#Chris carnovo

[apieters]

Chris,

What would you say was your favorite movie to work on and why?

Hello Anonymous! Sorry it took me a while to respond, it took a while to find the exact photo I wanted…

I love every movie I work on, but Peter Pan has a special place in my heart. That was the movie that definitively launched my and André’s careers as fight choreographers. The fights were fun to design, and we had a blast working with the cast. Someday, I’ll have to share some of the shenanigans we were up to behind the camera—but I digress.

Probably the best part of working on movies is the friends we made along the way. Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, and Jim Hook—sorry, Captain James Hook—are some of our closest friends to this day. We regularly get together for dinner and they’ve shared more adventures with us than I can count.

Ah, so many happy memories—but a few sad ones. I was young, immature, and insecure, and I did something behind the scenes that ruined my friendship with André for nearly a decade—something that ended up costing me an eye and the claws of my left hand…until I finally had the chance to make it right—and Peter and James and Tink were there to help me.

But those are stories for another time…

Yours cordially,

Christopher James Carnovo

[apieters]

I’ve got Art Block/Indecision Paralysis.

My OC’s by Setting:

Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom (Disney Fanfic)

Chris Carnovo, a swashbuckling tyrannosaur

André Caron, a half-French half-Scottish swordsman

Heimar (Medieval Fantasy)

Peter Dragonsbane, semi-mythical founder of the main characters’ family

Peter the Marshal, liberator if his kingdom and direct descendant of Peter Dragonsbane

Reikert the Marshal, Peter’s heir

Hendrick Marshal, Peter’s younger son

Tristan Martel, the Black Knight, of infamous repute

Michael Agrippa, the best swordsman in the kingdom

Cartoon Animal Characters

Leo King, a lion MMA fighter

Ariel King, a lioness nurse and Leo’s wife

Trevor Khan, a tiger and Leo’s best friend

Wesley Packard, a wolf and Leo’s other best friend

Sammy McLeon, a lion cub and Leo’s nephew

OC Outfit Doodle Asks

Send one of the following symbols and one of my OC’s names and I’ll doodle:

👀 OC in their typical underwear 💤 OC in their sleep attire 🔞 OC in something sexy 🏄 OC in what they would wear to the beach/pool 👔 OC in what they would wear to a formal event (such as a wedding) ☠ OC in what they would wear to a funeral 👖 OC in what they would wear to a casual event (such as a birthday party) 👑 OC dressed as royalty 🚪 OC in what they wear when lounging around at home 💕 OC in what they would wear on a first date ❌ OC in something they would absolutely never wear 🎃 OC in a costume they’d wear for Halloween 🎄 OC in an ugly Christmas sweater 🚓 OC in a prison uniform 🚲 OC in athletic gear  🐰 OC in a kigurumi of their favourite animal ❄ OC in what they’d wear on a very cold day 🔥 OC in what they’d wear on a very hot day 👕 OC in a T-shirt with something stupid printed on it (think Zazzle) 🎭 OC in another OC’s typical attire 📦 OC wearing something that isn’t clothes (such as a fig leaf, a barrel, etc.) 👻 OC in a really bad disguise 📷 OC in a stereotypical tourist getup 🙎 OC in something embarrassing 👗 OC in something from the 50’s 💀 OC in goth/emo/scene attire 💃 OC in some radical 90’s clothes 🌁 OC in a hoodie 🌋 OC in camping or adventuring gear ♠️ OC in their armor (or in some sort of fantasy armor if not applicable to their story) 🎨 OC in a cartoon character’s outfit  🏨 OC in a maid outfit 🏥 OC in a nurse uniform 🐑 OC in farmer wear 👍 OC in a crop top

[scribbly-bear]

"OC ask game: Send me a fact about your character, I'll tell you a semi-related fact about one of mine!" My swashbuckling tyrannosaur, Chris Carnovo, is mildly far-sighted and wears reading glasses.

My character Ragunoe needs glasses to see in general, though I haven't put much thought into the details.

Thanks for the ask!

[apieters]

1000+ Posts!

I was going to make this my actual 1000th post, but the queue has a mind of its own. Oh well.

I decided, to celebrate my 1000th post, that I would draw a self-portrait of myself and my main OC’s, since I joined this site in order to post my personal art. I love these guys as only a creator can love their creations, and I wanted to symbolize how real they feel in my head in some fitting way. I don’t have anything fully written for these guys, but they each have fairly well-developed character biographies that I hope to bring to life in story form soon.

From left to right:

Peter the Marshal, my medieval fantasy character. I hope to write a fantasy story about him someday set in a land called Heimar, but I want to work on my writing skills before I attempt to do his story justice. If you want the story concept, though, it’s “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in Westeros.”

In case you’re wondering what I look like…now you know.

Chris Carnovo, my oldest OC. A swashbuckling tyrannosaur, Chris has finally found a home in my fanfiction/learn-to-write-a-story project, Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom. Chris is the fight choreographer behind all the Disney movies we know and love, but his fencing skills often come in useful whoever his friends find themselves in need—and in the wild world of the Magic Kingdom, many a Disney character finds themself in need of a good-hearted swordsman to help them out of some dastardly villain’s mess…

Leo King, an MMA fighter who loves his family and dreams of becoming “King of the Octagon.” His story concept is basically “Rocky with MMA and Anthropomorphic Animals.”

[christian-oc-tournament]

Round One Schedule

may 27 (group 1 left side)

Joy O'Connor vs A'den

Adelle vs Adrian Alyward

Ahleri vs Aithus

Aleksander Thunderblade vs Alice Liddell

Amelia vs Amaranth

Andre Caron vs Anwedd

Anise vs Lt. Strike

Aqua vs Ariella

may 28 (group 1 right side)

Adrian Mori vs Alexander

Andris Harkin vs Ashley Bethaz

Arkyn Thornburn vs Athaliah Taveet

Aris vs Atlas Fletcher

Arryn va Azarias

Barir Stelmer vs Beck Valentine

Bela Balogh vs Betani D'Agia

Billie Way vs Black

may 29 (group 2 left side)

Betty vs Bob Guppington the 1st

Blodeuwedd vs Brat

Burr vs Caldren

Cpt. Ambivalent vs Casey Dickenson

Caroline Schaeffer vs Cedric Blackwell

Cassidia Reynolds vs Christopher

Celeste vs Cluinn

Bobbert Guppington the 2nd vs Clair

may 30 (group 2 right side)

Bobby Guppington the 3rd vs Chris Carnovo

Conas vs Crispin

Copper vs Cusick

Connell vs Cymin

Dae vs Dallow

Daniel Grace vs Daven

DeathScreen vs Derik

Doc vs Domitius

may 31 (group 3 left side)

Dr. Victor P. Henly vs Dhrake

Dorothy Gale vs Dr. Elliott Sinclair

Eabennor vs Edith Wickham

Ellie vs Edlyn

Elysia vs Elwin

Emma Gardner vs Erin

Ephesia vs Eniss

Epic Palustre vs Eriol

june 1 (group 3 right side)

Dr. Riku Honda vs Edmund

Ethylene Petra vs Eva Blythe

Faraena vs Farold

Evelyn Vordur vs Felix Rodzic

Feire vs Gail Goffrey

Gerdie vs Ferir

Ghost Lad vs Gigi

Evangelinne vs grandma Maudie

june 2 (group 4 left side)

Haru vs Heather

Henry Pebbleton vs Hibiscus

Hiromi vs Hope Espy Chase

Hugo Mallory vs Ilumi

Ilias vs James Zauberen

Ilya Severin vs Impossible

Jacer vs Jack Archer

James (Loriair) vs Isidore Kavi

june 3 (group 4 right side)

James (Eyurenia) vs Isabel

Jarryd vs Jasper

Jett vs Joden

James Bracegirdle vs Julia Cook

Kabos vs Kate Riley

Kathryn vs Keres Blake

Keyto vs Kimera

Kodi Archer vs James Mulligan

june 4 (group 5 left side)

Korosa vs Kylin

Laughing Hare vs Leeli

Kurtis vs Kyra

Len vs Licia

Leo King vs Lt. Matthew

Lina Lane vs Loch

Logis vs Lucas Greydawn

Lt. Madeline vs Logolas

june 5 (group 5 right side)

Kyr vs Laurentiu

Maddox Darling vs Luria

Kestler vs Matthew Johnson

Marin of Yuneth vs Meridian

Mathilda Talbot vs Mina

Mihalis vs Max Way

Mip vs Milton

Misty Way vs Maristella

june 6 (group 6 left side)

Miranda Hayes vs Nikki Way

Mochrar vs Myra

Mr. Guardian vs Nabikio

Naru vs Ms Hallifax

Nimble vs Nevin Imre

Orchid Finch vs Prince Adar Griffith

Nokh vs Obsidious

Onne vs Peter Pensworth

june 7 (group 6 right side)

Mr. G vs Ourem

Pandora vs Owen

Oriana vs Peg

Peter Dragonsbane vs Percy

Pietro vs Princess Torva

Peter Bethaz vs Prince Adric

Princess Rovyna vs Prometheus

Protagonist vs Naphtali

june 8 (group 7 left side)

Puddles vs Queen Alyth of Avena

Quinn vs Ragunoe

Ramona vs Rannis

Relaner vs Rhyin

Ril'siya vs Ripple Fisher

Riema vs Riser Way

Rocoroi Markus Mikko vs Rosemarie

Ryphl vs Santeri

june 9 (group 7 right side)

Saskia vs Senaka

Sh'zkai vs Shleaema

Shiido vs Skylar

Sonrisa Firiel vs Syx

Sly Bastion vs Stelemi

Spike vs Sz'nami

Tad vs Tamaki

Teasel vs Tannufia

june 10 (group 8 left side)

Tehvlar vs Thaendric

the Enemy vs the Mailman

the Poppy Queen vs the Runaway Prince

Theo Gray vs Tiger

Thomas Hargrove vs Tiny

Thessaly vs Tsuname

TJ Valentine vs Toka

Trajeda vs Val (Keepers)

june 11 (group 8 right side)

Veelia vs Trevin

Verity vs Vokku

Vellatra vs Waizu

Valentina vs Wendy

Wryden vs Yasmin

Wisteria vs Zac O'Connor

Yuro vs Zaire

Zhahara vs Ziph

[apieters]

For Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom:

Chris, the blue swashbuckling tyrannosaur, got his name when I was a toddler (he was originally a little plastic dinosaur toy). His original name was Carl (when I was 2-3 years old), but by the time I was 4 his name had changed to Chris. Carl became the name of his father. At some point, I gave him a full name—Christopher James Carnivore, but when I decided to breath some fresh life into the character as an adult and write Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom, I changed his last name to Carnovo. So that’s the history of Christopher James Carnovo. As for why he was named Chris in the first place—it just came to me. It felt right.

The childhood version of André Caron was a originally a self-insert and had my name. When I decided to revisit the character as an adult and write Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom, he was still named Andrew, but I gave him the last name Taylor, as a reference to how Andy Griffith and Tim Allen gave their characters in their respective shows the surname Taylor, while keeping their first names (Andy Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show, Tim Taylor in Home Improvement, respectively). However, as the character evolved and I started drawing on other literary characters to make his personality and character arc, I decided to differentiate himself from me using the French form of my name, André, since by this point I had decided that André was indeed from the Magic Kingdom’s French district. I toyed with giving him a completely new first name—Louis was a particularly strong contender—but it just didn’t feel right to give Chris’s heterosexual life partner anything but a variation of Andrew/André as their first name—the name combo of “Chris and Andrew” had too much mental history for me. For André’s last name, I chose the name “Caron.” I have heard that this name appears somewhere distant in my Oma’s family tree, and in high school French class I used that as a pseudonym when I was signing my name in exercises in French. That being said, he’s not as connected to that surname as he’d have you think…

why'd you choose your oc's name?

[apieters]

The Mane 3: Jedi Edition

I’ve been on a Star Wars kick recently ever since I started hanging out with the lightsaber fencing class at my fencing club, so I decided to draw the Mane 3 characters of Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom as Jedi (why am I making AU versions of my characters when I haven’t even finished the main storyline ugh…)

Chris would probably be the Jedi Battlemaster of his era, and skilled in all 7 canonical forms of lightsaber combat. However, he would probably favor Form II/Makashi, the same style as Count Dooku. Like Dooku, I have Chris a curved hilt lightsaber to facilitate his thrust-centric fencing style, and I would imagine his lightsaber has a blue blade. Like Dooku, I gave him a double-breasted jacket much like a fencing jacket, but instead of a cape I gave him a short-sleeved robe (which would be blue) as an homage to his normal design.

André Caron’s character is based in large part on Anakin Skywalker, so his design is very close to Anakin’s from the Clone Wars cartoon series. However, I would imagine that his color scheme is more in line with Anakin’s Revenge of the Sith robes, with (very) dark brown fabric and black leather. He carries a more standard lightsaber with a blue blade, but the grip is slightly shorter because he also likes to fight with a single-handed grip. I also decided that he would favor Anakin’s lightsaber form, Form V/Djem So, since André is a very aggressive, sometimes brutal character in combat.

Kopa gets the standard Jedi robes and the Padawan braid, and a standard-hilt green lightsaber. Since he’s kind of new to swashbuckling adventure, he’s still learning Form I, Shii Cho.

[apieters]

Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom-“Marlin Spike”

I drew a comic!

This is my first comic strip I’ve ever drawn. I was inspired by @temiree’s and @kingdomblade’s great comics, Little Runt and Lesser than Three (respectively—you should seriously check them out, they’re great) to try drawing my own characters in comic format. I’m quite pleased with the result, for a first attempt.

This scene is actually canon for my characters, as it will definitely make its way into the written version of Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom, my Disney fanfic about how Simba’s son, Kopa, needs to be bodyguarded by the two fight choreographers behind all the Disney film fight scenes. This segment of the story will feature Chris and André—the fight choreographers and eponymous swashbucklers—taking Kopa on a treasure-hunting expedition alongside their old friends Captain Hook, Captain Jack Sparrow, Jim Hawkins, and Silver—an endeavor that is sure to go smoothly and won’t involve any entanglements with the corrupt East India Company, Captain Jack promises.

[apieters]

Wha Wadna Fecht for Kopa?

Wha wadna Fecht for Kopa? Wha wadna draw the sword? Wha would up an’ rally For the Bonnie Prince’s cause?

Now the prince has raised his banner! Now triumphant is our cause! Now the Scottish lion rallies! Let us strike for Prince and Laws!

In This Scene

Not necessarily canon in the context of Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom, but my story is about Chris and André drawing their swords for Kopa, Prince of the Pridelands, who does actually go by Charlie in certain contexts…And at least part of the story has some superficial similarities to the ‘45 Uprising…

But if they ever decide to go to the Magic Kingdom’s Annual Highland Games, this is definitely how they do it. And they would call their charge Bonnie Prince Kopa.

Canonically, Chris can fence with a variety of swords, including a British backsword, but his short arms lead him to favor thrusting swords like rapiers and smallswords. But if he does decide to use a basket-hilted broadsword, he’d just favor a more limited set of techniques, relying on the basics of footwork and timing to carry the day.

Most of the Lion King characters in the Magic Kingdom can transition between walking around like regular lions and becoming fully anthropomorphized with relative ease, because it’s the Magic Kingdom and I, the author, said they can.

Behind the Scenes

This took so long. But I’m proud of how Chris’s tartan turned out.

I decided to give Chris and Kopa the Royal Stewart Tartan, since Kopa is not just a lion, King of Beasts, but is the Prince of the Pridelands, while Chris is a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the “King of the Tyrant Lizards.”

I based Kopa’s outfit on a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie, but I made the colors a lot more vibrant.

André wears the Black Watch tartan, since he canonically wears a lot of black. He is also canonically half French on his paternal side and half Scottish on the maternal side, and canonically plays the bagpipes.

[apieters]

André Caron started off his conceptual life as a self-insert, but gradually amassed some of my least favorite character traits (temper, grumpiness, guilt) as his defining character traits. Fortunately, the cocktail of negative character traits and other story considerations combined to transform him from a self-insert into an expy of certain characters from a certain movie franchise that I can’t reveal yet for story-related reasons.

Chris Carnovo, his Heterosexual Life Partner, is the repository of my more positive traits, or at least the ones I aspire to embody.

tag the oc that's basically you but Worse

[apieters]

Someone will die—OF FUN!

This is a pretty good summary of Chris and André’s relationship.

I actually didn’t trace this—but I was definitely inspired.

[apieters]

The OC narrative questionnaire thing-Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom

15. Well! It looks like a couple of no good bad guys are trying to snatch [5].  Why on earth would they do that? How much trouble would they have? What if [1] got involved?—> Well! It looks like a couple of no good bad guys are trying to snatch Scar.  Why on earth would they do that? How much trouble would they have? What if Chris got involved?

Elsewhere

Scar isn’t exactly on good terms with a lot of people, and if he got snatched it’s probably because he tried to screw them over first. If they got the drop on him or lured him into a trap they could overpower him, but he’s surprisingly capable in hand-to-paw fighting, especially since he has no scruples about fighting dirty.

Nevertheless, Chris still considers him a friend and will stage a full-scale rescue, complete with clashing swords and André complaining about how why he has to rescue Scar too (while still helping anyway).

[apieters]

The OC narrative questionnaire thing-Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom

11. Say [5] really has to hype up [1] to [3]. Is this going to be easy? Sincere? How convincing would this all be for [3]? What if [1] overheard the hype session?—> Say Scar really has to hype up Chris to Kopa. Is this going to be easy? Sincere? How convincing would this all be for Kopa? What if Chris overheard the hype session?

Canon

Scar’s too egotistical to hype up anyone but himself, so it would be both incredibly difficult and carry only the thinnest veneer of sincerity. If truly forced, he would offer a lot of very backhanded compliments, like, “The scar on my face isn’t nearly as impressive as his,” or “He’s always galavanting off on some harebrained adventure,” or “We served together at the Siege of Pride Rock. I suppose he put on a good show, under my leadership, of course.” (The last one is a bald-faced lie—Chris was the one who actually wielded command during the Siege, usurping it from Scar).

Kopa, of course, would be thoroughly convinced that Chris was an amazing person anyway.

If Chris overheard it, he would probably be offended, especially at Scar claiming leadership at the Siege of Pride Rock, but he wouldn’t show it. In fact, if he had enough context for the hype session, he would probably be more amused at Scar’s hopeless attempts to hype him up than anything else.

[apieters]

Chris Propaganda!

Please vote based on the picture AND the description!

Bobby Guppington the 3rd [the fantail guppy @megan-karau]

the quiet, moody and poetic one of the triplets, he loves to read and write as well as monologue to his brothers for fun. he's also the most emotional and empathetic of the two(dies within a night by bloat disease)

Christopher "Chris" James Carnovo [Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom @apieters]

Chris Carnovo is a swashbuckling, anthropomorphic tyrannosaur who lives in the Magic Kingdom (The Magic Kingdom is basically the world of the Disney show "The House of Mouse"--the Disney movies we all know and love are just that--movies--and the characters have lives outside of their movies. However, the movies they act in tend to be "fantastic retellings of real-life events," and there is something magical about those Storybooks at the beginning of the older movies...). Chris spent his childhood alongside his best friend Andre Caron as a privateer, notably hunting down the infamous Captain Flint, and as adults the two reunited to work as fight choreographers for Disney movies ("Peter Pan" was their big break). They work especially closely with the Pridelands Shakespeare Company, currently headed by Simba, on stage choreography. He is widely considered the best swordsman in the Magic Kingdom. Chris lives his life according to the motto, "Anything for a friend." If one of his extensive network of friends is in need, he will try to meet that need as only a swashbuckling tyrannosaur can. Like a classic swashbuckler, Chris is adventurous, gregarious, and meets each challenge and danger with a hearty joie de vivre. He is also capable of great tenderness and gentleness, borne from his strong sense of compassion for the oppressed and suffering. However, he is often impetuous and frequently finds himself in over his head, and it often falls to his longsuffering best friend, Andre, to get them out of the messes they create for themselves.

[apieters]

The MacBeth Demonstration

In This Scene

“Lay on, MacDuff, and d@mned be he that first cries ‘Hold, enough!’” André recited, and he swung at Chris the tyrannosaur with his heavy Scotch broadsword. Chris slipped back and lunged, and André quickly brought his sword up into a hanging guard, and the fight was on.

Simba, King of the Pridelands and Director of the Pridelands Shakespeare Company (PSC), smiled as the two fencing masters demonstrated the new fight choreography for his next production of the “Scottish Play,” scribbling notes in a notebook as he jotted down ideas that came into his head as he imagined his father and himself clashing blades onstage, he playing a Lowland Scots MacDuff and his father the role of the Highland Pretender to the throne of Scotland.

Beside him was his mate, Nala, Queen of the Pridelands, making her own mental notes. However, she found her thoughts drifting back to Scar’s regency, when she first learned of André’s skill with the broadsword. She was but a cub, then. The infamous “Hamlet Incident” had been but a year in the past, leaving Mufasa in a coma, Scar as King-Regent, and Simba nowhere to be found. She had seen the PSC’s fight choreographer hiking along the edges of the Pridelands several times, brooding silently with a sword at his hip, always looking disheveled, as if he’d slept in his clothes and just woken up. One day, she and her friends Chumvi and Kula were foraging for food (the first of several famines during Scar’s regency was just starting) when a group of hyena thugs had cornered them to steal what they’d found. They’d escaped up a tree, surrounded by hyenas, when André had appeared. He told them all to stand down. They’d sneered at him, asking to know what he was going to do about it.

That was when André drew his broadsword.

The hyenas attacked at all once, but André retreated until they’d thinned themselves out, then began attacking them one by one, hamstringing some, slashing at others’ shoulders, and smashing others in the face with his sword’s steel basket-hilt like brass knuckles. The fight was over in minutes, and when it was over he’d escorted the cubs back to Pride Rock, scolding them for wandering off alone so far from their parents. So when Nala grew older, a few years later, she knew who she wanted to teach her how to fight…

Behind the Scenes

Since I’ve been leaning a bit more heavily into my Highland broadsword fencing in the past few months, I decided to draw Chris and André doing something broadsword-related. While Chris can canonically use a Highland broadsword, his anatomy (short arms, big head) places major limitations on the techniques and guards he can use effectively, so he prefers to use rapiers and other thrust-centric swords whenever possible. Meanwhile, I’ve always conceived of André favoring more cut-centric swords and fencing styles since his earliest inception, and in the spirit of “write what you know,” I’ve given him skills in the British/Anglophone broadsword tradition.

Thus, I decided to stage a fight scene between Chris wielding a rapier and André wielding a Highland broadsword, and in that spirit decided to trace a screenshot of the final duel between Tim Roth and Liam Neeson in Rob Roy—this one, in fact:

I drew Chris using the same (anachronistic) style of rapier that Roth uses (it’s from nearly a century before the film takes place), while André gets the broadsword. From his earliest incarnation, Chris’s signature weapon was a cup-hilt rapier without a knuckle-guard, because he was a pirate captain and Disney’s version of Captain Hook had one. But as a kid, I came up with the idea that as Chris got older, he would retire his old rapier and start favoring a shorter, lighter rapier with a knuckle-guard, and Roth’s prop was exactly what I imagined. It seems that at this point in his life, he’s already acquired his new weapon, even if it’s not his main sword.

I was originally going to have the scene take place in the same kind of castle vault as the original screenshot, but the framing wasn’t working right—there was empty space in all the wrong places and the perspective was a bit too hard to nail down. So I changed the scene to Chris and André’s studio/home, Jeronimo’s.

The story is a variation on the children’s book “Nala’s Dare,” written by Joanne Barkan, as summarized on the Lion King Wiki ( https://lionking.fandom.com/wiki/Nala%27s_Dare ). In Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom, the Disney stories and movies we all know and love are exactly that—movies and stories. However, these stories usually end up being “fantastic retellings” of the characters’ “real lives” when they’re not making world-renowned movies, and some characters can appear in more than one story under a variety of names and even forms. In this case, Word of God says that André is, in fact, the in-universe basis for the character of Ni the rogue lion in “Nala’s Dare’—and this fact will become important in the latter half of Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom as Chris, André and Kopa start playing with some unusually powerful magic…

[apieters]

The Movement of Conclusion

In This Scene

Chris: And that’s why they called it a movement of conclusion—because it concludes the fight!

Simba: I see…

Chris and André, the Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom, are the fight choreographers for all the Disney films, but they also do a lot of stage choreography for the Pridelands Shakespeare Company, which was founded by the brothers King Mufasa and Prince Taka/“Scar,” and is currently headed by Mufasa’s son, King Simba. Simba continuously tries to put a different spin on each production, and that means a continuous need for new fight scenes to fit his latest vision. Chris and André don’t mind at all—the PSC is their biggest contract and their working relationship has become a close friendship, a friendship that survived the Reign of Terror and weathered Scar’s turbulent Regency, and which may be Prince Kopa’s only hope of surviving the present storyline.

Here, Chris demonstrates the Spanish Movement of Conclusion, or grappling with the left hand. As Simba has just learned, this can be used to disarm an opponent, which means Simba needs to learn it in order to play Hamlet in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act V, Scene 2, where the stage directions specify: “Laertes wounds Hamlet. Then in scuffling, they change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes.”

Behind the Scenes

Chris is canonically skilled in all styles of rapier combat, but I wanted him to have a specific style as a base. Originally, I wanted it to be Fabris, but then I decided on the Roman-Neapolitan style of the Marcelli family, to suit his cup-hilt rapier and turn-of-the-18th century aesthetic. But I’ve finally decided that I ought to write what I know, so now it’s Word of God that Chris’s base style of fencing is the Spanish school of La Verdadera Destreza, which is my main fencing style.

The Movement of Conclusion is the third and closest-range of the three canonical defenses in Destreza, and since it can be used as a disarm it becomes a plausible means of performing the sword-switch in Hamlet. As this article demonstrates ( https://www.cassidycash.com/hamlet-laertes-rapier/ ), Shakespeare and his audience knew swordsmanship, and they knew that disarms were common in the fencing system of their day. Therefore, when the stage directions say, “…they change rapiers…” Hamlet is meant to be portrayed as intentionally seizing the poisoned sword so he can kill Laertes with it, not flying into a mad rage and accidentally grabbing the poisoned blade. He doesn’t know it’s poisoned, but the swords should be blunt (they are referred to as “foils”) and the fact that he’s just been wounded by a sharp blade means Hamlet’s suddenly figured everything out—Claudius is trying to assassinate him with Laertes’ cooperation. After waffling the whole play, Hamlet finally acts and takes the revenge he was charged to take at the beginning of the play, even if his indecision has cost him his own life (and several others). Laertes now has no choice but to seize Hamlet’s blunt rapier to defend himself, and thus, “…they change rapiers…”

Also, Simba was hard to draw. I had to study a screenshot of The Lion King’s final fight for a while to figure out what Simba would look like standing on his hind legs for fencing.