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Ghost of Tsushima and the Political Myth of the Samurai

This is an absolutely fantastic piece by Kazuma Hashimoto on the ways in which the developers of the recent open-world RPG Ghost of Tsushima used an aesthetically evocative but politically and historically naive portrayal of samurai in their game:

The preservation of the Bushido code that was highly popularized and utilized by Imperial Japan lives on through promotion by history revisionists, who elevate samurai to a status similar to that of the chivalric knight seen in Western media. They are portrayed as an honor-bound and noble group of people that cared deeply for the peasantry, when that was often not the case.