May 10, 2025
Author's Commentary #282:
Time to talk about Chapter 282: Chess' worldwide importance.
This one's a lore dump chapter, and there's a lot to talk about. And the big one is easily the state of the world thanks to the effect of the DESPERs. The fact that Germany's now the German Empire of Prussia, Russia's ruled by a tsar, and England's ruled by fairy chess fanatics probably cued many to the fact that while Earth in this universe does share some parallels with our modern day earth, there are many differences as well. However, one thing I felt I needed to address in the story was the state of Ukraine.
This is a touchy topic due to current events at the time of writing this, but since Ukraine has such a rich chess history, I felt it needed to be in the story. While I could have taken the safe route and simply decided to have the war not take place in this universe, I felt that wasn't the right way to go about it, thus I went with what I did.
The war still occurred, but it ended much faster due to the DESPERs. Ukraine does still exist though, but now has chess players as it's army in order to defend itself from Russia. As for why Grigori didn't force the Ukrainian president to cede all of Ukraine to him as part of the wager, it lies in the fact that Grigori sought to build his public image as a peacemaker, and he felt he could just slowly snip away at the land later anyway. Vesna's backstory will also be one of the darker ones in the series o fair warning on whenever it comes up again.
One other thing I'll mention before moving on to the next discussion topic is that there were many other nations I felt needed to be a part of the Chess Olympics due to either, their rich chess history and or good placement/won medals at the 45th Chess Olympiad. This is what initially drove me to make so many teams, and before I knew it, I had over 40. I doubt I'll be able to have both male and female teams for all the countries, in fact I'll confirm that the number of women's teams including Japan will not exceed 50. This is not to snub all those other teams, but rather it's just too big a task to write all those characters. Remember, each team consists of 5 members and even if you exclude the characters that have already been introduced, that's still a lot of characters to juggle. And that's just on the women's side. I've still got to write out some of the teams on the men's side. But I do think it's important to at least flesh out most of these characters as many of them will return for future arcs.
Now I'll talk more about the other nations mentioned in this chapter starting with the Neo Kingdom of Egypt. This nation came about mainly because I wanted to have an ancient Egypt-themed nation. And thanks to the DESPERs, some Egyptologists can now live their dream and rule Egypt as pharaohs. As such, this nation's characters will be more on the lighthearted side of things.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Israeli Kingdom of Simien will be much darker though. Like with Ukraine and Russia, the middle east at the time of writing this, is currently embroiled in conflict. Not wanting to mess with it, I instead decided to just revive Babylonia and have them conquer everything with robots. And in case any wonder why Babylonia has robots, blame Live A Live. To be honest, writing the key characters from these nations is easily one of the most difficult things I've attempted. These characters need to be written as close to perfect as possible otherwise the story suffers. This arc won't focus too much on these nations much, though there will be some key characters from these nations that will have major roles in this arc.
Finally, let's end things on a lighter note by talking about Mongolia. For them, I just wanted a Genghis Khan type character and after listening to way too much Mongolian folk metal, decided to go with it. There will be some interesting things to talk about in regards to Genghis Jad, but I'll save it for when he properly debuts in the story.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
