> >A member of the
> >traditional schools is likely to manifest his Tiger Strike by
> >punching Gary (to be equal oppurtunity in my violent examples)
> >across the room, focussing his self-individuation and feelings of
> >aggression into his closed fist.
> But if there are more traditional, then there are also less
> traditional schools.
Not that I actually said 'more traditional', mind. I'm in a no-win situation here, it would seem: if I make a statement about martial schools in general, I'm being too prescriptive; if I make a more qualified statement, this is taken as a concession that there are "more interesting" schools than the sort I'm talking about, so let's ignore those and move swiftly on.
> Less traditional schools may more often tend to be bad
> guys, of course.
> Personally, I have figured Tiger Style to be one of the less
> traditional, and Dragon Style (predicaably) to be the most traditional.
I was talking about a Tiger Strike, not a 'Tiger School'. I don't think the one implies the other, so the distinction is not necessarily merely pettifogging. A message I meant to follow-up to earlier, but didn't get around to due to numerous other pre-occupations made a very pertinent point here: the Chinese kung fu styles are, as a generality (and perhaps an over-wooly one, as I'm not intimately familiar with them, perhaps I should stick to 'in several cases') about emulating _one_ animal, but merrily mix in references to (ignoring for the moment what it is the references means...) to numerous animals. I think this important if we want to avoid analogising on an excessively simplistic basis.
I agree with your presumption that anything with the word 'Tiger' in it is suspect on a mystical, if not to say a cultural, level. But the same could be said for punching people through walls, so it's not necessarily amiss for that to be dubbed a Tiger Strike.
> I would contend that most martial arts magic may not be purely mystic.
I'm less interested in theoretical questions like "Is it purely mystic?", which IMO is a semantic minefield that's already claimed several legs, as in functional descriptions of same. What does it look like? What does it do? What do the kralori say about it?
> I make that contention in part because I want Kralorelan campaigns
> to resemble wuxia/ wire fu films, and I am not sure that can be done with
> purely mystic magic.
Since Gary Switzer just advanced the same rationale in the context of his desire for _non_-manifest (in the particular sense at hand) martial arts, I'm tempted to conclude that 'more wuxia' is as objectively useful a standard as 'MGF'.
Cheers,
Alex.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #365
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