If there’s a legit good reason why Qui-Gon chose to specialize in form IV, Ataru, the Hawkbat lightsaber form, aside from the simple, likely fact that he did it to troll his old Master Dooku (who outright calls the acrobatics of the form “ridiculous,”) I’d like to hear it. By which I mean I’ll write you a post about it.
Ataru is fast, aggressive, and inclined to treat the battlefield as a 3D space where the air is just as comfortable a place to be as on your own two feet. A direct response to Soresu, the “defense is my attack” form, Ataru flips that into “attack is my defense.” (We won’t talk about Makashi’s contribution to the conversation: “no defense whatsoever, but think fast, I just threw a dinner fork at you so hard it stuck in your metal arm!”)
Of course, the most recognizable and classic application of Ataru is Yoda’s; we see him whizzing around people’s heads like a little green hummingbird in his AotC and RotS duels. Qui-Gon’s version looks nothing like that. If we weren’t told, I think it would be hard to guess that those characters are using the same form. In Duel of the Fates, Qui-Gon has to move down or over those infamous walkways repeatedly. He just jumps them: no flips, no aerial maneuvers, no bouncing off the walls. And this isn’t simply a practical choice for his age and build: Jocasta Nu is running up walls and leaping out of skyscrapers at easily aged 40 years older than Qui-Gon, and for all Dooku’s bitching over Ataru acrobatics, he does more flips to simply avoid walking down a few stairs than Qui-Gon, Master of the flip form, does in his entire time on screen.
And yet, on some level, all of that makes perfect sense for Qui-Gon. Who better to completely subvert a form? This is a character who is contrary as fuck, full of wonderful contradiction, who blends lightsaber theory centered on attack and aggression with literal meditation. While the most notable scene, actually kneeling in the pose and everything, is in TPM, he does battle meditation repeatedly on a mental level in the Master and Apprentice and Padawan novels. (And it rightfully freaks out Obi-Wan.) Qui-Gon takes Ataru’s “your whole body is a weapon” and doesn’t apply that to somersaults, but rather, to moves like punching Darth Maul off a balcony as we see him do in Duel of the Fates. He fights in a way that throws himself bodily up against obstacles. You can see the same physicality of his relationship with his weapon in the scene where he is simply burning through the blast doors in TPM. We’ve seen Jedi cut through things on screen other times, but that scene is remarkable and memorable for Qui-Gon’s level of intensity. He is the battering ram.
And we could loop back into lineage, couldn’t we? Qui-Gon stands in a line of Jedi with unconventional relationships to their lightsaber forms; their choices are formed in context of and in conversation with each other. Those backward, momentum-gaining swings from Duel of the Fates look very familiar, but who trained Qui-Gon? (And who notoriously had a problem with Ataru and might've pushed his student on some workarounds or encouraged him to cut out bits he didn't like, such as aerials?) And speaking of, is it a stretch to think that Dooku’s own casual backflips are less a considered choice and more an old habit, being himself trained by a Master who has only a theoretical relationship with gravity?
All this to enjoy just another example of how personal the lightsaber forms can be to specific Jedi, and what wonderful fun it is to unpack the ways they use them differently because of their unique personalities and lineage.