The Sanguo Yanyi - Chapter 63
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 7:12PM The Sanguo Yanyi - Chapter 63:
Zhuge Liang Mourns For Pang Tong;
Zhang Fei Releases Yan Yan.
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WARNING: YUP. YOU GUESSED IT. SPOILERS.
Chapter 63: Pang Tong is assassinated. 1963: John F. Kennedy is assassinated. Coincidence? Or Conspiracy? (If it's a conspiracy, that's one hell of a long-lived conspiracy. About 1800 years or so.)
Anyways, yeah, Pang Tong is skraight up assassinated in this chapter. Of course, the assassin, Zhang Ren, totally meant it to be Liu Bei that fell at Fallen Phoenix slope, but...well, I guess you can't be too picky in such a situation, right? Amiright? SureIam. :p
So it just got real over in Shu. Liu Bei had been told once that if he had both Sleeping Dragon and Fledgling Phoenix to support him, he need have no anxiety about being able to accomplish his great goal of reunifying the Han Empire. Well, now, he's just lost one of those two. I'm sort of curious what "Heaven's" take on all of this was. After all, supposedly, it was "Heaven" that drove Liu Bei to mount this expedition into Shu in the first place. And now it is "Heaven" which appears to be punishing him for doing so? Make up your mind, "Heaven".
Maybe Liu Bei might have been better off just being an atheist. :p
At any rate, not even the death of Pang Tong can utterly defeat Liu Bei, though he finds himself in some serious crap right about then. And it forces him, ultimately, to make yet another mistake. For, in the death of Pang Tong, Liu Bei has to call Zhuge Liang into Shu to help him out, and that means that the Jing Province, Liu Bei's relatively secure base, must be entrusted into the hands of another.
Who would that be? Who else?
His Bearded Badass-ness, of course. Guan Yu, the mightiest warrior of the post-Lu Bu era. It might seem like the decision to leave Jingzhou in the hands of Guan Yu is a solid one, at first. But...meh...wait about ten chapters or so. You'll see why maybe it wasn't quite such a good idea after all.
But as for this chapter, well...if Liu Bei didn't have a personal reason for completing his conquest of Shu before, he has one now. I imagine the death of Pang Tong must have wounded the hell out of Liu Bei. (Yeah, go ahead, Cao Cao and Sun Quan loyalists. Have your moment of laughter. Yes, as a matter of fact, it IS sort of morbidly funny that Pang Tong didn't get taken out by Cao Cao or Sun Quan, but by a servant of Liu Zhang. It's sort of like the great Muhammad Ali getting knocked out by a one-armed midget. But weird stuff happens sometimes, I guess...)
Anyway, as tragic as the death of Pang Tong was, the real awesomeness of this chapter actually took place a bit further to the south, where Zhang Fei outwitted Yan Yan...yes, you read that correctly. Zhang Fei outwitted Yan Yan. Zhang "I'm a big, stupid, bad-tempered brute" Fei outwitted Yan "I may be old but still badass enough to kick some Wei Generals' asses" Yan. Talk about weird stuff happening...that's about as weird as it comes.
Heh, I love these moments in the story where Zhang Fei uses his reputation as an ever-sodden drunkard to trick his enemies. He's used the trick before...you might remember that he used it against Liu Dai and his co-commander back in the Xuzhou days. And he will use the trick again, later on, against the great Wei general Zhang He. But here in his dealings with Yan Yan, he uses this tactic to perhaps its greatest effectiveness, securing the surrender of a whole string of cities in rapid succession on his triumphant march to the rendevous with Zhuge Liang and Liu Bei in the West River Land.
There's still going to be Zhang Fei haters out there, but even the haters gotta admit that sometimes he has his moments of cleverness. And, after all, he had a pretty badass mustache. What's not to love about that? I mean, seriously. Mustache. Of. Freedom.
Anyways, I don't really have anything else to say right now. My brain is about half asleep because of "Computer Monitor Fatigue Syndrome", so I'll just let you get down to listening to this episode. You know where you found it. djraspe.com, yo.
Reader Comments (3)
Hello there,
Can I just start off by saying this is so awesome, you are doing an amazing job. My question was, is there any way to download the full archive as I've been following for a long time and have recently got a new pc and I've lost all of the episodes.
Thanks,
Drew
Ummm...no. There isn't a way to download the entire archive at once right now (if that's what you appear to be asking.)
The reason for this is that each of these episodes is huge, and that if I put them all together into an archive, that archive would also, likewise, be huge. There are certain limits to how big files can be in order to be uploaded to my server, and I doubt Squarespace allows files that big to be uploaded.
Perhaps when I have time to do so, I'll try archiving them in a .zip or .rar file and seeing if the file is small enough to upload on some sort of Dropbox or Rapidshare server, but currently it seems near impossible to upload such a massive file using the resources I've got to work with.
The good news, however, is that each episode is available for individual download by visiting the entry in which it is posted (for instance, "The Sanguo Yanyi - Chapter 1" post has a link for that chapter to be downloaded. Just click the download link, then right-click and "save as" to download a copy of the enclosed audio file to your hard drive.)
That's about the best I can do as far as that goes, for right now. Sorry I could not be of more assistance, but thank you very much for your continued interest in this series I've been working on. It is gratifying indeed to know that people listen to them. :)
- D.J. Raspe
Please make more, i find reading tedious as i am a student and allready have to read a lot, and i just HAVE to see this to the ending!!