A New and Experimental Way to Understand Opposition

Today, we have a thinky post. I was inspired to write this post after some fights over the weekend, in which find-gain-attack wasn't working against me. I was able to counter-gain and attack my opponent due to my shoulders being higher, and I wanted to explore why this is the case.

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After-the-fact edit: I've already thought of some problems with this, but I'm going to wait for a while to update this post.

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What is Opposition? Well, it's the mechanism by which we interpose our sword in order to limit our opponent's options in order to not be hit.

This is usually performed by pushing our opponent's blade aside, and then extending our arm to place our blade literally on top of our opponent's blade. However, if your shoulders are lower than your opponent's shoulders, this becomes difficult. This is due to the following principle:

Ignore the fact that these spheres get terrible  past the part where they overlap.

I don't own a compass. The spheres should be centered on the fighters' shoulders.

I know they're circles. Imagine them as spheres because that's what they are in real life.

If your opponent's shoulders are higher than yours, then you are giving up range at full extension by attempting to put your blade on top of theirs. As well, consider the following:

In this position, the higher opponent can gain stronger opposition by moving forward. The lower opponent, however, can only gain opposition by raising their hand.

If the higher opponent wants to stab the lower one, all they need to do is move forward and stab at the lower one's face, pushing their sword aside by the weak.

If the lower wants to stab the higher, then they can't just push through. Pushing forward moves a weak part of their blade to a strong part of their opponent's blade. The only single-tempo action they have is a disengage and thrust to the belly. They can pull their hand back to gain better opposition, but that adds a tempo to their action.

Let's look at the first picture again.

If opposition is the way we stab our opponent without being hit, it makes sense that we would want to put our opponent's sword in a place that means we can hit them without them hitting us. If we look at the spheres depicted in this picture, we can see that the lower person can hit farther on a low line, and the higher person can hit farther on a high line.

So, it makes sense that if we are higher than our opponent, we want to bring their sword up, and push through their sword on a high line.

If we are lower than our opponent, we want to bring their sword down, and push through their sword on a low line.

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Shoulder positioning matters. If someone's shoulders are higher, then that means that the Duello-style find-gain-attack Just Works. You can remain more on-line than your lower opponent, since coming on-line to strike at your chest or face is automatically a disadvantage to them in terms of opposition, as illustrated above. I have had problems working on Duello-style find-gain-attack bladework because of this very set of principles.

I think this means that the lower opponent should favor Transports, in an Italian context. You sweep their sword down and are in position to stab them in the gut, as illustrated above. This doesn't mean a lower opponent can't find-gain-attack. This is manifestly false. It just requires the lower opponent to carry their opponent more off-line before attacking.

Note that I'm saying "higher" and "lower". This is because you can raise or lower your shoulders in subtle ways over the course of a bout. The two people in the first picture should be about the same height, if they were standing up straight. The one on the left just has a far, far wider stance.

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This is all well and good, but it's not enough. It's a set of squishy, imprecise if-then-else statements. This is terrible. Swordsmanship should be universal! If there's this idea of "carrying up" and "carrying down", how do we do it?

Fortunately, we have the Spanish. The Spanish have their own set of sweeps and carries, which I have worked with for some time. However, I could never get the thrust after the atajo to work quite right. The brewing of some half-remembered ideas about "straightening the arm" and "spiraling the blade in" eventually led to some exciting geometry.

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This is intended ot be a drawing of someone pointing at you in a destreza stance.

The thing that looks like an apple is a sword.

Foreshortening is hard. Drawing is hard.

If you imagine an opponent standing head-on, facing you, the farthest they can reach is the line extending from their shoulder to your shoulder. If they are head-on to you, this is close to a point. If their arm is fully extended, then you can imagine them divided into quarters. Their shoulder lies at the center. The lower-right quadrant contains their belly, while the upper-right quadrant contains their head.

I'm going to show you a symbol now. It won't make sense until I explain it. That's okay though.

Each line represents part of a blade transition that can be done. So, there are two in the upper-right quadrant. One is represented by first going up, and then going right. The next is represented by going right, and then going up. At the end of each of these, we cut through our opponent's blade and push them to one of the adjacent quadrants.

So, the first one I mentioned moves your blade up, then right, then pushes your opponent's sword down into the bottom-right quadrant.

The second one goes right, then up, then pushes your opponent's sword from the upper-right quadrant into the upper-left quadrant.

Each of these movements is begun with the tip. There are four steps in each. I assume that you are in an arm-extended late-period Destreza stance, although I will later show that this is not necessary. The steps are:

1. Move your tip outwards along the central cross.
1. In the first example, this means to move it up.
2. You are only moving at the wrist here.
2. Move your tip outwards along the end of the cross. At the same time, move your hilt to the position that your tip used to occupy.
1. In the first example, this means to move your tip right and your hilt up.
2. The tip movement is again accomplished with your wrist. The hilt movement is accomplished with your shoulder. Or elbow, if you really want?
3. Move your sword in a direction opposite the two directions you have moved. Straighten your arm fully at this step, such that your sword points out along the dot in that quadrant of the cross.
1. This is the step at which you first make blade contact. According to the first example, you should be pushing your opponent's sword downwards.
2. You will be adjusting slightly right and down with your shoulder. Your wrist will be straightening back out, which will carry your tip leftwards somewhat.
3. I'm not sure if you should be straightening your wrist completely - I think it might be just a pivot opposite to the second direction. This is to make your sword "flat" relative to the direction your hand is moving, to make it harder for your opponent to use your momentum to slide from your strong to your weak.
4. Keep pushing your opponent's sword opposite the first movement you made, carrying your and their sword into the appropriate quadrant.
1. This means that you have pushed them downwards, in the first example.
2. The downward push is accomplished with your shoulder at this point. You probably shouldn't need to bend at the elbow or wrist at this point? But maybe you will. Who knows.

This is the shape of the first action:

Here is an excruciatingly thorough and somewhat exaggerated illustration of the action, from the side and the top:

The side view of the third step has a weird sword because I was unsure 

if it should be parallel to the ground, or straight in line with my arm. This is one of those things I will

attempt to work on tonight.

Step 4 Top View also has an art error. The arm should be *more* toward the center than Step 3 Top View, rather than less.

There is a diagonal aspect to the last action, but it's primarily downwards. This diagonal aspect is omitted in the below listing of the actions.

The tl;dr of this is that you move your sword around your opponent's sword and then cut through their sword in the direction opposite of where they currently are.

Real talk: In practice, the first and second actions can be combined, or even used as a stance to rest in. The third and fourth actions are basically the same action, except that you want to have your arm straight near the beginning of your movement.

The eight actions and their result in a righty-versus-righty fight are:

1. Up, right, down. Probably stabs the gut.
2. Right, up, left. Probably misses over their right shoulder.
3. Right, down, left. Probably misses under their right arm.
4. Down, right, up. Probably stabs the face.
5. Down, left, up. Probably misses above and outside of their right arm.
6. Left, down, right. Probably stabs their right flank or belly.
7. Left, up, right. Probably stabs their face. Maybe their right cheek?
8. Up, left, down. Probably misses, sort of looped over their right arm.

In general, you want to use the action corresponding to the location of their blade. If their blade is super-low and only a little to your right, you probably want to use Action 4 - down, right, up.

If the correct action isn't clear, you can make it more clear by walking left or right, or dropping your shoulders to reposition the relative location of the cross on their shoulder.

If your opponent has their arm and blade very far off-line, this will not help you too much? You can approach and then counter-thrust if they thrust as you enter measure, or you can do something different to bar them and keep them off-line, then thrust as you get close.

If your opponent has more reach then you, then you will have to push them farther off-line to succeed, so they can't yield around your opposition and stab you.

If your opponent's shoulders are higher than yours, you should favor the actions which involve downward movements. Similarly, if your opponent stands lower, you should favor actions which involve upward movements.

My intuition says that after you initiate the movement, you should step in the opposite direction you would expect to, in order to get past their hilt more easily. So for Action 1, you would circle left until you complete Step 2, at which point you would take one step to the right in order to finish the action.

I have also been less than transparent with you about the definition of "in a quadrant". "In a quadrant" just means that the part of your opponent's blade that you expect to touch in Step 3 of your action is in that quadrant. Their full sword could span up to three quadrants, but only the location of the part you plan to touch matters. This gets complex if your opponent is not in a late-period Spanish stance, but you should be able to hide behind your hilt such that their riposte is a duo-tempi action, regardless of where you push them or how they started.

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Let's break this down even more.

Fencing is a game of reactions. You want to get your opponent into a position in which you can stab them before they react. Since steps 3 and 4 can (and, in execution, should) be done as a single-tempo action, that means that our Win Position is after completing step 3. So, if you can get your hand angled right with respect to your opponent's blade, you can take a single step and blast them in the face or gut.

As a note, this is the idea of tempo as according to the Italian. If I remember my research from a few years ago correctly, the Spanish tended to prefer to think of time as more fluid, and not divisible into discrete moments. I disagree with the Spanish in this regard. I have apparently never written a blog post about this, and I should fix this posthaste.

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Most Italian stances are "pre-loaded" in a position in your lower-left, upper-left, or lower-right, depending on which Italian master we are talking about. So, the appropriate single-tempo responses would be pre-loaded Actions 6, 7, and 4, correspondingly. Approach as though you have already completed Step 2, and then stab them in the gut, face, or face.

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As a note, Spanish masters tend to deeply dislike "violent" or upwards movement. This means that Actions 4 and 5 are probably a no-go according to them. I plan to use them, however, and see how it goes. Maybe I will come to agree, maybe not.

Happy fencing!