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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   761 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 8, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm going through Conrad's Lord Jim. Backlog not moving.

I finished reading Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima. It wasn't what I expected from the man, I first bounced off with "WTF is this effete nonsense?", but ended up actually being quite engrossed by the writing, even if just in the English translation. Once one gets past the main character's completely alien upbringing and mindset, the book goes through various fairly universal themes and does a very good job of it. Can recommend.

Since I intended to be a little more active in martial arts this year (specifically longsword HEMA, but I'll need to branch out since there's no HEMA nearby), I looked into literature that would go along with it. Which, to say the very least, did not go as expected.

I don't even remember how exactly - it might've been through the youtube asuggestions - but I ended up starting to read "Baki the Grappler", a so-called "shonen" manga. I put it down again very quickly, because it had jack nothing to do with martial arts, and was instead all about fantastical magic dressed up in impossibly-muscled guys performing physically impossible feats on each other. Not recommended.

Next up, I read "Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without A Fight", another manga about martial artists without the anatomical and physical impossibility. The fight scenes actually had more sense to them and were roughly on the same planet as "believable". Still, I can't exactly recommend this work, because it's also just plain old porn.

And since my bag of recommendations wasn't still entirely empty, I finished it off by reading "Kengan Ashura", which seemed to be just another "Baki", with impossible muscles doing impossible things, but at a closer look that was just exaggerated presentation, and underneath was a lot of real martial arts...intermingled with more muscle magic. Real whiplash when it went from real-world striking and grappling to "lol just vibrate your body at 3000Hz to become invulnerable". Also weirdly formulaic, in how the bystanders are always surprised by grapplers striking and strikers grappling, how you can tell the power level of a character based on whether he's injured (very strong), unarmed (strong), armed with a knife (weak) or armed with a gun (extremely weak). Also weird how the characters constantly claim to kill each other, and break each other's necks or punch each other hard enough to shatter concrete, but then everyone just gets back up. Again, can't really recommend.

Lesson learned, I guess. Don't fish in the wrong waters.

I would recommend sticking with Baki. It's the best fighting manga, way better than Ashura, with some amazing fights. But like you said, it's a shounen, it's meant for teenage boys, it's not meant to be realistic.

Also if you do read it, start with the original Grappler Baki (1991) which is more grounded than than later ones.

Otherwise if you want realistic martial arts manga, the best one I know is All-Rounder Meguru, which is about MMA.

There's also Asumi Kakeru which is also MMA, and quite close to All-Rounder Meguru. The author also has another manga about Sumo.

I love fighting manga and martial arts, and so I've read basically everything translated, but if you're looking for something realistic for a HEMA practitioner, you're not going to find much. Either try lowering your standards, or just skipping manga. Besides All-Rounder Meguru.

Maybe try Vagabond, which is a manga about Musashi, but it's not finished, what is there is really good though, but again, I don't know how realistic the fights are.

Yeah, skipping Manga seems to be the reasonable choice. Maybe I'll look into the others you mentioned at a later point in time, but for now I think I'm good.

Maybe try Vagabond, which is a manga about Musashi, but it's not finished, what is there is really good though, but again, I don't know how realistic the fights are.

I looked into it before, but it seemed to just be a manga version of Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi, which I read, so it didn't seem to offer much additional value.

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