Gruesome details of real-life sword play in Dublin!
specky_ie on LJ saw the footage of the guy who lost his hand when he was attacked by a sword in Dublin a little while ago. Morbidly fascinating:
And this is where it got more interesting for me. The spaces were not very confined (ceiling was perhaps a little low for a long-ish sword) and he had plenty of room to move about in. The movements of the protagonists were very fluid - much more so than you see in staged sword combat.
There was a clear intention on the part of the attacker to remove the other person’s head, and as an unarmed (oh I didn’t mean that one) combatant, his natural reaction was to raise an arm in defence (which was how the hand became disengaged from the arm).
A couple of the other occupants of the bar played football with the severed article after it hit the floor, but the owner of the aforementioned appendage carried on fighting without the slightest flinch. In fact, he was punching the swordsman with the blood-spurting stump of his unhanded arm for much of the remainder of combat without seeming to realise the fact that he was five fingers short of a handshake.
There were a surprising number of people about at the time of the attack, which resulted in a lot of people running in every direction to get out of the way of the sword (or the hammer that his friend was carrying), or to get out of the way of the pumping jets of blood, or perhaps to get to the carvery before it closed…I dunno.
Ick! Pumping blood and body parts!
On the other hand (pun not intended) I can’t believe the guy kept fighting after he lost hand, but I guess it makes sense with adrenalin pumping and pure survival instinct. It may colour my descriptions of fights in-game. I’d imagine a trained sword-fighter would have downed the guy with the first strike (or perhaps I’ve just watched too many samurai movies as a child) but because the guy was not trained, any damage he did was pure luck.