>>539718097
Now, Ryoma was, by all accounts including his own, a stupid cunt as a kid and dropped out of school several times. BUT he was apparently very, very good with a sword. Like most samurai from bumpkin minor families, he had little prospect of advancement, and as a young man, became interested in politics, though not enough to learn properly. There’s an anecdote where he tries to impress one of his friends by showing him a complex Chinese treatise that his friend thought very brainy and hard to read. Except when Ryoma started to read aloud from it, his friend quickly realized Ryoma barely even understood Chinese, at which Ryoma claimed that he at least “got the gist of it.”

We know most of Ryoma’s life because he very often wrote to his favorite sister about whatever he was doing, which you might think is not the brightest thing to do as a political subversive but, well, I direct you to the “stupid cunt” thing above.

After he parted with the Sonno Joi and lucked out of getting butchered with the rest of his idiot friends, he wandered around and eventually settled on a plan to murder a dude called Katsu Kaishu, a prominent reformist who had studied abroad and was involved with the naval trade. The story of their (probably partly glamorized) encounter claims that Ryoma burst into his house to murder him for the crime of dealing with foreigners, but Kaishu convinced him to listen to his ideas, summed up vaguely as “I want to strengthen Japan too you dumb retard, but we need guns ‘n shit.” Ryoma was apparently so struck by his apparent first encounter with someone who had two brain cells to rub together that he instantly dropped his plans and begged Kaishu to take him as his student, which Kaishu agreed to do because, hey, kid’s got balls.