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February Stats and Woxin Fan Musings
English reading:
Legend of the Jade Dragon by Yasmine Galenorn
--twee and indefinably annoying.
Treason by the Book, by Jonathan Spence
--fascinating and appalling by turns. Emperor Yongzheng was clearly a man who never slept but spent fourteen hours a day reading reports from all over his huge empire. Amazing also that in that huge empire, if you wanted to track down a man who passed through a village two years ago, you *could*. My guess is that the same would have been impossible in tiny 18th century England.
Japanese reading:
Koori no Mamono 5, 10 & 11
--still fun, though it says something that I can skip four voumes and still be on top of the action, aside from the backstory of Rapunzel and uhh Built. Which is recapped anyway in 12 I think.
Writing:
Oh well, now there-- circumspice.
The old wisdom that I can never quite follow is 'The story doesn't have to be perfect. The story has to be finished.' Prompts are marvellous for promoting that: to have it finished, and finished within a certain 24 hour period, is the essence of the thing. Perfection being next-door to impossible under those circs, the nagging need for perfection- hell, the need for depth or even semi-respectability- must be jettisoned. So there was a kind of giddy freedom to doing these. I haven't written this much this fast since first discovering dragons or getting into Saiyuuki, and I wouldn't have written it for Woxin without the outside impetus of someone else's prompts.
I think it's partly the arbitrariness of the 31_days set up that did it. Some stranger assembled the quotes off their own bat, with no reference to the series I was watching. They just happened to apply so well to so much of it. The full swell of Marlowe's sailing verse matches the Woxin visuals so splendidly-- not to mention that he too deals with kings and courtiers and conquerors
Equally, short fics or omniscient narrator observations allow me to comment on the series in something other than essay style. This is amusing but also, ultimately, unsatisfying. I do want to write *stories* and am still hampered by the basic problem of not knowing how these people talk. Looking at the Chinese subtitles helps a little, a very little, but I'm still confined to writing English that seems to fit the tone of voice and the facial expressions. Which is.. mhh. Annoying. Especially as I get past 20 in my rewatch and the plot goes off more and more from where I want the plot to go, diverging (and going wrong) at the point where Fu Chai says (as per subtitles) What did you think of the battle? and Gou Jian says I lost; I lost because it was the will of Heaven and Fu Chai says, No, what did you think of the *battle*? Why did you tell your troops to retreat here, didn't you foresee that I'd surround you there? and Gou Jian says No, you were supposed to have brought the men from the navy up, you took a huge risk doing what you did, and Fu Chai says Yes, precisely, me I thought *you'd* see through it and cut us off there; and the two spend the next hour rehashing troop movements. Which I can't write because it didn't happen and because I still don't know what Fu Chai's tactics were. (If anyone's reading the novels and the novels say, do please tell me.)
However, there's still rewatches, and rewatches of rewatches, and realizing why live action fen never stop talking about what this quirking lip or that widened eye might mean. The human face does so much more than anime can make it do; is why anime is so much simpler a way of being a fan. And Gou Jian asks Fu Chai if he'll keep the terms of the treaty, one term of which is that he won't kill Gou Jian. Of course, says Fu Chai, it's all written out fair and square; and then when the troops bay for blood, immediately says Do you know how I'm going to kill you? Does Gou Jian see that as having gambled on Fu Chai's trustworthiness and lost, or does he realize it's a legalistic 'I won't kill you myself, I'll make you kill yourself' or did he always expect not to walk out of Yue's Great Hall alive but thought it worth it to preserve his people?
And other such matters in the unending examination of what a couple of actors can do when they talk to each other. (Now, Fan Li wordlessly leaving Wen Zhong when the latter says 'Surely even guest officials should not disregard the welfare of the country just to save their skins!'-- stories could be written about those few silent seconds as well.)
(Have been looking at maps. What the hell was Fu Chai going to do with a navy anyway? Sail it around and attack Yue's coastline? The other thing is, it looks like there's nothing but mountains between Yue and Wu. Why are they natural enemies? It looks to me like Yue should have turned its sights on the states to the south-west of it, and Wu to the north. Those guys across the pass? Why bother with them?)
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IIRC what he actually says is "(do you know how I'm going to) 让你死 (=*let*, or *make* you die?)" - which is not quite saying flat out "I'm going to execute you in defiance of what was written, hence negating my trustworthiness" - so Gou Jian assumes that he has to do the honourable thing (which he was probably was prepared for anyway, but did hope that Fu Chai, making an idiotic mistake as Fan Li said, would spare his life). What he didn't expect was the (possibly unprecedented) enslavement of a defeated king.
The novelisation is rather simplistic (though I can't remember if this was exactly what was played out on screen): Gou Jian attacks the Wu navy at the lake and Gongsun Xiong retreats with some losses. Yue has a force (Zhu Jiying) in the marshes to cut off the Wu retreats -> Wu Zixu expects this and hence plans to encircle the entire Yue army in the marshes by superior numbers of the land forces.
Gou Jian knows that WZX is thinking in the above manner, hence had ordered Zhu Jiying to come out from the marshes *before* WZX et al get there, and fall on the retreating navy from behind as the main Yue force puruses them, hence destroying 6 years' worth of resources in the navy.
Fu Chai's plan is just to attack the Yue forces at the lake (presumably the terrain supports this, according to Fan Li) before they can join up, which WZX says is too audacious and risky.
Fu Chai going to do with a navy
Eventually sail it up the canal he sunk so much resources and manpower in (with Fan Li's encouragement) to conquer the central regions (Qi, Chu et al) and become hegemon. If Yue weren't a friendly/submissive state (as it was under Yun Chang and Helu's time), Wu would be vulnerable to attack from the back - hence it was in Wu's interest to have Yue either subjugated or incorporated. Chu was an ally of Yue for this reason, to keep Wu on its toes having to guard against both its northern and southern neighbours.
Yue should have turned its sights on the states to the south-west of it
Too small; only after Yue had incorporated Wu into itself did Gou Jian feel safe enough to challenge for hegemony himself.
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Eventually sail it up the canal he sunk so much resources and manpower in
Wait- wait- what? Fu Chai is all Hurry up and build me a navy, I need my navy *now*- and it's sitting in some *lake* waiting for the canal to be built that Fan Li hasn't even advised them to make yet? No- waiting for Yue to be subjugated so it's safe to build canals for the navy to sail on, and a sitting duck for both Yue and Chu in the meantime?
This Does Not Compute. Seriously. There's bass-ackwards, and then there's Fu Chai.
no subject
Overrun by the Wu army, one supposes. (The actual battle sequence didn't really register in my head >_<) Not much of a strategy, yes.
the canal to be built that Fan Li hasn't even advised them to make
Actually the idea for the canal (called the Han canal) was there (WZX's? Fu Chai's), just that the engineers didn't plan it wide enough and underestimated the time and resources required so Fu Chai was ready to give up or seek an alternative route until Fan Li said, it's worth your while to widen the thing, it'll just take another 5-10 years.
waiting for Yue to be subjugated so it's safe to build canals for the navy to sail on, and a sitting duck for both Yue and Chu
Yue would have to be either a vassal state or incorporated into Wu for it to feel safe, preferably the latter. The power of Chu had been broken by Helu+WZX (q.v. corpse-whipping battle) 10-15 years before the start of the series, so they felt it necessary to ally themselves with Yue to contain Wu - hence Wen Zhong bringing 20,000 soldiers to Yue. Helu was seriously considering conquering the states of the Central Plains (in fact some sources recognise him as the 4th hegemon, just before Gou Jian), so Fu Chai (who confusingly is also thought by other authors to be the 4th hegemon after the Huangchi conference) was continuing the work.
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Err yes, so Wu has two enemy countries front and back, both weakened but neither completely subjugated. I'd say this sounds like wannabe hegemon more than anything definite. This era's history makes my head hurt almost as bad as Three Kingdoms, tho' nothing can be as bad as that.
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