#tianze

Tianze 2017

And now she's all angry because a general friend of hers got killed. What about all the people that got killed during your victories? Writer where is your head.

That is to say I enjoyed that the writer was depicting the court proceedings seemingly exactly the same as the Han proceedings for the Quanrong. But then you get these prejudices in the narrative where they don't have etiquette to receive international guests. Be real with me for one moment. Or the main character who is a MODERN WOMAN is convinced that all the violence her people exact is fine and their violence is bad. YOUR PEOPLE DO SLAVERY!!!! RAPE AND MURDERING!!!!! The writer literally saying that before the Quanrong conquered the Han Chinese cities they were only good at herding animals - oh I guess all this armour and cavalry just popped up out of nowhere? A couple of hundred soldiers will just 'melt away into the grasslands'? Right. Why can't those pesky foreigners just fuck off into their wilderness. They don't have preexisting relationships with their families and clans ? They don't have a production system which supports their armies and institutions? Yeah they do but no deep research to represent that.

In fact this is making me want to go *scroll back in time* go to before the Eastern Zhou / warring states era because that's fucking funny isn't it - they never really go back so far these Chinese stories written by Han Chinese people, because then they'd have to contend with how the people of the plains WEREN'T THERE FIRST - NO!! - (literally the argument given by our modern king for why it was ok to take the city) they invaded these lands in the first place.

Anyway WHAT A SURPRISE, even when the Chinese writer espouses a super clear view on valuing human lives - and slavery being bad - still there is this relentless imperialism that coats the whole thing. There isn't even a QUESTION that perhaps contending for power with all the other states might be stupid. It's this inherent assumption that this self-aggrandizement is GOOD and existential to a state and therefore justified. And that makes sense because everything written about that time evinces that concept. The problem is that is still the attitude and there isn't even a question mark about that leading us into endless war.

Only complaint I've got is that there are two other women in the main characters collection and the narrative basically ignores them. Oh. Right my fake wife / best female friend set up a school for girls? Let's just throw that in as an aside because apparently that could never feature as a place to draw talent or officials from?