So I usually give fantasy swordfighting a pass for almost everything. Your character is doing stunts with sparks flying off of their sword and doing backflips while cutting through skyscrapers? Sure. I can forgive that, it’s cool to watch.
What grinds my gears in fiction is usually when one character is teaching swordplay to another. This is when it really shines through that the writers don’t know anything about swordfighting, didn’t bother to research, and they aren’t just bending the rules for entertainment. They’re making shit up and hoping that nobody notices.
I was watching the Kirby anime with a few friends the other day and the most common mistake I see showed up here. (Meta Knight isn’t the only offender I see this line in almost every fantasy scene of somebody learning sword-fighting.)
Nobody who first picks up a sword is ever going to feel like the sword is an “extension of themselves” and telling them that they need to do this is poppycock. This only comes with practice and proficiency, and it’s not just with swords either. This is when you learn to do anything that involves a tool.
How would you have felt if somebody told you to view the car as an extension of yourself during your first driving lesson? Music lesson? Art class?
My sword fighting teacher has never used any lines regarding seeing the sword as a part of your own body. The closest he ever came is talking about “having knowledge vs owning it” in regards to knowing what to do in a fight vs having the muscle memory and doing something by instinct. And he teaches that practice is the only way to own it. Again, this goes for just about anything you can possibly learn.
I’ve seen some other nonsense advise in fantasy, but not as commonly as the “part of your body/extension of yourself” crap. Other offenders include: “Make sure to not grip the sword too tight or too loose!” Of all the mistakes a new person can make, gripping the sword is not really a problem. People know how to grab things.
“Being fast is more important than being strong!” Somebody’s speed of movement and how strong their muscles are usually go hand in hand. “Sparing.” Sparring with swords is called fencing.
Anyways, if you’re a writer and you don’t know much about swordfighting, just avoid writing detailed scenes about one character teaching another swordplay. They slow a story down anyways, other martial arts stories just do training montages or time skips and that works fine.
Also you aren’t going to learn anything accurate ever about swordfighting from fiction. I see a lot of people talking about swordfighting in real life about what’s realistic and what isn’t, and it becomes very easy to tell who has actually used a sword before vs who picked up everything they know from anime and Star Wars.
Edit: You know what I do want to point out that Meta Knight did use a real duel technique in this episode though which was cool. So there are cutting methods in swordplay that are meant to cause pain or mild injuries that usually involve hitting somebody with the flat of a sword, which was specifically used for dueling. See, dueling was legal in a lot of European countries way back when (also in the Americas but gunpowder was more common by then so a lot of duels involved pistols. However, throwing away your shot was a real thing, which is why it shows up in Hamilton) but duels were not meant to be to the death. You could still face legal troubles or be accused of murder if you killed your opponent in a duel. Duels were meant to bring satisfaction to a disagreement, not kill the other party. (I’m certain there were people who used duels as a chance to murder somebody while trying to use “I used every way I could to not kill them I promise!” as a defense but that’s besides the point, that’s not what duels are for.) So there are a lot of primary sources for sword manuals throughout the ages that involved hitting somebody with weaker cuts or with the flat of your weapon so you can knock the shit out of them, but not kill them. This commonly refers to hitting somebody with the flat of the blade. They’re a pain in the ass to learn though so I’m not really good at non-leathal dueling swordplay. This is why we wear armored fencing gear.
