[opelayday]

关云长 as a positive role model?!?!!?

You are just perpetrating chinese mythology that has little to do with the actual historical narrative!

关云长 for your info was the least intelligent of the 3 sworn brothers. His only virtue was superhuman bravery and a ferocious plus extremely righteous personality. But in terms of guile/strategy he fell far short. I am not too sure I would promote his brand of heroism to our younger generation. Brawn without brains? No way, man.

关云长 was appointed to guard Jing Zhou as a result of a tactical error by both Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang. He was the least suited for the job. In fact Luo Guan Zhong's narrative suggests that even Zhuge Liang had reservations, but still went along.

As a result of his appointment, he was eventually slain by the eastern kingdom.

The simple thing here is Cao Cao is the bastard character used for teaching every generation of people to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. In Chinese 分辨忠奸。

You are entitled to your own opinions, you are not going to convince most people that this bastard is one character that had won respect or trust or be any positive role model for most people.

You can go and try.... I am not going to stop you.



In the same era as CaoCao there were very respectable characters set as positive role models for children to learn from e.g. 关云长。

Together with the vicious CaoCao the righteous characters produced contrast and set positive vs negative role models serving the purpose of education.