values & motivation & gintoki

Throughout the duration of Gintama, what the audience sees isn’t Gintoki’s values shifting, or even his motivation changing. What we see is the expansion of the scope of Gintoki's motivation to encompass more than just a handful of people. 

As a samurai - albeit a nontraditional one - Gintoki has bushido, a personal code of honor. While Gintoki never explicitly states what his bushido is, it is clearly defined through his actions. From this, we can gather a number of important characteristics and values from Gintoki - things he holds near to him even when everything is falling apart. They are thus:

(Unyielding) Loyalty, family, justice, and pleasure. 

When we meet Gintoki we slowly uncover these values and how they manifest in his life, one by one. The first thing we learn is pleasure because the Gintkoi we first meet is self-absorbed, crass, and only interested in the things that bring him immediate satisfaction at the cost of quite literally everything else - drinking, gambling, and sweets, specifically.

From there, we meet a Gintoki who is fiercely loyal to Otose, his landlady; who cares about his makeshift family (not that he would call them that); and who, inexplicably, believes in a certain kind of justice in a country and world he genuinely believes to be unfair. 

Gintoki is motivated to protect the people he cares about. That’s it. Everything he does is rooted in this fact, and every other goal he has comes back down to this singular drive. What we see in Gintoki, is not how his values shift, but how the reach of his motivation expands until it goes beyond just the children he employs and Otose - it encompasses the Kabuchiko District, the country, and, eventually, Earth itself.

Chronology is hard in Gintama, because a lot of the important backstory isn’t revealed until late in the show. But I must start at the beginning to explain Gintoki’s growth. Not all the way back to his childhood, or even to the Joui War, but to the immediate aftermath of being forced to kill his teacher and only parental figure, Yoshida Shouyo, losing the war, and ending up alone. 

Understandably, Gintoki is depressed following the events of the Joui War. He has just been forced to kill Shouyo in front of two of his longest friends - Katsura Koutaro and Takasugi Shinsuke, who were also basically raised by Shouyo, albeit for a shorter time than Gintoki - and not only that, the war is lost and everything he fought for for the last ten years goes up in smoke. Following the Amanto (Gintama term for alien) involvement in Edo affairs, samurai are outlawed because of the trouble they caused during the war, and even carrying a sword without the Bakufu's (government) permission is deemed terrorism. Everything Gintoki has been, everything that made him himself and took away the loneliness he experienced as a child, is gone. 

He’s homeless and stealing offerings from graves when he meets Otose, whose husband died in the first half of the Joui War, which Gintoki had been too young to participate in. She lets him eat her late husband’s offerings and sees a lot of her husband in Gintoki. He manages to make a connection with her, although he is not seeking one. She lets him live on top of her bar (although she does demand money for it because she expects him to get a job) and he promises to always protect her as a repayment of this debt. Otose becomes the first point of connection for Gintoki after the war, the first person he cares for since Takasugi, Katsura, Sakamoto, and Shouyo. 

But he’s a samurai and he can’t be that. So he’s aimless. Near the end of the series, Gintoki tells Shinpachi and Kagura this, which reveals why he created Yorozuya during this time when he had no motivations, goals, or desires:

"Do you know why I started Yorozuya? Long story short, it was because I had nothing to do. There was nothing I wanted to do, so I decided to do anything. Messed up, right? I'm amazed I came this far when I started it for such a flimsy reason."

Creating Yorozuya widened Gintoki’s scope of loyal protection to more people as he met them - specifically Shinpachi and Kagura, who are his family. And once that door was opened, and once Gintoki had people in his life to help him grow, to care for him, it didn’t stop opening. His family became the people he worked with throughout the Kabuikcho District he lives in, which he fought to protect in the Four Devas arc, almost to his own death. Eventually bringing him connections with the Shinsengumi (police - which he hates; working for the bakufu - which he fought against in war for ten years) and the Shogun Shigeshige himself. He stopped hating the Shogun, and instead directed his hated towards the various Amanto groups he runs across that are seeking to control the Shogun and bakufu without regard for Edo or its people.

Thus, the country becomes one he’s willing to die to protect. Because it’s where the people he cares about are. And the people he cares about also care about other people that live there, which makes them worth protecting, too. 

[the text in this image should be read right speech bubble to left speech bubble - manga is written left to right]

When the serious content of the show really ramps up in the last three arcs (four, technically, depending on how you split Silver Soul), you find a Gintoki that’s not different from episode one, in terms of his values, and basic motivation stemming from those of protecting those he loves. But you’ll find a Gintoki with a lot more connections, with more to protect, and with a plotline that gives him goals to achieve. Each one serves the purpose of protecting his family, community, country, or planet, and they grow and shift as the story does. 

If Gintoki’s overall goal is to save Earth from threat (any combination or order of the Kihetai, the Harusame, the Tenshouin Naraku, the Tendoshu, Takasugi, and Utsuro), he accomplishes things on his way to set up that eventual success. Endogenous instrumentality is just this - these smaller tasks, smaller defeats, all directly protect something Gintoki wants to protect. Everything he does that’s meaningful is deeply connected to this overall desire to save and protect his family at all costs. 

The second half of the quote from above is as follows:

"As like-minded people gathered here [Shinpachi and Kagura], I lost my chance to quit. So I decided that if they ever found something they really needed to do, I'd trake down the sign and close up shop."

Everything Gintoki does has meaning, even if it isn’t understood until much later. When it comes to the serious things, the meaningful things, Gintoki keeps making bigger and bigger choices - like (temporarily) disbanding Yorozuya to keep up with the scope of his protection getting ever-wider, ever-bigger as he builds connections with more people. Every choice he makes is to follow this goal of his - typically his actions in these scenarios have a very direct correlation with protecting. His values are deeply connected to his goal, and it drives and motivates him to get involved in things that may end up costing him everything.