HEMA Community Triggered or Only a Sith Speaks in Absolutes

[Husky_Khan]

Looks like the Daily Wire's Andrew Klaven spoke a little too hyperbolically about his distaste of the Woman Warrior Queen in The Witcher by stating "Zero women can fight with a sword."

I'm sure there's more but when the HEMA community on Youtube gets affronted, they do a good job of coming out in force.







*whistles*

Really, the important takeaway is that one shouldn't speak in so much absolutes.

Some of the videos actually had some informative bits on women in historical martial arts, especially the first and third link, which I actually wasn't aware of before, so I learned new stuff. Yay! Thanks everybody.

 

[S'task]

I would note that of those, the Shadaversity one should tell you just how broad the frustration is at this, as given all his other videos, Shad is likely very much in line with Klaven on most politicial and social issues.

 

[Erwin_Pommel]

Eh, I can see their points, but using HEMA as a basis for a counter-argument doesn't work well given it is set up in a way that outright prevents several other factors in a sword fight from happening, as in, the brutality of it and the fact a light tap in X area is not how fights went down or how they will ever go down unless one finds themselves in a cohesive formation of pikes or something.

Of course, Andrew fucked up by contradicting himself with a statement of absolutes and then the existence of outliers. Can't go both ways mate. Then there's the statement of "women can't fight with swords," that doesn't even need a video, just a citation of Scythian warriors via snipping a PNG, videos are useless when all you need is a yes or no. Of course, Andrew could end up clarifying with "Sorry, I meant they couldn't do it well and it was a spur of the moment statement."

Overblown issue at its core though.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Yeah Andrew Klavan then clarified his statements by stating he was still correct but of course there are a few "exceptions" who can fight and defeat Men. This of course ignores the fact of his original argument in regards to The Witcher, which was literally a female character who grew up as a Queen in a noble family with no male heirs, in a country with a notable self reliant streak and as a Queen had the resources and drive to give herself excellent training and motivation to learn martial arts... all in all a rather exceptional character.

So he clearly poorly thought out his original rant and his subsequent 'clarifications.'

 

[Erwin_Pommel]

So he clearly poorly thought out his original rant and his subsequent 'clarifications.'

True.

as a Queen had the resources and drive to give herself excellent training and motivation to learn martial arts...

Eh, sure, she could fund herself some armour, would keep her alive longer and give flexibility to her moves as the plate will keep her safe, but we saw plate being chopped up by some of the Nilf's so that brings some methods into question and at the end of it all her own physical weight and strength will determine the rest, armour isn't that helpful when the larger guy can just shove her down and put a blade into her armour gaps, hell, the lack of a helmet is going to hurt her badly. As I brought up before, swordfights are not like HEMA at the end of the day, more dirt involved in where the male-to-female biases really shine through. A woman's best chance to win a sword fight requires quite a few things stacked in her favour. But we're just brought back around to the outlier statement with this so details aren't really worth going over.

We know the statement is false and we can prove it false so discussing it seems pointless in the long run beyond going over the counter-arguments made by people like Shad and such. So I am just going to leave the topic here as it would be wrong of me to dig deep into something I state is overblown and delving into it counter-acts that IMO.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I believe the Olympics plan to add mixed-gender fencing at the 2020 games in Tokyo this year. Mixed open fencing has been a thing for some time. For instance Brock Open Fencing has mixed events and going off, say, the 2017 results women aren't doing terribly. Granted a man took 1st place that year but 2nd, 3rd, and 4th look to be female names (Darcy, Vera, and Sasha).

Now I'll admit fencing is a sport, or at best a martial art, and not actual sword combat. At the very least, though, one can say they share the same metaphorical genepool and the fact that women are competitive in mixed events with pointy bits of metal is fairly suggestive that women can be competitive with, y'know, point bits of metal.

 

[Deleted member]

I believe the Olympics plan to add mixed-gender fencing at the 2020 games in Tokyo this year. Mixed open fencing has been a thing for some time. For instance Brock Open Fencing has mixed events and going off, say, the 2017 results women aren't doing terribly. Granted a man took 1st place that year but 2nd, 3rd, and 4th look to be female names (Darcy, Vera, and Sasha).

Now I'll admit fencing is a sport, or at best a martial art, and not actual sword combat. At the very least, though, one can say they share the same metaphorical genepool and the fact that women are competitive in mixed events with pointy bits of metal is fairly suggestive that women can be competitive with, y'know, point bits of metal.

This is indeed generally acknowledged in the fencing community: Top of the line women can compete on even terms with men.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Fencing is watered down to absolute boringness though, it's why I prefer HMB, with it's full armored head bashing.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Fencing is watered down to absolute boringness though, it's why I prefer HMB, with it's full armored head bashing.

HMB = Historical Martial Bashing?

 

[PsihoKekec]

Historical medieval battles, their annual international tournament is called Battle of the nations

 

[ShieldWife]

I’m a big fan of Shad and here was my reply to his video:

“Of course there are some women who can beat some men in combat. They are going to be the exception, but they exist. When we look at fiction though, almost all of the women in action movies easily win against any man they fight, usually without breaking a sweat or getting injured. When that isn’t the case, it pleasantly surprises me.

In medieval combat, the argument that fielding women allows for more solider is pretty silly. A medieval army isn’t going to be 100% of the men in a nation on the battlefield. A soldier needs training, needs weapons and armor, needs supplies to get them to the battlefield. Only a relatively small minority of a nation goes to war. If you can only afford to send 5% of your nation’s population to war, you are going to send men.

Also, weapons might be equalizers for women, but armor unequalizes things again. Taping somebody with a light sword in a duel is different from hitting hard enough to penetrate mail or plate, or wrestling with your opponent to force a point between plates.”

I could have gone into more detail over that last point, that HEMA fights aren’t anything like actual medieval combat, and is more like two handed saber fencing, where a touch that wouldn’t even debilitate an opponent if it hit bare flesh counts.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

I would point out that most cases of women in action women easily beating most men is literally elite hero protagonist characters beating mooks. It's a matter of glamorizing fictional heroes, and it's a blatant double standard to say (or imply) that's okay for male heroes but not female heroes.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

Ugh, HEMAtards.

I'm sure there's more but when the HEMA community on Youtube gets affronted, they do a good job of coming out in force.

Their excited, breathless parroting should not be encouraged. Swortubers are at their best when they're disagreeing with each other rather than fifteen year out of date strawmen talking about samurai swords.

 

[Husky_Khan]

I’m a big fan of Shad and here was my reply to his video:

“Of course there are some women who can beat some men in combat. They are going to be the exception, but they exist. When we look at fiction though, almost all of the women in action movies easily win against any man they fight, usually without breaking a sweat or getting injured. When that isn’t the case, it pleasantly surprises me.

In medieval combat, the argument that fielding women allows for more solider is pretty silly. A medieval army isn’t going to be 100% of the men in a nation on the battlefield. A soldier needs training, needs weapons and armor, needs supplies to get them to the battlefield. Only a relatively small minority of a nation goes to war. If you can only afford to send 5% of your nation’s population to war, you are going to send men.

Also, weapons might be equalizers for women, but armor unequalizes things again. Taping somebody with a light sword in a duel is different from hitting hard enough to penetrate mail or plate, or wrestling with your opponent to force a point between plates.”

I could have gone into more detail over that last point, that HEMA fights aren’t anything like actual medieval combat, and is more like two handed saber fencing, where a touch that wouldn’t even debilitate an opponent if it hit bare flesh counts.

Your points are well taken for sure and make perfect sense.

The thing is with Klavan's point about women in The Witcher specifically. To your point, in The Witcher, the only displays of martial prowess from women are from singular and often named characters. Warrior Queens. Superhumans. Specially trained mages. There was also a tribe of female warriors but IIRC, not much was displayed of them in martial combat. So it was exceptions... and each of them was established fairly well in the context.

There wasn't anything like the 'normalization' of warrior women that you'd get in video games such as Dragon Age or Warcraft or ignoring the issue like in Pen and Paper games such as Dungeons and Dragons. No orders of warrior women or the like either dueling men in melee combat and the two being physical equals being left unsaid. Nothing like what'd you see in a Chinese Wuxia style Kung Fu film or Arthur or something.

So basically it was more Eowyn then Charlie's Angels.