Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "knights"

It's often said that fight scenes are only good if they forward the plot, and that to have one without deep narrative weight is a waste of everyone's time. I say you can go deeper: a fight scene always has weight because they wouldn't try to beat the shit out of one another if it didn't.



That is, so long as the writer's doing their job.

It's a clash of wills - motivations, deep convictions, that the characters are willing to stake their very lives for. They know what they're getting into, and they're not going to back down. It's likely - preferable even - that they already tried to figure things out by words and diplomacy, and failed. This is the only recourse left.

Sometimes, one side (usually the villain) thinks they hold an overwhelming advantage - ambush, terrain, or some weapon or technique - and find that it's simply the easy way out to unleash this advantage on an enemy rather than try to talk it through. They need no such convictions as discussed above... but their victim does. It's up to the underdog opposition to prove them wrong and to take the fight to them. It was, after all, likely their own convictions that led to them being ambushed in such a cowardly way in the first place.



If this isn't true, you're fighting for no reason but to put up a show for the viewer. Just a spectacle that may indeed be nice to see, but that to me does not hold any real long-term interest. It does not, as you say, forward the plot.

But there's another consideration: whatever happens, all involved must take the fight seriously, in-universe and out.



You're trying to put a world of hurt to somebody, and that somebody is trying to do the same to you. This is no place to goof off or to relax, prolong it any more than necessary, or even to get distracted for a moment to talk about plot stuff with your buddies. This is equally true of the narrator (or director): they too should keep their attention well to it and frame it in an equally serious manner, rather than cutting to, I don't know, a little wood creature dancing comically in the foreground. You know of what I speak. It is a travesty.

(Not to say there can't be comedy in it, a few good laughs from the audience's part - especially when the fight isn't to the death - but the characters themselves shouldn't find much to laugh about.)

If any of this happens, then why should the reader take the fight any more seriously? There's no real sense of threat, and everything's obviously going to be fine!

I like my fight scenes gritty, meaty, and messy. I like to devote my full attention to them, and to have each character do the same. They don't break out on a whim, and once they do, are unlikely to last long. They're never effortless, nor trivial: even if the heroes do survive unscathed (and they rarely do), there must always be the expectation that they could be seriously hurt if they slipped up for only a moment; even if it's a quick mid-story scene long before the climax, where by any story conventions you should know for a fact they'll be fine, you must still at least feel a slight gnaw at your stomach that perhaps they won't be.

It's a clash of powerful and climactic forces, after all. One can never be truly certain.