Why is the sword so widely over-represented in fiction

Cutting down a tree with a sword sounds like it's much more damaging to the weapon than cutting down a tree with an axe.

Can't stab people /w an axe, and can only chop.

A sword usually can, to varying degrees, be used to stab, slice, or chop.

For hiking and camping you don't really need an axe to cut wood. Axe is for efficiently stockpiling wood. If you're wandering around there's wood everywhere

Fighting axes are very light and have small, thin heads. You couldn't chop down a tree with one in the first place.

Not all battle axes are small. You had legendary warriors who could wield giant ones.

Swords were super popularized during the romantic period. Fencing, dueling, and theater were widely popular during this time, and as such the general populace started regarding swords as something better than itself.

Infantry/Calvary would typically carry a spear/halberd with a sword as a backup weapon. Archers would have their ranged weapons and their sword as a backup. The sword was always a backup weapon and a lifesaver to many warriors across history.

Also the sword was even more fantasized by the weaboo katana craze.

>just smack them with the sharp part
Have you ever cut something with a sword? It's not that easy kid.

the weight of the sword did more damage that its sharpness. most the time you were just bashing shit with it.

Axe damage is less versatile. Swords can pierce along with slash, plus more importantly reach is a major factor.

Swords make fights look intense, spears are just stabbing which is short and anticlimatic like a gun fight.

Axes are too gory for most stories and honestly make the hero look like an underclassed savage.

A typical arming sword weighs about one pound

The sword is a conceptual surrogate for the penis, as the reproductive impulse is the undercurrent of myth/romanticized adventure tales.

Cause they look cool as fuck.

Who here /mace/?

>Why is the sword so widely over-represented in fiction
Because literally everyone carried a sword by his side both in peace and war time?

because they're cool

But then that's forfeiting the "easy to carry" benefit.

Then they are not easy to carry you cretin
>legendary warriors

yeah fucking credible I bet you're the kind of idiot who believes everyone in te middle ages looked like Schwarzenegger in Conan films

Are you the legendary "nothing personel kid" man?

This hits on an important point. Swords were very much a close quarters 1v1 weapon meant for use as a defensive and offensive tactic once the line broke. In actual battles, polarms and spears were the mainstay because they kept the enemy at a distance and allowed soldiers to fight and move as walled unit, stabbing forwards to prevent chaotic sword fighting for as long as possible.

This. Stabbing a baddie in the heart and chopping their neck halfway to the spine are very different images. Piercing is just more pleasant mentally.

But he is posting about axes, not swords.

fiction needs more crow's beaks.

Swords are more aesthetic, imagine this being a polearm.

Forgot image.

>Cause they look cool as fuck.

Behold! The Trips of Truth!

Yes, but fictional heroes are rarely rank-and-file soldiers. Theyre expected to do most of the best work in 1v1 situations or even when outnumbered. For a protagonist the line is permanently broken.

The sword is accurate for Middle and upper class soldiers
For Lower class it should be cudgel axe dagger and spear
Swords are expensive simply because you need good quality metal throughout and are signs of relatively advanced society
For all the romanticism the majority of armies were peasant levies with spears in bunches and even then it was primarily sieges not field battles where morale is more affective

>[X], compared to longswords.

Yeah, 'cause all fiction uses longswords.

>[X], just smack them with the sharp pat.

Axes are quite a bit harder to use in combat then I think you realize user.

>[X], even moreso than swords. Even peasants have them.

You realize battle axes are not the same as wood axes, right?

>You can even make firewood with it

...Nope, lol, he doesn't. Stay classy Veeky Forums

That's not aesthetic at all you goddamn weeb.

>asthetic

nothin personnel kid

Because the sword was the weapon of the Noblility and thus the weapon used by heroes in literature and oral myth. The everyman has a bill, a voulge or a partisan. The soldier wields the bow, the mace and the misericorde. Only the Noble, the Hero, the Knight carries a sword

>I won't go into why swords and bladed weapons became big because it meant you could capture the enemy far more easily

There are plenty of valid interpretations, as seen in this thread.

I think the dick-measuring contest interpretation is at least the most entertaining, especially in cases such as Note that the masamune is a good bit longer (but much thinner) than the buster sword.

It's juvenile, I know.

anything that is dagger handgun as one weapon, light functional and draws energy for ammunition from the ionosphere can never stop working nor dullen, infact using the blade component sharpens etc likewise the gun learns etc and everyone gets one, it cant be affected by magnetic blanket emps etc etc

Spears, swords were side arms.