#ehh...

Here's the design of what my Achieves Persona and his Crystal Gem boyfriend looked like (and yes, I will emphasize EVERY time that he is a Crystal Gem).

Well, let's just say they didn't have a well-developed lore... honestly, their lore was awful and very poorly done.

Well, Rein (who is the Crystal Gem) was a gem of Yellow Diamond... and that's all...

The last one is probably self explanatory considering how particular I can be about screwing up military 'activities' in media, but the first one might need some explanation.

Ya see, I don't actually care about whether the gun models were historically accurate, or their effectiveness, or anything like that. What I care about is how alien they seem to have been made to appear to the 'Japanese' side of the story. Like, this is Edo Japan, they have guns, and used guns back in the day to unify the country.

While I can kinda understand them not appearing in most parts of the setting, I'm kinda ticked off at the fact that the guard of the Shogun himself, being presumably some of the best in Japan, don't either?!? In fact, they act like they've never seen a gun in their life, but that gets into the battle side of things and I don't wanna go further than drawing that connection.

Nonetheless, I think there's something more to this utterly odd portrayal of firearms here at stake. The great, long lived, and stupid myth / legend that 'Samurai don't use guns', which has existed well before BES, is itself just one facet of the common trope that 'oriental' societies are hopelessly and actively backwards in their rejection of modernity, to their ruin at the hands of those who do.

And I don't want to blame this show or anyone connected to it for the fact that this trope exists, because I don't think they mean to trade in that sorta thing. There is a genuine narrative impact achieved through so thoroughly overstating the resistance to modernity that these 'old elites' embody, but at the same time it's hard to overstate how much the zeitgeist / public 'knowledge' that surrounds foreign societies and times is shaped by the media that portrays them, 'knowledge' that sometimes leaks into perceptions of actual, current societies, though I don't consider that fact a necessary addition to justify criticism.