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waterscrollMy final talley for Last Lover Standing:
Total votes 99,700. Of which 25000 went to Mitsuhide because he's my favorite, 25000 went to Hideyoshi because damn he earned them in this event, and the rest went to various people for items. I started the event with 630 energy hearts and now I have 450 but I know I spent more than 200 because of all the free energy hearts I kept getting. Probably more like 300 or 400. I think I'm not going to spend down hearts like that again for a while (maybe next year's celebration?) but to do once a year it was fun.
(My secret to accumulating all these hearts btw - read stories over and over during the story events. You get 10 energy hearts every time you read a story, and with a six-story event I usually read every story twice so that's 120 energy hearts. That puts me behind on skill points so I use some of the energy hearts for skill points during the triple-point fever in the battle events, but I still end up collecting 50-70 energy hearts a month.)
But ok, back to Hideyoshi. I've been rambling about him and this lovely ES on bothscytale's and alias_sqbr's posts, so time to do it here.
I had, uh, very strong reactions to Hideyoshi's main route, and I'm still thinking about it. I have a great fondness for characters who are Good But Not Nice, but the opposite, nice but not good, is very hard to write well. Usually it degenerates into evil but charming, which is not the same thing. And then there's Hideyoshi. He's genuinely nice and also genuinely kind. He loves to do nice things for people. He really enjoys making other people happy.
Except that at the same time, everything's a transaction. He's always looking for the next advantage for himself and he's not really interested in the question of how these transactions affect other people. It's most blatant in how he treats Mitsunari, who genuinely loves him and would do anything for him. He's nice to Mitsunari and even helps him advance, but he never notices how everything he asks of Mitsunari is slowly destroying him. Even when it's totally blatant.
In Hideyoshi's main route, one of the first things he does is manipulate Mitsunari into helping MC cook something. It was totally unnecessary, he could've asked Mitsunari to do it as a favor and he would've said yes gladly. But he doesn't want to owe Mitsunari a favor, he wants Mitsunari to owe him. It's a totally unnecessary bit of manipulation to get a tiny bit more power over someone who already completely belongs to him.
And then in Mitsunari's main route (in act 2) Hideyoshi separates Mitsunari from MC so they can only see each other once a month. His dying command is to put Mitsunari in charge after his death, even though Mitsunari isn't suited for leadership and very shortly afterwards gets killed by Ieyasu. Through all this Mitsunari never blames Hideyoshi or gets angry at him and even in his reincarnation ending what he most wants is to find Hideyoshi again.
I feel like I can relate. I keep buying Hideyoshi epilogues and I'm going to read his act 2 *so* fast the minute it comes out, and yet I've never wanted to slap a screen as badly as when Hideyoshi is on it.
Anyway, so this ES helped me a lot. Courtesan!Hideyoshi is just as bad in some ways, especially in how he treats Mitsunari. In Mitsunari's ES we see him doing himself a great deal of harm by trying to turn himself into something he's not in order to stay by Hideyoshi's side. And in Hideyoshi's route when MC brings him up Hideyoshi's like, oh that guy. He's manipulative towards MC as well, showing just enough sadness to keep her coming back. And *everything* has to be an exchange, and in the end she's always the one who owes him.
But, this is her dream. And if she sees all this in a dream, that means that she understands pretty well what kind of guy she's with. I didn't feel like she did in Hideyoshi's main route, her interior monologue there was always about how Hideyoshi was so kind and generous and helpful. She was also inexperienced in relationships so she didn't have the ability to know that he was playing with her heart, even though the entire route is him alternating between trying get her to have sex with him and pushing her away. (They don't have sex until the very last scene, but you see him angling for it from the very beginning.) He even uses that cad's trick of refusing to define the relationship so that when he leaves her at one point she has no right to complain. He doesn't tell her that he's had a thousand lovers and I don't think in the main route she figures it out.
And someone who has had *that* many lovers and who works *that* hard to seduce someone immediately upon meeting her has to be using sex for something. But what?
So, this dream shows that she gets it. She knows he's having sex with a lot of people and knows that it's because he sees it as on some level necessary for his survival. She knows he's stuck in a mindset of seeing relationships as transactional and as something you can win. And, asalias_sqbr pointed out, she's not trying to save him from any of that. She sees what he is and finds him loveable anyway. And damnit, so do I.
The nice thing about a courtesan AU like this is that in it Hideyoshi doesn't have any power. The rule with him, in stories that I've seen about him (and possibly in history) seems to be that he is a living walking example of the saying that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Here he's using all his tricks but all he can get out of it is for MC to keep visiting him. And, he doesn't have anything else to offer her. When all you have is manipulation, that's the only way you have to show love.
And he does love her, and I think he loves her in the main route too. Love isn't enough to make a relationship work, of course, and I am expecting that things are going to go to absolute hell in his act 2 before I get to the AU happy ending that will presumably fix some things.
But here in the AU, working as a courtesan, it makes sense that he's going to use all his skills to angle for a little bit of control in his life, because he has so little. So when MC dreams this it shows that she gets this too, not just that he's sleeping around and not just that he's always manipulating but that he does both of those things because he feels as powerless as a courtesan imprisoned in a brothel. It's not true, he's not that powerless, and he's about to become the most powerful man in Japan. But in recognizing that he feels that way maybe she can help him come to terms with his power in a way that (in an AU, maybe) could keep him from being completely corrupted by it.
ETA: Speaking of routes that I can't wait to read, Nobunaga's act 3 is coming out soon!! So excited.
Total votes 99,700. Of which 25000 went to Mitsuhide because he's my favorite, 25000 went to Hideyoshi because damn he earned them in this event, and the rest went to various people for items. I started the event with 630 energy hearts and now I have 450 but I know I spent more than 200 because of all the free energy hearts I kept getting. Probably more like 300 or 400. I think I'm not going to spend down hearts like that again for a while (maybe next year's celebration?) but to do once a year it was fun.
(My secret to accumulating all these hearts btw - read stories over and over during the story events. You get 10 energy hearts every time you read a story, and with a six-story event I usually read every story twice so that's 120 energy hearts. That puts me behind on skill points so I use some of the energy hearts for skill points during the triple-point fever in the battle events, but I still end up collecting 50-70 energy hearts a month.)
But ok, back to Hideyoshi. I've been rambling about him and this lovely ES on both
scytale's and alias_sqbr's posts, so time to do it here. I had, uh, very strong reactions to Hideyoshi's main route, and I'm still thinking about it. I have a great fondness for characters who are Good But Not Nice, but the opposite, nice but not good, is very hard to write well. Usually it degenerates into evil but charming, which is not the same thing. And then there's Hideyoshi. He's genuinely nice and also genuinely kind. He loves to do nice things for people. He really enjoys making other people happy.
Except that at the same time, everything's a transaction. He's always looking for the next advantage for himself and he's not really interested in the question of how these transactions affect other people. It's most blatant in how he treats Mitsunari, who genuinely loves him and would do anything for him. He's nice to Mitsunari and even helps him advance, but he never notices how everything he asks of Mitsunari is slowly destroying him. Even when it's totally blatant.
In Hideyoshi's main route, one of the first things he does is manipulate Mitsunari into helping MC cook something. It was totally unnecessary, he could've asked Mitsunari to do it as a favor and he would've said yes gladly. But he doesn't want to owe Mitsunari a favor, he wants Mitsunari to owe him. It's a totally unnecessary bit of manipulation to get a tiny bit more power over someone who already completely belongs to him.
And then in Mitsunari's main route (in act 2) Hideyoshi separates Mitsunari from MC so they can only see each other once a month. His dying command is to put Mitsunari in charge after his death, even though Mitsunari isn't suited for leadership and very shortly afterwards gets killed by Ieyasu. Through all this Mitsunari never blames Hideyoshi or gets angry at him and even in his reincarnation ending what he most wants is to find Hideyoshi again.
I feel like I can relate. I keep buying Hideyoshi epilogues and I'm going to read his act 2 *so* fast the minute it comes out, and yet I've never wanted to slap a screen as badly as when Hideyoshi is on it.
Anyway, so this ES helped me a lot. Courtesan!Hideyoshi is just as bad in some ways, especially in how he treats Mitsunari. In Mitsunari's ES we see him doing himself a great deal of harm by trying to turn himself into something he's not in order to stay by Hideyoshi's side. And in Hideyoshi's route when MC brings him up Hideyoshi's like, oh that guy. He's manipulative towards MC as well, showing just enough sadness to keep her coming back. And *everything* has to be an exchange, and in the end she's always the one who owes him.
But, this is her dream. And if she sees all this in a dream, that means that she understands pretty well what kind of guy she's with. I didn't feel like she did in Hideyoshi's main route, her interior monologue there was always about how Hideyoshi was so kind and generous and helpful. She was also inexperienced in relationships so she didn't have the ability to know that he was playing with her heart, even though the entire route is him alternating between trying get her to have sex with him and pushing her away. (They don't have sex until the very last scene, but you see him angling for it from the very beginning.) He even uses that cad's trick of refusing to define the relationship so that when he leaves her at one point she has no right to complain. He doesn't tell her that he's had a thousand lovers and I don't think in the main route she figures it out.
And someone who has had *that* many lovers and who works *that* hard to seduce someone immediately upon meeting her has to be using sex for something. But what?
So, this dream shows that she gets it. She knows he's having sex with a lot of people and knows that it's because he sees it as on some level necessary for his survival. She knows he's stuck in a mindset of seeing relationships as transactional and as something you can win. And, as
alias_sqbr pointed out, she's not trying to save him from any of that. She sees what he is and finds him loveable anyway. And damnit, so do I.The nice thing about a courtesan AU like this is that in it Hideyoshi doesn't have any power. The rule with him, in stories that I've seen about him (and possibly in history) seems to be that he is a living walking example of the saying that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Here he's using all his tricks but all he can get out of it is for MC to keep visiting him. And, he doesn't have anything else to offer her. When all you have is manipulation, that's the only way you have to show love.
And he does love her, and I think he loves her in the main route too. Love isn't enough to make a relationship work, of course, and I am expecting that things are going to go to absolute hell in his act 2 before I get to the AU happy ending that will presumably fix some things.
But here in the AU, working as a courtesan, it makes sense that he's going to use all his skills to angle for a little bit of control in his life, because he has so little. So when MC dreams this it shows that she gets this too, not just that he's sleeping around and not just that he's always manipulating but that he does both of those things because he feels as powerless as a courtesan imprisoned in a brothel. It's not true, he's not that powerless, and he's about to become the most powerful man in Japan. But in recognizing that he feels that way maybe she can help him come to terms with his power in a way that (in an AU, maybe) could keep him from being completely corrupted by it.
ETA: Speaking of routes that I can't wait to read, Nobunaga's act 3 is coming out soon!! So excited.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-11 02:08 pm (UTC)Good choices! Mitsuniari's route is a gut wrench from beginning to end and will give you lots of reasons to hate Hideyoshi but it's very well written. Both endings are good but I liked the happy ending better.
Mitsuhide's AU happy ending is unfortunately short and underwritten. It's fun to see them happy but it doesn't say anything new. I saw the reincarnation ending on youtube before playing the route and unfortunately it was taken down but from what I remember it was very good. He was a somewhat unconventional person in the modern era but he'd be somewhat unconventional in any era, and he had a modern-day life that suited him well. Do you want more details?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-11 03:20 pm (UTC)And I'm curious -- is there anything you would have wanted Mitsuhide's happy ending to cover?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-11 03:58 pm (UTC)Mitsuhide reincarnates as a high school teacher. MC meets him as his student and immediately falls in love with him, but doesn't do anything about it because of course Mr. Light of Honor doesn't fuck his students. She ends up becoming a teacher as well and meets him again as a trainee teacher but of course Mr. Light of Honor doesn't fuck his subordinates. When she finishes the last day of her training he gives her a bouquet of bellflowers and for the first time it occurs to her that the feelings might be mutual, or at least that she should find out if they are. She runs to meet him at the shrine where he prays and tells him that she has always loved him. He tells her that bellflowers mean eternity and that now they will never be parted.
A lot of people don't like it because they don't explicitly remember each other they way they do on the Nobunaga route. But I think I like that, it shows that they'd fall in love with each other in any universe under any circumstances and they don't need the memories of the past relationship to make it happen. And I'm sure they'll remember everything eventually.
is there anything you would have wanted Mitsuhide's happy ending to cover?
In the other happy endings the guy deals with some of his issues. In Mitsuhide's act 2 I guess the main issue in the relationship is that they don't have enough time together and don't communicate well, and I guess those are fixed in the happy ending. But Mitsuhide's own big issue is his conflicted relationship to war and politics. I'd want to know more about what it means to him to be Tenkai. Does he see this as walking away from trying to make the world better or a different way to do that? Is he trying to live as a monk to work to help the monks that he harmed? Is he going to support Ieyasu, like historical Tenkai did? If so, why on earth???
Also, Tendai monks don't get married, so what is up with that. Is Tenkai not a monk in this universe? Or did he join a different order, like Kennyo's, where monks do marry? But if he joined Kennyo's order, well, that's pretty interesting and would've made a great story.
So yeah, there are a lot of stories that could've been told there but weren't. Maybe there will be a Mitsuhide act 3?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 04:26 am (UTC)Then they drink poison and die in each other's arms.
...wait what. Is this an "I don't want to live without you" thing for MC?
The reincarnation ending sounds sweet, though! Mitsuhide as a teacher is an interesting future take; we do see him teaching MC in Nobunaga's route. And I could see him being happy as a teacher.
And yeah, I agree -- I like this better than them remembering.
Maybe there will be a Mitsuhide act 3?
Maybe! That would be very cool, especially explaining the Ieyasu stuff.
I didn't realize that Tenkai did anything more than live a simple monastic life (but in hindsight this should have been totally obvious given that he has a Wiki entry and is well known...).
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 03:27 pm (UTC)I don't know, I didn't catch how the battle with Hideyoshi goes in the sad ending. It would've been expected in this time and place for families of traitors to be executed, so maybe she was doomed anyway. But it's hard for me to imagine that this Hideyoshi would do that. Although RL Hideyoshi would, and did, so you never know.
Speaking of Hideyoshi being awful, I just came across this Kyoichiro&Hideyoshi conversation, in which Kyoichiro calls him a 'genuinely terrifying fraud of a man.'
https://pendingreply.tumblr.com/post/183520513254/foreshadow-shameless-blathering-about-my-fave
...not wrong. And now I'm curious about Kyoichiro, because most characters don't figure that out.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 03:35 pm (UTC)Hideyoshi clearly does too. And him thanking Kyoichiro at the end, omg. He's so accepting of himself.