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.

Stop Motion Dreams: Q the Winged Serpent!

Theme: The Aztec Rock - The Aztecs

And speaking of David "Is That Rigor Mortis Or Are You Pleased To See Me" Carradine, it must not pass without comment that he was in Q, a movie whose premise sounds like something I would have made up: in the New York City of the early 1980s, an Aztec cult offers sacrifices to the god Quetzalcoatl, whose name I presume the producers thought no one who wanted to see this flick would be able to pronounce, hence the truncated title.

If nothing else it raised the bar for Halloween costumes.

It's widely believed that in the original lore Quetzalcoatl was supposed to be the one god who refused human sacrifice, making this whole premise a nonsense of routine Hollywood proportions. Furthermore, since the victims are flayed, it would have made more sense to have them offered up to Xipe Totec, as Aztec priests would wear the flayed skins of their victims in his honour.

There's a neat little bit of foreshadowing here with the waiter slicing some meat before the big gore payoff of the next scene. Never let it be said they phoned this one in.

Xipe Totec was the Tezcatlipoca of the east, while Quetzalcoatl was the Tezcatlipoca of the west. Just to confuse and annoy you, the Tezcatlipoca of the north was simply named Tezcatlipoca. That Tezcatlipoca's victims could be voluntary: if you had the dubious distinction of being chosen, you could cosplay as him for a year, serviced by four wives, themselves LARPing as Xochiquetzal, Atlatonan, Huixtocihuatl and Xilonen, before being dispatched to meet the real deal. Most sacrifices, however, were of slaves (tlacotin) taken in flower wars, and thus not voluntary at all. But fuck all that, because making it Quetzalcoatl allows the filmmakers to do this:

And you thought you'd go to the grave never once seeing Shaft yeeted to his death by a stop-motion dragon-bird-thing. Actually, you probably never thought that specifically.

The main plot actually involves this Norwood scale victim discovering Quetzalcoatl's giant egg in this nest in the Chrysler building, presumably because King Kong already used the Empire State.

This scene is like the ending of Lovecraft's The Outsider for dudes with thinning hair.

I can't remember the guy's name but he gives a stellar performance as a terminally annoying no-hoper roped into a heist who loses the money and leads the goons hoping to beat it out of him to their deaths in the nest before revealing its location to Carradine and Roundtree's bickering detective duo. The male pattern baldness poster boy is quite the charmer: an ex-junkie who we're told beats up his gf when he's not crying into her pillows. On learning he has an incredible secret to trade to the cops for his freedom, he has the brass balls to angle for a book deal and a cool million bucks too.

He's literally me (just kidding, I have a great hairline).

You watch the flick not knowing if he's going to have some kind of redemption but he never does, even when saved by Carradine from the Aztec priest, making him the most authentically repulsive protagonist ever to get away scot free after all his bullshit. Amazingly, after shooting the priest dead in baldie's hotel room, Carradine takes a do-not-disturb sign from the opposite door and hangs it with the please-enter side facing out on the room with the corpse inside. I don't know why he did that, other than to prank the hotel staff like the world's biggest dick.

"Lol" - David Carradine.

Alas, Quetzalcoatl itself (they sort of hedge on whether it's the actual god or a near-extinct animal simply worshipped by the cult) gets shrekt by heavy machine gun fire and craps out on this building that looks pleasingly sort of like a step pyramid. No sequel ever emerged, but the creature lives on in the hearts of stop motion and shitty B-movie enjoyers everywhere.

"No, it wasn't the airplanes...it was getting shot 5,236 times that killed the beast" - actual dialogue.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Apocalypto!

The blue hippies from Avatar meet real Indigenous Peoples (1502, colourised).

Apocalypto peaks so hard in the cast-of-thousands city sequence that the third act, consisting of a few guys chasing one another around a forest, feels more like an extended cooldown than an escalating climax. I know we're supposed to care that our hero gets back in time to save his family from drowning, but the whole time I just wanted to get back to the city, because it's the one time on film this criminally underused aesthetic has been let loose in its Mesoamerican maximalist glory. A fun game to play is to pause at any point during the crowd scenes and see what the incidental extras are wearing, and make reaction images of them:

>mrw ____

Mayan cities tended to rise and fall somewhat cyclically due to location, resources and their eventual exhaustion. A city might form around a subterranean cenote, thrive for a time, and then collapse from overlogging and desiccation of the soil. So much for the cliché of pre-industrial peoples living in harmony with the natural world (though, to be fair, the Mayans only ruined one city-sized area at a time. Australia was covered in lush rainforest until the aboriginal inhabitants repeatedly burned the entire thing to the ground to smoke out game, meaning the worst ecological catastrophe of all time was caused by a people hippies are now obligated to worship).

Whoa, for real? Jamie, pull that up. You're blowing my mind right now.

NPCs deplore this kinograph for portraying the Mayan civilisation as cruel, but in truth it doesn't show nearly the worst of it (children were ritually drowned in the cenote, for starters), and it's not as though The Northman or Kurosawa's epics whitewash the history of their respective settings. Personally, I want to see more Mesoamerikino that's as uncucked about showing both the aesthetic splendour and the insanely violent practices of pre-conquest Mexico. The rise of the Aztecs from Chichimec nomads kicked out of every place they settled to vassals of the Tepanecs to a triumphant regional hegemon under the speakership of Itzcoatl would be the perfect subject matter for an epic to end all epics. For this reason alone, infantilising noble-savage cod historiography must die.

Bastard role models: Tezcatlipoca

Tezcatlipoca was the troll god of the Aztecs and would periodically destroy the world, mostly by trolling other gods so hard they deleted fucking everything. In other words, the hero we deserve and need.

>ywn be as /fa/ as tezchadlipoca

Tezcatlipoca was so dedicated to trolling, he created the world by using his foot as bait to lure in Cipactli, a giant fucking crocodile fish space monster, which was then rekt and turned into the world by the combined gods of the Aztecs. He gave up his own foot just to make a Sims game he would then spend the rest of eternity fucking with and destroying, like a cross between a Bond villain and God.

One time, Tezcatlipoca thotpatrolled Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, making her cry so much it flooded the world, forcing everyone to turn into fish in order to survive. No reason, he just liked doing things like that.

Tezcatlipoca in The Warriors (1979, colourised)

The other thing Tezcatlipoca is known for is that every year a Chad tier Aztec would be elected to LARP as him for one year leading up to his feast day, when he would be ritually killed and his heart offered up to the troll god. During this year he would get mad puss. Considering the alternative was to be a peasant til you dropped, this was a pretty sweet deal.