Immersion-breaking

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Strike?
"But I came here to win :("

Or that they're holding the bow drawn for a long period of time, waiting for the order to "fire".

Long bows averaged a 200lb draw weight. Try holding that for 5 minutes.

Archers of the day:
- Literally - you can pick out English longbowman bodies from the shape of their skeletons
- I "fire" traditional recurve bows and honestly it ends up being a lot of core, back, and your front side shoulder, but this image is funnier.
  I guess also another thing that gets me is when they are fire from the hip, with no anchor point. You draw back the bow to the same spot every time, then move your bow hand to aim. Radically changing how you draw, while hitting precision shots at varying range is like John Whicking archery, but nearly everyone with a bow in movies can do it. And they almost never wear gloves on a bow that has to be hundreds of pounds of draw to go through armor. How are your fingers not worn to bone?
  Also arrows are pretty custom depending on draw weight, tip weight, draw length, and there are various types. Where do these perfect arrows you need all come from, hrmmm Legolas?
  I am now realizing I took this meme way too seriously, but I've already typed it up, so here we are.
I never blamed the archer on the walls of Helms Deep. Waiting for the enemy to get all the way up to your walls was dumb enough, but waiting while having drawn your bow for what must've felt like ages for a human archer, is fucking rediculous. Terrible leadership.
You don't want your archers to be excausted before the battle even starts, just so you can look really unbothered on top of your wall.
- I agree, but it’s obviously done for the tension in the movie. It wouldn’t be as exciting, if the archers were just chillin’ while the Uruk-hai were charging. 😄
- I admire you for holding the archery in LOTR to a high standard of realism even when the films feature a giant flying and levitating eye.
I mean, this depends heavily on the type of bow used (which is also largely the source of confusion) it's common for archers who aren't medieval war longbow archers to draw then aim because it's a lot easier to do. And lower draw weight bows certainly did see use in war until plate armor became common enough to make them nearly useless in warfare.
I know that modern bows with the radial cam thing have different hold vs draw requirements.
Not being a bow-knower, do the other sorts (long, recurve, etc.) Not have a similar thing that can happen?
- Short answer: no, they don't.
  Modern compound bows use that cam to lessen the power needed to hold.
  Older bows are like holding a spring extended, the further back, the greater the force needed.
- By modern I take it you mean compound bows. No other types of bow have that. The force you need to pull back is at its maximum when at full draw. The exact scale of 0-100% through the draw varies with different bow designs, material and even age as it can permanently deform with repeated use.

Loose!

- Nocked em
- 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.
- They were talking about ur mum
- Loose!
Begin!
Later…Stop!
Loose!

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.
- And then charged in to total darkness
- 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 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?
- i really want to like total war, but it just isnt for me :(
  i do play a lot of tactics and strategy games tho <3

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.

If you were commanding a mass of archers "Spaff!" was the correct command.

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?"
- Guy named Mark: "What?" *gets shot
- Whoever decided to call it "Draw" instead of "Tighten" should be loosed out of a cannon. Into the sun.
- 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.
Yeah they would just spaff all over the enemy, multiple times.
- Step enemy, help I'm stuck in the dryer...
Spaffing Brits were the most underhanded of the lot.
I don't like this.
wow I'm glad that changed

Well, this is going to bug me for the rest of my life.

Thanks.

for the haters :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volley_fire#Bows

The co-ordination and timing could probably be resolved with musical instruments, which were used to relay orders, messages etc.

EDIT : Also, what did OP expect, for all the characters to speak Old English?

"Loose" works. As in "Draw!" ... "Loose!".
- Release?
What a macabre rhythm game.
- Beat (the) Saber?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snare_drum#History
  Before the advent of radio and electronic communications, the snare drum was often used to communicate orders to soldiers.
  Always has been

Yeah, or a sequence of "nock, draw, fire/loose/shoot" commands. Warbows cannot be held that long ffs.

More likely they didn't shoot in volleys at all. When you can only hold the bow for a second or two even with lifelong training you can't really have volleys.
- Longbow maybe not but shortbow, recurve, etc can be held for a while if you're willing to sacrifice accuracy.
  How far apart does a group shot of arrows have to be before it's considered separate shots v a volley?
- Yeah, that's a point I tried to make, sorry for not being precise enough.
- Here's a great video of a well-trained longbowman shooting 160 and 210lb longbows (jump to 8 minutes). There is zero chance he's "holding" the draw.
  https://youtu.be/MjY2QrU4sm4
- Why not? It just won't be as tight as in movies
- We can have a rain of arrows then, right?

Correct term was probably "loose!"

Nobody was holding a ~90lb war bow at full draw waiting to hear "Loose". Not possible.
- Speaking of English longbow, the draw force could be a lot higher too, going upwardsof 130lb, and they were expected to shoot up to 70 arrows a battle at a rate of 6 per minute (at best).
  I don't think they'd struggle to hold an arrow for the initial volley, although I don't expect they'd be drawn for as long as shown in movies to increase tension.
The slang term was "Fart in their general direction!"

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.

Often times, I think of movies or stories as the story teller as translating for the audience. You don't watch Troy and think it's odd the characters are speaking English.

It's acceptable to complain if the work is nonfiction and meant to be for education.

You don’t watch Troy and think it’s odd the characters are speaking English.
I get it. But movies that try to be realistic get extra points from me. Props to Apocalypto for having the actors speak in Yucatec Maya. (even though the movie and director have problems in other ways.)
- Nothing I love more than multilingual movies where different groups speak different languages.
  Language barriers (and overcoming them) is such a huge part of everyday life for much of the world's population.

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.

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.
- 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!
- 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
- I would pay to see both of those.
- No joke I'd watch that Viking epic for the lolz
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.
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.
- Yeah. What's the point of this exactly?
  "Hang on, lemme exclude you from this bit of the story real quick..."
  ?!
- oh man youd hate the star wars holiday special. wookiee is spoken for a good chunk of the film and there are no subtitles
- I think it is OK if the foreign language is just spoken for a few seconds and the protagonists are not supposed to understand the language.
They're made for an American audience, who are generally afraid of non-English languages
- Also generally terrified of reading
- WHY ARE THERE WORDS ON MY SCREEN?!
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.
- Is CinemaSins even part of the conversation anymore? They had 1-2 good critiques and then been shoveling garbage for years.
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
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.
The movie execs know about poor literacy rates :(

Archers... PEW PEW

pfew pfew!

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!

Archers also didn't usually shoot upwards to arc their shots. It loses power, reduces accuracy, and makes it more likely for them to hit armor, not less.

If they're using indirect fire they certainly would. Such as shooting over friendly formations.
- Guess what you also didn't usually do?
  It's not that it never happened, but generally speaking it was a bad idea. You'd only get archers using indirect fire at long ranges.
  There are however accounts of infantry kneeling so the archers can fire over them. Otherwise archers would be employed in skirmish lines in front of the main formations and then fall back into the main body as the lines approached.
Yeah, but raining thousands of arrows on to an approaching army is intimidating as fuck
- That’s a pretty expensive war you got there
- Valid

“Let fly!”

LOOSE!!!!!

Leave my mother out of this

Same. Also hate when character says “touch and go” in pieces before airplanes

Why? Touch and go is a maritime term recorded back in the 16th century, for the keel touching the seabed briefly without running aground.
- I have been lied to?!?
  Immersion restored.
  Thanks !
- It's recorded use in the 16th century I don't believe had anything to do with maritime use though. The one I'm aware of was literally someone writing that they will "touch on one topic briefly then move onto other topics"

They also aren't speaking Gaelic.

What would the order (in the language of the day) have been, something as simple as “archers” or “archers, release”? “Release arrows?”

“Archers make ready” meaning they place the arrow in the bow but do draw, and possibly aim, might make sense.

No clue how accurate it is but I have heard some films use something like. Archers, Loose. In place as in let the bow string loose.
Nock, aim, loose
We might never know, but they probably didn't even do these commands anyway, it doesn't make sense when you think about it. There would likely have just be a command to begin the attack and then each archer would loose arrows repeatedly at any target they thought they could hit.
- Archers weren't always on top of a wall. There might have been friendly infantry in front of them, and the archers firing above them into an advancing foe. You'd want someone who can see the range giving the order to 'loose' when the range was right, and then you'll want to make sure they stop shooting so they don't hit your own side. Can't have the archers firing at everything that moves all the time.
- It would be silly to make your fastest archers wait for the slowest ones.
I've heard release used in films so it is probably wrong too :P

wait actually?

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

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...
RoMeO aNd JuLiEt WaSn'T sEt iN CaLiFoRnIa
u rn

They messed this up in the first season of wheel of time, but they got better in the latest

WoT can have anachronistic words since the 3rd Age, which the series is set in, is a regression from a high tech age. They could have carried the word over from having some form of ter'angreal gun.
- Yea that absolutely makes sense, but if I remember right Robert Jordan did stick to loose in his battles. Idk, how much you have read but I believe that is what the "shocklances" are supposed to be in the scenes we get from the third age
I've read that the TV show was an abomination. Is it any good?
- First season is very rough, especially in the second half. They had a number of extremely bad production issues introduced by COVID. For instance shooting and lodging on opposite sides of a border, and one of the actors just not returning after a recess. The second season was solid and won back my interest and the third is just excellent. There are some changes introduced to rearrange the appearance of settings that will seem a bit odd to a book reader at first but will gradually make sense when you see the plots connected to those places interspersed elsewhere. Definitely worth giving a go if you were on the fence

Yeah this will never not make me angry. It's beyond pet peeve at this point.

Except for all those night scenes where they dip the arrows in fire so you can see them better on the screen

Leithio i philinn!

What term would have been used for archery?

I believe it was usually "loose"

Sure, but you have to keep modern audiences in mind when making these films.

Yeah, hearing "release" on screen might sound even more wrong...

Are we saying they never lit their arrows on fire before the invention of gunpowder?

Using 'fired' for launching them at the enemy doesn't really make sense. It isn't like they said 'arrowed' for when they launch a regular arrow.
Homestar Runner is not historically accurate.
- Homestar Runner is not historically accurate.
  You take that back!
- We also don't say trigger when you shoot a gun. Imagine someone yelling fire in a period piece and someone lighting fuse on a cannon and it going off seconds later. Or lighting a firework/bomb and waiting like 20 seconds per foot of length. Not nearly as climactic I'm guessing when it comes to immersion.
Fire (flaming) arrows never existed in most battles, having to put a large fuel source on the end to try and prevent them just blowing out when airborne meant the arrows would have a much shorter reach. It was also pointless because it wouldn't just light people on fire anyway, they were wearing metal plates, not straw. Fire arrows are another thing movies greatly exaggerated. In reality they were only used in very specific situations where a fire could potentially be started against some siege equipment or by firing them into a village with thatch roofs etc.
- This says otherwise
Then "fire" would be the first step into shooting the arrows.