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07:55 - 21.01.2025
These days i was a bit irritated or agitated. I do not know the correct word but basically i get angry or emotional very quickly without much triggerring. I used to take these like a champion when i was working at a hotel reading about psychology, philosophy and writing down my thoughts. Eating and sleeping well, meditating and whatnot. It was all smooth sailing even in the darkest times of my own mind. I have stopped doing those. I stopped taking care of myself since some time now. It took it's effect on me really. I always knew how much it would effect my mental well being if i did not take care of myself both physically and mentally but sometimes you just do not know how it is until you live through it.

A lot of feelings just rush around my mind all the time. At this day and age i have the most resources and knowledge i have ever had in my life. However it is the time where all of them are near useless at this time. You know, everything in life comes as a package. Not as a single thing and you have to love it for what it is. You cannot just say "Oh if i knew what i know right now at the good old days i would be much better right now!" However all of those years you spent going through the problems, living through the time you did not know what you know right now you were actually learning what you know right now. It is just how it is. I want to work on drawing and animation like a crazy man! However i lack the time and leisure to do that. I have a lot of responsibilities right now and i am trying to get into the mobile game industry because they earn a lot of money. Animation studios just open and close everyday here, but mobile game studios are very stable. Even the ones that are quite bad. So i have to learn to work for them. For that i started learning Spine2D and Unity3D. Two programs that i had no idea about. Learning new programs always takes me a lot of time. For every failed attempt i have to for some reason learn a new program or a new way of making things to better make myself suitable for that particular available mobile game studio. Forcing me to spend more and more time on stuff that i do not know anything about.

These days it feels quite pointless you know. I never valued art more than say something like a bakery. Art is fun and can be important for mental well being. It can teach a lot of things to people. However at the end of the day art is art and most art do not provide anything good to most people anyway. This being my perspective on art makes it hard for me to take all these "art" game studios serious. Making animation for fun or trying to come up with a philosophical, psychological or teaching artwork is good and makes sense to work on it but working on these meaningless game animation stuff that will be used for basically "mind numbing digital drugs" is just not very motivating to work for.

On top of that i am also questioning my sociality too. Recently i realised that all the friends that i have do not really take me as their friends. This is not a personal thing but rather a social thing from a large standpoint. I spent all my life trying to form bonds and connections with people. Not only to me but also with other people too. I love communities and i loved being a part of a community back then. So i was always looking for the next community to be in but it just never happened. It never existed ever again. So i took it to myself and tried to creat one over and over and over again. Resulting in always me having connections to dozens of people and no one having any connections to each other. This is not a community. Also those connections that i have with people, they are one sided. When i do not connect to them they do not connect back. This was how it is since the high school. Once i stopped texting my high school friends they stopped texting to each other and also to me too. I am basically lonely. Because people are alone these days not because they are forced to but they rather prefer being lonely even though in the end they always say "oh why i don't have any friends?" it is always their own doing in their own loneliness. People don't want to talk to each other, to discuss nor to help each other. They are too scared and they are also lazy as fuck. They just cannot bring themselves to care for someone else for a second. Anyways. For these reasons i am lonely. I want and need people around me, there just isn't anyone. That's one of the things that make me sentimental and agitated.

For all these i also know that what i have to do is quite simple. So there is nothing to cry about.

Welcome to my Sketchbook tour! Second one to be precise. The first one is actually on Bearblog, i made that one when i was still at the very beginning to blogging. You can see that one if you press here:

So recently i got offered a nigen job. It basically means tiedown in japanese animation. Doing tiedowns for someone else's rafugens. So i started practising by looking at actual genga out there. It was really fun! This one was made for that reason.

Not all of them are referenced tho. For example this one is from my imagination. It is not as good as the referenced one but still. Pretty good for my own level :]. I like it.

This one was again from imagination. Just recently i have actually completed messing around with my mobile game animation portfolio. I was not able to work on my drawing skills because of that. However now that i am done with it i might just go back to practice drawing again.

This one is referenced. This time i will make a sketchbook that is themed tho. I will go and buy 4 color pencils for drawing the genga color seperation lines. I am basically going to make a sketchbook theme about genga. Every sketch that is gonna get drawn on thet sketchbook has to have correct genga notationss and whatnot.

This is referenced too. That way i will get to practice my genga drawing skills too. Not only for drawing but also for actually making the genga, thinkering about notations and whatnot.

This one is from imagination. I still not quite know how to draw hair. It kinda looks ai generated :D.

I am sure that this is from imagination too.

Ah yeah... Imagination. I do not know what i tried here. I think i just tried to get a contrasted compostition by putting 2 different characters on each side of the page while also making them completely contrasted. The one on the right is sad and tired, the one on the left is confident. Left side is bright while the guy on the left is dark and vice versa on the right side. I think it did not quite work out tho. It does not really look good. I could actually take revisions from this by mail!

I love this sketch of da vinci. Partly because it looks like drawings of my gf and also partly because it is so different from rest of his stuff. I think i did a pretty good job imitating his drawing here. I then realized how the character looks like a kung fu fighter :D so i drew another one in the bottom showing her pose.

Just a hand drawing i did when i was still practising hands ( i still should practice hands.)

I drew this one when i was hanging out with my friends. I am pretty happy with the face but where does the arm come from ? I kinda did not make that right :D.

I made this after watching the "fa jin" video of "Sensei Seth" on youtube. I am pretty proud of this one actually. The perspective of the feet, the slight torsion released from the body. The overall posture, i really like this one. However not really many people gave any reaction to this :D.

Just my gf

Practising heads, this was rather early in this sketchbook actually. Before i started practising genga drawings and anime head drawings and whatnot. Looks terrible xD.

Referenced from the gengashuu of HIBIKE! Euphonium.

Ah, i really like this one. I got inspired by both my gf's drawings and also one artist she showed me from pixiv. I tried to get multiple character interaction right. Also trying to come up with another contrast. I tried to pay attention to their legs, tried to place their torsos according to their legs, hope i got it right. It looks right to me. I think these are fairly good :]

One of my friends told me to try drawing the characters as mannequins, so i did that here.

I was just chilling at a nearby park and i basically drew myself sitting in that park while sitting in that park. The general feeling of the scene is inspired by a scene from MONSTER tho.

I don't know what was going in my head when i was making this :D

This one too is not bad i think.

Really liked the character designs of the "TEXHNOLYZE" series. So i drew ichise from cover art.

That was it! Thanks for reading my sketchbook tour :]. Also thank you if you are reading this from an rss reader. Have a good day all!

I realized that maybe centralized way of searching the web is not that useful. Yes marginalia and wiby.me are cool but the problem is that if you are not a tech savvy person for example if you are an artist you will realize that it is hard to find art related stuff on these specialized search engines. Since they are made by tech savvy people and are interested in tech. It is only natural for it to be that way. Don't get me wrong i find a lot of really cool stuff from marginalia, wiby, solofield, newgle etc. however they are never catered to my own needs. So i found that YACY is a search engine that has an option for personal indexing. What does that mean? It means you can crawl a site that is in your interest and you will see that the links that are in that website are also related to other websites that the author of that website has interest in. Meaning, by indexing and crawlinf that website you will also crawl other cool websites that you care. The main point of this article is that my suggestion is that instead of relying to search engine websites i think we should just crawl and index websites personally and then when those spesific indexes come to a certain maturation we should just share them on our blogs like "here is my SAKUGA search engine that spesifically indeces sakuga related websites". Then we could juse surf the internet and take only the related seaech engines that are useful to us.

Thanks for reading and following by rss.

I was just coming back to my house by taxi last night. I saw a weird ad on the taxi car when it was arriving. I got in the car and i asked what was the ad is all about. He told me that he knows nothing about the ad itself but that he ishappy to make some extra cash by the usage of that ad. He told something little about also making ads back in the day but i did not ask much about it. When we were coming to an intersection he saw a bilboard about the "Rings of Power" and told me that he was waiting for that for a while "we will see if it will be worthy of waiting". I told him that i only watched the trilogy and he said that he was a fun of all of these stuff since he was a kid. Then he turned me and told me that "I was the founder of the Anima". I first thought he tried to say "Anime" so i replied with "Yeah i worked in a few anime works too. Then he said "No i was the founder of the company Anima." I asked "Anima? Anima istanbul?" he said yes. That was quite of a shock.

He then started to talk about the joys of starting out and the cool stuff they were doing with stop motion back in the day and how they went from stop motion to 3D and specialized on that. He told me that he was a Kötü Kedi Şerafettin fan and always wanted to make a movie about it. I said that i liked the movie. He said "I did not. I did not even go to the premiere of the movie, it was never like how i wanted it.". He apparently never liked the Kötü Kedi Şerafettin movie coming out with a general audience tag on it instead of +18 tag and how they bogged down the movie to a basic kids movie. Was certainly a weird moment.

He told me that he quit the company because of the direction that it was taking. He told me that they only care about money and always get people inside just because they are their connections and not because those people are actually capable of doing those stuff. He said that everything in this country lacks merit. Which i agreed.

I then told him that i at some point applied to anima istanbul but could not get in because of my lack of experience. He told me that if i knew him he would get me in and teach me the job inside. Quite an ironic answer from someone who talks a lot about merits in workplaces.

He was talking a lot so i could not talk or ask much to him and the trip was coming to an end. At the end of the line i told him my name and that he can find me on instagram if he wanted to. He then replied that he only uses email and never liked using social media. I told him that i feel the same. However when i asked his name or mail he just fudged it up and ended the transaction. However i actually found the guy on linkedin since there is only two producers in the Kötü Kedi Şerafettin movie and that he has quit the job. Which there is a linkedin account with an unedited entry of working there for 30 years. Which fits perfect since he is a person that does not use ssocial media, he probably just set it up that way when he first used it and never touched it again. His face was the same as the linkedin account and the interview that is done with him was talking about the exact same things he was saying to me. So i probably actually found the guy. I will not share him here tho. Would not be right imo.

Yes that is my weird and interesting taxi trip with a former animation company owner.

Thanks for reading and following by rss.

This book was very important for me actually. Because it kind of opened my eyes. For the reasons of where I live it was always made sure that we felt a rush to get a job, do something quickly. If I could not achieve something, be it drawing a picture or getting a job in a certain period of time, it always felt like a critical mistake. Which always made me feel depressed, resulting in me quitting the work I am doing at the time. Now looking back, a lot has changed about me on this topic, and this book, along with many other things, really helped me change.

One thing that really inspired me actually was to see how old masters actually work. It is known that even a simple portrait might be finished in a few months in the old days of art. But the thing that really inspired me was to see how much study works Da Vinci has done. When you flip through the pages of the book, you see tens of works that are just finished products of tens of other study works. I knew that doing studies was important, but I just did not get it before reading this book. Even for a simple head, Da Vinci has a lot of studies done for that specific head. It makes sense when you think about it. The paintings took a lot of time to complete, so even the sketch of a painting should pretty much be a final product in itself. So to achieve this, it is only logical for one to practice even one specific drawing a lot of times to get it right the first time when finishing the painting. Let's check out some examples.

Now all the pictures you see here are a study of a painting that is going to be finalized. He basically just first draws a completely fine drawing of what he will paint out later.

Now this can be seen as something simple since they are only one phase of drawings before starting to do the actual thing. If you think so, you need to look at this one:

Now there are two drawings before the actual thing. However, wait! You did not see anything yet. What really opened my mind was this one:

With this one, he really pushed until he got something he really liked. Four different almost all-completed drawing studies before the actual thing. Which really came to me as incredible. I really understood that there is no rushing in art (until there is, with all the deadlines :D), at least not on something that is important to you and will be your personal thing. After seeing all this, I started studying myself too, and this really got me to enjoy doing studies. They were not pointless exercises before doing the actual thing anymore. They are important stuff by themselves too, and now I really enjoy doing them.

Now another thing that really caught my attention in Leonardo's drawings is how he depicts anatomy. His anatomical drawings are almost as if they are designed to teach anatomy. They are simplified in such a way that they kind of look like a wireframe view of a 3D Model, and this really made me understand some anatomical parts that watching countless Proko videos could not. Of course, I am still not that great at anatomical drawings, but my understanding is now way more vast compared to what it was before (just drop some basic shapes here and there, come on bro, who even sees those anatomical details ANYWAY?).

Apart from all the very important teachable stuff, I really like Leonardo's sketching style. I personally think that his drawings and rough sketches are way better than his paintings. However, that is a personal taste; he was great for his time when the style of paintings was linear and tectonic. So of course, in the criteria of his own time, he is great. I just think that his drawings are way more free and full of feeling than his paintings. Now here, I will just put his works that are my favorite.

(this one is my favorite)

I would really want to add a lot of his works here, but I think further experience by the actual source material would just be better for anyone. Thanks for reading. Thank you if you are following from RSS. Hope to have you here again!

Gotta make sure that I have an about me page right?

I am an animator that tries to make it to the Japanese animation industry. Have been animating since 2009 and have been working in the industry since 2017.

At first, I was watching Xiao Xiao animations on YouTube with my elder brothers on my cousin's computer. It was amazing to see such things. Everything changed when my elder brother discovered anime. He discovered Kenshin, which I loved watching, and I still do actually. After that, I found Alan Becker's Animator vs Animation, and that made me type "Stickman making program" into Google, which started my animation career. I asked my elder brother to download it for me, and then I was PLAYING animations instead of games. Making animations was my video games. Then I grew up and actually wanted to get into the industry. Started by first being an intern at a poorly started 3D Animation studio and then continued on by working at that studio for a full year. I was a prop modeler and texture maker there. I was using Maya and Mudbox all day every day, but my mind and heart were still at 2D cel animation. So I also kept animating in my free time.

The studio went bankrupt at some point, and then I was jobless for a month until I got hired by my dream studio at the time. I worked there for 2 years as an animator. Worked on all kinds of projects, but with me being young and resourceless on mental struggles and the studio being a bit pushy, I got burnout at some point and lost the ability to animate. I was pretty much a dead weight to everyone in the company, to be honest. That was until I met a friend on Discord whose nick is "Aki". Dude was even younger than me but had all the talent and knew what to do at the right time. He got me back to loving animation, and I started working fine again. That was the time I started making very short but kinda cool animations thanks to Aki.

At some point, that company went bankrupt too, and I got unemployed once again. Though this time I wanted to make it overseas. I learned a lot about sakuga and the Japanese animation pipeline. I was improving at animating. However, there was one problem. Being a former stickman animator, my drawings were... VERY BAD. I pretty much never worked on my drawing skills at all. So even though I was improving at animating, I was still very bad at drawing, which meant I had a low capability of keeping the character models accurate. Which is very important in animation. I kinda never liked drawing, to be honest... I just loved animating, and drawing was just a thing I had to do to animate. Which made it hard for me to learn how to draw. However, recently I got my head around a few books. "H. Wölfflin's Principles of Art History, Scott Robertson's How to Draw, Loomis books and a few others" helped me finally enjoy and love drawing. So I try to improve my drawings now. Which I enjoy doing finally :]. Will be sharing my drawings here on some page I will make some time. So keep following me on RSS! (you can find the link to the RSS in the footer, down below).

Just a few weeks ago, I was alone at the house and I just set up ani-cli on my newly set up Debian computer. Yes, I am trying to make the switch to Linux and FOSS slowly, and I started with Debian. So far it goes pretty well. It would not be an exaggeration if I said I actually love using my Debian. Anyway, this is not what you are here for. You want to read about TEXHNOLYZE, so let's go actually. I found some weird and interesting character designs that resembled the ones my friend used to draw. Those weird and interesting character designs were the SETTEI of the TEXHNOLYZE anime. The character designs were semi-realistic, which I like. So I opened up my ani-cli on the terminal, and trying to come up with an anime to watch, I just put TEXHNOLYZE in there and started watching it.

I think the best and most interesting episode of TEXHNOLYZE was the first episode. There was hardly any speech, the characters did not talk much, and tried to tell and justify their thoughts in a manner of a WALL OF TEXT narrative. So I liked it. Most people actually said that the first episode suffers from the pacing because it is so slow, but to be honest, it felt just right; I did not get bored at all. I hate characters talking all the time and things happening too fast, so this first episode was perfect for my taste actually.

Basically what happens in the first episode is that our protagonist is a fighter, and he waits for the payment from his boss, who is a woman. The boss declines, wanting to have sex with him in order to pay him. The protagonist seems uninterested but has sex anyway. In this world, for the technology of the TEXHNOLYZE to be working, they put some additional modifications to a human's eye, making them have HUDs in their vision, which also makes it so that the eye is no longer as soft as it was, I GUESS. So this texhnolyzed boss, being curious about this untexhnolyzed fighter kid, she tries to put her finger through the eye of the protagonist, which hurts him, which in turn makes him punch her. Which in turn makes the boss, who is actually associated with a mafia, torture the kid. Whatever. As you can see, the story is actually quite easy to follow if you actually watch. This is not why we are here. If you are curious about the story, I highly recommend you to watch it, to be honest. We are here for the SAKUGA.

I really liked how characters had this "semi-realistic" design going on. I like it because no singular element on a character dominates their look. They have eyes, a nose, a mouth, everything a human should have :D. I think this is important because this makes it possible to make characters look distinctive. After SAO (Sword Art Online) took off with A1, all the characters started looking the same. I know there were templates for old anime too, it is just that the characters are way, way more similar these days. So for that reason, I really liked characters having their own unique looks to themselves.

Animation in the first episode is actually quite good. Especially the opening scene, I am talking about the fight scene. With all the dynamic angles and vague silhouettes of the characters, I think it is quite hard to make the audience understand what is going on, and it actually succeeded at that.

Another cool scene was probably the fight between HAL vs SHINJI. It showed that in order to win, you don't need a whole cyborg implant; only one robotic finger is enough as long as you have the brains and experience. Shinji was just way too superior compared to Hal. He just did not stand a chance.

One interesting thing that I notice not only in this anime but in anime generally is how they handle walks.

In this particular scene, they basically made it so that every frame is eased in and also eased out towards all keyframes. Which makes the character have a "stop & go" feeling going for it. Now, both in real life and in most animation, people do not walk this way. We mostly keep a certain speed as we walk that stays mostly the same. However, in this scene, and also in many animes, they make it so that the character kind of gets slower in every step. They also make this in running animations too. Which I think is a very cool technique. This actually reminds me of something from H. Wölfflin's principles of art history. I will not be directly quoting what is inside the book, but the difference between Baroque paintings and Renaissance paintings is that Renaissance paintings are mostly linear and Baroque paintings are mostly painterly. Linear art tries to make every detail pop, which makes the painting crowded. However, linear art really tries to give you every detail there is about the subject, while painterly art tries to convey the feeling of the subject rather than having all the details. I think this weird walk-run technique in animes is done for the same reason. For conveying a feeling even though it is not actually showing the real thing.

However, we can also find the opposite of this in some animes. For example, if we look at Toshiyuki Inoue's walk cycles, they look quite realistic. He rather tries to convey the feeling of the motion by giving characters side-by-side motion rather than forward motion. Which is also not the actual real thing but a different way to depict reality. I think the stop & go style of walk and run cycles are more suited for lower-budget animation and also maybe more stylized animation, and Toshiyuki Inoue's style of side-to-side walking is for higher-budget animation. This is completely speculation, btw.

I did not like the animations that much in TEXHNOLYZE other than a few bits here and there. Even though I liked how the characters moved so slowly and so weightfully, there were not many moments of intriguing techniques of sakuga or excitement. Most scenes were very plain. What is done in the scene is pretty much set up in the storyboards already. So I think the beauty of most scenes just goes to the director even though the animators were good. They just did not bring that much to talk about.

After the first episode, a lot of drawing errors become visible to the audience. That was what I noticed when I was watching. The characters were just not consistent. This was most noticeable on faces, especially on face turns. Characters just did not look like themselves from certain angles. I did not like that part, but it was not so bad that it hurt to watch. It was fine.

I mostly watched the anime because they did not talk as much, and they did not talk as clearly like other animes. I think Japanese people being so educated actually kind of hurts their creative writing, especially in anime. For some reason, writers always seem like they need to tell what they exactly think by the character's mouths, and then we just sit and watch some roughly animated lip-sync doing loops while we hear some weirdly detailed plot in a single scene. No, I hate that. In TEXHNOLYZE, there is almost no talking in the first episode. We can see what happens instead, and if you just watch it, you will understand what is happening too. Which is better than someone just telling you. I actually do not like the rest of the episodes that much compared to the first episode because characters start to talk more. At least they are still talking kind of humanly. That is a good thing to experience; it is hard to find. Basically, I liked finding a show that was finally more about show, not tell, even though it was not that much of an awesome thing. Another cool thing is that things kind of just happen. I felt an emptiness after finishing the anime, not in the usual sense, but rather the anime felt empty. There was nothing in the first city, there was nothing in the second city. Actually, there was so much nothing in the second city we actually came back to the first city's nothingness to just end in nothingness. It was that empty. Which is a good feeling, I guess? The anime makes you feel stuff. I will give it that. Sorry if this was not such an in-depth analysis of the anime; I watched and experienced this anime for and with very basic reasons, but I still wanted to tell it. Thanks for reading it!

I went to cinema with my gf 2 days ago. Howl's Moving Castle was on the theaters. It is a very good movie. Normally I almost don't watch anything twice since I know what happened and I already "understood" the movie. Yet I also wanted to watch this movie yet once again because my gf told me something I did not notice about the movie before. When I first watched the movie I mostly focused on Howl and how he was running away from his responsibilities. That was mostly what I noticed the first time. Then my gf told me that movie had a lot of stuff in it about how it is to live being "beautiful or ugly". Which I did not notice the first time. It caught my interest and I wanted to watch it again. At last, we did watch it at theaters 2 days ago. Which is awesome :].

There are some specific shots from the movie that I particularly have an interest in.

On this first one, I like how the woman changes his direction once she notices Howl from the window. Her head is looking at the opposite side she walks which then she changes after a moment. Which just looks soo good to me :D.

I love this one. Sophie tries her hat and tries to look cute to herself despite not really thinking so that she looks cute. Just look at her expression xD

Now this one is very interesting. You see Japanese animation mostly uses twos to animate scenes. Twos or threes, not really much ones. However this scene is animated on ones. The reason is that the background is actually 3D and it moves on ones. Which it should because if it moved on twos it would hurt our eyes. So to keep the speed of the feet that step on the ground to match the background's speed, the characters are also animated on ones. Now, this could be avoided easily by just getting the camera just a little closer. This means that they wanted to make this exact shot. When I first saw this scene when I watched it on my PC monitor, I actually did not like it that much. It just looks kind of weird seeing this animation animated on ones after seeing a lot of animation animated on twos. It just feels weird. However, when I saw this scene at the theater, it did not feel weird. It actually felt just right. Maybe the spacings are just too small to watch appropriately from an already small screen such as a monitor, or maybe the sheer size of the theater just makes it so that the sides of the screen are seen by my peripherals rather than the center of my vision. Whatever it is, it just feels soooo good in theaters. So I am glad that I watched it at the cinema.

This one is also pretty interesting to me. There was a lot of 3D usage on Howl's Moving Castle. However, this one sticks to my eyes particularly more interesting. While all the other 3D scenes were quite special for themselves, I think only this scene could only be done in 3D. No medium other than 3D could pull this off imo and I think this is a very important thing. To me, every medium should be used to their own special extents. Making something do another thing which can already be done quite well with some else technique kind of feels like a waste of time. However, if we culminate all of our efforts to have a medium that can have its own thing, it is way more important I think. People try to imitate 2D cel character animation with 3D CG or AI. To be honest, these are very short-sighted attempts. Because we humans can already animate characters on cels PRETTY GOOD actually. So it is kind of pointless to try and replicate it on some else medium. However, IMHO I never quite liked background cel animation. There are some interesting and good examples like in Soul Eater:

However, when this technique tries to replicate realistic visuals, it kind of honestly hurts my eyes. It just is too inconsistent to look realistic imo.

However, in Howl's case, they used a very good traditionally painted 3D models (this is all just a guess btw, maybe they actually drew all of them by hand [impossible]) which looks extremely good while also being very consistent and replicating the round earth effect. I think this Howl scene is just too good and I do think that other mediums should be used by this mindset too.

I just like how Howl makes a funny gist with his mouth like a little spoiled kid xD

The whole scene lasts 34 seconds. This is the single most favorite fight scene of all time for me in the world.

What I like the most about the scene is that they are literally fighting. Fighting is a game in which both players are trying to subdue or kill each other. There are no pseudo-achievements to achieve other than to win the game, which makes it great. Your techniques and strength do not matter as long as you don't win. So the most important condition is to win in a fight. In most fight scenes, not only in anime but in the whole media, most of the time the characters are not engaging in the game of fighting; rather, they are acting to fight. They are not trying to achieve the state of winning but rather seem like they are trying to achieve certain objectives that look like fighting.

So what makes this scene great apart from the fact that they are literally fighting? Well, it is because it is a SHOW DO NOT TELL scene. Even though the characters do not talk to each other at all, we can see and understand everything that happens in the fight. The character does not have to tell you what he does because you already see it anyway. You see, you understand, and an actual outcome comes at last at the end of the scene that means something for the story it happens in. Which makes it great. Because in most scenes, you cannot really see what is happening. If you somehow managed to see what is happening in the scene, you cannot really understand it, and if you even manage to do that, it does not make sense (the players do not actually engage in the activity of fighting, so the moves do not make sense in the context of fighting). Yet in this scene, everything is right before our eyes, and everything is understandable. If you do fight, you will understand that this is a great scene.

So in the opening of the scene, Kenshin and the assassin have a face-off where they think about what to do next. The assassin decides that he will attack, and Kenshin simultaneously deflects that attack with his sword and counterattacks himself. Yet that was all a setup by the assassin. The assassin has a chained double wakizashi. So when he attacked by throwing one of his wakizashi, he actually set his main attack up. He knew that Kenshin would deflect it, so it was not a real attack but just a setup. The real attack was to get Kenshin tangled up in chains so he is vulnerable to attacks.

Setups are one thing that gets overlooked or done extremely badly in almost all media. A proper and experienced fight cannot happen without setups. After a certain skill level, no one eats a vanilla punch. You have to set it up.

So in this scene, actually, Kenshin pretty much loses. He played right into his opponent's hands. He bit the bait and cannot do much at that moment. The rest is psychological. Instead of panicking and trying to get out of the bind quickly, Kenshin just waits until the assassin gives away.

Given Kenshin's situation, the assassin thinks that he completely has Kenshin in his hand at the moment and decides to finish the fight. So he jumps, expecting Kenshin to stay still. However, Kenshin was waiting for the assassin to give a moment for him to do something, and that is the moment. Since the assassin is mid-air, he cannot control Kenshin, but since Kenshin is grounded and he did not panic and make his situation worse, his footing is reasonably well, so he has control over the assassin at the moment. The moment the assassin jumps, Kenshin just pulls him by his own chains and attacks with his own chained wakizashi, ending the fight by dividing the assassin into two equal parts. This concludes with Kenshin winning the fight.

There is more to fight scenes than OH HE HAS WON BECAUSE HE HAS 5000 POWER. OH WELL NOT REALLY BECAUSE THE OPPONENT'S WATER POWER ENHANCES HIS 3000 POWER INTO MUDDY ATTACK TRAIT AND MAKES IT SO IT IS NOW 9000 POWER SO HE WINSSSS turning a fight scene into an MMORPG-style spreadsheet or OH HE HAS WON BECAUSE HE IS BUILT DIFFERENT, and they are not only action filler scenes. Personally, I get incredibly bored in scenes where they make it so there are visual effects everywhere, and they scream all the time. This is not fighting; this is rather more like a pretend play of fighting. Fighting is more about positioning, strategies, psychology, and all of these have to be told by the visuals, not by narrative voices in my opinion. One of the things that bugs me is when they portray a character to be a master of fighting, and they make it so that character beats 15 guys at the same time, even if they are behind him. No, masterful fighting is not beating people magically. Masterful fighting is done in a way so that you will have the more dominant position against the odds so that you can win. If you let someone get behind you and you still beat him, that does not mean that you are fighting masterfully; that means your opponents are retards. And that alone takes all the impressiveness out of the scene, in my opinion.

I will be covering more stuff like this in the future on my blog. So feel free to reach out to me if you want to talk about it :]. Have a good day.