Was cao cao really a villain?

because the author had a huge Shu boner and needed to create stuff to villify Cao Cao/Wei and elevate Shu/Liu Bei/Guan Yu etc

I find all the Asian live action TV series terribly unnatural and somewhat creepy.
At least anime abstracts away the facial expressions and overacting is practically required, while live action makes me feel like a spectator on stage during a school play. Really unsettling.

>terrible acting
cao cao didn't give a shit about the han, maybe it is intentional

Cao Cao dedicated 30 years of his life to restoring Han.

I find Asian melodramas quite entertaining. However, if I spoke the language it might not work out right.

Fuck you, Zhao Lixin is great in that scene.

>Cao Cao dedicated 24 years of his life to controlling Emperor Xian of Han*
fix'd

how do you even know? Do you speak Chinese?

Anyone recommend good movies or shows about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?

IRL Cao Cao was probably a bonafide loyal Han Prime Minister trying to fix shit.

Not his fault Cao Pi went "fuck it, where toppling the useless Han."

Three Kingdoms 2010. Its the best adaptation of ROT3K ever. Faithful and very entertaining. One of my favorite tv shows. Do read the book after though so you can read what the show missed. Show doesn't even have the opening of the book, but whatever.

Cao Pi had his valid reasons.

Near the end Cao Cao was getting flooded with petitions that he become Emperor, but he could afford to refuse them because his authority was already firmly established that becoming Emperor would have changed very little. Cao Pi however was newly come to power and needed to establish his own legitimacy.

Furthermore, what we need to realize is something that should be rather obvious in retrospect: people in those times had different perspectives and goals than what we do now. While later commentators typically make very cynical statements that all the portents and attempts to give legitimacy to Wei's succession to Han were meaningless gestures and farces, what we need to realize is that those portents and ritual acts would not have necessarily been dismissed as cynical farce at the time they actually occurred.

What most historical commentators fail to realize is that Cao Pi's succession to Liu Xie was the first successful abdication based transfer of the Mandate between dynasties, and so became the precedent for all other abdication based transfers afterward. Just because later abdication based transfers were often meaningless rituals, where the abdicated Emperors were often quickly murdered by their successor within weeks, does not mean this was originally the case for the first occurence: Liu Xie lived fourteen years after abdicating and died of natural causes, outliving Cao Pi.

>recommending fantasy fiction
>on a history board

Read this instead:
digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/html/1885/42048/peace1_index.html
digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/html/1885/42048/peace2_index.html