Kratos wrote:Regarding Unicorn's ending, it fits better than you might think, and you don't even have to get all cynical and say "it had no effect at all in the end."
As noted by Amion, the one major political change made clear across F91 and Victory is that the Federation has a greatly weakened/diminished presence in space, allowing the antagonistic forces of those stories to gain power unchecked. How does that relate to Unicorn's ending? Well, in that ending, it's revealed to the world as a whole that the Federation has been knowingly suppressing legislation from the space settlements that would have given them significantly greater say in their own governance. It's entirely believable that the Federation would have been under a lot of pressure to decrease their military presence and puppet governing among the colonies if asked to, that their exhausted state would have prevented them from keeping their old position by force, and that more and more colonies would jump on that train as time went on.
Is it a retcon? Sure. Prior to Unicorn, that just kinda happened as time went on and an exhausted Federation couldn't keep as tight a hold on matters in space. Unicorn's ending is very similar to 0083's, in that it provides an explanation to something that had already been sufficiently explained (albeit less directly). But to call it a contradiction - or even inconsequential - isn't really accurate either, I think.
To add to what both Amion and Kratos brought up, it's easy to see how the conflicts in later UC not only aren't contradicted by what happens in Unicorn, but can plausibly *emerge* out of those events. While Laplace's box doesn't directly cause any change of policy that we know of, it probably changes fundamentally the discourse of political philosophy and political theory between Earth and Space going forth by giving credibility to both the notion of spacenoid evolution (which can dangerously err into a belief about spacenoid superiority, which I will fondly dub henceforth as space darwinism) AND spacenoid independence. In other words, it's plausible that the release of Laplace's box has an active hand in creating the conflicts we see later on in F91, not only by potentially weakening the political credibility of the Federation's dominion over the colonies, but in helping lay the ideological groundwork that would enable the rise of a space aristocracy which legitimizes itself on a belief of tribal and even racial superiority.
