Blackthorne: Tell him his excuses fool no one, and that anyone with eyes to see understands that he clearly intended Jack Torrance as a self-insert, and Kubrick's portrayal of him as a volatile abuser from the start touched a nerve.
Mariko: The Anjin is upset about The Shining.
I feel like the entire internet is gaslighting me into thinking this show is good when all I could think about repeatedly during it was "how has the protagonist not been beheaded a dozen times already? Is this a harem anime? Wait no, I think it's an isekai. He did what now?! Please! Behead him!"
the show several times show that he keeps getting a pass because he's a foreigner and the locals all expect him to behave terribly, and they're just keeping him around because he's interesting (and his protectors are somewhat desperate)
he's not bound to the local customs in the same way, he's an interloper, which lets him fuck around and not find out, because people look at him and think "barbarian weirdo, not a threat, maybe amusing or useful" vs "his and my families have two hundred years of history"
Did you miss the part where both Ishido and Torunaga have political reasons for keeping him alive? Or the bit where they were gonna behead him but he got rescued?
He comes to a foreign land where he and only he has a special power hardly anyone else does. He has a lot of trouble adapting yet somehow finds himself in a house full of women that worship him and he uses his special ability to gain power and influence. It's an isekai.
Okay so he isn't the only one with that "special power". That's kind of the whole point of keeping him alive, to diminish Portuguese influence over the country
So given that it was written by an Australian in 1975, do you suppose Clavell was aware of the genre he was writing in, or might he have influenced the genre at a formative time?
You know that that genre exists in part as a fantasy version of people like the guy this show is based on, right? And that there have been numerous other real examples?
I could write a LOT on this, as I'm an East Asian Historian, but ill keep it short:
1) conflict between honorific individualism and rule of law make execution complicated in this era
2) he gets slack for being foreign
/cont
3) execution is reserved for the very worst crimes, as it is differentiated from seppuku for the samurai caste. BT could have been ordered to commit seppuku for some actions, but he can't - he's foreign.
4) it's in the TV, relax
given outlander’s centering of a woman’s romantic perspective, i would argue that outlander has a much, much more compelling claim to being an isekai than shogun
to be clear: i don’t think isekai is a helpful framework with which to understand shogun, in that i do not understand or perceive shogun as being a series about audience-insert wish fulfillment or erotic access
I only know the novel. In the aforementioned novel, Omi, Yabu and several others all consider executing him repeatedly, but his perspective is inherently valuable to their liege given that otherwise knowledge of Europe is highly curated by the Portuguese, but yeah, sure, they COULD throw that away.
Or much of a watcher if it's anything like he novel.
Tora be like, "What happened to that non Portuguese Euro you found?"
"He made me mad, so I executed him."
"I understand. You will go commit seppuku now. That is all."
IMO, it is as close to the novel as is reasonably possible in a ten-hour TV format. Though it does lose a lot of the cultural conveyance simply by nature of said format. I am very glad to have read the book immediately prior to watching the show.
I read it the better part of a decade ago, but I still remember that the reason Omi pissed on him was that he *wanted* to execute him but *was not permitted to*.
Well it is based on a real dude (William Adams) who was the first known English person to reach Japan and whose knowledge of trade, artillery, and sea craft wound up making him a pretty important tactical asset to the founders of the Tokugawa shogunate.
His head should have been detached from his head at least a dozen times before that point. In the first episode we see someone being beheaded for simply stopping him from walking into the village yet he gets away with ANYTHING!
