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To Continue Their Battle? (Shogun 2024)
Should honoring our dead keep us stuck in a loop?
Like many viewers around the planet, I’ve been enjoying the phenomenal Shogun on Disney+. As the show is still rolling, this isn’t so much a take on the show itself, rather on a specific line that caught my attention.
“We grieve those we have lost by continuing their fight.”
I won’t go into too much detail as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t got that far, but as a viewer, I found it an extremely moving, stirring line in the given circumstances.
In the heat of a really good show, you find it hard to disagree. Not only do you think of course we should continue that fight, you’re actually convinced it’s the honorable thing to do.
In the show’s setting, it may be. When translated to our real, perhaps less impressive circumstances, the quote turns from noble to sinister in a heartbeat.
Are we born to further the clan’s fight?
Alas (or perhaps mercifully), we don’t live in TV shows, no matter how beautiful they may be, but in the real world. As such, our fights (generational and not) are not always about honor, nobility, and sacred rights. Often, we fight out of…