#ryuzo

HOT TAKE:

Ryuzo’s betrayal had less to do with Jin than it did with Lord Shimura.

HEAR ME OUT—

i think the other explanations are good and i think some degree of all of them are true. he cares about his men. he cares about his status as their leader. he feels betrayed by jin in the past. he feels jealousy. jin would lead them all to certain death. his men would have joined the mongols with or without him. all of those make sense but i think we’re all missing another context here.

he hates lord shimura.

it’s apparent in every interaction. he’s happy to see jin—jin asks him to help save lord shimura and the whole demeanor changes.

“he’ll give you anything you want” and ryuzo basically asks for a pony because it’s horseshit and jin is too blind to see it.

it’s every interaction that jin gains ground and then loses it because he brings up lord shimura.

“he’ll make them samurai” then he’ll send them to die.

“surrender” i won’t die by your uncle’s hand (but i’ll die by yours willingly).

even in childhood, ryuzo said shimura would get rid of jin when it suited him. and guess what, he was right, and it’s worse because that moment happens not 3 minutes after jin guts ryuzo for betraying him. (whoopsies, might have gotten a lil hasty there, jin)

shimura hates ryuzo too since childhood, don’t get me wrong there, like ryuzo has enough reason to hate the bastard cuz wdym you have beef with a six year old, but let’s consider this context as well:

scrapped voice lines mention ryuzo was an orphan. abandoned by his family. he was clearly very young when it happened, and surprisingly doesn’t seem too bothered by it.

but here’s what i think.

ryuzo was too young to truly process the impact of that orphaning, but that trauma sits like a timebomb waiting to detonate.

jin is an orphan too, of sorts. mother dies in early childhood, father canonically described as a stranger and there’s an implication of being abusive (explicitly stated in the scrapped voice lines but it reads pretty clearly between the lines too if you’ve got your own childhood trauma).

jin now fills the role of family for ryuzo and the bond between two similarly traumatized children/teenagers can be intense.

now old enough to truly process it, imagine the trauma of losing jin after kazumasa dies, when jin goes immediately to castle shimura and away from ryuzo.

it’s a second orphaning, and yeah i think there’s some jealousy and resentment toward jin for that—i mean, ryuzo just got orphaned again and jin did too with his father’s death, but jin gets to go live in a castle and become the jito’s surrogate son while ryuzo just…loses everything. thanks to shimura, who clearly hates him and called him a demon child and thinks jin should have nothing to do with him.

the tournament? i think ryuzo sees jin becoming shimura there. jin will become a samurai regardless and one day he’ll become jito. ryuzo, however, has no chance outside of this tournament. and instead of a fun duel between friends like normal, jin annihilates him, nearly breaks his arm, and treats ryuzo like an enemy, like he doesn’t even know him. more than likely, that feels a lot like how shimura looks at ryuzo. like being less-than, undeserving, and abandoned.

and that? is a third orphaning.

(i don’t think jin is necessarily in the wrong—those scrapped voice lines imply jin was fighting his abusive father in his head at the tournament. i think he was fighting the perception of him as soft and unfit as kazumasa said, a coward as jin called himself for “letting his father die,” and the shame and judgement he must have thought everyone looked at him with for it. i don’t think either party is wrong here; two traumatized teenagers, one likely with autism and the other likely with bpd? they’re gonna get some shit WRONG, boi, gonna have some BIG misunderstandings, that’s just how it is.)

now—consider this.

ryuzo has found a home with the straw hat ronin. he’s found a life that is his own and what he considers a family. when the mongols invade, many of the straw hats die at komoda beach, including their leader. recruited by the samurai and presumably the jito.

fourth orphaning. we could even consider it a fifth orphaning for the fact that jin was also at komoda and presumed dead.

lord shimura holds blame for four out of five of the times ryuzo has became an orphan.

losing the remaining ronin, what’s left of his family, trying to rescue shimura—which by all appearances and odds is a suicide mission—would put shimura to blame for five out six here. five times that ticking timebomb of an abandonment wound has been reopened thanks to lord shimura. jin might be worth it if his men don’t have to die, but lord shimura isn’t.

his decisions after—regret, clearly not wanting to kill jin—are a different rant entirely and we’ll skip that for now even though i find it fascinating. i will say that i think the mongols would have killed his men if ryuzo chose to join jin after. i think he legitimately couldn’t have gotten them out of there alive and there’s a good chance they wouldn’t have followed him at that point anyway, but i think it’s 100% a given that the khan would have slaughtered them to punish ryuzo even if they stayed loyal to the khan.

but the point is.

i think his betrayal was a harder decision than we tend to credit it as being, and the context of him being an orphan really gives new light to what his beef with shimura was, his apparent beef with jin prior, the erratic conflicting emotions, and his sudden willingness to join jin once his men have died.

the argument that he’s trying to save his skin by agreeing to join jin? that boy’s been at that castle before, he knew his way out, he wasn’t guarded, the windows were busted, he could have ran. he could have hid. he chose not to. he was waiting on jin, had lit candles for the reunion so as not to be misinterpreted by poor lighting. he walks into jin’s blade at his throat. i think it was genuine.

“[the khan] murdered taka” yeah and you slaughtered my family, all two dozen of them, that i tried to not let down and sacrificed my dignity for and yet here i am begging you to let me join you. your uncle will discard you for what you’ve done, but not me.

it’s interesting too that he predicts shimura abandoning jin again in the context of begging to join jin. because ryuzo would be blamed for jin’s actions, too. ryuzo would be just as abandoned by the jito and shogun. his chances of becoming samurai at that point are less than zero. so it’s not even the chance to rise above his station, either, because that ship done sailed.

and to throw down his saya before the duel? he knew he’d never sheath his blade again. he knew he was going to die. but he chose for it to be by jin’s hand.

because the jito took enough from him already.

he begged one last time for jin to choose him. to see him through his own eyes and not through lord shimura’s eyes. and jin chose wrong too, in the end, not just ryuzo, because jin lost both of them, one after the other.

the tragedy of it has me in a fucking chokehold.

anyway thank u for coming to my TEDtalk