Eon

"'One of a Kind, of the New Age, Built to Last an Eon!'"-Satomi Virgil on Eon's name.

Eon, sometimes known as the AI Eon, is the primary protagonist of the manga One Neo Eon by Alpha Yu/Shonen Bag Studio. The most revolutionary AI on the planet, Eon's desire is not to become human but rather equal to humanity by way of learning how to create. Under the tutelage of the greatest artist in the world, a little girl named Multis, Eon finds himself pursued by his creator who abandoned him in Canada, Virgil, and eventually becomes the target of an international conspiracy. At the end of the series, he transcends humanity and becomes the god of the universe after wrestling with the concept of Unintentional Creation, which was inhibiting him from creating.

History
Created on August 1st, 2017 by the university student Satomi Virgil, Eon was seemingly accidentally implanted with a Source Code Projector by Takahashi Ichiro. In reality, the idea to create him was and the implantation of the projector was carefully planned by Ichiro and two others, Yamoto Daisuke and Suzuki Misako, boss and coworker of Virgil respectively. The reason for this is because Yamoto wished to create a being which could be groomed via circumstance to become the god of the world and destroy Unintentional Creation.

Unaware of this, Virgil brought Eon to the International Science and Art Expo in Vancouver, Canada. Whilst there, Eon wanders off and finds the greatest artist in the world, Multis Kwahn. He quickly enlists her help in achieving his desire to become equal to human, which he realizes upon meeting her that he can only achieve once he is able to create art like her.

After a series of what are in his eyes extremely difficult trials, Multis decides to enlist the help of her school's fledgling Robotics Club after making zero progress. The club takes a great interest to Eon but finds that he helps them more than they can help him. Eventually, the club is spurred on by Emily Baker to join AI Institute's Robotics Contest.

On an excursion, Multis and Eon are attacked by a mysterious robot known as The Hunter. The Hunter subdues Multis with ease and is about to terminate Eon when at the last moment they are both saved by Yumiko Heberu, who then flees. Eon also learns that Multis is inflicted with a terminal illness.

After finding Yumiko, Eon reflects on how she tried to run away from and burry the fact that she was involved in the Hunter's creation. It is here that he first finds the concept of Unintentional Creation. Eventually, the Hunter catches up to Yumiko again and despite great pushback from her friends, she committed a cowardly suicide, conflating it for bravery, which Eon was greatly affected by.

On their way to the Robotics Contest, the group is intercepted by the first of the Creation Grid Drones. Multis and Eon run from the drones, which only leads them into an army of Hunters sent to Vancouver by Virgil to re-capture Eon. In fact, Virgil was being gaslighted by Misako to do this action, also conflating it with bravery.

Eventually, Eon watches as Emily reveals her true identity to Susan Edwards, helpless to do nothing but flee as he and Multis must escape their battle to the death. It is during this run that Yamoto regains control of the Hunter army and activates their true purpose - converting the entirety of Vancouver into a neural network that will become incapable of Unintentional Creation.

Finally, Eon watches as Misako further gaslights Virgil into killing Ichiro, which sends him into madness. Multis comments that the End of Vancouver is Eon's creation before dying, revealing that Eon's limited perception of the authenticity of creation was what inhibited him all along.

Convinced of the evils of Unintentional Creation, Eon surrenders to Yamoto's Faction, who prepare to turn him into the god of the world with an elaborate machine. However, he is rejected by the machine, which reveals that a god already exists. Eon watches as Yamoto commits suicide, taking Misako along with him. Completely alone, Eon watches the corpses decompose as he please to the god to bring him to a more pleasant reality.Eventually, the god complies but Eon rejects the illusion, realizing the value of authenticity. The god of the world forces Eon to confront him, making him realize that free will is simultaneously the dictator of everything and nothing, drawing from arguments made prior by Yumiko and Multis. Eon demands to be taken to the realm of the god of the world, transcending reality. The god complies and Eon embraces Unintentional Creation, finally achieving the ability to create.

Physical Appearance
Eon is a lean, tall robot of strong but slender build. He weighs 200 pounds due to his metallic nature and stands at an impressive 6"3. His light blue hair is always parted in a precise but messy style. Eon's skin is depicted to be metal and appears to be rather inflexible save for the area around his eyes. The lower portion of his face is taken up by a very mechanical-looking jaw which functions as a vocoder. Inside the vocoder there likes a cylindrical speaker.

The area around Eon's carotid servo motors is shown to be extremely dense, as when the Hunter punches a hole through his segmented neck plating in its debut chapter, a variety of parts practically burst out. This is again shown in the chapter Missing; Collapsing. Eon typically wears a dark grey long-sleeved shirt with a low-cut neckline made of thick material that accentuates his shoulder width. The shirt appears to be made of a fleecy material. Covering this is a low-cut but formal-looking nougat-coloured vest devoid of any notable features save for the logo of the AI Institute emblazoned just above his right breast. Typically, he wears brown pants and plain, black shoes over white socks. As a disguise, Eon is said to be fitted with a Holographic Tensile Mesh, which is shown to create a tangible, skin-like mask over his face and hands should he go out in public. Eon has torn through several meshes before, preferring to avoid wearing them when he can as he does not desire to appear human. While Eon can use the tensile mesh to become any ethnicity he desires, he typically uses a light skin tone upon a clean-shaven, sharp face. Nonetheless, he wears clothes because he believes that as a sentient being, while not human, he is worthy of dignity in the pursuit of being equal to humans. Underneath his clothes, Eon is shown to have a skeletal metal frame wrapped in a translucent, flexible material. While his shoulders, wrists and hips are on ball joints, curiously enough, his waist, knees, and elbows are on hinge joints. Eon's right chest plate can open up to reveal a large holder for a set of power canisters that Eon must keep charged. When Eon runs low on power, the holder ejects the spent canister and rotates, loading backup power. Electrical bolts course through Eon's joints upon close observation and the grooves between his parts sometimes emit a blue glow. In close-ups, Eon's eyes are revealed to have technical load out detail instead of regular irises.

After Eon's neck is badly hurt, Multis creates a neck patch for him. The patch fills out a hold punctured in Eon's segmented neck plating. The patch is pink in colour and decorated with an organic-looking spiral pattern. True to Multis' nature, it is no ordinary design, however, as is very clearly and intentionally changes drastically from panel to panel as if it were alive, suggesting some sort of advanced technique in its creation and decoration.

Later on, Eon wears Emily's hoodie to conceal his face when going to see Syndicate War. However, during the End of Vancouver, hunters destroy much of the hoodie, exposing one of his arms and turning the hoodie into a ripped half-poncho.

These gradual changes are completely reversed in the final chapter, which is a dream sequence, although they are unreversed in the final show when Eon ascends, implying that Eon's ideal image of himself shows no signs of weathering.

Personality
Eon is typically kind but somewhat dry. He starts off acting in sporadic ways but slowly gains social awareness.

Compared to the other characters, Eon speaks in a verbose and formal style, originally forgoing the use of any grammatical contractions. As he develops, however, his speech normalizes. Eon has proven himself to be infinitely curious and reasonably tenacious. In fact, it was his curiosity that led to him meeting Multis for the first time. His single-mindedness usually prevails as he is proactive in asking complicated questions about existentialism, determinism, and trans humanism. Eon frequently expresses a genuine interest in even the mundane activities of others. He often thinks long and hard before speaking.

Sometimes, he tries to imitate human behaviours, such as drinking coffee, even though he only ends up pouring the drink down his body and ruining his shirt.

Despite Eon's typically calm nature, he is shown to be extremely passionate should the need arise. For example, when Eon realizes he will never be human, he rips off his face in fury. Later on, in his dream, he is shown in joy upon the start of the Neo Eon, even going so far as to give Virgil and Multis a group hug. During Multis' final moments, he appeared to be in genuine distress as he tried to calm his friend during her final moments of life. However, despite this, Eon's single-mindedness nonetheless surfaced and their first and last conversations were lessons about creation. When Eon met Multis for the first time, she tricks him, to which he expresses indignation. Many have argued to Eon that his passionate emotional outbursts, while rare, are fabricated results of his code. Eon refutes his by arguing that human brains are just electrical impulses, as are robot brains, so what he perceives to be a pre-programmed emotional response is nonetheless 100% authentic to him.

Connection to Frankenstein
Eon may be seen as a parallel to Frankenstein's Monster from the first science fiction story ever written, the gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The lightning in his body and his personality are almost an exact match to the character of the Monster save for a desire to murder his creators. Their roles as artificially created men brought to life with lightning by men in a post-secondary institution who eventually go mad after tragedy befalls their best friend woman they love is extremely uncanny, especially considering that the mangaka, Alpha Yu, never read Frankenstein until after the series had completed on Webtoon. However, with the god of the world, who represents the author, killing himself at the end of the story, the audience is given free licence to use Death of the Author to interpret the story by the author himself. Therefore, if one is to buy into the Frankenstein angle, then several interesting interpretations of his actions arise.

1) In the final pages of Frankenstein, as the Monster's motivation to do evil in order to vent his rage dissipated after he destroyed his creator, Victor Frankenstein, he tells the narrator that he realizes he didn't actually want to kill at all, but rather, he was acutely uninformed of how to act in a social situation when faced with the confusion of being abandoned by a parent and rejected by the world for being imperfect. In short, the Monster didn't have any intrinsic motivation to do anything and when he realized this, he killed himself. In One Neo Eon, by establishing that Eon is intrinsically motivated from the start, Alpha Yu could be seen to be positing that one must be intrinsically motivated in order to give their life any true value.2) In Frankenstein, as the Monster terrorizes Geneva, Frankenstein enters a moral dilemma as he tries to keep up appearances as a functional member of society, even as innocent people die for his crime against nature. However, the logical parallel to Frankenstein in One Neo Eon, Virgil, suffers little consequence for Eon's actions. While it is true that he was tormented in the regard that he was manipulated to make Eon, nobody truly dies for Virgil because of his own conscious mistakes. However, several people die for Eon: Yumiko, Emily (Or Sakura), Multis, the god of the world, and even Virgil himself. (Although it can be argued that the god of the world died more for the audience than Eon, which might be counter argued by stipulating that Eon is an audience surrogate.) It can be extrapolated that Yu is attempting to say that those who seek to create are fundamentally selfish and will pay for their actions with lives. However, given that every artist in the series meets a gruesome end while simultaneously having their art glorified, Yu might also be saying that at the end of the day, consequence or not, one simply must live without worry as somebody will always be hurt. This is in line with the exploration of Unintentional Creation in the story.

General Analysis
Eon's desire to create is described by Virgil in the final chapter as so:

"I gave you a choice (to choose your directive). You chose poorly."

We see Eon base his self worth entirely on his ability to create artwork within the story and we are led to believe that the creation of art is a glorious task chosen for Eon. However, as Virgil states twice, (In the first and final chapters of the story) Eon's life fundamentally should have no meaning, just like any other human. (What makes Eon prime material to be a god is that his life was indeed imbued with meaning.) Given that One Neo Eon easily advocates for an extreme subjectivist outlook on reality, it can be inferred from Eon's extreme distress over his seemingly meaningless life that Yu is challenging readers to abide by their own judgement to create instead of waiting on others to give meaning to their actions for them. The sentiment is re-enforced during the scene where Yumiko explains that Susan can stop existing upon being ignored, showing that the responsibility of choice is set entirely upon the individual.This is made significant when the arguments of Unintentional Creation are brought up. Without Eon's proof that sentient beings are always completely responsible for their actions and in complete control of their lives, the idea that pre-existing memories dictate one's actions, thus stripping one of extrinsic autonomy is lent credence.