Secondly, this is all on-panel. You make it sound like Caneghem wants to be part of the coalition and have a seat in the House. He’s warned both Syr’nj and Reynolds that Gastonia. Even Iwatani noted that Caneghem did not care if he crowned himself king.

He was reluctantly persuaded to join the Gastonian coalition simply because he was persuaded that either World’s End or Gastonia would eventually develop the capability to invade their city. So they might as well side with Gastonia to head-off that possibility.

Well he tried that, and Iwatani was assassinated by his son. And then our heroes try to tell them that things will be better and different with the World’s End.

I can sympathize with Caneghem’s perspective here. That all looks very suspicious. Our main band of heroes look like they have fluid loyalties, so why would you trust them? Weren’t you telling us that the World’s End was the mutual enemy? And now they aren’t? Well that’s awfully convenient. And Gastonia has gotten taken over by a mad child king after his dad died under suspicious circumstances.

If you’re Caneghem, you already think the Gastonian humans are duplicitous, warlike and greedy. So none of that improves your opinion of your “allies.”

So no, he wants nothing to do with Clair’s coalition. She’s welcome to the seat in the House. He tried it her way, and as far as he knows, it didn’t work.

Either way. Beyond that, I just checked his tag. It appears, unless some early tags were missed, he made his very first appearance as a Gastonian Head of House. You appear to have filled in a lot of details of his off-panel life and how he came to join the Altruists; that is, of course, something you have the right to do for your own reading, but when you’re talking about things that were not actually presented in the comic, you have to be prepared to get the answer “what I would fill in off-panel is radically different from what you’re asserting,” as you are here.