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Caspar · **08-21-2015, 04:38 AM**

(08-21-2015, 04:05 AM)Oli! Wrote:
(08-21-2015, 01:30 AM)Caspar Wrote: I think it's pretty crass to suggest fancy coreography is "dickwaving."
The fights in wuxia are beautiful and often heavily coreographed, more akin to dancing than real fighting, yet they can still feel dangerous or intensely serious. To suggest the exaggerated fantasy martial arts common to those shows lack any sort of compelling element is off-base.

I'd almost even argue it's faintly Eurocentric, as that emphasis on low fantasy realism seems to be really firmly rooted in European martial arts and popular Western fantasy more than anything else, but that's perhaps a long shot.

I'm not going to get into the meat of this argument, but I did want to say that I agree with this.

Indeed, there are real martial-arts with dance elements that are very flashy, and still see real use.Â Capoeira, in particular, comes to mind. One of my characters uses a Hydaelyn-ized version of it.

These things are real and out there. Perhaps not common, but out there.

This certainly is true, and capoeira is a really fascinating and crowd-pleasing style of fighting. Yet at the same time, even ignoring that it exists, you still have forms of exaggerated stage fighting that are commonplace in entertainment media that are designed to entertain. Forget a practical yet flashy martial art; even the playfighting coreography can entertain if the scene tells a story and maintains some basis of dramatic tension. Even if the characters are powerful, you can still feel uncertain as to who will live, wince at painful moments and look in awe when something very clever or deft is performed. I think it's fine and exciting for people to want to push the envelope of what is possible in a normal fight in real life because we already are typically fine with whatever we see in an action scene so long as it feels good to watch. Whether that means it's a fast, brutal stabfest or an acrobatic display, it should feel viscerally entertaining in some manner. That's why I don't get why the realistic approach is put on a pedestal here when it's not even strictly the only canon depiction.

Besides, the only reason why you can't do more modest stabbings ingame as NIN is gameplay limitations; would you want to basically never see any of your attacks in PVE content because your ninja wields their pugiones correctly? It would be an enormous headache.

Rant - The Problem With Eorzean Knife-Fighting

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes