Red Cliff shit that doesn't really mention the movie

So since John Woo's epic Red Cliff is actually out in theaters (and mysteriously available on Xbox LIVE) I actually read up on it a little.
Seems to focus on Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang versus Cao Cao.
Yeah, like I know any of the Chinese names. Souten Kouro's warped revamp is my entire source of knowledge for this shit.
Okay, so who were they in that?
Tony Leung is Zhou Yu, 周瑜, Shu Yu. Didn't ring a bell. Apparently he looks like this in the Souten Kouro anime:

Which is probably the least distinctive design in the entire series or something. No memory of the dude at all.
Takashi Kaneshiro is Zhuge Liang. Pretty famous guy, historically.
諸葛亮. Shokatsu Ryo. Hunh. Wait, this guy was awfully famous. Surely he was in the...
Oh. This 字/zi/courtesy name business. Naturally, both these guys are referred to almost exclusively by their courtesy names, so I only know him as 孔明/Koumei/Kongming. Koumei is pretty spectacular in Souten Kouro, portrayed as alternately a flaming homosexual and a fucking God descended to Earth to tell humans how to win fucking battles. He looks like this:

Which also reveals that there is apparently a fucking Three Kingdoms CCG that uses artwork from SEVERAL different versions of the series simultaneously, just to fuck with people.
(Zhou Yu's courtesy name is 公瑾, which the Japanese wikipedia is unhelpful on, but which I'm assuming Koukin. The Chinese is Gongjin. This was unhelpful in jogging my memory.)

This week's Souten Kouro bullet points

Cao Cao is still a pimp, flirting with his tsundere wife and seducing a dancing girl AT A FUNERAL.
I see budget issues lead to them using exactly the same dancing music at all occasions of state.

More importantly, Guan Yu has an awesome 'stache.
Later, some horses run in place.

And a small child cheerily talks his way into being Cao Cao's military advisor.
Cao Cao then INVENTS THE MEME and destroys the fucking country.

My deepest post yet

Cao Cao is so damn sexy...

He makes all the ladies faint.

Ten

One of the most dynamic and memorable bits in the Souten Kouro manga was the scene where Cao Cao is told there are many witnesses to his crimes, but no witnesses, save himself, to his innocence.
He responds by pointing at the sky.
"The heavens are my witness."

Somehow this wound up being animated with his hand in front of his mouth so they wouldn't have to fucking animate his lip flap.
Argh.
And yet, the fundamental beauty of it continues to shine through, to the point where I'm officially going to make this my last bitch about the budget and the fucking horrible voice casting. I've got nothing new to say on those posts, and they're not preventing me from coming back every week.
Particularly when Cao Cao is taking a position in charge of the Northern gate, and ordering beatings to anyone breaking curfew. Beatings with a fucking massive log. A particularly awesome bit has a man sentenced to a hundred and four whacks; this is reduced to twenty two on the grounds that it is not intended to be fatal, but the man dies after one. "Fine," Cao Cao declares.
And moves on to preventing the world's most awesome suicide.

Death by axe headbutting!

A shift in tone

Souten Kouro's early plotting is an odd duck to begin with; after a brief burst of early violence, the first thing it really focuses on is one of the least typical episodes in Cao Cao's life - a tragic romance.
While the first episode left me concerned, and the flaws are still present - lots of clever budget saving shit all through the episode, and Cao Cao's voice actor simply cannot sell the towering fury or flamboyance of the man at all - they actually pulled this storyline off pretty well.

Despite the budget limitations, they managed to be stunningly beautiful when the mood demanded it; the pacing was very much what it needed to be, and they managed to suggest the nastier half of these events despite the necessary cuts for television.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by its very nature, has almost no female characters; those that do appear tend to be sundry wives not even worth granting names.
This was something King Gonta clearly wanted to address, and there are a number of moments throughout the series in which he manages to dig into the less sausagey side of things.
Dude meets girl, girl captured by evil eunuch, shit goes bad is a pretty standard story as far as ancient Chinese shit goes, but King Gonta managed to make the girl a really fascinating character in her own right, and in twenty minutes she gets a full character arc of her own - one stronger than the entire arc of most anime main characters. I remember making a similar point about the second episode of Kaiba, but coming across a character that is only around for one episode but has more characterization packed into that brief span of time than most characters get in a full series really drives home how thinly characterized most anime end up being.
Not that this will stop me enjoying the piss out of the extremely shallow Sengoku Basara, but it definitely makes me a lot happier that Souten Kouro's around, even if the budget leaves it a little compromised.

Horse tossing

It's no secret that I have been looking forward to Madhouse's adaption of the MAJESTIC Souten Kouro with RAW NAKED TERROR.
Mouryou no Hako aside, Madhouse's track record with adaptions has been absolutely fucking vile for ages, and for every astounding triumph the studio tends to shit out at least two budgetless abortions.
And Souten Kouro is fucking unfilmable, the single most bad ass thing ever put to page.
So I am pleased to cheerily inform you that the anime is not total shit.
The voice acting is relentlessly mediocre, the pacing is all the fuck over the map, and there are glaring budget-saving animation cheats all the hell over the place, but fuck it.
It seems to have preserved just enough of the bad ass abandon to remain entertaining.

Severed heads bouncing off pillars, deafening bells rung by flung boulders, horses tossed miles into the air, epic philosophy debates in a raging sandstorm, an opening song that's almost catchy till the singer ruins it, and an ending song that gets a free fucking pass for the most awesome band name ever: Ogre You Asshole.
But what the FUCK is this shit after the preview!?

Is this the fucking mahjong anime slot? DEAR GOD.

I refuse to get excited about Madhouse adaptions anymore

But they are, apparently, doing Souten Kouro this Spring.
I vaguely recall them announcing this and concluding that it must be some other Souten Kouro, since King Gonta's name was nowhere to be found, but apparently it was the real Souten Kouro after all.
Which makes the staff listings all the more terrifying. Nothing like "From the director of Initial D! And Trouble Chocolate!" to inspire confidence. Nothing like a stealth air date announcement a month before it fucking starts to suggest it has the kind of budget it needs.

On the other hand, Souten Kouro is so filled with bad assitude it stains your hands. It retells the Romance of the Three Kingdoms with Cao Cao as the hero, and every single panel is dedicated to being as ludicrously awesome King Gonta could actually draw it.
So even if the anime turns out to be shit, perhaps people will actually know the god damn name and be able to read it.