Ravages of Time - conflict in literature

 

Sun Ce - seeing the world as the hunting ground and getting haunted in the end by other animals who emerge more and more as you are getting closer to the core of the world

Yuan Shao - A romantic who has an artificial facade of honorable reputation

Yuan Fang - chaos that is not letting him be what he wanted to be and the chaos that makes people go against relatives

Ma Jun - technology affecting the war in the latest arc and him countering it

Cao Cao and Liu Bei - completely opposite sides of one coin (being an anti hero) that cant share the path

Zhao Yun and Zhao Yun - mirroring each other

Sun Quan - experience making him to learn the reality, trying to accept it and facing frameworks within frameworks of going against the reality (history repeating itself and etc)

Zhou Yu - literally going outside of the framework

Zhuge Liang - making a cult of personality to give ppl guidance as there is no god to guide them in his stead

Lu Bu - "winners write history" and basically going against other adaptations to still end up as one

Of course there could be other variations of this

Zhou Yu breaking out of the framework isn't exactly a straightforward case of the 'man vs God' setup since there's no motif of resentment or defiance against the heavens (the meta interpretation of it would better fit 'man vs author' insofar as it suggests resistance to dominant authoritative frameworks laid out in the Art of War of Sunzi), a better example would be Lu Bu trying to hold the flood

Zhuge Liang doesn't deny heaven but struggles to deal with the inscrutability of heaven, perhaps a better case of the 'man vs no god' setup would be Yu Ji (who embraced the role of sect leader to channel mass discontent and cope with the lack of heavenly meaning) as well as Zhang Jiao in the spinoff novel if that summary I found before is to be believed

Sun Ce hunting is a nice case of the 'man vs nature' setup, though perhaps a wider example would be Cao Cao's army during Huarong

as for the 'man vs reality' setup, on the narrower end there's Dian Wei being cut in half and unable to command his 'disloyal legs', on the wider end there's Taishi Ci's anticlimactic last stand against Sun Ce

the 'man vs technology' setup is a bit tricky (if we are to narrow it down to hard technological inventions and not include the notion of past heroes vs future schemes and policies), but perhaps the last stand of Cao Chun's unit of the tiger and leopard cavalry (or on a more positive note, Lu Meng overcoming the leather-covered warships in the attack against Huang Zu) would be a clearer illustration than Ma Jun figuring out the mechanisms

I suppose any explicit instance of characters commenting on how they will be portrayed (or better yet, trying to defy foregone conclusions and dominant expectations) counts as a 'man vs author' setup