Cool Thing: Mācuahuitls!

Theme: Axolotl - The Veils

I borrowed the background from my own WIP comic page. The actual māc is from tochtliwear.com.

Fatsoes with beard strips artfully covering their double chins have argued since the internet began about which sword is teh epicest. Typically their conclusion is the Japanese katana (because they're weebs) or some manner of rapier, but they're all wrong because swords, like fedoras and trenchcoats, are only good for looking cool, thus owned exclusively by those in deficit of cool, thus making them lame (I have a trenchcoat, but I'm the exception. Shut up).

But if having weapons from the Middle Ages were still actually cool, the most aesthetic of them all would be one that's not very good at all, actually. For the Aztecs, that most /fa/ of civilisations, never quite figured out things like steel or iron or bronze, but had a lot of shiny black volcanic rock lying around, which they creatively jammed into the edges of flat wooden clubs, which made for the best-looking weapon of the day. Sure, the mācuahuitl was no match for Spanish steel, on account of it had all the deft manoeuvrability of a cricket bat, but its obsidian blades were ridiculously sharp, to the point that Spanish eyewitness accounts plausibly claimed it could behead an horse with one stroke, raising the whimsical thought that Tom used one offscreen in The Godfather.

Since the purpose of Mesoamerican warfare was moreso to capture victims for sacrifice than to kill them upon the field of battle (in fact Mexica-Tenochtitlán would frequently declare a xōchiyāōyōtl, or flower war, with some hapless neighbour for this express purpose. They did this so often with Tlaxcala that it largely motivated the Tlaxcalteca to team up with the Spanish when they could simply have killed them following La Noche Triste), you only gained points toward ennoblement as a cuāuhocēlōtl if you brought your opponents back alive. This was much more challenging than actually merking them with your equine-decapitatory big club of glass blades, meaning, paradoxically, that the culture who fought without metallurgic weapons practiced the most metal form of combat.