reduce it all down to adolescent sword-tagging games. In my own efforts, my senior students and I have achieved near textbook application of what is described in the sources. Tellingly, our form in sparring is identical to our form in drill and exercise while matching that in the sources. By contrast, we regularly witness countless others struggling with basic execution of essential moves, performing techniques too softly and slowly, oblivious to the requisite force and speed intrinsic to the craft, or else excluding crucial moves altogether from their play-fighting contests. It goes without saying that popular culture today, including the closet-industry of self-certifying professional stunt fencers whose job it is to fake fights for movies and television, have no real clue as to what actual bladed combat was really like. Why? For the simple reason that to fake it, you first have to know it. You can't effectively pretend to do what you haven't legitimately reconstructed and revived as an authentic fencing method to begin with. When your job is not to accurately restore genuine sword combat teachings as real martial arts, but to instead safely create merely the illusion of fighting, to exaggerate its motions for entertainment with dramatic license, well then, self-defense reality is the least of your concerns. Stage-combatants and theatrical fencers are under no obligation (nor much expectation) to present things realistically, accurately, or martially -- and indeed, they haven't now for generations. Besides, what authority is going to argue with them anyway? Certainly not producers,