I think it made Traditional Martial Arts dojos modulate their claims. It provided a venue of “live” instead of scripted adversaries in a variety of styles, which made it difficult for unscrupulous TMA dojos to make claims about how powerful their arts are. (i.e. you can just say “why don’t you go use it in MMA?”) Of course there’s still value in TMAs: exercise, discipline, competitions, skills like punching and falling and kicking, etc. And MMA has its limitations too, it’s just another rule-based competition, see Rory Miller’s “Meditations on Violence” for one discussion on this.
Yeah, exactly. Violence is contextual. Sometimes you just want to get the drunk out of the bar. Sometimes you want to hurt someone enough to leave you alone. Sometimes you want to defeat your opponent in a fair fight. Sometimes you want to get as many people as possible and catch your enemy by surprise – but even then you may not want to kill them bc you want to “win the peace as well as the war.” Obviously no single “style” is gonna cover all of these. (and one of MMA’s contributions was to emphasize how you could mix them together.)
It took me a while to understand why a lot of self-defence-focussed jiu-jitsu reminded me of Aikido so much, instead of more “efficient” styles.
But it makes sense for the intended purpose: you don’t want to immediately punch someone into the next time zone for being loud and pushy at the bar, or for touching you in a way they see as bold and you see as creepy. But a twisted joint communicates “do this again and it hurts more” pretty well, yet doesn’t do long-term harm or cross the line into excessive violence
Plus, didn’t it reveal taichi to be a load of bollocks? Or was that some other martial art?
It unmasked a ton of charlatans in the martial arts space.
I think it made Traditional Martial Arts dojos modulate their claims. It provided a venue of “live” instead of scripted adversaries in a variety of styles, which made it difficult for unscrupulous TMA dojos to make claims about how powerful their arts are. (i.e. you can just say “why don’t you go use it in MMA?”) Of course there’s still value in TMAs: exercise, discipline, competitions, skills like punching and falling and kicking, etc. And MMA has its limitations too, it’s just another rule-based competition, see Rory Miller’s “Meditations on Violence” for one discussion on this.
Everything this side of a real life or death fight has rules, so I don’t think people could ever test stuff without limits.
Or rather, the number of people who agree on a no rules fight is self-regulating…
Yeah, exactly. Violence is contextual. Sometimes you just want to get the drunk out of the bar. Sometimes you want to hurt someone enough to leave you alone. Sometimes you want to defeat your opponent in a fair fight. Sometimes you want to get as many people as possible and catch your enemy by surprise – but even then you may not want to kill them bc you want to “win the peace as well as the war.” Obviously no single “style” is gonna cover all of these. (and one of MMA’s contributions was to emphasize how you could mix them together.)
Good point.
It took me a while to understand why a lot of self-defence-focussed jiu-jitsu reminded me of Aikido so much, instead of more “efficient” styles.
But it makes sense for the intended purpose: you don’t want to immediately punch someone into the next time zone for being loud and pushy at the bar, or for touching you in a way they see as bold and you see as creepy. But a twisted joint communicates “do this again and it hurts more” pretty well, yet doesn’t do long-term harm or cross the line into excessive violence