Lu Xun more like uhhh uhhhhh

i have no idea why i named it this

[inheritedfang]

the collection grows

[romance-of-three-memes]

The only correct way to engage with Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you weren't introduced to it through cultural osmosis is the way I did it when I was 12:

1. Find out one of your favorite video games is based on a novel

2. Check out the first volume of the Brewitt-Taylor English translation at the local library

3. get very confused when you don't recognize most of the names because they're rendered in Wade-Giles romanization because pinyin didn't even exist when that translation was created and no one's bothered with updating it (partially because it would be a massive pain and the ass, but also there are other much better translations now)

4. try to read the book anyway and realize it mostly follows a few select guys from the video game series that you never really cared much about

6. start skipping around for mentions of people you do care about (mostly women at the time since I was still in my 'boys kinda suck' phase, so the characters you care about are few and far between)

7. finally give up after getting even more confused and bored, go back to just playing the video games until you're like 21 when you have better knowledge and resources to access the material.

[inheritedfang]

Me not understanding the names as a kid and getting mad that "Zhao Zilong" took the place of one of my favourite DW characters

[inheritedfang]

so much Quan posting. opinion on his hobby of asking Zhou Tai to take all his clothes off for... inspection. 😤😳😳😳😳

i mean hey id probably do the same, fuckin look at this guy

[inheritedfang]

big fan of manga sun quan, absolute goober

[inheritedfang]

live Sun Quan reaction

[inheritedfang]

what the bag of shredded cheese in the fridge sees when i get hungry at 3am

[inheritedfang]

Yuri Lowenthal's one of those VAs I recognise really easily to the point of it almost being distracting, Sun Ce being one of those examples.

But I wasn't emotionally prepared to find out he also voiced Zhang He, idk how I never noticed

[inheritedfang]

Xiahou Yuan's diminished presence in dw6 is bizarre to me - it being the main one I played as a kid, I barely registered him as a part of the roster. His only presence in the game is in Wu's Invasion of Xuchang, and the Mt. Ding Jun battles, with his only real stand-out moment being in the latter, that being him calling out Huang Zhong to fight (who's also barely in that game), where he is either killed or forced to retreat. In the former it's possible to finish the battle without him even appearing, confining him to a single, relatively unimportant stage. His prominence later in the series (and possibly earlier, but tbh I haven't played enough of the Wei side in the earlier games) makes going back to the Wei stories in 6 pretty jarring - I don't even think he gets mentioned in Cao Cao's musou mode.

I think the biggest misstep with Yuan in 6 is his visual design. His design's always had a pretty cohesive look- you look at him in 9?

Yep, that's Xiahou Yuan. What if you went all the way back to 4?

Still definitely him.

So what did 6 do?

I find it just so... offputting. Characters standing out visually in these games is usually a good thing, I'd say good examples of stand-out character designs are Ding Feng, Zhang He and Pang Tong's everything. But Xiahou Yuan stands out in the worst way possible, it's like he showed up in cheap cosplay.

And the sword they gave him is absolutely, comically huge. Ridiculously so. I think he shares a moveset with both Huang Zhong and Zhou Tai, though only Zhou Tai is spared from the colossal sword. This oversized sword, combined with his... less than good design and his honestly just funny running animation makes him a joke of a character, and when Huang Zhong shares many of these aspects, it makes me wonder why the two of them were even kept when other characters who could've been used much better were cut.

[tarrmacktaxi]

I'm reading 3 kingdoms and it's so fuckign funny I love them

So true Lu bu

[inheritedfang]

[inheritedfang]

I have no clue what DW Blast is but this art of young Lu Meng looks great and I wish DW had like, actual character arcs he could be more than the gruff kinda-old guy. The arc of the warrior-turned-scholar is basically written for them already

[inheritedfang]

Showcasing the rare singular Sun Quan character trait, Alcoholism™

[inheritedfang]

I love the art of Cao Ren where they've tried to make him look normal but he's built like a fucking freight train

I need like an xray of this guy's skeleton just to see how he's put together

[inheritedfang]

Finding out that wo long is getting a Sun Ce-focused dlc made me remember how much I like the consistent-ish visual design everyone's seemed to settle on for him.

(I cant find a good full body image of him from wo long so here's his armour set and a portrait I guess)

The red cloth over armour with tiger pelts as an accent, plus the tied up hair, is a really cool look. He's even one of the characters that's maintained a pretty consistent appearance through all of the dw games, with 5 being my favourite.

...ignoring that weird period during 6 and 7 where they decided giving him short hair was a good idea.

Especially ignoring the weirder stuff that's on his Koei wiki page, like how this is apparently Sun Ce?

I refuse to question it.

The consistency of Sun Ce's look across different media is somewhat odd to me, because Sun Quan really doesn't get the same treatment, even across dw.

This is literally all I could find of Sun Quan in Wo Long. Is he even in that game?

I'm generally pretty mixed on Quan's visual designs throughout the DW series because he's a character I've always really wanted to like, he's felt just underwhelming. His voice in 7 and 8 never felt fitting, and I hate the beard in the earlier games. My favourite version of him is the version in the 6th game by far. He just felt cool in that game, his voice (he actually shares a VA with Lu Xun prior to 7), his moveset was always satisfying (despite it being one of the generic clone ones), and his design was perfect.

The intro to the battle of hefei castle in 6, combined with the music and his voiceline, really made an impression on me as a kid.

Quan not really having a consistent look just always felt like a side effect of the fact that he's kinda always sidelined in the three kingdoms media I engage with. It's pretty disappointing.

[inheritedfang]

I’ve entirely fallen off with three kingdoms stuff in the past two years, but I heard DW9 Empires is pretty bad and that’s kinda funny

[inheritedfang]

Now finding out that I have a notification from someone saying “please write more”, among other things. From 237 days ago.

I’m very sorry but all I’ve done is sit around for three months.

[inheritedfang]

I am planning to have another go at writing another biography of someone from the Jian’an and Three Kingdoms period, though it’ll likely be just another rewrite of the SGZ bios like the Ling Tong one I did because there’s not much else to add. I haven’t really decided who I’m going to write about yet. Probably Yue Jin.

[inheritedfang]

Just realised I’ve been inactive for three months now. I have been entirely unproductive in those three months and have produced nothing. I have been awake for twelve hours and it is 6am right now.