pointless backstory
I was born in the 80s and some of my earliest memories where the Karate Kid films. If anyone here is in their 40s, they'll remember the obsession with karate. Kids were signing up for karate lessons left and right. I recall something on TV where kids were demolishing a house using karate (obviously it was staged by whatevs).
Then the 90s happened, and the West got paranoid about Japan taking over. Pop culture produced absurd books about Japan taking over the US, and people literally feared it happening.
I like anime. It's definitely better than most white culture shit. It just feels like the #1 theme or trope for a video game or series (that isn't the West) is Japan. I'm just utterly bored to death of Japanese schools, Japanese feudal themes, yakuza shit, Tokyo streets, etc. Yes, it's 1000 times cooler than New York or Texas. I'd rather play Ace Attorney or a Yakuza game than COD or Modern warfare. I'd rather watch JoJo's Bizarre Adventure than Family Guy. Japanese stuff is often cooler than Western stuff.
God I can't complain if Japanese developers want to make something that they know with the language they speak. My big gripe is non-Japanese developers imitating Japan because that's what sells. Think Genshin Impact, Battle Realms, or Blue Archive. My steam recommendations are filled with Japanese themes made my non Japanese developers. No, I'm not offended. I'd just like to play a game, once, that doesn't have samurai and geisha. It would be neat to learn about another culture that isn't Japan. Maybe go to another continent.
Wouldn't it be neat to play a stealth game in Nigeria or Bolivia, and not yet another game with Samurai.
I think just being willing to be critical instead of fetishize goes a long way. Seven Samurai is an all-time great film for several reasons, but one of them is that it challenges the mythology of the samurai in several ways and, despite the title, the only literal samurai in the narrative are people killed off-screen at an indeterminate point in the past because they were terrorizing peasants.
Edit: Also, Jojo has an extremely Japanese inflection, but only parts 4 and 8 are set in Japan (and 3 starts in Japan but by episode 2 they leave and don't come back until basically the epilogue).
I thought Kikuchiyo was the only one who wasn't a samurai? The rest were, but they weren't wealthy or powerful samurai.
Technically, the remaining six are ronin rather than samurai. They used to be samurai, at least to the point of coming from a samurai family in the case of the youngest (I don't remember the exact details if they are even given), but you aren't really a samurai unless you're actually serving under a lord, which none of them are when the film takes place. So six are ronin and one is a peasant or something but larps as a samurai.
We can infer from a couple of factors, not the least of which is actually possessing a substantial amount of armor, that the samurai killed prior to the movie were probably real samurai. It would also be much harder to get away with the crimes they were committing if not for them being under a lord, and if they were career criminals in the eyes of the law then they would probably just be referred to as more bandits by the villagers (because that's what they would be).
At least, that's my understanding of it.