Here's the second Sangokushi OVA, from 1986: Orphan's 125th release. It starts after the Battle of Red Cliffs and charts the ups and downs of Liu Bei Xuande's attempt to create a viable state in Shu Han to balance Cao Cao's Wei and Sun Quan's Eastern Wu. It is considerably darker than the first OVA. The alliance between Lui Bei and Sun Quan falls apart. Several more main characters, including audience favorites, bite the dust. The ending is inconclusive, at best, and tragic, at worst.
Like the first OVA, and like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms from which it draws inspiration, Sangokushi 2 plays fast and loose with history. It portrays Liu Bei as supremely virtuous and Cao Cao as a megalomaniac villain. Neither view is supported by historical records. Although Liu Bei adhered more closely to Confucianism than his rivals, he was still an unscrupulous warlord, starting as an ally of Cao Cao and then betraying him. Cao Cao was a capable ruler in many ways but consumed by his ambition, universal to warlords of that period, to become supreme warlord and then emperor of a united China. Cao Cao's origin story - that his blonde hair is not an anime convention but the result of his mother being raped by invaders - is fiction. The romance between Liu Bei and Princess Lihua (Lady Sun) is likewise an invention. (He was married four times. Lady Sun returned to Wu after the break between Liu Bei and Sun Quan.) Still, the power of great fiction to overshadow fact cannot be denied; in China, the equivalent of the English idiom "speak of the devil" is "Speak of Cao Cao, and he appears." Attempts to rehabilitate Cao Cao's reputation in the Communist era have been only moderately successful.
The cast and staff of the second OVA are basically the same as the first, so I won't repeat my comments from the earlier blog post. Iri translated, Yogicat timed, I edited and typeset, bananadoyouwanna and VigorousJammer QCed, and Skr provided the raw. bananadoyouwanna styled the insert/ending song, "Miss Dreamer," which is very good.
You can get Sangokushi 2 from the usual torrent sites or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net
Like the first OVA, and like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms from which it draws inspiration, Sangokushi 2 plays fast and loose with history. It portrays Liu Bei as supremely virtuous and Cao Cao as a megalomaniac villain. Neither view is supported by historical records. Although Liu Bei adhered more closely to Confucianism than his rivals, he was still an unscrupulous warlord, starting as an ally of Cao Cao and then betraying him. Cao Cao was a capable ruler in many ways but consumed by his ambition, universal to warlords of that period, to become supreme warlord and then emperor of a united China. Cao Cao's origin story - that his blonde hair is not an anime convention but the result of his mother being raped by invaders - is fiction. The romance between Liu Bei and Princess Lihua (Lady Sun) is likewise an invention. (He was married four times. Lady Sun returned to Wu after the break between Liu Bei and Sun Quan.) Still, the power of great fiction to overshadow fact cannot be denied; in China, the equivalent of the English idiom "speak of the devil" is "Speak of Cao Cao, and he appears." Attempts to rehabilitate Cao Cao's reputation in the Communist era have been only moderately successful.
The cast and staff of the second OVA are basically the same as the first, so I won't repeat my comments from the earlier blog post. Iri translated, Yogicat timed, I edited and typeset, bananadoyouwanna and VigorousJammer QCed, and Skr provided the raw. bananadoyouwanna styled the insert/ending song, "Miss Dreamer," which is very good.
You can get Sangokushi 2 from the usual torrent sites or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net
please can you translate the original Tiger Mask anime?
ReplyDeleteThanks for that paragraph about historical Liu Bei not actually being a saint and Cao Cao the devil, it's appreciated :)
ReplyDelete