Q&A: Short Fighters and Centers of Gravity
any specifics to be mindful of on writing a very short fighter? like under five feet tall? i don’t necessarily mean children, just like, ppl who are short
I’m going to discuss writing short combatants below, but I want to make it clear. What I’m going to be discussing is about adults, not children. You want to set a clear distinction between the two in your mind right now. Children are their own category, broken down into several separate categories of roughly 1-5, 6-8, 9-10, 11-14, 15-16, 17-19. Segment them out by age categories, break apart older and younger teens, and keep a beat for mental/intellectual/emotional maturity in line with their physical growth rates. Children are different from adults, and different ages face different challenges.
When you’re writing children, you need to take their age into consideration, the fact they’re bodies are still changing and growing, the fact their minds are maturing. They don’t have the same capacity as adults, the understanding, or the ability to utilize their experiences to the same degree. The problems for children are not just in their size, but in their brains, in the softness of their bones, in the bodies that are constantly changing, emotions only just emerging, which combined with a lack of experience and maturity often put them at a significant disadvantage.
A twelve year old who is set against a seasoned killer faces a lot more problems than just a height difference, would face those same challenges even if they were the same height.
Now, let’s talk about short fighters. They’re not much difference from anyone else, nothing more than a different set of natural advantages, that may not even mean much in the grand scheme. Spend too much time obsessing on physiological differences and you’ll end up thinking they’re the only thing that matters. There’s not that much difference between someone who is 4″10 versus someone who is 5″1 or 5″2 in terms of combat.
What you want to understand about the size of humans is that the benefits are mostly in the mind. There are a lot of culturally defined stereotypes, conventional wisdom, and cries of “realism” when it comes to martial combat that are complete bunk. The perception that short people are at an automatic disadvantage is one of them. Every body type comes with their own strengths and weaknesses, learning to compensate for the weaknesses and take advantage of the strengths is what training is all about. You’re going to need to throw out most of your internalized prejudices and start over. You’ll find you’re full of biases when you really get down to thinking about it, ones you’ve subconsciously picked up over the years, and, I want to make this very clear, addressing them doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
Center of Gravity – People who are short are closer to the ground. This is important because the center of gravity is your body’s balance point. This is your body’s point of stability, and useful to know about for a large variety of exercises. This point changes based on each individual human being, with constant motion, and is somewhat subjective. So, everyone has to locate this point within themselves and find their own individual balance.-
However, what you need to know about for the purpose of this question is: Short people are very difficult to knock over if they know how to create their base and set their weight.
Now, the center of gravity in a man versus in a woman are physiologically different. A man’s is located in his chest, and a woman’s is approximately in her pelvis. Physiological differences mean men and women will show progress in different exercises more quickly because they’re more naturally inclined toward them. A woman’s balance point being lower lends itself to more stability in the lower body. From a practical perspective, what this means is that a man has to spread his legs wider and get lower in his stances in order to achieve the same physical stability as his female counterpart, and likewise a tall man has to bend his knees more than a short guy for similar results.
This is a taught advantage, not a natural advantage.
Well, it doesn’t mean much of anything except that short people are naturally better at grappling than taller people. If they know how to set their feet and get down low then good luck throwing them. You won’t pick them up. They’re not going anywhere. After all, throws are not strength based (someone who is tall is not necessarily going to be stronger than someone who is short) but are instead dependent on destabilizing your opponent’s base (the position of their feet, and stance) then utilizing their own force against them.
Someone who is short is much closer to the earth than someone who is tall, and this advantage lends them more stability. Weight isn’t weight, and strength isn’t strength. The martial arts battle is primarily over an ever-shifting balance point and breaking your opponent’s stability. You’ve got to work harder to get them to fall over.
The Intimidation Station – Tall people can be naturally intimidating, because conventional wisdom says they are. Intimidation happens in the mind. However, short people can be intimidating, because intimidation comes from presence, not physicality.
Here’s something to keep in mind when writing short characters: When you’re short, you live in a world of tall. You’re used to being (physically) looked down on. These characters will have been learning to compensate (if they need to) from day one, so the idea they’ll fall apart while facing off against someone significantly taller than they are is silly… really silly. They’ll be more used to fighting tall people than someone who generally fights people of equal height or mild differences. If you’re used to constantly being at a “disadvantage” then that state becomes normal and you learn to just roll with it.
Aggression – Short fighters can be, but are not uniformly, or always more aggressive combatants, and women are often more actively aggressive in combat than men. This doesn’t mean they have more aggressive personalities, but they can be much more pro-active when it comes to rolling over into an offensive mode.
Reach – You’ll hear this one brought up a lot, mostly by people who don’t really understand the concept. Reach matters more with weapons than with bodies.
I hear a lot of writers searching for “natural” advantages, or see an over reliance on those perceived advantages in fiction. The reality of success lies with technique and hard work, not the body you were born with or the talents you were gifted with. You’ve got to polish what you have. In hand to hand, there are plenty of ways to compensate for a difference in height. The primary means of overcoming distance is footwork, not the length of your arms or legs.
Mind Over Matter – In terms of physiology, the rules aren’t hard and fast. They’re not black and white. There’s no can and can’t. There’s mind over matter, mind over internalized biases, and mind over perceived impossibilities. What there isn’t is magic. No matter who they are, your character will never be suddenly amazing or skip all the perilous trials of learning. There’s pain, yes, embarrassment, frustration, and failures, which are all part of building character. Skill requires training and practice. It’s difficult, it takes time, and you’ll need to do a lot of pushing past what you believe to be physically possible (rather than what is) before you’re done.
What your character perceives about their own abilities and their actual abilities are not one and the same, the same is true of their potential. The hill may seem impossible from the bottom, but we progress up it one step at a time.
Here’s one last thing to keep in mind:
