Ooo wefwef finally renamed itself

Lmao I literally did a double take with your name and the post

The greatest tragedies are often the conflict between completely acceptable powers, not good and evil. Yeah, that’s a really good takeaway from this kinda of history.

Sun Quan was the weakest of the three leaders though. So indicisive!

In terms of individuality and becoming emperor of all of China, perhaps. He had a surprising number of really competent aides and generals, when compared to Cao Cao and Liu Bei. He was the kind of leader that was much more of a skilled manager of capable talent than a director who knew exactly what commands to give. In the long term, tho, this admittedly lead to politicking and infighting that cause Eastern Wu to rollover and die.

Also, it’s worth considering that he was also arguably the most important of the three for their legacy. The Southeastern part of China is incredibly important /influencial in later chinese history, from Tang to Song to Ming and all the way to today, and Sun Quan had the unenviable task of fully absorbing the distinct jiangnan and southern chinese customs and idiosyncrasies into what we nowadays think of as chinese culture.

Eh, I’d argue that it was less stupid games and prizes and more… Unusually equally matched candidates vying for the throne? I mean, think of the warring states, or the Chu-Han contention, or whatever the fuck was going on in Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

In each of the cases, after the fall/overthrow of the previous dynasty, multiple powerful folks threw their hats into the ring. Warring states ended with Qin beating its rivals. Liu Bang out maneuvered Xiang Yu to reunite all/most of China. The Song Dynasty succeeded where all the previous 5 Dynasties failed and absorbed the ten kingdoms. The Three Kingdoms era was mostly similar, but somehow the three major contestants managed to almost perfectly balance their power and just got stuck at an impasse for long enough that the good ol’ classic causes of the downfalls of Chinese dynasties (corruption of bureaucracy and the imperial families) took hold.

On reddit, I once read a really good perspective of the whole thing. To summarize: one of the greatest tragedies of the three kingdoms was that Liu Bei, Cao Cao, and Sun Quan were born in the same conflict era, as each of them were more than capable rulers and leaders that had what it would have taken to unite china. Meanwhile, the other conflict eras had only one or two truly capable emperor-aspirants that had the potential to take it all.

No seriously, evolution fucked up it’s cable management. iirc, there’s a nerve (essentially the biological equivalent of a data cable) that has an extreme detour, going from the upper neck, looping under the aorta (more or less the largest blood vessel), and then back up all the way to the throat. In giraffes, it’s 4+ meters going down the neck and then back up. That is horrible cable management and can actually cause health risks/complications for certain surgeries