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Can you talk more about height and combat? Like for example a taller woman fighting a shorter man? I usually see the opposite (and the woman having all of the disadvantages) but how would it look the other way around? Assuming neither is skinny.
In most circumstances, height is less important than a lower center of gravity. Height can be useful in some situations, such as being able to see over obstructing obstacles. Reach is very useful, though overall height results in a negligible increase to reach.
So, generally speaking, any object with a lower center of gravity will be more stable than one with a higher center of gravity. Obviously, when we're talking about inanimate objects, you can get some weird examples where this isn't the case, but when you're talking about your normal, roughly humanoid object, a lower center of gravity will be more stable than a higher one.
This leads into another general statement that won't be true in every possible case, but is important to be aware of, if someone says that women have, “all of the disadvantages,” in a match-up, they don't know what they're talking about. The low hanging fruit is that women are more resistant to exertion and exhaustion than men, and that will become important in a prolonged fight. As mentioned earlier, they have a lower center of gravity (in most cases), meaning that they'll be more stable than a male foe.
If you've ever watched Judo videos of a five-foot-nothing girl casually tossing a massive guy around, what you're seeing is a practical consequence of that lower center of gravity. This is just a practical application of basic physics. If your center of gravity is below your opponent's it is far easier to leverage them off the ground and deposit them in a tangled pile of limbs at the location of your choosing.
Beyond that, while getting into ground fighting can be very dangerous for the smaller fighter (regardless of their sex), being able to put your foe on the ground before getting dragged down yourself, does open the door to some options for ending the fight, if you have the stomach for it.
A taller woman versus a shorter man will narrow the difference between their respective centers of gravity, and may make it possible for the man to get his center of gravity lower than his foe, but it depends on the relative height difference, and you'd be looking at some pretty extreme differences before this starts to become a realistic possibility.
In the grand scheme of things, the total amount of mass is less important than where that mass is located. This is why ground fighting, that is to say, when both combatants have already fallen over, and are continuing to fight without getting back on their feet, can be very hazardous. At that point, both participants are about as stable as they'll ever be, and sheer volume of mass can be used effectively. When you're standing, not so much. Also, yes, there is a window in the transition to ground fighting where one combatant has gone down, and does have a stability advantage. Some martial arts (again, Judo comes to mind) specifically train to act in this window. You're not going to fall over again, so you may as well take the opportunity to maneuver and drag your foe down, with an eye for making their trip to the ground less pleasant than yours.
Something we've said, many, many, times is that reach is very important, and this is true. So, it would follow that a shorter person would have less reach, which is also true. On average, your arm-span should be roughly equivalent to your height. So, if you're 6ft, you should have a 6ft armspan. If you're 5ft8in, you should have a 5'8” arm span. (There's some slight variation based on gender here, which has more to do with the length of your individual arms. The average arm length for an adult male is ~14.5”, while the average arm length for an adult female is ~13.5”, even though the average height difference is ~5”.) However, in most combat situations, when we're talking about the importance of reach, we're talking about a difference measured in multiple feet. Someone armed with a 4” dagger is going to have a difficult time countering someone armed with a 60” greatsword, for example. However, when you're talking about a difference in a few inches, that's not nearly as decisive. Unless your shorter character is dramatically shorter, they shouldn't have any difficulty reaching their opponent, so while reach is an exceptionally important consideration in armed combat, gender isn't likely to be an important factor when calculating overall reach.
The big thing to understand about height, and this is very true when looking at authors interpreting its importance in writing, is the factor of intimidation. A taller person will generally feel more intimidating up front, and a lot of visual narratives use this as a cue to show that a character is at a disadvantage. Adventure fiction, like Indiana Jones for example, uses this to great effect and so do most martial arts action movies. When someone is talking about the importance of size, that's usually what they're referencing. When you see a massive person walking on screen or popping up in your favorite anime, your brain mentally checks itself and goes, “oh. Oh no.” This, of course, has nothing to do with reality, it's just our brains interpreting danger.
We say this a lot on the blog, but really, you learn to fight with the body you have. Men and women fight the way they're trained to fight, so they don't have intrinsically gendered fighting styles after release into the real world. The concept of gendered fighting styles really comes from anime and other fighting games or as a reaction against socially constructed systems such as 'fight like a girl!'
If you ask Michi, who grew up doing martial arts, what it looks like when a tall woman fights a short guy, her reaction is to shrug and say, “it looks like two people fighting.” There just isn't a discernible difference outside of personal, stylistic preferences.
-Starke
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