When I first wrote Manifest Destiny, starting in 2015, I had a simple premise that 4chan's /a/ board compelled me to go along: What if Gate was Generation Kill but just in its setting? Well, I went for it. I went for it very early on and apparently, asides from a huge few glaring mistakes, Manifest Destiny was for quite sometime the leading story in the Gate fandom. Leading, but perhaps not popular or well received, in my opinion.

It was Gate and Manifest Destiny that turned me into the writer, and person, that I am today however, and I'll explain:

I was drawn to Gate because of its overt imperialism that was its basis: The Japanese sending their SDF into an actual foreign land on divine auspices and the "responsibility" to do so? It still ticks me off to this day to think about it, and of course Generation Kill portrays a very similar premise: The results and goings on of how the United States and its own combat units fared, invading Iraq in 2003-4.

There is an obsession, of course, on "realism" and portraying this type of media, fiction, right. That the JSDF as portrayed in Gate was not "realistic" when compared to Generation Kill.

In a younger me's head, I correlated this to American exceptionalism, and how the Americans, battered and bruised from its own wars abroad must know how to do this right by now, even with its scars and mistakes in the past.

But something terrible happened, something absolutely terrible that I cringe to even explain now:

Because of the research and discovery I did writing Gate, I learned the wider breadth of American and Western Imperialism. America could not stand as being the "better" of the two if both the JSDF and the Americans went into a Gate-like scenario. Under no auspices could I portray what a military intervention of the type of this story to be at all, in any way, a positive, or even portray what the Untied States has done as positive because they had done it before so they could it "right" this time.

To be realistic about it is to accept the fact American interventionism has done nothing but bring a lot of the world to ruin.

And so with that knowledge, I return to Manifest Destiny.

Manifest Destiny will be different this time, as far as the path it takes, and although it'll take a bit to have parity to what it once was, it's a story that I very much always return to in my mind.

I don't have much to say here in this foreword, but this is a story I will finish because I owe much to it, no matter how long it takes.

It is a platform by which not only I can tell a story, but share the facts and experiences of American interventionism abroad. That is this story's purpose, and not as a military wankoff against the Empire.

I thank you for taking the time out of your day to read, and, I only ask that off this story, you explore the consequences of American imperialism and military interventionism if you can.