Magick Chicks 03-04-12 Narrow it down a little

[Zorlond]

Wouldn't be a problem ( see illustration)

That's a Trope. Meaning it isn't real.

[Zorlond]

Having worn some plate, even though you can maneuver in it, and even roll with a lot of training, it's still very heavy and very hard to fight in.

Knights trained in full armor. It's pretty much the one thing they did with their free time, due to the fact that they were professional soldiers under oath to their liege to fight in his wars. Assuming the armor is properly and professionally fitted, getting hours of practice in it most every day for years would teach you how to move in it to full effectiveness.

You're not going to go dancing across a bog in full gear, nor expect armor-piercing arrows fired from a Welsh longbow to just bounce off (those bows were Just That Damn Good, the armor wasn't weak), but you would be pretty much unstoppable against anything less than another knight. Or a musket (but that's a different issue).

[Error of Logic]

Nnno, she has a vow to sleep only with a man who can best her in combat, not every man who does. Beating her is not an automatic booty call, not to mention the only male I've seen beating her was an elder god. (Not of the tentacular persuasion!) And alas for you, Artemisia, she doesn't seem to be into girls. Or women.

Robert E. Howard, who wrote the original stories, died in 1936. If he conceived Red Sonya as preferring women, her vow could easily be the only hint he would have put in the stories. If he had somehow made it clear that she was sexually attracted to women, the stories would have been considered obscene. (It's entirely possible that he actually didn't know that there are people who are attracted to others of the same gender.)

The version of Red Sonya we're discussing wasn't created by Robert E. Howard, although her creation was inspired by a character created by him - one that shows significant differences with she of the chainmail bikini. Conan was R.E. Howard's creation, and Red lives in the Hyperborean Age everyone's favourite Cimmerian also stalked through. I am uncertain whether it would have been considered obscene for a comic book character to be homosexual in 1973, though I suppose it is possible.

[Artemisia]

Having worn some plate, even though you can maneuver in it, and even roll with a lot of training, it's still very heavy and very hard to fight in.

Knights trained in full armor. It's pretty much the one thing they did with their free time, due to the fact that they were professional soldiers under oath to their liege to fight in his wars. Assuming the armor is properly and professionally fitted, getting hours of practice in it most every day for years would teach you how to move in it to full effectiveness.

You're not going to go dancing across a bog in full gear, nor expect armor-piercing arrows fired from a Welsh longbow to just bounce off (those bows were Just That Damn Good, the armor wasn't weak), but you would be pretty much unstoppable against anything less than another knight. Or a musket (but that's a different issue).

Oh, I'm not saying that you'd be nigh on unstoppable. I'm just saying that stuff is hard to fight in.

[Adamas]

Give me a bow anyday, best way to reduce a knight's effectiveness is to take out their horse, half the time the horse falling would finish the knight (Even with plate poleyns, greaves and sabatons, you have a ton of weight fall on your leg, You're NOT getting up.) That was supposedly one of the main uses for the claidheamh mòr .

[Stonefoot]

The version of Red Sonya we're discussing wasn't created by Robert E. Howard, although her creation was inspired by a character created by him - one that shows significant differences with she of the chainmail bikini. Conan was R.E. Howard's creation, and Red lives in the Hyperborean Age everyone's favourite Cimmerian also stalked through. I am uncertain whether it would have been considered obscene for a comic book character to be homosexual in 1973, though I suppose it is possible.

Right. Sonya vs. Sonja. It's been too long since I read those stories or the comics.

In 1973 they could have gotten away with it. That would probably not have appealed to most of the people buying the comics though. (Unless they went at least as far as showing actual naked women, but it probably wouldn't have gotten the wide distribution that it did.) There would certainly have been plenty of people who would have considered it obscene, even if it only mentioned that there was lesban sex going on, but in 1973 that wouldn't have mattered. (That was during the 'window' between a U. S. Supreme Court ruling which essentially made anything other than child porn legal, and the one that created the current 'community standards' interpretation.)

Oh, and the 'mainstream' comic publishers were in no hurry to take avantage of that freedom. (Probably because pre-teens were a large part of their market.) The Conan comics and the related ones (like Kull and Sonja) were, as I recall, the first of those to show shirtless men with actual nipples. (And then there was Heavy Metal.)

[The Nick]

Pssht, all this armor talk is off.

In the days of yore, there were essentially two kinds of 'armor' - the personalized stuff and the cast-off, second-hand, mass-produced stuff. Generally, we want to deal with the properly fitted, personalized, 'correct' armor as opposed to "I found this on a guy I killed who was three sizes smaller than me, but I'm gonna wear it anyway" stuff.


Well-made armor fits like a second-skin. The weight wasn't the issue so much as the way it is distributed. Consider the difference between carrying a wiggling 30 pound dog, a three 10-pound bags of dog food, or one 30 pound little brother who hugs you and generally behaves. Ideally, your armor will be of the 'behaving' quality. It should put the weight on your larger muscles and allow you to move with balance and grace rather than almost toppling with every step.

Secondly, well-made armor was for soldiers. Professional warriors. Killers. A soldier's equipment varies depending on MO and even nation, but carrying 110 pounds of "stuff" isn't unheard of. If you can't take a stroll with a hundred pounds on your back, you're probably not in shape to be wearing a full set of armor. The trick is that knights were.

Most of what we believe we know about armor is what we hear about in the media. A good suit of armor is something that you can fall into water in, then just swim right back out. While it might not be buoyant (although it could be!), it's not just a big set of dead-weight.



Now, let's consider that cast-off stuff. To make a long story short, once smiths got the idea that they could mass-produce armor, they started making armor 'too big' and letting individual customers wear stuff underneath it to pad it out. This wasn't as good as actually making armor 'correctly,' but it opened up the market. This armor isn't nearly as good as getting armor for yourself - compare getting your older brother or sister to give you second-hand clothing, even if they're the wrong gender or body type, as opposed to going and getting your own clothes. One 'fits' much better and actually serves the purpose, while the other just gets you detention for cross-dressing.

[Don Alexander]

I accidentally all the Mel.

Does the hand movement in the last panel look strange to anyone else? Like it switches chirality... Maybe

After I read this, I looked again, and thought "Well, it's just a twisting motion of the wrist..." But then I realized something. The thumb is closest to the camera in both positions. That's not physically possible unless all the fingers in her hand are freely double-jointed...

She's a Goddess. . .technically, that body is just a shell or an illusion to make it possible for Melissa to see her. She really doesn't look like that at all, so her body kind of operates differently than ours would. If she's upset or disturbed, she might not even notice that she screwed up her hand.

That's an extremely convoluted explanation for "the artist did something wrong" which I deem is a much more likely explanation.

But it seems most of the thread had nothing to do with the comic...

[Ravenhull]

It's a geometry lesson. We're demonstrating tangents.

[thebitterfig]

Looking back, it seems entirely possible that the reason Hekate was so offended by the wand is that it would make Mel wear such horrible, horrible clothes. I'm so glad this page is in black and white.

Quote fixed. The DAMNed