by Crazy Ivan
Wednesday nights are late nights for me. I do the online brawl until 9 o'clock so I usually don't make it home until near 10. By then the house is usually winding down and with Maverick and Animal in Australia I expected to come home to a pretty quiet place.
To my surprise, Monk is upstairs with Noodles, Bones, Bamboo and Unknown playing Magick. I'm in the room all of 2 seconds and both Unknown and Bones announce that they have new moves to show me. Bones claims seniority so he shows me his move first.
Now, I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but I'd seen the move before. It's a variation on a 2 sack aerial where you toss 2 Myachis up from opposite hands then your right hand Illusions around one and 360s around the other before you catch back in the hands you started from. We'd come up with the same trick years ago while brain storming on 2 sack aerials (we'd also done it cross handed and with the Myachis crossing in the air) but I didn't want to deflate him so I just nodded with a smile that tried to say "cool".
Then I turn to Unknown and he pulls this awesome Nightcrawler/Illusion move that is a beautiful thing to behold and I instinctively say, "Nice, bro!"
Well... I guess it was kind of obvious that my reaction to Unknown's trick was way bigger than the one I had for Bones' trick. Unknown even made a joke of it... "I got a 'nice bro'," he jested.
At that point I figured it would be best to come clean so I told Bones that I'd actually done that move before and I couldn't recall whether it was Animal, Butter or I who had done it first. I showed him a few variations on similar moves as well and he was happy to learn them. Bones' greatest strength is that he soaks up new stuff like a sponge.
But it got me to thinking about that feeling. I've been there before. When I was new to Myachi I constantly thought I was coming up with the most revolutionary trick ever invented only to find out that it already had a name and the name was cooler than the one I'd come up with. Of course, that was almost 8 years ago and literally hundreds of thousands of moves have been created since then. The challenge of coming up with something truly unique has gotten harder and harder over that time.
Bones' expression summed up the feeling perfectly. It's not exactly disappointment because it's not like there's a bonus to the Myachi Master who can come up with the most original moves, but it's got an element of disappointment. It's not exactly jealousy because you know deep down that the only reason someone else created it is because they were exactly as creative as you, only earlier, but it's got an element of jealousy. It's not exactly pleasant because you feel deflated but you're excited that there are already variations to learn so it's got an pleasant element as well.
To be perfectly honest, "creating" a move doesn't mean much in the Myachi world. It's really about who perfects the move. It's about who popularizes it. When we came up with the trick Bones did tonight, it wasn't a big deal. We came up with it while trying to think of as many variations on one simple theme as we could. That particular pattern didn't even merit a name at the time.
Now, if Bones names it, perfects it and popularizes it, it's his move. It doesn't really matter that somebody did it years before. He'll be the one who really brought it to Myachi.
I can think of several examples but there's one that seems particularly appropriate. Bamboo rediscovered an awesome two sack variation where you Illusion around one sack while verting a 2nd sack then 360 back around and catch both sacks in one hand. He called it the "Armageddon" (though I don't think he actually came up with the name) and started doing it in every two sack shred.
Bamboo didn't do the move first. It was actually part of my daily 2 sack repertoire at the time. But it didn't have a cool name and I never really taught it to anyone. When I came up with it years ago I was rediscovering a move that had already been done years before that. All that being said, everyone knows the Armageddon as Bamboo's move. He's the best at it and he does it often enough to be synonymous with it.
I could offer a bunch more examples, but like I said, Wednesdays are long nights for me anyway. The larger point here is that you should never feel deflated when you create a move only to discover that somebody else already came up with it before you. They weren't any more creative, they just did the same thing sooner. But if the move is obscure enough that you've never seen it, maybe it's not too late to perfect it and make it your own.
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