As a person with some common sense, and having held an axe before, I can say that most of the images are flat out wrong. My grandfather had a double-bitted felling axe, and it was enormous. By fantasy standards, rather small, but in realistic terms it's heavy and unwieldy. Granted, I'm a 125 pound girl, but swinging the axe would consume my whole body to get any momentum going. Cloud's Buster from FFVII is the WORST sword ever. Someone made a full scale steel Buster, and was actually unable to use it because his doctor said he would slip a disk. He got a body builder friend to use it, and this guy was ripped, and he mostly used gravity to lift the thing up and drop it on a wooden palette. Even still, it would cut through about 1/2 of a thin wooden plank. A good claymore using arm strength and downward cuts would slice further.
People get so fixated on huge weapons, and it's only made worse by all of fantasy, but real world weapons are small, and that's good. Swinging around a 30 pound axe head is going to dislocate shoulders! Your average sword was short and agile, and axes were very small. Go to wikipedia for some images of real axe heads. And if you think "they're just showing the tiniest of heads" then go to a hardware store and pick up a felling axe. Hold it at arm's length, elbow straight, and see how long it takes you to collapse. Felling axes are lumberjack axes, for taking down trees, not little hatchets. Now imagine that the average fantasy axe is 5x larger.
And with all that in mind, generally any art of a weapon is false. Pictures of a weapon are entirely more reliable.
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Topic: What do weapons look like? (Read 34536 times)