Hey! I just found your account and I really like your art and the characters! Could I juts get a story recap though? I understand that Venice has kinda tuned into a zombie and I'm gonna assume that's is cuz of the unification? Like all the states merging into one has gotta be tough and Gilbert said that it had happened to Ludwig just not as bad. I'm assuming that he meant when Germany unified Ludwig went through something similar? I might be able of lmao, I think it's really cool I just want to o make sure I haven't missed extreme lore points!
Hi and thank you for your interest in the story!
Actually you got everything right - this story takes place in the mid-19th century after the unification of Italy and Germany in the 1860s and 1870s.
Originally, the representative of Piedmont, a woman named Cassandra, was supposed to become the representative of Italy. During her fusions with the other states she essentially has reduced her family to just five people (from previously around twenty-ish). One of her last attempts at fusion went wrong, and both her and Feliciano died.
But since you are asking I will go a bit more in-depth!
In my story-world the physical body of a people is just a tether, so the representative can die or disappear for years and it technically won't affect the country. They can randomly re-appear years later, change their appearance completely, and hell they technically don't even have to be human. A nation rep could tie itself even to multiple people, transfer itself to an animal body, a tree, the possibilities are pretty much infinite. If enough people believe that the people's spirit is part of the local mountain range, there might be a particularly long-lived wild goat somewhere up there. Their consciousness can also be shared by multiple entities, multiple people even, and can shift and fade away at random. Ultimately they are generally kind of random and somewhat spirit-like, and hard to pin down. They're creatures made of soil and mud and the collective spirit of a group of people who live in community with one another.
However, the government and the people read a lot into this and having a proper representation is expected and a sign of stability and power. That's why in regions with organized governments, borders and enforced national identities, the representative will usually be a young, idealized version of a human with the physical characteristics that people associate with their ancestors.
Hence, a nation not having a proper, singular, humanoid representative, even just temporarily, is a PR nightmare. Having the wrong kind of representative is seen as a lack of control over the country. Governments are incentivized to micromanage their representatives' looks, mannerisms, gender expression, and language.
However, as soon as humans start messing with this, trying to artificially create the perfect representation, things can become ... weird. That's how you get frankensteinean patchworks of what might be a human but it really doesn't want to be.
With this added info I hope you can see why Feli's - and to a lesser degree Ludwig's - current state is a huge problem.
