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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Live News G” board asking users to rank their favorite Three Kingdoms generals sparked discussion about the gap between Japanese rankings and how these figures are viewed in China. Zhao Yun’s high placement drew repeated questions like “he has no notable achievements in the official histories, so why is he so popular?”, with posters pointing to the influence of the manga Souten Kouro, Peking opera, and Koei’s video games. Some noted that Lü Bu, generally scorned as a traitor, is being “reverse-imported” back into Chinese pop culture thanks to his popularity in Japan, while others pointed out that the obscure general Gao Shun ranked surprisingly high thanks to the sheer coolness of his epithet “Camp-Breaker.” Overall, the thread revealed that the rankings aren’t a simple measure of martial strength, but are instead shaped by layers of fiction and image built up over generations.
What people said
Go read Souten Kouro too
He barely did anything in the actual official histories
Probably the influence of Peking opera
Zhao Yun's popular enough in China that they made a whole handsome-hero TV drama about him
Dude was an old man by the time he died, but somehow he always gets drawn as a hunk
Yuan Shao's actually pretty popular, huh
I just picture him as the ultimate villain who rescued baby Liu Shan (who'd go on to run Shu into the ground)
Handsome, fiercely loyal, and strong
That sounds like it's straight out of some random fanfic manga
He's massively hated over there, but he got popular in Japan, and now that's kind of trickling back and boosting his image in China too
He might be the No. 1 most love-him-or-hate-him general there is
Jiang Wei's popularity in Japan is probably because a lot of people played as him in the Famicom game Tenchi wo Kurau
They've got that hardened-warrior vibe too, which is just cool
Of course you're gonna end up loving them
Right?
Souten Kouro makes literally everyone insanely charismatic, it's ridiculous
He's in the Japanese top 10 too, though
Sun Ce >>> Sun Jian and Sun Quan
Why is that?
If anything Zhou Yu still ranks too low here
That victory at Red Cliffs was a work of military art on the level of Cannae
The guy had no eye for talent, and even Cao Cao — who was obsessed with recruiting talent — never wanted him
He wanted him, he just gave up because Liu Bei got there first
He defected from Wei in the first place, after all
He's got that "tragic general who fought to the bitter end for a weak, doomed nation" image
But honestly he was one of the reasons it fell, and I think he was doing it for his own self-satisfaction rather than for the country or its people
People who actually know the official histories say he wasn't that great a general
I mean, he never really screwed up big, did he? Even when things went wrong he covered the retreat properly and kept the damage to a minimum
No big negatives, so I think that's what gives him such a strong "competent guy" image
Never hear about him having a bad personality either
Re: #70
In the official histories, Zhao Yun basically amounts to "served Liu Bei loyally for who-knows-why, no real achievements, never got a high rank, but was one of the original veterans and lived a long time"
That said, he's easy to dress up as "the man of loyalty and righteousness," so he ended up carrying a lot of embellished, pro-Shu episodes
No idea why he's up this far
Re: #89
Maybe it's partly because his stats are set pretty high in the Koei games?
The epithet "Camp-Breaker" being cool probably has something to do with it
Gao Shun's obscure in Three Kingdoms fandom, but he carried a stylish epithet like "Camp-Breaker" and was one of the finest generals on the continent at the time
Low name recognition plus loyal and competent — that's basically a checklist of everything otaku love
He was genuinely good at warfare, wasn't he?
If you think of him as basically a yakuza boss, he probably was the fighting type
Background and Key Points
What this popularity poll really shows is that most of the Three Kingdoms fandom in Japan has been shaped less by the official histories than by secondary works like the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the manga Souten Kouro, and Koei’s video games. In the official histories, Zhao Yun is described as someone who “served Liu Bei loyally for a long time but has no standout achievements or high rank” — his image of loyalty and good looks was fleshed out later by the Romance and other fiction. Lü Bu, conversely, is viewed poorly in China in both the histories and the Romance as a traitor, but because Japanese fiction embraced him as a symbol of raw martial power, that reappraisal has recently been spreading back to China as well. Obscure figures like Gao Shun ranking highly seems to owe a lot to the coolness of his epithet “Camp-Breaker” and to how strong his stats are set in Koei’s games. It’s easy to miss that the thread mixes together results from a “Japan-only poll” and a separate “pan-Asian poll,” which aren’t really an apples-to-apples comparison.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Live News G) thread “Japanese fans rank Three Kingdoms generals and somehow put Zhang Liao in 2nd place.”
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