this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Funny that the two most popular "types" of warrior nobility/elite (european knights and japanese samurai) are both most strongly associated with what effectively was mostly a sidearm, backup or unarmed self defense weapon but most definitely not their main battlefield weapon, and both are actively separated from gunpowder weapons in popular culture while both were among the earliest adopters of gunpowder weapons in their respective environments.
Probably romanticism. I remember Don Quixote calling artillery an evil of their contemporary warfare. A bit understandable because the invention of artillery basically led to more indiscriminate destruction... And I reckon that because you can basically target people from afar, you can just hit people not actively engaged in battle and take them by surprise.
Romanticism of swords, in particular, also goes back an extremely long time. They're harder to make and more expensive to maintain than other weapons so they've been associated with the nobility, the only people that could consistently afford them, for thousands of years.
Murrican gun-worshippers absolutely mald on the subject of FPVs, calling this unethical weapon of cowards.
Maybe because:
Maybe because in times of relative peace, there is more time to focus on literature. Do you end up with more surviving tales of people living in these times. During wars, the would be authors would instead by fodder.
No, that's not it. We have tons of material, especially picture sources, about medieval warfare. Pop culture just choses to ignore it.
The romantization of sword-wielding knights started in early modern times, at the latest. Knowing about something and focusing on something in popular culture are two different things.