During my twenties, I decided that I would start fencing.
I wasn’t very strong, but I did have some quickness and agility, and I liked how fencers seemed to epitomise those last two qualities. I wasn’t very good at the sport, ultimately, because fencing doesn’t just require speed and agility, but also timing, distance measurement, and skill. (I also foolishly approached it as something more instinctive than cerebral.) Fencing movements, at least from my experience with a ‘foil’ (one of the weapons), are very small and subtle, and the best approach is sometimes a very simple manoeuvre. Someone attacks? You parry the strike by pushing it to the side just to the point where it misses, and then stick your own foil out in a riposte to their upper body. You may not even have to move your legs during such a sequence.
En Garde!Publisher: Fireplace GamesDeveloper: Fireplace GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 16th August on Steam.
I didn’t actually want to fence like this, though. I wanted to use dramatic and flashy movements, the kind you might see in a pleasing cinematic duel.
Rather than parry attacks, for example, I was very fond of dropping my foil completely and leaning straight back, something that a fellow novice joked was akin to Neo’s famous dodging in The Matrix; a very ill-advised thing to do in fencing, but still wonderfully enjoyable when you could make the opponent fall just short in their lunge to tag you. I’d then take one step back with my right foot to regain my balance and quickly snap it back again in front of my left, as if dancing. I liked to weave my upper body around too, like a boxer, in a way that may have looked sillier than It felt.
In one match I attempted to wait until my opponent lunged, and then (my feet still planted) I bent my upper torso all the way to the right — as if reflexively dodging a ball thrown at me — and simultaneously hit him with a counter. I landed, but the opponent’s foil tip glanced against my vest just enough to trigger the scoring system, and he took the point. (In foil fencing the one who attacks first wins the point even if you catch them coming in.) He stopped and looked at me, a bit taken aback, and just offered an appreciative noise. After a different match with another opponent (where I indulged in my usual odd moves) they smiled and said that I was ‘fun to fight’.