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http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2014/8/15/...

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Technical analysis of strikes, transitions, grappling, tactics, with gifs.

This is the sort of nonfiction reading that's useful to writers who want to include hand-to-hand fight scenes in their stuff. If you write sword-fighting scenes, you should go to thearma.org, and so forth.

There are a fair number of fantasy authors I'd read (and loved) who wrote exciting fight scenes... And now that I'm older and have actually taken more of an interest in combat sports and scholarly works on swordsmanship, it's obvious they really didn't know what they were writing about.

This was not really much of a problem; only a small fraction of geeks cared about the authenticity of fantasy novels (unlike in SF, in which people regularly got into serious deep thinking about FTL, advanced weaponry, computers, etc long before). But in this age of MMA as a major sport, with esoteric combat sports like longsword competitions or spectacular karate knockouts with leaping, tumbling do mawashi kicks on youtube, and all kinds of historical research on real life fighting technique and weaponry on the net, I'd like to think that the fantasy audience is gradually becoming more sophisticated about what it reads. There are growing subforums on reddit for enthusiasts of historical combat and so forth.

These resources were much harder to find when I was a kid, pre-internet. So writers would have trouble finding them too!

But now, the resources are out there. Use them!

There is a real interest in realistic blood-and-guts fantasy fiction, I think, which has not yet been fully tapped (other than G.R.R. Martin's giant epic of course... and Vikings). Fantasy is reaching its vampire, fairy, steampunk, etc saturation point... maybe it's time for a grittier sword-and-sorcery revival? Orrr maybe it's already happened with a wave of GRR Martin imitators I've just not heard about? Hmm.

There's been an explosion of books getting published, so I've actually not been the best at keeping track of new trends--I mostly notice them when they're almost over and the aisles in the brick-and-mortars are saturated. Yeah, I still shop in physical stores.

Even for writers in other categories though, it's good to read these things if your characters ever do engage in physical combat. If you've got razor girls cybered out in heavy chrome who can leap across twenty feet, you can still think about how real hand-to-hand combat, with feints and timing and footwork, gets altered by superhuman capability.

Speaking of which: Neal Stephenson is probably the most hardcore sword enthusiast among writers who've sold a lot of books. I'm sad that his video game didn't work out (though not surprised: I've tried to do a video game before with friends and it is REALLY hard to collaborate with a large interdisciplinary team, it's a totally different skill set).

---on the article itself

Oh Maynard.

I think the same thing happened to Brock Lesnar. More so than than his serious intestinal issues, I think that the fight with Shane Carwin demolished Brock Lesnar's mental state for handling punches.

While Brock did weather Carwin's heavy assault and come back to win, he took ENORMOUS damage from a really powerful puncher.

After that, Brock became afraid of getting hit. Before, he could still think while getting hit and fight, but after the Carwin fight, he'd freeze up and instinctively try to run instead of defending himself.

Certainly, recovering from the diverticulosis sapped his athleticism, but the Brock I saw post-Carwin had more problems with the head game than with his strength or endurance. And it didn't help that he only trained in his own gym instead of going out to the really great MMA gyms that could have given him technique to go with his incredible physical talents.