“If it frightens you then swing the sword” is what Siegfried tells Sieg in Fate Apocrypha before sharing his powers with Sieg, before Sieg manages to pull Sigfried’s sword from the ground and wield it.
While I did do historical fencing classes in the past, I have no intentions of picking up the non-metaphorical sword again. Writing is already both my sword and my shield.
That line did stick with me even since I first saw that show, which is one of my favorite anime shows. I’ve re-watched it a … considerable number of times.
Fate Apocrypha, from the Fate series, is a show where factions fight in a war for the Holy Grail, which can grant any kind of one wish to the last one standing. Mages on each faction initially summon Heroic Spirits to act as their Servants and fight for them. Those Heroic Spirits are based on mythological and otherwise figures like Joan Of Arc, Achilles, Frankenstein, Siegfried (the legendary germanic hero), Mordred and so on.
One of the factions (the faction of Black) actually creates live artificial humans, homunculus, which they then use as “living energy batteries” to power their magic. It is honestly not very nice of them to do that. Besides being slaves, the homunculi also have very short lives, roughly three years. One of those homunculus eventually acquires a will of his own, breaks free from his pod and eventually gets involved in the plot. One of the things the homunculus struggles initially, after getting his new found freedom, is deciding for what and how to live his life, a familiar feeling to some. One day when escaping that faction’s stronghold or similar, the homunculus comes across a mage from “his own” faction of Black and gets struck down, mortally.
The Heroic Servant Spirit Servant of that mage was Siegfried which, when witnessing that scene, sacrifices himself and gives his own heart to the homunculus, saving his life. Now free (again ?) and in need of a name, the homunculus eventually takes up half of Sigfried’s name and becomes Sieg.
See, when alive, Siegfried defeated the evil dragon Fáfnir and, at least in in this story, then obtains an invincible body. From that point onward, he lived his remaining life as a hero granting other peoples wishes, culminating in the wish of his own King for Siegfried to perish, which was a condition to terminate a potential war conflict with some enemies or whatever.
Siegfried had a wish of his own tho, which was to one day grant a wish of his own accord. Self-determination is a familiar feeling to us all. He fulfilled that wish as an Heroic Spirit when he saved Sieg’s life by wanting him to continue to live (which was Sieg’s own wish).
Sieg wasn’t off the hook yet tho, as later on he gets involved in a battle with another Heroic Spirit from an opposing faction, Mordred (Saber of Red) and gets struck down hard yet again. That guy really can’t get a break. But soon after, since he has a connection to Sigfried this time, they both meet and have a conversation in some limbo space where Sigfried’s sword is half-entombed in the ground. At some point, as Sieg stares at the sword, the evil dragon Fáfnir appears roaring in front of him, which is when Sigfried professes the words “If it frightens you then swing the sword” and asks Sieg what is his reason for bearing the sword, what was his wish. Sieg replies he does not know yet but asks Siegfried for the power to save someone (his friends).
Consciously or not, Sieg had acquired a powerful goal, a motivation, and with that he is then able to overcome his fears, remove the sword and inherit Sigfried’s powers. Sig then proceeds to get back to the battle, now able to transform into Siegfried for short periods of time, go ham with Saber of Red and send him packing back to another episode.
So, anyways, a lot more interesting stuff then happens on the show but what does any of this have to do with anything other than me being secretly a massive anime nerd ? Well, a considerable amount of stuff actually, since many of the themes in the story are familiar feelings with challenges and otherwise other things some times we face on our very regular human lives.
For additional context before I proceed, I should say that my physical exercise for most of last winter peaked at climbing office stairs and running loops between my desk and the coffee machine. Total couch potato. So, when I went skiing with my family to the French Alps last month, oh boy was I in trouble. My first and only ski experience had been in 2019 and since I wasn’t experienced enough to keep up with them on the tougher slopes, this time I was in need of another productive day activity and decided to take on a 6 day beginner’s snowboard group course. At 40+ years old. At one point during that week, while I was queuing on “téléférique” line behind my averaged-ly 13y old class mates, some of the older people around the line were teasing me that “there were some big kids in the group”. Since one of my secrets powers is speaking French, I got back at them by saying that taking on snowboarding lessons at my age wasn’t one of my brightest ideas. We all giggled in French (and I saved myself there) but I was being serious…
Ohhhh boy, at the end of the 1st day I was both mentally and physically crushed to the point that I was that close to take my family’s advice and just change to a ski course. I had skied in the past and found it easier to pickup just with a 10m crash course from my cousin since it’s technically possible, but incredibly boring, to pizza slice down almost any slope. Just the idea of eventually having to aim down the snowboard straight down a slope would give me a sense of dread. I guess part of our growing up experience is also learning what to fear and sometimes those fears become engrained and become road blocks. I was a fast learner there, once as a kid I found myself landing on my ass at the bottom end of a slide and had to sit on a pillow for a week. On that mountain I was well aware of the consequences of a bad fall, also given that I had already seen people being carried down on stretchers right on the first day. But, the idea of quitting something that I feel is within my reach always made me feel uncomfortable, I’d rather fall of a cliff. OK not really, but I am from Porto, a city/region that an Instagramer recently described as a “city you don’t walk but climb” and they didn’t call us the “Unvanquished City” for nothing. So the option to change course was straight out, I was gonna finish that course and get that beginner’s completion medal even if I had to slide down that mountain on my ass, which to be honest occasionally happened here and there.
There are things out there that frighten us.
We all go through tough situations that hurt and leave some scars. We might break a feather or two like in the song facing our fears, but we can patch it up. We’re not completely powerless, we can fight back and swing the sword. We owe it to ourselves and the people that care about us, to eventually move on and sing a new song again.
I had acquired a goal, resolve and that shit had now turned into… a hard engineering problem. We fear things we do not understand so the first thing I needed was information to unblock my brain. I had already seen a few of beginner snowboard videos on Youtube but I went to Reddit and joined a “snowboard noobs” subreddit and shared my experiences. Something very comfortable that people mentioned there was that, each day will be better than the previous one and it was totally true! Another advice was starting juicing some Ibuprofen earlier than later to deal with sore muscle pain and etc.
From what I understood, “light snowboarding” is not extremely intensive on the body per se, but if you’re not doing correctly you end up putting your body, particularly the legs, under quite the amount of unnecessary stress. By the end of the 5th day, my left inner thigh muscles were REKT. Had I not already been juicing some sore muscle relief I’d be in serious trouble of failing my mission.
Next thing I did was then to beef up my breakfast and stock up on carbs. I also always loaded power bars and gummy bears on my ski jacket to pump up some sugar mid snowboarding.
Classes were during the afternoon and during the whole week, instead of going crazy ham on practice in the mornings, I also took a step back and kept in mind I was on vacations on a beautiful snow mountain after all and should enjoy it. So, I spent most early mornings taking walks enjoying the scenery, relax my mind, my muscles and my broken feelings in the lessons from the previous day. I did practice before classes here and there on a small slope next to our place but honestly learned nothing.
Eventually I made it out alive and unharmed to the end of course, got the 1st level of my official “Ecole du Ski Français” progress booklet stamped and my completion medal. To be even more honest, based on what I observed from other people in my course group, my progress that week was… unsatisfying to say the least. So, since then I have a new goal: the next time I go snowboard to an ESF location (in a year or later), I’m going to take the tests again and they’re gonna stamp up my levels faster that I can say “un croissant s’il vous plait”.
Along the usual theme of having more luck than brains, there are decent indoor ski places around were I live AND one of my friends can actually snowboard. So we went hit the range over there the other weekend and with his teachings I was finally able to both toe and heel slide. So progress is progressing, I’ve also restarted other activities like rowing and running which is good for leg power and if the winds keep blowing in the good direction, I’ll keep hitting the indoor ski and next year i’ll be ready to take on the mountain again.
I’ll say, one thing that has surprised me in this experience is how supportive people can actually be, even strangers and particularly the kids. One later afternoon in the snow mountain class, I was just sitting at the top of a slope with the snowboard strapped on, munching on my last chocolate bar (emergency energy supply) while contemplating both the scenery and my life choices. One kid from my class comes to me and asks if im OK. I said “yeah i’m just resting a bit” and since he had well noticed I was struggling to keep up with the techniques, he just tells me “hey do it like this and this and that. At that point my motivation was already in the gutter and I just tell him back “well, you know, i’m null”. He then tells me “NO, don’t say that, you’re not!” then takes off like a rocket down the slope. He was right on one thing tho, sobbing my hurt feelings wasn’t really do any good for me and he reminded me I’d better just get off my ass and keep going. Honestly, with that kind of attitude that kid’s going places fast in life and not just down the mountain.
The other weekend that we went to the indoor ski, at some point I was finally starting to get a wif of the hang of actually snowboarding when midway down the slope I catch a snow pile while not raising the edge of the board properly and I took a fall. While I was composing myself back, right when I was about to let a “sighhh fuck meee”, a kid slides down past me, gives me a thumbs up and tell me “that was a nice try!”. It instantly made me feel better and I got right back on that metaphorical horse, which in this case was the board! Maaaan we do really never how far a small kindness to strangers can go do we ?
P.S.: None of this applies to skydiving or similar, THAT’S A STRAIGHT OUT NOPE FOR ME.