Would YG's martial arts development differ greatly if he didn't start with WP's MA?

[Ken Cheng]

For martial artists in wuxia, what he/she learns at the very foundation/beginning of his/her training can greatly determine the direction and extent to which his/her skills eventually develop, even if those early skills are, in of themselves, not particularly great or formidable. Witness Gwok Jing in LOCH: he started off training with the Gong Nam 7 Freaks' martial arts - not exactly world-beating stuff, but provided him the sturdy foundation he needed to learn much greater skills later on.

When Yeung Gor developed his ultimate skill of the Sad Palms, he synthesized the many different skills he had learned during his youth into a new skill that had certain attributes of all of them. The Sad Palms is described as a skill that combines tremendous raw power with unusual, counter-intuitive strokes that are extremely difficult to read and counter. Despite being called Sad *Palms*, it's actually a full-body skill that uses many parts of the body to attack.

Doesn't that sound familiar? You bet it does. It sounds *a lot* like West Poison Au Yeung Fung's skills - particularly after he tried to combine his twisted faux 9 Yum Jen Ging skills with his native Ha Mo Gung technique.

Yeung Gor learned his first significant martial arts skills from Au Yeung Fung. Although Au Yeung Fung didn't teach Yeung Gor that much, what Yeung Gor did learn of the Ha Mo Gung became the foundation for all the myriad skills he would gain in the years ahead. Thus, it's not surprising that the Sad Palms came to resemble faux-9 Yum Ha Mo Gung to a great extent.

This raises the question: if Yeung Gor hadn't learned Au Yeung Fung's Ha Mo Gung skills, but nevertheless learned those many other skills that he later did, would it have made a notable difference in the path of his martial arts development? Would Sad Palms have ended up looking/working very differently?

[pannonian]

Yang Guo was always prone to picking out and experimenting with eclectic martial arts based on a whim. Before he entered the Ancient Tomb, he had been taught the Toad Stance by Ouyang Feng and some very basic Beggar Clan arts by his mother, but he didn't particularly practise those. The Ancient Tomb arts were the first he dedicated himself to, at least partly as his devotion to Xiao Longnu. Even with these, he modified them according to whimsy. With every martial art he came across, he digested their essence before executing them according to his mood, without ever feeling any need to retain every detail of the original. Similarly with Sad Palms, the theory of which was intended to be counter-orthodox, not because Yang Guo thought that counter-orthodoxy was the way to a supreme martial art, but because he thought it would be more interesting.

[tape]

It seems like people just retain the skills that they feel most fit to use. Yang Guo completely stopped using his first serious martial arts (Ancient Tomb) after he learned the Heavy Iron Sword because he was now a cripple, and because it was so vastly superior.

Even Hong Qigong in his younger days seemed to prefer sophisticated and elegant martial arts like 'Wandering Fists', but as he grew older he completely stopped using it.

ZBT almost always uses Vacant Fists as his martial art of choice, but the incredibly soft style doesn't seem too reminiscent of Quanzehn/Wang Chongyang's style, though it is Taoist in theory.

[Ken Cheng]

Every martial art skill that Yeung Gor learned fed into the Sad Palms in some form or another, but I think that Ha Mo Gung was the most obvious and apparent influence. The way it's described calls to mind the Ha Mo Gung more than it does any of Yeung Gor's other skills.