One foot in a fairytale, the other in an abyss

Overall, the plot is solid and captures the highlights of the early chapters of the novel effectively and with great visual impact. Characters are static for the most part as this is a story-driven show where the audience is expected to already be familiar with the source material and enjoy the epic highlights at face value. To summarize, the story takes place during the Spring-Autumn Period of Han China when central power has collapsed, and remnants of the royal family are scattered. Old vassals have turned warlord and carving up the once great empire. The royal family is now a joke, and he who has the child emperor can claim legitimacy and use him as a puppet. In short, Three Kingdoms is Chinese monarchist propaganda so the characters and factions who are trying to restore the Han are portrayed as the undisputed good guys, everyone else sucks and you are not meant to like them. That has never stopped any Japanese IP from making team Cao Cao or any controversial figure in Chinese history look cool.

Enter Lu Bu, an unmatched warrior of great strength, making him a highly effective general on the dueling scene. Legend is his idea of a fair fight is himself against three opponents, at once. His martial prowess was what brought him great fame in his lifetime and cemented his place in history and popular imagination. He was not, however, as effective in the tactical scene. Lu Bu is remembered for his many faults – arrogance, violence, messing with other people’s wives, and unreliability. The man practically betrayed everyone he knew, rendering him a less-than-ideal retainer despite being a beast in combat. Often perceived as a simpleton and brute of a man, he plowed through life as a self-serving asshole with zero foresight. He spat in the face of Confucian societal expectations and moral values as his favorite approach to contracts when entering into a lord’s service was getting adopted as a foster son and swearing double filial piety as a vassal to master and son to father. Except loyalty evidently meant nothing to him since he would drop one father for another if it suited him, sometimes offering up the head of the previous father to another potential father. If anything, Lu Bu was a controversial man.

He was also the strongest element of the musical. That would be expected seeing the title of the show is his namesake. The entire musical captured all these complicated facets of his character. Houzuki An presents a troubled man of violent temper and arrogance with great passion. Together with Haon Mika dance-galloping across the battlefield as Lu Bu’s fiery steed, the Red Hare, they bring to life the warmongering general with unquenchable ambitions. Between Houzuki’s performance and the costume department’s amazing armor design, Lu Bu stands on the stage as a legendary and memorable figure. This is the Flying General the world knows. We also get to see him grow into a more reflective and gentler person in private due to his beloved Diaochan’s influence though he struggles with peacetime concepts and some more complex ideas are beyond him. But he is given some depth rarely seen in the character. However, Lu Bu is only one half of a pair.

Takarazuka’s bread and butter has always revolved around romance. Therefore, it is baffling that they managed to fumble a famous romance already written for them. Now I understand changes are necessary when adapting stories across various media. But of all the things Takarazuka could mess with in their adaptation of a renowned epic romance, my main complaint is…

Lu Bu married who now?

Historically, we know Lu Bu was a married man to one known wife, but no one cares about her. The novel decided to triple his love life and recenter it on his fabled romance with Diaochan, one of the Four Great Beauties of China. Now Three Kingdoms is a sausage fest, so there is not much we can glean about Diaochan the character. She is more of a plot device that informs us about characters surrounding her and supplies commentary. Her foster father pimping her out demonstrates societal decay, regardless if you interpret him as a scheming social climber or misguided patriot driven by desperation to save his nation. Aforementioned father betrothing her to two men at once to instigate backstabbing drama shows us usurper Dong Zhuo is a morally bankrupt disgusting pervert of a tyrant, and Lu Bu is a morally bankrupt brute who can’t keep his anger and dick in check. As for Diaochan, when she is not a femme fatale assassin she is a representee of the brutalities of war – even beauty is not spared in the face of destruction. Chaos reigns supreme and chivalry is dead. Or is it?

What makes Lu Bu interesting in the novel is his individualistic personality. His disregard for societal conventions and morays does cause him to chafe with his contemporaries and is to his detriment on the political scene. But to his credit, maybe because he lived so against the norm, he was quite chivalrous in regard to Diaochan. Regardless who she really was and her ill circumstances, Lu Bu accepted all of her. In some retellings, Diaochan confesses she is an assassin sent to seduce Lu Bu right in the bedroom with Dong Zhuo’s corpse still warm between them. Lu Bu doesn’t mind and still agrees to marry if she wishes it. If Diaochan is a victim married against her will and attempts suicide in the name of honor and to remain faithful to her true love, white knight Lu Bu happily makes her a honest and living woman. Regardless, this marriage costs Lu Bu his own reputation as everyone remembers clearly the betrayal and assassination of his own foster father and technical claiming of someone else’s woman. It is hard to say how clearly Lu Bu was thinking at the time or if he fully understood the consequences of his actions, but ultimately he willingly shouldered the stain to his name. Furthermore, where lesser men would not be able to take their woman back after sexual assault, being deemed damaged goods, Lu Bu overlooks that and accepts Diaochan for all that she is. Were it not for the greater intrigues of the world and Lu Bu’s ambitions, they could have lived a content, simple life together.

I don’t think the original authors of various renditions of this romance thought that far about their relationship outside of an extraordinary hero should be paired with an extraordinary beauty. But from the text, we can glean novel Lu Bu is a generous and open-minded lover in some respects. Though this little love story is straightforward, both lovers are given depth and there are a lot of challenging concepts about chivalry and defining integrity for men and women that can be explored in this epic romance. But none of this was to Takarazuka’s liking. It appeared they wanted some spice for their musical but the main story was too controversial.  Perhaps the original heroine was not “pure” enough for company values and too passive for modern women to relate to. Not to mention patricide is a bad look for an already contentious protagonist.

But the fix Takarazuka employed did not help much at all. In fact, it made have made the characters look worse. Instead of Diaochan, Lu Bu’s great love of his life has been swapped out for some chick named Xuelian. This is not a simple name change. She was outright switched with another character all together. While Diaochan is largely believed to be a fictional character, there are limits to hhow much you can change her without her losing her identity.

Xuelian is the daughter of Lu Bu’s first lord Ding Yuan. You know, the guy he betrayed and murdered for Dong Zhuo. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a major change given Lu Bu’s track record. But Ding Yuan never pimped out his daughter. There was no need to. He was just warlording his merry way in his corner of China and made the wise political maneuver of betrothing his daughter to his star general to put a leash on the man. Since we are no longer following the original plot, the original conflicts are sterilized so Takarazuka needed to fabricate more lest the marriage to Xuelian devolve into a mundane political alliance where the main couple just needs to get to know each other better. To spice things up, Lu Bu is convinced by team Dong Zhuo to murder the entire Ding clan right before tricking Xuelian into marriage. This new scandal does drive home Lu Bu’s more negative traits, but he unfortunately never redeems himself to Xielian, making both of them look incredibly unforgivable for Takarazuka protagonists.

Lu Bu is irredeemably a dastardly traitor, murderer, and liar – as far from a gentleman as one can be. Also, their whole marriage and love is built on lies and familicide. He is allegedly moved by Xuelian’s virtuous and noble nature, yet he dies a selfish despot with anger issues. I take no issue with static characters, as mentioned earlier that was the approach with this musical. Problem is they framed the story to give Lu Bu room to grow. There is a pivotal scene where Xuelian rescues an orphan, interrupting her own wedding. The concept of mercy and grace to the downtrodden is seeded in Lu Bu, made clear by the blocking of the scene. Yet we do not get the payoff in Act II. All his actions after this is just in service of what he wants, it never pivots towards consideration for the common folk or soldiers under his care in reflection of the alleged love of his life. So now Lu Bu has been reduced from a man who attempts to make honorable choices under impossible circumstances to a brute who just never learns.

They also did “Diaochan’s” character dirty as well. Xuelian marrying under false pretenses is a great disservice to her character. She is rendered a less than stellar heroine for forgiving the man who murdered her family for no reason (being Chinatsu hot only gets you so far, Lu Bu…) despite her preaching righteousness. While there is no problem having problematic female characters or toxic themes, it seems to run contrary to Takarazuka’s initial intent in this production. They don’t even know which “Diaochan” they want her to be. Sometimes portrayed as just another victim of a cruel world, other times a femme fatale who is an active player in her father’s schemes; I suspect they tried to merge both. Now we have a woman who is simultaneously too pure for this world but also a sultry assassin-seductress who is half-assed at her job because Takarazuka heroines cannot be too competent in this department. The character’s inconsistency can be quite jarring to watch despite Amashi Juri’s best efforts. A woman who is anti-war decides violence will solve the conflict at hand. A proper lady raised in a respectable household with love somehow thinks she can be so scandalous as dance in public and seduce a dirty old man. The discrepancy between the character’s gentle personality and ruthless decisions is simply too wide a leap of logic.

Another problem is Diaochan still exists in this timeline as Wang Yun’s daughter, who is still being set up to marry Dong Zhuo. Neither woman can even claim the reputation of empire-ending beauty to her name as Xuelian easily impersonates the other woman anyways. Diaochan is just a meek little girl swept up in her father’s politics. But as she is no longer the female lead, she does not matter. Xuelian offering to take her place in marriage is meant to give her some agency and strength of character but much like her acts of kindness and charity in front of Lu Bu, the impact of her actions is inconsequential. She, a married woman, deciding to take someone else’s place in their marriage to personally assassinate a tyrant is a naïve plan and her husband has to bail her out halfway anyways. She makes decisions, but they aren’t meaningful. She is a great beauty with a twin. Strangely, the real Diaochan somewhat diminishes the fake Diaochan’s spotlight, causing confused mutterings in the audience during intermission.