All competitive games are the same, at heart. The difference is in the way that you interface with the game. That search for different ways to interface with the game is the interesting part of competitive games. Competitions are tests of the validity of your lexicon. Practice is for finding new things to add to your lexicon.
In this terminology, a disengage is one action in your lexicon. As is a lunge. Period manuals provide pre-made lexicons, which have many valid actions and some invalid actions. Some actions are valid for some people, but not valid for others. If an action doesn't work, then either it is a bad action or I don't understand the principle behind the action. There are enough ways to generate new actions that it's not worth my time to try to sort out which category an unusable action falls into. Most actions are not applicable in all situations.
That is all.
It's time for Count-Pointercount!
ReplyDeleteCounterpoint: The actions supplied by manuals aren't so much the point in themselves; rather, they are illustrations of Good Fencing Principles. All the illustrated actions may not apply to every fencer (let's be real, they definitely don't), but the underlying principles apply to all fencers. Ergo, don't work actions without investigating underlying principles, and discarding an action because it seems unusable without sorting out the principle it's trying to illustrate will leave holes in your understanding of the true fight.
I do agree with you, but I feel like it is impossible to tell how valuable the insight from a particular principle might be. Thus, if it takes a bunch of work to figure out, "oh, he was demonstrating a disengage here", then I don't want to do that. I only want insights that are easy to find, unless I have particular reason to believe that a particular insight might be worth more work.
DeleteExamples of these reasons include period masters whose work I know is super good, running out of things to study, specific suggestions of particular plates from other fencers, and holes which I notice in my game. Note that I am very in favor of frequently returning to period masters to look for new insights, because things become more obvious over time.
As well, I think this decreases the likelihood of reading things into an action that the particular master might not have intentionally put there.