Beyond Kaiserreich: Announcing American Kingdoms + 2024 in review

"You can only plan so far. Then life gets in the way."
- Logen Ninefingers, The First Law Trilogy (Joe Abercrombie)

~~~

The end of 2024 is rapidly approaching - a time where we at Kaiser Cat Cinema traditionally reflect on the projects and releases of the past year, and look forward to our plans in 2025. Anyone following the channel will know it has been... a bittersweet year for me.

We spent a lot of the year celebrating the incredible 100K milestone we reached after KRDOC7. It was a difficult celebration for me, because I spent most of it in a hospital of some sort or other. I will spare everyone the details, I think I've rasped on the low back thing enough by now. On a positive note, I now designed and built a custom DIY supine workstation, and it is awesome.

My new workstation -  thanks in no small part to some masterful DIY tips from friends and forum users with similar back issues. 

At 100K subscribers, we have reached the milestone I originally set for myself when founding the channel. I wanted to make sure there was a full library of Kaiserreich lore videos available online, and have about 100K subs. Beyond that, it gets more complicated. I don't really subscribe to the idea that a channel needs to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I would very much prefer to have a small channel, a manageable workload and a tight-knit community. My ambition then, is not outwards, but inwards. I want to work with this community, with this team, and make cool alt-history videos. I like making art and writing characters - that's pretty much all there is to it.

The second challenge we face going forward is that we are kind of running out of Kaiserreich. With the release of KRDOC8, we are now looking at entering the third and final act of the Kaiserreich Documentary series. Future episodes will be, in order: KRDOC9 China, KRDOC10 Africa, KRDOC11 East-Asia, and KRDOC12 US civil War. Beyond that, it gets complicated. Do we hold on to Kaiserreich forever, and create increasingly niche videos or endlessly remaster old ones? We are rapidly approaching a point where we have to ask: What is Kaiser Cat Cinema, if it is not a Kaiserreich Youtube channel? Those who read my email newsletter regularly will have seen me take various angles at attempting to form a unified mission statement for the team. This new site, bristling with 'about' pages and behind-the-scenes stuff is just a facet of that. 

The mission I ended up with was 'An alt-history show on every screen. An alt-history book in every store'. As we go into the 'Peak Kaiserreich' phase, we need to also think about the post-Kaiserreich future. I began hinting at this early this year with my 'Shows I want to make' videos. These included a Cold War alt-history universe, an over-the-top Warhammer-esque Dieselpunk universe, and finally a medieval American alt-history. American Kingdoms seems to have really struck a chord with the community. It's just a really cool premise, and I think we would be the first to bring a full worldbuilding project like that to Youtube.

Enter American Kingdoms. I think the the title itself pretty much says it all, but I will drop the universe pitch here:

What if the Americas had already been colonized in the Dark Ages? In American Kingdoms, American history is re-imagined as an Arthurian medieval epic.

Three decades ago, the settler Kingdoms of the East Coast rebelled against their British overlords, pushing the perfidious Redcoats from the continent. Now, King Washington struggles to hold his waning Union together.

In Europe, a new British emperor lays claim to his lost American colonies, and vows to conquer an empire upon which the sun will never set…

This is a 'figure it out as we go' kind of thing, where we build the universe from one video to the next. However, the initial wave of content will be intimately familiar to everyone who has seen our work:

• World of American Kingdoms: The initial releases will include a WoAK  'The Union' and 'Redcloaks'. These videos star, of course, you godless rebels and the glorious and rightful Emperor of the Americas, the British.

•  Audiobook Series: I am currently running auditions on the first AK audio book projects, which will include about 30 pages of story from various POV characters. This will be the main premise of the webseries, as I want to focus more on improving my writing and character work. I'm also a huge fan of audiobooks - I end up listening to a lot of books while working, doing chores, so I want to offer our community that chance as well.

•  Maybe! A writing contest: This is something that people have been asking for for a while now, and I may look into it in 2025. We could run a writing contest where the top three contestants get their short stories published as audiobook shorts, and get a nice bundle of merch from the webshop.

A medieval rendition of 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' for our upcoming WoAK 'The Union' video.

So in 2025, American Kingdoms will join Kaiserreich and The Divided States as our projects going forward. If these original projects continue to do well, we may introduce other experimental stuff in the far future. In the long run, I would like to get us to a place where we have projects set in all popular eras of alt-history: World War Two, Medieval, and Cold War. First, however, I want to wrap the Kaiserreich Documentary Series, and get TDS Battery Park out the door 😅

Thanks for reading my dev blog! I hope you are enjoying the new revamped site. If you have any questions, just use the comments feature below.

Yours truly,
Vincent D.N

The Kaiser Cats wish everyone a great Thanksgiving, and thank everyone for their wonderful support in 2024!