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FLIPADELPHIA posted:criticism of the White Savior / Protagonist variety in the novel I'm not trying to say the book escapes this completely unscathed, but having read it relatively recently I don't think it's as bad on this count as a lot of people say. It's basically the story of blackthorne's white savior impulses getting utterly manipulated and exploited to the hilt by toranaga and his retinue, ultimately leaving him a broken husk. The actual problem with reading the book today is of course the impressive variety of cringe sex stuff No Mods No Masters fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 22:09
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Yabu seems like one of the characters most improved in this adaptation. Really loving his actor, not who I would have ever envisioned for the part but he's great
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Feb 28, 2024 06:02
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I feel like book yabu played up the aesthete aspect a lot more, this is like glorified bandit yabu. But it really works, he's my fav in this version I think. I look forward to watching him waver between the two sides 100000 times in the 8 episodes to come
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Feb 28, 2024 16:38
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MrMojok posted:Can’t wait to see what they do with the ninja attack. Probably the attack at the end of the second episode is a good indication, and it was executed pretty well. I've never seen the 80s version but I read a review that said the equivalent scene in that had a stereotypical ninja, and honestly from the book I remember most such attacks basically involving stereotypical ninjas
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Feb 29, 2024 00:30
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Fortunately ninja attacks in dramas about japan have been relegated to the dustbin of history. Now to take a big sip of coffee and start watching tokyo vice (2022)
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Feb 29, 2024 00:48
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Kingtheninja posted:Can't wait to check this out. I read the book for school like, over twenty years ago. I remember a lot, but the thing I keep thinking about it How people would pee together to make a deal? Was that a thing? It's taken directly from a pretty well known folk story about the real people the taiko and toranaga are based on. It even inspired a weird japanese saying that's kind of like "birds of a feather flock together" but for piss https://kotobank.jp/word/%E9%96%A2%E6%9D%B1%E3%81%AE%E9%80%A3%E5%B0%8F%E4%BE%BF-2026289
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Feb 29, 2024 01:21
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The show is set in 1600, it says so at the very beginning of the first episode. I think the book takes place over a few years leading up to sekigahara to make things a little more plausible
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Feb 29, 2024 18:06
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I didn't get to the new ep yet, but It's a bit interesting that people seem about 50/50 between spelling it blackthorn and blackthorne, I guess probably depending on exposure to the novel or not (it's the latter)
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Mar 5, 2024 23:25
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I can buy the jesuits especially not wanting to cause a diplomatic incident by blowing a bunch of japanese sailors to hell in open view of the entirety of osaka. They should have just killed blackthorne then and there yeah but at some point you probably have to let people not killing blackthorne slide a bit to enjoy shogun
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Mar 6, 2024 02:00
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The fight was fine for what it was, they kept it relatively realistic. Neither of them are really fighters though both probably have a little training and have been around a lot of fighting. Granted "neither complete amateur nor super skilled" is sort of an awkward thing to film and they wisely didn't dwell on it No Mods No Masters fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 03:13
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I guess I'd give taipan by this creative team a shot but also good luck, I feel like that is much inferior source material (and also ends on a huge anticlimax). Those are the only two clavell books I've tried but maybe I should keep going. Would noble house be readable if I don't super remember the events of taipan? I basically remember the taipan had some of the magical debt coins still outstanding, died in a typhoon with the rivalry with the other guy unresolved, and left some legitimate and illegitimate heirs
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Mar 6, 2024 05:20
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It's a reasonable change even just for filmic storytelling reasons, it would really gently caress with the pacing to show more of the steps in that sequence than they already did
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Mar 6, 2024 18:16
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mobby_6kl posted:Mariko seems to get over the death of her husband pretty quickly. Abundantly justified in the book, for reasons already pretty implied in the show. Mariko and her husband absolutely loving hate each other and are together basically only because toranaga is withholding permission to divorce as a carrot No Mods No Masters fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 18:48
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timp posted:Yeah totally. I was honestly surprised to see he was a competent and brave warrior cause from the way he was acting I was kind of getting "insecure coward" vibes in the few snippits we saw before that scene. I think this is just someone's mis-memory of the book pinging around because he doesn't die then in the book, and IIRC he might even survive to the end
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Mar 6, 2024 18:59
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:It could be any or all three of those things- concealing his true plans / motives is his most defining practice. This is heavy book spoilers and maybe just my interpretation, but totally in line with this It is kinda all of those things, but ultimately underneath everything, toranaga needs one friend and that is basically where he begins to cultivate blackthorne for that role in his own hosed up way
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Mar 7, 2024 19:25
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I think I've talked myself into liking this blackthorne precisely because he is being more of a hulking obviously flawed weirdo than playing it as a straightforward hero. It's one of the key things foregrounding all the non blackthorne characters, which is paying dividends so far. I guess the real test of this direction for the character will be the love story, at the least it'll be interesting to see the attempt
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Mar 8, 2024 17:45
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Bring on the version where he maintains his current goblin level and still weirdly hits it off with mariko somehow I say. Catch her in bed with a goblin
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Mar 8, 2024 23:19
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Yeah it doesn't sound right to me, I was pretty confident both novel blackthorne and william adams had a wife and kids in england I mean wikipedia backs it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Adams_(pilot) No Mods No Masters fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 21:43
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Nice Tuckpointing! posted:The show is doing a fantastic job buffing out all the "This was obviously written by British/American/Australian dude from the mid-20th century who was wrestling with some WWII trauma and thought Ayn Rand was just dandy, but was also trying to be respectful in his own middle-aged horny teenager way" stuff, and balancing Toranaga's story and Blackthorne's story. Which makes me wonder about the final act of the whole story: I'm betting we get to actually see the Battle of Sekigahara instead of a "Then a battle happened" two-paragraph coda. In fact, I would be pleased to bits if the final episode is maybe a half hour wrapping up Blackthorne's story, with him working on a new ship, and then a full half hour of the battle focused on Toranaga and Ishido in the thick of it. I have mixed feelings because the ending of the book is really great, maybe even the best part, but yeah it will need changes of some kind to work in a visual medium. The exact balance they strike, well it will be interesting to see. Much as I personally would enjoy toranaga's wild 30 minute sociopath soliloquy about just how completely and totally he's manipulated everyone
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Mar 11, 2024 21:36
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I guess this could be approaching some dangerous fanfiction line, but maybe with this creative team they could be trusted to do a season 2 covering the siege of osaka castle. Given how much the marketing material seems to be playing up lady chacha (I forget her clavell name) relative to her role in the book, maybe they're thinking about it
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Mar 12, 2024 04:08
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My takeaway this time is fujiko's actress is also very good. Chalk up another quite improved in the adaptation character in addition to king poo poo yabu
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Mar 12, 2024 06:38
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Fujiko is maybe the most batshit person in the entire story and hell I don't blame her. I loved the actress's light  when she pulls the gun, she managed that without going over the top really well
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Mar 12, 2024 16:34
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Nice Tuckpointing! posted:Oh man, I just realized that we're probably not going to get village life delights such as the rotting pheasant/dead gardener and the threat to wipe out the village if Blackthorne doesn't learn Japanese in six months that are in the book. IIRC the pheasant thing was very ahistorical and sorta cringe so I think that's a fine cut. They did go out of their way to introduce the gardener so maybe they can come up with a better sequence of events for him to die and blackthorne to feel bad. The love story and blackthorne starting to actually speak japanese do require some stuff like that to create the feeling of time passing
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Mar 12, 2024 17:56
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I also reread that section last night because I certainly didn't remember ishido's messengers getting turned into paste by cannons. And indeed they simply get turned into paste by 20 matchlocks at point blank instead. But overall they did a good job adapting it with a lot of the implications intact, while cutting out like 5+ really long conversations between all the players making everything explicit
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Mar 12, 2024 18:08
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I guess the funny thing about yabu (broad spoilers) is the situation pretty much tends to push him more into toranaga's camp, if he just accepted that and committed he would have probably come out great having done mostly the same things. His riding the line pretty much only hurts him in the end. Quintessential congratulations, you played yourself character
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Mar 12, 2024 19:48
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You don’t have to like it, but it’s what peak performance was thought to look like at the time
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Mar 13, 2024 01:48
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I think it was just a reaction to the huge provocation and having just seen people turned into loving jelly, jesus christ
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Mar 13, 2024 03:52
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The baby could do an easy sudoku. The dad had to do one that required an x-wing
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Mar 13, 2024 04:06
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It's fair to want to see yasuke and miss him in this if he's one of your sengoku faves. Granted he had disappeared from the historical record for years at this point in the real events, but hell the real person mariko is based on never left her castle between age 21 and her death
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Mar 13, 2024 21:38
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Arglebargle III posted:Wasn't the koku also a unit of gold that was supposed to be the same value? I think you're thinking of a koban. quote:Traditionally one koku of rice equaled one ryo of money, which was represented by a gold coin called a koban. A koban had a fixed weight of 18.2 grams, or 0.64 ounces of gold. At present exchange rates of about US$1,200 per ounce of gold, one ryo, or one koku, is therefore worth about US$800 in today's money. Ergo the lowest- ranked daimyo with a fief worth 10,000 koku had an income of about US$8 million per year.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:18
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BrotherJayne posted:"the koban, which was equal to three koku of rice," reduce that USD value by two thirds This was where I quoted from, as it goes on to say it sounds like the actual exchange rate fluctuated a lot over the period and there is no one hard number https://www.diffworlds.com/samurai/monetary_system.htm
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Mar 14, 2024 00:48
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Out of any material in the book that isn't sex weirdo stuff, this is probably what I wish they would have taken the hatchet to the most. They made a few smart snips but it's not the full success I've been conditioned to expect
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Mar 19, 2024 17:11
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I don't really want to reread the cringiest part of the book for the exact details, but IIRC there he wanted to make some ye olde dish that required the meat to age then forgot about it and the servants were too afraid to tell him. It's a contrived sequence on several levels
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Mar 19, 2024 19:13
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Also in the book everyone ahistorically acts like it's wildly weird to eat birds in japan, so the servants are kinda just like "maybe he is a goblin who likes eating rotten things IDK"
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Mar 19, 2024 19:49
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Jamwad Hilder posted:This is actually largely accurate. They were relatively lax about a lot of things to do with Buddhism, but meat wasn't commonly eaten by the Japanese until the 19th century. Rich people did occasionally have boar or deer from hunting, and sometimes beef or chicken too, but it was rare. I don't think they would have thought "nasty this guy is eating a BIRD?!" but it wasn't common for many people. I dunno, this is my source: https://www.columbia.edu/~hds2/learning/Learning_from_shogun_txt.pdf p118 (a very cool little companion book I recommend to other nerds btw) quote:We must also stress that, except among the Buddhist clergy, the prohibition against eating meat referred only to four-legged animals. It obviously never applied to fish, which have always provided the overwhelming bulk of animal protein in the Japanese diet, but neither did it apply to birds. Indeed, fowl ranked only slightly below fish as the most prized food in the era of Shogun. Japanese of all classes, including the Kyoto aristocracy, have always been fond of bird flesh and it seems safe to say that almost no winged species was safe from being served up on the tables of traditional Japan. Pheasant in particular was considered a great delicacy, and Mariko’s reluctance to sample such a representative dish as “small pheasant, cut into tiny pieces, barbecued over charcoal with a sweet soya sauce” (p. 688) can be explained only as a peculiar personal preference: it was certainly not a national trait. Even European visitors were astonished by the variety of fowl consumed by the Japanese, although here we find the same qualification as with fourlegged animals: as an early observer noted, “they never eat hens, because, as it seems to me. they breed them and they never eat anything they breed” (Cooper, They Came to Japan, p. 191). It was less the eating of meat than the raising of animals to be eaten which most clearly set the Europeans apart from the Japanese. No Mods No Masters fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Mar 19, 2024 |
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Mar 19, 2024 20:12
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I don't think it's that hot a take except insofar as anything going against the general oh holky gently caress reaction the show is getting is. I also had the thought during this episode that we're now halfway through and it doesn't quite feel like the blackthorne/mariko relationship is where it needs to be at this point for things that happen later to have the appropriate impact. Hopefully episode 6 or 7 can spend a lot of time on it and mitigate that, but I have a feeling it's going to be mitigating a problem, rather than not having a problem
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Mar 20, 2024 17:23
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Yeah I prefer how the miniseries is handling many or most or maybe all things besides blackthorne/mariko and the more down tempo feeling of time passing stuff. As everyone is saying always they are absolutely killing it on the toranaga side (man I loved his performance being dug out of the dirt and smiling like a loving demon) and that's probably the most important thing to me. I guess it's just one of the hard things about adapting shogun that you also really have to do blackthorne/mariko well because uhh it's going to be pretty important also
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Mar 20, 2024 18:23
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Cosmo jarvis would have probably been a disaster as the straightforward hero in a blackthorne-forward adaptation a la the 80s version. Fortunately he's pretty well suited to being a tom hardy esque lumpy goblin in an ensemble cast
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Mar 21, 2024 02:12
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I don't think toranaga or ishido are portrayed that sympathetically, but that's probably appropriate, they are both absolutely sociopathic schemers. One just happens to see the use in blackthorne, and is generally better at playing the manipulator game
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Mar 21, 2024 02:51
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I think your take is correct if you take a look at it from 10,000 feet, but for most viewers Toranaga is definitely being perceived as "the good guy" This is part of why I think it could be genuinely interesting to take the story beyond sekigahara. You could take a lot of the bullshit evasive sheen off of toranaga watching him come directly to the point and finally ruthlessly obliterating ochiba and the heir
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Mar 21, 2024 03:01
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