A Spanish (probably they want to call themselves Catalonians) historical reenactment group called Barcino Oriens who try to recreate imperial Roman army and civilian life in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE does a very poor job of representing archery. And when I say very poor, I mean absolutely abysmal.
It should be a crime to teach something if you have absolutely no clue of what you are talking about. This man here shows how he thinks a bow is stringed. This is not how it's done. That is utterly and completely wrong and he is plain ignorant about it. It is totally impossible to shoot that way, and if it would be a real bow (I mean not made of plastic), and if he somehow got the string to keep in place while drawing, the bow could break. Fortunately the string will slip off of the bow nocks if he tried to pull the string that way.
I of course commented on that, since it was on Facebook, and I like to educate people. The answer was as usual, hostile:
"Imposible! It's only one way this!" is barely an understandable sentence. I know their native language is Catalan, and not English, but neither is mine. The laughing smiley (I heard the diginatives call them emojis nowadays, but I still call them smileys) is by my (bow shooting) friend.
I patiently gave them an explanation in pictures, since if we don't have a common language, that should work:
I don't want to comment on the quality of their reenactment, since it's not the subject of this blog (maybe I'll start another one in the future?), but let's just say that if Catalonia did separate from Spain, we would not lose much.
UPDATE
They deleted their picture without any comment. I hope they learned their lesson.
UPDATE
They answered me later in Facebook, and it seems that they learned how to string a bow. Nice to see that I taught somebody to do it right.
