Quezon, Shogun, and Rajah Humabon

Storytellers grappling with power

Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power are perennial bestsellers in the Philippines. I’ve got a theory why. Most of us were brought up to believe in meritocracy. If you work hard and play by the rules, you will win. Yet at some point we realize that there is a hidden, ancient, and bigger game being played. We soon see in the Philippine playing field that many of the winners won through the game of power. So we buy Art of War and 48 Laws of Power.

Most of us realize at some point that we don’t have the stomach for this game, especially after meeting people born to play it—people unconstrained by good or evil, who desire power as if it’s oxygen, and who were gifted with instincts for politics when the rest of us just fumble around half-blind through books. So we get out of the way and watch—admiring them, resenting them, sometimes both at once. We vote for or against them during elections. We try to win their patronage in corporations or at least avoid antagonizing them.

Yet they still fascinate us. We see these power players not just in our offices and social circles, but reflected back at us in the stories we consume. We’re drawn to Game of Thrones and House of Cards, watching figures who move through the world unburdened by our taboos. Even our teleseryes give us kontrabida who command our attention more than the bida. Roman historians documented the scandals of their senate, our ancestors whispered about which datu’s family was rising or falling, and when I take taxis in Davao, drivers give me real-time updates on Duterte family drama—the same story, different characters, across centuries.

Perhaps I’m just projecting. After all, I just spent a few years of my life researching and writing a novel whose protagonist is Rajah Humabon, the power player at the center of the drama at the dawn of Spanish colonization. It’s understandable how no one talks about him. Nationalist historians and content creators would rather depict Lapu-lapu, who we know enough of to create a hero but not too much that we’d have to confront the complex realities of power. These complexities though are unavoidable with Humabon. After Magellan’s death, the rajah invited his erstwhile allies to a farewell dinner and promised them a casket of gold and jewelry as tribute to Carlos I. By then, the European visitors were used to the port’s hospitality and its ruler’s charisma, so twenty four of them accepted the invitation, including two captains. Humabon massacred them. This complexity is inconvenient for promoting nationalism, but—sweet mother of the Santo Niño—it is gold if you are novelist, especially if you want to explore the themes of power, psychopathy, and violence.

Those years spent researching, imagining, and eventually writing Rajah Versus Conquistador changed how I experience fiction, especially fiction that explore similar themes, like Jerold Tarog’s recent film, Quezon, and Shogun, the greatest TV series ever made IMHO. I have yet to write about and through this new lens I’ve acquired, so let me try for the first time here. Let me compare how the creators of Quezon and Shogun handled their Big Man with my experience with Humabon.

Warning: Spoilers!!!

Experiencing the psychopath’s charisma

My thesis for my ongoing MA in Anthropology will most likely be at the intersection of ritual sacrifice and the figure of the Southeast Asian Orang Besar (or “Big Man”—my 2025 article in Michigan State University’s Contagion journal is an example—DM me if you’d like the PDF—it’s within TOS if I send it individually). If you live in Southeast Asia, you know this figure. He is characterized by his 1) charisma, 2) ability to lead an organization, and 3) brutality. I’m sure you already have some people in mind!

Shogun‘s Lord Toranaga is an interesting example of a Big Man. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of Japan’s three great unifiers who ended the Sengoku period’s century of civil war and established the Tokugawa shogunate that would rule Japan for over 260 years (1603 to 1868). He’s played by Hiroyuki Sanada in the 2024 FX adaptation of James Clavell’s novel. I don’t have a film or theatre background, but I know Sanada’s acting is superb because of its impact on viewers. If your politics, upbringing or temperament disallows you from falling into the spells of the likes Duterte and Marcos Sr., watching Sanada’s Toranaga offers a vicarious experience of what millions of Filipinos feel in the presence of these figures. The real Tokugawa inspired seppuku, battlefield deaths, and assassinations—the same charisma Filipinos feel during elections, but taken to its natural endpoint where devotion means dying and killing, not just voting and waging keyboard wars on Facebook.

My interest as a writer is this: how did they pull this off? How did the showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo make us root for Toranaga for nine episodes, only to reveal in the finale that we’d been cheering for a manipulator who treated human lives—including those of people who loved him—as expendable pieces in his game? The answer lies in a masterful bait-and-switch. Throughout the first episodes, Sanada played Toranaga as exhausted, reluctant, defensive—a man who seemed manipulated by the Council of Regents and who explicitly refused power multiple times. His tactics were primarily psychological rather than violent: he manipulated emotions, drove wedges between enemies, and rarely shed blood unless necessary. The show even kept him offscreen during the penultimate episode, reinforcing the impression that he was improvising, barely surviving. We saw a family man who laughed with John Blackthorne, who seemed to genuinely care for his people. Only in the final episode, during Yabushige’s seppuku scene, does Toranaga finally confess the truth—and notably, he does so only to a man about to die, ensuring his real nature remains hidden from history.

The genius of this approach is that the show makes us experience what Toranaga’s followers experienced. We feel his charisma not because the show tells us he’s charismatic, but because Sanada’s performance and the writers’ structure make us want his approval, feel relief when his schemes succeed, experience something close to pride when he outmaneuvers his enemies. The reveal doesn’t come as a lecture about power or manipulation, but as a visceral gut-punch when we realize we’ve been complicit all along. Suddenly, recalling earlier episodes, the signs were always there: his strategic use of Blackthorne as a distraction, his usage of his most loyal general’s ritual suicide as a mask for his intentions, his calculated deployment of Mariko to Osaka knowing she might not return. The Shogunate, as the show makes clear in its final moments, would be built on propaganda—with Toranaga’s image perfectly maintained while everyone else did the dying. This is how charismatic authoritarians work: not through cartoon villainy, but through making intelligent people want to serve, believe, and sacrifice for a vision that requires their blood but never his.

Which brings us to Quezon.

Possibly the best version of the bad man

My study of Big Men has led me naturally to studying propaganda, and having spent more than a year inside Humabon’s head, I appreciated what Tarog et al were doing: unlike Shogun, which makes us feel propaganda’s pull, Quezon shows us the machinery. We watch it being constructed rather than falling under its spell.

The film’s central technique lies in its use of the film-within-a-film device. Nadia Hernando, Quezon’s inaanak (godchild) and an aspiring filmmaker, creates black-and-white propaganda reels for Quezon’s presidential campaign—silent films shot in the style of early Philippine cinema that blur the lines between propaganda and art, truth and myth. These sequences parody the mechanics of mythmaking while simultaneously implicating cinema itself. But the crucial move comes when Tarog reveals that Nadia made two versions—one glorifying Quezon, another condemning him—showing us that history, like film, depends on which cut survives. We watch Quezon stage his heroism, unaware that others are re-editing the same footage into his undoing.

This is the opposite of what Shogun does to us. Where Sanada’s performance pulls us into Toranaga’s reality distortion field until we’re complicit in his manipulations, Tarog keeps us at arm’s length from Quezon’s charisma by constantly showing us the stagecraft. The camera falls in love with charisma, but the edit decides truth—and Tarog stitches silent-film vignettes, propaganda reels, and campaign shorts into the story like mirrors turned at different angles. We don’t experience Quezon’s magnetism as his followers did; instead, we occupy the position of Nadia in her editing room, literally watching two cuts of the same footage, understanding that political reality is manufactured through selection and sequence. The lesson also lands viscerally: doubt the edit, trace the source, ask who paid for the camera. The black-and-white cinematography itself signals constructedness—these aren’t just flashbacks but artifacts, reminding us that what we’re seeing are representations, not reality. By the time Rosales delivers his chilling final line—”I am the Philippines”—we’re not swept up in the declaration but horrified by it, because we’ve spent the entire film watching how such claims are manufactured and weaponized.

This is why I’m interested in Quezon as someone who studies the Big Man. Online reactions to the film expressed shock at seeing the lionized figure from our peso bills and statues revealed as a Machiavellian manipulator hungry for power. But here’s what years of studying these figures has taught me: they’re all like this. Every single one. In fact, by Big Man standards, Quezon was one of the good guys. There were no massacres under his watch. No matter how ruthlessly he destroyed his rivals politically—cutting off Aguinaldo’s pension, weaponizing the press, manipulating constitutional amendments—he never had any of them killed. This is an absurdly low bar to clear, I know. But once you spend enough time studying orang besar across Southeast Asia, once you’ve traced the logic of datu politics from precolonial slave-raiding expeditions to modern political machines, you learn to calibrate your expectations differently. The question isn’t whether a Big Man plays the game of power—that’s definitional. The question is whether his ascent to power was paid with the ancient way of blood and sacrifice, or with least bad option of cunning, manipulation, and propaganda.

Redemption for my monster

We all pay taxes, but in the past 90 years, that money was used to promote and standardize only one Philippine language, Tagalog. It was later rebranded as “Filipino”—a standardized dialect of Tagalog. Its supreme achievement: there are more films, music, and literature being produced in Tagalog than all the other Philippine languages combined. This move has the same signature of cunning and propaganda from our boy, Manolo.

According to Jojo Abinales in an episode of the PODKAS podcast, Quezon’s model was not the United States—which never imposed a national language—but Stalin and Europe’s fascists. “Isang bansa, isang wika, isang diwa” could have come straight from any early 20th century ethnostate ideologue. Prior to the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, ethnonationalism was the normal playbook, and as a new nation-state, the safe option is the usual option. This sacrifice for the sake of the nation-state was not bloody (in this aspect), but it was still a sacrifice, and non-Tagalogs continue to pay it. Maabtan ra mo’s gabâ puhon.

Writing Rajah Versus Conquistador helped me desire the Big Man’s salvation and transformation, not merely his condemnation. In my preface written more than a year before I started writing the novel full-time(ish), I relayed how a fellow named Jay was gunned down outside my workplace in Davao. As a recent immigrant to the city and a student of culture, I wanted to explore how Duterte’s supporters viewed deaths like that of Jay’s as the cost of peace and order.

The story took a life of its own, however. Instead of a parable that would function as a palette for explaining culture, the tale grew into a novel. I had to choose. Will I let the story be what it wanted to be, or will I force it within my scholarly critique? The second chapter I wrote was the last chapter, and it would have ended with these lines had I chosen the latter option:

The halad and the casket both fall to the ground, both hitting with a thud, the halad scattering its sacred liquid and the box its treasures across the earth. Gold ornaments, precious gems, and luminous pearls tumble out like fallen stars, darkened from their consecration with blood. The bright metals and stones take on deep crimson hues in the torchlight, transformed from mere wealth to powerful offerings.

As though a wave breaks upon the shore, violence erupts across the feast grounds. Your bilanggô and his warriors emerge from the shadows, weapons drawn. The datus rise as one, their knives and swords glinting in the moonlight. The devadasi step away from their targets with practiced grace, their garments untouched by the blood that begins to flow.

The red harvest has begun.

I envisioned an ending similar to Shogun‘s: no “moral lesson,” as our teachers used to call it; just the terror of seeing the reality of power and its cost. In contrast, because of expectations set by Hollywood, I sense Tarog had to punish his Quezon in his ending. The film closes with the president ravaged by tuberculosis, unable to stand, wheeled into a bunker as World War II erupts around him. In the film’s final moments, we see him consumed utterly by his lust for power, his ego spiraling into delusion—before he is swallowed by the darkness.

I chose possibly the most intimate perspective in writing Humabon’s half of the novel: second person present tense. I wanted to see through his eyes and think his thoughts—and bring along the book’s readers with me. The unintended consequence was that my first reader—my writing coach, Mitya—ended up rooting for the rajah. And although I modeled Humabon’s mind based on what I’ve read about psychopathy, our identification with him led to empathy instead of fear or loathing.

My writing approach is similar to method acting. Everyday, I would enter the mind of Humabon and let him live and make decisions with the world of the novel and within the constraints of the historical record. So I did not expect him to have a conversion in the middle of the novel—it was not even religious but merely psychological. After that, and considering the second person’s effect on the reader, I did not have it in me to send him back to hell, as originally planned. The storyteller in me made the scholar let go of his critique of the Big Man and let in a ray of hope—usa ka bidlisiw sa paglaom, as Humabon would say. Even I did not escape our protagonist’s charisma and maneuvering. This turned out to be a gift. I’m a bit biased, but I think Rajah Versus Conquistador‘s ending is more beautiful than Quezon‘s or Shogun‘s. Check it out.

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While I was writing this essay, a massive typhoon devastated Cebu and many areas in the Visayas. The death toll is in the hundreds and rising. Many families have lost their homes. Recovery is the focus now. If you’d like to help, here are some options:

• Institutional: Red Cross | Caritas

• Private business: Lost Books Cebu

• Private individuals: My brother and my mother are coordinating help for several families we know whose homes were damaged, including one family who lost theirs completely. Send me your email and I’ll connect you with them.