#purely because of how much residual insecurity came out of reading na. and then rereading it to make sure it wasnt just a 1st time thing

[graffitibible]

I'm going to preface this real quick with: if you enjoyed National Anthem (which I’m going to shorten to KJNA), that's good! I really do genuinely mean that. I'm happy for you and I hope you continue to enjoy it and find things to enjoy in it, because I generally prefer it when people enjoy the content they consume. This post is going to get a bit mean, so this is your forewarning if that isn't for you.

I don't currently have the time or inclination to get into the nitty gritty of how much I disliked KJNA. I especially don't like the idea of comparing it to Killjoys: California (which I’m going to abbreviate as KJCA) because the two works are, in my opinion, very fundamentally separate. The only things they really share are a few names and concepts. I try to judge works based on the standards they set for themselves, which is why I personally tried to go into National Anthem with as few expectations as possible (in part so I couldn't be let down, which failed anyway). I don't care that it's a separate story. I don't care that it's its own thing. In fact I think it should have been more its own thing and should have shed any and all ties to the KJCA concepts entirely, but I digress.

The point I think I want to make is that I didn't set out to look at parallels between KJCA and KJNA. And for the most part I don't want parallels to bog down things because I think the stories should stand on their own. But when I did glance at those parallels, what I saw kind of troubled me.

KJCA, as sloppily written as it was (and it was, let's be real here, very sloppily written), had very clear themes. Some of those themes benefited from the fact that the album/twitter accounts cemented those kinds of things beforehand, but some of those themes were exclusive to the comic. For however poorly I think KJCA was written, one of the themes I genuinely did like about it was that of how corrupt institutions will always, through their systems of oppression, forge the instruments of their own undoing. BL/ind and Battery City explicitly fall apart because of their mistreatment of the people in teh Zones, the Girl, the pornodroids, and Korse, and it is through this systematic abuse that BL/ind’s institution is uprooted and destroyed.

KJCA had a very prominent, not-insignificant message of how the system was fundamentally cruel, no matter how well-intentioned its origins and purposes might have once been, and that the people in that world could only live free of it if they tore it apart. The status quo was intrinsically unjust, and it had to be overthrown.

And then I look at KJNA, a story that was crafted almost ten years later. And the similarities between the draconian rule of BL/ind and the hyper-consumerist, capitalist modern day we see in KJNA are undeniably there. It felt like an intentional thing, like the harkening back to the Analog Wars as this vague concept that tied the two universes together. But when it comes to the system present in KJNA, the takeaway there is that it's not the system that's cruel; just the people running it. The system isn't corrupt; it's the things acting on it that are. Get rid of the bad part of it, and you can live happily in this ideology because it doesn't need further changing. You just need to cut out the aberration and everything will be fine. The same capitalist, consumerist dystopia that was unbearable in KJCA is fine here, or at least tolerable - and in some ways it’s this very status quo that the characters were fighting to preserve and restore.

Maybe that's not what other people saw in this, and that’s perfectly fine. But for my part, I find the startling contrast between those two themes to be...unsettling.