"The market is over saturated. Children and teens aren't reading books these days anymore. There aren't any Black main characters in manga. But...you're a film director--why do you want to make manga?" These are all plausible comments that I've received over this first year of preparing, writing, publishing and marketing The Seventh Kingdom. None of which I intend to listen too closely to.
Simply put, I created The Seventh Kingdom from a place of reflection--a desire bourn from the need to create art and the need to offer commentary about the state of our current world--politics, environmentalism, racism, classism etc. If you stopped reading after this sentence, I'd understand. I know that sounds incredibly cliche, but if you're still curious then by all means-- humor me for this one blog post.
As I've spent time dilly-dallying between honing my craft and framing my mindset for future aspirations, I've noticed something increasingly disturbing...current generations have no hope. Of course, when you flat-out ask them, people will say the stereotypical, cookie-cutter response that they "have hope". But, when you ask them to describe what life will look like when things get better for them...they retort that they "don't want to delude themselves." I've experienced this enough now to not make a wry face when someone responds along these lines but, on the inside, I'm always floored.
Eventually, these responses got me thinking... How many other "mature" or "adult" rationalizations do we internally (or even externally) rehearse as "logic" to justify our current/past decisions rooted in fear, cynicism, and hopelessness? A much wordier question that I also asked was, how many dysfunctional systems have taken hold in society as a result of the collective apathy or even justification that "the situation was too great to tackle", "things have always been that way" or "that's not my problem"?
These questions have guided my crafting of the fictional world Pretoria and the overall story around The Seventh Kingdom: Fukushuu no Oukoku. In our marketing endeavors, we've always emphasized the underground aesthetics of cyberpunk and solarpunk, the theme of revenge and other popular anime series that served as inspiration for T7K but at the heart of it lies more profound questions that I, and many other young adults, grapple with. So, to answer the question headlining this blog post... I made The Seventh Kingdom because, it needed to be made. 🤷🏾♀️
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-Robbie J. Atkinson
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