Dryads from Witcher's world

I love the world of the Witcher. I read the first book not too long ago, and I've played through the first and second games. Unfortunately I haven't yet had time to read rest of the series as well as play the third game. But they are on my list as soon as I can manage to have some (read = a lot of) free time. I've also seen the first season of the Netflix series, but in my opinion it's not nearly as good as the books or games. It is too dull, too grey, not funny enough, and I hate the costumes, and some choices made in the casting. Geralt himself is fine, although he could do more than just grunt and be angry all the time. Hopefully the second season corrects the mistakes that are possible to correct.

I was pointed out recently that a post of mine that I thought of having been a half-orc woman, was actually a dryad from the Witcher 3's Gwent cards (a minigame inside the game). And it's true of course, how could I have missed that! Well, I haven't yet played the third game at all, and although this same dryad was in the first game, I didn't recognise her. I just didn't connect the dots in my mind. Generic female half-orcs do look similar, I will say in my defense. Anyway, my bad, now the blog post is correctly titled, and I got inspiration from that to make this post concerning the dryads in the world of Witcher.

 

This dryad is jumping while shooting. Hard, but certainly possible. The arching of the back that far is not good form though, much more power you get by leaning forwards from the pelvis with a straight back. But then again she's leaping in the air. The back arching this way is done to make her more sexy of course, since men are naturally drawn to arched backs like this, as science has shown. On to the archery mistakes:

1. If your bow has started to grow leaves, it's made of way too fresh wood! The bowstave should dry a long time before making a bow out of it, one year is not a bad time. Making bow out of fresh wood is a bad idea, since wood is a living material and the properties of the bow would change when the wood dries, ruining the bow's carefully designed performance abilities.
2. Making a bow out of a tree branch like this is also the worst idea. Real self bows are and always were made of one piece of wood, carved out of a tree trunk at least twice if not four times larger in diameter than the finished bow. So there's a lot of material to remove to make the bow in desired shape. Picking a sprout dividing into several branches is bad, as is the fact that this looks like the very tip of a tree, which would make it unsuitable for a bow. For example English longbows were made of the part of a yew tree where the heartwood and sapwood meet, to make the belly of the bow (heartwood) more resistant to pressure and the back of the bow (sapwood) more resistant to stretching.
3. The fistmele (distance between the bow handle and the bowstring) is way too big here. It should only be about hald of this distance. This bow has too short bowstring. It make the shot less powerful because of the wasted distance where the string could still pull the arrow forward.
4. Where are her arrows? There are no quiver or any spare arrows to be seen.

 

Eithné, queen of the Dryads and ruler of the Brokilon forest, as seen in the now defunct The Witcher Battle Arena illustration. The maker of this drawing has never seen human legs in his life, since the character has an entire leg growing out of her knee, the leg certainly doesn't start from the pelvis, like legs usually do. I know perpective and anatomy can be hard, but not this hard! Look at a human being, look at a photograph, look at a mirror, you have legs don't you?

Also the dryads are described as slender and small in the books, so how come this forest lady has silicone boobs?

On to the archery mistakes:

1. I searched for a moment where the bowstring actually goes. It is blurred in this image, in the ah-so-fashionable-motion-blur-effect, which they think makes drawings look like photos, but is just becoming annoying at this point since its serious overuse in concept art. It's a cheap Photoshop trick that requires no painting skills. But I was supposed to tak about archery stuff! Okay, okay, the bowstring does not touch the arrow. When the bowstring is released and is still angled like this, the arrow has not yet left the string. Only at the point when the bowstring is completely straight, thearrow leaves the string. What is drawn here cannot happen in reality.
2. This elbow is too high, and so is the shoulder of this same arm. It's bad form that does not use the back muscles correctly.
3. No spare arrows or a quiver anywhere, again. Do the dryads grow arrows out of themselves? Where do they come from?!? 
4. The bow handle is way too long. A bow is not a two handed weapon like a longsword, a space for only one hand is needed in the handle part. Too long handle takes space away from the bending arc of the bow, making it not as powerful as it could be.
   

 

 

 This picture I found from the Witcher wiki, and it was said to depict a dryad. It has grave mistakes:

1. The bowstring goes from the outside of the bow arm! This is very bad mistake, which not even a beginner would think of doing while actually holding a bow, but is alarmingly common in drawings. It happens so that the drawer first sketches the character and the bow in a certain position, and then don't realise where the bowstring should go. In some cases when the bow is canted to a ridiculous position, like completely sideways, there is no space for drawing the string under the arm, so they draw it over it thinking it must be so. It's wrong!
2. The arrow hand is upside down, grabbing the string the wrong way. We should see the palm of her hand in this picture. You might argue that maybe she's just placing the arrow there on the string like this and the changing her hand position, but I don't think the drawer has thought it that much.
3. The arrow is not nocked where it should be nocked. I drew a line to show you where the arrow should approximately be (if everything else would be correct with her bow handling, which isn't).
4. The back quiver. Not the most useful thing to have. Also making it even less useful you can put it on the wrong shoulder like this dryad has. Impossible to take the arrows from there. The length of the arm is just not long enough to draw arrows over the opposite shoulder. Also all the arrows in the quiver are broken, since they come out in a very wrong angle compared to the scabbard.

 

 

I know this is not a dryad, but a drawing of Braenn, a human woman, who was raised by the dryads. I just came by this picture, so decided to include it here because of the subject. Mistakes include:

1. Drawing the bow halfway while not shooting. One of the more common mistakes in drawings. Even a halfway draw is tiring to keep up, so no archer would ever do this. Traditional bows are not like modern compound bows where you can hold the bow for a long time while aiming. This girl is not even aiming, so what's the point of drawing the bow like this? There is none!
2. Two finger mediterranean draw, and the posture of the hand is very awkward. Three fingers would be better in this case.
3. A back quiver. Also on the wrong shoulder, so completely impossible to use.
4. The arrow is too short. The bow is half drawn, but there's not much arrow left to be drawn. It should be some twenty centimeters longer. Also the handle of the bow is unnecessarily long.

 

 

I will end this post with this lovely image of a dryad mother and her child, making arrows together. The picture is so lovely I don't want to ruin it with my red numbers, but it isn't without mistakes either:

1. The arrows are way too short. They should be almost double this length. The perspective alone cannot explain their shortness.
2. The feathers her child has gathered are lovely, but all different. You should use the feathers of the same bird (species) in an arrow, or at least very similar to each other (yes, sometimes people make the cock feather out of different species, but historically they tended to be all the same). Some species (like goose), are considered better for fletching arrows than others. You should even use the feathers from the same wing for the best results (so not mixing left and right wing feathers, since they curve in the opposite directions). Maybe the child didn't know this?
   
3. Why is she holding the thread between her teeth like that? I've fletched my own arrows with feathers and string, and I never needed to do this. I cannot understand what would be the point, since it's not even the end of the string. You can tighten it with you fingers too.

 

This is it for now, see you next time!

School girl Link with aviator hood

This time a 3D-rendering that looks like the Japanese game developers have tried to compose something vaguely European and Medievalish like. Those boots are just super weird, and so is the aviator hood! and the plaited skirt has much more common with modern Japanese school girl uniforms than with anything Medieval. The archery is also weird.

Mistakes:

1. The bow has these huge wooden blocks inside its arc, that will render it pretty unusable, since they would hamper the bending of the bow limbs severely.

2. There is a large bulbuous thingy in the upper nock of the bow. What's its purpose? Certainly it doesn't have one, apart from making the unusable bow even more of a nuisance.

3. The fistmele, the distance between the grip and string of the bow as indicated by the red line here is too large. In a longbow it should be approximately the height of the archer's fist with an upturned thumb.

4. The ubiquitous back quiver strikes again! It's a clear mistake in European Medieval context (and in fantasy derived from it), which this obviously tries to be.

Avatar revisited

In continuation to my update of the archery review of Hunger Games, I decided to re-review James Cameron's Avatar, since that blog post had already got recent comments criticising my critique of it. I'm always glad that my blog posts stir comments, so keep them coming! Here it is for this time:

Avatar (James Cameron's)

This is a shortened version of the blog post from five years ago I did concerning archery on James Cameron's Avatar (2009). Nothing of importance is removed. You can read the original blog post here.



Avatar’s archery is depicted all wrong.

Mistakes:

1. The beginners bow grip mistake, holding the arrow with an index finger. It keeps there without holding if you’re calm, and this only hurts your hand, damages the fletching of the arrow and can effect the flight of the missile.


2. This string grip is reversed. The moviemakers apparently thought this would look more “alien” to us, but it looks stupid. It is impractical and unnecessarily hard form, which no bow hunting people (on which the Na’vi are based) have ever used on Earth, because it’s just not good. This hand just shouldn’t be upside down.


3. The string should go here where this circle points, close to the face of the archer. Now the bow is way overdrawn, since the string is about half a meter back from the face. This makes aiming much more difficult, since the end of the arrow is not close to the archers eyes.


4. The fletchings of arrows in this movie are made either from feathers, or from insect wings. That is not a mistake, since fletching can be made of different materials (although feathers would be best), but the number of feathers on these arrows are. Based on the screencaptures I can only see two feathers (or bug wings) in the arrows. An arrow needs three feathers in order to rotate around itself in three-dimensional space, after releasing of the missile. This rotation makes the aim more accurate, two feathers don’t do anything.


5. The distance between bows arc and string, called fistmele or brace height, should be the length of the archers fist and a protruding thumb (thumbs-up-hand). This bow is way overcurved, since the fistmele is as long as Neytiris entire forearm! That is the reason behind the mistake in point 3. I’ve drawn there a longbow with good proportions for scale.

Some of the comments were disagreeing with my criticism, and here they are (some dissected into several parts for clarifying different arguments):

Freeyutube: "But using only two fingers should work fine also (we can read that medieval english archers used only 2 finger to draw their longbows)."

No, medieval English archers mainly used three fingers to draw their bows, not two. This is a popular misconception spread around in history books and populistic publications that do not check their sources. Most pictorial evidence from the middle ages show three fingered grips and there are historical sources to tell this is the way they shot. A powerful war bow benefits from the use of the third finger, and it would be disadvantageous to use two fingers to draw it.

Freeyutube: "And about using a "reversed grip" with the arrow on the usual side of the bow, the russian Seregedel's school shows it is feasible."

Yes, I've seen that video of Iza Privezenceva shooting with a reversed grip (which I will discuss in a separate blog post), but there has to be a reason why they didn't do it historically. There is close to zero evidence that this technique would've been used historically. If it was somehow better surely it would've been used at least somewhere. It is entirely possible to practise yourself to be good at this technique, but it doesn't mean it would be better technique than some other, or that it would've been used historically somewhere. I think this technique is heavily related to the use of back quiver, since it's difficult to draw arrows quickly from the back. Maybe the Russian woman use this technique to somewhat counterbalance the back quiver hindrance. When really the solution would be to use a hip quiver or when wanting to be extremely quick, to hold the arrows in the hand while shooting.

Matthew: "Just because you don’t like the way it looked and haven’t done your research, doesn’t mean that method wasn’t used. If you do your research you will find that several cultures throughout history have used this method for war and hunting. If you reverse everything in the picture to show right handed shooting you will see that the placement is a lot more correct then you realize."

I have done my research, thanks for asking. The reverse grip method is not well documented anywhere in the World. There are few sketchy pictorial pieces that might or might not depict that, and I will discuss them in a later blog post. If it was done somewhere historically, it must've been so insignificant an instance that we don't know much about it. More probably it wasn't done in any significant scale, since it's unintuitive and doesn't offer anything that a regular grip couldn't. If you know some evidence that reverse grip was indeed used by "several cultures throughout history" "for war and hunting" please show me the evidence. Pictures would be nice. But I don't think this evidence exists. If it does, I'm more than happy to correct myself. It's not that I would be preaching the ultimate truth, I just look at the evidence and make deductions based on that.

Matthew: "About the fletchings you say it needs 3 fletchings to fly properly but they only used 2 and that is completely native style, and the avatars are more like natives on steroids if you will. You are focused on the European style archery and are closed minded to other styles both historical and current."

It is indeed true that some arrows were made using only two feathers for their fletching. In worldwide scale this is really rare, but for example some native American peoples did use two fletched arrows, you are right in that. However their arrows are usually fletched a bit differently than the CGI ones used for Na'vi in the film. In Avatar, the two fletchings are straight opposite of each other, and form a flat surfice, they are not curved at all. When actual native Americans (for example Cherokee) did their arrows with the two-fletch style, they often curved the feathers helically around the arrow shaft, and/or formed the feathers very differently than this. I will make a blog post of those in the future too.

Arrows in Avatar have two fletchings, forming a two-dimensional plane. While this is possible to do and the arrows will fly of course when shot from a bow, it would be more beneficial to have either three fletchings, or the two fletchings turned helically around the arrowshaft like in the third picture, ot cut differently from the feathers like in the fourth picture. The photos represent some Native American (Cherokee) style fletchings.

Matthew: "You have drawn a longbow there but not all cultures used the longbow like the bow that the chief that have his bow to Navi when he died is similar to a horse bow there is even proof of some South American style bows made that way."

I only drew there a long bow, not meant to be "the English/Welsh/European Longbow". It is there only to show that the fistmele of the Na'vi bow is huge. But there I have actually made a mistake by looking at the picture. I thought five years ago that in this picture the bow in undrawn. But now when I look it closer I see that the arrow is on the string and while Neytiri doesn't draw the arrow and string back with her string hand, the bow is still drawn to a degree, and she just holds the arrow there with her bow hand. This can be seen by the fact that the bowstring makes an angle at the arrow nock, which I didn't notice before. This unproves my criticism of the too big fistmele, since we can see from other pictures that the fistmele in this bow is in the limits of possibility.

Upon closer inspection I noticed that the bow is in a semi-drawn position, the string making an angle at the nock of the arrow (strengthened with a red line).

But now when inspecting the bow again, I want to talk about another point regarding to it. This is the ceremonial bow of the Na'vi, owned by Neytiris father, until she inherited it from him. It is different from the regular Na'vi bows by the fact that it has these blue blade-like objects stuck in it. From the picture above you can see that the bow limbs are bifurcated so that the blade-part goes between the halves of the limb. The bowstring is then split into two near it's end and both ends are attached to the bifurcated bow limbs.

This design is absolutely ridiculous. There is no point of making a bow like this. It might look cool to some modern viewers, but this whole construction would make the bow weaker both in shooting power and in integral strength. Also a lot heavier with those large blades, and more cumbersome and difficult to carry around. I admit it's a ceremonial bow, but it's been seen used for shooting in the film, so it is clearly also intended for hunting/combat, not just as decoration.

There's a reason blades were never attached into bows. Bows are delicated weapons, if they are used to hit things they might break. That's why archers usually had a back-up weapon in case they got into close combat or otherwise couldn't use their bow anymore. In Europe that usually was a sword, dagger or an axe, could've been something else in pre-Columbian America, on which the Na'vi are based. Anyway, nobody in history used their bows to hit things, since the bows could break, and there were more useful things to hit people with than bows. So blades were never attached to bows anywhere in the world.

Integrating these huge blades in the centre-line of the bow has resulted in the bow limbs being cut in hald, since they have to bend and travel through the blades. That makes the bow limbs structurally weaker, they might break more easily, and it also diminishes the power of the bow. Attaching the string becomes extra hard, since it has four nocking points instead of just two, and a bowstring needs to de detached when the bow is not used, since otherwise it will strain the power out of the bow in the long run.

So, I like to present the updated version of my criticism of the archery in Avatar as follows:

Mistakes and updates:

1. The beginners bow grip mistake, holding the arrow with an index finger. It keeps there without holding if you’re calm, and this only hurts your hand, damages the fletching of the arrow and can effect the flight of the missile.


2. This string grip is reversed. The moviemakers apparently thought this would look more “alien” to us. It is unintuitive and unnecessary form, without much precedence in the real history of the World, although some modern archers have emplyed this technique more or less succesfully.


3. I originally draw this circle here to point where the arrow is traditionally drawn. However an overdraw isn't always a mistake, and longer arrows can indeed be "overdrawn". Neither does the anchor point of the arrow be near the eyes, it can really be anywhere.


4. The fletchings of arrows in this movie are made either from feathers, or from insect wings. That is not a mistake, since fletching can be made of different materials (although feathers would be best), but the number of feathers on these arrows is unusual. Based on the screencaptures I can only see two feathers (or bug wings) in the arrows. Most arrows have three feathers giving it a good spin. This rotation makes the aim more accurate. Two-feathered arrows however do occur in the real World, but they are rare and often times contructed differently than these.


5. The distance between bows arc and string, called fistmele or brace height, should be the length of the archers fist and a protruding thumb (thumbs-up-hand) for a longbow. For recurve bows this can be greater. I originally misinterpreted the image so that I though the fistmele was way too big. It's actually not.
6. The Na'ci ceremonial bow has huge blades stuck right in the middle axis of it, splitting the bow limbs in half. This design, while it might look cool, is highly impractical and dminishes both the bows integral strength and it's shooting power. There is no reason anybody (human or alien) would ever construct a bow like this.

With this I will close this case for now. Have a nice day everybody and thanks for your comments!

Another one of those elvesses

Why is it that all elves are female? I know why, it's because men (and boys [and men-children]) draw these pictures with one hand in their pocket. That pocket that has a hole in the bottom you know. But seriously think about how an elven population could sustain itself if it's only made of up women? Are elves a kind of fantasy race such as Amazons who only go to men when they want to reproduce, kill all their boy children and live in solitude? Or is it that gender roles are reversed in elven societies, so that elven women do all the fighting stuff (you know, archery is fighting when done against people and not animals, in which case it is hunting), and elf-men are take care of the home and children?

These scenarios seem unlikely at best. But according to contemporary pictorial evidence, all elves seem to be women.
Except Cary Elwes of course!


Back to business. That Elder Scrolls inspired (quod green glass sword) elvess (?, female elf) has many mistakes in her archery style, so probably she's just a poser with a bow, but without any knowledge of how to shoot with it.

1. Let's start with the bow as always. It's hoorrible, also as always. Sad. This bulky spiky thing would not actually work as a bow, so maybe she should just throw it at enemies instead of trying to shoot with it.

2. The string is not attached to the end of the bow limbs, as it should. The fistmele is also too great.

3. This is a reverse grip of the arrow. There is no point of doing this, and to my knowledge, no evidence of anyone ever doing it.

4. This is the place where the arrow should be nocked. About the center of the bowstring (technically usually one fist above the center, depending on bow type though), but this arrow is nowhere near the center. This arrow would hit the ground if shooting it is possible at all.

5. Back quiver. And on the wrong shoulder for a right handed person. Impossible to get the arrows from there.

6. The arrow has a huge arrowtip, which would be too heavy for an actualy arrow that is intended to be shot from a bow.

10+2+3−12 commandments of skeletal archery

They couldn't invent just ten commandments of dungeon delwing, so they had to add two more and call it a ten+. Ok, let's add three more, so we have fifteen commandments, of which three last ones are mistakes:

1. This is a huge fistmele. The fistmele in recurve bows is sometimes bigger than in longbows but this is just too big. It makes the bow ineffective.

2. Back quiver, as usual. It is also on the wrong side...

3. ...on the other hand the skeleton archer is left handed. Is it a mistake, or is the image mirrored (which would still make it a mistake)?

Ms. Violet with a Plexiglass bow

Let's start the year 2019 with this digital drawing. Some could consider it quite nice even. At least the woman is beautiful. The bow she holds is instead ridiculous, so let's get to it.

Mistakes:

1. Is the bow made out of glass? Crystal? Ice? Plexiglass? I don't care, it is impossible. It wouldn't work. Plastic bows do exist, and maybe theoretically you could make one out of transparent plastic, but the shape of this bow is also wrong, so it wouldn't work. A plastic bow has to be flat, and this is not.

2. The bowstring seems to be permanently attached to the bow via a hole in the bow. This is not good, since bowstrings are intentionally removable, so you could easily replace them if they snap. The more common reason is that you should always take the string off the bow when not shooting, since if you always keep the bow with the string, there's tension which over time makes the bow weaker.

3. The fistmele in this bow is huge. Way too big for this to be an effective bow, even if it could otherwise work, which it doesn't.

4. Back quiver, always the back quiver. Now, if this would be an accurate depiction of some Asian style shooter, they often use a kind of back quiverish quiver, which really is a hip quiver but the arrows are at the side of the archer, and the quiver doesn't cover much of the arrows, and they are easier to get from there than from a traditional Hollywood back quiver.

5. The arrows don't have room for fingers behind the fletching, which makes them very difficult to shoot.

Black clad archress

Black and white = cool? At least some people think so. Well, the face is in colour, since grey skin looks repulsing. No really, there is a condition (achromatopsia) that means people who have lost all their colour vision, so they really see everything in greyscale, and many of those people become depressed since human skin looks grey and disgusting to them.

It doesn't happen when you watch old black and white films of course, since you know it's only going to last a certain amount of time, but if you would have to live in a colourless world for the rest of your life...

Why I always get carried away before we get to archery mistakes, since this picture features an archer, and there are mistakes:

1. The bow is again ridiculously thick and ugly looking. Not a good design at all.
2. The bowstring is not attached to anything. A problem that could be corrected by looking at a real bow one. Or a picture of a real bow. Just once!
3. The fistmele, space between bow's handle and the string is too big.
4. Back quiver is bad quiver.

Bonus:
Left handedness. Maybe. Although the arrows are on the wrong shoulder if she's shooting left handedly.

Fantasy 17th century female gladiator ranger?

I've never seen anybody standing like that. Not even in the gentlemen's club we visited in Portugal at the start of the summer. That would've been the place I would've expected to see women standing like that, but they didn't. Maybe the draughtsman of this picture hasn't been in a gentlemen's club. I would recommend going into one. But not a one in Jyväskylä, that was not so great told my friend who lived there (in the small city in Finland, not in the club of course).

By the way, why has this woman covered her forehead, right shoulder and boob, and her left hand in armour, but not anything else? Having thick steel gauntlets is not beneficial to archery by any means. And that metallic peaked cap is seriously interfering with vision it seems. Vision is quite crucial in archery, just saying...

Anyway, to the mistakes:

1. This bow is in the category "so ugly it couldn't be recognised as a bow if it wouldn't be held like that by a person."
2. This huge space is called a fistmele. And it shouldn't be this huge. It should be about one's fist and up pointing thumb distance, not much more.
3. Where are her arrows and quiver? They are nowhere to be seen.

P.S.
Those 17th century men's cavalry boots didn't actually have stilettos on them even though they did have heels.

Gothic Jungle Book Pocahontas

This picture is like Jungle Book meets Pocahontas in a gothic setting. Where are all the colours (of the wind)? Bagheera here is black, and also colourless are the dead looking Grandmother Willows. The woman is just about to slip from the tree brach se is sitting(?) on. Wardrobe choices seems to to concern her, but who wouldn't want to dress in a mini skirt and a tight leather top that can "malfunction" at any time, while presumably going to a hunt in the forest and climbing trees? There is also a very specific little wind just in her black hair, and another that blows right next to it, to her hood, but in the opposite direction, must be magic!

Not very many archery mistakes in this drawing, since the woman is not shooting. When shooting, there are numerous things that can be wrong, but when just holding the bow, it is easier to get things right, since there are lesser amount of things to notice.

Still, there are mistakes:
1. The fistmele, the space between the bow and bowstring at the middle is too wide. It means the bow is weak. Nobody would use a weak bow for hunting or for war. Only children use weak bows when they start practising archery. And bows can be made weak without having a huge fistmele.
2. Quiver on the back. It would be easier to list all the times I've seen a hip quiver in modern archer drawings. Can't think of any at the moment.
3. The quiver is also on the wrong shoulder, if you would like to get arrows from there.

Halfling with a human bow, or a human with giant bow?

I don't try by trying to find mistakes in these pictures, they are usually just so blatant that they jump to my eyes, irritate me and force me to make a blog post about them. My sincere hope is that I educate people, little by little, to notice these mistakes, correct them and avoid all kinds of errors relating to archery.

So this picture looked good at first, but I just looked it a little longer and noticed a lot of odd things, which can also be called mistakes:

1. The bow is huge! It's just way too big. Biggest longbows were as tall as the archers themselves, but they were longbows. This is a recurve bow, and recurve bows usually were composite bows, which means that they were made of multiple layers of wood and sinew. In contrast self-bows (like longbow) are made of a single piece of wood, and they have less proportionally power in the same bow length. That's why a longbow which is much longer than a composite bow can be as strong as the other. The recurve bow in this picture is longer than a longbow, and it's a recurve bow. Recurve bows were never that long. It's unnecessarily long, it will need more power to draw it to full length than this woman has, and thus she couldn't harness the full potential of this bow, so the extra length is useless. In fact it only hinders the user. This bow is made for a giant. The proper length for this kind of bow is drawn in white for comparison.
2. The handle is thrice as long as it needs to be. All the extra length in the handle part make the bow less bendable, and thus decreases its power. Not good.
3. The fistmele is too big too. In longbows the fistmele should be the height of a closed fist plus an upright thumb. In recurve bow though it should be shorter, since the handle goes back at the string.
4. There are some hand length of useless space in both sides of the nocks of the bow. It has no use if its behind the bowstring.
5. Maker of this picture has drawn some leather bracers on this womans arms, but they are not meant for archery, they are just the clichéd fantasy leather bracers every fantasy (and "historical") character must have, no matter the profession and task at hand. A proper archer's wrist bracer should be the other way around, so that the attaching "mechanism" doesn't interfere with the bowstring.
6. The quiver is not only at back (where it shouldn't be), but its also behind the wrong shoulder. How is she going to get the arrows from there with her right hand?

Good:
Hmm... not much archery related, but at least she's not overly sexualised fantasy character. A pretty clichéd brown leather and green hooded cape "wood elf" fantasy attire though. And the bow of course, female characters only use bows.

Swaggety swag peasant bowman

A male archer for a while. Looking quite swaggish, even though I hate the word swag. Can't believe I'm even using it! Anyway, to the mistakes:

1. This is the most imbalanced bow i've ever seen! It is true that in kyudo, Japanese archery, people use asymmetrical bows, which' upper limb is longer than the lower limb, but they are not nearly this asymmetrical. This is really too much. The lower part of this longbow sized recurve is so small compared to the upper part that it makes shooting with this device a completely impractical job.
2. The bow is also very unusual in shape. And when I say unusual, I really mean bad design. It is a recurve bow, but it curves here and there, has a weird angle just above the handgrip, and that angle goes in wrong direction. It's also pretty ugly altogether.
3. Fistmele, the distance between the bows arc and string is a bit too big.
4. Where is the quiver for arrows? No arrows at all, what's he going to shoot then?
5. Now, these asymmetrical bows were only used by samurais, and samurais were mainly horse archers (yes, sword was only a secondary weapon to them). They used asymmetrical bows (hankyu and daikyu) because they could then more easily aim at low targets and the bows lower limb wouldn't contact with the horse, but the bow was at the same time powerful enough since it was longer at the upper limb. The main problem here is that this man is wearing those oh-so-fabulous baggy pants which girls nowadays seem to love on men. And it is impossible to ride with that kind of impractical lower body garment. So this archer is using a cavalry bow, but cannot ride.

Sexist manga female archer drawing

Some picture I found on the Internet in a group of 30 "amazing archer illustrations" or some other bullcrap it was titled. Every single one of them were ridiculously full of inaccuracies, mistakes, errors and stupidity beyond any measure. I got angry. I still am. I'm going to post a few of them in a row next, starting with this manga one with ridiculously skimpy "clothing" or "armour", dislocated hip, over exaggerated legs and pair of plastic boobs the size of her tiny expressionless doll head.


Mistakes, regarding to archery:

1. The fistmele (or brace height) of this bow is two times bigger than it should. It should not go to the elbow, only half way there.
2. The arrow is once again on the wrong side of the bow. It's also not on the bow gripping fist as it should, but at the side of it.
3. This is not a proper grip of an arrow. The fletching is located too back the arrow so that the gripping hand touches it. Wrong all the way.
4. The string is not attached to the bow in any method. It just appears under some blue thing, which might be ice, or magic crystal or some other stupid thing.
5. What is this bow made of anyway? It the brown thing is wood, then this is very very badly made bow which could break in any moment. And whatever the blue material is, it's not doing any good for the bow. Stick to real materials please.
6. Where are the rest of her arrows? No quiver anywhere to be seen.

Good:
Absolutely nothing. I should really stop this "good"-category altogether, since in these pictures, there aren't any of it.

Avatar (James Cameron's)

Now is the time for the most highest-grossing movie of all time (if not adjusted to inflation, otherwise it loses it’s title to Gone With The Wind, a film made 70 years before this one), a movie which is basically a computer animation with some added human cameos, which stole it’s plot from Pocahontas and it’s visual milieu from Bug’s Life and Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and which would not be the highest-grossing movie of all time without the newly introduced 3D-technology back at 2009. This is of course the famous Avatar (not to be confused with Avatar: The Last Airbender), which uses the infamous Papyrus as it’s title font.

But don’t get me all wrong, I actually enjoyed the movie, because of the (unintended?) visual similarity to Bug’s Life and Morrowind, which I love both.

Avatar’s archery is though depicted all wrong.

First of all, all the Na’vi (the blue super tall humans with tails, elf ears and slightly deformed facial features, who should look like “alien”, but not too alien, so that the viewers can still identify with them) are all left handed. It is because the director James Cameron and the lead actress Zoë Saldaña are both left handed and they decided to make all Na’vi lefties. I must admit this not to be a mistake this time, since they really decided it to be that way, but it bothered me for the whole movie.

Mistakes:

1. The beginners bow grip mistake, holding the arrow with an index finger. It keeps there without holding if you’re calm, and this only hurts your hand, damages the fletching of the arrow and can effect the flight of the missile.


2. This string grip is reversed. The moviemakers apparently thought this would look more “alien” to us, but it looks stupid. It is impractical and unnecessarily hard form, which no bow hunting people (on which the Na’vi are based) have ever used on Earth, because it’s just not good. This hand just shouldn’t be upside down.


3. The string should go here where this circle points, close to the face of the archer. Now the bow is way overdrawn, since the string is about half a meter back from the face. This makes aiming much more difficult, since the end of the arrow is not close to the archers eyes.


4. The fletchings of arrows in this movie are made either from feathers, or from insect wings. That is not a mistake, since fletching can be made of different materials (although feathers would be best), but the number of feathers on these arrows are. Based on the screencaptures I can only see two feathers (or bug wings) in the arrows. An arrow needs three feathers in order to rotate around itself in three-dimensional space, after releasing of the missile. This rotation makes the aim more accurate, two feathers don’t do anything.


5. The distance between bows arc and string, called fistmele or brace height, should be the length of the archers fist and a protruding thumb (thumbs-up-hand). This bow is way overcurved, since the fistmele is as long as Neytiris entire forearm! That is the reason behind the mistake in point 3. I’ve drawn there a longbow with good proportions for scale.

Good:

I can’t actually think of any. Yes, these could be tried to justify since they are “aliens” from another solar system, but it doesn’t substitute the physical errors with the bow, and arrows fletching, nor the beginners grip mistakes with both hands. Surely the Na’vi, who rely on archery with their society’s food supply, would have corrected these flaws in design when they notice them. Or then they are a really stupid species which repeat their predecessors mistakes form generation to generation.


P.S.

It would’ve been nice to see what the moviemakers would’ve came up with if the Na’vi would’ve had six limbs like every other species on that moon, not just the regular two arms and two legs.


Update

Five years later I have updated this review with some corrections, read it here.