It is a real post and I stand by it.
Well, of
course it is, YM, and
of course you do! I can't think of anyone else on MT who has ever demanded evidence of advanced dan rank from someone expressing an enthusiastic view of a possible new development in
any martial art.
And with that, folks, I'd like to suggest that we rewind the clock a little bit and just pretend that YM's pretty much totally off-topic post never happened. Judging by the reception it got,
we'd be just as happy to, and I suspect, in spite of his brave front in the above post, he'd probably be just as glad if we forgot about it too. My guess is, it hasn't had the intended effect—quite the reverse, in fact—and maybe the kindest thing we can all do is to just ignore his unfortunate initial post—I wouldn't disagree with a single thing anyone's said in response to it, but we're big people here, and we all know that sometimes the best thing to do is just roll your eyes and move on.
So what I'd like to do is return to Terry's OP and one of the points someone—miguksarum, I think?—raised above, because it's been nagging at me a little also: just what would a specifically dedicated SD-based hyung
look like? I mean, if folks like our own Stuart Anslow (StuartA) and Simon John O'Neil (SJON) are right in their detailed practical analyses of TKD hyungs, there is a whole rich world of combat applications in the forms we already have. If they, and kata bunkai pioneers like Rick Clark and Iain Abernethy are right, the problem isn't with the forms themselves, but with the camouflage that was thrown over the interpretation of the pattern movements by Anko Itosu—and by his peers who, for whatever reason, went along happily with Itosu's repackaging of the fighting content of karate forms as simple punch-block-kick sequences. The advice of all these people is just: learn how to read the forms better, in a way closer to their original intent, rather than the way Itosu packaged them for the Okinawan school system. So exactly what would a form which tried to make its practical ready-for-use street combat content more obvious do differently?
You see what I'm wondering about? Short of hauling out a flag out of your dobok sleeve at the beginning of every new tech that announced, "Now I shall be showing how to deflect a hard shove from in initial Fence hand setup and follow it up with a grip on one of the attackers shoving arms and going inside with a hard horizontal elbow strike to his face, which I shall then convert via muchimi with the hand of the striking elbow arm, and a hard 180º pivot, into a throw-down", or whatever the new tech was all about, how would these new poomsae look different from the older classic ones? What would be
distinctive about them that corresponded to their avowed SD orientation?
