let's talk about bushido.
Things I do when I don't want to do my homework: write stupid essays about Hanbei's ~feelings~ on honor, bushido, and being dead.
I have no idea how coherent this will be. I mean, I already had a confused moment tonight when I managed to get Guo Jia and Guo Huai flip-flopped in my brain so I'm not at my best here, just saiyan.
Honor! It is, as you would expect of any good samurai canon, A Thing for most of the characters in Hanbei's canon. However, there are exceptions, and Hanbei is one of them. He's not quite as dramatic of an exception as his heterosexual life partner Kanbei, but he has some issues with it and he doesn't have the same blind adherence to bushido as quite a bit of the cast.
A brief tangent on Kanbei, actually, since I keep wanting to compare their philosophies on everything -- Kuroda Kanbei is pretty literally Hanbei's other half. Historically, Hanbei and Kanbei aren't their real names, but matching nicknames that Hideyoshi gave them, in recognition of the fact that their talents meshed so well that it was like they completed each other (which sounds gayer than I meant it to, but their Koei incarnations really do come across as an old married couple so that's okay!). They're presented in canon as opposites, both visually and ideologically. Hanbei is a tiny cheerful smartass who wears white and prefers to avoid wholesale slaughter. Kanbei is a tall gloomy linefacer who wears black and has a CRUSH THEM ALL approach to war. Et cetera et cetera.
They are both openly critical of honor and bushido. They're different about it, though; Kanbei flat out condemns it, and one of his most notable cutscenes has him expositing about how honor and pride and all those great samurai virtues are the things that keep fucking shit up and causing great houses to fall -- specifically, he cites them as the reason the Toyotomi clan went to shit after Hideyoshi's death. It doesn't exactly earn him points with most of the cast (Kiyomasa pulls a knife on him as soon as he says it), but it's not without some truth to it.
Hanbei doesn't take the hard-line approach to anything, though, and while he's openly critical of honor, he's a lot more flexible than Kanbei and has more optimism for the human condition. The quote I always come back to on that topic -- and actually, one of my favorite things he says in all of canon -- is from when he defeats Nagamasa in the battle of Anegawa: I look forward to the day when a man of honor is not looked upon as a fool. But as long as this war rages, the honorable are destined to die.
So he definitely sees the issue with honor; the Azai clan is wiped out because Nagamasa refuses to back down from the honorable option. But he never seems to have an issue with the idea of honor; it's more that he realizes it's a luxury that he can't afford to indulge, as a strategist, because his job is to keep as many people alive as possible, and he takes that seriously. (Very seriously; there's a reason it's the core concept I built his subconscious dive around, and why the signs of it popped up everywhere in his mental house, while other big issues of his stayed limited to the rooms that represented them.) Hanbei admits in one of his friendship events in SWC that he's pretty much always thinking about peace; he runs through every battle plan thousands of times in his head trying to pare down losses, because he feels a sense of personal responsibility to every soldier who dies on his orders ("I'm sorry? I tried, but I failed? You have to die because it’s more convenient for us? I can't say that.").
However, even as he knows he can't limit himself by adhering strictly to honor, lest he get more people killed, Hanbei still has a clear respect for the concept itself, and he'd like it if honor could prevail -- he's just realistic enough to know that's not an option in the world they live in. And that idea can be expanded to fit bushido in general. He's also critical of the concept of dying for one's lord; his exchange with Yukimura at Nagashino pretty much says that he thinks Yukimura's throwing his life away, your spirit doesn't live on, you die and that's it. It's a pretty cynical thing to say, considering how central the concept of honorable death is to bushido.
It's especially cynical of him to say considering that he doesn't even seem to buy fully into his own words!
I'm not talking about a quick throwaway line, either. He states in more than one place that he'd welcome the chance to die on the battlefield, he'd prefer to die on the battlefield -- in Motonari's story, where he does die in battle rather than from his illness, he flat out thanks Motonari for giving him an honorable death on the battlefield. It doesn't quite jive with what he says to Yukimura. Possibly his perspective changed when he realized he was ill, but that honestly doesn't feel right to me, either; I prefer to think of it as a similar case to honor -- he finds the concept itself admirable, but in their current circumstances, perhaps a bit misplaced. Yukimura's death at Nagashino would be meaningless, and there would be more he could accomplish by continuing to live, hence Hanbei's politely suggesting that Yukimura's being kind of stupid about it.
And Hanbei himself? Well, by Kizugawa he's ill enough for Hideyoshi to notice and suggest he get off the battlefield, which I'm sure equates to him having realized he's sick for quite a bit longer -- the way he brushes off Hideyoshi's concerns shows that it's going to take a lot to get him to admit defeat and go to bed. He doesn't want to sit in bed and wait for his own death. He wants to be out there fighting and doing something useful up to his last breath. He can suggest Yukimura would be wasting his life because Yukimura still has plenty of good years ahead of him, but it's not hypocritical for him to wish for that death himself because he knows he doesn't have much longer anyway.
(He's still kind of a hypocrite sometimes, though. Just not about that.)
His canon point in camp is after his death, so he's sort of come to terms with the fact that he doesn't get that, and he does wind up dying in bed. (According to my headcanon, Kanbei at some point bullied or otherwise forced him into going and lying down before he passed out on a battlefield.) He knows it's happened, he knows it's not changing, and Hanbei is pretty good about not beating himself up over things that are already set in stone. But there's always going to be part of him that's not really okay with it. It's a very well suppressed part that doesn't rear its head up terribly often, but it's there and it's not going anywhere.
tl;dr Hanbei would really like to be a good model samurai, but saving tens of thousands of lives is more important and also TB really fucking sucks, guys :(
I have no idea how coherent this will be. I mean, I already had a confused moment tonight when I managed to get Guo Jia and Guo Huai flip-flopped in my brain so I'm not at my best here, just saiyan.
Honor! It is, as you would expect of any good samurai canon, A Thing for most of the characters in Hanbei's canon. However, there are exceptions, and Hanbei is one of them. He's not quite as dramatic of an exception as his heterosexual life partner Kanbei, but he has some issues with it and he doesn't have the same blind adherence to bushido as quite a bit of the cast.
A brief tangent on Kanbei, actually, since I keep wanting to compare their philosophies on everything -- Kuroda Kanbei is pretty literally Hanbei's other half. Historically, Hanbei and Kanbei aren't their real names, but matching nicknames that Hideyoshi gave them, in recognition of the fact that their talents meshed so well that it was like they completed each other (which sounds gayer than I meant it to, but their Koei incarnations really do come across as an old married couple so that's okay!). They're presented in canon as opposites, both visually and ideologically. Hanbei is a tiny cheerful smartass who wears white and prefers to avoid wholesale slaughter. Kanbei is a tall gloomy linefacer who wears black and has a CRUSH THEM ALL approach to war. Et cetera et cetera.
They are both openly critical of honor and bushido. They're different about it, though; Kanbei flat out condemns it, and one of his most notable cutscenes has him expositing about how honor and pride and all those great samurai virtues are the things that keep fucking shit up and causing great houses to fall -- specifically, he cites them as the reason the Toyotomi clan went to shit after Hideyoshi's death. It doesn't exactly earn him points with most of the cast (Kiyomasa pulls a knife on him as soon as he says it), but it's not without some truth to it.
Hanbei doesn't take the hard-line approach to anything, though, and while he's openly critical of honor, he's a lot more flexible than Kanbei and has more optimism for the human condition. The quote I always come back to on that topic -- and actually, one of my favorite things he says in all of canon -- is from when he defeats Nagamasa in the battle of Anegawa: I look forward to the day when a man of honor is not looked upon as a fool. But as long as this war rages, the honorable are destined to die.
So he definitely sees the issue with honor; the Azai clan is wiped out because Nagamasa refuses to back down from the honorable option. But he never seems to have an issue with the idea of honor; it's more that he realizes it's a luxury that he can't afford to indulge, as a strategist, because his job is to keep as many people alive as possible, and he takes that seriously. (Very seriously; there's a reason it's the core concept I built his subconscious dive around, and why the signs of it popped up everywhere in his mental house, while other big issues of his stayed limited to the rooms that represented them.) Hanbei admits in one of his friendship events in SWC that he's pretty much always thinking about peace; he runs through every battle plan thousands of times in his head trying to pare down losses, because he feels a sense of personal responsibility to every soldier who dies on his orders ("I'm sorry? I tried, but I failed? You have to die because it’s more convenient for us? I can't say that.").
However, even as he knows he can't limit himself by adhering strictly to honor, lest he get more people killed, Hanbei still has a clear respect for the concept itself, and he'd like it if honor could prevail -- he's just realistic enough to know that's not an option in the world they live in. And that idea can be expanded to fit bushido in general. He's also critical of the concept of dying for one's lord; his exchange with Yukimura at Nagashino pretty much says that he thinks Yukimura's throwing his life away, your spirit doesn't live on, you die and that's it. It's a pretty cynical thing to say, considering how central the concept of honorable death is to bushido.
It's especially cynical of him to say considering that he doesn't even seem to buy fully into his own words!
I'm not talking about a quick throwaway line, either. He states in more than one place that he'd welcome the chance to die on the battlefield, he'd prefer to die on the battlefield -- in Motonari's story, where he does die in battle rather than from his illness, he flat out thanks Motonari for giving him an honorable death on the battlefield. It doesn't quite jive with what he says to Yukimura. Possibly his perspective changed when he realized he was ill, but that honestly doesn't feel right to me, either; I prefer to think of it as a similar case to honor -- he finds the concept itself admirable, but in their current circumstances, perhaps a bit misplaced. Yukimura's death at Nagashino would be meaningless, and there would be more he could accomplish by continuing to live, hence Hanbei's politely suggesting that Yukimura's being kind of stupid about it.
And Hanbei himself? Well, by Kizugawa he's ill enough for Hideyoshi to notice and suggest he get off the battlefield, which I'm sure equates to him having realized he's sick for quite a bit longer -- the way he brushes off Hideyoshi's concerns shows that it's going to take a lot to get him to admit defeat and go to bed. He doesn't want to sit in bed and wait for his own death. He wants to be out there fighting and doing something useful up to his last breath. He can suggest Yukimura would be wasting his life because Yukimura still has plenty of good years ahead of him, but it's not hypocritical for him to wish for that death himself because he knows he doesn't have much longer anyway.
(He's still kind of a hypocrite sometimes, though. Just not about that.)
His canon point in camp is after his death, so he's sort of come to terms with the fact that he doesn't get that, and he does wind up dying in bed. (According to my headcanon, Kanbei at some point bullied or otherwise forced him into going and lying down before he passed out on a battlefield.) He knows it's happened, he knows it's not changing, and Hanbei is pretty good about not beating himself up over things that are already set in stone. But there's always going to be part of him that's not really okay with it. It's a very well suppressed part that doesn't rear its head up terribly often, but it's there and it's not going anywhere.
tl;dr Hanbei would really like to be a good model samurai, but saving tens of thousands of lives is more important and also TB really fucking sucks, guys :(