Tollan

They’re the Acuity culture, and modeled after Atatürk’s Turkey and Mesoamerica. I knew right away that I wanted to use the colors turquoise and jade. To me, knots bring to mind intelligence, which is what I was going for. In particular, I was inspired by grid diagrams. This particular knot is the trefoil.

Kimvuka

The Ginen Union, or Kimvuka, is based off of the European Union and central African cultures. I went with this “space between four circles” shape since I felt it looked very modern, since the union was so new. The oval motif serves a similar purpose. I chose 24 lozenges since there are 24 member states. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use some of the pan-African colors. I decided against red since communism is so important to the setting, and green had already been used on lots of other flags, so I went with black and yellow. Originally, I had black lozenges on a yellow field, but my brothers convinced me to switch it.

Erset

Erset is based off of a few things; I wanted a power that used to be subordinate to another (Kamiaka) before they decided to do their own thing, I wanted a country to have left the GU, Brexit-style. I wanted a country that was diverse like Ys, but without the resentment. Stylistically, the country is like Egypt. Since Kamiaka’s flag has the yellow five pointed star on a red field, I wanted to do something different. The tricolor is basically arbitrary.

Ys

I wanted Ys to feel very European. They were the bad guys in the world war, so I imagine that they had to use a simpler flag as a part of their punishment. It’s vertical since there’s not much wind in Ys.

Kamiaka

Old flag

Kamiaka is a democracy where the monarch were defeated by a coalition of the communists and the church. I’m thinking the church’s color is saffron, blue represents the ocean, and white the king. Kamiaka started out as an India and Soviet Union mash up, but my desire to explore democracy, the religious right, and a “strange bedfellows” situation lead to me toning the Soviet influences down.

Merope

Merope was envisioned as a profoundly corrupt and incompetent state that’s only able to survive due to its excessively large military and vast reserves of natural resources. It’s ideology is based off of Scientology, Protestant Work Ethic-ology, and environmentalism (mostly to contrast it with their incredibly destructive minig habits), it’s geography and wildlife are, for the most part, Australian. Since they were so incompetent, I intentionally broke some rules of flag design; the flag is square, the red and green look the same in greyscale, and it has text. The particular text is a transliteration of the Welsh word “Ffynnwn” (’thriving’) into George Bernard Shaw’s invented alphabet. Using an invented alphabet feels like a totalitarian thing to do, and “thriving” is 1) an almost meaningless platitude and 2) false, since their destructive mining and agricultural practices, and their heavy investment into the military has lowered the citizens’ quality of life immensely.

Itoda

Itoda is culturally and religiously very similar to Kamiaka. However, they are a confederation of de jure military dictatorships, but de facto monarchies (except for one, which is a theocracy instead). Since saffron symbolized the religion, I decided to use a lot of it. I thought that my designs were too angular, so I used a white circle. Let’s say it represents the full moon, which is a major spirit in the religion.