flemmings | (no subject)

One of these days I'll restart my reading of Three Kingdoms, possibly aided by this site ('ware ads) that I can't tell is it a RP 3K game or is it treating the 3K characters *as if* they were part of a RPG.

This because I, currently very porridgey in the brain, first read the lj entry about writing POC for Yuletide and saw that Red Cliff has made the YT cut; and then read an entry observing that feminine utopias are somehow always peaceful and one-with-nature, which prompted

rushthatspeaks to observe "the old perception of women states very firmly that you can't be a mother and a warrior, a mother and a scientist." Porridge brain then presented me with a female Zhao Zilong fighting with a lance in one hand and a baby in the other. Which I like enough to start considering gender-bender AU 3K. This requires either finishing 3K or seeing Red Cliff somehow or possibly reading what there is of Ravages of Time in Japanese, which may not go nearly far enough. Cannot think which would be the least painful of these.

(OTOH there's a female general in the current Sumeragi Natsuki. And I wonder are there any female generals in Yue opera, or are they all delicate scholars? Shall find out next week.)

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Oh oh oh oh OH!!!

Yes.

You should do that. *laughs* Heck, I should reread Three Kingdoms myself...

Yes, well, first I have to get a handle on these guys, and my translation makes me not like any of them very much. Thus the need for Ravages, where someone's illustration of pretty-face Zhao Zilong made him look a lot like Youko from 12 Kingdoms. Purely by accident I'm sure...

waaaai! xun yu's empty box!

http://three-kingdoms-card.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

Of course it's always possible that Cao Cao simply meant 'your illness is as empty as this box' and Xun Yu tragically misunderstood.

I like the way porridge brain works.

paleaswater would know better of course but my impression is that female generals are fairly common in opera, Generals of the House of Yang (http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/English/e2006/e200602/2p52.htm) (杨家将) being the most notable example. I've no idea if it's a mainstay in the Yue repertoire though.

I'm increasingly taken with the notion of spear-clutching baby-wielding female generals. How to do them properly being the problem.

Wonder if The Yang Generals was the one

paleaswater showed me an excerpt from, where everyone in the family was a general. The mother was a general, the father was a general, the son was a general, and in this scene Mama was being not terribly impressed with son's way of handling his troops.

That sounds like them, yes. Several sons, all generals.

I'm increasingly taken with the notion of spear-clutching baby-wielding female generals

An excellent start! although it could be argued that Zhao Zilong (genderbent or not) doesn't qualify 100% because the baby he's protecting is Liu Bei's son i.e. he's doing his job. Random-baby-protecting!Hellboy, though...(not pretty, alas) (http://feliciter.livejournal.com/58726.html#cutid1)

Female Chinese military personnel in opera are ~~usually~~ often more bada** than the men. Folklore has it that Mu Guiying (said Mama General) rescued Yang Zongbao from Liao soldiers (who was, in one version, which I prefer, the commander and only survivor of a platoon sent to flush out her band of outlaws, but got ambushed by the foreign enemy) - and held him captive until he agreed to marry her and arrange a pardon for all the bandits (who, a la Water Margin, had mostly been wrongly accused of minor crimes/condemned for fighting againt corruption and injustice).

See, what struck *me* about Zhao Zilong's baby-saving exploit was that he tucked the toddler inside his breastplate / Chinese equivalent of same. Quite aside from all 'just how old is a two year old toddler in 3K China' head-bangers (because in Japan until Meiji newborns were de facto already a year old, so in fact that toddler might have been a baby still), quite apart from all 'and just how big were 3K toddlers anyway' worries (one can't use last-20-years weights and heights as a standard, natch, but the idea of carrying a two-year-old anywhere about my person still makes my back ache to think on't), what it reminded me of was kangaroo care (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_care). I want my baby-wielding general to be kangarooing her kid inside her breastplate as she goes to battle. To keep the sprat close to the source of nourishment, obviously.