waterscroll

My 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 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.