What's Wrong With Us?

It seems like the question of why there aren't any home-grown White Scarves in northern Artemisia is one that just keeps coming up. It even came up at Harvest Court this last weekend, but the answer I heard was a new one. It came from a knight who said, "You guys don't know how to be White Scarves." And this from a knight who is actually fairly fencer-friendly.

A bit of a Catch-22 there, I'll admit. At least for those of us who don't travel a lot. We don't have any White Scarves up here to teach us how to be White Scarves, so nobody earns their White Scarves, so we don't have anyone to teach us how to be White Scarves, and so on. The answer for those who have the time and money is, of course, to go to where the White Scarves are. Yes, it'd be nice if we could get them to come up here, but with the distances involved and the costs, I can completely understand why they can't make it up north more than maybe once or twice a year.

Which still leaves us in the position of being adrift in the White Scarf sea (and also helps explain why we tend to be a bunch of uncouth barbarians). And, quite frankly, it tends to leave us a little frustrated. We can see we're missing something, but we don't have any idea what. So we wind up fishing around, looking for help where we can. That's how some of us more experienced fencers have found ourselves in positions of authority. We're not White Scarves, but at least we know some. But we suffer from the same problem. After all, if we knew how to be White Scarves, we'd already be White Scarves. So we find ourselves copying the closest we have up here: the knights.

It's a start, at least. But an armored fighter isn't a fencer, and their priorities aren't the same as ours. If nothing else, they have a whole different sense of grace. Yes, a good armored fighter is graceful, but it's the grace of a main battle tank forging into the thick of combat: pure power, honed to a terrible perfection. That's not the grace of a fencer. The grace of a fencer is like the rapier itself: a sense of simplicity and beauty combined in elegant effectiveness.

Maybe that's also why we northerners tend to excel at melee - we can do effective, but elegance takes some work.

But none of this helps solve the problem we have here in the north of trying to learn how to be White Scarves. And I don't see any simple answer for those of us who must limit our travels. The most I can suggest is that our southern cousins be patient with us northern barbarians and, when possible, help teach us country bumpkins what it takes to be a White Scarf.