flemmings | Lessons from Three Kingdoms

Basically, don't trust anyone. How this work can be interpreted as presenting various conflicts of loyalty beats me. No one is loyal to anyone except our spotless hero Big Ears. (Noddy meanwhile gets drunk and pisses off Big Ear's allies.)

Am growing more tired of Luo's bias by the moment. Moss doesn't help. Cf his introduction:

(Cao Cao's) boldness and unflinching resolve are dogged unceasingly by his selfish scheming. An example of his craftiness occurs after he defeats Yuan Shao's army at the battle of Guandu. Evidence is found in the enemy camp that some of his subordinates had been in treasonous correspondence with Yuan Shao. But in order to preserve harmony in his own ranks and make the guilty one beholden to him, he has the documents burned without looking at them.

Real selfish scheming, that: the kind that can get your throat slit in the night.

Forge on, forge on. Am not even diverted by the text telling me that Liu Bei goes off to see Lu Bu accompanied only by Lory Guan and Zhang Fei. Clearly Guan Yu has his transgendered moments too.

(Lu Bu is being rather commonsense, here in ch 16, and I'd be tempted to like him if only because he's the only person to date who's ever tried sitting people down and getting them to talk. But yappari the man is a brute and a bully. Oh right, right-- Luo says the man is a brute and a bully.)

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(Er. Noddy?)

Moss was only being sarcastic! :P
And erggh. Long Ears tended to overdo the refuse-thrice tradition. Also. The part where he offered Tao Qian's domain to Lu Bu (with Guan and Zhang glaring at Lu Bu behind Long Ears) - that never fails to make me snort in amusement. I mean. Is this guy for real?

(Lory?)

If you're referring to the part where he was bullying Ji Ling and Liu Bei ("stopbrawling or i'llbashyourheads), erm, wasn't that just a chance to show off his marksmanship?

(See, I had the impression that *all* the scattered Children of Empah were introduced to the classic Brit kidslit of Enid Blyton at an early age and/ or were indoctrinated in childhood with her outmoded works of British imperialism at the expense of indigenous writers-if-any. Thus I am kerblonxed that you don't know Noddy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(character)) I quote: "Big-Ears, a wise, bearded Brownie who lives in a toadstool house outside of Toytown. He is Noddy's best friend" and considerably older than he is, and a less innocent age has deeply serious squicks about him.)

Lory= typo for Lord. Moss habitually calls Guan Yu, Lord Guan, and Liu Bei, Xuandei, which is an intelligent move since the illiterate like myself will confuse any two-character Chinese name with any other two-character name at the drop of a hat. There are many reasons to like Cao Cao and one of them is that you can't confuse him with anyone else. Yuan Shu and Yuan Shao require careful reading to stay separate, and I'm still not sure which is which.

Err, yes, it degenerated into showing off, but I'd assumed at the start it was intended to get the two of them to stop assuming that the other would kill him on sight. What baffles me in this work- one of the things- is that Japanese proverb about 'yesterday's enemy is today's friend' taken to really insane extremes. Try to remember who's fighting with who and the next time you look, bosom enemies are taking refuge with each other because somebody else has rolled onto his other side. Basically, everyone is ready to fight with everyone else if they see advantage in it. Thus the opening line of my post.

Now the Japanese confine themselves to life-long enemies, which keeps their narratives straight. Uesugi Kenshin is battling Takeda Shingen, period. They're not ganging up together on Oda Nobunaga then battling each other while Takeda runs to Oda for help and Shingen calls in the Hojos.

I'd just add that probably blood debt is a constant in that novel. Even Cao Cao had to abide by that; Tao Qian died bequething his domains to Big Ears, thus sparing Cao the trouble. One wonders Tao disinherited his own sons in order to spare them from Cao's revenge. Who knows.

And then we have, side by side, some defeated general saying the virtuous man does not revenge himself on the innocent, as if it were a well-known axiom, and everybody else doing exactly that-- executed the whole clan in bunches and hung their heads up as a lesson.

Quite apart from this story of the Peachtree oath where Liu Bei says 'Y'all have family and I have none and your obligations will restrain you' and the other two saying 'OhhhKaaay then we'll kill our families!' and then saying 'No better idea we'll kill *each other's* family!' and doing it fghjghsghjk

Lessons from Three Kingdoms

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