I considered Spoilering things but decided it would seem disrespectful to the people I'm replying to.
Searching for 'Hiashi, Assassinate' I find a lot of jokes and only
one serious one, which sounds like the one I was remembering, so I cede the point here.
I don't think the isolationism is unjustified as long as it's genuine. There's been five Hokage now, at least four of whom were idealists seeking world peace, and they've had to wage three world wars and all died violently with as far as I can see only the first having clearly accomplished anything major internationally by instituting the innovation of the Villages. The others have done good for people in Konoha and Fire though.
No worries, I felt the need to get things I've thought about for a while off my chest. That's all.
In general I can appreciate the intellectual arguments for consequential thinking, but I see very few examples of leaders using it every working out for the common people. Leaders who lean towards virtue ethics seems to work better to inspire positive political and social changes long term. Think of it like the sum of your actions making your moral character and people taking on what they see. Sure, a government leader can say in your heart you want world peace and prosperity but if you only ever invade countries to 'hunt down terrorists' and 'topple the dictator' and kill a lot of peoples families as a result? All you ever actually did was kill people, and all those people only ever saw suffering coming from you. Contrast the outcomes for societies of someone like Lenin and Ghandi, or revolutionary communists in general against reformist social-democrats.
I'm pretty sure it's the people who act according to virtue ethics who actually inspire positive perspectives in the people around them which transforms into something self perpetuating.
I would consider the capsizing to be a larger crime, following orders wouldn't change that and yes I did forget it. If you know the chapter off the top of your head I'd be interested in reading it again.
Basically it means doing ruthless things because you think it makes you strong and smart.
I mean this as a suggestion not a dig at you, but I would argue it's as vital a point to good roleplaying games to invoke the kind of emotional reaction that a decision warrants as it is to keep up a brisk pace of choices. So adding certain interludes could help the experience even if it came at the cost of slowing or cutting down main updates. When a game spends whole chapters on making you feel
great about winning a fight but only occasionally reminds you how you've doomed a species to ongoing slavery and death that's saying something about the game's priorities.
I rewrote this, but frankly I think it sums up my position too well; Wenher von Braun got America to the Moon that doesn't make him a good guy. He just did his thing for the highest bidder. I don't really credit anything Hazou did as a positive moral choice for that reason. The situation was thrown into his lap by the GMs. There's really no reason I can see why an Earth or Cloud agent couldn't have filled the same role Jiriaya did and have Hazou cheerfully providing them weapons for a believable story about how he's making the world a better place. It just happened to be the Good Guy Faction who snapped him up and they happened to use all his toys for Good Things.
I'd genuinely say Akatsuki were in the right if removing Chakra brought the Chakra Beasts down as far as Humans so they wouldn't overrun civilization and the risks of Sealing Failure can't be perfectly solved. Removing the military supremacy of a tiny minority of humanity probably leads to better treatment of the rest then with no ninja ruining the infrastructure every war ultimately technological and social progress, and as long as Sealing Failure remains a horrible risk running a magi-tech civilization off them is probably a death sentance in the long run.
Specifically 'evil' and not just something with bad consequences he could feel guilty about? Capsizing the boat, choosing to continue an unnecessary mission and kill that agent (and the two civilians) in Hot Springs, and selling weapons to the Pangolins after he knew they were war criminals. Bad things he's done include killing the border guards, setting up [rank and file members of] the peoples liberation Samurai cult in Iron to be purged and contributing to damaging Konoha's norms for peaceful transition of power. His scheme to arm all the Summons (who signed onto his scheme) would probably have ended up on this list somehow.
I don't think anyone is 100% harmful. In Hazou's case he's helpful to people around him and generally pro-social in a micro-scale. The issue is his crimes on a wider scale are conscious decisions (arming Pangolins after knowing what they were) and his positive influences (enabling the death of Yagura and a chance for Mist to reform or debateably stopping Akatsuki's ritual) are coincidental to arming the right buyers.
Honestly Jiriaya appearing in the story was appreciated as it opened up the world's lore, but the way the Akatsuki arc was handled just felt way too custom made to justify Hazou's inventions as positive developments rather than just tools of genocide. How could an almost even match up have been anything other than a slaughter if Akatsuki had full aerial superiority? There would have only been a counting clock to the chakra-destroying ritual, which I doubt was the original script.
Thank you, I appreciate the thought.
I think the worst example of pride is the entire Hot Springs incident. IIRC the mission wasn't from Jiriaya or any kind of authority figure, it was done for some kind of snake-themed company for cash. The mission was taken to be cool and have something to do, and when it escalated to confrontation they chose to fight rather than run, presumably because people thought the plan was clever enough to risk it and they wanted to win. (I do wonder whether Jiriaya would've been in such a bind if that agent had gotten through with that kid.)
I think there's a lot of pride in the lack of effort to try to talk openly with or form cases to appeal to Hiashi (or to a degree Akatsuki, which I don't think would have genuinely been out of players' reach in a meta sense). Diplomacy and efforts to understand where a person is coming from is a more effective way to get specific pro-humanitarian policies through the political mill than fighting everyone to get your candidates to rule all the time. Overall I think the toxic mix is the idea that Power = Moral Points. Hazou needs power to do good things, therefore it's okay to take blood money, enable a military coup or focus on weapons development. All the exact things that Yagura could do, except while claiming it's for a good cause. It's about focus and what you do making up who you, which is why Tsunade's mission is so powerful. She's refusing to focus on the power politics to spend her time understanding what she has to do to help, which people then see and can know she's genuine to be inspired by that.
Attempting to implement (if Keiko hadn't shut him down) the Summons Cold War was a pretty damn awful decision. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop for the Summons balance of power shifting causing Human wars to kick off when Summoners' villages start getting Pangolin level protection/seal money and we see something like a caribbean resource colony analogue emerge.
I don't think Hiashi's actually decisively wrong with his views expressed so far on that. War probably is coming between someone, the only question is whether it spreads worldwide. Isolationism isn't unjustifiable as long as you aren't a hypocrite about colonialism. If his 'nobless oblige' stretches far enough Hiashi-land could be Switzerland with fat, jolly, citizens making cuckoo clocks under heavy guard. Pre-Battle of the Gods the big rising conflict seemed to be Mist choking off Cloud's food supply in alliance with Hot Springs. Doesn't Jiriaya's alliance with Mist threaten to draw Konoha into war, or at least precariously balance maintaining 'peace' on the threat of that? An isolationist policy could've avoided that.
If it pre-dates Jiriaya's coup as it seems to his ruthless behaviour towards the other clans does represent a kind of predatory conduct that would be bad to see in a hokage, but it's difficult to blame him for playing dirty now after seeing Jiriaya outright steal the election with basically a threat to murder him then and there. And now there's a made-up clan and two dead clans voting for his rival too...
