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WARNING: THERE MIGHT BE SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING COMMENTARY. BUT THERE SHOULD NEVER BE SPOILERS ON CARS. EVER. THEY'RE SO UGLY.
So now Cao Cao and Lu Bu are getting ready to get down to business. Lu Bu, at the insistence of Chen Gong and with the connivance of Cao Cao's longtime friend, Zhang Miao, has stolen the city of Puyang away from Cao Cao while His Scottishness was off in the East trying to punish Tao Qian.
This is one of my favorite chapters thus far. I'm quite a Lu Bu fan, and Chen Gong is one of the most impressive advisors in the entire land. All the Cao Cao fans out there are probably going to want to throw farm produce at me for this, but I say that Chen Gong was every bit the strategist that Xun Yu or Guo Jia were.
And that's not to throw rocks at Cao Cao or his army. He had some very excellent followers. (I previously neglected to mention Dian Wei, so I'm going to mention him here.) Dian Wei, Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Yu Jin, Li Dian, etc...they were all very great at their jobs. It's just that I don't like Machiavellians. They're right. The ends do kinda justify the means. But they're assholes. Cao Cao was an asshole, and he pretty much implied as much when he murdered his Father's sworn brother and his entire family, so it's not like I'm saying anything that Cao Cao didn't pretty much say himself centuries earlier.
Speaking of Dian Wei, though, I will spend a few more words here talking about old E'Lai. His nickname, or style name, or whatever, was the Coming Evil, and I suppose that made a lot of sense to those who met him on the battlefield. But I think a better nickname for him would have been "The Wall". He was always there to protect his Lord Cao Cao from enemies. Brave to the point of insanity, as terrible as a War Elephant on the battlefield, he saved Cao Cao's life on many different occasions, one of which is demonstrated in this chapter. Cao Cao was a very intelligent man by all accounts, but sometimes, he just simply didn't think things all the way through, and his entry into Puyang following the fake "defection" of the Tian family illustrates this fact quite well. If it were not for Dian Wei, Cao Cao would have been transformed by the fires around him into "General Cao's Chicken".
As I've said before, I'm not really much of Wei loyalist, but Dian Wei would have been an asset to any master he served, and kudos to Cao Cao for being the first to recognize his value.
One other thing of note that I wish to say here. You might notice the bad Christopher Walken accent that I tried to apply to Guo Jia. That comes from a very old injoke between myself and my brother. In the original RoTK title for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the little "officer portrait" for Guo Jia bore a striking resemblance to Christopher Walken, or so we both thought. So when I started making this audiobook, I decided I had to TRY to do the Walken accent, as bad as my attempt is. To this day, whenever I'm doing lines for Guo Jia, it's quite difficult to stop myself from slipping in something like "Da Ice is about ta break" or start telling that story from Pulp Fiction about the wristwatch.
Okay, enough of that. On with the show! Erm....audiobook...