no guts, no glory

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…

“(…) when a body, an object or a predetermined shape no longer hold their natural form, this automatically influences us and challenges our logic, leading to a feeling of uncertainty, rejection and even foreboding. We do not know how to interpret them, nor what form of knowledge we need to resort to in order to define that new object.

(…) One of the main emotions of abjection is the feeling of repugnance. This emotion represents the separation of frontiers between man and the world, between subject and object, between interior and exterior; everything that has to be separated out and even eliminated. Disgust is a powerful emotion for most human beings, and it could be said that it somehow shapes our intimacy and is a part of our routine. (…) Our social relations are partly based on what we find repugnant and the different ways we go about avoiding it.

(…) Rejection of this otherness is measured by the fact that they remind us of what we are, of our mortality and animal vulnerability. Their appearance and strong physicality make spectators reflect and try to reach a conclusion to decide what they are actually seeing, what it refers to and why it is there (…) a controversy in which individuals seek self-confirmation about something they are unable [to] assimilate.

Repugnance is another emotion that involves the limits of the body, the perishable aspects of it. When something reminds us what we are or simply where we come from, we avoid it; it disgusts us to recognise that animal weakness, the perishable side of life and our bodies.

When we come into contact with this kind of highly cognitive concepts surprise is a factor that dominates our feeling of repugnance towards abjections. But abjection, and shapelessness, as we have already seen, are more than just a simple idea of surprise or distancing from social norms.

We want a GOOD ending. With closure. That isn’t 100% mind-crushingly depressing. And unless you like ending up as a desert rat with a bunch of nomads or giving your body to to the decaying engram of a terrorist, then this game has absolutely nothing for you at the end. It makes everything you’ve done feel completely pointless. Its badly made rpg cause they didnt bother there holes

Beloved, you answered your own complaint in the ask. Yes- the game is hollow. Because it's meant to be. You spend all this time getting invested and loving through characters and for what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. You can contribute nothing because you are nothing.

In fallout and outerworlds you're some unique and talented person who seems capable of things no one before you could do- in cyberpunk its made very clear that people before you COULD do it and when you're gone, others WILL continue to do it.

Imagine instead- you play in fallout, not as a brave and intelligent person determined to bring change, but as a scared and helpless wastelander or scav or something of that like who's trapped in the hundreds of years between the bomb and when our fallout protagonist arrives- your game would almost certainly be pointless and end unhappily.

I think one of the biggest problems people have with the cyberpunk genre when playing is that you, as an individual, are NOT the hero. You're not even A hero. Maybe you do heroic things, maybe even save a few lives. But you're still not the hero. You're just another thirsty young upstart who will meet their demise same as all the others. Its not just how the game works, its how the entire GENRE works.

You make friends, maybe care about some people, get invested, get excited, then BOOP! Gone with a single mistake, no closure, nothing. And the point is for it to settle in as you're watching the ending - you never mattered. You were never the important person you'd worked yourself up to be in your head. Some people might miss you. Certain things may end differently. But in the grand scheme, nothing changes. Life goes on. People move on. The city and the corps that run it continue to consume.

That is the point of the game and the genre in and of itself. If you really hate it that much, play a different genre. It's a commentary on the futility of fighting capitalism when you're one of the people stuck under its thumb, and its MEANT to piss you off.

That is LITERALLY how the game is designed - you are nothing, you get no closure, and you get no 'good' ending. You sit at the end and have to reckon with yourself that you didn't matter. At all. It's unnervingly life-like in that aspect.