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I loved the constantly reused animation of the Khan slowly turning up his head

Give us the bison video Cody.

30:39 This seems important enough to have a timestamp

5:00 what do I do about the 30-50 feral bison that enter my yard while my kids are playing

I believe that Cody made this video just to talk about bisons

4:12 "China is whole again! And then it broke again!"

Sugestion to video: What if Suez and Panama cannal were natural?

It's worth noting that at this point, the Kamakura Shogunate wasn't the real power in Japan. Power was held by the Hojo clan who'd acted as regents for the Minamoto shoguns in much the same way that the Soga and Fujiwara had done to the emperors. Worst part? The Hojo did it almost entirely out of spite. The story is honestly crazy.

One thing you didn't discuss was the Emperors of Japan themselves. While of course, this whole era and a long time after it were defined by figurehead Emperors, while the Shoguns ran the show, I think it is hard to overstate the unifying effect of just having an Imperiall dynasty that is so old it seems timeless. They are a unifying figurehead from which all legitimacy can be derived.

But if the Yuan take Japan, that dynasty ends. The simple claim to the title of Emperor after their refusal to submit would make them a threat that the Yuan cannot countenance and odds are, when they reach the North, the dynasty is destroyed and the title of Emperor of Japan, like that of Emperor of China, is claimed by Kublai or his heirs. Likewise the clans that were able to claim the title of Shogun.  

Which means, once the Yuan implodes, Japan is not just fractured, Japan has been fractured before—it's fractured with no one who even has a claim to being the unified central authority. Japan becomes, like any number of other empires, a place where there is constant effort to claim Imperial title because the precedent has been set that it is up for grabs, there is no longer a requirement of descent because all those lines of descent (or at least, all the known ones) were severed.

5:24 we'd all be eating pretty well for a while.

April is rolling around in like 6 months, give us the Bison video then and everyone who didn't like it will think it's a joke

I feel like this new animation style is the best compromise. It feels more alive and animated without losing the original feel of the snappy choppy animation of the old videos

It also doesn't look like incredible gassy anymore so that's good.

Ah yes. Ghost of Tsushima is where I learned of all of this.

At the time of the Yuan invasions, the shogun himself was just a figurehead. The real ruler of Japan was the leader of the Hojo clan, who were the descendants of the first Minamoto shogun's in-laws. Back in the early 1200s, the Hojo clan systematically marginalized the shoguns of the Minamoto clan, becoming the real power who ran the state, leaving the leader of the Minamoto as a puppet (occasionally assassinating Minamoto leaders who wouldn't go along with the Hojo). The massive resources spent to fight the Yuan (and guard against future invasions) eventually destabilized the government (run by the Hojo in the name of the shogun) in the 1300s, leaving an opening for Ashikaga Takauji to push out the Hojo, take over the government, and become shogun himself.

Ashikaga Takauji's descendants couldn't hold things together as well as he could, so by the 1400s, the Ashikaga shogunate government only really controlled the city of Kyoto itself, and the provinces were effectively independent mini-kingdoms...until 1476, when a civil war broke out in Kyoto between rival claimants to the Ashikaga shogunate, which started the Sengoku period for real. The Ashikaga hung on in Kyoto until 1573, when Nobunaga came in and pushed out the last Ashikaga shogun.

When Europeans showed up in the 1500s, the Sengoku was in full roar, and the provinces had been operating independently for over a century. In a timeline where the Yuan conquered Japan in the late 1200s (and then lost it in the 1300s), the Japanese who met these Europeans would be fewer in number, poorer, and traumatized by the Yuan invasion...but it sure as hell wouldn't be a Tokugawa shogunate. You'd have to work out how a post-Yuan Japan developed in the nearly two centuries between the fall of the Yuan and the arrival of the Europeans.

Thank you for that mea culpa at the end there. A lot of us were really disappointed by the drop in quality. Glad to hear you took the feedback to heart!

Which way of supporting is better? Through the youtube premium or the patreon? Does it matter?

I LOVE how the style of this video turned out.

The channel was undergoing a shakeup with the visual style and it finally feels like it's getting to a good place

9:23 perfect opportunity to say Khan-quest, lost forever

I personally would love a "what if the buffalo respawned?" Video lol

Jin Sakai disapproves of this video.