Kingdom

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I've always been a bit puzzled as to why Kingdom isn't any more popular on this site. Despite having been publishing on a consistent weekly basis for nearly a decade by now, and despite being one of the highest rated manga on MAL, I still essentially never see anyone talk about it. It almost feels like people aren't even aware that it exists. I think this is very unfortunate, because they're missing out on what is perhaps the most inspirational manga I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

The story takes place during the Chinese Warring States period. After a full 500 years of constant warfare ... between the various states of China, the bloodshed still shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. It is here our story begins with a young man named Shin who has the naïve dream of becoming the greatest general in all of China. After accidentally becoming involved in a conflict over the royal throne of the state of Qin, he eventually ends up serving under the new young king who has the ambition to one day unite all of China under one banner.

As a result, Kingdom is a manga of epic proportions, containing large scale warfare with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, advanced military strategizing and incredible intensity. The battles are long and complicated, but perfectly understandable as the author's style of writing is extremely detailed and also utilizes tons of tactical maps, overviews and time jumps to explain the flow of combat. It's intelligent but without requiring much from the reader in order to keep up with the plot.

At the same time Kingdom also has extremely in-depth national politics and diplomacy between nations, further enhancing the overall sense of realism. Speaking of which, it should be stated that the manga is in fact based on true events and characters from Chinese history. Of course it's only loosely based on it as the historical records only dictate *what* happens, but the author is the one who decides *how* it happens. In other words he manages to create a story which is perhaps exaggeratedly epic, yet still never contradicts the actual true events.

The best part of Kingdom however is undoubtedly the characters. The story covers many years of time, and thus you get to see how everyone gradually grows and evolves over the course of time in very high detail. There are hundreds and hundreds of notable figures in the story, consisting of generals, commanders, soldiers, civilians, politicians, royalty and more. Especially the main military figures are superbly written, with incredible charisma and all with their own individual traits. The vast majority of them are almost impossible to dislike, regardless of which state they may come from. The amount of color they bring to the battlefield simply cannot be understated, and it feels like they're not just raising the morale of their respective soldiers in the manga itself, but the morale of the readers as well. At the same time, some of the death scenes in this manga are some of the most tragic and emotional death scenes I've ever seen in media. When one of your favorite characters passes away, you will truly feel it. Furthermore, the sheer amount of inspirational and downright moving speeches throughout the course of Kingdom is simply astonishing. The author truly knows how to touch the hearts of the readers with the way he's written the story. I really cannot praise him enough for it.

The art is extremely high detail and helps to amplify the level of intensity of the story. Especially the armies and the battlefields look simply fantastic and sometimes it makes you feel like you're really there. While it may not exactly be on the level of something like Berserk in terms of visuals, it's still more than enough to appropriately showcase the cold and harsh reality of the field of battle, and deliver that atmosphere to the readers first-hand.

Kingdom has some very long arcs occasionally during the more drawn-out battles, and I'll just say here and now that when you're in one of those segments, it's effectively impossible to stop reading it. Why? Because every single chapter ends in a huge cliffhanger! This is one of those stories which just keeps teasing you and forces you to keep reading the next chapter. And the next one. And the next one. And the- ...you get the idea. Point being that despite it having over 400 chapters published at the time of writing this, you can still easily read through all of it in just a few days, no problem whatsoever. It's just *that* addictive once you start.

Overall, in my eyes Kingdom is a manga which seriously needs more attention. I'm still not sure exactly why so few people have read it, but I really wish more people would give it a chance because it truly is one of the most influential and impressive manga out there. It stands out as a very atypical manga to begin with, but above all it is exceedingly rare for a story to be so action-packed, so intelligent yet so incredibly emotional all at the same time.

Kingdom is a series that people like to hype up these days and indeed has a great premise of ancient Chinese warfare that harkens back to wide spanning stories such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, its poor presentation and repetitive nature causes it to be about as impressive as a second-rate Shonen.

Now, it certainly isn't an absolutely terrible series (though it being rated a 5 and not a 1 should make that obvious). It seems to have some semblance of war strategies and some of the supporting characters do develop as the story goes on to some extent.

The main complaint of the series' ... execution lies intertwined with both its plot and characters, or more specifically, its main character. Xin is a terrible protagonist as not only is his personality and motivation a typical hotheaded youth wanting to be the best in the likes of Naruto, but the plot armour provided to him is insane for a series that attempts to pass itself off as a historical piece. Not only does Xin outperform and defeat skilled assassins without much real experience, but doesn't even do it through actual tactics and instead just by shouting and overcoming his opponent through willpower as in any run of the mill Shonen. This practically betrays any engaging premise the series could hold as the attempts at strategies and the support characters' roles are made meaningless when the climax of several major battles focus on a kid overcoming challenges by himself without any thought put into it.
It also doesn't help that many of the support characters seem overly interested in Xin's actions or potential without much reason to do so, such as Wang Yi practically entrusting his legacy to him for typical passing the torch reasons within coming of age stories or the young girl having romantic feelings for someone so dense it took them over a hundred chapters to realise they were female.
Now, I can't fully say if the quality has improved since I dropped this work almost 300 chapters in, but if a series takes that long to become more than a typical Shonen in more than explicit content, there's no real reason to view it in any worthwhile light. Yes, some series take a while to get good, but over 300 chapters in is more than pushing the limit.

To get to the point, Kingdom gives too much of a focus to its protagonist and his Naruto-esque lack of logic to the point it heavily damages the series' overall quality. Overall, this series that is supposedly praised for its genius is one with such a lack of logic revolving around the centrepiece that it could be insulting to my intelligence.
If wanting a good manga about Ancient Chinese warfare with genius strategies and very little plot armour, read Sangokushi or most Romance of the Three Kingdoms adaptions in general (particularly the 2010 live action series Three Kingdoms) or if wanting a period drama with memorable and well written characters, watch Rose of Versailles.

Overall ranking - 5/10 mediocrity

Kingdom is a particularly difficult Manga for me to talk about, because much of what I think of it stands in stark opposition to what it claims itself to be. Kingdom is a story for peace; it is a story that knows how horrible wars are, it is a story that is much about the importance of human connection, of seeing the value of even the smallest, most meagre man within an army of tens of thousands. Yet it is also a story that turns the violence of battle into simple entertainment, that shows fields of war as the sole domain of certain individuals who, ... from high up on their horses, dictate the flow of life and death and all that lies between. Kingdom shows us events of immeasurable cruelty and looks at us to tell us that this is war, that this is the suffering that must be prevented, yet it is this cruelty that never touches a single character.

What makes this story so difficult to discuss for me is the degree to which it is either unaware of its own contents or how it lies about the beliefs it holds and ideas it conveys. For this reason alone, this review will be split into two parts. Usually, I like to base my writing on a central through line, most commonly this takes the form of the message a work leaves me with, but this is not a foundation on which I can discuss Kingdom in a balanced manner. Though I do not particularly like this Manga, unlike its author, I want to give the subject I am writing about a good look, as free from bias as possible. Because of this, there will be a first part solely concerned with Kingdom’s ability to entertain and function as a self-contained story and piece of art, while this review’s second part will be solely concerned with the ideas propagated in Kingdom, their ideological and political implications, and why I believe them to be reason enough for you not to read this Manga.

Part 1. Kingdom The Entertainer

Over the course of its more than fifteen thousand pages, Kingdom manages to construct a narrative that grows and grows smoothly and cohesively. At no point, reading this Manga, was I ever left with a feeling that a chapter betrayed what came before, that the author somewhere messed up in their planning or that the carefully built-up structure of interlocking events and arcs even slightly drifted apart. If there is one thing that I find worthy of praise here beyond all else, it is the standard of quality kept throughout every single one of those hundreds of chapters and thousands of pages. Never once does Kingdom dip below some standard of quality you would expect from it, but in reverse, Kingdom also rarely exceeds expectations. While this story most definitely has narrative high points and arcs that are better than others, if you finish the first 170 chapters of this Manga, roughly equivalent to the anime’s first season, you will have seen the heights this story sores to, and this is a high point it manages to reach quiet consistently close to a dozen times over the course of its long runtime. That being said, you will not find it exceeding this point; you will see story arcs that more densely contain the same high points with less downtime in between, but the peaks this story contains are all kept under the same ceiling. I do not wish to talk about this too much, as this ceiling I am referring to is largely based on Kingdom’s ideological failings and will thus be discussed in part two, but there is an aspect of this that I want to talk about here, and that is the narrative side of messaging within media.

A story always says something; a narrative conclusion always entails a solution that is sold as functional or dysfunctional, and in this regard, the narrative structure of Kingdom is one that bleeds into itself, as there is never an elevation out of the known into territory that feels even remotely new. Story Arcs throughout Kingdom move on much the same ground; this is even figuratively the case, you will rarely find visual variety in the many battles this story spans. Historical accuracy, though commonly disregarded by this Manga, is a reasonable explanation for why much of the environments of Kingdom are the same. Pitched battles did predominantly occur on flat, mostly even terrain, and in the case of this Manga, the given location where an armed encounter occurs is largely accurate to history; still, it does little to distinguish them from one another. The fields of combat bleed into one another in a way that would almost be poignant if this were a fact acknowledged by the story, or bolstered it in any way. Nonetheless, we are left with a lot of visual and narrative set dressing of large battles, which sure took a lot of effort to create, but does not leave a lasting impression. All battles within Kingdom, no matter how many chapters they might span, no matter what result they might lead to, are largely devoid of substance. This is the case because, as we will get into in part 2, Kingdom does not contain effective messaging for these battles, nor does it even really have messages to convey, but also because of the way that it depicts combat.

Throughout a given battle, you will see beautifully illustrated and detailed infographics to show the positions of troops and specific individuals, and right off the bat, there are a few things that are problematic with this. Though Kingdom is a struggle for the impossible, a story about realising what was previously decried as a dream within a dream, it fails to convey this in an effective way narratively, due to a severe lack of realism. Time and time again you will see conflicts in which the protagonist faces off against an enemy that is supposed to be deeply cunning and dangerous beyond belief, often times you will see the “good guys” fail against them, yet every single time you will notice, that team Qin (that is team “good guys”) will never have more combatants than whatever dangerous man they are facing off against. Every struggle needs to be so fragrantly David v. Goliath that you inevitably notice how utterly irrelevant the number of combatants is to begin with. Never, throughout the entirety of all of Kingdom will you see an unnamed character be responsible for the death of a general. Every chapter, you get 10 panels of people ripping each other into shreds, you get long speeches about the dangers and futility of war, but not once does this random cruelty befall a single character we know. Instead, every general is a hulking wall of meat that effortlessly slices a group of ten heavy-armoured soldiers in half with a single swing of their glaive. This is such a problem that Kingdom actively struggles with making its enemy generals seem more and more dangerous. Both the first and most recent big baddy our protagonists face off against are introduced with that same move, with a bunch of good guys running at them, and a bunch of good guys falling apart after being sliced to bits. Turns out you can’t properly convey strength at this point of exaggeration, without outright making the glaive longer every time, until the next general can cut a hundred meters far or develops into an outright technical nuke. With this, we run into the inevitable problem of turning war into a Shōnan-like spectacle, which is once again twofold. For one, there are again apparent ideological problems with this, which we will get to in part 2, but here I want to focus solely on the inefficiency of telling this story within a war-centric setting. Kingdom is fundamentally about a set of protagonist characters overcoming a set of antagonistic characters, and relevant to this are rarely more than five people on each side. To base such a story on the violent battlefields of hundreds of thousands of combatants not only creates a deeply historically inaccurate portrayal of warfare, but also unnecessarily bloats this story with redundant elements. As strange as this might sound, war is largely obsolete to Kingdom’s canon. Obviously, these events are historical; obviously, these acts of martial warfare did occur, though not in any shape even close to what this Manga portrays them as, but for the story that it tells through this history, these wars are nothing more than wallpaper covering the pages. These could just as well be back-alley brawls or, more accurately, scheduled matches in martial arts dojos and public gymnasiums. For all this story is concerned, the thousands of soldiers present at these fights do not amount to much more than rows of screaming fans, cheering along for their side’s Big Guy. There is another side to Kingdom’s battles, one which I expected to be its heart, and that is its use of strategy. Unfortunately, while there are some plays at strategy in here that had me dumbfounded, wondering how I didn’t think of that beforehand, all of it is narratively meaningless. Strategy is only ever the thing that builds the scene, that brings our two buffed guys into the same room. The outcome of all wars will always end with a single blow-by-blow action scene.

Yet there is another side to Kingdom, far behind the battlelines, one of political intrigue, of courtroom struggles, and it is here where this Manga’s better half, as well as its furthest steps into the realm of ideological pondering and soul-fuckery occur. I quite like much of what happens in these unfortunately rare few chapters, in which we at last leave behind our unsalvageable main cast (whom we will get to soon), and finally dive more into the “competent” side of this nation’s leadership. Here, you will unfortunately have to accept that Kingdom tries to sell you some real freakish idiots as morally good people to lead a nation. Still, if you can get over the way this Manga portrays the Qin Dynasty’s generals and chancellors as bastions of good in a world of evil, there are, at the very least, some interesting ideas here. Generally, don’t expect anything particularly smart to come from this, but there are a lot of things that are good food for thought, and unlike a few other people I’ve talked to, I quite like the dabbles in Confucian and Legalist thinking we get throughout these chapters. Mainly, though, courtroom drama and intrigue serve as much-needed breaks from long and tiring battles, and it is here that the story seems to actually move. While a given fight is obviously an event instrumental to the goals of all parties involved, the act of warfare itself, which, as I said, is not something you really see here, tends to be a long and painful endeavour. Victory is when there is once again time to breathe, and following it, time to move. The things that were fought over are claimed after the battle is over, lines are moved, ranks are handed out, updates and plans are exchanged. It is here that the story manages to establish its sense of scale, and if it wasn’t for the few glimpses we got behind the walls of capitals alike, there truly would be nothing to distinguish this Manga from its contemporaries in Shōnan Jump.

At last, we are left with two groups we have yet to discuss, our protagonists and antagonists. To start with the former, Kingdom stars Shin, a slave who slowly builds himself up with the goal of reaching the rank of Great General. This is close to all there is to him. There are small bits of his character we get that go beyond this ambition; Shin is a generally empathetic person, he tends to see the best in people, struggles for his comrades, fights for those who lay their hopes upon his shoulders and carries the burdens of the ones his blade could not protect. All this is true, yet the person I envision reading that sentence, the person I expect most to see when they read it, is so much closer to Guts from Berserk than Shin, and yet Guts is also a tormented, brutal soul that was so often cold and distant and could not care for the men and women around him. But that is precisely why I see a character like Guts as embodying such values to a degree that Shin could never portray. Shin was never a broken man, though he is a child of war, and though he grew up under the doctrine of heroic sacrifice and military ambitions. What makes Shin so utterly boring is the way in which he flattens the world surrounding him. Shin is not the product of his time; he is a character solely separate from his environment, not one you see spout and change out of the people he meets across this journey, but one that always already saw a lesson beforehand, so he can teach others of its meaning. Though this is the story of Shin, a man destined for impossible greatness, overcoming all odds, you will not see him grow; he will be the same child at age thirty that he was at the beginning. I am not saying that Shin should grow from warfare, I simply ask that a character is changed by their experience, be it shellshock or genuine love and maturity or growing incompetence from bad friends or wisdom imparted by those that did not make it as far as he did… but this is not Shin, for Shin does not change. It is this that, beyond all else, turns all battles into the same. You watch the same kid fight the same stupid struggles, and you want to see him change, you want to know that at some point he breaks because of it or looks back upon the past and sees some kind of stupid young self that he no longer is, but he can’t. You will not find introspection in these characters, neither forced nor willingly; you will not see this band of warmongering “good guys” grow into something they weren’t before. A few times throughout this story we get short arcs that are not focused on our protagonist Shin, and time and time again we see people expand their abilities, we see friends grow from little girls to military experts that judge the battlefield like few others, we see coldblooded assassins turn back to at last use that knife of theirs to cut away that path that binds them to their craft… and yet again, the only thing that changes when they inevitably come back to the party, is their ability. These aren’t characters that grow; these are characters who, to use the Manga’s own language, “level up”. This is what contextualises all characters that find their place on the battlefield. They are abilities, they are buttons to press at some point throughout combat, so we can get a panel of them using their special move, or being all smart and seeing through the strategy, but because all of this is irrelevant, because all combat only ends in the same one-on-one struggle between Shin and an opposing general, they truly often feel like less then nothing. I do not know the names of any of Shin’s fellow unit members, except for Kyou Kai and Ka Ryo Ten, who are both irrelevant and are coincidentally also the two most important characters besides Shin. There are over a dozen named foot soldiers that don’t die, simply survive all struggles, even though every time we see them, they are about to be sliced in half, and never do they accomplish anything important, because, no matter how many soldiers they kill, soldiers are irrelevant; only the lives of generals dictate the battlefield.

There are two more units/armies that we commonly hear of throughout the story, both of which are utterly irrelevant except for the two men that lead them, who also don’t change and have the same dynamic for over a decade's worth of chapters.

Lastly, I want to quickly talk about King Sei, the “young” monarch whose expansionist ambitions create all of this Manga’s story and a very interesting and deadly period in Chinese history. He will be the protagonist of this review’s second part, but for now, I want to declare him as this story’s second most interesting character (there is one general that tops everyone else by a mile). Sei is central to the narrative’s biggest ideological conflict, and strangely, it is his character that is mirrored for our primary antagonist, Ri Boku. This is problematic, as Ri Boku is the wall that stands at the end of Shin’s narrative and military road, yet Ri Boku does not make for an interesting antagonistic force against Shin in the slightest, as these are not characters that have any conflict beyond the mere battlefield. In its current form, taking the character of Shin and assuming that he could not be changed (which would obviously be preferable), the kind of antagonist this story required would be one that mirrored Shin, but this is not possible, because Shin does not hold any interesting moral or ideological positions and neither is he created to be wrong in any of his beliefs. This leaves us with Sei as the de facto protagonist of the narrative’s actual plot, while Shin is simply the lens through which we observe it. I must quickly add that this is not at all accurate to the way this story is actually told, but still, analysing it from this angle at least makes many of its narrative choices understandable. The conflict between Sei and Ri Boku is interesting, though this is the kind of ideological struggle that requires two things: firstly, a deep enough understanding to actually depict these positions accurately and with that, the necessary understanding of history to not turn a tyrannical dictator into the perfect nice guy. This is the problem with Sei, he is a good guy more so than even Shin, he is portrayed as morally atop the world itself, while his actual position is terribly stupid and led to a suffering so great that you could fill every single page of every single chapter of Kingdom with lists of names similar to the thing they did in Chainsaw Man (I am sure some people know what I am referring to), and still you would not get everyone that died because of Sei’s commitment to military action over diplomacy.

Kingdom’s best antagonists are a rare few old men struggling with the idea that their time is soon to pass, and that they are no longer the new kids to dictate the flow of blood on the battlefield. Apart from them, this Manga’s antagonists are as hollow as our protagonists, fighting for not a whole lot more than nationalism, and even of that, we do not get an even remotely interesting analysis. Once again, the enemies our protagonists face off against are like rocks to climb over; they could be training dummies, because that is narratively all they amount to. If all our progression amounts to stat increases, to “level-ups”, then there is no person to overcome, because an interaction with a person would create an environment in which our characters would change, and this seemingly must be avoided at all costs. It probably doesn’t need to be said, but our non-character antagonists do not change any more than our already unchanging protagonists.

With that, we reached the end of the first part, and to leave it on a positive note, I want to at least mention one more time the level of quality and detail in this Manga’s drawings. They are not interesting, not narratively, not contextually, not through experimentation and strange new compositions, but still, they adhere to their boringly great quality.

Part 2. Kingdom The Teacher

Kingdom is a story that is, at the same time, deeply politically ignorant, and very far up its own arse in a way that quite reminded me of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. In this way, it is special because it fills the role of teacher so much worse than most stories, but wears its clothes so casually.

All stories to some extend have a lesson within them, something they give their readers to carry on with. Some are more focused on this than others, Manga like Vinland Saga, Takopi or Ping Pong, which never waste a second, staying focused throughout it all. There is a distinct style to these stories, and it is often the colours of grandeur. When you have a thing that you find important enough to share, you frame it on a stage you see as befitting. Kingdom is one stage builder, but what it puts into the spotlight is subpar and not fully formulated at its best, and outright fascist at its worst. For me, the apparent stupidity of its lessons was only highlighted through this contrast between contents and presentation, yet I understand that this is not the case for everyone, and so we need to understand the apparent dangers in mythologising the wrong lessons. Kingdom particularly struggles with this, due to its historic context.

Sei is a man who existed, who lived as the Qin Dynasty’s first emperor, and so his actions to some degree are bound to history. This is not to say that Kingdom stays true to this history; instead, we view China’s ancient nobility through rose-tinted glasses and gloss over the mass murder of dissenters and far-reaching censorship this king was once known for. Sei is portrayed as a good character by the purest meaning of the word; he is a just king, a loving king, one who views his citizens alike as equals, even as he sends them off to die in the thousands. His ambition, true to history, remains the conquest and unification of China, but this is not depicted as the warmongering insanity it was, but instead as the necessary way towards an end to warfare. Kingdom presents him as a man who bloodies his hands, but who sees what is necessary and commits the violence required to at last birth a better future. Unfortunately, a single look at history informs us, the Qin Dynasty, once it united China, to at last stop the endless wars, persisted for a meagre 15 years, before internal conflicts, either violently suppressed or violently fought to the end, ripped it apart.

The reality is simply that peace can be protected with violence, but it can never be achieved through its use. The violent annexation of a nation will never create an environment of long-lasting peace. The ambition for a unified China is a noble one, at least as it is presented in Kingdom, but all strive for equality, to remove borders, be it between nations, ethnicities or social classes, can only be achieved through acts of equality and diplomacy. War is by its nature hierarchical, both in the environment that births it, but also in the environment it creates. The slaughter of another always entails a degradation of their humanity, a refutation of their rights. It is because of this that peace, a state defined through equality, cannot be achieved with means of warfare.

King Sei’s plan for unification was always destined to fail, and this alone is not a problem. You can tell a phenomenal story about futile ambitions, and the deeply broken and unlikeable people who carried them, but this is not what Kingdom attempts to be. Within this manga's mythology, King Sei is not a fool, is not a lunatic authoritarian, but the one good king. This fundamentally misrepresents the ideas propagated within this manga, but also the very real history from which it draws so much of its setting. To portray a king as competent at all is highly questionable, be it only because any competent and “good” king would do all in his power to slowly and safely convert his Kingdom into a democratic nation. The mere depiction of hierarchical structures is not problematic, but to show them as efficient or functional when every part of history shows us that they aren’t, is not only disingenuous, but dangerous. It is here that Kingdom’s openly nationalist story drifts into the realm of fascism, and to understand this, we first have to look at militarism.

I have already talked to some extend about how poorly Kingdom portrays war in Part 1, but it is now that we finally get to its broader implications. Today, we attribute the field of historical analysis called “Great Man Theory” to Thomas Woolner, himself both an imperialist and monarchist. For Woolner, history was “[…] but the Biography of great men”, and it is this view that underlines all that is Kingdom. All wars are decided by individual figures, and almost always are these figures shown to be naturally capable beyond all reason, and their position as commonly great generals validates the hierarchical structures that elected them to their positions. It is undeniable that the men who united China under Qin had a deep proficiency for war, yet it is both wrong to depict them as particularly wise and to depict this ability as a physical capability for combat. These battles should, on the one hand, be focused on strategy, with no general, no soldier at all, ever being portrayed as martially skilled enough to change the tides of battle through physical combat alone. There can be offsets on the battlefield, but these must be down to strategy or chance. On the other hand, these generals were not great men to change history, but instead were themselves the product of said history. When talking about Shin, I described him as solely separate from the world in which he supposedly grew up, and it is this reason that portrays the author's utter misunderstanding of history better than any other. Our world is ruled not by people but by ideas; it is ideology and thoughts that dictate the flow of history. During the Autumn and Fall Period, these thoughts were feudalism, nationalism, statism, expansionism, militarism, monarchism, totalitarianism, Confucianism, Legalism and hierarchy, and these are principles that led to centuries of warfare and suffering. To believe that it was a list of great men that dictated this era means to cut them away from the chains of their environments. They were not the judges or creators of history, but simply another stream along which it inevitably flowed.

These Hero-characters on which all this narrative is built are an essential part of militarism and its propaganda, and because of this, it is deeply tied to fascism. Umberto Eco describes the fascist, be it Führer or foot soldier, as the hero of their own legend, and it is the fascist’s deep desire for plot, for narrative, that brings him to try to move his story and in doing so risk his life on the battlefield. It is hard to read holocaust scholars and philosophers talk about the drive for glory and not see it reflected in this manga time and time again.

This is the inherent contradiction of Kingdom, the gaping abyss that lies between the words of its protagonists and this story’s actual contents. While Shin will be depicted as a force of good, as a soldier who stays true to his morals and thus embodies the values of Sei’s humane war, this is as backwards as the war itself. Shin’s portrayal as a “good guy” is not necessarily ahistorical, there most definitely have been soldiers through out all wars, which detested war, and yet continued onwards, but these were men that either hated the systems that pushed them into bloody sacrifices, or they were themselves the ignorant victims of doctrine, which they could not parse from their previously held beliefs. Shin’s beliefs, as presented by this manga, stand in contradiction to what he is fighting for, and this contradiction is never addressed. He is a man for whom war did good, who served his nation until his nation served him, who was born a slave and reached the highest ranks of military service, but this story isn’t real. Nobody grows or is made better through warfare, and sure, there are necessary wars, which have to be fought to protect what is dear, but even those wars are better not to occur at all. The ideas of military fulfilment are irreconcilable with principles of equality, peace or safety, all of which Shin believes in to some degree. To sell us a character like him in this day and age is like the soft lie of a fascist, to get you on board with his wars. “You can keep your principles”, they tell you, “There are men just like you fighting for the homeland”, they assure you, but all of it is bullshit.

Kingdom is propaganda, consciously or not, to get you to see war as a deadly game, but not an uncomfortable one. Death is plastered along all pages, but never does it meet a familiar face, never does it come unexpectedly, never is it dirty. Even when we see a man get tortured and diced, we are sold the lie that he remained, that he was strong until the last second. But this isn’t war, in war those familiar faces break, in war you don’t just die, you suffer. War isn’t a game with deadly stakes, but a long and suffocating track through a swamp of razor blades, and it is not one that is endured, but that seeps into the self and slowly drowns it. A man who truly sees war always dies, though there might be a thing that returns, and though it might in some hollow way still resemble him. Through this, Kingdom launders history and its atrocities, it turns the King into a trusted figure, the state into a competent institution of functional technocrats and sells you the lie of a good authority that fights for those it looms over. War is turned into a means of entertainment, and suffering is whitewashed into the simplicity of death, of a body being sliced in half, just as the one before it, and the one before that, and the one before that. There are comrades in war, friends you find in bloody struggle, not people to cling to in your darkest hours, but souls with whom you will soar to new heights. There is a home to return to, that always waits for you, that loves you, that thinks you fight for it, as you disappear for months on the battlefield. These are the myths of Kingdom, they are fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian, imperialist myths that exist to appeal to those who do not have a life that fulfils them, and thus, looking for something new, are susceptible to the propaganda of kings.

You should not read Kingdom for the same reason you should not trust a psychic. They will tell you that all they want is in your interest, that they are honest, fun, enjoyable people, and that they just want to talk. They don’t. Even if this story’s author does not want to recruit you into the military, the psychic sure will. To give them your time means to make yourself vulnerable to the ideas they spread, and those ideas will make you lonely, hateful and, if you sign that recruitment document, maybe even dead. Be mindful of the ideas that dictate the media you consume, because you won’t always be on your guard, and they will lie to you, and you will take their word for it.

This is why you should not read Kingdom.

[Edit 30.06.2026: An aspect of the narrative I failed to mention writing this review, which now seems beyond important to address, would be the manga's conflation of state interests and the interests of its citizenry. Time and time again, Kingdom argues for the mass mobilisation of its populace on the grounds that they would be brutalized following the fall of Qin, and through this, it frames its many wars as the product of a universal will that drives the citizens of Qin. Not only is this deeply historically inaccurate, it also presents King Sei as a de facto democratic representative, that merely fulfils the will of his many subjects, once more laundering his image. I remind you of the fact that the manga does not even once make an effort to showcase inequalities or inefficiencies caused by hereditary monarchism, it does not question its morality, instead actively showing both ‘good' and bad monarchs, the only difference between the two, according to this manga's mythology, being the individual greed and lust of the crown bearer. In other words, Kingdom articulates an appeal to technocracy by presupposing the validity of an authority, which it predicates on said authority's assumed capacity to rule; a good king is good merely because they are, there are no deeper reasons that inform such judgements. It pathologises not the institutions which ultimately allowed for this time period's suffering to occur, but instead casts blame solely upon those it deems to be the evil ones, and though this manga might grant even them a shred of sympathy from time to time, it will not do the reverse for its main characters, will not critique them, will not challenge them on their beliefs, will not question their positions. They are the will of the people; why? Because they have to be. Because they are ‘the good guys'. Because, if they, the state, the military, were acting against the interests of the people they supposedly represent, we would need to ask ourselves if these are truly the heros they claim to be. And so their moral virtue is always presupposed, the world curbing around them to meet their position. If they are the good guys, then the country has to like them. If they are the good guys, then they need to be good at their job. If they are the good guys, then all is fine; this is a just war, because one cannot do harm in the name of good.