The Manga that Makes You Better at Fighting

november 12th 1993 was wild this was a night when a group of weirdos entered a steel cage with the purpose of answering one question what was the most effective way to disable another human with your bare hands one fighter was a 400 pound sumo wrestler another a professional ranked boxer who fought bizarrely with a single glove there were karate experts pro wrestlers street fighters and the idea that they were all going to be allowed to just fight with no rules no round time and no weight limit was insane to the point that some of the fighters themselves were convinced that this was a scripted pro wrestling style show a delusion that came crashing down when 14 seconds into the first round a dutch savate fighter's kick exploded across the face of a giant obliterating everything we thought we knew about fighting that shock building with each captivating and brutal match that followed but the biggest surprise of the night came when the entire tournament was won by its smallest competitor a quiet softly spoken man who had somehow been declared the ultimate fighting champion and yet had barely thrown a single punch or kick and maybe you don't care about fighting maybe this all seems very brutal and very unnecessary well you are who i'm making this video for see something amazing happened here tonight and if i can do the next 20 minutes right you'll understand not only what that is but why it matters in recommending an obscure 2008 manga but first a brief word from our sponsor day of the dead they live tokyo avengers one-piece stampede laid back camp weird resident evil cg movies like 50 crayon shinchan movies keep your hands off azoken and puppet master the littlest reich which may or may not be a film about nazi puppets these are just a fraction of the titles available on netflix but not the us version see streaming service geolocking has gotten so bad that there's now entire websites dedicated to showing you what's in different countries netflix libraries and to access these forbidden titles i like to use expressvpn an app that works on any of my devices letting me bypass geolocks by changing my online location allowing me access to thousands of new titles quickly and easily personally i'd suggest using this newfound freedom to watch azokin over the nazi puppet thing but hey that's your business and with expressvpn it can stay your business as expressvpn also encrypts a hundred percent of your network data go to expressvpn.com wolf and find out how you can get three months of expressvpn free okay fighting yuzuko mo atari has just transferred to a japanese high school having grown up in brazil where she spent her early years well getting the [ __ ] beaten out of her but in doing so gradually learning the arts of striking grappling and submission that training manifesting in her love of mixed martial arts a love she now wants to share with her fellow students through her newly established mma club yusiko is a delight she's kind of like a puppy if that puppy was really into ufc and could rip out your shoulder with an armbar and the exact kind of hero you'd expect from a shonen manga like tepu only this is not our protagonist natsu oshido is a nightmare at nearly six foot tall she towers over the rest of her school but not just in height since she was a child she's only needed to see an action performed once or twice to be able to replicate it perfectly meaning whether it's karate basketball or volleyball she's an elite physical genius that effortlessly surpasses everyone around her but that genius has isolated her from her peers and even her own family envious and disdainful of her god-given abilities but that's a hatred she's learned to revel in her cold callous nature taking joy in challenging what she sees as regular untalented people and showing them that all their practice all their hard work and all their training are just in the wake of her natural sadistic genius in any other series this would be our villain but in tepu this is our protagonist the story beginning when yusuko unaware of who and what natsuo is invites her to join the mixed martial arts club natsuo taking this as an opportunity to humiliate the tiny fighter but that's when she collides with something she's never encountered a person she cannot dominate with raw talents and as she stumbles away from the fight blood dripping from her nose she's filled with a single obsessive desire learn everything she can about mixed martial arts and use it to destroy musical tepu is the story of these two characters and the dynamic that forms between them told through fighting and i love fighting i've been doing martial arts most of my life to the point that i now have the combat ability of two and a half regular people or 18 small children but i have previously stated on this channel that i'm about as violent as a small tour toys wearing a little cotton hat and the reason both those statements can be true is to me fighting does not equal violence and what's so compelling about the setup of tepu is how those two different concepts are embodied by these two characters to me there is nothing violent about two consenting people helping each other to get stronger through friendly competition that is the core of what fighting and martial arts is to me and also to usico for her mma is not about surpassing other people or proving your own superiority it's about focusing on yourself and gradually getting better at something you love even if you have zero talent in that something yusiko initially having to perform even the simplest actions dozens of times before she starts to understand the techniques but that lack of talent is important as it creates a space in which her personal journey of growth can happen victory or defeat not being the purpose of that journey but just a byproduct of it with that in mind take a look at this this is not fighting this is two people who have lost control of their day and the random ridiculous flailing of their bodies is a result of that the goal here isn't to better yourself for your own growth but hurting another person with the intention of exerting your own dominance that's violence and that's what natsuo embodies violence has become a way to hurt those who have hurt her initially using her talents to take revenge on the bullies tormenting her brother but eventually even turning on her own friends like sane the captain of the karate club who embarrassed natsuo's brother in a spar only to be crushed by nazo in front of her entire class however rather than natsuo's brother being grateful for this he's humiliated at the thought of his little sister protecting him and an insidious envy begins to creep into their relationship as natsuo's brother grows cold and abusive and as much of a nightmare as she can be it is kind of devastating watching her crumble in the face of her brother's hatred never wanting to feel the pain of that rejection again violence has become natsu's way of isolating everyone around her the only threat to that isolation being yusuko natsuo having grown so twisted that she actually envies yusuko's lack of talent she sees how fulfilled the smaller fighter is and the relationships her journey have helped her build and it maddens natsu it highlights every failing of her own life but worse she can't even deal with the problem the only way she knows how violence yuzuko's years of training meaning natsuo is completely outmatched by the smaller fighter and not only is this idea at the core of tepu's story but it's also what's great about martial arts martial arts have never been a way for the elite to get stronger they're a way for the week to rise up and one of the best examples of this comes in the form of my personal favorite martial art brazilian jiu-jitsu and if you think this entire video is just an excuse for me to talk about how cool i think jiu jitsu is only a little its origins go way back to the ido era a set of throws and grapples that samurai could fall back on if they lost their sword during combat and it survived right up into modern times when in the 20th century a wandering fighter named mitsuyo maeda traveled to brazil on a series of challenge matches where he befriended a brazilian family teaching the sons of the family the art of grappling however one son was excluded from the training the sickly frail helio this dude was so weak that he couldn't even run up a flight of stairs without losing his breath but in secret his brothers taught him what they had learnt and helio began to develop a modified style of jiu-jitsu one that shaved off every excessive movement and strenuous motion so that even the weakest person could use it to overcome larger stronger opponents and it did this by focusing not on traditional punches or kicks but by dragging your opponent to the ground then twisting and choking them into submission and if you want to see just how effective this new brazilian jiu jitsu was then just look at the night of november 12th 1993 where the first ultimate fighting championship was won by the 176 pound softly spoken jose gracie who through jiu jitsu tapped out each of his much bigger stronger opponents changing the world of fighting forever joisei being the son of haley gracie at its heart jujitsu is about overcoming things that are bigger than you that's why it's a fighting style that makes so much sense for a character like yusuko someone with no natural advantages beyond her own desire to grow but this also gives her fights a totally different dynamic than the brutal long-range strikes of natsuo or the full contact karate of sunny in that years ago has to rely on grappling and this introduces something really unique and special into the fights of tepu despite the massive shift grappling has caused in modern martial arts you still don't see a lot of it in anime or manga outside one or two speciality characters and this is likely because grappling is simultaneously less visually dramatic than punches and cakes but also much harder to decode without experience and tepu solves this problem beautifully and to see how let's first look at how tepu creates movement in its panels everyone's familiar with the idea of motion lines in comics it's a simple way to carve out a path of action and for the purposes of fighting create big moments of singular impact but what's so cool about how tebu does this is it rarely uses one big motion line but instead multiple smaller crescent-shaped motion streaks to communicate these subtle intricate mechanics of a fight take this panel the twist of a leg as it since force shooting up the body resulting in the vicious arc of a foot cutting skyward the split second pivot of an ankle creating a chain reaction as an entire body spins backward to avoid that initial attack it's awesome but when these motion streaks are applied to grappling the panels take on a nearly instructional quality here we can see how uziko has kicked her left leg off the ground using that momentum to create a rotation that spirals through her hips hands and shoulders causing a massive centrifugal force through her entire body that she's using to snatch the arm of her much bigger stronger opponents and by contrast look at how much less information we can decipher if we take away those motion streaks the beautiful thing about this isn't just that it looks [ __ ] awesome but that it makes grappling make sense when i first read tepu i'd spent about 10 years learning to strike but grappling was a weird and honestly kind of scary concept to me but its panels like these that made me feel like oh i kind of get how this could work tepu taking the time to explain these subtle intricacies of techniques as well as specific fight scenarios i remember first reading tepu and seeing natsuo get caught in a spider guard basically a move where your opponent grabs your sleeves and jams their foot into your elbow turning you into this weird meat puppet it doesn't really hurt but you have to spend massive amounts of energy just to stay upright while your opponents can just lie back and wait for their opportunity to sweep then years later one of the many many times i got my ass kicked in jujitsu was by being caught in this exact scenario and as my face plummeted towards the mat all i could think was wow this is just like that manga i read and i would later discover on my reread of tepu there was even a full-on explanation of how to escape the spider guard this kind of real life recognition happened so often during my review of tepu i have to believe that moria ota tepu's author has some real life experience with martial arts but unfortunately dude's kind of a ghost online aside from a few details we'll get into later the only thing i could dig up about him was a single interview as well as this photo from a 2013 blog post where he shows up at a women's mma events but whatever the connection is his drawings show a genuine understanding of what makes these techniques work and how to apply them and that insight was a huge part of what first opened me up to grappling and eventually led to me taking up jiu jitsu in 2019 and that ended up becoming this super positive force in my life when i first took up jiu jitsu i was not in a good place but fighting became this tool to help me rise out of that i've spent a lot of time thinking about why this is when non-combat sports tend to do very little for me and the best way i can describe it is that if you play a game of tennis the worst reasonable outcome is that you lose that game of tennis but with fighting you could get beat up or choked out or any number of painful unpleasant things but that kicks a part of your brain into this survival mode that shuts everything else out you cannot worry about if you are [ __ ] at making anime videos when a large brazilian man is trying to choke you and yeah it's scary especially in the beginning but there's also tremendous freedom that comes with existing in only that moment as your entire world becomes just you and your opponent and all that anxiety all the aggression that you might feel towards other people or yourself it forces it all into perspective lets you rise past it and the beautiful thing about tepu is that it captures that it shows you the effect fighting has on the lives of each different character for some fighting becomes a way of pushing back against societal boundaries this real struggle not being against any one opponent but the perception that fighting is not a woman's activity and as a side note [ __ ] that i don't see fighting as masculine or feminine and if you're a girl watching this and have ever wanted to try fighting for self-defense or fitness or the weird emotional stuff we just talked about find a decent gym and just try it the world needs more women fighters for others like yusuko we come to learn that she doesn't really experience emotion in the same way that other people do and fighting has become her way of connecting with those around her and i get that there is a strange intimacy to fighting that is hard to explain if you've never experienced it it's like when you fight someone you experience them in a way that not even their closest friends or families do and through that experience you begin to get this really raw sense of who they are their strengths their fears if they're willing to take risks or how they handle failure and in that same way those aspects of yourself are laid bare as well and so for someone like yusuko fighting becomes an answer to loneliness the person that fighting affects most however is natsuo and this is why i think she makes such an interesting main character because she starts from such a flawed broken place we get to see the journey that fighting takes her on and where this really becomes apparent is in one of the final fights of the entire series where natsuo faces her former friend sunny at this point in the story sanee has hardened every part of herself becoming the physical embodiment of all natsuo's sins everyone she's hurt all the talentless people she stepped on and what's incredible is how the opening action of this fight just seethes with the violent energy of two people who just [ __ ] hate each other natsu lashing a vicious kick at her former friend which just finds its mark only for sunny to pivot at the last moment sending the attack sailing past her son a blasting back with a counter punch only to stop her fist at the last second and obscure natsu's vision with an open palm drilling her with a brutal kick to the head only for natsu to block sani's attack and just smile it is knife edge tense but as the fight drags on natsu begins to feel sane's resentment with each devastating attack her old friend's hatred finally sinking in and as it does the panels start to bleed back and forth between the brutal violence and all nazor's memories that have brought them both to this point how her desire to protect her brother led to even her own mother seeing her as this violent unstable person and how rather than push back on that perception she's internalized it becoming the monster everyone has started to see her eyes with that realization finally all the pain all the isolation it hits her and it's only through recognizing this she's able to start moving past it both in action and storytelling this fight to me is one of the best i have ever read in manga which is why it's such a shame that tepu actually ends not long after this ota reportedly suffered major health issues during taboo's publication to the point that the series went on hiatus for two years right at the start of this fight and while his health is obviously more important than anything and he does conclude tepu's main story it does mean that some subplots are left hanging tantalizingly open and unfortunately he hasn't worked on anything since aside from two parasite side stories which are actually awesome but it is a shame considering not only how he really felt like he was coming into his own in the latter part of tepu but also in the power of the story he created up to this point when i talk about fighting as a way to free yourself from your emotional garbage that's what i see in natsuo at the end of this fight she doesn't feel like that violent person anymore and don't get me wrong she's still kind of a nightmare but she's also formed real connections with the people at her gym and started opening up to those around her and as we head into the final fight of the series there's this feeling like wow she really has grown that final fight being against the person we've been building to the entire story yusiko and we're not going to talk about that fight because i want you to go read this story for yourself so i guess that's the end of the video goodbye friends hope you enjoyed this video and if you did and would like to help me make more okay no no we are going to end this video on the story of a big fight just not one that happened in taboo or even in manga this one took place in real life and brings together everything we've been talking about yanya jaychek is the former champion and queen of the ufc strawweight division a devastating outfighter technician who obliterates opponents with her long reach and razor sharp strikes and tonight she faces the champion zhang weilei an explosive monster of raw power and speed that blast through her opponents with sheer force backed up by a vicious submission game and currently on a 20-match win streak the air is thick the atmosphere tense both women need to win this fight the match begins and their initial exchanges are fast and brutal both fighters are aiming to end this fight quickly trading devastating shots back and forth and for a time it seems even but there's a difference out of the two whale is by far the more powerful fighter and as this becomes appearance jay check struggles to stand against the overwhelming onslaught of the champion even her very best strikes don't seem to even phase waylay the second round ending as the champion drags the challenger to the ground again and again if this continues jay check's third round will be her last but she perseveres the two continuing to trade brutal shots back and forth their faces swell their thighs redden and something starts to shift the invincible whaley's movements become slower less explosive her strikes weaker and imprecise the power that let her dominate the early rounds has now sapped her stamina leading to a lack of aggression that lets jay check stand back and pick apart the champion with precise devastating strikes again and again whaley is tagged each new blow sinking in deep and threatening to drag her into consciousness and as it starts to feel like the sun is setting on huele's championship reign they enter the unprecedented territory of the fourth round in ufc regular fights are three five minute rounds but championship fights go for five rounds and up to this point in her reign no one has ever pushed waylay to championship rounds and so exhausted and entering unknown territory waylaid does everything she can just to survive absorbing knockout blow after knockout blow i genuinely do not understand how a human can absorb this level of punishment but somehow she does she endures and she keeps enduring it's like she's tapping into something deeper beyond physical fitness beyond training beyond technique and it's letting her not only survive but do the impossible and start blasting back against the challenger and slowly once again the entire landscape of the fight transforms jay check now on the brink of oblivion now it's the challenger who's forced to dig for something deeper and maybe it's her raw tenacity maybe it's her love of fighting or her knowledge that this could be her very last shot at the championship but whatever it is she finds it and it lets her stand once again in this impossible battle with the champion and over and over the two clash surviving the impossible and i cannot overstate it it is like they become more than human they have pushed each other past any conceivable limit and it is incredible and my favorite part of the entire encounter comes at the start of the fifth and final round when the two exit their corners and instead of throwing out punches kicks or grapples or anything that could have ended the fight they just for a second hug in this brutal combat scenario they show each other this brief moment of respect and love and it's awesome i'm not going to talk about who won this fight because honestly it doesn't matter this was a moment when two people brought out the very best in each other and transcended become something more and at its absolute best that is what fighting can be the reason i love tepu is it understands that it knows fighting it knows it's not about size or gender it's not about getting hurt or hurting another person it's about taking everything you are and rising past it if you're someone who's ever wanted to try fighting hope this video is gonna be the push you need to do so but also to seek out this insanely underrated manga about girls who'd like punching each other friends hope you enjoyed this video and if you did and would like to help you make more like it you can do so over at eye patreon.com wolf where for a single dollar you can have your name listed with these beautiful folk right here special thank you this week to ben bowman jessica murray tessa grissom i'm gonna say zen gaijin it's crispy chips jenny vu and super chunk find me as ever hosting the let's fight a boss video game podcast on twitch.tv forward super patchwolf or on twitter at ipatual friends take care of yourselves and i'll see you next time

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 995,198

Keywords: Teppu, Ufc, Martial Arts, Fake Martial Arts, MMA, conor mcgregor, Manga, Fighting

Id: PvTOlV6GGaI

Length: 26min 43sec (1603 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Noirsam]

It's a shame that Teppu had to end earlier than expected.

But in the end a authors health is more important then their work.

And i would like to recommend Fight Class 3 as a dessert to Teppu.

[u/RoyaI-T]

Would also recommend All Rounder Meguru.Its a pretty good manga about amateur MMA.Its goes in decent detail about techniques.

[u/RocketbeltTardigrade]

The manga makes you run away and cry for help? It's one of the strongest moves.

[u/Terthelt]

Fuck yeah, Teppu. As much as it sucks that it had to be cut short, the final showdowns with Sanae and Yuzuko are some of my favorite fights across all of manga.

[u/Yodon]

Time for all 40 of us Teppu fans to get hype! Let this video be the spark that leads to an official western release.

[u/Polygonalfish]

Hell yeah I finally got around to reading Teppu a little while ago

[u/ILikeReddit2Much]

Teppu is so basedddd

[u/KizuSkipRow]

How long before SEW makes a "This manga teaches you about medicine. Doctors hate it" video?

[u/TheShortSwede]

Dude Teppu is the shit loved the manga when I read it! =D