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The Nitpicker’s Guide to Ancient Warfare: Introduction

In answer to David Flin's question: yes, it definitely matters. My wife is probably tired of me saying things like, "that's rubbish, that's not how <insert naval/military/air event/unit/tactic> works!" I'm happy to accept daft things in fantasy and (soft) science fiction, but in works which want to be taken seriously as plausible AH - or plausible stories on TV, for that matter - these things just make me stop reading / turn off.
So, yep, put me down for the book when it comes out!
 
Or any number of battle scenes where the lead character doesn’t wear a helmet so the audience can see who he is?
That one is a pet peeve of mine. It shows up so often, it's referenced on TV Tropes as "Helmets are hardly heroic". Most ridiculous of all is when the lead character is clad in full plate armor, but their head is entirely devoid of any protection.

I'm reminded of a character in the first season of The Witcher who started out sensibly wearing his helmet. Then the minute he became plot-relevant, he started going into battle bare-headed.
 
So, yep, put me down for the book when it comes out!

The current plan is to post the book, about a thousand words at a time, on here until its published so the author can get the benefit off feedback. And then when it comes out, then we straight away drop the pay wall and go 'to get the rest buy the book'. We might even then remove the initial articles.

We did similar with Tim Venning's Roman timeline and we'll be putting up bits from books by Dale Cozort and Sarah Zama later this week. As a try before you buy, thing.

We'll see how it goes, and how it works both in getting feedback and attracting interest. I will never publish an entire book, that seems self defeating, but I think putting up bits of it can work to attract attention.
 
That one is a pet peeve of mine. It shows up so often, it's referenced on TV Tropes as "Helmets are hardly heroic". Most ridiculous of all is when the lead character is clad in full plate armor, but their head is entirely devoid of any protection.

It's not just confusing for audiences, but armies too:

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Though presumably William did not then say, "You know what chaps, I can see how it's confusing. Let's all take our helmets off so we can identify each other."

He probably said it in Norman French for a start.
 
The strangest thing of course is that medieval armour came up with loads of mechanisms to identify the 'main characters' of the battlefield while still keeping helmets.

Though I can make an honourable exception for films like Troy or the like where they're meant to be larger than life characters pulling off heroic deeds beyond the ken of normal mortals. Though even there I feel like people should at least start with helmets even if it ends up being abandoned mid-battle.
 
Though I can make an honourable exception for films like Troy or the like where they're meant to be larger than life characters pulling off heroic deeds beyond the ken of normal mortals.

This is probably also why you don't get as much writing on implausible ancient-war methods and cultural practices in LOTR versus the Dothraki, who as 'low fantasy' are meant to be more grounded and quasi-real.
 
This is probably also why you don't get as much writing on implausible ancient-war methods and cultural practices in LOTR versus the Dothraki, who as 'low fantasy' are meant to be more grounded and quasi-real.

No, that's entirely a function of the fact that Return of the King came out 2 years before YouTube was launched, whereas Game of Thrones spanned 8 years during a time when the internet was well established.
 
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