Posted By :
liamjtolentino
25 Jan
Unconventional Weapons
This may be one of my more unhinged posts, but I just needed to get this thought into words somehow. I was thinking about how most martial arts styles teach the use of conventional weapons (insert My Chemical Romance joke here) like swords and knives, but I want to see a style that’s based around using random everyday objects you find lying around. In a way, it would be similar to Miss Tatsu’s Beast style from Yakuza 0. For those who haven’t played that game, Beast style is a hyper aggressive fighting style you can play where you pick up the nearest object and use it to beat up your enemies. The Yakuza game series isn’t known for its realism, but I think the concept can be applied to real life martial arts. Obviously you can apply the same skills from using conventional weapons to most items you’d find lying around, but I feel like there would be a lot of situations where you’d have to get really creative and use something like a frying pan which doesn’t have the same balance as something like a dagger. Going back to the Yakuza 0 example, there’s a bunch of techniques in that game centered around using unconventional weapons in unique ways, like using a bicycle to knock down opponents or using a portable stove to burn an enemy that gets too close. Obviously these moves don’t require martial arts skills and are just general improvisation, but I think they can be taken further with martial arts principles.
I’m thinking, if I ever decide to start a martial arts school, I’d teach a style based around the use of unconventional weapons like this. It would obviously have to be based on a solid foundational martial art based around weapons like Kali, but the school would have more focus on understanding the physics of the weapon to better understand how to apply the knowledge to objects that are not meant to be weapons. So back to the frying pan example, you can hold a frying pan like you would a dagger or baton, but you obviously wouldn’t be able to use it in the same way, at least not effectively. We’d probably teach how to adjust for unbalanced weapons like that so that students can understand how to improvise when forced into a situation where they need to use one against a trained opponent. And then for something really unconventional, we’d teach how to use a flat, rigid object as a weapon, like a door or a book or a laptop or even a baking pan (actually, this whole train of thought started when I was in the kitchen earlier and wondered how I’d use a baking pan as a weapon haha). Now I’m no martial arts expert, just a guy who’s really into it, but I’d imagine for this style of weapon, it would be like that scene from Everything Everywhere All At Once where Evelyn used a riot shield like a spinning arrow sign but probably adjusted for different sized objects. See what I mean? There’s no conventional weapon I can think of that’s used in the same way so most martial artists probably wouldn’t really know what to do if they need to use something like that so I think it would be useful to have a fighting style that encompasses all sorts of unconventional weapons so you’re never in a situation where you don’t have a useable weapon.
All that probably sounded either absolutely insane or complete genius and I’ll have no idea until I wake up tomorrow. Maybe both. Who knows? Most of my ideas with a lot of things sound insane at first until they somehow work. But yeah, that’s it. Any martial artists who read this, please reach out to me and tell me I’m crazy.