Cobra Kai season 4 episode 7 has a training scene where the sensei has a little girl student kick all of the male students in the groin. The last student says he doesn’t want her to, but she does anyway. The scene ends with all of the male students on the ground, writhing in pain, and the girl giggling and proud of herself.

What is interesting is that Cobra Kai started out with three seasons of close to no mga, which is impressive and unexpected for a show with this theme (competing karate dojos involving high school aged kids). There are girls in both Miyagi-Do and Cobra Kai schools, and lots of fight scenes, many excuses for mga. But…almost nothing. One training scene where a boy gets hit in the crotch by a tennis ball shot from a machine (not targeted by anyone at his groin, just random), another is a scene from the original Karate Kid movie (there are flashbacks to the original movies throughout this season). That’s it.

In the scene in the original movie, Mr. Miyagi kicks a boy in the groin. The context is a group of boys attacking Daniel, Miyagi’s pupil. What is interesting about this is that the made for TV version edited this scene out. So, at that time, 38 years ago, this was seen as sensitive content, enough so to remove it. It’s hard to imagine that today, when media made for small children contains mga.

There is also a scene of genital assault on a girl; one girl gives a front wedgie to another girl that is painful enough to put her on the ground. Later Daniel’s daughter, possibly the heroine of the series, praises her for “ripping her a new vagina.” This scene feels…out of context, a weird kind of meanness for the series, and there’s nothing else particularly like that scene elsewhere in the series. I don’t think I have a lot of insight into what this scene might mean about the writers…sometimes this kind of thing happens in situations with lots of mga, and feels like some kind of grotesque play related to the mga, possibly justifying the mga in the minds of the writers. “See, we do it to girls too,” that type of thing. But that’s not the case here, at least not at this point in the series.

Sometime I might talk about that false equivalence; usually it feels a bit like comparing grabbing a woman’s breasts to grabbing a man’s chest. In this case it’s implied that the girl was hurt, which should be disturbing. It is also interesting that the victim isn’t disposed of, but has an evolving role. I guess I would say the scene doesn’t particularly merit analysis, it is an odd scene that doesn’t reflect a particular social habit, nor does it give us insight into the writers’ views on genital assault.

For the first two seasons of this show there is a deeply praiseworthy theme. The Miyagi-do dojo is all about training well, emphasis on careful pedagogy, progressive challenges, an attitude about hormetism that errs on the side of cautious (hormetism is the property of biological organisms that, when subject to stress within a certain minimally harmful bandwidth, stimulates growth and improvement in the organism. So if you lift weights, your muscles tear down a little bit, then grow back stronger). The Cobra Kai dojo has basically every kind of haphazard risk and harm thrown at the students, a lazy and indulgent kind of tough love philosophy. Much of the series is about comparing the training methods in these two dojos.

The outcome is actually quite profound (not sure if I should credit the writers for this, but it is what it is); the Miyagi-Do students are better than the Cobra Kai students, but not by much. The Miyagi-Do students are MAYBE happier and more well-adjusted than the Cobra Kai students, but not by much. The Cobra Kai dojo is larger than the Miyagi-Do dojo, and despite the hazing, abuse, and neglect in the Cobra Kai environment, it is clearly making the lives of many kids better.

On the teaching side, Daniel is clearly working hard to make his lessons work, always pitching the effort and promised results to the students, and you get the feeling often that they might just be wasting their time. Johnny is putting way less thought and effort into his lessons, and somehow his very neglect is inspiring in it’s own perverse way; kids clearly need to work to get him to work, to impress him, to get his attention. So they do. Johnny’s lessons are direct, almost stupidly so…beat the shit out of kids in order to toughen them up. Daniel’s lessons are subtle, and distantly related to any kind of end goal. It is easy to imagine someone looking at Daniel’s lessons and suspect bullshit. As for Johnny and Daniel themselves, we judge Daniel’s character flaws and blindnesses much more harshly than we judge Johnny; any moment Johnny behaves like an adult or with compassion, we feel like cheering for him.

Today we have much more useful information about fight training than we did forty years ago. The UFC started in the early 90s, and to say that martial arts have had a renaissance ever since would be an understatement…more like a series of rebirths.

So how do they train? Do they beat the shit out of each other until the weak die or live out the rest of their lives in a wheelchair? My impression, at least on the elite end, is the opposite. I’ve heard some interviews where fighters say they NEVER spar. Found a long monologue from Firas Zahabi, an elite trainer, talking about how elite Cuban boxers train on concrete floors (meaning they are sparring so gently that no one even falls down). I’m not aware of elite fighters or trainers talking about the value of hazardous, mean-spirited training, hazing students etc.

But this is not how fight training is portrayed in media, basically ever. Typical scenes of training are people sparring full-out with each other, often taking shots at each other outside of the sparring (like after someone has submitted or the bout or round seems to have ended, so just out of a desire to hurt the other person). Interestingly, you get the feeling that the writers get sadistic satisfaction from this…usually it’s a character we’re supposed to like who is doing the unnecessary or opportunistic hurting.

There are many, many mga scenes of this sort; there is a training situation, the moment finishes, and then the girl kicks the boy in the groin once he has let his guard down; invariably this is a signal that we are supposed to like her. She’s tough, she doesn’t play by the stupid rules, etc. He was stupid to trust the training environment, he got taught a good lesson, he probably deserved it, etc.

…probably, like cobra and miyagi, it is way easier to write the indulgent and childish training scene, and would require actual work and thought to make real training part of a story. Similarly, to have the discipline to write a series like this with no mga requires awareness and discipline, and could eventually have led the writers to writing a new, intelligent, or nuanced mga scene (where the victim isn’t invisible, where there are consequences for the mga, etc anything outside of the narrow way mga always gets used).

So it’s no surprise that they eventually included a truly dehumanizing mga scene. What is surprising is that it took them so long. One of the female actors actually requested that she have a scene where she knees a male character in the groin

‘Cobra Kai’ Star Courtney Henggeler Originally Pitched a Bigger Season 3 Fight Between Amanda and John Kreese (cheatsheet.com)

…and was turned down. How did that happen? They actually told an actress that she couldn’t have an mga scene, in a tv series about karate. Obviously they gave up whatever discipline this was in season 4, but the fact that that went on for so long is noteworthy, and I can’t help but think that there might have been some thoughtfulness in that, that it was an actual decision.

I found a reddit thread about the mga in Cobra Kai, and I will write about it soon; but my next article will speculate about why Courtney Henggeler would specifically request her own mga scene.