#would make a neat gifset 😅

[korpikorppi]

Some impressions of the Yunmeng Jiang fighting style (and some of the others, too)

This comment by @mylittleponygrrl

My one wish (regret) about the series is that we never got to see the Yunmeng Jiang fighting forms. What a wasted opportunity that we never got to see Wei Wuxian, their first disciple, actually sword fight 🥺

on this post about my favourite LWJ sword technique got me thinking. While I agree that There Should Have Been More!, we actually do see Wei Wuxian sword fight and we do also see the Yunmeng Jiang fighting style 🙂. Let's see...

We do, of course, have The Moonlight Duel™️. Wei Wuxian does not, as we know, draw Suibian, but he uses the sword in it's scabbard to parry Lan Wangji's attacks, using defence techniques we can safely assume to be part of the Yunmeng Jiang fighting style. And he fights Lan Wangji to a standstill, so they appear to be quite effective.

The occasion where we see the best glimpses of Wei Wuxian fighting with a sword (even if the sword is not, unfortunately, Suibian) is the fight against the Wen in the cave of the Xuanwu, which is actually a really nice show of the various fighting styles. It is (also unfortunately) almost impossible to get good screencaps of him: he is a flurry of motion, twirling in tight circles (rather similar to the moves he uses when casting his talismans, come to think of it, so that is perhaps something typical for him), performing fast parries and strikes with relatively small movements, skillfully wreaking havoc as he goes.

In this fight, Wei Wuxian also performs a neck slice, basically the same technique as my LWJ favourite (caps here), but the execution is more straight forward with him moving in after a nice little parry, keeping his body straight, barely leaning in, before pulling the blade back.

Moving on... Wei Wuxian actually wields Suibian during the fight on the Jinlintai stairs! Even if he has not been using a sword for a long time, even if he no longer has his golden core nor a reservoir of spiritual energy, he's doing... quite ok, relying at this point (I imagine) on his reflexes and muscle memory from his years of training.

And of course, regarding the Yunmeng Jiang fighting style, we must not forget Jiang Cheng. As the Young Master of the Jiang Clan he's sure to have received as thorough and rigorous a training in the Yunmeng Jiang sword techniques as Wei Wuxian, and we see him fighting both in the Xuanwu cave...

...and during the Sunshot Campaign.

Based on how the Yunmeng Shuangjie fight, I get an impression that where the Lan (or at least the Twin Jades) like to keep their enemies at a distance to employ their large, graceful sweeps and swirls, the Yunmeng Jiang seem to go by the principle of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer", also in practise.

Both Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng perform their parries relatively close to their bodies (as can be seen in some of the images above), keeping their movements precise, fast and economical. And even when thrusting and striking out, they do not seem to reach very far or lean in but keep their bodies straight and their weapons closer to their bodies than the Lan, who always seem to go for range, to bend and stretch (check out the contrast between Jiang Cheng above and Lan Wangji below). I also have a feeling that compared to the Lan, more emphasis is placed on defensive techniques in the Jiang style, which would make sense considering the above-mentioned difference in their "range of engagement".

Also, the Yunmeng Jiang characteristic of fighting at a relatively close range allows Wei Wuxian to more easily adapt his sword style to fighting with Chenqing when he uses his flute (much shorter than a jian) as a melee weapon. Quite handy.

To end this, I also have to mention that I absolutely love the way Jin Zixuan fights! If the Lan favour engaging at a long range and the Jiang at a relatively short range, Jin Zixuan seems to settle somewhere in between. His techniques are not as graceful as those of the Lan nor as fast as those of the Jiang, but they are very powerful and well grounded. And while all of the young masters are quite adept at unarmed combat (look at the fight in the Xuanwu cave!), Jin Zixuan strikes me as being the most comfortable with it. So are those things representative of the Jin fighting style? Probably, but it is pretty much impossibe to say to what extent, because we do not see anyone else really use it (and Jin Ling for sure had not been taught proper unarmed combat).

And oh, talking about the fight in the Xuanwu cave! It is also interesting to see Lan Wangji fight the Wen: his injured leg prevents him from moving much so he needs to adapt his preferred fighting style. Pretty cool!

And the Nie style? Beats me. There are sure to be clear differences compared to the rest of the great sects, stemming from the difference in their weapon to begin with, but the only Nie representative we really see fighting is Nie Mingjue. And I strongly suspect no one else fights like Nie Mingjue.