There's an element of that, certainly, especially when you start getting into the advanced ki-manipulation stuff. It's a bit like the Matrix - one can't really be told what it is, one has to see it for oneself.

Mind you, part of that is simply an artifact of the fact that that's how Sakura learns. She picked up what she knows of Shotokan karate in the same way, and in any sort of training or educational context, once you've found the best way a student learns, you'd best stick with it. It helps that G's always been a learn-by-doing type himself.

>I could be wrong, but
>I'd imagine that Gryphon worked out big chunks of the Icon of Stone
>out for himself, since it doesn't seem like Rose would be intimately
>familiar enough with that part of Ler Drit for a step-by-step teaching
>philosophy to work.

Oh, she knows how to do it, but it doesn't come as instinctively as the more mobile and precise forms, and the Icon technique itself is the sort of thing that doesn't really look like much when someone else does it anyway. She could describe the focus required to make it work, but finding the way to achieve that focus was up to him. It's a very sink-or-swim style, at least the way Rose teaches it. You never know when you might find yourself ditched at the airport with a note giving you two months to walk the entire length of Japan.

>And just as similarly, I don't think the Icon of
>Stone bit would work too well for Sakura.

I'm not sure. She hasn't got the mass to do anything really spectacular with it, but she certainly has the determination to make it happen. In her case it'd pretty much only be useful for turtling (which is what G's doing with it in 06, but under certain circumstances, for a big enough fighter, it can also be used offensively).

>So I'm curious, on an
>technique level, are there other sub-styles in Ler-Drit other than
>Gryphon's Icon of Stone, Rose's Psycho Whirlwind, and whatever Bison's
>version's called?

Quite a number - it's a bit like kung fu in that respect. There are a number of flavors. I've been thinking about going into greater detail about that, but the fact that the entire martial art, in its WL incarnation, is a huge and embarrassing error is holding me back a bit.

The thing about Ler Drit as it appears in WL is that its original appearance was based on a misinterpretation of some incomplete data on my part. It's listed as the fighting style Bison uses in the old White Wolf Street Fighter Storytelling Game manual, which is what inspired this series in the first place, and I knew from elsewhere (probably the cutscenes in Street Fighter Alpha that Rose had taught Bison the psychokinetic techniques he used. I had never heard of Ler Drit and there was no such thing as the lazyweb at the time, so I assumed it was made up for the game setting, and that both Bison and Rose were practitioners.

Well, it turns out that's not the case. A while after WL started coming out, when it would have been a fairly big faff to fix the mistake, someone informed me that Ler Drit is a real fighting style. It's more or less the Thai Army's analog to Krav Maga or Sambo - special forces fighting, emphasis on hurting the other guy real, real bad, not much in the way of finesse. What the game manual had actually meant was that Bison had learned Ler Drit somewhere in his early travels, and then added the psychokinetic stuff he learned from the mysterious Rose, who fights in a completely different and apparently unnamed style, to create that whole Psycho Power ultra-murderous-bastard thing he has going on.

Similarly, information was very thin on the ground as to how the "culture", as it were, of the made-up martial art I assumed Bison and Rose shared would actually work, so most of the window dressing in WL - the terms for master and student, the word for someone who practices the art, the sub-styles and names of techniques - I made up from whole cloth on the spot, and they're obviously nonsensical in the light of the above.

If I had it to do over again, I'd take things that logical step further and just make up all the terminology surrounding the mysterious art Rose practices, and all would be well. It certainly annoys me a little more each episode as I inevitably compound my original mistake by making further references to "Ler Drit" and embroider the whole concept further.

Odds are I'll just snap and go fix it all one of these days. It might even conceivably be today. I used to be dead set against major revisions of released material, but that was in the days when EPU's output was distributed through USENET; nowadays, with the master repository for all the stuff being a website under my control, there's really no reason not to beyond pigheadedness - particularly for obvious, glaring errors like the Ler Drit thing.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.