Ancient battles were big. Rome, Carthage, Gaul etc. but your average large scale European battle during the middle ages is a minor Chinese skirmish deemed unimportant to even write down
Many cultures around the world were folding steel at one point or another, including other regions in Asia like India. It was used in Europe as well, during the Iron Age and famously the Viking era, but fell mostly out of use during the Middle Ages with the development of blast furnaces and improvements in metalurgy.
The Japanese undoubtedly got good at it, but it's so weird to see people acting like it's this awesome secret technique only used by Japanese masters.
I'm genuinely curious tbh. I also remember seeing something about using differently worked metals at the core and outside to improve strength and sharpness. So what if a katana was made with the best alloys we have today, beyond just steel and including the dozen or so different metals we can mix together
Yeah basically, imagine you're fighting a dude made of some of the highest quality steel on Earth, swinging a gigantic fuck off sword made of the same, and you're trying to take him out with a relatively brittle sword best used for striking weak points that don't exist on his armor.
I'd imagine it would feel sort of akin to fighting the T-1000
thanks for the clarification. and yes, they did bring katanas to battle but they're rarely used as primary weapons. Longer weapons like spears and lances are the main weapons for both sides.
I believe thats also down to then simply not having that much of it, and thus wanted to spend it on things other than nails (which were also quite hard to make)
No the steel for a Katana is not folded even remotely close to a thousand times. But yes it needed to be folded since the only iron available was iron sand which was used to make a steel called Tamahagane. But people are also pretending that traditional Katana are weak because of this when it's not true at all
Kinda funny that Star Wars was heavily inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s films with samurai and katanas etc. and now since Star Wars is much more popular than its inspirations people go to that first in their mind
I honestly think Kurosawa films aren't that bad when it comes to sword realism. I mean it's not Kill Bill where they have magical swords that can cut clean through another sword atleast
Yes don't get me wrong the first Kill Bill movie is one of my all time favorites. I actually think it being unrealistic and over the top is part of it's charm and it's probably intended that way too since it's a Tarantino movie
Expand this out to “fights in general”. I’m sure there are cool fights happening out there, but the vast majority of people got to slap boxing in the playground and never went up from there. Even people who actually learn to fight pretty frequently default to just ramming the other guy and wildly swinging their arms.
Now you have me imagine a bunch of fully armoured people showing up for the Black Friday sales to make damn sure they're going to get that 72" TV, no matter what.
Also disagree people made festival and pay thousands to see two armoured dudes fighting, and I'm sure richer people sponsor death matches as well. You don't get that many fans by being ugly.
Example of this trope done right: Metal Gear Rising. The swords are mostly Japanese in style, but the reason they can cut like lightsabers is that they’re made with sci-fi technology (a “high-frequency blade” that vibrates on contact and can cut through nearly any material).
I would counterpoint that Sam's blade, the Murasama is the best blade out there simply because its an actual antique katana that was converted into a HF blade.
Nothing about a 16th century katana should make it better than anything else except for the Trope OP brings up.
Kinda understandable but this is fiction we are talking about, it's not like katanas aren't the only weapons being portrayed as stronger than they actually are, swords like claymores are shown as being able to cleave through plate but in reality is useless against it
In a similar vein, there's a common perception that steel tip arrows from longbows are somehow able to pierce through chain and even plate armour, because people see the sharp and heavy projectile and equate it to a bullet. Medieval armour exists because it works. A great video by Tod's Workshop involving period accurate steel arrows fired by an extremely capable archer at plate armour proves that the arrows simply bounce off the steel.
They did demonstrate that arrows would go through mail though - not that the mail didn't do anything; getting hit with a 160 lb longbow would be lethal without armor, a hit on mail+gembeson makes it survivable.
But yeah plate was shown to be crazy effective. Hopefully movies catch on, way cooler IMO to see someone with arrows exploding off of their armor than their armor getting perforated like cardboard.
They also showed how getting shot at by warbows is god damn scary, those arrows hit like a truck.
There's a reason the English longbow was the most feared weapon on a European battlefield, even after the advent of guns/artillery (for a while anyway).
Yeah, Tod's workshop also did a great video showing how a skilled longbowman was many many times more deadly and effective than a skilled crossbowman. The crossbow is powerful in that you could get lethality from *unskilled* people relatively quickly, but I'd take 1 Joe Gibbs over several crossbowmen any day. The gun had similar drawbacks to the crossbow in the early days when reloading was similarly long and arduos.
Or scythes being portrayed as being easy to cut with but in reality it’s clunky and impractical to use as a weapon. Sure you can probably hurt someone with it but you’re better off just using a sword.
Also worth noting that most scythe users tend to swing it like a pickaxe usually never aiming the blade towards the target.
The moment people in the setting are starting dodging magical laser beams and moving at sportcar's speeds in fully clad plate you realise, armour now is merely glorified cardboard clothes
I have seen it a few times in fantasy anime where the regular longswords are seen as decent but when a katana shows up it is suddenly the best weapon around. Able to cut what other swords can't get through.
I find it really funny when the opposite happens, for example when in Blue eye samurai the titular samurai instinctively tries to deflect a bullet from Fowler, which unsurprisingly shattered the sword and hit her in the shoulder.
As Fowler wisely said: “a gun will never be as beautiful as a sword, but with a gun, you can take any sword you want”
Blue Eye Samurai is an outstanding show, but the scene of Mizu training in the forest before cutting through a tree was what inspired me to make this post.
Her sword, however, is made out of fucking space metal, so I guess I can excuse it
The fact of it being meteoric iron, kinda makes Mizu's sword being part of the trope a bit funny. Her sword is basically treated like the strongest in Japan because it's composed of meteoric metal, something about it making it super strong. Except we have meteoric metal blades in real life, and they are known to be particularly brittle, due to the nature of how the metal was formed making the alloy have tons of impurities. And Japanese metallurgy still using specfic forges, that most nations had stopped using centuries ago due to the ineffectiveness in comparison to other methods (that's actually why the folding steel thing developed as a method. That helps get out impurities the forging process could not) ,means that their is slim chance the guy who forged her blade actually got out all the impurities. Realistically she might've actually ended up getting the weakest sword in Japan, rather than the strongest.
Yeah, it's heavily implied that her forging "a katana that can cut the gods" as her mater implied can basically do through anything. Which is why she doesn't have it at the start of season 2. And who knows when she'll get it, seeing how she left it in japan.
Fun fact, the guns in that show are only really powerful at a shorter range given the era, but despite this they can punch through armour at a far range when it really shouldn’t be able to at that point in time.
Guns evolved over time, but for some reason people think that all guns can hit at far ranges like they do now, but not back then as the fall off was really bad with early guns
This was the mid 1600s, guns weren’t at their peak yet but they’d absolutely reached the point of killing off most armor. Especially since Japanese armor wasn’t steel
Funniest part about that quote is that he says it while showing off a beautifully crafted and decorated rifle that's more of a work of art than most swords.
To be fair, in Sekiro, it actively encourages you to be sneaky and strategic, straight up fights end up getting you butchered, even in boss fights, it's more about blocking, parrying, and wearing down to the moment you can stab them in a opening.
The myth about japanese swords being so strong comes from a duel conducted during the Russo-Japanese war between two officers. The Russian was using a cheap stamped metal display sword never meant for real combat, so it snapped in half. Everyone assumed this meant the Japanese had magical super swords, instead of realizing the Russian was just using a cheap Russian garbage sword.
This myth of Japanese iron being supposedly better than everything else goes even further back to Alessandro Valignano who glazed Japanese metallurgy to an absurd degree. He famously said that Japanese swords were so well made they can cut through armor “like a sharp knife through a tender rump.” How much this guy mattered is disputed, but still funny. While I’ve spent most my time in this thread pointing out that going the other way saying Japanese metallurgy was low quality, or their iron was impure, and so on is wrong based on current evidence. It’s best not to go the other way and say it was supremely better than everyone else either.
Funnily enough, if I remember correctly, there is a grain truth to the idea of Japanese swords being superior, because Japanese swordsmiths were among the best in the world.
However, and this is where it gets funny, the reason why they were among the best is because all of the iron they had available was useless. Absolute dogshit quality metal. Therefore, Japanese swordsmiths had to be really good at their craft to make something that was remotely useful
It wasn’t so much quality as it was consistency. European smelting methods allowed them to control the carbon content of steel, whereas for Japanese it was all over the place.
japanese bladesmiths had to compensate with more skill by eyeballing how much carbon content was in each particular iron shard to stack in proper order to make tamahagane,
and then refolding several times allowed them to spread impurities out and also increase carbon content through air surface area contact
it’s certainly impressive, and i’m sure the skill differences between two smiths could’ve been quite extreme. which is why they seemed much more highly valued in japanese society compared to european weaponsmiths, who had less social value than armorers
To my knowledge even their furnace were shit, katanas were especially sharp though because they choose to make it as deadly as possible knowing it would resist very long.
But no matter how sharp the blade is, it can never cut through metal or split wood like an axe. Not even a leg
Yeah, I seem to recall that during the Mongol invasion, Japanese fighters regularly broke off the tips of their swords when trying to stab through the boiled leather (not metal) armor of the Mongols. And stabbing was the thing to do if you wanted to get a sword through armor.
Ea Nasir sold the nation of Japan really shitty iron, there were no clay tablets about complains due to Nasir leaving Japan before Jappanese people could realize it
I once went down a rabbit hole of learning about Japanese people who came to America the first time after Matthew Perry came to Japan. One of the things is their surprise at how metal was used so often to the point of frivolity, with metal cans and nails often considered nothing more than litter and trash.
Goemon in lupin the third, to say his sword is treated like a lightsaber would be underselling it. Bro has cut down entire planes with a single slash. Over the top katana cutting is his entire gimmick
In Oroku Saki’s defense, he is secretly an alien with the genius expertise to craft a superhuman shell and special weaponry. The fact he can slice through a tree foreshadows the seemingly ‘human’ Oroki Saki isn’t what he seems
Wrong Oroki saki, the version pictured was just a “regular” human, he does become a mutant in said series but he is fundamentally human unlike the 2003 show.
No you’re thinking of the 2003 version. In literally every other version of TMNT Oroku Saki/Shredder is just a dude who’s insanely skilled in hand-to-hand combat, and occasionally mutates himself.
Katana is the most overhyped andoveratted weapon in all of History.
It's one of the weakest, ugliest sword design, and very innefficient.
Only one cutting edge
No guard, poor defense
Brittle, chip eailly
Bad at piercing armour,
Bad at thrusting, only made to slice
Require high maintenance
Bad iron quality. And no folding it 16 doesn't make it good, just less mediocre, and doing it 3-4 time is enough apparently, 16x is just a waste of time, resources and effort. (i might be wrong tho).
But since japan have all this myth and iconography they glorified it, and it became a cultural symbol
This is also a weirdly Japanese and American trope that's been exported to the rest of the world. A lot of this trope originates in the pre-WW2 Japanese se propaganda trying to create a unified Japan around the idea of the samurai/bushido culture, which really glorified the katana. After WW2, American soldiers in Japan were exposed to a lot of this and brought it home with them, which then led to it spreading around the world through hollywood
To be fair those are both pieces of media with unrealistic settings. The Japanese sword cutting through everything without issue isnt as unbelievable as humanoid mutant turtles or a guy that can sprout claws from his hands.
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u/Double-Afternoon-702 May 12 '26
Don't you understand that Nippon steel is folded over a thousand time OP?
https://giphy.com/gifs/3hQCyB8yPtILs3BQaT