Balls Deep In Adventure - KUSOMEGA Design Blog #1

A couple of sentences into writing KUSOMEGA, I knew it was going to be a bigger project than anticipated. I started writing about ten minutes after having the idea, expecting to churn out a single chapter and move on--but through the happenstance of needing to leave the house that day and taking May to the library so she could study, I continued--and by the end of the day, I finished the first volume.

My excitement over this completion was electrifying. I've been trying to write light novels ever since discovering and falling in love with them in 2005, but my attempts only reached different stages of failure. For years I dedicated myself wholly to media analysis until I could understand what I liked about the things I liked and what I hated about other shit. Now, I finally return to writing with the confidence that even if I still have a long way to go developing my skills mechanically, I at least have some idea of what I'm trying to do.

I suspect many will view my career thus: I completed my cult-beloved shitpost book "I Wrote This Light Novel In Like A Day, It Sucks And I Hate It, But If It Get An Anime Adaptation I'll Say It Was A Masterpiece," which opened me up to writing fiction again; and then a couple of years later, I wrote another light novel in a day and ran with it. 

In truth, I started and failed to continue a whole ton of fiction over these last three years. 

I think I've always been better at writing from prompts than from the void. It's easy for me to project myself and my worldview onto things; no matter what, I'll write my own story about any idea. My own ideas are these nebulous clouds whose "appeal" I can't easily recognize. When someone pitches the appeal of the thing up-front, it's like I've been given a fill-in-the-blank. 

And so, with the excitement I felt over the successful completion of my book, compounded by the very kind reception it received, I conceived of the basic story outline for all four volumes and the whole plot of volume 2 immediately.

I was ready to charge through the entirety of KUSOMEGA guns blazing--but I also felt invested enough in the project that even if it had to sit on the back-burner for a while, I'd still come back to it and follow through to the end. It was apparent not only that I would have to plan a physical release (as people had already been asking me to do for IWTLNILAD, but I didn't want to make that my first published book since long stretches of it aren't very good); but also that I would have to involve a ton of artists, because the first volume generated an unexpected deluge of fanart.

I suspect that most people won't think too much of my illustrations for this series, but for me the illustrative element has gradually become massively integral to the project as a whole. 

Over the last few years, I've begun to have a renewed interest in illustration by way of getting interested in storyboarding. Even if I can't realize the visions in my head to a high level of technical quality, as long as I can convey a story through the arrangements and relationships of visual components, I can deliver something illustrative which others can connect to. 

The emergence and staying power of ONE has been a beacon for me as an illustrator. While One Punch Man's makeover was undoubtedly what allowed it to reach the heights of popularity that it has, what made the original webcomic excellent in spite of its shoddy art was not only the excellent core conceit of the story, but ONE's awesome sense of visual composition. When I saw how striking his images were even with low technical drawing skills, and how that naturally transitioned into the more advanced final version, I felt like I could do that very kind of collaborative visual art. (Seeing Tsugumi Ohba's storyboards and how Takeshi Obata adapted them in Bakuman was also a huge wake-up call.)

With my character designs for KUSOMEGA, I prioritized getting across the "feeling" of a character over actually trying to draw them well. This was easy to accomplish by simply pulling visual elements from characters whom I felt had similar images to the ones I wanted for these characters, and then modifying the most easily-modifiable parts of their design. 

For Exia, I used a fan art of Felt from Re:Zero for reference, and then gave her a hairstyle partially based on the red-haired girl from Gabriel Dropout. Aether in the text was imagined based on the isekai goddess trope and characters like Aqua from Konosuba or Ristarte from Cautious Hero; but since she's got a bit more regal bearing, I modeled her visually after the main girl from Drakengard 3 (which I have an awesome poster of above my desk). Baika and Baila were just straight-up inspired by the blonde twins from Dr. Stone, and it shows in Baika's design, even though I actually used a fan art of Android 18 for my reference. Personality-wise, these characters diverged pretty hard from their forebears, and I think it shows in the ways that others have interpreted them in their art.

Even if they were made using references just like any other halfway-decent drawing I'd made up to that point, designing these characters was a huge turning point for me as an artist; because in at least the cases of Aether and Exia, I'd managed to make them just distinct enough from their influences to stand as their own designs--and people loved them. 

There was boatloads of fan art for both characters based purely on the strength of their designs--you can tell because even though Baika and Aether had equally very little development over the course of the story, one of them barely got drawn at all--and it was the one that everyone could tell the inspiration for immediately.

Once I saw these characters realized in more legitimate anime art-styles (along with many other fascinating interpretations) I became really excited to design future characters for the series. Right away, I knew that I needed to add a beast-girl loli, as well as a hot psychic girl through whom I could expand on my takeaway from rewatching the Sabrina arc in the original Pokemon anime. I started writing volume two the next night after releasing book one; but then I became struck with a sort of guilt.

I was late on patreon rewards (I still am) and I had other plans with friends which started to look promising that I wanted to expedite (KHANTEHNT), and I had to continue making videos that people like for my anime youtube channel. With the end of the decade coming around, I threw myself into making crowd-pleasing end-of-decade lists for a bit, had some other ideas, made some promises in various places that I would cut off my legs if I didn't finish volume two by the end of the month, and then was reminded of those promises as soon as I woke up on the last day of said month; and thus decided, "fuck it, I'm putting everything on hold until this thing is finished."

...now it's fifteen days later and guess what, I sure didn't stop!!

This wasn't what I meant. I finished volume two that night! It took two days instead of one to make the audiobook and draw the art (because the book was twice as long as the first), and I also needed to use the launch of this book to promote my initiative to have it physically adapted in as near a future as possible. After all, I'm chasing one of the most elusive phenomena of the web 2.0 ocean: an internet hype wave.

Like I said before, I was ready to churn through the rest of KUSOMEGA back when I finished volume one--but I felt guilty. Both of those feelings remain; but in taking the next step forward and actually completing the second volume, the scope of my feelings toward the story have only tripled just as it has in length. The more of it I write and plan out, the more fleshed out my own understanding of the characters and story become, and the more excited I get about trying to show you all what this whole thing is building towards.

When you can already see something in your mind and you just have to make it happen, and you have to ask people to be patient and follow along as you walk that path and try not to falter or fuck it up for anyone, it puts a lot on your shoulders. The more time you spend on this thing, the more of it will have been wasted in the eyes of people who don't think you pulled it off. Maybe they hated it from the start--even if only because it took you away from other things you could've been working on. Or maybe their feelings soured when the story went in a direction they weren't impressed with, or when the quality of your writing just wasn't enough to deliver on the promise of my premise in their eyes. I will inevitably lose people at every step of the way; but it's okay, because I get to see many of them leave their exit polls. 

There are many things I already know will be hiccups to the enjoyment of different audiences. Some of those things I haven't yet learned to avoid, or didn't in time. I don't care to heavily revise my stories because I become extremely attached to the version of events which I've already transcribed as the "actual" version of what happened (only feeling the need to correct plot-holes and inconsistencies where they spring up, and then more often through justification than revision). 

It's difficult to truly "fix" something broken in a story without completely starting the structure back from the beginning, or at least pruning back an infected branch. While I've written plenty of stories where the stem couldn't develop enough leaves to catch light from the start, KUSOMEGA is completely planned; it's just a matter of delivering it as best I can as fast as I can, using the lessons I learn along the way to make it hopefully better and better as it goes, and then taking everything I learn from it into the future with me.

To that end, if all I wanted was a series of written novels, I could probably sit back and crank through books three and four in a week. (Don't tempt me!) But in the course of the past two weeks, my understanding of what I'm building has developed in a more roundabout way, and started to grow whole healthy branches apart from the main trunk of the light novel series. 

I want to bring KUSOMEGA to fruition as a full-grown, beautiful, sturdy, adult tree that can chill in the back of a small section of pop culture's mind and toss for a couple years before taking its resting place comfortably on a respectable media shelf alongside, hopefully, the likes of Zaregoto, Asura Girl, No Game No Life, and yeah, fuck it, Re:ZERO; right where it belongs. 

A physical edition of the book was the obvious first step, and I announced right from the get-go my intention to hire artists to do proper light-novel-style illustrations as well as variant covers for the physical release; but where mind-expansion-meme truly happened was when goodvibrations came to me on twitter proposing his desire to create a full-blown comic book adaptation of KUSOMEGA, with me writing and him drawing. 

I will say right away that I have no intention of penning a full-bore adaptation of KUSOMEGA to manga because the story is deliberately crafted in a way which takes advantage of what can be done stylistically in the written medium. Even creating the audiobook is a fairly difficult translation to nail down, and only possible because I've been training my voice reading scripts and doing podcasts for the last decade. While I do think it's possible that the story could have a successful translation to manga, it would be a massive and extremely time-consuming task and ultimately nowhere near as interesting as simply writing new manga--

And it's right when I had that thought--that I had that thought. "I'll just make a new manga set in this world and he can draw that," I thought. Then it became, "actually, what if I storyboarded twelve one- and two-page comics, covering every character and idea in the series that I want to expand on a little bit?"

The best way I can communicate my excitement over this idea is through anecdote:

When I released volume one, I was asked by several artists if I had any guidelines for Baila's design, since I never gave her much of a proper description in the first book and didn't draw any art of her. 

Baila is obviously set up as an aesthetically-recognizable character. Her main trait which gets mentioned in the book is her upturned eyes, and we know that she's mostly identical to her sister, but we don't know what she's wearing or enough about her personality to know the kinds of expressions she might make or stories she might appear in. Because of this, even though she's conceptually an aesthetically appealing character whom some people were curious about, no one ever made any fan art of her. The same can be said of Kyirin, about whom sparse details and some description have been given across both volumes, but not enough to have a strong sense of her character.

At this stage in production, my mindset was essentially that I would draw "three girls per book;" meaning that each book either introduces or reintroduce certain characters who'd get their own art until everyone I wanted to have art did. I knew from the planning I'd done the couple days after volume one released that I was going to reintroduce both Baila and Kyirin as more major character in volume three, and so I could draw both of them then. 

Now, while it's certainly the case that not every light novel will feature art of every single character described in the book in every single book, I think it's probably fair to say that a "full roster" of character art for the first volume would've likely at least included Baila; and had this been an anime or manga from the beginning, then you almost certainly would've gotten to see Baila during the scene where Takuma goes to Chrom's manor. If you hadn't gotten to see her in that scene--maybe because her face was hidden by a shroud or something--it would've drawn attention to itself and needed to be mentioned in the original text to match it canonically; but it doesn't. It was never my intention to "hide" Baila; I just neither described her in much detail (I never do), nor drew any pictures of her.

The reason that illustrations are so core to the existence of light novels is that light novels are built from the same meta-textual lexicon as anime, manga, and video games--all visual mediums whose text is inexorably tied to imagery. When we see a character's design and their range of expressions, we learn a shit ton who they are--but more importantly, we form easy reference points to be made in the text.

Light novels, like every other part of nerd culture, are inherently autistic. (For the sake of coherency in this argument, we'll be running with the proposition that autism is characterized by "shorter" neural pathways in the brain.) Information is connected rapidly, to the point that blurting out what comes to mind seems incomprehensible to onlookers before extensive, unwanted explanation. Explanation is littered with condensed ideas, keywords--hotlinks down the proverbial wikipedia rabbit hole. An autist is a database animal.

If I show you a loli with a certain kind of smirk on her face that you've seen before on other characters with bossy personalities in anime, and then she has that kind of personality in the story, then when I describe the "wry smirk" spreading across her face, you form a mental image from an amalgam of the character design and the database of expressions which you've seen on other, similar characters. This shorthand allows stories to skip over massive amounts of detail/setup and get straight to the point--be that fanservice and fight scenes as in most of the medium's drivel, or meta-textual, high-minded drivel, like we got from the old glory days of the style.

Creating short comics for side characters was my way of trying to condense as much of a sense of those characters as I could into as few visual ideas as possible. Take for instance, "Chrom & Baila." In the book, we see Baila as a very serious and studious young woman who doesn't give Takuma the time of day. This is expanded on in the comic, where we actually get to see her practicing her magic, and some sense of its strength based on Chrom's observations about it. You can see on her face in the second panel exactly how she feels about using this magic--an over-the-top seething energy, almost like she gets off on what a badass she is.

But then on the next page, the focus shifts to Chrom, and we shift into seeing the characters from a new perspective. Chrom's inner monologue has more sense of humor then how he presents himself out loud; which I couldn't present from Takuma's first-person perspective that controlled all of the scenes Chrom appeared in before. We also get to see Baila in a good mood for the first time; the way she refers to her "papa" being surprisingly cutesy, suggesting a close and unguarded relationship totally unlike what she has with Takuma. It's also this unguarded innocence which makes her comments cut harder--she's completely sincere about looking out for her old dad when she tells him they don't have to train so hard every day. 

Chrom's reaction, though, is the part that truly takes advantage of illustration the most, because it's an emotion so deeply embroiled into anime and manga's visual lexicon that it's difficult to describe in words and do justice to what it specifically feels like aesthetically. Even when I did my storyboard, the best I could do was to draw the "poison lines" (as I'm tempted to call them) over Chrom's head, along with as close an approximation to the right expression as I could get. goodvibrations brought the face to life perfectly without needing those lines, because he grasped what I was trying to suggest implicitly--as have many of the other artists I've contracted to work on this physical release.

Now, in order for you to understand what happened next, I'm going to have to explain an aspect of my career that isn't super evident on the surface, but obvious when you think about it: 

artists fuck with me hardcore.

If you're an artist working in an anime-inspired style, odds are you're an anime fan, putting you in my wheelhouse right from the start; but one of the unique things about my animation analysis is that I'm a lot more interested in understanding visuals than most media critics. 

I'm not especially educated in how animation is made or in aesthetics in general; in fact, most of what I did was to apply the things I was learning from other youtubers breaking down visuals in film and applying the same logic to anime. This was low-key by far the biggest influence that I had on anime youtube--I brought conversation about visuals forward and defended it massively' a lot of more visually-focused channels began to emerge over the years, with the eventual spread of deeper industry knowledge and terminology correctness spreading in undercurrent waves through the writing styles of the anime youtube community.

It also happens that I produce hours and hours of content on a weekly basis (much of which doesn't require you to really look at the screen) and my written content is easily re-listenable; plus it doesn't usually have music, so you can play your own over it--all of which means it's ideal to listen to while you draw. The number of artists who've told me that they continually listen to my videos while drawing has got me doing the same thing with other videos.

But none of that is the real key: the true kicker is that if you make fan art of me or my characters and send it to me on twitter, I will retweet it 100% of the time. 

While my twitter audience isn't extremely impressive, an artist with 27k followers would most likely be doing it as a decent career. If you get put in front of that audience creating something which is relevant to that audience, there's a good chance it's going to get more attention than most of what you post--in addition to the guy you drew basically saying he thinks your shit is cool. It's also a good way to get feedback; not only will people in my audience respond (and usually they're overwhelmingly nice), but the really good stuff will show itself in the likes and retweets. I am fully aware that I'm opening people up to the experience of seeing their own art get paltry likes while someone else gets plenty--and I hope that it inspires those people to keep trying to improve until they can get similar results. Hell, it might even just be a good way to figure out if your style has mass appeal or not.

I learned very early into my career on youtube back when I had a tenth of the following I do now just how powerful it is to have the camaraderie of artists--and I immediately vowed to make sure I never, ever abused this power. Artists are some of the easiest people to abuse, because they simply love to draw. Everywhere I looked I saw youtubers grinding free labor out of artists and bleeding the passion right out of them, and I vowed that if I worked with anyone on anything serious, the relationship was going to be very clear, and everyone was going to come away feeling fair about it.

I also had learned early on that I was truly spoiled for choice when it comes to artists. I love tons and tons of the styles of people who draw art of my stuff, and choosing something out of a sea of options to go with is a risky business; especially speaking as someone who almost never works with people that I don't know personally. Because a large number of my personal friends are skilled artists, I've gone "in-house" for almost all of the commissions I've used over the course of my career--however, all of my friends are people with their own projects to worry about, and I can't expect them to always have time for as much as I want to ask for.

So returning to the story at hand, after publishing volume 2 on youtube, I quickly set about planning the KUSOMEGA kickstarter, and decided on having 12 illustrated pages, 18 pages of comics storyboarded by me and redrawn by other artists, and 4 variant covers. I knew I could get a different artist to handle each of these roles, and I thought it would probably take from three to seven days to fill them all. It took two.

But before I could get there, I had to draw all those storyboards--and that was an adventure in and of itself. I don't know if it comes through in their odd layouts, but I haven't really "planned" any of these comics before I started drawing. I approached each one starting with an introduction to a scene that I wanted, and then figured out how that story could reach a resolution with a beat in the middle for impact in the page space which I had to tell it.

Creating every single comic felt experimental and fascinating. I was always presenting myself with the problem of an opening panel and then slowly working out a solution to the end point, with different amounts of the story already figured out ahead each time. I finally felt like I'd done enough drawing from reference to have a decent sense of how to convey anatomy and perspective freehand--at least enough so that you could tell what I was trying to show you, anyways. I used almost no references in all of these storyboards. I had been given confidence by a thirteen-page comic storyboard which I designed in early 2019 that never saw release anywhere but which I had been very proud of, and so I set about drafting all these storyboards and had an incredible time.

Before I knew it, my initial plan to just draw a couple of them for now to test the waters had become the completion of all the storyboards; and now, unintentionally, I'd found myself at a point where all I had to do was an afternoon's worth of setup and I could go ahead and get people drawing. The sooner the better, right? So I went ahead and opened up applications for the project.

For the next two days, I was glued to my inbox. It was a nonstop thrill ride of awesome artists and unexpected takes on my work. Tons of people had drawn my characters before; tons more drew up drafts of what they wanted to do before sending their application. Some were practically finished! Some were practically finished AND had to be left out, because I'd already given the role to someone else, who'd already made their own amazing pitch. I was contacted by almost a hundred artists in the span of two days; most of them were great, and most of them had to be turned down. The ones I hired all had styles or ideas that I loved, and some of those people burned through their work like it was nothing.

And that brings me back to goodvibrations. When I first launched the applications, he offered to do all of the work for free. I turned that down, not just because of earlier-discussed principles, but also because a big part of this is my desire to feature different styles and interpretations as part of the work. It's precisely because I can't pick any one of these styles as the "most definitive" for the series, and because I want to see how these characters can be transformed and shown from new angles in the hands of other artists, that I want all this art to go into the project...

but that doesn't mean I can't vibe with someone who's down to crunch the way ol' Digibro likes to crunch. The fact that goodvibrations had sketches of my comic done by the next night, literally taking my storyboards and giving them the technical finesse to communicate their message better, made me feel like it would be a waste to pass on the opportunity to work with someone so willing and capable to bring something bigger to life.

It so happens that my plan for the kickstarter included a 12-page bonus comic, which I didn't want to make someone draw before I had secured their payment for it; but since he wanted to do this work one way or another anyways and was plowing through what I'd already given him, I thought, fuck it, let's storyboard the Mahou Shoujo Gil comic too!--so I did that.

Making this 12-page storyboard across three nights took about as much time as writing the first book of the light novel. I handled each two pages as a unit, telling short stories which comprise the bigger short story of the issue. Ultimately, it's just a cute little action comic with a very straightforward plot that brings us into the narrative of what's going to be happening in Volume 3.

After drawing Mahou Shoujo Gil, I started to realize I was "getting it." I wasn't drawing these storyboards out of an obligation to making the ideas happen--in fact, as stated before, none of the storyboards I've drawn have been bread from ideas. They were imagined in the same way that my story has been--one panel and page at a time with a vague notion of where it has to end up and in how long.

Drawing these storyboards is FUN. Making up stories which can utilize the power of visuals is FUN! I actually WANT to do it just for the hell of it and WANT to get better--not because I want to impress anyone, but because I want to be able to tell deeper stories! 

Because of the ultra-thick, imprecise lines I use in my work, I struggle to convey more specific detail. In order to sell an expression, I have to make it more extreme and wacky because I can't draw well enough to convey it with subtlety. When I design a character, I can only give them a few key pieces of clothing without much detail, because I don't have space within the lines to add that detail without cluttering the drawing--and most likely, those details will come out muddy.

These are problems you can only solve with practice--and for the first time, I actually think I have the capacity to practice drawing. Just being able to shift the responsibility of my work's quality away from the detail of an individual illustration, and onto the relationships and interactions of images in a comic has given me the ability to create things I actually like enough to make drawing feel like something productive and fun.

So naturally, when I finished and handed over the Mahou Shoujo Gil storyboards, I went right on drawing more comics, just for myself... and at this point I realized that comics were becoming inexorably tied to the identity of KUSOMEGA in my mind, since I'd by now spent about as much time figuring out how to tell stories in this universe through that medium as I've spent on doing the same in writing.

I've also just straight-up been writing the third volume pretty quickly at the same time. With how much I already pre-planned the story and how well I've come to understand my goals with it, writing is not difficult--and stopping to resolve certain stoppages by realizing characters visually through comics has helped me to understand what I'm making even better. I am LITERALLY practicing what I preach and using the explicit themes of the story as a guideline for how to create it.

Indeed, as I called attention to in the afterward of the youtube version of volume 2, KUSOMEGA is primarily a story about storytelling itself, and the system of Lower-Deck magic is pretty obviously an extended metaphor about different artistic mediums. These themes will come even more to the front in the coming volumes, but a big part of the idea is to show how forming a foundation cobbled together from your understanding of the commonalities between lots of different "languages" allows you to create new "spells" through their combinations.

So let's propose that the KUSOMEGA light novel series which I write in WordPad and Drive documents, is Earth magic. Earth magic has a lot of crossover properties with plant magic (analytical writing); and so while a lot of my knowledge of Earth magic comes from reverse-engineering the principles of plant magic, I am also able to create new kinds of spells through the combination of both magics--and as long as the elements I use are compelling, then the story is compelling as well. 

Well, I've also got some decent wind magic skills (oration) which I've grinded making audio content: how can this magic be incorporated into a spell with the other magic? Obviously, this is how the audiobook comes to be.

So what elements of every type of magic can I incorporate into KUSOMEGA? That's the question I'm interested in answering. Here is a list of ideas:

-First and foremost, the physical release. This will already be a mixed-media project involving comics and illustrations from other artists, but it will also have art in its framework. I am obsessed with the form and format of especially physical media, and I have more in mind for Kusomega's physical design than just pumping in illustrations. I want specific design for the table of contents, for the extras section, and for the layout of the text--unique Afterwords and the like. I want to physical release to feel almost like a magazine--a truly collaborative experiment to realize one vision from a bunch of specific angles. God that sounds pretentious.

In any case, there will ideally be three physical books: volume 1+2, volume 3, and volume 4, each following similar formats with their own little experiments in places. If possible, I would also like to create an artbox to house the trilogy.

-The audio version could potentially be cut into a more complete series of mp3s for each chapter, or even released on CD as an audiobook if there was interest. I could also look into the potential of creating side-story audio dramas.

-One of my kickstarter stretch goal plans is for a "Fan Artbook"--an official release of just a huge deluge of KUSOMEGA fanart. There's already a fanart page on this site which collects all the stuff that gets posted on twitter, but money will be involved in this production.

-Some sort of long-form analytical deep-dive of the series once it's over. I want to see as much analytical writing from fans as possible, but there's also just so goddamn much I could say about this series, and I know there are some people who'd be interested in my own perspective on all of it as the author.

-More comics. Eventually, I think this will lead to the publication of one or more full-blown manga collections. The story just leaves so much room for comics as a possibility for expanding on it that I think it's worth getting all I can out of it. In particular, the way that the story expands in volume 3 will leave a lot of doors open for side-stories.

-Some kind of video game. One of the artists who applied for the series had a style I thought would be so perfect for a KUSOMEGA game that I realized I had to make one. No idea what this would amount to--I don't even want to think about it until a significant amount of this other stuff is done.

-Every time I make a story, everyone jokes about making it into an anime. Some people even animated small clips of the first book! I think the potential for telling side-stories through animation is just as strong as it if in comics, but animation is just such a huge undertaking that I'd need to learn a lot more about my avenues into getting it created before I could be sure I was going to go through with it. That said, I'm not discounting the possibility of simply attempting some rudimentary animated shorts myself.

-Music is a tough one. I'm not that interested in putting together an "official soundtrack," but it might be interesting to try and make a character album. Maybe this could also be a big collab project? It's hard to say at this point, but I do have at least one idea for a character theme that I want to make myself. 

-I don't even begin to know how I'd get this done, but if KUSOMEGA reaches a level of popularity where a limited run figurine seems like it could be worthwhile, I would absolutely love to make it happen. Would probably hold some kind of design contest and have people vote on the one they want adapted to a figure.

-And of course, there's plenty of merchandising opportunities here. Basic stuff like buttons, pins, stickers, whatever--each of these presents an opportunity for storytelling and creativity.

KUSOMEGA is a story about pushing yourself, trying new things, and evolving as a creator and as a person, and I think it only makes sense to try and reflect those themes in the way that the story is actually constructed. In the end, the singular tree of KUSOMEGA will most likely be this website. All of the branches will be displayed here for you to explore.

It's not about being clever, it's about moving forward.

-Digibro