I finally got around to watching The Avengers. It contains a large number of fight scenes where two superheros widely known for their strength and invulnerability pound on each other. If I’m being generous, at most once is this done as a delaying tactic (when the Skrulls I mean Covenant I mean Chitauri turn all their firepower on the Hulk). The rest of the time it seems like they’re genuinely thinking “well, maybe if I hit him just a bit harder” despite having shown no damage from the previous barrage.
It made me think of Zatoichi, which is a long-running Japanese series about a blind swordsman. In particular, the protagonist Ichi (zato means “blind”) uses Iadio as a fighting style. As described by Wikipedia, an Iadio fight consists of “drawing the sword from its scabbard, striking or cutting an opponent, removing blood from the blade, and then replacing the sword in the scabbard” – there’s no need for a second strike because either you or your opponent is dead. Check out the final boss fight from the 2003 version of Zatoichi (the bad guy imagines how the attack will go first):
I think realistically this is how superheros should fight: they walk up to each other and hit each other with their strongest attack. If their opponent shows no sign of injury, they shrug and agree to a truce, at least until a bigger ambush can be sprung later. I know this is not what the pop corn eating hordes are looking for, but it would be a really interesting way to reimagine a story where all the major characters are invulnerable.
This is similar to how I think Jedi Masters should have fought in the prequels: We just see them circle each other, and make a few relatively slow probing swings.
But really they are using the Force to anticipate their opponent’s moves and to plan their own best moves. They would also be, largely invisibly, using the Force to try to directly attack their opponent, move stuff in the environment against them, and counter their opponent’s attempts to do the same. Mostly these invisible Force actions would cancel each other out so we wouldn’t see much.
Then, after a while of this, one of them will foresee an opening and the other will foresee their own defeat, and the one strikes down the other.
So it should look a lot like Obi-wan vs Vader in A New Hope.
I “learned” somewhere that sword fighting, in actuality, is (as Jared mentions) incredibly dangerous — that Fencing, or even Kendo, are foppish systems of combat thought rather than anything “real”.
Musashi-kensei’s most impressive fights were usually when he surprisingly beat people to death with a club of some sort instead of fighting “normally”. Once in his life, in about a half-century of fighting, he did some crazy ninja stuff like in the movies (this, when he fought Matashichiro). And even that much is only quasi-historical.
Film itself is a lie though, so it doesn’t surprise me that it also lies in this particular. Still, I like the aesthetic that Don describes.
According to Neal Stephenson, we don’t really know how people actually fought with swords in the medieval West.
@Don: That makes Jedi sound like wizards rather than knights. Anybody have a favourite magic battle from film?
@Jared: good link!
@Jared: The one from the end of Flight of Dragons.