Wykkrwomb

Though The Lord of the Rings founded modern fantasy, recently A Song of Ice and Fire (A Game of Thrones) has taken a look at the genre, attempting to better illustrate just what it might mean for real human beings, with real, human-being issues, to live in a mostly medieval world with a fantastical silver lining.

Tetsujin 28-go (Gigantor) originally founded modern mecha manga & anime, inspiring thousands of young creators to try their hand at a "super robot"-based story, then in 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion took a deeper, humbler look at it, giving us the same sorts of characters we knew and loved, but also finally answering why they were the way they were - illustrating that tragic, if not horrific, backstories tended to be the only real common logical causes.

This is called "deconstruction", when an author comes along and adds his or her understandings of the minute boundaries of reality to a genre - a series of recognizable tropes used as a means to carry a story - and thus help it mature. We want to believe in the stories we consume, and in a world that often seems devoid of meaning, we want these stories to give us something to inspire us towards living better lives. This is why attempting to find a realer way to utilize a trope is so valuable. It allows us to have an easier time reflecting on, and ultimately making hard decisions about, the things in life that we value most. Thus, why deconstruction is so key to good story-telling.

In 1996, Pocket Monsters Red and Green hit stores in Japan. These were video games centred around fictional creatures called "Pokémon", which humans known as "Pokémon Trainers" caught and trained to battle each other for sport. After the world-wide success of the game, the Pokémon franchise quickly became a popular children's animated television series, animated films, toy line, and trading card game. Today, you can see its most popular creature, the electric-cheek-charged mouse, "Pikachu", even largely rendered on the sides of some Japan-bound airplanes. We all love cute things, and the Japanese are masters at crafting cute into everyday life.

As a television show, Pokémon was a strategy-battle adventure series, emphasizing the benefits of friendship over pure firepower. Beloved, it was quickly followed up by a series of similar genre-sharing shows, the most popular of which were Digimon (after moderate success of the titular film), and Medabots. Strategy-battle adventures rely hea-vily on overcoming a series of opponents, cerebrally, by planning and directing literal combatants in physical combat - as well as following the characters as they travel across foreign (often mysterious or wondrous) lands.
Unlike the fantasy genre, or even the mecha genre, strategy-battle adventure is a genre that has barely even begun to see the full potential of its use.

Along with witches and aliens, Wykkrwomb is our attempt to further deconstruct it. We hope you like what you see.