With the exception of the Spider Clan in O5R, and maybe the early Crab- and Scorpion Clans, I don't think L5R ever had a clear House Badguys.

I do wonder how much the videos premise is affected by the presence of magic; divine mandate must be a lot easier to rule by when the Gods are very definitively and provably real.

Early Scorpion in the RPG was pretty bad to detriment of the game. Void in the Heavens was screaming for Phoenix villains, but no, the villain had to be a Scorpion.

The Dragon clan also had the tendency to annoyingly one note...

It seems to me that the Scorpion Clan in the current story is basically just "House Badguy". And up until now, there hasn't been anything to justify their bad guy slant. In fact, rather the opposite, their line seems to be "Oh, we are house badguy totally on purpose! And that's okay because our founder so totally got told by the first emperor that we were supposed to be evil, which is helpful and not a problem at all, because ultimately we are loyal to the emperor... or we say we are except act the opposite every opportunity... huh... are we even loyal to the emperor? Maybe he isn't worth being loyal to..."

The others... well, they tend to all be described positively. The only bad guy Crane so far was Yoshi and the Lion have some bad guy tendencies, but one can't really pin it on a single character (and the main Lion protagonist is on his way out of the clan). But other than that, it seems like everyone else is some flavor of "House Goodguy".

It feels like thus far the writers have been pretty careful about allowing any of the clans besides Scorpion to be painted as villains in any of the stories, instead using ronin and imperials and magical evil critters as the opponents for the protagonists to overcome. And the Scorpion aren't even opponents right now, they are just an obviously evil group that just stomps all opposition without any real trouble.

So the video is basically describing Dune. Maybe I love crappy fiction, but I'll go on record as saying I loved Dune. Call me crazy

In my opinion FFG has done a good job of trying to create enough nuance such that each clan can seem like the heroes in their own narratives. So far we've not really seen someone who is only a mustache twirling villain. Even Kuni Yori is given a really great intro fiction where you are allowed to understand him and his current predicament.

I'm actually not seeing a lot of Clan-related ideological exposition in the stories. I see a lot of characters going into the Goodguy Camp while others are gunning for the Badguy Camp. The only case I can remember from the top of my head when a Clan was put onto the stage was the Scorpion novella, but even there things were a little messed up because the hero of the story was a Scorpion too. Otherwise, we have characters who are not representatives of their Clans (Toturi, Hotaru), characters who represent only themselves (everyone Unicorn and Imperial and non-Toturi Lion), characters in non-representative stories (everyone Phoenix and Scorpion), and characters who just kinda linger in the metaplot (everyone Crab and Dragon).

Considering the (supposedly) collectivist setting, I find this kind of wild individualistic approach ironic .

54 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

It seems to me that the Scorpion Clan in the current story is basically just "House Badguy". And up until now, there hasn't been anything to justify their bad guy slant. In fact, rather the opposite, their line seems to be "Oh, we are house badguy totally on purpose! And that's okay because our founder so totally got told by the first emperor that we were supposed to be evil, which is helpful and not a problem at all, because ultimately we are loyal to the emperor... or we say we are except act the opposite every opportunity... huh... are we even loyal to the emperor? Maybe he isn't worth being loyal to..."

The others... well, they tend to all be described positively. The only bad guy Crane so far was Yoshi and the Lion have some bad guy tendencies, but one can't really pin it on a single character (and the main Lion protagonist is on his way out of the clan). But other than that, it seems like everyone else is some flavor of "House Goodguy".

It feels like thus far the writers have been pretty careful about allowing any of the clans besides Scorpion to be painted as villains in any of the stories, instead using ronin and imperials and magical evil critters as the opponents for the protagonists to overcome. And the Scorpion aren't even opponents right now, they are just an obviously evil group that just stomps all opposition without any real trouble.

The thing is Scorpion with their assigned role in the Empire as written have to be antagonistic to the other clans so the House Badguy analogy is harder to get away from with them. What we have gotten with many of the POV stories however is that we see the nuance in those characters and the struggle that they sometimes have with their duty to be "scum" and their desire to live to parts of the code of Bushido. Yojiro is a perfect example and his moral struggle has made for very interesting reading. And while some characters like Kachiko and Aramoro are very much being written as villains, Shoju is being written to be very sympathetic as he sees the cliff his clan is rolling towards and he doesn't see any way to change the course due to the prevailing state of the empire.

4 hours ago, phillos said:

So the video is basically describing Dune. Maybe I love crappy fiction, but I'll go on record as saying I loved Dune. Call me crazy

Eh... Dune is specifically cited as averting some of the pitfalls in the "how House Badguy wins" segment.

But love it though I do, there's little denying that the Harkonnens are HILARIOUSLY incompetent in their stewardship of Arrakis- but also note, they don't betray the Padishah Emperor. Far from it.

As far as L5R goes... I would actually argue that at MANY times in its history, it has fallen into a "House Placeholder" approach to multiple clans.

I mean... what did the Unicorn get up to in the original Clan War arc? What did the Mantis do during Celestial Edition? What were the Phoenix doing from the end of Samurai through the debut of the New Moto Curse?

While not every Clan can or should be a presence in every story, having entire factions basically go AWOL from the plot for years- literal, real-world years- at a time makes it hard for them to feel fleshed out.

3 hours ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

Eh... Dune is specifically cited as averting some of the pitfalls in the "how House Badguy wins" segment.

and then conforms through most of the rest of the video. I felt like the author was just throwing me a bone at that point That is true though the Harkonnens are technically loyal throughout the book to the emperor even though they are clearly House Badguy. So that's something I guess.

To be fair, the Dune books avoid the lack of characterizations, and beyond the feud Atreides/Harkonnens Bene Gesserit, Fremen, even imperials are rather fleshed out well.

The Dune movie though, short as it is falls often into these traps. (Despite just a moustache and not full goatee, the traitor made me think of Yueh's characterization).

why L5R "avoids" this well? Because it's not two Houses centric.