#nobuspawns

Mentioning this again because it's funny.

I have this long time crack conspiracy that due to being the one raised in the most noble household, Nobukatsu sometimes gets asked by his bros to write their formal letters for them so that it would sound super proper and fancy. The person in question then just later writes in the signature at the end.

Shitpost reasoning for it:

1) Of all the letters that I've seen, that "t"-shaped stroke in the 信 kanji is only ever done by the 3 of them, not even Nobubu himself does that. Obviously there's probably a ton of letters that are lost and maybe among those lost letters actually other people do it too, but still. The 3 brothers seem close and at least one account says that they do occasionally visit each other.

If my conspiracy is true, it could be that when they're together some important thing came up and bro got asked to write the letter under his brother's name.

2) There's some very odd letters where it looks like the letter-writer mistakenly wrote "Nobutada" as 信直 (usually read as Nobunao) and not 信忠. The only other name where I've seen -tada written as 直 is someone from Iga. Like, again, maybe actually it's normal and there's just no other surviving records of it yet. But if my conspiracy is true, it could be that -tada being written as 直 is a thing that Iga people likes to do.

Helpful notes about Nobuspawn, though I really don't like how people keep saying he made peace with Hideyoshi "without Ieyasu's permission". Even if the article was saying "Well Ieyasu was actually fine with it", the issue is that he does NOT need Ieyasu's permission to do anything.

It's like if Nobunaga has suddenly called off Nagashino and decided "You know what, I think I want to have a treaty with Katsuyori, sorry man, we're going home", he doesn't need Ieyasu's permission. It would be shitty because as allies they should probably discuss and agree on a decision together, but Nobu doesn't need permission.

Nobukatsu may not be the actual clan head, but the argument was that he was more or less the one calling the shots while Sanboushi was still a child. In which case don't treat him like he's subservient to Hideyoshi or Ieyasu, asshole, just because those two are the Saneiketsu. In their lifetime, it's not like that.

How I imagine the Nobuspawns for my mostly-historical-based imaginations

One of my crack conspiracies was that Nobu's sons are are super close and they hang out with each other often, and eldest son is actually lazy AF, so he sometimes has his brother signs off his documents for him. This is based on this bizarre signature on document artifacts where the signature looks like his, but the written name kinda looks "wrong".

Like, it can be the condescending "this is so stupid" type, or the "always fooling around" playboy, or the depressing emo kid type, so it can run with any of the 3 hellspawns.

Thankfully some guy provided a rather detailed summary of the program's content. Basically there were letter artefacts that indicate that Hideyoshi did view Nobukatsu with highest respect, and his tactics in Komaki-Nagakute was actually good.

As much as I like this interpretation, without seeing what the actual artefacts and how things work I can't judge for myself whether it's all forced and crock, or if it has merit.

Like, there's this part where they said he "consolidated his territory(?)" by focusing on pacifying the Iga riots or something. Which, based on my own reading of what little text I have access to, doesn't feel like it. It seems to me he wasn't confident that he could put up a stand if he entered Azuchi, and just turned back and left.

But there's still missing details that I don't have, like whether he even moved out to Azuchi at all, or if he never even headed there, and just focused on Iga right away.

Anyway, the Shizugatake circumstances is important. If as of Shizugatake Hideyoshi is still acting respectful, even if he's just pretending that could mean that the big dramatic seppuku Nobutaka did was false.

Like, that had always sounded absurd to me. Even if people can and will do crazy things in legitimate records, I always cautiously assume outlandish stories to be false first. Edo era stories tend to be super crazy and then turn out to be false, so I don't trust crazy stories now.

They're fun to tell on a fictional basis (for spice in otome/other Sengoku fiction), but for history it's just bunk.

Like, maybe it's just a respectable seppuku and Nobutaka is like "ah damn, my brother defeated me, I guess" and there's no dramatic tantrum of throwing bloody guts at the wall.

That, and that also means Nobukatsu bringing down the order of death on his brother was his own prerogative as the "leader", and not because he's Hideyoshi's underling.

The Komaki-Nagakute one is also something I really want to see the paper trails/maps for, because typically this was seen as "Ieyasu's battle", and I really want to know how the army movements went. Even when some of those annoying pop infotainment article acknowledge that Nobukatsu was the figurehead, they still claim Ieyasu did a lot of the work.

Also, this program mentioned that both Ieyasu and Nobukatsu were in accordance to want to negotiate peace with Hideyoshi. That would explain why Ieyasu wasn't pissed that Nobukatsu randomly just went "Nope, I'm done" and made peace instead of pushing ahead for victory. The reason the program said why Ieyasu and Hideyoshi still has beef afterwards is because the Tokugawa side of the negotiations failed, while Hideyoshi's agreement with Nobukatsu went through just fine. I need more info about this, because like... what happened???

I really want the details for why there's peace treaty. Wikipedia has been updated to now say that Hideyoshi was too strong, sacked too many of the castles, so both Nobukatsu and Ieyasu thought it was a lost cause and agreed to try to negotiate for peace.

Also, apparently Hideyoshi was already offered the post of shogun shortly after Komaki Nagakute but he said no, WTF.

This doesn’t make any sense at all, and I’m just... surely he’s not somehow too dumb to understand what it means?? 

My shitpost theory is that this is a code for something else. There is a Japanese literary trope (in legends at least), where people uses puns in poetry to allude to something completely different based on homophones or word association.

The poem’s full sentence is “I’ve already conquered the entire nation, and I’m going home”, so maybe he’s saying that he’s not interested in going any further and is just staying put “at home”. Unification can go hang, if anyone else wants to have at it, then let them have at it. He just uses grandiose language (especially one that sounds similar to Tenka Fubu) to throw people off.

The even more shitpost interpretation that is totally not historical is that he meant what he says. Like maybe he somehow has this really complex network of minions all over the country. Don’t play, or he’ll crush you. And the reason why he maintained reasonable authority all the way through his death is that both Hide and Yasu are lowkey scared of what he might do. 

So there’s always been a debate about the order of actual birth because some documents said Sanshichi is actually born as the second son a few weeks ahead of Ochasen, but Shit Happened and Nobubu ended up naming Ochasen the second son.

Also despite the status that he did have, Sanshichi is seen as valued far less than Ochasen, so people were saying maybe it’s because his mother’s background was far lower. 

I’m honestly still surprised I have not found conspiracy theories saying that Ochasen and Sanshichi are actually twins, and this very fuzzy family background is the result of the officials of the time messing with the records to throw people off track. After all “Twins = bad luck” is a persistent belief up until the Meiji era.

Maybe not enough people care about Nobuspawns, I’m so sads :(