abandoned paper ideas pt.1
Cleaning out the documents folder, I found this old thing which I was almost considering developing out, in a longer and more sober fashion, for my pop culture class.
"Fancy Lads of the Warring States"
Or: "Everything old is gay again"
A while ago Capcom announced a fighting game for the arcades based on their "Sengoku BASARA" games. "Sengoku" refers to the warring states period of Japanese history, analogous to the period of strife that produced the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in China. "Basara", remained undecipherable until, while moving out, I emptied out my bookshelves and found my old dictionary of ancient Japanese terms. According to it, a "basara" is someone who dresses and behaves extravagantly, parading around town in gaudy clothing and wearing shiny and extravagant swords on their hips. It dates from the Kamakura period, when sword-making had become an art, but hadn't yet become a utilitarian one over a century plus of civil war.
Sengoku BASARA was a bold-faced rip-off of the Dynasty Warriors games, gleefully dumb and cartoonish parodies of Japanese and Chinese warring states fiction in which you run around as a famous feudal general slaughtering hordes of 3D footsoldiers while lightning explodes to the tune of howling butt-rock. Capcom must've used an archaic word for flamboyant men because they were stealing a game concept from another developer, and making the game gaudier and louder seemed the easiest way to accomplish their act of one-upsmanship.
While Koei, the makers of Dynasty Warriors, churned out a new version of their franchise for years without any more idea about what makes this type of game fun than they did when they started, Capcom made a calculated decision that the name of this game was silliness. They then slathered said silliness liberally across every aspect of the game. Sengoku BASARA may have a combo counter like Dynasty Warrrios, but while the later rarely reaches the double digits, the former's routinely shoots up to three or four hundred, triggering canned cheers at each hundred mark. Both games may feature the legendary warrior Honda Tadakatsu, but Dynasty Warriors just makes him into a giant mountain of a man with a goofy helmet, while Sengoku BASARA makes him a giant cyborg with Gradius options following him everywhere. Oda Nobunaga may be some kind of vampire satan in Dynasty Warriors, but in Sengoku BASARA he's a vampire satan with a fifty-foot cape and Japanese voice acting's most ridiculous male voice, courtery of Wakamoto Norio. The silly move that sealed the deal, though, making Sengoku BASARA a hot, hot property with sequels and spinoffs and a licensed manga, was playing the yaoi card by making two random B-list generals, Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura, gay for each other.
That isn't to say that it's silly to think a samurai could be gay, or at the very least have guys on the side. Although the popular image is now that they were straight as an arrow, many of the famous generals of the time had relationships with their young pages, Sanada Yukimura's lord and Oda Nobunaga among them. Why weren't these important men chosen as the bold bearers of subtext? No idea. While we're at it, it's hardly inappropriate to depict these generals as gaudy rock stars, given the level of excess they lived in. No, the real silly thing here is that Sanada and Date probably never even met. Not in battle, let alone face to face--and certainly not long enough to develop the fictional boy-boy love Capcom shilled to increase sales.
Of course, historical accuracy is never really a concern when we're appropriating historical figures. The past is always getting reinvented, and in periods with poor records, like warring states periods, there's always plenty of room to recast the long-dead in new roles. Hardly a year before Sengoku BASARA, Koei cast Sanada as a paragon of warrior virtue, which meant he made bold speeches about valor and sacrifice. Half a century ago, Showa era generals used the same kind of speeches, and the same samurai, to encourage high school boys to pilot planes full of explosives into American battleships. Sanada seems a little different--or more frequently, just plain gets upstaged--in each new work from Japan's still-bustling historical fiction industry, where personalities and deeds are reassigned and rewritten as dramatic needs demand. Capcom similarly sensed a need, or at least a market demand, for gay drama, and cast their historical players accordingly. This might have had the odd accident of bringing them closer in some respects to the realities of the actual men, but said men will be too busy flying through the air and exchanging erotic CG staredowns for anyone to really notice.
Never got to use the words "frisson reactor" in a sentence. I still kinda want to.
"Fancy Lads of the Warring States"
Or: "Everything old is gay again"
A while ago Capcom announced a fighting game for the arcades based on their "Sengoku BASARA" games. "Sengoku" refers to the warring states period of Japanese history, analogous to the period of strife that produced the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in China. "Basara", remained undecipherable until, while moving out, I emptied out my bookshelves and found my old dictionary of ancient Japanese terms. According to it, a "basara" is someone who dresses and behaves extravagantly, parading around town in gaudy clothing and wearing shiny and extravagant swords on their hips. It dates from the Kamakura period, when sword-making had become an art, but hadn't yet become a utilitarian one over a century plus of civil war.
Sengoku BASARA was a bold-faced rip-off of the Dynasty Warriors games, gleefully dumb and cartoonish parodies of Japanese and Chinese warring states fiction in which you run around as a famous feudal general slaughtering hordes of 3D footsoldiers while lightning explodes to the tune of howling butt-rock. Capcom must've used an archaic word for flamboyant men because they were stealing a game concept from another developer, and making the game gaudier and louder seemed the easiest way to accomplish their act of one-upsmanship.
While Koei, the makers of Dynasty Warriors, churned out a new version of their franchise for years without any more idea about what makes this type of game fun than they did when they started, Capcom made a calculated decision that the name of this game was silliness. They then slathered said silliness liberally across every aspect of the game. Sengoku BASARA may have a combo counter like Dynasty Warrrios, but while the later rarely reaches the double digits, the former's routinely shoots up to three or four hundred, triggering canned cheers at each hundred mark. Both games may feature the legendary warrior Honda Tadakatsu, but Dynasty Warriors just makes him into a giant mountain of a man with a goofy helmet, while Sengoku BASARA makes him a giant cyborg with Gradius options following him everywhere. Oda Nobunaga may be some kind of vampire satan in Dynasty Warriors, but in Sengoku BASARA he's a vampire satan with a fifty-foot cape and Japanese voice acting's most ridiculous male voice, courtery of Wakamoto Norio. The silly move that sealed the deal, though, making Sengoku BASARA a hot, hot property with sequels and spinoffs and a licensed manga, was playing the yaoi card by making two random B-list generals, Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura, gay for each other.
That isn't to say that it's silly to think a samurai could be gay, or at the very least have guys on the side. Although the popular image is now that they were straight as an arrow, many of the famous generals of the time had relationships with their young pages, Sanada Yukimura's lord and Oda Nobunaga among them. Why weren't these important men chosen as the bold bearers of subtext? No idea. While we're at it, it's hardly inappropriate to depict these generals as gaudy rock stars, given the level of excess they lived in. No, the real silly thing here is that Sanada and Date probably never even met. Not in battle, let alone face to face--and certainly not long enough to develop the fictional boy-boy love Capcom shilled to increase sales.
Of course, historical accuracy is never really a concern when we're appropriating historical figures. The past is always getting reinvented, and in periods with poor records, like warring states periods, there's always plenty of room to recast the long-dead in new roles. Hardly a year before Sengoku BASARA, Koei cast Sanada as a paragon of warrior virtue, which meant he made bold speeches about valor and sacrifice. Half a century ago, Showa era generals used the same kind of speeches, and the same samurai, to encourage high school boys to pilot planes full of explosives into American battleships. Sanada seems a little different--or more frequently, just plain gets upstaged--in each new work from Japan's still-bustling historical fiction industry, where personalities and deeds are reassigned and rewritten as dramatic needs demand. Capcom similarly sensed a need, or at least a market demand, for gay drama, and cast their historical players accordingly. This might have had the odd accident of bringing them closer in some respects to the realities of the actual men, but said men will be too busy flying through the air and exchanging erotic CG staredowns for anyone to really notice.
Never got to use the words "frisson reactor" in a sentence. I still kinda want to.