It is true that really big muscles like for example those of power lifters make fighting more difficult? Are speed but not very muscular characters actually plausible as fighters?

So, there’s two different things here, power lifters and body builders. Power lifters tend to look really bulky, rather than describing them as having, “really big muscles.”

This doesn’t really help powerlifters offensively. How hard you can hit someone is a function of power generation, not raw strength. So, just because you can support the weight of a midsized car with your legs doesn’t mean you can throw a punch with the power of that sedan.

Defensively it helps, some. If you’re a walking wall of meat, and someone (who doesn’t know what they’re doing) is trying to throw a punch, it’s not going to get through. It doesn’t help, as much, against a trained opponent, because, ultimately, your body is still put together like any other human, and a skilled fighter is looking to exploit the inherent limitations, which you can’t really bulk your way out of.

If it sounds like I’m being dismissive, I’m not; power lifters are incredible athletes, and I have a lot of respect for them. However, they’re not training to fight people, and it is unfair to judge them based on that.

On the flip side, being a body builder has no upside for combat. Those really clearly defined muscles make finding pressure points incredibly easy. On top of that, body builders are intentionally abusing their muscles to cause swelling. When they bulk up, it’s their body crying for help.

A common element to increasing muscle definition is called, “cutting water weight.” This sounds benign, but it really means they’re intentionally dehydrating to the point where it’s adversely affecting them. In some cases, you’re looking at a guy (or women) who is a couple hours away from loosing consciousness due to lack of water. Yes, it gives them incredibly well defined muscles, but it’s actively dangerous.

In most cases, when you’re looking at a bodybuilder (at least, during a competition), they are not in fighting shape.

The thing with a lot of professional martial artists is, they are pretty muscular, but it’s sleek. You’re more likely to see someone who has a very athletic build. There’s a lot of strength there, and in some cases, more raw strength than a body builder, it just doesn’t look like it. At a glance, you could mistake them for just being lean or fit, but, the reality is, you’re just not seeing their muscles.

When it comes to professional sport fighters, (like boxers and MMA practitioners), you’ll often see them cut water weight for their formal weigh-ins. This is the practice of weighing a fighter and assigning them their weight class. It’s advantageous to be put into a lower weight class if at all possible, you’ll be matched against smaller competitors. However, after weigh-in, they’ll rehydrate and get back into fighting shape before the match. You can track some of the visual effect water weight if you look at a fighter who’s trying to weigh into a lower class at their weigh-in versus when they show up for the match. In some cases, it’s a pretty striking difference.

Cutting water weight is also really common in Hollywood action films. You’ll frequently see actors who are on the edge of passing out, specifically to give them clearly defined muscles for a scene or two.

-Starke

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Question. Blackpowder weapons. How bad was the smoke and the noise? Would it be a choking hazard indoors or just a mild annoyance? Deafen anyone within 10 feet? I imagine stealth would go out the window as soon as the weapon goes off, but I have heard that ninjas used firearms in assassinations and wondered if you had any insight into that as well. Blackpowder and smoothbore muskets as sniping weapons if it would not be better to just stick to crossbows or bows for that instead of the loud booksticks with an egregiously long reload time.

Black powder firearms are a bit messy. It’s not clean burning powder, and that does result in a lot of smoke coming off the gun after firing. It would never be so sever that your vision would be obstructed after a single shot, however, if you line up 20 or 30 soldiers, and have them fire in alternating volleys, the cumulative smoke produced could be blinding.

There’s some other side effects of this as well. A major factor is that because black powder produces less pressure, the resulting gunshot isn’t as loud as a modern firearm cartridge. You’ll still know someone is shooting, but it’s not loud enough to damage your hearing if you get into a gunfight. (At least, when I fired a black powder rifle in Scouts, we did not use hearing protection. Some of that could be due to it being 25 years ago, but, as it was my first experience with a firearm, I didn’t really understand the sound difference.)

Even a modern, smokeless powder cartridge, won’t deafen everyone within 10 feet of it. That kind of damage is reserved for explosive charges, concussion grenades, things of that nature. Being in close proximity to a gunshot, without hearing protection (particularly in a closed space) can result in hearing damage, but you’re not going to be deafened on the spot. Now, being in a modern gunfight without hearing protection will likely result in some degree of hearing loss down the line, and can easily result in medical issues, such as a persistent headache that persists for days.

As for, “why the gun?” you’re missing key details. Training archers on the bow was extremely time consuming. The aphorism was, that you would spend a lifetime creating a single skilled archer. Also, bows, in medieval warfare were used as more of a general (fire in that area) method for dealing with infantry, rather than being analogous to a marksman.

Crossbows are much easier to learn, but they are also significantly more expensive, and mechanically complex. Ironically, crossbows did have their time as military weapons. For over a thousand years, crossbows saw extensive battlefield use various places in the world.

Even as the firearm gained popularity in Europe, the crossbow held on into the early modern era. Throughout the 15th century, it would have been reasonable to encounter a well equipped European army that employed a mix of gunpowder and crossbow units.

Ultimately, the problem for the crossbow was that the gun is very easy to use, easy to transport, and relatively sturdy. Over time, it became the better option for an infantry weapon.

As for ninjas using firearms? I don’t know anything on that subject, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Ninjas were notoriously opportunistic, and even a fairly primitive black powder handgun is an excellent way of immediately eliminating a samurai. While Japan would eventually (effectively) regulate firearms out of existence during the Edo period, between the introduction of the gun to Japan in 1543, and the mid 17th century, where the technology was embraced. While it conflicts with the stereotypical image of the Ninja, Japan in the late sixteenth century boasted a thriving gun culture, and the idea that a ninja would simply shoot their target and leave, is actually pretty plausible.

-Starke

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Hi, this is my first time coming to your blog and ask a fighting question so… How to write a slow-mo scene where character B caught a bullet that is heading towards them (especially their face) with their own bare hands?

I got inspired by this one scene from an anime I’ve watched. Honestly, I don’t know how to approach that cause this is my first time as well writing a combat scene and I don’t want to make it sound lame. So, I figured that you would know…

I’m really sorry, I know I shouldn’t asked that kind of question but seriously I’m drawing a blank here. And I really hope you could help.

So, this is going to be a difficult place for you to get your start. It’s not truly possible to convey time compression in prose (or in sequential art.) This is really easy with films because you can just ramp the footage.

You can flatly state that there’s time compression, that things are happening in slow motion, but I’m willing to bet you already tried that and it didn’t work.

So, when you’re writing a fight scene, you generally want to keep the language as simple and fluid as possible. There’s a lot of skill to making this the best it can be, but a simple blow by blow is a safe starting point.

The more efficient you are with the prose, the faster the audience will read it, and by extension, the faster they will perceive it as occurring. More detailed prose, and larger blocks of text will slow the reader, and slow their perception of the passage of time. This creates a false answer for you, “clearly the solution is to just pad out the fight scene with additional detailed descriptions to slow down the reader, so they are perceiving the fight in slow motion.” The problem with that approach is, it doesn’t actually convey slow motion, it makes the fight feel slow.

There is a delicate balance when you have characters with heightened reflexes, where you can inject slightly more detail into the character’s perceptions mid-fight, to convey the idea that they are processing information faster than a normal person.

This is also someplace where character knowledge can become a huge factor. A character with extensive knowledge of firearms may be able to identify the exact make and model of a weapon when it’s drawn, while a less knowledgeable character might just identify it as, “a gun.” If your character is not particularly knowledgeable, but has heightened reflexes you might be able to convey that by slapping a couple adjectives onto the gun when it’s drawn or fired.

The other problem you, probably, encountered is that anime doesn’t easily translate to non-visual media. Anime is an art style, and that informs the entire work. Not just, parts of it. Writing anime inspired works in prose can be challenging. You lose the visual cues that the art style informs, and as a result you’re left trying to reconstruct without the art style that actually sells it.

It gets worse; Anime relies heavily on spectacle to sell its action. Simply trying to copy that without the visual component, can easily result in disappointing scenes. You’re providing an excellent example of this. The visual spectacle of a character seeing a bullet coming towards them in slow motion and snatching it out of the air can be compelling. However, the text description undermines the character and the scene. They’re no longer fighting to survive, and instead showing off. If you’re trying to establish an anime superhero, that’s fine, but if you’re trying to maintain any tension to the fight, that will kill it.

It is possible to write anime style narratives in prose, however, this is not an easy starting point. It requires a fairly comprehensive understanding of the genre, including a lot of the subtleties in the way it is written, and the reasoning behind that.

So, while you can absolutely write that scene, pulling it off well will some pretty sophisticated work, a lot of skill, and a lot of homework. I would not recommend this for your first fight scene. I would instead suggest starting with something more contained violence.

-Starke

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How unrealistic is to have a hero who is politically savvy/uses guile but also uses brawn? I heard is bad to have a hero (especially a female one) to “have it all”

“Realistic,” is a bit of a loaded term, but, on it’s own, this is not a problem.

An, “overpowered character,” is only measured in relation to the adversity they face. If there was an objective measure of how powerful a character could be, the superhero genre couldn’t exist.

So, “adversity,” is a little bit of a weird way to phrase it. I’m collecting multiple antagonistic factors together here; including the actual villains, the protagonist’s own flaws, and other incidental factors that are working against them. A story starts to suffer when the protagonist grossly outclasses their adversity.

So, let’s look at a simple(-ish) example of this: On the surface Superman is an utterly boring character. He is absurdly powerful and his greatest foe is a dude with cancer. Here’s the thing about that, Superman has a host of internal flaws. Some of these are the simple vulnerabilities, (like kryptonite and magic), while others are his difficulty with human civilization, his desire to fit in (and the entire Clarke Kent persona), his own moral code (this is a double edged sword, as it’s critical to his identity as a person, but it also seriously limits how he’s willing to solve his problems.) Depending on the writer, Superman can either be an utterly uninteresting brick, or an incredibly compelling character, and this hinges on the author’s ability to balance his inherent limitations to bring out an interesting narrative.

it’s difficult to manage a hero who has it all. This is because, if you miss the balance on their foes, the whole story will fall flat. This leads to two easy solutions, low power heroes with limited options, or extraordinarily powerful villains. However, if you feel up to the task, it’s entirely possible to have powerful heroes who are hamstrung by factors unrelated to the foes they’re facing.

A character who is in a politically important position can’t go digging through dive bars hunting for leads. They may be able to send an agent, but, politically, they may not be able to directly intervene. Conversely, a spy may have the political savvy, and even be willing to get into the occasional brawl to maintain their cover, but they come with the distinct disadvantage that if they’re exposed, they’ll be hunted down and killed. That, by the nature of their job, they are incredibly vulnerable.

The, “trick,” such as there is one, is in understanding the limitations of your character when you’re creating them.

And then there’s Doc Savage. Okay, that’s a little unfair of me, there is an entire host of pulp protagonists from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, that would eventually evolve into the early superhero genre, though Savage is one of the most famous examples. It’s an important stepping stone to understand in the creation of the modern superhero. These were characters who were (generally speaking) without flaws, and (at least in the case of Savage), were thrown into adversity that bordered on parody. The rule of adversity above still applies, however, the entire structure is about applying ever greater degrees of external adversity for the character to overcome. So, while I said it can be difficult to manage a powerful character, Lester Dent was pumping out Doc Savage novels in less than 40 days. (Seriously, he wrote 159 novels in 16 years.)

So, when you’re creating a powerful character, you want to keep in mind the foes they’ll face and their own limitations. If your character can breeze through whatever you put in front of them, you may have a problem. However, if you’ve created foes who can legitimately challenge your protagonist, it doesn’t particularly matter how powerful your character is, only how powerful they are in relation to their opponents and the adversity they’ll face along the way.

-Starke

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