{"id":386,"date":"2013-08-05T17:11:59","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T21:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/?p=386"},"modified":"2013-08-05T17:15:45","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T21:15:45","slug":"tropes-vs-women-in-chinese-historical-fiction-also-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/tropes-vs-women-in-chinese-historical-fiction-also-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Tropes vs Women in Chinese Historical Fiction (Also Games)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warning:\u00a0<\/strong>I try to make things non-referency as possible but some fluency with the broad-scale events of the\u00a0Three Kingdoms<\/em> novel will be very helpful interpreting this post’s specifics.<\/p>\n

Alright, so I’m actually a big\u00a0Dynasty Warriors<\/em> series fan. Almost all the Musou games, actually; the exception is\u00a0Hokuto no Ken Musou<\/em> (“Fist of the North Star”) and\u00a0Troy Musou<\/em>\u00a0which are just kind of… too bloody for me. I guess considering I racked up 6000 kills in one battle of\u00a0DW8<\/em> over the weekend that seems hypocritical? I’d like to think my aversion to video game blood is because I understand the consequences of RL violence rather than the other way around. Anyhow.<\/p>\n

Much like my thoughts on\u00a0<\/a>Project X Zone<\/a><\/em>, I don’t necessarily think New! Refreshing! Gameplay! Systems! is the draw of the Musou series (by the way, the word “Musou” is Japanese for “without equal\/peer,” hence the Japanese name of the series, “Sangoku Musou,” means “One without equal in the Three Kingdoms”). In fact, much like I described\u00a0PXZ<\/em> as being, the Musou games have been a steady motion of iteration with increasingly small but steadily better changes… except\u00a0DW6<\/em>, which changed everything and which everyone pretty much hated. So there’s that. Rather, I think the fun of the games is seeing what twists on the theme the new game brings, what new characters become playable (or change), and that sort of thing. As someone who’s read the unabridged\u00a0Three Kingdoms<\/em> twice and abridged versions four times, I find the\u00a0DW<\/em> series to be like watching the campy anime version of this book I love.<\/p>\n

Now, without implying that women characters are absent or unimportant in Chinese historical fiction — I don’t think that’s true — it\u00a0is<\/em> fair to say that women, as a whole, don’t play a lot of importance in the\u00a0Three Kingdoms<\/em> novel. Yet even back in the day when the first\u00a0Dynasty Warriors<\/em>, a 3D weapons fighter that wasn’t really very good but was fun in its own way, happened, Koei (and developer Omega Force) added one of the novel’s only prominent woman characters, Diaochan, as a fighter:<\/p>\n