I never gave it a single thought. But now I have been cursed with this knowledge and will fly into a fury every time I hear it now.
But thanks anyway.
Correct term was probably “loose!”
The slang term was “Fart in their general direction!”
Nobody was holding a ~90lb war bow at full draw waiting to hear “Loose”. Not possible.
Given the fact that any language used in such a movie is going to be wildly unlike the language spoken in the time and place of the movie, I think that’s a mild anachronism
Old English / Norman French etc would be practically incomprehensible to anybody.
There was an interesting TV show called Barbarians a few years ago where all the Romans spoke Latin but with Italian accents but they had the Germanic barbarians speaking modern German. Not sure if that would please anybody.
They also aren’t speaking Gaelic.
Using modern english phrases to convey meaning to modern audiences is usually fine to me, as long as they don’t reference modern history or events. but what really pisses me off is movies like “The Great Gatsby” that take place during the 1920s and have JayZ and Lana del ray playing at a rich person’s party
RoMeO aNd JuLiEt WaSn’T sEt iN CaLiFoRnIa
u rn
Yeah, We Will Rock you wouldn’t have even been written during A Knights Tale, so unrealistic.
They owned it though in Knight’s Tale…
Leithio i philinn!
Well, this is going to bug me for the rest of my life.
Thanks.
If you were commanding a mass of archers “Spaff!” was the correct command.
wow I’m glad that changed
The best part was when they said “ITS SPAFFFIN’ TIME” and spaffed all over those guys.
“So I started spaffing”
“Ready your bows!”
“Nock!”
“Mark!”
“Draw!”
“Loose!”
“Nock! Nock!”
“Who’s there?”
“Mark!”
“Mark who?”
Volley fire wasn’t a thing with bows. You ever try holding a 90lb war bow at full draw waiting for someone to yell “Loose”? Never happened.
Wikipedia seems to disagree:
The Persians army employed volleys of arrows, slingshots, and javelins against the Greeks in Gaugalema[21] and Thermopylae.[22][23] Ancient Greeks and Romans used arrow volleys.[24][20][19] The goddess Artemis was called “‘of the showering arrows”.[25][26]
In medieval Europe, after the initial volley, archers would fire single shots at individual enemies.[27] Examples include the Battle of Hastings in 1066,[28] Battle of Crécy in 1346[19] and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.[29]
I’d imagine it’s possible that a volley meant that they started drawing at the same time rather than drawing and waiting.
Spaffing Brits were the most underhanded of the lot.
Yeah they would just spaff all over the enemy, multiple times.
Step enemy, help I’m stuck in the dryer…
Something I dislike in movies is when a movie is set in a non-English-speaking country, but all the characters are speaking English. I would rather have the characters speak the proper language for the country, with English subtitles. But I guess the movie execs have calculated that subtitles will make the movie less profitable.
The movie execs know about poor literacy rates :(
Even worse in my opinion is when they use a generic British accent as a stand-in for literally any time and place in history. Ancient Rome? British accent. Ancient Greece? Also British accent. Ancient Persia? British accent again! Ancient Egypt? You guessed it! British accent! Even when the actors aren’t even British, the accent is. It makes no sense. It’s lazy and arrogant.
If I had a billion dollars, I’d make the most painstakingly realistic movie about Samurai in feudal Japan, and have all Japanese actors using a SoCal Chicano accent. Or maybe a hyper realistic Viking epic with a full Nordic cast, but they all talk like surfer bros.
The audience needs to be forced to see how insulting that shit is.
I would pay to see both of those.
a hyper realistic Viking epic with a full Nordic cast, but they all talk like surfer bros
Jarl! My dude! We totally viking’d the shit out of that Irish monastery! It was fucking rad!
“Duuuuude… King Ælla’s a total boner. We gotta roll up on Northumbria and fully hack these posers to bits, brah. Then maybe, y’know, hit the mead hall and get wasted with some totally rad shield maidens.”
I swear to Odin, I would make this movie and only release a few short trailers with no dialog in them. Just brilliant cinematic shots of action, scenery, all the super authentic costumes and customs, and get some historians to endorse it (I know a few who would love the joke and the chaos). Then BAM, hit the audience with the most ridiculous shit ever.
No joke I’d watch that Viking epic for the lolz
Now I just need to secure about a hundred million dollars.
Yeah I can understand speaking English and avoiding subtitles, but there are basically three options for accent:
- American, with some allowance for “urban” vs “country”
- Not American - English
- Evil - Russian or German, depending
The English accent is often used for evil empires too, eg Star Wars.
Also lots of evil mastermind types in spy movies and whatnot. They also like to eat while being evil, which I have a whole theory about.
Evil - Russian or German, depending
Or just vaguely Eastern European. Basically, do your hammiest Bela Lugosi impression, and you’ll have a bright future as Human Trafficker #1 in all the best shaky-cam action schlock Hollywood has to offer.
They’re made for an American audience, who are generally afraid of non-English languages
Also generally terrified of reading
It’s true. I’m terrified of reading this thread right now.
I don’t mind this. I also don’t mind watching a movie in a non-English language so long as there are subtitles (Pan’s Labyrinth was awesome).
What I dislike are movies/series that decide to include a conversation in a different language without providing subtitles.
I hate this. Spending the next 5-10 minutes searching the internet to find a complete script of a show just so I have a complete understanding of what’s going on is annoying, not fun.
oh man youd hate the star wars holiday special. wookiee is spoken for a good chunk of the film and there are no subtitles
Yeah. What’s the point of this exactly?
“Hang on, lemme exclude you from this bit of the story real quick…”
?!
It doesn’t fit a lot of movies, but some movies start in the foreign language and then switch to English
I liked the solution used in Inglorious Bastards, all the Germans and the French spoke English because all the Americans were so bad at speaking German and French.
This was great to watch in The 13th Warrior.
When I was a kid I saw The Longest Day and loved that all the Germans spoke German.
German in US movies has a wild array of quality levels.
The best ones are all from native German speaking actors. Movie actors don’t need native proficiency since the script is written out for them. The accents are really hard to nail down though and native speakers often have some regional dialect that second language learners almost never pick up.
Mac Steinmeir nails it in Saving Private Ryan and he’s Bavarian. Christopher Walz speaks flawless German. His French and Italian sound perfect to me but native speakers consider him “pretty good for a foreigner”. He’s Austrian.
Christian Slater has a very clear accent in Heathers but he’s not supposed to be a native German speaker.
Or even worse, having to dub a movie, and the lip flaps are not matching up with the mouths. CinemaSins will give an infinite amount of dings for that.
I disagree. I think that sometimes it is good to have a language that is correct to the setting of the movie but also it does make it harder to follow if you don’t speak that language and it does reduce from the visual aspect if you have to focus your eyes on the subtitles so it’s not always the best option.
I would say that for slow-paced movies or documentaries it makes sense use the correct local language
Loose!
They weren’t calling your mom
Nocked em
Still incorrect. You wouldn’t have archers sitting there pulling thier bows getting tired until ordered to release
Who said anything about holding the bow nocked all the time?
Generally they would yell “DRAW!” And the soldiers would nock their arrows and take aim, then they’d yell “LOOSE” to release the arrows in one big salvo.
Yeah I believe this as well, since a coordinated firing of arrows would be more effective, and because still today military commands largely consist of a prepatory phase and an executing phrase.
Like
"Company… ATTENTION"
"EEEEEYEEEEES… RIGHT.
“Preseeeent… ARMS”
etc
So it’d make sense. The commander just basically gives the tempo, but the commander knows what it feels like to do it, so you don’t get shit like “draw”… [extender pieces of dramatic faces and dialogue which symbolises a loaded gun held to someones face] and then “loose” /relax, because drawing a war bow takes some serious fucking muscle. So the “draw, loose”, would almost be in the same breath. Almost. But one breath apart. But so the voice synchronises them all. Just like it does with steps in modern militaries.
One still needs a person besides the form goin “left, left, left right left” to achieve the uniformity. Well from a well experienced group, less so, but you still need the starting “company… march” command to sync the starting step at least.
You wouldn’t do that because why would you need it to be all at the same time? This is musket logic being applied to bows. Pulling a warbow isn’t something anyone can do. People who did that trained all their lives for it. They literally had a different bone structure and musculature because of it. You don’t get people to wait with a shitload of pounds of force trying to wriggle out and launch an extremely heavy arrow. Hollywood bows are shitty props with loose strings that resemble a child’s toy more than an actual bow.
I think you’re strawmanning here a bit. Just because they saying “ready - fire” doesn’t mean they’d always have a huge pause in the middle. It could just be to get a nice synchronus volley. Plus, even if someone’s arms got too tired during it they could just wait until fire was called and shoot a little late. Plus, the person telling the archers when to pull and when to release could easily be an archer themselves or someone familiar with the process and not do that dramatic “pull! … … … … … … … Loose!”
That said, I have no knowledge about how it actually happened. I’m just saying your arguing against the dumbest version of it.
Look at how actual warbow archers fire their bows. This isn’t the modern block bow that gets easier when you pull it back because of the pulleys. Some longbows had 240 pound draw weights. If your arms were to tire, you would be useless as an archer, so why the heck would they even try to do it. You let the arrow go immediately. And you would do that immediately when enemies got in range to prevent them from comming closer. Again, don’t apply musket logic to bows. You can shoot a bow much faster than a musket, but you had to train people all their lives, so when they were lost, you lost a lot. Crossbows changed all that, with basically anyone being able to draw them and aim them. Muskets then slowly replaced the bow and crossbow because they were able to go through armor better. So they beefed up the armor too. So to prove the armor stops bullets, a smith would use a pistol and shoot it. You’d look for the dent and see it works. Some bad smiths would then hit it with a hammer and punch to simulate it, and then people got hurt.
You don’t get people to wait with a shitload of pounds of force trying to wriggle out and launch an extremely heavy arrow.
If your arms were to tire, you would be useless as an archer, so why the heck would they even try to do it.
You’re contradicting yourself or just strawmanning my post as well. I wasn’t talking about tiring from a “fire when you want” scenario. I was clearly talking about tiring from “volley” fire. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, don’t archers use straw men as their targets typically?
Learn what strawmanning is, read up on how longbow archery worked. I’m done here.
What do you think the command would have been, then?
Why would you think there’d be a command at all, other than “when they are in range, kill them”? Why would you wait till people are closer when you start shooting them when you can shoot them when they are further away just fine. It’s not like someone would say “oh fuck these dudes in the front got taken out by archers, time to take out my shield”. They’d just walk with their shield out already. They’d use siege engines to hide from the arrows. They’d have barricades to hide behind. You wouldn’t simply go for the Futurama killbot limit, why would you give your opponent more time to walk towards you
They’re not aiming at individual targets. They’re shooting volleys. That would require coordination.
If you can’t come up with any answers to those questions on your own then I don’t think it’s worth my time responding to this.
Fire! Wait-
There are so many people in the fediverse who are just typing words because they like to see their name on a screen.
Can confirm, sigh… but at what cost.
Where did you hear this? There’s so little information on archers through history.
I can’t cite a specific source since I was researching the subject for a fantasy novel I was writing at the time, and I’m not even sure the material I was reading was in English, but I remember the author was making a comparison to Roman legionnaires throwing their Pila synchronously to maximise their impact/psychological effect. And it made sense to me since every soldier only had two to carry.
Apparently shooting them in single massive salvos would force their enemies to crowd into one another (they’d have to push someone else into the path of a Pila to avoid one that’s coming at them) which devastated their morale.
They were talking about ur mum
Loose!
Begin!
Later…Stop!
Loose!
“Let fly!”
Props to the movies that shout the “Loose!” command
As I understand it, that’s still not very historically accurate. It was not really a thing for archers to nock and loose together like they do in the movies.
Never really made sense to me, loose all the arrows at once and then give a break between volleys? Gives everyone a chance to hide behind their shield, and then advance when it’s clear. Unless volleys are perfectly timed between multiple rows of archers.
Random arrows flying constantly never gives the enemy a chance to feel safe since it’s a constant barrage, and there’s no wasted time for the archers needing to wait for the command to fire.
Archers were strategic weapons, not the main crux of killilng. They were used to do things like keeping an enemy division pinned down so that your cavalry can move around them or one of your own divisions can reach a more advantageous position. A well placed concentrated barrage could force an enemy to move in a direction that is more advantageous to you, etc…
They weren’t the primary means of killing people. They were the means of steering the battle where the general wanted it to go.
That’s an oversimplification. Skilled archers, especially in numbers, are a force to be reckoned with. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt
Or think of horse archers. The mongols used them to great effect, and the Romans lost 7 legions against them, despite their testudo supposedly being next to invincible against projectiles
Volleys do have their place, but mostly as a way to open the battle, and at long range. You are correct that that can often be used to provide breathing room for troop movement. However, once the fighting starts, archers usually start picking individual targets and fire at will
Yes. There’s no doubt that the English longbows were a force to themselves. They were lethal in piercing armour but they were still used in generally the same manner. To open up the battle by forcing the enemy to take a defensive stance and “thinning the herd” (so to speak) before your own infantry engages their forces.
Once the infantry engaged however, you didn’t want to be raining down arrows on your own men and so the purpose of the archers largely changes to a completely different purpose; controlling the flow of battle with strategic use of volleys.
And yes…the Mongols changed everything with their horse archers. There’s a reason a good part of the population is descended from Genghis Khan…
Quite right and why make your fastest, best archers wait for your slowest ones?
Maybe, but each archer will only be able to have so many arrows. What good is an archer if he only had 20 arrows and fired them all, already? If command thinks they’ll need archer support for more strategic things, they may not want them firing off as many as they can quickly, even if the archer believes each arrow will hit its mark.
Armies relying on archers often had a continuous resupply running towards archers in position.
Yeah, real warfare isn’t a good spectator sport. It’s chaotic, difficult to understand what’s going on, things take way longer or way shorter to happen than would make sense for a film, and it’s nothing like the orderly battles shown to us by Hollywood. The fog of war is a real thing. But that’s why they do it, because if they did it realistically it wouldn’t be very fun to watch.
Except if the movie is an anti-war one.
Yes indeed. Generation Kill is the only thing I’ve seen that got close to reality. I was in a unit that did exactly what was shown in that show, and for the most part they nailed it. They showed the confusion, stupid orders, lack of proper communication, the constant fatigue, and the crazy shit that just happens out of nowhere when you have a bunch of 18-20 year old testosterone rage machines running around with serious hardware.
This makes me want a chaotic locked wide shot of a old battle for at least a minute, to take it in
The purpose of the flight of arrows was to blanket the area ahead of an army advancing to meet the front line of your army. It was mathematically, the only way to have a chance at killing a large number of targets, as being accurate at that range was nearly impossible, even for the best longbowman.
So they went with numbers over precision. This also allowed them to effectively slow down the pace of the advancing frontline if every time they loose their arrows, they all have to stop and take cover.
It has a tertiary goal of likely killing any wounded still on the ground. It’s not a technique you’d use when your forces have fully engaged as it’d kill just as many of your units as the enemy’s.
Finally, it could be used in strategic encounters to force the enemy to stagger/get out of position if you could cause just one part of their advancing line to stop, it’d essentially break or weaken the enemy’s frontline.
I have shot a longbow, you can be pretty accurate given the target is a large group of people. Sure, I can’t realistically hit that guy there with the red hat. But I can probably got one of the guys near him.
If all the guys have armor and shields, the chances of hitting anyone in a spot that matters is a lot snaller
Well yeah, this is why you shoot more than 1 arrow.
Strike?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volley_fire Y’all really just make stuff up without even checking wikipedia huh? It wasn’t typically used in medieval Europe for bows beyond the initial volley, though of course initial volleys were still a thing. You didn’t just have elements of archer formations fire whenever they decided the range seemed right.
I followed the cited source for the wikipedia claim, and it’s just a guy writing a paper and saying his opinion. He’s not citing anything deeper to cover his claim about an initial volley followed by targetting individual solders. Just because it’s in a paper doesn’t mean it’s right, or even well-researched.
Sure, it FEELS right, and that does have weight with living history and experimental archeology, but I worry that “feeling” is the only thing anyone is actually citing in this whole conversation, including Wikipedia.
You’re misunderstanding. War bows can’t be held, the bow is way too heavy to allow you to hold an arrow and loose it at will; drawing and loosing are two actions of a singular movement.
Volleys were used, but the similarity with the way they’re used with firearms only exists in the use of crossbows, which were invented specifically because they allow to draw and shoot in two motions (and also they require virtually no training compared to war bows)
I made this comment in passing and prefaced with “as I understand it.” Always happy to be corrected.
Actually, it worked pretty much exactly this way in the first stages of battle.
In the opening moves of a medieval battle, archers were essentially like the “creeping fire” that they used in World War 1; it’s purpose is to keep the enemy immobile behind their shields and unable to advance as fast as they would like. Your army can’t rush to take an advantageous position if they’re constantly having to stop and hide under their shields.
In WW1, in the Somme especially, the artillery would lay down what they called “creeping fire” to keep the enemy huddled in their trenches while their own soldiers advance behind the wall of firepower. Archers basically played the same role.
I’m imagining a teenage Henry Horne reading about longbow tactics and thinking “damn that’s pretty sweet” and then suddenly remembering it at the Somme and being like “awww yiss I’m about to blow these motherfuckers minds”
“But I came here to win :(”
Yeah, hearing “release” on screen might sound even more wrong…
i usually complain to the wife when horrible tactics are used in medieval battles.
like… why is everyone always doing a full frontal assault, have the wrong weapons, not use fire appropriately, never flank, use cavalry inappropriately…
miltary tactics in movies is usually abhorrent.
I loved the battle of Winterfell, where everyone took up defensive positions OUTSIDE THE CASTLE WALLS.
That battle caused a mass-extinction event among the Total War community.
-
Frontal cavalry charge without any follow up
-
Siege engines positioned outside the fortifications against a mobile enemy
-
Projectile forces unsupported outside the fortifications
-
Melee infantry inside the castle, watching and picking their noses
My wife told me to shut up multiple times during that episode as I was screeching like a monkey. The wrong side won that battle that night.
I was so mad about those catapults. I’m still mad. That battle was just completely unforgivable.
It’s not like they didn’t HAVE consultants on retainer for this series already. Give me a break!
I need to go lie down now.
I guess they kinda forgot to give a shit about the show they were producing.
There there. We will recover, brother. 😔
-
And then charged in to total darkness
Against monsters that turn corpses into monsters
I mean by that point they had made so many other stupid decisions, I think it was just in character for them to do that.
Terrible line discipline too, they broke formation immediately.
Did they at least have chicken?
I take it you are a Total War player?
One of a few movies that could’ve used a “Fire!” was the intro of Robin Hood: Men in Tights (fire arrows, get it?), AND THEY DON’T EVEN DO IT!
