@@michaelr3583 I never played those one but there is one more game I played about the 3 kingdoms period but I forget the name it was on Ps2 and it was the second game in a series and for someone I think the first game was about Feudal Japan? Does this ring any bells for someone? It was army management during battles and I between battles you could make choices such as recruiting more troops training, more troops or doing things to get money I think? Found it Kessen II
Thersites covering my favorite time period of history in long form content? Helluva thing to come back from a gig and see, guess I know what I'll be doing for the next three hours...
Some of Guan Yu's divinity did not come from his battlefield victories but from his perceived injury. As the folk stories spread, his Immortal status was achieved from the people wishing to placate his wondering spirit. Chinese folk religion allowed many immortalized martial deities, guan yu being one. Eventually his cult is taken up by emperors and so more and more titles were added. By the end of Qing dynasty guan yu had a very long title, reflecting whatever the worshippers wanted to observe in the persona.
57:31 God of War as a title in Chinese is actually supposed to be more about martial virtues and honor more than it is direct battlefield achievement and strength (though that obviously helps). There are technically been many God of Wars next to Guan Yu like Jiang Ziya and Yue Fei. Being powerful is secondary to being an admirable person sort of thing, hence why guys like Lu Bu are only considered anti-heroes at best. It should noted that Shu-Han had the most lacking historical records compared to the other two kingdoms and has obviously the least number of chapters compared to Wei and Wu. Officially Shu had no court historians and had information deficiencies as Chen Shou wrote in the Records ("又國不置史，注記無官，是以行事多遺，災異靡書。" - volume 33 of the Records of the Three Kingdoms), so sometimes a lot of the achievements of officers such as Guan Yu or Zhang Fei we can only learn based on their assessment by their contemporaries and reading between the lines rather than direct records of their victories, hence why Guan Yu for example has surprisingly little of his achievements recorded despite major figures of the time assessing him very highly, so likely there's much about his overall performance and experience we don't know about that could earn him such a high regard. Also placing Zhuge Liang at B seems insane personally speaking, given he's the primary reason why the Shu even lasted as long as it did and popularity
Hi, I'll try to go over the whole thing (probably not in one go as it is very long, I'm not sure why Thersites seem to have run around a bit in both ROTK and the sources based around San Guo Zhi (there are also other more serious sources, but San Guo Zhi is the official one) , obviously reading this without knowing Chinese is hard. Also that because Official Chinese history are usually in the format of individual biographies, a lot of them you need to cross match to really figure out what happened (or even some individuals' achievements is more obvious when you read about their friend and foe's biography. Most notably, if you just look at the biography of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, it didn't seem that impressive, but the problem is there were numerous other biographies where people were losing their shit when talking about these two bros (and these were men that both served with and against them.), such as the Cao Cao strategies Chen Yu calling these two "One man armies" even before the battle of Guan Du and a decade plus later Zhou Yu, at the peak of his power after Red Cliff, told Sun Quan to use every trick in the book to kidnap Liu Bei so they can control these two "man that's like bear and tiger" Liu Bei: it should be noted that in the early period of Liu Bei (after the Dong Zhou era, and even a bit before that.) Liu Bei was effectively more like a subordinate of Gongsun Zan, that's how he got to run Ping Yuan, though obviously with a decent amount of autonomy, the context of the post Dong Zhou alliance is that there's a general Yuan Brother civil war, where one side was Yuan Shao + Cao Cao (who at this point was also more like a subordinate of Yuan Shao.) vs Yuan Shu (who was also employing Sun Ce) and GongSun Zan (With Liu Bei under him.). Liu Bei ran off to Xu Zhou and effectively became independent, and obviously also since Cao Cao grew stronger the alliance between him and Yuan was fraying, and Lu Bu made a huge mess of things so it became a free for all. Liu Bei was probably more deserving of credit in the victory in Han Zhong, the defeat in Yi Ling was a bit problematic, as the reason why Wu won had a lot to do with again, the naval forces, and Liu Bei lost all his naval forces with Guan Yu, also his foe basically won every fight he was involved in where he can use his navy against even greater foes, the Cao Pi part if real, the jokes on him since he spent his few years on the throne running his head into the Wu navy wall with multiple major defeat as well. Liu Bei's personal conduct seems far more defensible than that of Sun Quan certainly (especially when Sun became Liu Bei's age later on.) and didn't have some of the dubious things with other people's widow like Cao, let alone the story of murdering someone's whole family out of suspicion. Zhang Fei: the part of him being rich seems to be more ROTK stuff, though generally he fits a very obvious stereotype of men in Chinese history (especially those from his area of China. ) being "dog butchers" (one of Liu Bang's closest companion was also described like that.) Using other sources such as the Wu Chronicle (wrote by someone who served as a officer in the late Wu ) during the post Red Cliff campaign, where it took Zhou Yu a year + to capture serious territories from the retreating Cao forces (and he got wounded in the process that eventually killed him.) one of the major reason why he won that campaign was that Liu Bei borrowed him Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, and they ran a guerrilla campaign in Jing Zhou and ruined the Cao force's logistics line. Guan Yu: He didn't kill Hua Zhong, that was ROTK (and the gate is Hu Lao in ROTK, which didn't exist during that time.), he also didn't kill Wen Chou, but obviously he did kill Yian Liang in the most impressive way (basically just waltz into a huge army and took his head.) Guan Yu was fighting the Wei around XiangYian / FanCheng before the final campaign, if we look at some of the people involved there, like the Wei general Lei Jing, it seems that Guan Yu was doing pretty well, also, if you look at relative resource, that he was winning his final campaign was just amazing (he probably had 1/4th the Wei army facing him.) Mi Zhu: no, Liu Chang's mother was not his sister, that's ROTK, his San Guo Zhi said that he basically never lead forces or really ran government, but yes he was given the highest title after Liu Bei went into Sichuan. Liu Feng: it's probable that Liu Bei had sons that died somewhere along the line, given that Liu Chang was still a baby when the events happened ( when Liu Bei was already there for many years) given that in history we really didn't hear about Ms. Mi after the events of Xu Shou in history, it's probable that most of Liu Bei's wife / kids died during the ordeal between Xu Zhou until he settled in Jin Zhou.
I think the fictional characters should have their own tier, like un-rankable(U), just like how you did for your older tier lists Also may I suggest you unlisted the old video Officers of Shu Han, Part I (non-sleeping dragon edition) and then put the unlisted video link in the description of this video, so the views will be concentrated on this video (and those who want to have access the old video, can access it via the link)
On the topic of "borrowed Jin Zhou" it's actually quite messy, and a lot of scholars in China even thousand + years back retorted it as being "Wu Propaganda", It should be noted that Liu Bei DID have the official title of the Jin Zhou Governorship from the emperor after Red Cliff, and there were complicated historical factors as to why Wu made the decision to give up their holdings in Jin Zhou post war to Liu Bei Jin Zhou province was divided into 8 counties (originally 8, Cao Cao divided up one of them into 2 when he rolled in), Liu Biao at one point had at least nominal control of all of it as the imperial sanctioned governor. However, by the time of his death, he had already lost the northern most county to Cao Cao ( it was part of the whole mess around the battle of Guan Du). When Cao Cao rolled in, he effectively took most of 2 other county, and then also got 4 others to nominally submit. (so only 1 of the county was effectively still fighting him. the ruler is the eldest sun of Liu Biao who's also a big patron of Liu Bei.) After the disaster of Red Cliff, the Wu managed to take one of the key county, and Liu Bei managed to roll down south to take 4 of those nominally submitted counties (this was a much easier fight than the Wu fight.) while Cao Cao manged to hold on to two county (so he started with one of 8 and ended with 2 of 8.) So after the dust settle a little in Red Cliff the tally was Liu Bei = 5 of 8 county ( Jian Xia / Changsha / Wu Ling / Ling Ling / Gui Yang ) Cao Cao = 2 of 8 county ( XianYang / Nan Yang ) Wu = 1 of 8 county ( Nan Jun ) However, obviously there are complication, such as Liu Bei's forces relied a lot of Wu's supplies, and the most important of the 5 he holds, was actually via Liu Biao's son, and the one that Wu held was quite key as it was the western most county and thus holding the entrance to Sichuan (Yi Province.) At that point, Zhou Yu's plan was to blocked out Liu Bei from going west, but still being a buffer to fight Cao Cao. (and also go west himself, as he ALSO had several Sichuan defectors on his side.) However, there's several complicated problem here, first is Liu Biao's son died (he was always sickly.) second was that there was an imperial decree that came down and declared Liu Bei as the official governor ( it's been hotly debated if this happened because Cao Cao wanted to drive a wedge between the allies or it was some infighting within the Cao Cao's faction.) But either way, soon Zhou Yu died anyway and he was succeeded by a much less capable (At least in terms of an aggressive military commander.) Lu Su, and that was the key point where the Wu "borrowed" their county to Liu Bei. ( it should also be noted, one of the underlying problems was that the Sun families had been attacking Jing province for decades, so there was a lot of bad blood with the locals. it was fairly dubious if they could have been able to hold down the various regions anyway.) So while it was true that Wu did give them one of the counties, the problem was that Liu also had the official decree to be the governor anyway not to mention he held more of JinZhou to being with.
I don't cover that as often as I used to, but I have not sworn it off or anything. It is more that I find the current state of politics to be depressing and distasteful in the extreme. Assuming that Biden drops out, we will have some interesting stuff to discuss as that would lead to some impactful developments in how parties find nominees.
Give a like for any of those who know about the Three kingdoms period because of the dynasty Warriors games, Kessen II and then the total war game.
You left out the koei romance of the 3 kingdoms game
@@michaelr3583 I never played those one but there is one more game I played about the 3 kingdoms period but I forget the name it was on Ps2 and it was the second game in a series and for someone I think the first game was about Feudal Japan? Does this ring any bells for someone? It was army management during battles and I between battles you could make choices such as recruiting more troops training, more troops or doing things to get money I think?
Found it Kessen II
@@leoskiii5860rotk by koei lol romance of the three kingdoms 10 specifically maybe
Thersites covering my favorite time period of history in long form content? Helluva thing to come back from a gig and see, guess I know what I'll be doing for the next three hours...
Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms is very enjoyable as well. Kind of like China's own Iliad.
So Big trouble in Little China was right when they said Chinese girls with green eyes are extremely rare and valuable. Wow😳
Some of Guan Yu's divinity did not come from his battlefield victories but from his perceived injury. As the folk stories spread, his Immortal status was achieved from the people wishing to placate his wondering spirit. Chinese folk religion allowed many immortalized martial deities, guan yu being one. Eventually his cult is taken up by emperors and so more and more titles were added. By the end of Qing dynasty guan yu had a very long title, reflecting whatever the worshippers wanted to observe in the persona.
57:31 God of War as a title in Chinese is actually supposed to be more about martial virtues and honor more than it is direct battlefield achievement and strength (though that obviously helps). There are technically been many God of Wars next to Guan Yu like Jiang Ziya and Yue Fei. Being powerful is secondary to being an admirable person sort of thing, hence why guys like Lu Bu are only considered anti-heroes at best.
It should noted that Shu-Han had the most lacking historical records compared to the other two kingdoms and has obviously the least number of chapters compared to Wei and Wu. Officially Shu had no court historians and had information deficiencies as Chen Shou wrote in the Records ("又國不置史，注記無官，是以行事多遺，災異靡書。" - volume 33 of the Records of the Three Kingdoms), so sometimes a lot of the achievements of officers such as Guan Yu or Zhang Fei we can only learn based on their assessment by their contemporaries and reading between the lines rather than direct records of their victories, hence why Guan Yu for example has surprisingly little of his achievements recorded despite major figures of the time assessing him very highly, so likely there's much about his overall performance and experience we don't know about that could earn him such a high regard.
Also placing Zhuge Liang at B seems insane personally speaking, given he's the primary reason why the Shu even lasted as long as it did and popularity
"Guan Yu, the god of being extremely mid" LMAO.
Hi, I'll try to go over the whole thing (probably not in one go as it is very long, I'm not sure why Thersites seem to have run around a bit in both ROTK and the sources based around San Guo Zhi (there are also other more serious sources, but San Guo Zhi is the official one) , obviously reading this without knowing Chinese is hard. Also that because Official Chinese history are usually in the format of individual biographies, a lot of them you need to cross match to really figure out what happened (or even some individuals' achievements is more obvious when you read about their friend and foe's biography.
Most notably, if you just look at the biography of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, it didn't seem that impressive, but the problem is there were numerous other biographies where people were losing their shit when talking about these two bros (and these were men that both served with and against them.), such as the Cao Cao strategies Chen Yu calling these two "One man armies" even before the battle of Guan Du and a decade plus later Zhou Yu, at the peak of his power after Red Cliff, told Sun Quan to use every trick in the book to kidnap Liu Bei so they can control these two "man that's like bear and tiger"
Liu Bei: it should be noted that in the early period of Liu Bei (after the Dong Zhou era, and even a bit before that.) Liu Bei was effectively more like a subordinate of Gongsun Zan, that's how he got to run Ping Yuan, though obviously with a decent amount of autonomy, the context of the post Dong Zhou alliance is that there's a general Yuan Brother civil war, where one side was Yuan Shao + Cao Cao (who at this point was also more like a subordinate of Yuan Shao.) vs Yuan Shu (who was also employing Sun Ce) and GongSun Zan (With Liu Bei under him.). Liu Bei ran off to Xu Zhou and effectively became independent, and obviously also since Cao Cao grew stronger the alliance between him and Yuan was fraying, and Lu Bu made a huge mess of things so it became a free for all.
Liu Bei was probably more deserving of credit in the victory in Han Zhong, the defeat in Yi Ling was a bit problematic, as the reason why Wu won had a lot to do with again, the naval forces, and Liu Bei lost all his naval forces with Guan Yu, also his foe basically won every fight he was involved in where he can use his navy against even greater foes, the Cao Pi part if real, the jokes on him since he spent his few years on the throne running his head into the Wu navy wall with multiple major defeat as well.
Liu Bei's personal conduct seems far more defensible than that of Sun Quan certainly (especially when Sun became Liu Bei's age later on.) and didn't have some of the dubious things with other people's widow like Cao, let alone the story of murdering someone's whole family out of suspicion.
Zhang Fei: the part of him being rich seems to be more ROTK stuff, though generally he fits a very obvious stereotype of men in Chinese history (especially those from his area of China. ) being "dog butchers" (one of Liu Bang's closest companion was also described like that.)
Using other sources such as the Wu Chronicle (wrote by someone who served as a officer in the late Wu ) during the post Red Cliff campaign, where it took Zhou Yu a year + to capture serious territories from the retreating Cao forces (and he got wounded in the process that eventually killed him.) one of the major reason why he won that campaign was that Liu Bei borrowed him Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, and they ran a guerrilla campaign in Jing Zhou and ruined the Cao force's logistics line.
Guan Yu: He didn't kill Hua Zhong, that was ROTK (and the gate is Hu Lao in ROTK, which didn't exist during that time.), he also didn't kill Wen Chou, but obviously he did kill Yian Liang in the most impressive way (basically just waltz into a huge army and took his head.)
Guan Yu was fighting the Wei around XiangYian / FanCheng before the final campaign, if we look at some of the people involved there, like the Wei general Lei Jing, it seems that Guan Yu was doing pretty well, also, if you look at relative resource, that he was winning his final campaign was just amazing (he probably had 1/4th the Wei army facing him.)
Mi Zhu: no, Liu Chang's mother was not his sister, that's ROTK, his San Guo Zhi said that he basically never lead forces or really ran government, but yes he was given the highest title after Liu Bei went into Sichuan.
Liu Feng: it's probable that Liu Bei had sons that died somewhere along the line, given that Liu Chang was still a baby when the events happened ( when Liu Bei was already there for many years) given that in history we really didn't hear about Ms. Mi after the events of Xu Shou in history, it's probable that most of Liu Bei's wife / kids died during the ordeal between Xu Zhou until he settled in Jin Zhou.
I think the fictional characters should have their own tier, like un-rankable(U), just like how you did for your older tier lists
Also may I suggest you unlisted the old video Officers of Shu Han, Part I (non-sleeping dragon edition)
and then put the unlisted video link in the description of this video, so the views will be concentrated on this video (and those who want to have access the old video, can access it via the link)
On the topic of "borrowed Jin Zhou" it's actually quite messy, and a lot of scholars in China even thousand + years back retorted it as being "Wu Propaganda", It should be noted that Liu Bei DID have the official title of the Jin Zhou Governorship from the emperor after Red Cliff, and there were complicated historical factors as to why Wu made the decision to give up their holdings in Jin Zhou post war to Liu Bei
Jin Zhou province was divided into 8 counties (originally 8, Cao Cao divided up one of them into 2 when he rolled in), Liu Biao at one point had at least nominal control of all of it as the imperial sanctioned governor. However, by the time of his death, he had already lost the northern most county to Cao Cao ( it was part of the whole mess around the battle of Guan Du). When Cao Cao rolled in, he effectively took most of 2 other county, and then also got 4 others to nominally submit. (so only 1 of the county was effectively still fighting him. the ruler is the eldest sun of Liu Biao who's also a big patron of Liu Bei.)
After the disaster of Red Cliff, the Wu managed to take one of the key county, and Liu Bei managed to roll down south to take 4 of those nominally submitted counties (this was a much easier fight than the Wu fight.) while Cao Cao manged to hold on to two county (so he started with one of 8 and ended with 2 of 8.)
So after the dust settle a little in Red Cliff the tally was
Liu Bei = 5 of 8 county ( Jian Xia / Changsha / Wu Ling / Ling Ling / Gui Yang )
Cao Cao = 2 of 8 county ( XianYang / Nan Yang )
Wu = 1 of 8 county ( Nan Jun )
However, obviously there are complication, such as Liu Bei's forces relied a lot of Wu's supplies, and the most important of the 5 he holds, was actually via Liu Biao's son, and the one that Wu held was quite key as it was the western most county and thus holding the entrance to Sichuan (Yi Province.)
At that point, Zhou Yu's plan was to blocked out Liu Bei from going west, but still being a buffer to fight Cao Cao. (and also go west himself, as he ALSO had several Sichuan defectors on his side.)
However, there's several complicated problem here, first is Liu Biao's son died (he was always sickly.) second was that there was an imperial decree that came down and declared Liu Bei as the official governor ( it's been hotly debated if this happened because Cao Cao wanted to drive a wedge between the allies or it was some infighting within the Cao Cao's faction.)
But either way, soon Zhou Yu died anyway and he was succeeded by a much less capable (At least in terms of an aggressive military commander.) Lu Su, and that was the key point where the Wu "borrowed" their county to Liu Bei.
( it should also be noted, one of the underlying problems was that the Sun families had been attacking Jing province for decades, so there was a lot of bad blood with the locals. it was fairly dubious if they could have been able to hold down the various regions anyway.)
So while it was true that Wu did give them one of the counties, the problem was that Liu also had the official decree to be the governor anyway not to mention he held more of JinZhou to being with.
Hey Thersites, Do you not do videos on politics anymore? I would like to hear some coverage of the election with you and sean.
I don't cover that as often as I used to, but I have not sworn it off or anything. It is more that I find the current state of politics to be depressing and distasteful in the extreme. Assuming that Biden drops out, we will have some interesting stuff to discuss as that would lead to some impactful developments in how parties find nominees.
The Geng/Jian Yong thing must be linguistic drift because they're not pronounced the same in current Mandarin.