Mr_Crocodile Wrote:It has long been the aspiration of mankind to touch the stars, to seek flight.
From those who told the story of Icarus with envy instead of warnings in their voices, to the brothers who went from printers to soarers.

Now, as the dawn of the Age of Monsters blots out the skies and swats out the flaming chariots of mankind, the human species dares to dream of going further beyond, beyond the very edges of their world.

And yet, even as their spears pierce the sky, humans will find their ambitions punished by the Steward of the Rainbow.

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Notes:
This is one of the most world-building heavy stories I have ever wrote for this entire series of fics. Not because of some specific and grand timeline-altering event, but because of hoiw it shows the ways in which Kaiju could (and would) slowly but unstoppably shift the tides of history.

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See the end of the chapter for more notes.

Ever since I started working on OtSoT, with the goal of writing a realistic earth beset by Kaiju, I have run into the issue of powered flight.
Back when Kaiju first became a genre, the ability for Kaiju to be beaten by bombs and fighter planes has been something writers had to deal with. Many have made full-use of them,. having the conclusion to a given movie be the defeat of a particular monster by the heroic cavalry charge-like arrival of the assailed nation's air forces. Others justified their uselessness by making the monster particularity robust, or an army of great numbers.

But past a certain point, you can no longer ignore that we live in a world were even the poorest countries can buy or even develop tactical missiles in numbers large enough to kill anything from beyond the horizon. So for a long while I wracked my brain in trying to find a justification for why or how in a world as technologically advanced as ours, nations wouldn't simply and safely atomize Kaiju with missile barrages.

And then I realized. If I can't justify every single Kaiju having some trick or trait that makes it missile-proof, then I would have to make the missiles themselves unreliable and costly. Dogora felt like the most obvious choice for such a game-changer, being a Kaiju whose domain is solely the skies.

The world building of this story, then, is the culmination of that, a long timeline of exactly why and how aerospace technologies have failed to deliver in the OtSoT timeline.