Billy Bob's Art Blog

Fairy wings? Boom! Backless halter top. Angel wings? Boom! Backless halter top. Friggin' dragon wings? You already know what time it is!

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

✧ Broken ribs suck. You don’t just “walk it off.” Breathing hurts. Laughing hurts. Existing hurts. Characters with rib injuries won’t be doing heroic sprints.

✧ Concussions aren’t instant naps. Dazed vision, nausea, dizziness, maybe even personality changes, but they’re not going to collapse neatly like in the movies.

✧ Blood loss is sneaky. It’s not just about dramatic pools of blood. It’s dizziness, confusion, and the body getting cold as circulation tanks.

✧ Adrenaline lies. Someone can take a serious injury and not feel it until the fight’s over. That “I didn’t realize I was bleeding until later” trope? Very real.

✧ Twisted ankles are brutal. One bad step and suddenly running is off the table. Even walking hurts like hell. Perfect way to ground a chase scene.

✧ Burns linger. Even small burns hurt more than most people expect. Blisters, infection risk, constant pain, it’s not just a cool scar later.

✧ Dislocated shoulders = useless arm. Characters can’t keep swinging a sword or firing a gun. They’re basically fighting one-armed until it’s fixed.

✧ Shock is a thing. Pale skin, trembling, rapid heartbeat, and eventually disorientation. A character might not even realize how bad their wound is.

✧ Stitches aren’t magic. Getting sewn up is painful and recovery takes time. They’re not instantly battle-ready after a needle and thread.

"Fay Attorney!" An Ace Attorney-style game which has you go over fay contracts to decipher and correct their hidden catches through the riddles and doublespeak. Not only that, but if you study up, you can actually use the fay's own logic and tricks against them, giving your client the advantage. Should you fail, however, the consequences could prove anywhere from inconvenient to catastrophic. Likewise, the fey aren't very well known for losing gracefully, so they may try to sabotage you after the fact, ironically making things harder the better you perform.

Anyways, the further you go, the harder the catches become to spot and work around, until you eventually are forced to face your greatest opponents yet: the king and queen of the fay court. These two are masters of manipulation and trickery, to the point where it seems as though their contract is impossible to get out of... Aside from one tiny footnote. From there, everything falls into place, and you officially beat the fey king and queen! You brace for the worst... but the two simply laugh it off, impressed instead of offended that a mere mortal could defeat them, and rewarding you handsomely.

It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)

-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps

-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.

- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back

- Footwork drills

- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords

- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position

- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear

- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes

- Learning how to maintain your gear

- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.

- Even more drills

Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial

When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing

There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.

However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.

Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight

At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can

Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other

At least in the modern version of sparring, one of the things we learn is how to spar. There are standard protocols to sparring depending on the form you're learning, and it's super important that you follow them.

This is not just about learning how to be the attacker--you also need to know things like how to fall right, which you learn for real life but also for sparring, because it can be really unsafe for both you and the person you're sparring with if you don't know the basics of how to keep yourself safe.

Tapping out! When you're doing particularly forms where you're touching each other/grappling/doing joint locks/etc., one of the main ways you signal to stop is by tapping out. This is key to keeping people safe during sparring.

People can get hurt during sparring, especially if you screw up. I once almost dislocated someone's shoulder doing a joint lock (they were fine, they tapped out, we talked through it, we figured out what I did wrong), and I had someone hyperextend my elbow once. It also seriously exasperated my wrist's repetitive stress issue, particularly from someone repeatedly muscling through something they shouldn't be muscling through.

You can also give people concussions, cause bruises, or even break bones if you aren't careful. I got a bruise that took months to heal (probably a bone bruise) from falling the wrong way during some exhibition sparring on a wooden platform.

If you start sparring/partnered fighting when you don't have the foundation of how to fight, especially if you're partnered with someone who doesn't know how to properly guide you, it's really easy to build bad muscle memory. The right way to do something, is not always the instinctive way to do it, and if you get thrown into partnered fighting unprepared you will fall back on instinct, not training.