thefarshore | [Video]

Posted: June 4th
From: Hachiman

[The video feed shows a rather spartan room in what appears to be a simple, old-fashioned Japanese building -- dark-stained wood framing, tatami with a hint of green left in the grass, a shoji screen that's been pushed open to reveal part of the gardens. Hijikata sits in the middle of the screen, dressed in a plain black yukata with a simple crest embroidered into the shoulders. Those familiar with Shinto mythology might recognize it as Hachiman's, though it's common enough to have been used for a number of different groups and households, including Hijikata's own in life.]

This is Hijikata Toshizou, the current incarnation of Hachiman. I apologize if any of this has already been said on the BBS. I'm still not as accustomed to this sort of technology as I'd like to be, so I'm sure I've missed a number of previous discussions. That said, I have a couple of open announcements.

Regarding the recent incident at a festival on the Near Shore:

It strikes me that the creatures we fought there were, in a sense, not unlike many of us. Souls taken from their proper time and place, and brought here. It doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility, or even likelihood, that the incident had a connection to whatever force disposed of our predecessors and has been bringing us here to replace them.

[His expression, already serious, hardens into something outright murderous for a moment.]

If that's true, then on the off-chance that whoever is behind it monitors this network, I want them aware that my opposition to them is now a personal matter.

[He pauses, calming himself a little.]

I'd also like to discuss more generally the concerns that have come up in recent weeks and months about the treatment of shinki. If a shinki has no power to reject an unwanted bond with a god they never chose, then it seems to me that gods are going to need to be responsible for policing each other's behavior towards their shinki. Anyone interested in being part of such an effort should discuss the matter with me. I'm especially interested in hearing from shinki about what sort of systems it would be helpful for them to have in place.

That will be all, for the time being.

[[OOC: tl;dr of what's behind the cut: Hijikata is pissed about his theory about the zombie incident, and interested in brainstorming about forming some kind of Shinki Defense Squad with any other gods who think the shinki situation is pretty BS, hit him up!]]

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Assuming that the force behind whatever happened to our predecessors is watching the network, we can assume they're likely an older god. If the same people who brought us here and who did away with our predecessors brought about the zombie plague....then what's to say we won't be next?

[There's the sound of a match striking, as Hijikata makes himself comfortable for a good talk.]

It's most likely they are. Taking the incident at the cherry blossom viewing into account, I'd speculate that they're someone who stands to gain from getting rid of those currently at the top. That makes it unlikely to be Amaterasu herself, and relatively unlikely -- though not impossible -- for it to be one of her closer advisers, who are presumably clever enough to just keep her in power and manipulate her without taking a gamble like this if power is what they want. My guess would be an old god of middling-high rank, with some political power but a relatively low profile to avoid notice so far.

So, theoretically of course... A person like that goes about disposing of gods who would be uncooperative towards a revolution against the standing administration, interfering with their reincarnations in the hopes that the new gods, upset at pulled from their own homes, thrown into an established culture whose laws and precedents are without context for us, will be easily manipulated into turning on Amaterasu.

Was there anything stopping that person from disposing of us if we turn out too "uncooperative", in the first place?

Likely a reluctance to completely fuck this universe over, forgive my language. This world, I imagine, requires gods to function properly. Our predecessors vanishing was unfortunate, but not outside the realm of possibility. All of us vanishing as well? That's suspicious.

But there are certainly plenty of "new gods" who have vanished, over the course of just a few months. And some of them have been replaced, with no more apparent difficulty than our predecessors.

But not en masse like I'm assuming the old gods did. One or two vanishing at a time and being replaced could be explained by whatever power holds us here losing it's grip for a second.

That's a bit of an assumption. If they all disappeared at once, you'd think we'd have some indication of when, and who precisely has been missing. I've been working more with the assumption that the old gods have been vanishing and getting replaced on a more one-by-one basis.

Aside from what happens if we tell a shinki their past, everything we know here is an assumption. Some, like assuming that Amateratsu is mostly harmless, are likely true. Others, like the one I presented, could go either way.

Mm. There's always going to be guesswork involved, but I still think it makes more sense to say that they didn't vanish all at once.

Just taking my own example, Hachiman is a major deity here in Japan, and I didn't turn up until a couple of months into all this. It doesn't seem reasonable, without explanation, to assume that Hachiman was missing for that long and no one noticed it.

Is he still a major deity, or was he one when you were alive and in the intervening years fell out of favor?

Judging by the size and number of my shrines on the Near Shore, and the number of visitors the major ones always seem to have? I'd say he's still rather well-known. I recall a sign at one of them mentioning that Hachiman's got more shrines than anyone but Inari, and Inari is a god of the harvest.

[Gods of "please let us have enough food to live" don't really go out of favor all that easily.]

...that's impressive. What is he the god of, anyway?

War, primarily. Particularly of the samurai, the old warrior class we used to have around here. It seems like the one of the things my old enemies actually did right was getting rid of the castes as entirely as possible, and "archery" and "horsemanship" are hardly relevant to most people nowadays, but that doesn't seem to have hurt Hachiman shrines' popularity too much. More abstractly, protection, of Japan and in general -- I imagine that's what resonates more with people nowadays.

There's also probably some nostalgia for the warrior class, if the number of samurai inspired...everything is anything to go by.

It's easy to be nostalgic for them if you've never actually had to deal with them. Pompous, selfish idiots, no fewer than half of them.

[...He says, but he DID spend most of his life trying to be better at samurai-ing than the actual samurai, until he was finally made one because he already was in everything but name, but whatever. Deep down inside, he's still the same person he always was, which is to say "a peasant-class boy entirely too ambitious to accept the limitations being a peasant put on him, and entirely too smart NOT to see the flaws in the system that put those limitations in place."]

Which is odd, because the few I met back home were...well, very good at their jobs but also complete and utter dorks. Granted, I only met two of them, but seeing as they were retainers to Hoshidian royalty...

Hmm. Perhaps there's a trend there. Most of the decent ones I knew were complete embarrassments.

[...Which is to say he loved them so much it hurt, of course.]

Well, I know I've been called an asshole for "taking things too seriously" so I suppose that makes sense.

I've never understood that. Someone needs to take things seriously, or they'd probably all get themselves killed within ten minutes or so.

Apparently there's a limit to how much seriousness a body can take. I've never run into it if there is.

Well, I outlived almost everyone who told me that, so I think I have the right to call the theory into question.

[Joking about how All His Friends Are Dead: emotional health progress???]

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