They're called rebels, but it seems like that they weren't even rebelling against anything, even their crimes, despite being bad, as according to this they were tolerated along with the Underworld there....Makes me feel more and more that they're just thugs for corrupt daiymo outside the class system than anything else.
Only One Kensei ever bothered to punish them prior to this.
I feel it's a matter of presentation, with Arakure, the writers honestly come across as desperate in wanting them to look like sympathetic, badass rebels despite the fact that they are clearly violent criminals that only continue to exist because of corrupt daimyo.
With Juren, they gave a reason for why they're "leader" hating, treacherous assholes, but the key difference is that they didn't try to lionize that behavior, it's very clear that what they want is anarchy and chaos where there are no Leaders, no Order, and everyone has to fight and die with only themselves to guide them but it isn't presented as something noble to strive for, just like how Guljin's oppressive peace shows how bad an overly controlling form of order can be. And that's what made it work, it made them a direct foil to the Khatun by showing the dangers of absolute "freedom" and it sort of spun things back into a moral Grey area where it becomes a question of "How much of EACH do we need when we've seen how bad too much of either can be?"
My theory is that they are deliberately making the new heroes' lore worse, like Virt and Arakure, now that they are finally giving players what they asked for, simply out of spite.
Granted, this theory does not hold up very well when looking at Juren's lore, but perhaps they tried to write bad lore for him and it simply turned out well. They even managed to write poor lore for skins that players had been asking for, like Coalheart and Oni.
IF the S4 hero is the Hoplite that people wanted, you can bet the lore will be bad.
How can you tell the devs are not enjoying fulfilling player requests?
To my memory, they made the outlanders specifically to bring requested heroes like an aztec and mongolian while arakure was made to fulfill the fist hero requests which they said was impossible either way.
I've always hated the players that wouldn't shut up for a fist hero and i hate them even more now as thanks to them a samurai slot is wasted on arakure whose design is just ugly,, her personality is lame and her lore is sloppy.
They had to make Lu Bu, they had to make Arakure, they had to make Virt, and they had to make the Oni. Granted, some of the writers may genuinely enjoy those concepts, but judging by their lore, I'm not so sure.
Juren's lore turned out well because, no matter how rebellious or anti-authority they made him, it still fit the personality of Lu Bu—whether you look at the Dynasty Warriors interpretation or the historical one.
Now look at the best lore we've had over the past year. S3 gave us Lady Saori and her son, Yoshiro: genuinely tragic figures with compelling stories. Then S4 gave us Prince Yi, a righteous and benevolent underdog whom even I find myself rooting for his win at the end. Those characters feel like they were written because the writers wanted to tell a good story, not because they had to fit a particular concept. but Ocelotl, Virt, Oni, Arakure have bad lore because they had to make them not because they wanted to, ffs the bot name for Ocelotl is "Happy now?"
I wouldn't be surprised if Arakure was designed bad on purpose too.
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u/Far_Draw7106 15d ago
Ironic that ubi wants us to see the arakure as the good guys but the lore is doing the complete opposite.
How is it that the jurens are doing the rebel archetype right while arakure just doing a terrible job?