JANUARY '25: INTO THE BREACH WITH THE WORST SWORDS IMAGINABLE
The world is getting darker, and I’m trying to hold onto my sense of frivolity and fun because I need to remember that I’m not just anger, not just desperately clawing out of a pit of despair, because when this is over I want to be more than a shell emptied by and of rage. I’m going to be silly and human, and I invite you to also be silly and human. Burn into the wood over your door:
Despite the horrors, we stay goofy.
This started as an excuse to dunk on the Bat’leth but it could not stay there, because SF/F has a long and storied history of completely failing to understand what makes swords work. The Bat’leth was not even the worst thing I found, because at the very least it looks solid and well-built and wouldn’t disintegrate immediately upon use. Friends, we are entering truly cursed swords territory.
Dragonslayer
Oh is it big? It’s really big? Unreasonably big, right? Multiple people have all pointed out how it’s too dang big. I’m not a hack okay, I know it’s big, Guts is also supernaturally strong, it’s fine.
No Dragonslayer sucks because it has no guard whatsoever. It is smooth like a ken doll down there, and by ‘down there’ I mean the bit that’s meant to stop him getting his other arm cut off. Do you see this?
And this?
Basically every sword (except the Shashka, which is a cursed real sword) has some sorta bit that goes in front of your hands that stops the enemy blade from getting to them. This is because of binding, the bit where your swords touch each other:
When your swords clash together, the guard is the thing that stops your opponent from just gliding their blade down yours and cutting your fingers off. The bizarre width of Dragonslayer makes this even worse, since instead of hitting your hands it’s more likely to hit you in the face or stomach. Griffith understands this, he’s basically rocking a Swiss Sabre, which is ornate but functional.
Dragonslayer is one of the mildest offenders. Here is how you’d fix it. Guts you already lost one arm don’t make the same mistake again.
The Bat’leth
I swear, the more episodes of Trek I watch the less sense this fucking thing makes. I honestly do not know whether I can in good faith call it a ‘sword’ because one of the most consistent things about it is that the bit in the middle does not cut, they whack people with it and it knocks them down without drawing blood, and this diagram is my best attempt to understand what the fuck I’ve observed throughout various Bat’leth combats.
Like it mostly just bonks people, occasionally they bloodlessly spear people with the points, which I think is probably the result of the producers telling them they can’t have any gore, but what it looks like within the diegesis is that this ridiculous jumbo ice skate has no functional blade.
My biggest problem with this thing is that it has absolutely no reach. One of the whole reasons you use a sword is because it lets you extend both your offense and defence significantly away from your body. It’s harder for the enemy to stab you if they need to get past a sword. The bat’leth, in going sideways, completely negates this advantage.
It’s apparently based on the Deer Horn Knife which is a real weapon, definitely an unusual design, but I think a crucial thing about those knives is that they’re small and concealable. They’re basically bladed knuckle dusters. Knives don’t need to have reach because they’re designed to surprise people, to be quick and light and useful if you end up grappling or if you get the jump on someone. A bat’leth is none of these things. It’s huge, it’s impossible to conceal, and it’s so so heavy, like unreasonably heavy, oh my god we need to get onto the weight thing.
I wanna lay out a ground rule here, that alien or supernatural physiology might allow the use of weapons that a human couldn’t. I’m saying this to be clear: the official weight of the bat’leth is 5.3kg and no it fucking isn’t. Is it made of hyperdense metal formed in the heart of a star? Because that’s ridiculous. This is a Montante, one of the largest human swords ever used in battle. It weighs about 1.7–2kg.
There is no way a Bat’leth is double that weight. It’s not that a klingon couldn’t lift 5.3kg, it’s that I just cannot see any way a weapon that size weighs that much.
I don’t know how to fix this thing, except to make it smaller and more knuckledusty, which is basically just reinventing the deer horn knife. Also Klingons having bladed knuckleduster fights honestly sounds raw as fuck.
The Kurgan Blade
This is a sneaky one because it honestly looks fine. The prongs are a bit weird but are clearly inspired by real medieval trident daggers, which are designed for parrying. It’s a bit redundant having additional parrying gubbinz that close to the guard, the guard will do that job fine, but that’s not the mortal sin of this blade.
No, the Kurgan’s sword is cursed because it’s a takedown sword. As in, it has multiple breakpoints where you can take it apart and hide it in a briefcase. This is a real thing with guns, as I understand it, but never with swords and especially not with a breakpoint in the middle of the fucking blade. I cannot overstate how bad an idea this is. It doesn’t even appear to really lock in, it just slides in frictionlessly, which means it’s also going to slide out frictionlessly the instant you swing it too hard, like in a swordfight where the only way to win is by decapitation. This is adding a huge amount of complexity and vulnerability to a design that is otherwise simple and functional.
Hey speaking of:
The Ballistic Triple Sword from The Sword and the Sorcerer
Oh yeah there it is, feel the hate flow through you. That’s three swords attached to one hilt, which is going to be so heavy for no additional benefit, except … yes I said ballistic. Because it’s also a gun. That shoots swords.
Okay so pure speculation here, but The Sword and the Sorcerer came out in 1982, and in the 70s and 80s there was a huge panic over ballistic knives, which can fire their blade sword distances. They were in the popular consciousness, this new deadly Soviet technology, a knife that could shoot, and this is basically just a really big ballistic knife.
The problem is that ballistic knives are … I mean not terrible, but most modern militaries just use regular knives, because if you want to kill at a distance you’ve got this thing called a gun, and trying to split the difference with a knife just creates a crappy gun with one bullet that’s also an overcomplicated knife with a lot more moving parts.
A sword though? That’s a heavier blade that’s going to require a lot more propulsive force to fling it with any real wellie. And unlike a ballistic knife it’s not firing its primary blade, it’s firing the two secondary blades on either side, which seems like it solves the problem of “oh my god I broke my own knife” but in doing so it adds a shitload of weight, my man is holding three swords in one hand, and even if you can lift it there’s no way you’re actually using it an an efficient and skilled manner. Swordguns exist in history! They weren’t common because they were expensive and difficult to make, but they do exist. They look like this.
If you want to attach a gun to a sword, you just attach .. you know, a gun. That shoots bullets. Because they’re much lighter than a whole ‘nother sword blade and they’re actually designed to travel distances. Dude just use a gun. It’s fine, it’s attested in the historical sources.
The Soul Calibur
When I was asking around about the worst swords, the Soul Edge came up a lot. I am not here to destroy the Soul Edge, which is basically a huge kitchen knife made of meat. I don’t think you should have an eye anywhere that regularly gets stabbed at but the eye seems fine with it so whatever.
This looks like two normal swords that got some meat paste smashed between ‘em. It’s cursed, but not as cursed as its supposed ‘good’ counterpart, the Soul Calibur. I fucking hate this thing.
This is like the Kurgan’s sword magnified by 1000, an initial glance it almost looks okay then the more you stare the more you realised how truly fucked it is, how this is not a sword, this is a catastrophic disassembly in waiting.
Okay so let’s start with the obvious thing, the split blade. This adds little to know functionality and in exchange your sword gets to be extremely brittle. “You can catch a sword in it” is bullshit, because you don’t parry with the tip you–
Okay we gotta get into swords theory and physics, I’m sorry but we do.
The half of the sword closer to your hand is called the forte, or the strong.
The half of your sword further from your hand is called the debole, or the weak.
It’s basic leverage, if a debole hits a forte, the sword will stop. The opponent’s debole has to get through your forte to hit you. Or, to simply it even more:
Where are the prongs on a trident dagger? Angling out of (and towards) the forte. Because that’s where you have the most leverage.
You do not parry with the tip of your sword. It’s the part of the weapon with the least leverage, where it’s the absolute easiest to blow through, and not only are you attempting to catch your opponent’s blade with it, you’re doing so with a blade you’ve intentionally weakened the absolute fuck out of. You’ve created a critical weakness to absolutely no advantage.
Okay but that’s not even what I hate the most. ZOOM, ENHANCE.
What the fuck it turns out you can't even enhance girls can't have anything.
Okay so a big thing about swords is that they need to be able to take an impact. A sword is both offence and defence, attack with the debole, defend with the forte. The forte needs to be, well … strong. Because that’s where you’re catching the most hits. This is … two bits of wire with a big weird hole AND two quillon-esque bits sticking out which are going to catch the blade.
It’s normally good to catch the blade here, assuming you haven’t built in two massive critical structural weaknesses at the exact point where the blade is going to take the most hits. This is going to bend and snap the instant it takes a single parry. This is hell, I am in hell, this is the worst sword, come at me.
Also buy The Dawnhounds and The Sunforge, I need money to spend on food and devilish transgender surgeries.
Yours,
Alexandra Stronach
Jan 2025
