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.

Horror vacui

There's so much going on it's hard to see what there really is. Horror vacui much?

Mistakes:

1. Utterly ridiculous trash bow.

2. The bow doesn't bend, instead the bowstring stretches.

3. Index finger on top of arrow.

4. This grip doesn't look anywhere near convincing. It's like he's not using any strength at all, probably because the bow doesn't bend and has just a rubber band for a string.

5. No quiver, no spare arrows anywhere. Until they're inside his massive spiked collar-thingy. Who knows really.

How many of these drawn girls shoot while jumping, and why?

Awful manga-inspired drawing full of bad archery. Mistakes:

1. Ridiculous bow. Completely unshootable. Made of a pile of junk. Would weight a ton.

2. No bowstring, what?

3. Overly large arrowtip. Wouldn't really fly far.

4. No other arrows in a quiver or anywhere.

I don't know if this could be more wrong

Yäääh, this is really bad! Where should I even start...
Mistakes:

1. This bow doesn't bend.

2. There are two (2!) bowstrings.

3. Bowstring(s) go on top of the bowarm here! A result of wrongly done sideway shooting.

4. Too large arrowtip. If it's on fire, don't draw it so near the wooden bow. Arrow is also too short and missing fletchings.

5. Reverse grip.

6. Back quiver, on the wrong shoulder.

Perfectly good hip quiver ruined with a ridiculous bow

This bow is completely ridiculous, it wouldn't work at all. It's way too thick and constructed of possibly metal. While metallic bows did indeed exist (e.g. in India, but they were always rare), they were really flat, not like this. This wouldn't bend at all and would weight dozens of kilos! There's also unnecessary spikes on the bow that are only a liability to the archer himself.

The only good thing here is the hip quiver.

I've never seen a bow like this been drawn

This just wouldn't work. The bowstring cannot go past the bow arc like this. The bow limbs have to bend back further so that the string is unhampered. Not like this, this would ruin the string very quickly, if it would work at all.

Also, a back quiver is a mistake.

On the other hand, I've stopped sanctioning left-handedness. Not because about five percent of all people are left-handed, no since the left-handed archer drawings outnumber the amount of real left-handers in any population by vast numbers. But instead because an excellent archer should know how to shoot with both right and left-handed. Does that sound fair to you?

And is this Avatar the Last Air Bender water people inspired by any chance?

Demoness archer

Let's get back to ordinary reviews of drawings and photographs, after a series of tiresome to write movie related posts. The next twenty will be these, since there's nearly 400 pictures in my files still waiting to be mocked, and new ones emerge every time I make a Google search. I want to get rid of these someday, so work work work...

Mistakes:

1. This bow is ridiculous, it wouldn't work since it's full of things that won't bend properly. Utterly unusable thing.

2. The arrow, while being a magic arrow, floats in the air above the bow hand. It should still rest on the fist.

3. There are no fletchings in this arrow.

4. And there are no other arrows in a quiver or anywhere else to be seen. Very poor archer only has one arrow.

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.

Boobs and butt pose number million

This obviously World of Warcraft inspired (night) elf is as usual: A) female, B) scantily clad, C) has a horrible bow, D) doesn't know how to shoot. On to the mistakes:

1. This thing is what the maker of this image probably thought of as a bow. A quick look at a real bow however would've been immensely helpful in rendering the bow realistically. This "bow" is unbeliavable, and not in a good sense of the word. How does she even get her hand in the middle of the spiky thing to find the handle of the bow? Her hand must be ful of scars.

2. This bow doesn't bend. So it doesn't work. So it's not a real bow. But that we knew already.

3. The posture is very bad. The elbow should be drawn back.

4. There are no other arrows anywhere to be seen, nor an empty quiver. What she's going to shoot after this only arrow?

Bonus: the bowstring is coming apart soon.

Bed gable bow

I hate the design clichés the Asians always do. I bet my head that this is an Asian drawing of a character. Have they never heard of the rules of how many heads the body should be tall? Since it's not twenty!

Other mistakes:

1. The bow is horrible. It looks like the gable of a "princess bed" some tasteless people want in their completely white homes. Those kind of homes make me sick.

2. There are two strings in this "bow". Two. Strings. That's one too many.

3. Also back quiver and left handed shooting (apparently).

The purpose of a hooded cloak is to look cool in a drawing, not to be of any use

Ohm, another one of those dark elves with holes in her hood for the ears. How would people otherwise know she is an elf? And what does it matter?

Mistakes:

1. This bow is stupid. It has two ends of the arcs. What's the point? There isn't any. Or actually there is two too many! Also looks like that the bowstring is not attached to the ends of the bow, which would be a waste of the bow's potential.

2. This bow also has stupid blades attached to them, à la Uruk-hai. No use, no point, no.

3. Magic arrows with stupidly small fletching too near the nock from a back quiver. I say no again.

What is this madness?

This is the worst I've seen in a long time. Refreshing my memory, since Thursday, February 7th, this year. So not very long ago. Anyway, it makes me want to puke, and I hate puking.  

Mistakes:

1. This pukesy thing is probably supposed to be a bow of some kind but I really can't tell how. Needless to say, it wouldn't work in real life.

2. This ridiculous stringy string is made of rubber.

3. That sad joke of pulling the bow is so utterly awful I don't know if I should laugh or cry. I have nothing else to say.

Do elf ears freeze in winter?

Why would anyone care about the shape of their ears so much that they would cut holes in their perfectly good and warm hood so that their ears will freeze in the winter? Is there really nothing else that the draughtsman can use to distinguish a character as an elf? And why has every archer character has to be an elf? And a woman? And an elf-woman? WHY? Somebody answer me.

Mistakes:

1. This bow is completely stupid. Looks like it's made of metal and it wouldn't bend at all. It's also covered in blades which is a very bad idea.

2. The bowstring is attached to nowhere near the ends of the bow. This is as stupid as putting the handle of the sword in the middle of the blade, or attaching a speartip in the middle of the shaft. Such a waste.

3. Is this a freaking fire arrow? Looks like napalm or something burning. Nope.

4. The age-old trop of the back quiver not supported by much historical evidence in Europe.

Do the ravens make her a bad character?

There isn't much mistakes because she isn't pulling the bow yet. The most mistakes happen when that is depicted:

1. This bow is hugely and ridiculously too thick. Nobody would be able to shoot with it.

2. The handle part of the bow is three times the length it should be. Only the length of a fist is enough.

3. Arrows at the back quiver. Can't even see if it's on the right or left shoulder. They would be impossible to get from there if it's on the left shoulder.

Good: Setting the arrow on the bowstring seems realistic enough.

Iorveth from Witcher 2

This is either concept art of fan art from the second Witcher game's elf brigand leader Iorveth. Mistakes:

1. The bow is just ridiculous. It wouldn't work. Why does it need two arcs? It wouldn't. The second arc is completely unnecessary. Also the bow arcs are way too thick and the handle part is too long.

2. Mediterranean grip with only two fingers. Three would be better, there is no reason why you shouldn't use the third finger, it gives more strength to the pull.

3. This arrow is missing its fletching.

Good: a hip quiver, yay! Witcher games have generally good clothing and gear design, pretty realistic and believable as fantasy. Although this bow is very stupid.

I don't recognise this as a bow

This "artwork" is a straight up copy of a game character from Aion, one of those stupid Asian MMORPG:s which I don't want to easte my life into. Many people do apparently, otherwise there wouldn't be a market for so many of those, and they all are copies of each other. They also do very bad when concerning realism. Especially archery. Mistakes in this one are as follows:

1. If there wouldn't be an arrow I wouldn't even recognise that this is a bow. It is so ridiculously ugly piece of crap that I don't want to look at it.

2. There is no bowstring.

3. The arrows is too far up from the bowhand and seems to be missing fletching. But it feels like nitpicking compared to the bow which is stupid beyond belief.

4. You cannot shoot with a gauntlet with huge claws like that. It would also probably damage the string.

5. No other arrows, no quiver anywhere.

This game is so ugly that I wouldn't play it even if they would pay me the 12 to 16 dollars the MMO:s usually cost a month to play. This is the worst picture I've seen this year. Hopefully the year has only just started a month ago so there will be a lot more of these horribilities coming. Stay tuned!

What's the point of fire arrows in Mordor?

This may be a Mordor orc or a goblin or something. I don't really care. But what I do care about are the mistakes!

1. This bow is stolen from Lara Croft. The young version, with more clothes and less boobs than usual. Also less of a bow, since it's made out of a bunch of sticks. It would be quite easy to make a bow from one piece of wood, but maybe orcs want to make everything crappy on purpose. Then again in many fantasy lores they are good craftsmen and smiths, but it doesn't really show since their products are terrible and typically unusable crap. Like this bunch of sticks here.

2. Are all these arrows used thousand times since the fletching of orc arrows is always so bad? Too little space between the fletching and the nock maybe be half the reason for that. And what is the purpose of keeping the arrow between teeth? It would seriously be in the way of the bowstring while shooting, and getting the arrow from there is not in any way faster than from some other places. I would even guess it would be slower to get it from there. Faster would be to keep several arrows in your hand already, either the bow hand or the string hand (the latter is even faster of the two).

3. He has a back quiver and a hip quiver, but why? If you are used to a hip quiver, why to have also a back quiver, isn't it just confusing? Why not two hip quivers, people (and orcs) have two hips after all?

4. The grip is wrong, two fingers used instead of three and the hand is palm down when it should be the other way around in this position. Also nobody would want to spend their energy unnecessarily by pulling the string half way back at this point when the bow isn't pointing anywhere near the direction of shooting.

5. Fire arrows. Stupid fire arrows again. What are he going to set on fire? The rocks? The volcano? It is already on fire! And there's nothing else that can be burning in a range of miles around him. The land of Mordor is completely barren. Fire arrows were not shot against people, since it's completely unnecessary, people die perfectly well from hits of regular arrows, and actual fire arrows would do less damage to people than normal arrows, because of the structure of their arrowtips.

Should I be worried about men who draw these sexualised little girls?

This bow is just ridiculous. I don't want to talk about anything else here. This bow is waaaay too thick to be usable by anyone, let alone by a girl who's arms are three times thinner than the bow itself. If there would be a machine strong enough to pull this bow two string would just snap in before the bow could really bend. If the string would be magical and not break the handle of the bow which is five times thinner than the arc, would break and the whole bow would snap in two parts. The handle is usually the thickest part of the bow, not the thinnest. This bow is so wrong there is just now would it could be usable in any magical fantasy world ever created.

She has a hip quiver too. And hips of an adult woman connected to the torso of a prepubescent girl who's boobies are almost slipping out of the underboob-cut vest. What's wrong with Asians?

Bladed bows don't really work

I always feel a little bad when destroying these drawings which are obviously made by teenagers. I wasn't a perfect draughtsman when I was a teen, artists journey continues his whole lifetime. But I like to think that these pictures have circulated in the Internet for years, maybe even decades already, so the initial teens who have made them are not teens anymore but adults who can take criticism without sniffing a pea into their noses (is that a proverb in English, I don't know, at least in Finland we use it... a lot, tells something about people around me, doesn't it). On to the mistakes:

1. Ridiculous bow which is too thick and heavy, has unnecessary spikes and apparently quite long metallic blades on both of its arms, which are so big and attached to their whole length that they wouldn't let the bow bend. It would be impossible to shoot anything with this thing. You just cannot attach blades to a bow like this.

2. The arrows don't have any space between the fletching and the nock, which is a bad thing.

3. Arrows from a back quiver, which is really impractical and almost never done in history, at least in Europe.

4. Left handed archer. I still count this as a mistake, since I don't believe for a moment that it is intentional, the draughtsboy just didn't have a clue where he should put the bow.