I'm not saying he was an asshole but the question was where that reputation comes from. The Samurai Trilogy and subsequently The Five Rings has changed my life for the better. I'm a huge fan of ol MM. But, again, a lot of westerners fall in love with the romantic idea of samurai in general or Miyamoto specifically and then feel a little betrayed when they find out that they had different rules of murder etiquette than we do which I find downright silly. If some guy is coming at me with a sword that is known to be capable of cutting through multiple bodies at once (they actually would test swords at executions and rate them accordingly btw) you're goddamn right I'll do what it takes to not let that happen.

Rather than research it I left the caveat at the bottom of my original post because nothing the guy in askhistorians said bothered me enough to stick with me. It left me feeling like the people who have turned against him have done so ostensibly over a headline without reading the whole article IMO. Choosing a recently rained on beach as a battleground so your opponent will tire themselves out immediately is brilliant. Showing up late to a duel specifically so that your opponent would be angry and the sun is more of a problem than it should have been is a dick move for sure but then, when I play an RPG that doesn't have a dynamic difficulty built into the AI I shamelessly grind until I'm practically a god and my life doesn't depend on it so I'm not judging. A lot of what he did could easily be viewed as using his opponent's pride against them which, having a particular distaste for narcissism, actually endears him to me rather than make me trepidatious toward him,