Muay Thai, and Muay Thai.

Because it is the movies. If you are getting in close enough to use your elbow you are also putting yourself at risk of being hit/injured/grappled.

Boxers with long arms can strike an opponent suddenly, with less risk if being close to somebody.

Best offense would be catapulting large rocks from a safe location, but this doesn’t make for good movie melee scenes :)

I dunno that I’m seeing a predominance of elbows in media tbh.

That being said, throw elbows!

Generally, you want to hit soft with hard, and hard with soft.

Unless it’s elbows. You really aren’t going to injure an elbow on a skull the way you would a fist or foot. Might not feel good, but it ain’t gonna break.

The drawback is that you gotta get closer with elbows. Doing that vs someone you’re not familiar with can backfire when they throw some stripe of jujutsu on your ass. So, you know, don’t get jitzed. Mind you, elbows are faster in close, so they’re harder to counter when grappling, so enough training vs grapplers, and you end up with an advantage.

So, I’m saying: cross train with resistive partners.

While the hands have more range, the risk of injury is high when you dont have gloves. Elbows however, can be thrown at full force no problem. Less range, but sometimes when shit goes down you’re already at the elbow range anyway.