as fun as it is to imagine that Mars is the Condesce’s pet moon (hey. if Caliborn can carry his planets around in his eyeballs, what if that’s what the pink gem in the Condesce’s crown is), interpreting the text based on extratextual elements like a NASA photograph of Mars is such shaky ground… if we accept that the pink moon is Mars because it “looks like” Mars, then what does it mean when the climax reveals LOWAS is just a blue tinted moon
It might help to know what the orbs nearby are derived from… Alternia looks a bit like a grayscale Venus but I’m not sure, and I can’t get a read on the green moon at all.
Though I will say, the way Alternia’s ocean is all crowded onto the lower corner makes it look like one of Vriska’s busted 8 balls.
Alternia’s actually the northern coast of Eurasia, with the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya prominent visible toward the south pole:
to my mind, the fact that the globe of Alternia is its own unique “asset” so to speak, having been warped from what it originally looked like, kind of sets it apart from the smaller planets that are wholesale copy pasted from other celestial bodies… but I guess if someone wanted to make a good argument that part of Alternia got transplanted onto Earth in the form of Russia I wouldn’t be in any position to really dispute it