229
This is a pretty good some up of the difference between things as they appear to be and things as they really are.
(hexbear.net)
I suspect a lot of people have difficulty recognizing that what they believe about the world may not be representative of how the world actually behaves. I certainly do, frequently.
Like with politics, people think they need to go vote and march and stuff to effect change, but if you're willing to accept the idea that there are limits to your ability to perceive the world and your perceptions are misleading, you can pretty reliably go and see that isn't true.
You can also decipher deeper realities like you can basically put whatever you want on flat bread, or that you dadskf;'akse'wfaegqrwt;'lj'a fuck my brain. I'm asd I'm not sure what I was trying to say.
"Baki, Son of Ogre" pivots around the fight at the end between Baki and his father (hence the title), whose name is Yujiro. There's a phrase that pops up towards the end that is said very mysteriously, that "the strong live in a different world than everyone else". What this means is very unclear until a moment near the end of the fight. Baki has Yujiro pinned with his left arm behind his back, face-down on asphalt. Normally, this is a situation where your options are very limited, since Yujiro's right arm should not be able to effectively reach Baki (who is basically sitting on his back). Yujiro, instead of trying to reach back to Baki on his right side, instead effectively performs an overextended hook punch through the asphalt to hit Baki on his left side while simultaneously rotating out of the arm pin.
It's absolutely moronic writing but nonetheless also very clever and it has stuck with me, and this reminded me of that. I suppose it's just lateral thinking, but there's always some interesting way to challenge your assumptions in different contexts.
If my description is unclear, it's chapter 280. And yes, I just like talking about dumb manga.
You may enjoy the UK show TaskMaster. They take a group of 5 comedians and give them weird tasks to competitively complete which they're judged upon later. It's quite funny and some of the stuff they come up with is pretty ingenious.
Also, I just watched that anime episode last month.
I'm reminded of a couple of stories where a character is pinned and unable to attack their opponent... unless they stab themselves, driving their sword through their own body to stab their opponent in turn.
That's a large part of the reason why berserkers are so terrrifying irl. There's no magical immunity to harm conferred by the berserk state. But if someone genuinely does not care if they die as long as they kill you it opens up many options that are difficult or impossible to defend against. Suicide bombers would be a more widely understood example; The hardest part of setting a bomb is often escaping. If you take that out of the equation it becomes much easier to blow things up.
related to the berserker thing, there's a concept in sword fighting sometimes referred to as 'newbie-fu', along with a lot of other names. Sometimes new fighters will do something so suicidaly stupid that experienced swordsmen have no defense against it. Not because there is no way to defend against it, but because whatever the newbie is doing is so dumb, and usually so suicidal, that no experienced fighter would ever try it. And because no one would try it, no one practices defenses and counters to it. Every so often a newbie will try something they saw in an anime and it'll work simply because no one ever bothered to craft a defense against such an outlandish attack.
A real world example i can think of is a series of French prison breakouts where the attackers evaluated all the defenses preventing them from getting in to the interior of the prison - Walls, fences, doors, cells, etc., and decided that the easiest way to breach all of them was to land a helicopter in the prison courtyard, get their guy on board, and fly away. None of the prison defenses mattered because the designers had simply not considered such a vector of attack.
I think some related TvTropes tropes would be things like "refuge in audacity". Or the idea that if you're wearing the right clothes and look confident you can go almost anywhere.