obviously sokka is like, the platonic ideal of an Older Brother. and katara and azula are both suuuch Little Sisters. and it’s clear that toph and aang are both Only Children. but zuko…. does not have older brother energy. at all. so I think that means that lu ten, at some point, must’ve been around a lot, and was the older brother figure that both zuko and azula looked up to. and that’s why zuko is, in fact, the ultimate Middle Child.
I was thinking the other day about how Zuko doesn’t feel like an Older Brother.
I saw and reblogged this one a while back, but it’s always worth repeating, and this time I’m adding a bit of background info comparing common fantasy sword features to the Real Thing (with pictures, of course.)
Leaf-bladed swords are a very popular fantasy style and were real, though unlike modern hand-and-a-half longsword versions, the real things were mostly if not always shortswords.
Here are Celtic bronze swords…
…Ancient Greek Xiphoi…
… and a Roman “Mainz-pattern” gladius…
Saw or downright jagged edges, either full-length or as small sections (often where they serve no discernible purpose) are a frequent part of fantasy blades, especially at the more, er, imaginatively unrestrained end of the market.
Real swords also had saw edges, such as these two 19th century shortswords, but not to make them cool or interesting. They’re weapons if necessary…
…but since they were carried by Pioneer Corps who needed them for cutting branches and other construction-type tasks, their principal use was as brush cutters and saws.
This dussack (cutlass) in the Wallace Collection is also a fighting weapon, like the one beside it…
…but may also have had the secondary function of being a saw.
A couple of internet captions say it’s for “cutting ropes” which makes sense - heavy ropes and hawsers on board a ship were so soaked with tar that they were often more like lengths of wood, and a Hollywood-style slice from the Hero’s rapier (!!) wouldn’t be anything like enough to sever them. However swords like this are extremely rare, which suggests they didn’t work as well as intended for any purpose.
I photographed these in Basel, Switzerland, about 20 years ago. Look at the one on the bottom (I prefer the basket-hilt schiavona in the middle).
A lot of “flamberge” (wavy-edge) swords actually started out with conventional blades which then had the edges ground to shape - the dussack, that Basel broadsword and this Zweihander were all made that way.
The giveaway is the centreline: if it’s straight, the entire blade probably started out straight.
Increased use of water power for bellows, hammers and of course
grinders made shaping blades easier than when it had to be done by hand. This flamberge Zweihander, however, was forged that way.
Again, the clue is the centre-line.
Incidentally those
Parierhaken (parrying hooks - a secondary crossguard) are among the only
real-life examples of another common fantasy feature - hooks and
spikes sticking out from the blade.
Here are some rapiers and a couple of daggers showing the same difference between forged to shape and ground to shape. The top and bottom rapiers in the first picture started as straights, and only the middle rapier came from the forge with a flamberge blade.
There’s no doubt about this one either.
The reason - though that was a part of it - wasn’t just to look cool and show off what the owner could afford (any and all extra or unusual work added to the price) but may actually have had a function: a parry would have been juddery and unsettling for someone not used to it, and any advantage is worth having.
However, like the saw-edged dussack, flamberge blades are unusual - which suggests the advantage wasn’t that much of an advantage after all.
Here’s a Circassian kindjal, forged wiggly…
…and an Italian parrying dagger forged straight then ground wiggly…
There were also parrying daggers with another fantasy-blade feature, deep notches and serrations which in fantasy versions often resemble fangs or thorns.
These more practical historical versions are usually called “sword-breakers” but I prefer “sword-catcher”, since a steel blade isn’t that easy to break. Taking the opponent’s blade out of play for just long enough to nail him works fine.
NB - the curvature on the top one in this next image is AFAIK because of the book-page it was copied from, not the blade itself.
The missing tooth on that second dagger, and the crack halfway down this next one’s blade, shows what happens when design features cause weak spots.
So there you go: a quick overview of fantasy sword features in real life.
Here’s a real-life weapon that looks like it belongs in a fantasy story or film - and this doesn’t even have an odd-shaped blade…
Just a very flexible one…
If you want more odd blades, Moghul India is a good place to start…
i could not ask for a better addition to my meme post than blade education thank you so much
I love this more than I love my left foot. (Seriously, fuck you left foot, why aren’t you a freaking wiggly sword? Huh?).
Bless you for the lovely post reminding others that those “fantasy” blade designs actually did come from somewhere, because we’ve been Doing Weird Shit To Iron for a very long time now.
vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects
Honey is literally murder but go off
Prove it.
They literally puke their guts up to make your honey
I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.
Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.
Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey
they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom.
…do they think they put bees in that and spin them around until they vomit…?
bee carnival
bad and naughty bees get put into the b e e c e n t r i f u g e to extract their honey
Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.
… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.
How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.
The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of.If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.
Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees
are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in
their keeping.
