Exactly what is a Kamehame Hadouken?

Courtesy Link: Kamehame Hadoken

Is it the cupping-and-firing motion, or is it a giant energy blast that a person fires? There are conflicting accounts and I'm confused.

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cupping-and-firing motion

But not all of the attacks classified as such have that hand motion.

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Big-surge-of-energy-from-your-hands-style Ki Attack. My bad.

But the actual Hadoken is not that big. It's just a medium-sized Energy Ball.

This is where the confusion sets in.

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It's the combination of an energy blast fired from the hands and the cupped, outstretched posture that makes the trope. The "giant" part has become somewhat memetic due to shows constantly one-upping each other, but the essence is just that: pose combined with blast, regardless of size.

edited 15th Aug '14 11:55:29 AM by Fighteer

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I've changed the Laconic and tweaked thoe opening paragraph of the Main page to be clearer that it's a Ki Attack in the form of an energy burst combined with the posture.

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We'll need to do some cleanup if we're going to make the definition more firm. There's a lot of definition drift going on.

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You're talking about the regular Hadouken. There are more advanced versions in use by both Ryu and Akuma (the Shinkuu Hadoken and the Messatsu Gouhadou, respectively) that are a lot bigger, beam-like, and more devastating, typically serving as super moves.

I think a more pertinent factor is that both of the trope namers did actually serve as the strongest move in their respective users' arsenals for some time (though technically, it's the advanced version of the move that does this in the Hadouken's case, as I noted above).

edited 16th Aug '14 1:28:09 PM by MarqFJA

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The beam-like versions are only in a few of the vs. Capcom spinoffs. The main series super-Hadokens are still just powerful Energy Balls.

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Another thing, we don't seem to have a trope for just the energy blast coming from a person. We have Wave-Motion Gun, but that's only for machines or other equipment.

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My understanding is that a Kamehame Hadoken is a Wave-Motion Gun (that is, a really big energy blast) powered by Ki Manipulation (as opposed to being explicitly magical or technological in nature). Whether it's a continuous beam or a singular energy ball doesn't really matter — the point is that it's a powerful destructive force that's fired out by the attacker. The pose used to fire it doesn't matter, but the fact that it's powerful does (if it's not extremely powerful, then it's just a Ki Attack).

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I thinkpost 11 is looking for Ki Attack (specifically a blast from a person). K-H is a much more specialized version, but tropable because it seems to make up as many examples as the broader trope does.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I wasn't specific enough; I meant huge-ass energy blast.

Again, we have Wave-Motion Gun, but that only refers to machines or other tools.

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We also have Energy Ball as a generic trope, but no Energy Beam or Energy Blast.

Energy Blast might be worth sending to YKTTW as a supertrope, actually.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Okay, these answers are way too inconsistent. Should we have a description cleanup or a TRS thread?

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