Writing Armed & Unarmed Martial Arts-Fight Scenes, with different styles & weapons?

[CarlManvers2019]

How can someone best figure out or learn how to properly portray differing fight styles in text?

Specifically when it seems like both fighters are perhaps using different styles

One doing Krav Maga, the other doing Judo or something else?

Because TBH, most of the books I read with melee combat don't seem to explain what their characters are actually using and mostly seem to just be using a "very practical, simple and generic" sort of martial art with things like feints and not much talk on the punches or types of attacks being much different from one another

And yeah, I think I've seen vids calling lots of taekwondo or karate users "actors" who need their students to "cooperate" or otherwise they get the shit beaten out of them by random brawlers.

How would you best also quickly learn how to write these sorts of fight scenes? Authors/Artists who seem to actually know/study martial arts seem to make it so that both armed and unarmed fights are a constant test of wits or deciding which move is the best to take and changing nearly on the fly

Just so you know, this was sort of a result of me liking Kengan Asura/Omega, somehow never knew feints were a thing until then

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

And yeah, I think I've seen vids calling lots of taekwondo or karate users "actors" who need their students to "cooperate" or otherwise they get the shit beaten out of them by random brawlers.

Taekwondo is entirely practical when practiced as a military combative, it's just lots of people only go through the motions without even understanding what they're for. This is true of a lot of martial arts to various extents, people just going through the motions and not even knowing what they're trying to do.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Taekwondo is entirely practical when practiced as a military combative, it's just lots of people only go through the motions without even understanding what they're for. This is true of a lot of martial arts to various extents, people just going through the motions and not even knowing what they're trying to do.

Fair, half the time I ever had to do some sort of East Asian Martial Art for PE, it was mostly for exercise rather than practicing it in an actual spar

And hell, I don’t think you’ll have the opportunity to get into the right stance for a move unless you actually have the skills to time things right or have enough space

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I typically don't like reading drawn out fight scenes. The moment it starts dragging out any further than "I struck him and won", I start skipping through the text to the conclusion to get back to the actually relevant stuff: the dialogue. 99% of the story in a book happens in the dialogue, not the prose. It seems like a lot of modern fantasy writers forget that and get too caught up in details that aren't relevant.

If you want a drawn out fight scene, consider drawing a comic. It excels well in a visual medium, but not in text. The strength in text is the prose and the dialogue.

I guess you could do a very brief description of the fighting style a character is using for the sake of differentiating the character/a sprinkling of light world building/making your protagonist look like he knows a lot about the martial world.. "Oh, I recognize that stance; it's from the Muramasa-style taught in Okada" or "that guy is used one of master Kenichi's techniques! He must be a student of his" and that's it. Don't go into depth about the intricacies of their exact sword strike or how they're standing or whatever. Just get on with it. They fought. Someone won. Back to the dialogue.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

I typically don't like reading drawn out fight scenes. The moment it starts dragging out any further than "I struck him and won", I start skipping through the text to the conclusion to get back to the actually relevant stuff: the dialogue. 99% of the story in a book happens in the dialogue, not the prose. It seems like a lot of modern fantasy writers forget that and get too caught up in details that aren't relevant.

If you want a drawn out fight scene, consider drawing a comic. It excels well in a visual medium, but not in text. The strength in text is the prose and the dialogue.

I guess you could do a very brief description of the fighting style a character is using for the sake of differentiating the character/a sprinkling of light world building/making your protagonist look like he knows a lot about the martial world.. "Oh, I recognize that stance; it's from the Muramasa-style taught in Okada" or "that guy is used one of master Kenichi's techniques! He must be a student of his" and that's it. Don't go into depth about the intricacies of their exact sword strike or how they're standing or whatever. Just get on with it. They fought. Someone won. Back to the dialogue.

Fair, I think the difference between Martial Arts Manga and other fighting series seems to be, the writers/artists may actually have watched real martial arts and decided to imitate reality a bit more by adding extra detail