Martial Arts Characterization - Hard, Soft, & Hardsoft

Last week, I shared the concept that the way your characters fight can be a serious way to define them on the most fundamental level. It's something that you really ought to think about and take very, very seriously.

Okay, maybe not quite so seriously

However, not everybody has been studying martial arts for years and years. And if you have, where are you going to get the time to write about them or incorporate them into your other media productions?! So here's a relatively quick guide to the most basic divisions among all martial arts styles, the way that people in the profession tend to think of them, or at least divide up the sorts of moves they might use: hard, soft, and hardsoft.

Actually, you might think of the three major types of martial arts like the three moves in Rochambeau (that's "rock, paper, scissors" to most of us - but there are some folks who really take this game seriously!). Or, if you're old like me, you might think of them like the "fire / wood / water" divisions of powers used by the fighting critters in the collectible toy line Battle Beasts.

Honestly, I still think this is heckin' rad

In the martial arts, the three basic styles of fighting are hard, soft, and hardsoft. Details about what each of these entail, along with examples, will be presented below. In general, hard techniques are countered by soft, soft techniques are countered by a hardsoft approach, and hardsoft techniques are countered by a hard approach.

Hard Styles

Hard styles are the ones that are usually best known to those outside of Asia, because they are the ones seen most frequently on television and in movies. Whether acrobatic and flashy or efficient and practical, these styles are set apart by their focus on offense and straight lines.

Hard styles are very effective because they are highly focused, and that focus is on taking one's opponent apart in the fastest, most direct manner possible. With a hard style, it is fairly easy to learn the basics and to become a highly competent fighter in a relatively short period of time, sometimes in as little as two to three years. Military organizations prefer to teach these styles because of these traits of ease of training and the efficiency with which its practitioners can be turned into lethal killers in unarmed combat. Against the wavering and variable hardsoft techniques, hard styles simply plow right through any attempts at defense and fling aside anything less than a full offense, making hard techniques the best against hardsoft styles.

Hard styles have weaknesses, of course. One of the most obvious is that strong physical fitness is usually a requisite of the proper practice of hard styles, because they can be highly demanding of their practitioners. Besides this need for great physical fitness, hard styles are also highly demanding of their practitioners in other ways, taking a great deal of energy from their practitioners and channeling it into aggressive energy. While this generally produces highly fit practitioners in youth, this can have long-term negative health effects. Most glaring of the weaknesses of hard styles is their principle of greatest strength: straight lines. Soft styles are specifically designed to redirect straight lines into more circular paths, and this makes them highly effective against hard styles.

Examples of traditionally hard styles are karate (when it's not mixed with something else...which is pretty much never, so eh), capoiera, taekwondo, Krav Maga, and Muay Thai.

Taken from this site for an island getaway off the coast of Brazil; seriously, though, just the story of how capoeira came to be is an epic tale on it's own! Go read it on that link I gave up above to see what I mean; which is a great example of using a style for building characters and worlds

Soft Styles

In sharp contrast to hard styles, soft styles have a focus on inner development, while its fighting styles have a strong emphasis on circles and redirection of motion. Soft styles avoid direct conflict whenever possible, not only in practice but also in principle. There is a strong belief in the principle of mutually assured destruction that results from opposing force with direct force, and so a soft style practitioner will prefer to absorb an opponent and turn that foe's force back onto the attacker rather than actively strike out.

Soft styles are highly effective because of their strong focus on the development of their practitioners, not just as unassailable combatants, but also on their full-life enjoyment. Practicing soft styles is thought of as being highly beneficial to one's health, both in the short and long term, to producing relaxed, healthy, and happy individuals who are at peace with themselves and the world around them. Flexibility and a concentration on avoidance and redirection of direct assaults makes soft styles astonishingly effective against the more savage hard styles.

However, soft styles do have their weaknesses. The most obvious of these weaknesses is how long it takes for a soft style practitioner to learn enough of the style in order to achieve any level of true mastery. It is not so difficult to learn and even master a few of the techniques of soft styles, and practitioners of many non-soft style make use of these techniques freely, but achieving full mastery of the intricacies of a soft style takes almost an entire lifetime (thankfully lengthened through the practice of the soft style in question). While practicing a soft style might provide health benefits in the long term, its tendency towards yielding can lead to too much softness, so that when direct action actually is needed, a soft style practitioner will be unable to recognize such a need. Hardsoft styles, with their wavering focus, allow the practitioners of such styles to counter soft yielding with similar softness, leaving a soft style practitioner with no place to escape, followed by hard attacks to finally dissipate soft style formlessness once and for all.

A few examples of traditionally soft styles include aikido, judo, and ta'i chi chu'an.

From Wikimedia Commons, two aikido practitioners on the mat

Hardsoft Styles

As a middle ground, hardsoft styles are an intermediary or hybrid between hard and soft styles, in practice as well as philosophy. These styles seek to find a middle ground, developing formless defenses while at the same time being willing and able to reach out and deal damage to opponents in direct fashion. Hardsoft practitioners learn to observe and make rapid situational decisions with an ever-expanding repertoire of techniques to respond to all situations with which such practitioners might be faced.

In theory, hardsoft styles combine all the beneficial elements of both hard and soft styles, taking them to extreme forms. In practice, however, at the same time that they play up the strengths of the other two forms, they also emphasize their weaknesses. Hardsoft styles equip their practitioners with the widest possible range of attacks and counters, making them highly adaptive, and thus extremely effective against the purely inward focus of soft styles. On the other hand, this wide variety of techniques takes a very long time to develop properly into a combat-ready repertoire, and at the same time it can also overload the mind with too much information. This makes a straightforward hard attacker a great danger to the wavering and adaptive hardsoft practitioner.

Some examples of hardsoft styles are kokondo (this was my first martial art), pakua, hsing-i (I have found multiple spellings, so I'm just going with my best guess), and the ever-popular jujitsu.

From the official Pakua International League website

To finish out the blog post, I'd like to include a form that you can fill out, which should cover all the most basic essentials behind a martial art that you intend to use in your own world, be it fantasy, science fiction, or right here in some variant of our own world. You can - and should, of course - adjust these elements of consideration to meet your present needs.

Also, don't be afraid of just making up a martial art style, even in your version of the "real world"! Seriously, people do it all the time - why should you be any different? But if you're gonna steal from sources, at least steal from good source material.

As a final "also," please remember: the story of your martial art is part of the story of the ones who practice it. Are your characters like the original capoeristas, slaves who wanted to learn how to defend themselves from the brutality of their masters?

Or perhaps you're portraying the practitioners of Krav Maga, locked in a lethal struggle against enemies who could strike at any time and who will show you no more mercy than you can afford to show them.

Or perhaps your character is like me and countless others, fascinated by the concept of the martial arts and wanting to get to know more, so they step into a free weekly college class, start reading a few books, and discover one day in a moment of crisis that they can actually handle the situation, keeping themselves and those around them safe.

That's what this form is trying to help you do: craft your martial art as a living part of a living world, an active manifestation of culture and character. Even if you just write out notes on extant martial arts from our world, this is a great opportunity to explain how your character-practitioners interact with the style, where their history intersects with that of the style and its masters.

Now on to the form:

Description

This is where to provide the basic information on a martial art style as an overview to the casual reader.

History and Founder

Where did the martial art style come from originally? Provide a basic overview of who founded the style, how it was established, some notable events of its past, and where it is now.

Philosophy

What is the undergirding philosophy that makes this into a coherent fighting style, and not just some fancy moves strung together by a skilled fighter in the past?

Reactions and Reputation

How well known is the martial art style, and how do people react to it when they hear about it? What groups regard practitioners positively, which negatively, and why?

Where to Receive Training

How widespread is training for this style, where can it be gotten, and what requirements must be passed in order to qualify for this style? Is it ancestral, and requires either blood lineage or adoption? Is it a military form, taught by a standing army? A peasant's or common person's style? Monastic, or belonging to some other specialized order?

Fighting Style

This is where to describe the look and feel of a style. Does it focus on punches, kicks, throws, ground fighting, weapons, a mix of the above, or something else entirely? This area should also include some of the more legendary feats which practitioners of this martial art style are known or rumored to perform or have performed.