#fight scene reference

[howtofightwrite]

Q&A: What You Bring To A Fight Scene Creates excitement

geek-bait said to howtofightwrite: I’m having trouble writing a fight scene. I feel like I’m either going too fast and it’s all a blur or that the flow is choppy and awkward and I can’t quite figure out how to make it work better. Is there any advice as to how to get the right pacing and still make the scene…exciting?

Writing violence is a lot like writing romance, what you bring to it is more exciting than the violence itself. The fight scene, like a sex scene, acts as both culmination and catharsis for all the work you did setting the up the battle. You need your audience emotionally invested in the fates of these characters. If your fight scene is not acting as a culmination, as set up for bigger problems down the line, as a jumping off point which leads us somewhere new, then the scene itself can fall flat.

On a mechanical level, you need two things to really make fight scenes work, clear visual description and strong stakes.

If you’re fight scene is going in a blur, it might be because you either don’t have the intricacies of what’s physically happening in the fight or you’re trouble is you can’t clearly convey the events happening on the page. Your brain is trying to cheat around that lack of knowledge. This is a description issue more than a pacing issue. This is solved by learning more about the subject you’re trying to write. You can’t structure a fight that makes sense without understanding the mechanics of violence, and you can’t describe those mechanics if you don’t know what they look like, feel like, or sound like.

The pacing problem is different and ultimately up to the discretion of the author. The way I structure pacing in violent sequences depends on the one who is winning, the one who controls the flow controls the fight. The one who is winning controls the pace of the fight, because violence is about taking control, and forcing your opponent to go at your pace. This way, you expend less energy, allowing yourself to fight longer. You can maneuver them into a bad position which is beneficial for yourself.

A strong character who is a good combatant will take control of the narrative pace. While this is often the villain, if your other characters don’t fight for control of the pace then the scene’s action will run according to the victor’s wishes. The pace can speed up or slow down based on emotional responses of the other characters to what’s happening around them, but the scene’s actual underscoring tension and the pace of the action end up hinging on the decisions of the character currently in control.

You can set this up by using standard narrative beats, and its a good idea to familiarize yourself with different genres so you can switch up your pacing style as needed.

Katie stalked onto the ballroom floor. Pushing through the crowd, she strode past the bodies of the fallen pieces and stepped onto the chessboard.

“Hey!” the blonde vampire controlling the white side yelled.

Katie’s eyes rose, locking onto the balcony on room’s far side. There. Five vampires significantly older than all the others. She’d been under observation in the capstone, and from the moment she’d stepped out of Giancarlo’s car. They were still watching her. When under observation by a skilled strategist, every action she took betrayed some facet of herself.

You cannot decide the mistakes of others. Bait them with your actions.

Her lips curled.

“Katie!” Nadia yelled.

Katie’s eyes flicked up and to the left, watching a knight in poorly fitted armor brought his sword down toward her head — a boy moving in slow motion. She stepped to the side, staying within her square, and let him stumble past.

He landed with a loud clang, rattling metal. His sword’s point struck the floor.

Katie rested her hand on the back of his helmet.

The boy turned, staring up at her with wide brown eyes.

“No one ever taught you to use that weapon,” Katie said.

His jaw clenched.

“Get off the board!” the blonde vampire in white yelled.

The vampire dressed in black and red on the board’s other side stroked his jaw, watching his opponent. His right hand drummed on the arm of his chair.

Every species had their tells, Katie remembered. With humans, it was often physical. Where they looked, where they didn’t, the tenseness in their fingers, their shoulders, the skin around their eyes. The difference between a vampire and the average human was experience.

The boy lifted his sword. He spun, right foot outside his square as he lunged at her.

Katie caught his blade, forcing the scales under her skin to recede, allowing the point to pierce a human palm. Her nerves screamed as she forced the sword up and splattered her blood across the checkered floor.

“Katie!” Nadia yelled.

The vampires in the room lifted their heads. Their eyes changing as they scented her blood. Both the vampire in white and the vampire in red stood. The audience lingering by the tables shifted closer. The elders on the balcony moved to the balustrade.

Katie seized the blade’s hilt, knocking the boy to the ground. “Stay down.”

The vampire in white leapt first.

She raised the sword, electricity racing up the steel in jagged lines. Blue light combined at the blade’s tip. Thunder rolled in the skies above the mansion’s domed ceiling. Lightning cracked the black clouds, spearing downwards. It pierced the roof’s shingles and blasted through in a blaze of blue-white light. The marble ceiling exploded. Crystal chandeliers crashed to the floor.

The vampires in the crowd stumbled and screamed, the humans they’d used as pieces on their chessboard scattering.

Katie closed her eyes and the world snapped into focus. Not one, but many. Everywhere. There were thirty vampires and she was with them all. Everywhere at once. Katie cut down the vampire in white. She cut down the vampire in black. The vampires in the crowd fell simultaneously, as did the vampires by the stage. The vampires in ballgowns, those in fancy dress, and the four elders on the balcony. Standing with the fallen vampires above the ballroom, she lay her blade against the throat of the fifth.

“H-h-how?” The elder said, clutching the golden cross hanging around his neck.

“You annoyed me,” Katie said.

Wake the Dead – by C.E. Schmitt and Michael J. Schwarz

Your pacing is ultimately dependent on your characters, their behavior, and their choices, which should already be built up by their surrounding narrative. When faced with a violent scenario, they’re going to be who they are and utilize the tools they have access to. The excitement of the scene comes from what these characters choose to do, the circumstances surrounding them, their desires, and the fallout from or consequences of their actions. If this scene doesn’t lead somewhere, affect something, or cause change in the narrative then it will end up being superfluous.

What you’re missing in the scene above is an entire novel’s worth of setup. You see a character using their superpowers to win a fight. You don’t see a character who is carefully balancing their personal goals (catching up with their sibling before their sibling gets eaten) and the expediency of ending the current threat against immediate responsibilities they’ll have to take up once they fully realize who they are (and why they have those powers.) Who Katie is drives her to make choices which put her off her goal. She uses her powers to save time and make up the difference, but every fight, every resulting conversation, every interaction with the world brings Katie a step closer to failure.

Your scene doesn’t need to be big, things don’t need to explode, people don’t need to die in order for the sequence to be exciting. However, each individual fight scene does need to have meaning and move your story forward toward your narrative goal.

This is where your narrative’s stakes really do matter, both the overarching stakes and your character’s personal goals. What are they losing when they’re winning? What will they do in order to win? What will they sacrifice? What are the choices they make? What options are closed off as a result?

It’s easy to confuse your fight scene as being a separate component from your story, to get so wrapped up in the techniques and cool moves to forget about the people behind them. It takes a lot of practice before you get good at writing the spectacle similar to what’s seen in movies, but it’s not as difficult to bring your characters into the scene. Even if your audience believes victory is certain, even if they are up against an enemy they outclass, how the character goes about winning can be exciting all by itself.

Your fight scenes should be cumulative expressions of your character’s identity as they utilize the skills and tools at their disposal. Examples of their morals, their values, their intelligence, their cleverness, and their problem solving abilities. Violence creates more issues than it solves. Skill at combat will change the way your characters are viewed by those around them, for the better or for worse. How will other characters respond when faced with a new threat to their power and control? Is the violence brought by your characters in this scene enough to cause another character to worry and plot their demise? What results from it? Maybe they’re banned from the tavern for life. What do they give away about themselves that an enemy down the line can use against them?

Going back to the example, Katie is a character who lives in a world where information is a commodity. What you choose to do and the way you choose to do it can give away a lot about who you are, how you operate, who trained you, what your abilities are, and what your limits are. Even when you win, you can lose out by giving future opponents insight. The danger can go from non-existent and ratchet up to immediate death very quickly if you misjudge what you’re dealing with. On top of everything else in the scene, you have a character making a calculated choice to put expediency ahead of their own safety for a definitive win.

There are plenty of people who’ll tell you a one-sided fight can’t be interesting, but it can be in the context of its narrative. Your protagonist losing a fight can be more fascinating than two characters evenly matched duking it out. I always approach fight sequences from the perspectives of the characters, what they’re trying to accomplish, and the solution they’ve chosen as their means of victory. You should always treat your scenes as mattering to the character’s future, even if that future won’t go on much longer or the novel will soon be over.

So what are the circumstances surrounding your fight scene? Are you clearly describing the actions these characters take? Is their reasoning clear? Or, at least, interesting? Do you care about what happens to them? Have you left open an option for them to lose, or have you already decided on a winner? Are the characters making use of the skills and talents you’ve shown earlier in the work? Do their decisions match up with what we know about them? Do they expand or provide insight to their values, their skills, and their flaws?

At some point, it’ll happen the way it happens. If no amount of small tweaks make it better and you’re still unhappy, then look at the bigger structural issues and the characters themselves. Address if they’re acting in a way that’s natural for them or if they’re out of character.

Lastly, be honest with yourself about the kind of dangers your characters are facing in their fight scene. Their behavior is dependent on their knowledge of the present danger. A character who takes on eldritch abominations in single combat isn’t going to be fussed by fighting a few vampires, and that will lead to them making very different choices from someone who could be ripped apart in a few seconds.

For clarification, the writing example used in this post was written by me and Starke.

-Michi

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Q&A: What You Bring To A Fight Scene Creates excitement was originally published on How to Fight Write.

[fightscenesreferences]

#47 Fight scenes references for Actors, Animators and Martial Artists Quantum of Solace (2008) Hotel fight scene

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#38 Fight Scene References for Actors & Animators The Grandmaster (2013) Wing Chun vs Xingyiquan, Hung Gar fight scene

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#32 Fight Scene References for Actors & Animators Ninja (2009) Subway fight scene

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One versus Group: Writing that Wuxia Action Scene

Having spent some time watching the pilot episode of AMC’s Into the Badlands with Daniel Wu, I was inspired to talk about writing the one vs group scenario. We’ve talked about the realistic side of the individual versus group combat in the past, and how difficult it is to pull off in real life. However, I’m sure most of you dream of writing your own action heroes someday (if not right now) and the hallmark of the action hero that sells them hardest is not the end fight. It’s how well they handle the group.

Group combat is difficult, both on the real world side and creation side. The logic of the 1vX scenario is that facing the multiple grunts is too difficult for the standard combatant to handle. Only “one of the best” can do it. Thus, it puts those combatants who can in a league of their own.

On the creation side, the 1vX is also one of the most entertaining types of fight scenes. It’s fast paced, visually rich, and designed to showcase a character’s skills. They are never, and should never be, one size fits all. After all, in a fictional context, the purpose of these fights are expository. They’re there to inform you of who the character is, very quickly, in a very perfunctory show vs tell. A choreographer or writer who can put together an entertaining 1vX fight scene will sell their character’s creativity, ingenuity, and skills to the audience without them ever realizing that’s what was happening. Even if all the character does is run away, we learn a lot from how they choose to handle groups.

In a martial arts movie, these sequences are used for bonding the audience and the protagonist. They do this more quickly than any other fight scene type. While also pulling the double duty of elevating the villain and their skill level as we wind our way toward the final fight.

Action cinema like all other media has coded tropes that communicate information to you without ever saying it. The group fight in an action movie, especially a finely paced one, is essential for selling a master combatant to the audience.  

In film, the 1vX is a common standard for action heroes, and I’ve seen novels where the author has attempted to imitate it. Some have success and others not so much. Success generally depends on understanding the tropes they’re trying to imitate, both how combat works and how the narrative of the fight presents the character to the audience.

This is why learning both sides of the martial arts world, from practical to performance, is necessary for building your narrative. While understanding how a group fight functions in reality is essential, storytelling is built on easily communicable tropes. Every culture has assigned flags that indicate who a character is and their purpose to the story, and those change over time. With film, it can be a myriad of visual items and one of the big ones is color. When written, it can be character actions, objects, clothing, anything really. So inured are we that, most of the time, when we’re consuming we don’t even notice they’re there and in the beginning when we’re writing we don’t even notice we’re making the same choices. These tropes are easier to recognize in the media of other cultures but, at the same time, when we don’t know their purpose we miss them entirely.

In a real world sense, fighting a group is about time, how much you have and how much you lose, where the enemies are, and how to balance them. This translates to the screen and into the language of the scene.

See, kung fu action movie group fights are not about trading blows as much as they are about tempo.

Yes, tempo.

Like a properly choreographed dance sequence, it’s rhythm.

You want a kung fu style action sequence in your novel, you’ve got to find a way to translate the rhythm into text. And where is the rhythm, you may wonder? It’s in the exchange of blows. In the thrust, and block, and kick, and fall. In the loosening and tightening of muscles, in inhale and the exhale. Do you hear it?

There’s a drumbeat in your character’s soul.

Traditional martial arts counts beats by breath, on the inhale and the exhale. The inhale marks the beginning of the movement, and the exhale is on the end. The inhale before and the exhale on the strike, when all the muscles tighten up, then you move again. You can count your strikes by number, on the breath, like in dance. One, two, three, and kiap.

Hear it.

That’s the sound of a combination.

Block, punch, and grab. Pause to sweep the ankle. Yank their hand to your waist. Against their will, they slide on; shoulder to hip. And you turn into the throw.

Your opponent flies into their incoming fellow.

Kick backwards as the enemy rushes in behind, hear them stumble, and spin to face them. Roundhouse to the head, pause, give the audience a moment to breathe then... Twist sideways as your next opponent lunges in, the blade passes your waist. Seize the wrist, step back, and yank them with you. Free hand to their elbow, thrust into joint break.

Elbow crunches. Appropriate scream follows.

Kick them away.

Remaining opponents have paused from fear. One clutches his busted arm, fingers coated in blood. Another helps the fallen to his feet.

Face them, and smile. Gesture ‘come’ with fingers.

Say, “Let’s go.”

You count the pieces of the technique, on the inhale and the exhale, and break them apart to create that tempo. Notice, the action comes from all sides. Often, from the direction the camera wasn’t pointed so you get the moment of, “oh crap!”

Now, it’s important to remember there’s a stunt actor que. There was one in the piece above. You notice it best in the terrible movies and shows, where you see them line up one at a time and wait their turn. A scene with a truly skilled performer and choreographer is such you won’t even notice the que because the action is happening so quickly it feels simultaneous.

If your character has a goal that involves protecting someone else from muggers, it’s important to remember that the muggers or whoever won’t all turn to fight when they leap in. When you have a good scene, this is an important source of tension for your hero. It gives them a reason to clear through the mob, forces the audience to focus on the necessity of speed, and a point to work towards. It also lets you do humorous things like throw one enemy your character is fighting into the other when they get too close to the protectee or stuck dragging them backwards. (This is also why you should never fight around an official protectee.)

Your characters aren’t puppets hanging still on their strings, they’re moving even when you’re not focusing on them. This is important because it lets you have moments of surprise in the scene. Like the character being seized from behind, or someone screaming as they’re about to be killed and the character has disengage, kick someone into a wall, and leap the other direction. They don’t have time to finish them forever, you see.

You build up your beats, mixing them all in together.

Your character gets thrown across the bar. (Beat.) Lands hard. (Beat). Rolls top over end. (Beat.) Notices a bottle of whiskey in hardened glass (like Jack Daniel’s. In a funny scene, they maybe take a drink. Also, that’s two beats.) Up they come (beat), crack their attacker across the face. (Beat).  Back over the bar. (Beat.) With a kick. (Beat.) Swing their club. (Beat. Beat.) Think they’re done, turn to yell at a friend still fighting, get clocked across the back of the head. Stumble, turn, and off we go again.

Then there’s the myriad of little beats in between the actions. Count every fall, every hit, every roll. The length of your sentences changes the rhythm. You’ve got to count. the time. it takes. to finish your scene. Fast, fast, slow, fast. One (breathe), two (chamber), three (strike), four (recoil), five (reset). When you get faster, they combine together into one, two, three. Remember, slow is for exhaustion, injuries, recovery, and long actions. Fast is for the quick hits.

Slow gives the audience time to refresh, catch up, time to breathe, just like the character. When the scene is unbalanced, it overwhelms. You’ve got to give your audience time to follow the action. That means breathers. Those breathers can come at any point, they’re where the action slows before rolling back into the rush.

Commonly, these are in the injuries, the received hits by the primary character. In group fights, they happen when a character is knocked from the fight (whether permanently or temporarily), they happen when the character runs, dodges into another room, or moves to a new scene location, does a slow transition between combat partners, or gets a moment where they fight one on one instead of in a rush of multiples.

There should always be a moment in the middle where you’re character is ducking and dodging being attacked from multiple sides all at the same time. This is going to be a challenge, especially if you are a neophyte and know nothing about either combat or action. It’s difficult enough to imagine one fight, but controlling a battlefield, moving between your dance partners, and fighting from all four sides is not how most of us are trained to think.

Unless we’ve practiced martial arts.

This is part of what katas are for, you know.

And choreography? It’s just a kata. There’s the kicker in it all. Understanding martial arts, traditional martial arts, is what’s most important to grasping the magic behind a wuxia style action scene. It’s performance martial arts. It’s all martial arts, at its best and worst. It isn’t what you want to be dealing with in real life, and that knowledge is precisely why these characters are held up as supremely skilled in their narratives.

So, how do you translate a visual medium into a written one?

When it comes to the page, the length of your sentences dictates the amount of time each technique takes. The longer the sentence, the longer it takes to read and absorb then the more time the action takes in the reader’s mind. You control the time it takes with your words, with the form of the paragraph, with the rhythm of language.

Punctuation exists to punctuate. Cut unnecessary words. Learn to be specific. Pinpoint. Figure out which techniques take more time, more energy, and budget techniques for those moments. Standing is quick, grapple is slow, and ground wastes time. It costs time to get up again. The time you took writing your character running over a wall to avoid a hit is the time it took for an enemy to kill their protectee.

What?

Yes, simultaneous action is happening that the reader doesn’t see. That’s the sleight of hand. As the writer, you control the amount of time your character has, but janking that time around screws with the audience and the character. Thus, we up both tension and tempo.

Time, baby. It’s all about time.

Where are you losing sentences? When is an action unnecessary? What is distracting from your action? Is that distraction what you want? Sometimes, it can be helpful.

When you’re writing action the time it takes for you to write a character did a thing is the amount of time it takes to do the thing. Sometimes, long sentences are good. Remember, those moments you take to describing scene or setting changes as the fight moves can act as breathers. As can the moments it takes for the fighter to reassess. Too much action too quickly is mentally exhausting for the reader. Difficult sentences are harder to follow, long sentences give you that moment to relax the mind. Knowing that, at a more advanced level, you can pace them to experience what your character is experiencing in the structure.

So, there is no one size fits all.

The only usual rule is that wilder, less trained combatants are more uncontrolled, more sloppy, more loosey goosey. The more crisp and controlled a fighter is, the more mechanical they are, then the better they are. The untrained fighter and noncombatant fights can be just as fun to write as the upper echelon, they’re also easier.

“I’m unpredictable.”

“I’ve predicted the unpredictable before, kid.”

If you’ve heard that one before, take a drink.

The less a character knows, than the less skill you need to fake. The more advanced they are, then the higher the limit. A character isn’t good just because you say they are, they need to prove it. So, that’s all up to you. The good news is that while good action is hard to come by, bad action is so prevalent that general audiences can’t tell it’s not bacon.

When writing action sequences, choreography is what you want. Learn to fake so well it becomes a kind of reality inside your story. So you never disrupt your audience’s suspension of disbelief, so the more they know the more willing they are to suspend it.

This is where action movies and wuxia films are important, the more you consume, the more you think critically, the more you try to understand what is at play then the better you will get. You’re not looking at them for realism, you’re looking at them for entertainment and how to transfer those techniques onto the page.

The good news for you: you don’t need wires. You just need imagination.

-Michi

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Is it possible to fight without hands? Like if one is handcuffed or their hand(s) are injured? If possible, how effective would it be?

You can fight with your legs,with your shoulders, with your head, and with your mouth (assuming you can get close enough).

The caveat to this, of course, when it comes to the legs is being able to adjust your balance to fight with your hands bound. Martial combat utilizes the whole body for any technique, and the arms are an important part of balancing yourself when you’re on one leg. So, when your hands are tied behind your back, this disrupts their ability to balance themselves.

The other caveat to the legs is they are more difficult than the average hand to hand technique to master. They also don’t work as well in tight spaces unless you’re using a martial art designed for them such as Krav Maga, the martial art developed and used by the Israeli Defense Force.

It should be said, the first responsibility of a prisoner is to escape. If your character is in a position where they’re injured or trying to get away from their captors, they don’t have the time to be sitting around trying to take every opponent as they come nor should they want to. Unless they have some character flaw with a crazed need to prove themselves while fighting at an extreme disadvantage, their first priority is going to be getting away or getting their hands free so they can up their chances of survival.

This can ultimately be any kind of sequence you want, the old Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies often have fun over the top fight scenes where their trying to fend off multiple enemies while their hands are bound. It involves a lot of ducking, dodging, running, trying to free their hands, inevitably finding a way between using their opponent’s attacks (like with a sword) to cut their bindings, or something else before they can finally turn around and fight freely.

Usually, these sorts of scenes involve the character making use of their environment. (As all good fight scenes should.) Giving you a chance to show their cleverness and ability to innovate on the fly. An unarmed character with their hands bound isn’t going to have a lot of options against an enemy with a weapon, but they can utilize their environment do the fighting for them.

This can be simple stuff like using objects such as tables to separate them from their opponent, tricking their enemy into burying a sword in a chair instead of them, then kicking away the chair and disarming them, etc.

A more grounded sequence usually involves a bull rush breakout, stealth, playing dead, or sometimes just throwing yourself off a cliff.

The basic answer is: fight for flight. You don’t want to stick around while fighting at a disadvantage against people who have use of all their limbs, and probably weapons. Especially if it’s more than one person.

Don’t get caught up in the idea that skill is defined by winning, it isn’t. You can get about as far with social engineering as you can with violence. A character who is capable of risk assessment, and able to make choices based off their ability and environment is the way of showing a character knows what they’re doing. Sometimes, the choice really is escape so they can live to fight another day. When your character has a greater goal in mind, they really can’t afford to lose too much of their valuable time dispatching Mook Number 3. When your character is debating whether or not they’re going to fight, always ask: what do they get out of it versus the risks involved?

There’s a great episode in Justice League: Unlimited where Batman is caught by the Luthor’s evil league and he uses it as an opportunity to get intel and socially engineer the situation so they turn against each other.

There are lots of ways to take scenes like this which may not be immediately apparent, but are always opportunities to emphasize a character’s particular skill set.

Not everyone needs to be ripping out their captors’ jugulars with their teeth.

-Michi

((I have bronchitis, so I apologize for everything being a little slow this week))

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Would going off into the mountains to train with the Ultimate Master™ of whatever fighting discipline and thus become the Ultimate Master™ yourself actually produce a skilled fighter? Wouldn't it be better to train with multiple people so you don't end up inheriting all of one person's weaknesses, or relying on your opponent to have those particular weaknesses? Can you get legitimate fighting experience in a controlled environment, or is there a limit to how much you can learn in the classroom?

Just for a heads up, the “Ultimate Master” or the “Old Man on the Mountain” is usually referencing Eastern mysticism and is a long standing genre convention in cinema.  When used in fiction, it always involves some kind of pilgrimage. It also has roots in reality, enough so that a whole genre of Chinese cinema builds itself around the concept.

Now, other cultures have this concept too, and there are European branches that defy what has become the expected fictional norms. However, when you decide to follow this train of thought for your character, it’s important to recognize what the trope is, where it comes from, and what its hallmarks and audience expectations are.

If you don’t want to write a character for whom their martial arts training is a quasi-religious experience, grounding itself in philosophy and spirituality, then this trope is not for you.

In a simple, much more recognizable Western example, if you don’t imagine yourself writing a Jedi then this trope is not for you.

9/10 that’s pretty much what the trope is, and, real talk, the more spiritual side of martial arts can do some pretty crazy shit in reality. I’ve seen American martial arts masters bend rebar with their clavicles, break baseball bats with their shins, break ten bricks with their hands, and that’s the more commonplace energy manipulation you’ll see in a standard martial arts school far from their traditions.

The conceptual idea that martial arts give you superpowers is rooted in the real world. Dragon Ball Z for example, takes real world martial arts philosophies and dials them over 9,000. Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back utilizes real philosophy with real world application when training Luke. For Lucas, this is mostly by accident but nevertheless if you’ve ever been in martial arts training Yoda sounds suspiciously similar.

The philosophy at play is spiritual/religious in nature, but also real. The idea is that through training, you will reach a point of inner spiritual ascension. Upon taking this first step in understanding, you reach a new plateau of spiritual and physical harmony that is beyond what the average martial artist can access. (Ronin Warriors) That’s what the mountain training is about, that’s what its for, and that’s why the neophyte is not usually the one who seeks out the Wise Man on the Mountain. (Yu Yu Hakusho) Usually, its a secondary or tertiary step in your training. You go to the mountain when the time comes to look inward, rather than outward. When you want to face yourself.

The other version of this trope is you have a character who was taken in by the Man on the Mountain as a child and raised in a hereditary martial art until they leave (Rurouni Kenshin), to test themselves out in the world. Where they go out and find other martial artists and, for whatever reason, fight them as a test of their abilities. (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) Or they are sent out into the world on some kind of a mission. (Iron Fist, The Empire Strikes Back) If you have watched any amount of shounen/fighting anime or any wuxia cinema, I guarantee you’ve seen this one before.

You’re basically talking about people who spend their whole lives training, and who are going to be fighting a lot. You want to fight the guy who learned to channel themselves in meditation while standing in a freezing waterfall for four to six hours? No, you don’t, especially when you know the purpose of meditation in martial arts. These are the guys with the ability to balance themselves on the top of their head. Its also worth pointing out that the balancing on the head has a real combat application, the purpose is to train balance and physical control. If this person can achieve perfect balance on their head, what are you going to do about knocking them over when they’re actually on their feet? These are kinds of skills you will never achieve unless you’ve spent a significant portion of your life in isolation training your body to a level of physical excellence that is so far beyond the average you seem superhuman.

This is the level above Jet Li playing the villain in Lethal Weapon 4, where it’s all normal and then… wham. Try to remember too, when you’re watching any Jet Li, Jackie Chan, or Donnie Yen film, that the camera is often losing frames on their fight sequences because they are moving too fast for it to follow. Or they are slowing way down.

That’s just approaching pinnacles of excellence in performance martial arts.

It’s worth thinking about it this way, you’ve got a character who goes up to the mountain and comes back. They’ve spent their years, paid their dues, put in the time, and achieved that pinnacle. Now, the rest of the world is moving in slow motion. Physically, mentally, spiritually, they have reached a plateau beyond what the other (standard) combatants are capable of. These enemies are slower, less aware, riddled with flaws, and do not make the most of their energy. They also adjust faster to new challenges as they test themselves in the world at large.

The Man on the Mountain isn’t classroom training. It is not a safe environment. It is one part martial training, one part spiritual exercise, and one part survival training. What happens on the mountain is never standard martial arts training, it is never safe. Whether it’s what you saw in Mulan, hopping over a raging river from pole to pole the size of your foot, fishing from the river with your hands, or any number of other countless exercises you’ve seen in anime and martial arts movies that were glossed over. The jacket routine in Jackie Chan’s The Karate Kid which culminates in this sequence. (Did you know The Karate Kid is an Old Man on the Mountain movie? All of them are.) Some of those techniques may have looked really dumb, but most of them had a purpose.

This is about testing yourself beyond your limits.

It’s the quintessential difference between student and master.

So, do they have weaknesses? Not if the master knew what he was doing. If he or she didn’t, if they were dicking around or the training didn’t properly sink in, then yeah, they’ll have lots of weaknesses. If not, they’re moving into the territory One Punch Man is subverting, mocking, and critiquing.

-Michi

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#39 Fight Scene References for Actors & Animators The Grandmaster (2013) Bajiquan fight scene