Respect
Shunshinkun’s death reveals that generals and leaders live with and amongst death, dead and the dying. And what makes a person a great leader is one who can fight competently against external and internal threats.
Accepting Rien into his circle and then letting his sister effectively give Rien all the handles to power was a lethal mistake. In a world where death and dismissals hurt the overall performance of a character, even a great general of Renpa’s persuasion should and must be wary of the court.
In contrast to Tou, who knew had no opposition in court and so was able to successfully conquer Han and then retire safely and happily; Shunshinkun was decidedly the exact opposite case. The man was powerful enough that his eminence became a weakness. The best leaders and generals should be expected to know how to accommodate that, be it planning around it or being absolutely nice to the court. In a sense, Renpa and Shunshinkun are the case studies for why being too strong makes you not as great of a person.
There’s a common saying “by making someone good, you failed to make them great” Shunshinkun’s strength essentially hampered his ultimate ability to be the greatest man of Chu’s history. And for Renpa, at least he survived although his sacking does stain his reputation quite significantly.
TLDR; Shunshinkun could have been awesome if he just killed Rien after the king died without any hesitation.
I can only think of two ways to explain why Seika is this powerful.
First theory is that they did not fight much before the Northern Zhao campaigns, especially not massive wars, and are just absurdly talented. But that makes zero sense when you look at what happened in the Han invasion arc. Tou explicitly pointed out that Han generals had all the talent in the world but got washed because they lacked real big war experience. You cannot win massive total wars against veteran monsters like Ousen and his generals on raw talent alone. Ousen's officers have been through absolute hell. A pure talent army with no macro experience should have crumbled the moment high intensity warfare hit them.
Second theory is that the Seika army is actually battle hardened and used to fighting massive wars. But if that is true, how on earth did they stay completely unnoticed for so long? Some people say they were just fighting regional border clashes with Yan. But regional skirmishes are like 5k to 10k troops max. Fighting small border raids does not prepare an army to lead 50k to 100k troop formations in total state warfare. And if they were fighting actual massive wars against Yan, there is no way Yan or Qin intelligence would miss an army of that scale and such talented officers. Ordo literally found out about SBS for the first time during the WZI arc when SBS is already a GG.
Another common cope I see is that deserting Zhao veterans and refugees flocked to Seika over the years. But if high level veteran commanders and thousands of troops were migrating to Seika to join a legendary general, Kakukai and the Kantan court would have definitely noticed and stepped in. On top of that, the vast majority of Seika's numbers are still just regular citizens and local levies from Seika and nearby towns. Maybe a few thousand could be elite, but Hara portrays the entire SBS army as literally unstoppable. They ride through 20k+ cavalry flank charges and rear attacks like it is nothing.
I am not writing this out of hatred for SBS. I just really hope Hara actually gives us a solid grounded explanation for Seika's power scaling instead of just buffing them out of nowhere to make Qin look like the underdog.
Two necessary preliminary points.
The first: this is merely a hypothesis of mine, which could nonetheless be refuted or I’m just too dumb.
The second: I’m not an english native speaker so I apologize for my grammar mistakes I’m forcing myself to not use a translator to help me
In this last arc Ousen is incredibly underwhelming and sidelined far too much, considering this is supposed to be the turning point that (perhaps) brings the mighty Zhao to its knees; while the focus is obviously on characters like Shin and Riboku, he is still the one in charge. For now, Qin seems to be struggling on every front, and in the rare moments they go on the offensive, they get disastrously crushed (take YTW and HSU, for instance) by an over-performing Riboku who, once again, is spamming his "teleport-no-jutsu” making it even more of a meme than it was already. While we’ve always seen Ousen using unconventional methods, yet ones that were decidedly more logical and calculated compared to characters like Kanki (my GOAT) but here, nothing: not a single move, and an entire newly reformed army that never even took the field.
I might be the only dumb one who didn’t manage to figure it out already but what if it’s all his Ousen master plan?
I might be stupid, so I could be wrong, but Riboku’s constant rushing between various battlefields certainly secured victories for Zhao and that only fueled his glazing and surrounding him and his already high standing in the capital. However, this also took a toll on him; furthermore, we know from history that Li Mu fell victim to a court conspiracy. This sets the stage for someone to wait for the perfect momentmuch like we saw Ousen do in previous campaigns to unleash their forces against a weary and weakened Zhao.
The Hi Shin unit has been developing commanders from its own unit
With some people from the Kakubi unit, some people from Duke Hyou but the rest are native HSU members
Comparatively most known members of Ouhon and Moutens unit are from their fathers
How do you become a GG without having talented people under you
it would be better if shin does the tactics and strategies by himself instead of having ten do them for him. it would make him more like how ouki was (who shins literally described as being his compass)
ten could’ve still been worked into the story but instead of doing all the tactics she would just be one of shins generals like how ouki had roku o mi and ryuu koku.