gunnslaughter:

jesseshimada:

afeatherlessarcher:

people don’t really get that in japanese culture, respecting your elders is an astronomically bigger deal. like, hanzo was literally pressured from birth to fit into this role for him, and the entire perspective is so drastically different than western standpoint allows that i don’t even know if it’s even POSSIBLE for non asian people to understand. 

here’s the fact: hanzo has PTSD, he was psychologically scarred from what happened, and his stifled, fluctuating anger comes from the fact that in japanese culture, there just isn’t a way that you’re meant to express that. the weight of his emotions is something that he is not emotionally or psychologically equipped to handle in the context of his culture. until you understand this, no, you cannot judge him.

hanzo gets so much unnecessary shit from the fandom when he and genji were both complete victims of circumstance. there’s no other way to frame it. people just don’t get that psychological tangles and concepts of that nature are just, viewed so differently in japan. hanzo didn’t get to feel conflict, that’s not how it fucking works. he doesn’t get to yell at the elders and rebel like some happy fairy tale, when you have a position, you’re supposed to do it, and if you’re conflicted, you keep it inside. this is a culture where suicide is often favorable to allowing yourself to have a full on breakdown. there is little to no argument that hanzo absolutely contemplated (and may still be contemplating) killing himself. in some cases, SUICIDE IS SEEN AS MORE RESPONSIBLE. 

hanzo literally couldn’t bear the weight of what he did and abandoned everything trying to redeem himself instead of just killing himself to stop the pain (this is, again, the much more common option). this is combined with the stigma against mental illness (especially those like depression, anxiety, and ptsd) and the pressure to just keep it underneath, and the fact that suicide is also a common response to something that you are deeply ashamed of (sound familiar??). YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE GRAVITY OF HIS CHARACTER UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND THE MOTHERFUCKING CULTURE. hanzo is so much more complex and tragic than the fandom has ever portrayed him to be and i’m so sick of his portrayal. 

edit: this isn’t saying you can’t dislike the character, there’s plenty of reasons why, and hell, you don’t even need a reason to dislike certain characters. this is telling people that he’s exponentially more complex than the fandom gives him credit for (and very important to me as a mentally ill japanese person), and making or seeing him as a flat asshole/stereotype is really ignorant at best, fucking hurtful at worst.

bless this post.

I wanna add to this because the OP is so totally on point, and I want to clarify.

This idea is not some vague notion that is not spoken of. It is named ‘giri’ and as quoted by Wikipedia to be 
       ‘a Japanese value roughly corresponding to “duty”, “obligation”, or even “burden of obligation” in English. It is defined as “to serve one’s superiors with a self-sacrificing devotion” by Namiko Abe.’

Basically, ‘giri’ is somewhere as integral as ‘life’s purpose’ and as everyday as ‘responsibility’. It is a social value that is bestowed upon you and becomes you. If you choose to live outside of it, you lose your honor, and losing your honor means that you fall out of society. Entirely. You become a no one, bereft of dignity and a place. No family, no friends. Completely cast out.

Giri’s opposite counterpart is ninjou, which is human nature. IT is the feeling that drives you to act against your giri, for example to love outside of your social hierarchy, to follow your dreams, to rebel.
The push and pull of giri and ninjou is a (exceedingly) common source of drama in Japanese literature.

Genji decided to shed his giri and dishonored himself and the family. To restore the honor to the family, it is Hanzo’s giri to kill him. But more importantly, by exercising his giri Hanzo is also restoring Genji’s honor by not letting him escape his own giri.

This is important. Hanzo acts on the elder’s decision not only as to right a social imbalance that has been created by his brother, but also in an act to save him, be it within a really skewed social justification.

Obviously, in the end, Hanzo’s ninjou gets the best of him, and he chooses a cast-out life than to live with his act, regardless of how honorable it was.

Tl;dr:
Unless you truly understand the social situation that the Shimadas come from, you can’t truly understand their personalities either.

Like, I’m one of those people who have a particular dislike towards Hanzo, but unlike many others, I’ve got hella more comprehension of what kind of man Hanzo is, and how he came to be who he was.

Piety towards the family and your family’s investment towards you needs to be paid. Someone, like Hanzo and Genji, who’ve been raised from birth to uphold a duty, were also raised to define their meaning of living by it. In theory, without that piety, Hanzo and Genji shouldn’t even have the life that they do.

Asian culture is notoriously anti-depression and anxiety. You hide that shit, not because of your own reputation, but for your family’s, too. People like Hanzo are the inevitable product of that kind of life. He’s got no method to express all that complexity and guilt and anger within him. 

And people will wonder why he doesn’t just pop into a therapy office, or rage against his family’s elders, or take a leaf from Genji’s book and try to heal in his own way. But, like … you obviously have no comprehension of what it means to shoulder that particular responsibility. In America, my family is legally stealing from me, because every penny that I gain goes directly to them. But in their mind, this is just part of our duty as blood.

Could I complain to my family and ask them to stop? Yeah, probably, but it won’t go anywhere except shame and embarrassment. There is no possible way to express, in the language that we speak, the idea that my family can’t be in control of my life.