#flashysamurai

It helped reinforce how Date's leadership was rooted in concern for common people, and apparently in ways that they actually appreciated. He wasn't just a detached, on-high ruler, making decisions for what's best for his territory, without the input of the people who lived there and what they genuinely cared about. He actually had their individual happinesses in mind, much more than cold, theoreticals about what is best for the nation. It really gave confidence that whatever Date was doing, it effected people in practical, authentic ways, and included the individual circumstances of the lowest, most oppressed classes, rather than governing authoritatively, from on-high.

It was later, very much in contrast to Judge End, where all the common soldiers were nameless and certainly didn't have their own scenes, characterization, and individualized screentime. Without the humanized, common soldiers, Judge End's Masamune felt more like a ruler detached from his people, and motivated more by personal pride to achieve power.

But in 2009 "Samurai Kings", with the named, humanized, common soldiers, 2009 Masamune constantly carried the implication that he genuinely kept all his common people in his thoughts, that they were authentically important to him, and he was motivated to make a better world for them. He wasn't just striving for power and domination, to appease his ego. It also supplemented all the moments throughout the series, when Masamune would refrain from acting recklessly, because of his concern for his subordinates'/people's lives.

Maybe Judge End (and videogame) Masamune later bucked those superficial characterizations. But I loved how 2009 Masamune, from start to finish, felt so admirable, and how the story subconsciously implanted that admirable interpretation of his motivations into our heads, just by having these 4 "common soldiers" so prominently humanized, all throughout the first season.

It was like Masamune was implementing all the things that Maeda Keiji preached, about governing should create a world where people can pursue their individual, simple happinesses, instead of becoming soldiers, just to die in wars, for the sake of their leaders jockeying for power. Keiji really felt like a tertiary protagonist after Masamune and Yukimura. But he also carried one of the most important overall themes of the series: that all this conquering to decide who rules, should be for the purpose of creating a life that the normal, common, even most under-privileged people can be peacefully happy in. That's why all the villains of those 2 seasons and 1 movie, were characters who didn't care about the type of world they left in their wake, created a world where only soldiers can live, didn't care about the welfare of their soldiers/people, were more focused on the overall image of their nation rather than the lives people could live in peace, and fought only for projecting outwards, their personal issues, their traumas, in callous, non-constructive ways. Whereas, all the heroes, were characters who cared about the commoners and lowest class subordinates, and either were very chummy with them, enough to discard nobility demeanors, or were very hands-on in creating infrastructure for the sake of benefiting the people's everyday lives. Despite how much I love Masamune and Yukimura, and admire Takeda and Motochika, I often find myself remembering wise things Keiji said, in reference to important overall themes from Sengoku Basara.

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Kind of like how FE3H's Golden Deer house had more commoners than the other houses. They had Leonie, Raphael, and Ignatz. Even though Ignatz's family was more middle-class as merchants, they were still more connected to the repercussions of the war on real common people, from classes lower than the nobility that filled the other Houses. Even the commoners in the other houses were only one person per other House, and 1 was a commoner adopted into nobility, and the other was a commoner who may as well have been a celebrity pop star. Maybe they had some much lower, auxiliary, side characters, who didn't have quite as high nobility status as the named, main, House members, but it's not as powerful as almost half the Golden Deer being actual commoners, frequently bringing commoner concerns straight to their nation's leader.