Kingdom

Reading Kingdom is a very strange experience. From the outside, it postures as some sort of mature and nuanced take on real Chinese history, but in practice reads a lot more like a kids' manga. It exists in some mythical grey zone that melds the shallowest aspects of Japanese media with some of the most costly and brutal conflicts in human history, and somehow remains readable despite being at points offensively tone-deaf.

Morally, it is completely asinine, as the author, Hara, takes absolutely no stance on the real suffering and violence that his story and art represents. This contrast of brutality and lighthearted nothingness, shockingly, made for one of the strongest "war is bad" impressions I've ever gotten from a piece of media -- it revels in the gratuitous violence that it depicts in freakish detail, the horrible atrocities that, at least in the author's world, are committed by people that speak the same language and share the same culture on one another, all due to their tenuous association to some leadership or piece of land. It's the worst of humanity, a pure distillation of the "us vs. them" mindset that continues to cause us grievance to this day...

...And none of it matters, because Hara is too busy writing out a lighthearted One Piece-style romp using the main cast of characters with a Big Goal and Friends and Teamwork. There is no nuanced philosophy, there are no well-formed opinions. There will be no moral deliberation or hard choices, no pained tossing and turning at night by a character wondering if they did the right thing. It doesn't matter that you just saw 10 guys get cleaved like it's Metal Gear Rising, or that pile of the decapitated nude corpses of a hundred innocent female civilians, or even that child that was stabbed through the back while crying over the desecrated corpse of his mother, because some guy thought it was a fun thing to do. Don't worry! The protagonist is here to kick that one particular guy in the balls and say "This is Bad!" (he's also the one that cleaved the 10 guys, though). Don't worry that the state leadership is using the lives of millions of people to further an ideologically selfish goal, the protagonist is there to say "It's for a Righteous Cause!". The morality of Kingdom is that the good guys are good, and the bad guys are bad -- and our favourite one is going to become the ~~King of the Pirates!!!~~ Greatest General That Ever Existed!!!

While it's nowhere near as repellent as truly vile garbage like Goblin Slayer, the sheer amount of tone-deafness can be almost painful. That particular instance of one of the protagonist's allies killing an "enemy" child was almost offensive enough for me to drop the whole thing, because it all happens to forcefully posit that the protagonist is a good guy, because he doesn't rape civilians or murder children, and in fact -- believe it or not -- thinks that doing either of those things is bad. There is no question of "are we part of the problem", because actually the good guys are completely unrelated! They don't ever do anything icky! In fact, none of the protagonist's ever-growing troupe commit a single image-defying act, in case you thought that would be an interesting development -- after all, that would reflect badly on the protagonists, and that's a no-no.

The author constantly uses his story in this bewildering way, where everything exists to prop up this childish power fantasy of shonen morals. You expect Game of Thrones, and you get what is essentially a cruel joke. The story is paced like a shonen, the comedy is on the same horrible level as a shonen, and important character deaths are sparsely spaced, like a shonen (despite there being many, many hundreds of unnamed character deaths with every volume).

The black and white "us vs. them" morals continue with the unfortunately quite gorgeous art. The battles are masterfully depicted, the style is unique and striking, the quality never dips. It pains me to know how much effort has gone into propping up such a mediocre story, and how blatantly it is abused to simplify ethical matters even more.

The 'good' guys are mostly good looking or maybe a little goofy, while retaining most of their charm, while the bad guys are ugly, and sometimes terrifyingly so, because they are the bad guys. They also rape and kill thousands of people, because they are the bad guys. Oh, and you can't forget the kinda-bad guys who look cool because they're smart and don't personally rape people, but only incite others to do it.

Which is not to say that Kingdom is irredeemable. The weakness of my flesh has betrayed the strength of my soul, because the offense I have taken at all of the above is not enough to blacklist it from my mind.

The unfortunate truth remains that Kingdom is quite readable. I've come this far, and while I doubt I'll last the whole way through, the execution of the shonen aspect (in isolation) is very competent. I'm not immune to big arching story lines and the good guys winning the big battles while the bad guys eat dirt. I'm just mildly horrified every few chapters when I remember what this story and these characters actually represent, and am quite repulsed until the next Big Bad shows up and I gain a mild curiosity as to how our dashing hero will deal with them. The art is engaging and evocative, despite it serving to highlight the thematically decroded nothing-burger that the author's voice serves up.

It's an edgier, almost refined form of slop, and it frustrates me to no end while I continue reading.