The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Do they get better after TaiPan? I read it a while back and just felt like it went nowhere, where Shogun was perfectly well contained as a story.
What I disliked about Shogun was the whole fake protagonist thing, like in Unsong. Both HK novels suffer a lot from "things resolve themselves", but at least the hero of the story is the hero of the story.
Did you have the impression Blackthorne wasn't the hero of Shogun? (I mean the book.) He definitely was in the Chamberlain series, definitely wasn't in the new series, but I remember in the book, despite the omniscient perspective getting into every character's head, Blackthorne did seem to be the main character we are meant to empathize with.
By the end of the book it's clear that Toranaga is the real protagonist. As soon as he appears in the story he immediately steals at least half the limelight, and ultimately Clavell spells it out that Blackthorne's story is the story of a tame bird of prey: he's not locked in a cage but he doesn't realize he's wearing a hood and sees only what his master wants him to see and his agency is an illusion.
That's Toranaga's inner voice, yes? Historically, Will Adams was eventually given leave to return to Japan, though he stayed. I'd suggest part of this is Clavell's unlimited omniscient writing style, combined with the passage of time in the novel. A similar trope was used in the original miniseries where you had Orson Welles reading out Toshiro Mifune's Toranaga thoughts at the end.
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