limitations yet, so none of our politics is ready for that.

So I need a new approach rather than just copying what works. My goal is to remove myself from the writing as much as possible, I consider myself a student of Writing and Game Theory, I've written a few books and made a few games; but more importantly, I read a lot and study a lot. I try to look for recipes which make great plot mechanics but I also experiment and synthesise new recipes; then bounce it off the Patreons for feedback; we want to build a strong, memorable lore here.

So the answer is, there isn't "No politics" in the game, but there isn't "my Politics either", there is just lots of politics, death and taxes. It's messy, as you'd expect, there will be new types of Politics that might be a Mashup of ones we know, some exotic unrelatable alien ones but also some familiar ones.

Ultimately though, in some cases it might not matter, as it will be the individuals that matter, in other cases like the Vionites it will be the total opposite.

We want depth, realism and intrigue.