Historifandom: Musou (Part 1)

The other day I called home and had a slightly disheartening conversation with my kid brother:

ME: ...so, yeah, I'm doing Asian history.
BROTHER: (shocked) Asian history?
ME: Chinese in particular.
BROTHER: ChiNESE?

If I knew he could understand the joke, I'd call him a 汉奸. Oh well.

Now, kid brother is one of those chilluns who began gaming almost as soon as he could sit up unassisted. He adores RTS (real-time strategy) and turn-based games incorporating historical settings, such as Rome: Total War. But his first reaction, and, I think, that of a lot of people, is that history (and by extension historians) are inherently and irrevocably boring; the older the period, the more boring--yeah, yeah.

ME: But you campaign against the Celts and Germans every night, don't you? Isn't that cool?
BROTHER: (grudgingly) ...I guess so.

Second bias everyone's heard of: historical Asians are totally, like, boring! All Analects and test-taking and repression and famines, not to mention confusing names. Asian history's pretty dull as it's taught in East Asia, too (I can only speak for the PRC of the 90s, but somehow I doubt there's been much progress there or elsewhere in the neighborhood away from memorizing endless lists of names and filling in blanks therewith).

But some fanchildren out there know this ain't so, and in fact revel in making history (even premodern Asian history) their fandom. Of course, Asian historifandom's more common in Asia, but with the rise, especially since the mid-1990s, of North-American "otaku" culture that revels in all things Japanese (a topic that requires more updated research, for sure), there's a brand of unabashedly fannish, distinctly Asian pop culture that's begun to infiltrate the American market, which merges the historio-mythological with the sheer distorting glee of fandom in a whole new way.

In particular, there's Koei's Musou series, which began with the heroes of the Three Kingdoms (Sangoku Musou--Dynasty Warriors in English; the first was released in 1997), then recently added a new line about the Sengoku Jidai (Sengoku Musou/Samurai Warriors, first released in 2004). Unlike the Total War series, the Musou games are far less concerned with historical accuracy--indeed, the whole point of my posting on the games (apart from being obsessed with them, cough cough) is that they sell by deliberately distorting history. Emphasis on deliberately, because the characters are still recognizable, and, like in Total War, the player can choose to reenact documented battles and events. Other than that, at first glance the games seem to have taken rather little from recorded history. Have a look at this picture of Oda Nobunaga, as he appears in Sengoku Musou 2:
For comparison's sake, a more old-school rendering:

There's something fascinating about this contrast, for me anyway. Without knowing that the top image depicted a character named Oda Nobunaga, could anyone actually recognize him? Possibly. The Musou series' heroes are condensed symbols of their historical identities, in the same way that other forms of popular culture have reduced the complexities of heroes of history and myth into distinctive visual archetypes. Take Guan Yu for example. Here's a screencapture from a Chinese serial drama (Lord Guan's on the far left):
And as he appears in Peking Opera:

And finally, as seen in the latest Sangoku Musou game (released in the US just a month or two ago):
He's got the green color scheme, the "beautiful beard," and of course the 800-jin Blue Dragon Knife, just like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms says! Now, Nobunaga's case seems more extreme, probably because Nobunaga's a much more recent personality with less symbolic detritus (no Romance of the Sengoku Jidai)to link his identity to his appearance, or maybe because Koei's a Japanese company more at ease with distorting Japanese historical figures. Nonetheless, his purple-and-black look, the decadent feather ruff, the European cuirass, and the lightsaber do make sense. Missionary Jesuits were active in Nobunaga's time, and he made pragmatic use of them against his rivals, as opposed to his successors Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned Christianity and began persecutions of converted Japanese, fearing the destabilizing potential of this imported faith. This Jesuit connection might explain the armor and cape. Nobunaga's ruthlessness and self-aggrandizement as "demon-king" (魔王, maou), whether factual or apocryphal, contributes to his evil-overlord look.

And does anyone really learn anything from this? Well, for one, that gross historical distortion (henceforth GHD) can show how the mythos of history, particularly that surrounding people, is formed and perpetuated, even in such 'crass" venues as video games. Moreover, the fact that the Musou games are popular and profitable (Koei's up to the 6th Sangoku Musou release in the US, just put out a "tactical" version of Sengoku Musou in summer 2007, and churned out Musou Orochi, a mind- and timeline-boggling combo of San- and Sengoku, last winter) reflects intriguingly on the consumers' side of historical production, too. The "hack-n-slash" gameplay, as most game review sites point out, is incredibly repetitive between new installments of the series; the cast of characters also remain generally the same. So there's something else gripping about the content--its appeal to historifandom's "historifantasies" through its reimagination and repackaging of these "boring" long-dead people into "awesome" heroes.

Sometime in the future I'd like to talk more about the sexualities at work in the Musou historifandom, the "alternate history" appeal of Musou Orochi, and of course more in depth on why and how the Musou characters are "awesome" in a specfically historifandom way.