[Sarai and Samiel]

Combat is not by nature competetive?

You're *beating each other up*. You're trying to *beat the other person up more than they are you*. If you're the writer, you're *writing someone trying to beat the other person up more than they are the person you are writing*.

The very nature of a fight is competetive, and saying that writing a fight has nothing to do with competition is, quite simply, either a blatant lie, or a sign that you've left your brain out in the sun too long. The only, and I do mean only, time that a fight is not at all competetive is when it has been completely pre-choreographed and there is no way to change who is going to win.

And to your simplify, I say 'To a reasonable degree'. I won't deny that part of that was just letting off some steam, and some of it was repetitive, but the greater bulk of that was more or less needed to get across what I meant to get across.

As far as actually doing anything goes, I am going to do something. I am going to start fighting the way that makes gorram sense, and leave it at that. I'm bloody tired of this stupid assumption that all characters in a fight have to be equal in power to make the fight interesting and/or worth writing about. I'm sick of making all of my characters the same by boosting their power to keep up with constant one-upmanship, and I'm simply going to stop doing either of those things from here on because they are not functional things to do.

I mean, you really think I would point all of this stuff out, draw my conclusions about why we have at least some of the problems we have, and not actually act on those conclusions?