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Originally Posted by Haak
I tried reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms once but gave up half way through the second volume. It was just impossible to understand...
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Originally Posted by DonQuigleone
Tried reading Romance of the 3 Kingdoms, but it was pretty hard. So many names, and so long.
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Yes, but that's epic.
I guess Westerners just approach this one differently. To me -- and other East/SE Asians -- it's a special sort of story, a mythology. It's war, it's history, it's politics and glory and the lens from which you make sense of the chaos in your world. You know them, you grow up with them. You make proverbs, snappy sayings, political metaphors from them. The Peach Garden Oath is how you swear a brotherhood; Red Cliff is where hubris gets served; Liu Bei visits Kong Ming three times to win over the genius man; Cao Cao takes to cruel actions to end chaos. Good kids want to be Liu Bei, bad kids want to be Cao Cao. Boys who think they're big and tough want to be Zhang Fei. Smart kids want to grow up to be Zhuge Liang. The grownups think the kids should act like Guan Yu, the honorable God of War. Nobody likes Sima Yi, the sonofabitch.
The girls are...kind of left out. There's Diao Chan and that's...that.
It's probably not unlike Greece, circa 5th century B.C.E. Everybody and their dog knew the
Iliad by heart, and even the radical Athenian democrats had in their heart of hearts a bit of a yearning for the Homeric hero (hence how Alcibiades totally dazzled them). This stuff is
culture. This is how epics worked.