 So this may sound like an odd subject to make a world-building video on. It barely ever comes up in anything fantasy or sci-fi related. Video games, movies, books, tabletop RPGs, whatever the medium, martial arts are hardly ever even mentioned. Well, that's exactly why I'm making this, because it's a subject no one ever thinks about. We all spend millions of collective hours creating and tweaking fictional religions, languages, and histories, yet none of us ever take time to think about something that's just as much a part of our world as all that. It doesn't matter how much fighting there is in the setting, writers just sort of hand wave away that warriors exist. Maybe there will be some information on weapons and armor. There's no mention whatsoever of how they fight, though. It's almost mandatory for fantasy novels to have a sequence where the protagonist learns to be an amazing swordsman, because that's just what happens, I guess. Yet this sequence is always, well, surface level seems a little generous. More like it skims along the surface of the setting's martial arts without actually touching on them. Some fantasy series take this time to examine an aspect of the setting's culture. In Wheel of Time, there's plenty of talk about sword forms and how they work. The Stormlight Archive invents magical weapons called Shardblades, and there's a constructed style about how people would fight with them. There are even some sketches showing how stances might work. The only problem is that this Shardbearer is clearly breaking his wrist in the illustration, did a single fencer look at this thing before they public. Both of those only focus on the use of a single weapon, and there's little to no regional variation. These series go on about sword forms without ever mentioning that there are multiple styles, or talking about other weapons, or even mentioning how unarmed combat works. Their martial arts are as deep as a puddle, yet still put everything else in fantasy to shame. One of the only franchises to do this subject any justice is Star Wars. If you're a fan, you might be aware that there are seven different lightsaber forms, each with its own distinct method of combat. But you have to be a super fan to know just how many different fighting styles exist in this universe. Oh my god, there are so many. Different races have their own styles developed for their own anatomy, different cultures have their own, different weapons have their own distinct ways of using them. Man, there is so much here. It's a fascinating rabbit hole, and having even a little bit of this makes the entire universe feel so much deeper than just throwing in yet another planet with yet another interchangeable alien race. But in most con worlds, there's not much detail given beyond, they swing the sharp thing at the other guy, and that's a real shame. Make a list of all the real world martial arts you can think of. Pause the video for a minute if you want. Alright, now how many could you come up with? You could probably think of a few well-known ones like Karate and Taekwondo. Maybe if you're more knowledgeable than the average person, you know about stuff like Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Did your list include Pankration, or Kalari Payatu, or Okichita, or Sambho, or Moiboron, or Savat, or Eskrima, or Mauu Rakao, or Hopkido? Probably not, but those are all real. Orientalism in the media has created a weird environment where people hear the term martial arts and exclusively think of East Asian ones. You probably imagine people wearing gi's and or doing a variety of complex dance-like movements that are obviously far superior to simply punching someone in the face like those Baka Gaijin do. And those ARE martial arts, they just aren't the only type of martial arts. Every human culture in history has had some form of martial arts because every culture in history has fought at least a little bit. On top of East Asian ones, there's also South Asian martial arts, European martial arts, Polynesian martial arts, Native American martial arts, and so on. But that's a long enough introduction. Let's go over how some of this works and how it can fit into any world you build. Part 1. The Basics Let's get some basic information out of the way first, just so we're all on the same page. Martial arts broadly fall into two categories. Hard arts and soft arts. Hard arts focus on striking, e.g. punching, kicking, headbutts, and so on. In the real world, this includes stuff like boxing, most schools of karate, and Muay Thai. Soft arts focus on throwing and grappling to subdue your opponent. This includes things like Judo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Western wrestling. And of course, there's the use of weapons, which can be for cutting, stabbing, bludgeoning, or restricting your opponent's movements. Or all of the above. Use of weapons falls under the martial arts umbrella, even though a lot of people think that it only includes unarmed styles. But remember that if the world you've made includes magic or psychic powers or anything along those lines, you can expand this further and have that magic system tie into the various martial arts of the setting, e.g. the various types of bending in Avatar. I made it this long in a video about fictional martial arts before referencing The Last Airbender. Clap for me. Clap for me! Training can take many forms depending on technology, what's affordable, what level of risks people find acceptable, and how much everyone involved knows. Generally speaking, though, you won't get very good if you only train by yourself. A character training by themselves in a cave or other secluded location for a while and coming out a grandmaster is a very common trope and it annoys me. You need someone to practice with in order to know how to act and react. That said, when you're practicing techniques that could kill or seriously injure your opponent, you often have to practice without a partner. That's why just about every martial art ever created has choreographed movements for practitioners to learn. These have many names. Forms, kata, flourishes, it doesn't matter, they're the same basic thing. A set of movements you practice to get used to doing them. Just doing forms won't make you better, but they help. Okay, that's the basic info out of the way. Let's move on. Part 2, What They're For In recent years, there's been a trend towards low fantasy, with things like dragons, elves, demons, and orcs becoming rarer. The sort of kitchen sink fantasy with a bunch of different races all interacting and using tons of magical weapons is less popular than it used to be. And even in modern high fantasy, humans primarily fight other humans using things like swords, bows, and spears. The end result of this is that in modern fantasy, martial arts are pretty much exactly as they are in real life, and that's a real shame. Real martial arts were created for one of three purposes. Sport, self-defense in a civilian context, and warfare. There's overlap between these categories, but they were all created to deal with a specific set of circumstances. A regular person may not have access to the same weapons as a soldier, or they may not be convenient to carry around. You probably won't take a halberd with you on your walk to grandma's house in the next town, but you might carry a knife, so you would practice with that. In feudal Japan, samurai and other soldiers never used shields. Have you ever noticed that? The reasons for that are complicated. The short version is that they weren't very useful. The type of iron in Japan wasn't great, so they couldn't use it for plate armor the way they did in Europe. And their armor eventually became good enough to resist most of the weapons they came up against. So Japanese martial arts, even those used in warfare, didn't involve shields. Instead, they focused on the use of two-handed weaponry. Meanwhile, European martial arts have shields everywhere, from the Greek Aspis to the small round buckler. They had to learn not just how to use them, but how to counter them. In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, the circumstances people live under vary substantially, more so than in real life. For starters, magic and fictional creatures can create whole new environments for them that real people never dealt with. Then there's fictional resources they can use to create different weapons and armor. If people live in coastal cities that are raided by merfolk regularly, they would need to fight in a way that counters the way merfolk fight. If there's magical steel that's as cheap and common as wood, then suits of armor would probably be pretty common. The real thing that always gets me, though, is that even in kitchen sink style settings, everyone seems to fight in the exact same manner and that just doesn't add up. A style designed for humans to fight other humans may not work on something like, say, a race of seven foot tall orcs. They would have an advantage in both reach and strength. Fighting something that big with a regular sword probably wouldn't work well. What if you had to fight a race that wasn't bigger, but they had four arms? Grappling them would be difficult and far different than with a human. What if they had ultra flexible joints that couldn't be broken easily? What if their only vital organ was their heart and damaged anything else would heal? These would all change how people approach combat. They would use different weapons, different tactics, and they would aim for different weak spots. Fighting humans who use different styles or weapons requires different tactics. Fighting things that aren't human at all would also require different tactics. In World War Z by Max Brooks, there's a brief passage about a martial art called Umcungalalem, which translates as the eel and the sword, a fighting style for defending against zombies. There's not much detail given. All we know is that there's an emphasis on wiggling out of grapples to avoid being bitten by zombies. Since they won't strike at you, all you need to do is avoid their mouth. Similarly, since pain and injuries won't bother them, there's no point in striking them in most cases. Todd MacArthur over on Deviantark made a few sketches for how it might look. So thanks for that, Todd. You can see here that these techniques make use of the predictable nature of zombies to get them off balance, then follow up with a killing strike to the head, since that's the only thing that will take them down. These probably wouldn't work as well on humans, since they would be focused on avoiding the machete. The Vampire Combat Manual is not a good book, but the author did spend a lot of time thinking about how a person would fight a creature that's almost human, yet far stronger and looking to bite you on areas with major veins and arteries. Since vampires are stronger than humans, he emphasizes using weapons in all encounters, and if that's not an option, to utilize soft arts like aikido, judo, and samba to mitigate their strength advantage. My own current work in progress also has vampires, so I spent time developing a fighting style that humans would use against them. The short version is that it's focused on protecting your neck, since that's where vampires will try to attack, and largely targets the enemy's soft spots like the abdomen. It's meant to be practical and flexible, so it doesn't have a lot of rigid forms or specific techniques to use, it just gives its practitioners some tools to work with that they can modify to suit their own needs. That's vague, because that's the thing here. Worldbuilding martial arts is just like worldbuilding languages. You can go to the trouble of creating an entire fighting style, but you only need to cover a few details and the audience will fill in the blanks on their own. And that isn't even counting what sort of fighting styles these other races would develop to utilize their own anatomy. Imagine a race of forearmed humanoids and what they could do. They could wield four swords at once, or two swords and two shields, or a spear and a great sword. The possibilities are almost endless. Dwarves and gnomes would have far less reach than other races, so they would probably use pole arms like spears and pikes, or just focus on ranged weaponry. Hear that, Gimli? Your axe is useless. Throw it out. So basically, before developing any sort of fighting styles for your setting, think about what the people who use them are using them for. Think about the threats they face and the tools they have at their disposal to combat those threats. Part 3, weapons. If you're an American, like me, it's probably easy to get a hold of most weapons, provided you can afford them. If you live somewhere that's not America, there are typically more restrictions on them. And even if you ARE American, there are still some restrictions. I can own a shotgun, I just can't take it to the park and do target practice with small children balancing apples on their heads. At least, not yet. Sign my petition in the pinned comment below if you want to change that. This is all great, but only possible due to technology. If I lived in a different time period, I wouldn't be able to use gunpowder to remind those kids who's in charge, I'd have to use a war pick, or something else barbaric. See, weapons are made with the resources available and for the circumstances they're used in. If you're fighting heavily armored knights on horseback, you want something with reach that can pierce their armor. If you're fighting someone who is naked and screaming, you don't necessarily need that. Without steel, you're limited in what you can make, especially in regards to armor. Bronze Age swords were much shorter than later ones because bronze is less durable than iron or steel, and it worked because their armor was also weaker. Without metal at all, you have to get even more creative. People made all sorts of deadly implements out of rock, bone, wood, and whatever else they could. Polynesians even took wooden paddles and sewed shark's teeth onto the edges of them, making them into lacerating weapons of doom. Just about every culture decided that one of the best ways to fight is by whacking your opponent with a stick. Short sticks, long sticks, really long sticks, it doesn't matter, just get a stick and start whacking. The exact manner of the whacking varies, yet it's always there, because almost every culture has access to wood. So, when looking at the sorts of fighting styles that cultures in your world use, first look at what resources they have access to, what can they find, harvest, or trade for, and how expensive would it be? The great part of creating a whole new world, though, is that you can create all types of new weapons which don't work in real life. Shard blades, lightsabers, hammers that always return to their wielder's hand, sentient swords that fight on their own, all kinds of stuff. Thing is, though, these weapons, magical or otherwise, would likely be used differently than real ones. Stormlight Archive has gone into some detail about this. Shard blades are used differently than regular swords, since they're so big and so light. They usually get swung in broad sweeping arcs, since they'll just slice through anything in their path, and they have enough reach that wielders can afford to leave themselves open for a little bit longer than they could with shorter swords. This is a Klingon Batleth. It looks stupid, and that's because it is stupid. It's used like this, completely different than, say, a sword, since it's a completely different weapon. It might work okay as a weapon for one-on-one duels, but that's about it. It wouldn't work well for hunting, or in a large battle, or if you were fighting something bigger than you, like, say, a troll, or other monster. So if Batleth works for the honor and battle-obsessed Klingons, it wouldn't work well for Geralt of Rivia. Therefore, he probably wouldn't bother to learn to use it. Weapons are a part of martial arts, and like martial arts, they're designed for a specific set of circumstances. Weapons are, however, much more limited by resources and technology than unarmed fighting. So think about what sort of situations the people who made them made them for. Then think about how well they would work, and how easy they would be to make. Are they expensive, or cheap enough that anyone can afford them? And what are the laws surrounding their use and ownership? Can anyone own a sword? Or will women be put to death if they so much as touch something meant for fighting? Are there any ethnic or religious minorities that are deliberately kept unarmed? If so, how do they deal with that? Consider all of these questions before simply throwing things into your setting that people use to kill each other. Also, consider using something other than swords because, holy shit, there are so many of those things in fiction. Please use your imagination. I'm begging you. Use a stick. Those are good for whacking. Someone please give your protagonist a stick. Part four, they're part of the culture. Culture is a nebulous term, to say the least. It includes a lot of things. One of the most prominent of those is art, things like music, painting, sculptures, etc., are all part of the cultures that produce them. And so are martial arts. It's in the name, people. Martial arts tie very closely into things like religion, philosophy, and spirituality. Various cultures tie all of those into their fighting styles to give practitioners confidence in battle or help them focus. Chi is a concept from China, and in this context, it's life energy, and people can send that energy throughout their bodies to make themselves stronger. Sort of. I'm greatly oversimplifying. Chinese martial artists send their chi from their chest into their limbs as they strike to hit harder. But really, it's just a technique to make sure they're breathing properly as they strike, because you're supposed to exhale as you hit to get more power. Whether you believe there's magic involved or not, it does work. A great detail from the Star Wars expanded universe is that lightsaber duels don't involve much thinking. Jedi or Sith are meant to practice lightsaber forms, both alone and inspiring, until it becomes muscle memory. Then simply let the force flow through them and let it guide their movements. In a weird way, they aren't even fighting, they're just letting the force manifest itself. This is kind of similar to how real fights work. You don't have time to stop and think, everything has to work on instinct. That's why training and practice are so vital. Things like Chi are used as a way for practitioners to visualize their movements and do them properly. In traditional Oceanian societies, mana was viewed as a supernatural force. Having a lot of mana meant someone had a lot of power and authority. One of the ways to gain mana was to defeat enemies in battle. Every time a warrior killed one, he would increase his own mana. This varied depending on culture, but that's the general idea. So by being good in battle and taking mana from enemies, warriors would gain authority among their own tribe. In this way, mana served as a basis for organizing and governing society, and it tied into martial arts. And just like other parts of culture, such as language, martial arts influence and are influenced by those they come into contact with. You've probably never heard of Kalari Payatu, a martial art from southern India, but its influence is huge. It first moved into China when Buddhist monks came to spread their beliefs. They learned martial arts to defend themselves in their travels and taught it to others. Then the people of China used it as the basis for many schools of kung fu. Then these styles of kung fu made their way across the rest of Asia where they became things like karate in Okinawa, jujitsu in Japan, and taekyeon in Korea. So most East Asian martial arts are descended from Kalari Payatu. At least that's how the legend goes. In reality, native Chinese fighting styles already existed long before Indian monks made their way north. What's indisputable is that Kalari Payatu influenced Chinese martial arts, and then those influenced martial arts throughout the rest of Asia. And on top of that, these legends are part of culture too. Every group of people tells a story about themselves, and legends like the one around Kalari Payatu are a part of it. Think of Americans going on about the Boston Tea Party, or Chinese stories about the Yellow Emperor. These are tales about where they came from, a way for them to all feel like they're a part of something bigger. Some of these stories are real, some are fabrications, and some are exaggerations of real events. But they exist for everyone, and I only occasionally see them in fiction. Let's say in your world humans live alongside a bunch of other races, all of whom are far bigger and stronger than they are. So for centuries humanity was the punching bag of the world. They were always getting enslaved and pushed off the best land until they only occupy a tiny area on the outskirts of civilization, waiting to go extinct. Until one day, a man named Richard meets an angel who descended from heaven, and that angel teaches him how to create magical swords that slice through steel like butter, as well as how to use them properly. Then Richard shares this knowledge with the rest of humanity. Many generations later humans have turned the tables, and now they dominate the world, using this legend all the time as an explanation. Is this legend true in setting? Maybe, maybe not. It's not important, it's part of the story that humanity tells about itself here. They'd probably guard the secrets of their world-conquering fighting style and swordsmithing jealously. To them it would be something that's unique to being human, not to be shared with outsiders. Back in the 1960s Bruce Lee got a bunch of Chinese nationalists upset with him for teaching kung fu to non-Chinese people. They tried to get him to stop with little success since Bruce Lee did whatever the fuck he wanted all the time. But the point is that they saw it being something that belonged to them and their culture. They didn't want others learning about it. What I've spent this section getting at is that culture is complicated and has a lot of interlocking parts. Martial arts are a single one of those parts which are often forgotten, and you shouldn't forget them. They should exist alongside things like language and religion. Part five, how much detail do you need? The short version, not very much. Not only is it difficult to go into extreme detail about specific movements and techniques, it gets boring fast. If you feel after all of this that you need to spend a year doing research and workshopping, don't. Unless you just find that fun in which case go for it. For everyone else, just come up with a basic idea for how things should work in your mind and let that guide your work. Then the audience will figure out the rest. If you don't want to create a whole new style, just use real ones. Take Shaolin Kung Fu and add fire magic to it. Boom, now you have firebending. Add water magic to Tai Chi and boom, now you have waterbending. It's better for something to exist and be derived from the real world than for it to not exist at all. Study the movements of whatever real style you want to use, find a way to describe it, and then do that. Maybe give it a different name too. And that's where I'll leave you. While we could go on about this for literal hours and barely scratch the surface, that would defeat the purpose of this video. I'm not here to tell you what exact steps to take to make the perfect, most bestest fictional martial art of all time. I'm here to give you a framework to build off of. Because just as every single setting you can make will be a little bit different, every process people use to make them is different. But whatever process you use, don't forget that people like to fight each other. And as long as we've been doing it, we've been finding ways to do it better. Thanks for watching. Hello, everyone. You're still watching? Well, that's pretty cool. You see all these names here? These are my patrons. They're the people that send me money once a month over on Patreon. My $10 and up patrons are Appo Savolennin, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Chib Zahoy, Dan Anceliovic, Dark King, Dio, Echo, Flax, James M, Carcat Kitsune, Lexi DeLorm, Liza Rudecova, Lord Tiebreaker, Microphone, Mistboy, Mitsimona, Peep the Toad, Robi Reviews, Sad Martigan, Psyche XS, Selene, Silyr the Vixen, Stone Stairs, Tesla Shark, Vaivictus, Vimeck Zoll, and Wesley. Who could ever forget Wesley? And you know what? Thanks all of you. If you can't afford to, you know, get access, early access to videos and stuff, then that's fine. Just like the video, comment on it, share it around, annoy all your friends with it. You know, that's cool too. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't. And if you have subscribed, then I guess like unsubscribe and then re-subscribe. I don't know if that does anything, but it makes me feel pretty cool. Anyways, goodbye.