Merlin: Hunt!Fail: How Not to Hunt Like Prince Arthur and Why

[crabby_lioness]

(I still lack auto-formatting. Grr.)

Merlin Hunt!Fail: Introduction (Note to Fanon) and Physics 101

Merlin is a family fantasy so I give it a lot of slack. They have yet to get a hunting scene right though, and in The Curse of Cornelius Sigan the hunting scenes went from bad to outright cringe-worthy. Their physics is laughable and their strategy is abysmal. Neverwhere had a better boar-hunting scene, and whenever I have to type "worse than Neverwhere" it's way past time for an intervention.

The only thing worse is fanon hunting scenes, which too often get the entire premise for hunting wrong. I'm not a hunter, but I live among hunters and these scenes have become increasingly painful to watch and read. So, in the interest of my own sanity if for no other reason, here are some notes on How Not To Hunt and Why. These cover the premise and the physics of hunting. I hope I don't have to write a seperate meta on strategy.

Introduction (Note to Fanon)

So why are these guys out here hunting anyway? Some fanon writers don't seem to understand why, and portray Merlin as against the activity. Nothing could be further from the truth. While there were numerous secondary reasons to hunt, the primary reason was pest control. The communities within Camelot and it's surrounding kingdoms were isolated islands of people surrounded by a sea of wilderness. The animals who lived in that wilderness considered the crops the people planted as free all-you-can eat buffets. To a farmboy like Merlin they wouldn't be seen as cute, fluffy animals, but as competition if he was in a good mood and vermin if he was in a bad mood. Domestic animals like dogs, cats, and poultry could handle the smaller garden bandits like mice and rats, but it took humans to kill the larger garden bandits like rabbits and deer. If people didn't kill the wild animals that ate their crops, one of two things would happen: either the wild animals would eat all their crops and the people would starve to death the following winter, or predators like wolves and snakes would be attracted to the animals eating the human crops and snack on humans as well.

A peasant like Merlin isn't going to object to nobles hunting in general, although he might well object to the particular techniques used -- Camelot's hunting tactics stink. If farmers hunted that badly they'd have no time to do anything else. The other objection Merlin might raise is dietary.

Medieval peasants, like most subsistance farmers and hunter/gatherers, usually only ate meat once a week -- this is where the phrase "chicken on Sunday" originally came from. The rest of the week they ate eggs, cheese, leftover meat, and meat substitutes. Their diet consisted largely of salads and "savory puddings" -- basically a salad dumped in a pot with eggs, milk or water, and whatever the local grain is, and cooked to a thick mush. There were two exceptions. One was winter when they ate a lot of stored meat, because meat stored better than plant matter in the days before canning and freezing. The other exception was for invalids and pregnant women, who needed extra protein. Doctor were writing sick patients prescriptions for chicken broth and beef broth into the early 20th Century. A pregnant woman in medieval Britain could by common law demand a share of any food anyone had to satisfy her "cravings". If they refused to give it to her and her child miscarried or was born with any birth defects, she could hold them legally accountable in court.

In contrast, soldiers, Knights, and the High Table ate meat at least once a day for the same reason modern bodybuilders quaff protein drinks -- they needed the extra protein to bulk up their muscle mass. (Ancient doctors lacked modern equipment, but there was nothing wrong with their basic observational skills.) This is the most probable derivation for the colloquiel medieval term for elite soldiers, "Beefeaters". Knights hunted not only to build up their skills, but to compensate for the strain they placed on the royal larder. So while Merlin wouldn't object to hunting per se, he might object to the meat-rich diet the knights ate and how much hunting they had to do in order to support it.

Physics 101: Not Every Projectile Weapon Will Kill Every Creature With a Single Blow (AKA Where The Merlin Scriptwriters Fail High School Physics)

We all remember that Force = Mass x Acceleration. For our purposes this means the force a projectile weapon generates is equal to the mass of the projectile multiplied by how hard the projectile is thrown. As the body mass of the target increases, either the mass of the projectile or how hard it is thrown or both must increase. Let's look at what this means in terms of various targets (rabbits, humans, deer/horses/unicorns, and boars) and various projectiles (rocks, bows, spears).

We'll start with the smallest target, a rabbit, and the weakest projectile, a rock. An older child can kill a rabbit with a thrown rock or stick in an open field or meadow. It's a job often given to children in substistance communities; there's a very good description of the technique in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A medieval crossbow, like we saw Arthur using in The Gates of Avalon, is a bit of overkill against a rabbit out in the open, but it's useful in deep forest where leaves and twigs might slow down the speed of the projectile.

Now at some point in our lives we've probably all been hit by a thrown rock or stick, either accidently or on purpose. It was probably moving with enough force to kill a rabbit, about the force that Merlin and Cedric were using to hit each other with sticks, but it didn't kill us. Unless the thrower gets very lucky and hits a vital spot, a rock thrown with the force to kill a rabbit is only going to bruise a human, maybe give them a cut if the rock has a sharp edge. Why? Because we have between five and ten times the body mass of a rabbit. That means a projectile that can kill a human with one blow is going to need five to ten times the force of that rock.

So, if you don't get lucky and hit a vital spot, how do you kill a human by just throwing a rock? You throw another rock. You throw a lot more rocks (called "stoning") until you hit something vital or the collective damage kills them. But a healthy human isn't going to stand around and let you do that. A healthy human is either going to run away or fight you. Stoning only works on a weak or injured human, or when a healthy human can be chased down or cornered. The same holds true for other animals. This is what lead to the development of bows and spears.

Not all bows are created equal. For our sakes, we can divide bows into three basic categories, short bows, longbows/recurves, and crossbows.

While a short bow generates more force than a thrown rock, it can kill a human only if it hits a vital organ. It doesn't generate enough force to kill a human if it hits anywhere else (Generations of high school coaches have been grateful for this fact.) But a short bow allows for a rapid rate of fire in the hands of an expert, like you see the Native Americans do in old Loony Tunes cartoons. This creates an effect like stoning.

Longbows/recurves were the medieval equivalent of Colt 45mms. They generate enough force to knock a fist-sized hole through a deer or an unarmored man, and to pierce the armor of an armored man. They will reliably kill something in those size ranges with one blow. But it takes about three times as long for an expert to draw a longbow and fire it as it does for an expert to draw and fire a short bow. (I don't really expect recurves to show up as they were not in Europe at that time period, but hell, Shine might inherit the props from that last Robin Hood series.)

Now let's look at the medieval crossbow that we see used in Merlin. It generated all the force of a short bow but took as long to fire as a longbow. So why did people use it? Because it was easy for non-expert to aim, and new soldiers could be taught to use it relatively quickly.

Think of a crossbow as the medieval equivalent of the "point and shoot" camera. In the hands of an expert a mechanical camera can take much better pictures, but in the hands of the average person a "point and shoot" camera takes better pictures.

Now let's look at the third type of target, a deer/horse/unicorn. They are between two and ten times the size of a human, and they're all muscle. How much effect do you think hitting one of them with a medieval crossbow bolt is going to have? About as much effect as hitting a human with a rock. It'll bruise them, but unless the hunter gets in a very lucky shot it won't kill them with one blow. With it's slow rate of fire you can't hit a deer repeatedly with the same crossbow, because a deer will run away. A deer can outrun a human. A deer with a minor crossbow bolt wound can get away completely. A deer with a serious but not immediately fatal wound can run at full speed continuously for up to two days before dying. It'll die, but that hunter won't be able to find it and eat it if he's on foot. The way
you hunt deer with medieval crossbows is on horseback, so the horses can keep up with the running deer. So when Arthur tries to shoot a deer with a crossbow on foot without another hunter there to help him bring it down as in The Gates of Avalon, I roll my eyes. Even an expert bowman wouldn't be able to do that most of the time. I accept that he's good enough to the kill unicorn in the Labyrinth of Gedreff because it was just standing out in the open, but if it had tried to get away he would have needed backup.

(Yes, I know there are modern hunting crossbows, but those are different from medieval crossbows. I don't know enough about them to say what all the differences are.)

That brings us to our final type of target, boars. Boars are built like tanks and about five to ten times harder to kill than a deer or horse. What sort of projectile weapon can kill a boar with one blow? A high-powered modern rifle or shotgun. Nothing less will do the job.

Spears were used to kill boars, but a thrown spear couldn't generage enough force to kill a boar with one blow. That amount of force would drive a spear through a brick wall. I was howling with laughter when Merlin used magic to kill a boar with a thrown spear, because magic is the only way that would work. The way you use spears to kill a boar with one blow is by gettting the boar to charge a hunter who is bracing a spear, either on the ground or on a horse, and letting the boar impale itself on the spear. It takes an adrenaline junkie with a great deal of strength and nerves of steel to do that; it's what test pilots used to do while waiting for planes to be invented.

And that takes care of the physics of hunting with projectile weapons, at which Merlin fails spectacularly. They're not any better at the tactics and strategy of hunting either, although I don't have time to go into that right now. I hope the series improves at this aspect, but I'm not holding my breath.

Comments

[quoth-the-girl.livejournal.com]

I am so glad someone else noticed this! The boar hunt in particular had me laughing all the way through. A regular boar is insanely dangerous and tough, and then that thing in 2x01 was the size of a trailer.

I loved the bit about the test pilots. Somewhere, I can't remember where, I read that they often used to put a slave or at least a lowly peasant sort on the job of bracing the spear from the ground, because the boars would be so enraged that even if you managed to skewer them, they'd push themselves right along the spear length to get to the dude holding it. Being the poor guy bracing the spear meant you were injured if it was a good day, killed if it wasn't.

[scarfman]

In The Sword and the Stone the boar-hunting party uses spears with crossbolts halfway along, so the boar comes up against the crossbolt when it impales itself, and still can't reach the spearman even if it doesn't die right away. Of course, the spearman then has the challenge of keeping the spear braced with himself at the base end away from the crossbolt, for as long as the boar takes to die. But the spearman is assumed to be clever enough to have been hunting with a party, who then come up to the impaled boar trying to get past the crossbolt and stab it till it dies.

I haven't seen 2x01, nor am I as educated about hunting generally as crabby_lioness; but had I seen it I'd have flashed back to the boarhunt in The Sword of the Stone and rolled my eyes.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Yep, those are the fancier boar-impaling spears for working from the ground. They only used the straight ones for enraging the boar and in later ages when they were mounted on horses. One French king got himself killed trying to impale a boar from a horse.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

It depends on the culture. In some areas it was a hero's job to be the spear-holder, in others it fell to a slave. In some areas there would be as many as three men holding the spear if they could find three lunatics to do it.

I started to write a long, graphic description of what boar-hunting actually entailed, then deleted it. The spear-holders were often crushed, and were always drenched to the skin in blood from head to toe.

[ceirseach.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

But of course the Green Knight, even when not currently green, is just so manly that he can do it with a SWORD.

I had much the same reaction to the two spears thrown at the boar in this episode - the normal one which just bounces off, and the magically-charged one which actually worked - because, honestly, even without a training in the theory of physics or the practice of hunting, basic common sense ought to tell you that outcome. And it DOES seem to get forgotten so often with Projectile Weapons Thrown Onscreen By Our Awesome Heroes (in any show).

I've just been reading through all your season 1 reviews (someone else linked to them, and I found them interesting enough to keep reading), and I do disagree with you on the matter of historical accuracy / anachronisms. Part of this is just different perspectives - I'm inclined to be lenient and allow narrative precedent over technicalities, so long as the narrative convinces me (which to be honest Merlin often fails to do, but that's another matter). I am a mediaevalist myself, so people often assume that I find it irritating, but here's the thing - it doesn't annoy me because it isn't history, it's fantasy. If one were to seek anachronisms one would first have to try for a chronology in which to put it, a moment and a world for it to inhabit; and it can't be pinned down even so far, so it remains story with no 'world' save that defined by the show.

To pick on just one example - paleography, handwriting - Merlin's mother writes in a late 14C Anglicana script, Merlin's book of magic contains scripts from the 8th to the 13th century which is rather a long time for one codex to accumulate, rather than being recopied in its entirety by a later scribe), and there are, of course, remnants of older languages lying around in fairy inscriptions.

And I think you mentioned at one point that there oughtn't be good, recognisable depictions of plants in herbals until the 19C - I've found very detailed, very recognisable images of plants in 12-15C manuscripts, but you're right insofar as it touches on the practical purpose. I've not seen any that were not merely decorations in the margins. Herbiaries, like bestiaries and lapidaries, existed to teach about the symbolic properties of plants, not practical medical explanations. So again, Gaius' book ranges over centuries of ability and intent.

And of course, given the (mix of) weapons, armoury, culture, technology, etc etc, it could be pretty much any time from the 9th to the 19th centuries. Certainly not the century Geoffrey of Monmouth pointed to.

And obviously I'm (slightly deliberately) missing the point myself here, which is that it's fun to critique. Which it is. :)

But in my mind this is precisely what Arthurian legend is for. It never had an originary time - it always existed in the past but is used to present/examine/delight in present thought. I have just had an article accepted on The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, a mid-15C romance in English verse which is very carefully positioned relative to the debates about marriage and consent going on in the Wars of the Roses at the time. Ywain and Gawain was probably translated from Chretien's Yvain into Middle English in the 1330s-40s, and contains very careful references to court fashion in Edward III's early court, in order (presumably) to impress the audience with just how fashionable Laudine's (Alundyne's) train is. And Tennyson, of course, reshaped the meaning and feel and message of the Arthuriana he touched for his own romantic time - and Marion Zimmer Bradley for the feminism and new-age interests of hers.

Merlin takes old stories and has fun with them as people have always done - with all that weight of retelling and replaying behind them. Which is why it always seems to me to be missing the point when people say 'the show got it wrong'. In my mind, it got it exactly right.

Although I do wish they'd get better script writers. And give Morgana back her personality (post season two). Sigh.

[ceirseach.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

That said, the one anachronism in Merlin that really got to me was one that was filtered directly to another part of my brain - my love of dogs. Why, why, does that statue turn into a Rottweiler? They weren't bred until the 20th century! Also, hey, Dobermanns for a manhunt? Totally not scenthounds, Arthur. Fail. Bring out the beagles. I promise they won't make you look less manly and threatening? Probably?

... and that was a rather longer comment than I intended. Sorry! :) It just seemed an interesting subject, which I've rarely had a chance to actually talk out.

[eandh99.livejournal.com]

I"m actually enjoying Merlin more now - because I've already come to terms with the total History!Fail (somewhere around episode 8? of first series) and now just roll along with the craziness. Cornelius just finding that faboo black feather cape lying around the castle? Sure, why not. The weapons are wrong (and even the beating was pathetic in that episode) the armour is wrong, the clothes and the food are just so many kinds of wrong, the castle has handrails and glass windows. But it's fun and the boys are pretty, and the gargoyles were way better CGI than last year's hippogriff.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

I know, I let most of the Fail go without comment (Although there's a huge rant about "The Old Religion" in my upcoming 1-13 review. You're warned.) but for some reason the Hunt!Fail has the same effect as fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Maybe it's the remote possibility that somewhere, some child will see it and take it seriously. IDK

[eandh99.livejournal.com]

Initially this drove me INSANE about Merlin, I bitched and groaned and complained while my partner watched. There are tomatoes and sandwiches and stiletto heels in Merlin!

Seriously, any child taking the history or the "technology" in Merlin as accurate? Once they actually get interested in medieval history, they'll be very quick to point out the mistakes. Like a truly dinosaur-obsessed child watching Primeval.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

I don't mind the rest, because getting the food or the costumes wrong isn't potentially life-threatening. Not many people die from tomatoes or designer dresses.

[eandh99.livejournal.com]

I just can't imagine anyone thinking - well, they killed a boar by throwing pointed sticks at it, let's go do that this weekend. It was definitely 10,000 BC levels of unrealistic.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

About 10 years ago some idiots snuck razorbacks across the River and let them lose in North Mississippi so they could hunt them without having to leave home. Now they're tearing up the field crops (especially Vardemon's sweet potato fields)and stopping traffic.

As dh's roommate used to say, "Never underestimate an idiot."

[eandh99.livejournal.com]

True, as we say at work " That much stupid, we can't fix".

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Aside from set dressing stoff like food, armor, and clothing, there's not really that many. The great social dislocation of the Dark Ages could explain things like Hunith's literacy.

[kathkin.livejournal.com]

In fairness, Cigan is a very powerful sorceror who could probably conjure up a feathered cape without much difficulty.
Just sayin'.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Not to mention his wardrobe was buried with him.

[kathkin.livejournal.com]

Goddamn I wish they'd shown that on screen. I mean, if he was a fan of feather boas...

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Mention of feather cloaks keep turning up in pre-Christian Europe. There's some indication they were worn by Pagan priests.

[kathkin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not saying it didn't exist. I'm just saying it looked a bit like a feather boa. *shrugs* I am amused.

[suaine.livejournal.com]

Yes! It doesn't bother me as much as it does you, but I giggle through the hunting scenes like a deranged squirrel. I only lived with a hunter for about half a year (hunting's not a thing in Germany, but it sure is in Louisiana) and the weapons, strategy and sheer ridiculousness in Merlin make me facepalm.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It really gets ridiculous.

[partofthequeue2.livejournal.com]

I am so glad other people noticed the flaws, and had enough technical knowledge to tell us where we're going wrong!
I always struck me as odd that Merlin would have a dislike of hunting for reasons other than Arthur dragging him out of bed and forcing him to carry all the gear :)

Thanks for doing this!

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Thank you. "Cute and fluffy forest animals" tends to be an urban idea.

[glorafin.livejournal.com]

Although your point about killing in one blow stands well, I'm unsure your use of Newton's Second Law F=m.a is warranted here. Although the mass of the projectile is a significant factor, the body-mass of the target has no bearing at all on how lethal a blow can be. What is important is the resistance the skin/armour/etc.. can oppose to the projectile's momentum or kinetic energy during collision. A massive boar with paper-thin skin could be killed much more easily with arrows than a tiny creature in a protective shell.

That said, Mother Nature is no fool and there is usually a correlation between how massive an animal is and the thickness of his skin. :)

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

This is my kiddie lecture. I tried to leave out things like velocity, resistance, impedance, and collateral damage as much as possible. :)

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. As a grown-up farm-girl, I appreciate it. Though I do have to point out that rabbits are as much of an anachronism in Merlin's supposedly-tenth-century setting as tomatoes are. (I know, I know.)

I do think that you're underselling the class conflict here. Britain especially had a VERY strong history of peasant objections to hunting. The Norman nobility made so much of it as an upper-class activity, and the creation of royal game preserves dispossessed the lower classes of limited lands, preventing hungry people from expanding agriculture as they needed. Add to that the very harsh penalties (amputations etc) for any non-noble hunting (poaching laws), and you have a culture of actual hatred for the practice, which shines through in folk ballads and documents from later periods.

Centuries later, when the descendants of English peasants settled in America, they still insisted on seeing hunting as an upper-class leisure pursuit, which aside from being not all that smart in a land without domesticated animals, let them to misunderstand and misrepresent the society of the people who already lived here, in which all able-bodied men hunted and women farmed. They assumed that agriculture was "real work" and anyone who hunted had to be a lazy parasite living off the back of those who raised the corn, leading to stereotypes about "lazy Indians" and their worn-down wives.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

I appreciate what you're saying, and it's certainly appropriate to Robin Hood, but there are no Normans here. The Arthurian Legends are set in the Dark Ages, when the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings were the invaders, not the Normans. We learned in Lancelot that Uther and his original knights created the nobility themselves, they are not hereditary nobility. They are still in the process of setting up the framework of the rights of the hereditary nobility.

There's a lot more about this in that upcoming rant. :)

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

Yes, I completely agree that it's an anachronism--but the whole series is BUILT on anachronism. And in the hunting scene, I definitely feel that the writers are drawing on a generalized "nobles-go-hunting" model that's based on Norman ideas.

And the show has certainly tried hard to erase the historical position of the Anglo-Saxon & Viking elements, both in the names of incidental characters and by making Merlin's spells Old English.

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

Also--I can't wait for the upcoming rant about "the Old Religion"! I have one of those myself, so I wonder if we're irritated by the same things...

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

It's a two-part rant that comes down to "When the heck is this set, anyway?"

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

Lovely post! This is one of the reasons why I adored The Once and Future King by T.H.White. He was so clear and interested in all the practicalities, including hunting.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

That and his origin of Lancelot were his best features.

[cyberdigi.livejournal.com]

Yeah! Merlin analysis :) Sorry I'm late.

I found the hunting scene strange, but not exactly for the same reason. More for the fact that Arthur believed or at least acted like he did that Cedric threw the kill shot...when Cedric was directly in front of the boar and the spear came from a perpendicular angel. Arthur and the other knights throw those things enough that they should know that that doesn't fly.

You bring up some very good points about the actual kill though. I'd assumed that Merlin had just by luck caught a major artery, which in retrospect still would have taken a couple minutes to bleed out.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Yeah! Merlin analysis :) Sorry I'm late.

Not nearly as late as I am with my other Torchwood and Merlin analyses, don't worry about it.

I found the hunting scene strange, but not exactly for the same reason. More for the fact that Arthur believed or at least acted like he did that Cedric threw the kill shot...when Cedric was directly in front of the boar and the spear came from a perpendicular angel. Arthur and the other knights throw those things enough that they should know that that doesn't fly.

In a melee situation, people get confused.

[cyberdigi.livejournal.com]

Well for Arthur at least I wondered if he was kinda covering (providing we go with the assumption he's figured Merlin out). He looked right at Merlin like he expected him to say something.

Looking forward to your future analysises(sp?).

[jacketpotato.livejournal.com]

psst - I'm putting together a list of resources for merlin_betas and I would like to include a link to this because it's fabulous. Do you mind?

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

No problem. You can link to any of my posts.

[helva2260.livejournal.com]

A pregnant woman in medieval Britain could by common law demand a share of any food anyone had to satisfy her "cravings". If they refused to give it to her and her child miscarried or was born with any birth defects, she could hold them legally accountable in court.

Huh, I did not know that! I'm going to have to jot that down somewhere in my miscellaneous medieval research file!

*g* I've been eyerolling at some of the hunting scenes too (like the boar hunt, where I spent the time wondering if Arthur was suicidal when he took the central position, or if he was just desperate to never have kids!), and at the fics that seem to derive their entire information about hunting from the show. People don't seem to realise that while nowadays we have the technology and social luxury to be able to say "Isn't it a pity that they wiped out bears and wolves and boars in Britain?", within that time period they were extremely dangerous species that no-one would have wept over. Not to mention that hunting equals food, which is a bit necessary for such a large household as the court! For myself, I've always assumed that Merlin's objections were more likely to be the fact that he'll be the one carrying the equipment and probably later loaded down with bloody animal corpses!

The one thing I'm not sure about is your comparison of the speed of an early crossbow to a longbow... I'm no expert on crossbows, but I thought that the Battle of Agincourt was won at least partially because the English longbowmen could reload so much faster than the French archers who were using crossbows. Were the later crossbows slower to reload?

[criccieth.livejournal.com]

My only niggle with the above is that it takes longer to shoot a crossbow than a longbow. A decent, trained, archer can get off maybe as many as 20 shots a minute from the longbow: not all of them will hit by a long shot but the idea was of course to have 5,000 archers shooting at any one time. A trained Welsh/English archer, of the sort who took the field at Agincourt, were expected to get off at LEAST 12 shots a minute.

I think the most I've seen anyone get from a crossbow was about 8. Which still beat the musket (3) and the early cannon (1 - the second shot went off a second after the minute) hands down!

Having done re-enactment and having used a longbow, I just give up on almost anything you see in drama etc which relates to bows.

incidentally, did you know that Kevlar armour will not stop a decent needle-pointed bodkin (arrow with a steel-jacket style tip) shot by a decent archer? Reason being Kevlar is made up of links, just like chain mail was: and the needle-pointed bodkin was designed to tear apart the links of chain mail.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Rate-of-fire is one of the complaints I chose to leave out. I could have easily written a dissertation's worth!

Modern weapons depictions are a joke all around. Don't get me started on Highlander....

As for good bowmanship, there's the Errol Flynn Robin Hood movie and the Mike Grell Green Arrow comic books. Grell's a bowhunter and it showed.

[criccieth.livejournal.com]

how about the old "quiver on the back" thing? Or the way people seem to keep their bow strung and looped over their back for days on end? Enough to drive you demented. Or just the old "ready, aim, fire"?

(to those who don't know, you only fire a bow if you use a match: which is to say the proper terms would be 'nock, draw, loose/shoot'.)

then of course we have the scene in Prince of Thieves with the two arrows loosed from the bow at the same time.......

[of-fkilter.livejournal.com]

This is an old, old post, and I don't even know if you read here anymore (I got here through meanderings through fic recs somehow as I'm new to the fandom), but I had to post that you made me laugh! Yes, my dad used to hunt wild pigs in Georgia, and he's said it's dangerous as fuck, and he has a tale of the time his hunting companion shot a boar before my dad got to the tree he had been intending to scale before the pigs got there; the boar charged my dad, took five large caliber shots straight into the chest, and still chased my dad up the tree before falling over because its heart was basically shredded pulp. No way in hell would I throw a pointy stick at one of them while on the ground!

Also, I read the part about test pilots aloud to my husband (a Navy guy who works with pilots all the time), and he laughed and said that was very good. :)

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Years after I wrote this, someone reminded me that Von Richtoffen did hunt boars while waiting for his next plane(s) to arrive!