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.

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.