User blog:Raidra/One Last Weapons Blog

Earlier in the year I made four weapons blogs featuring weapons from the arsenal of one of my comic book characters. Since I’ve created arsenals for some more characters, I’ve decided to do one final weapons blog. This doesn’t have the same level of detail and description of the previous blogs, but hopefully it’ll be interesting and/or useful to somebody. One arsenal belongs to a supervillain-turned-hero called Specter and the other belongs to a vigilante gang called Samgakdo (Korean for “Three-Sided Sword”) which is actually an off-shoot of Basilisk (a group mentioned in some of my pastas). I don't always depict a character's arsenal, but when I do, I prefer to have an extensive arsenal. Stay awesome, my friends! ;-)

Earlier in the year I got a book called Ancient Chinese Weapons by Yang Jwing-Ming, which was a big help here. Some of these you've seen in my Paper Weapons blogs, though a couple have different names or slightly different designs. There’s a note I should make for clarification, and it’s about the term “sleeve sword”. One source I read claims a sleeve sword is a spring-loaded weapon (a device to launch a blade from under a sleeve with the press of a button) similar to the sleeve arrow, but another source I read claims that a sleeve sword is actually a short sword with a retractable blade (allowing it to be hidden up the sleeve). Because of this I sometimes call a spring-loaded blade a sleeve sword (as is the case with Archery of Samgakdo) and other times I call it a sleeve knife and show the sleeve sword as a small retractable blade (as is the case with Specter). Specter’s protective mask is based on Beijing Opera masks. According to a website I visited, the color blue represents staunchness, fierceness, and astuteness, yellow represents fierceness, ambition, and cool-headedness, and black represents roughness and fierceness (and can indicate either a rough & bold character or an impartial & selfless personality). Lines representing folds on plump cheeks and foreheads are marks of ease and comfort, and long, thin, three-cornered eyes with lines at the corners represent craftiness. See, if you read enough, you can seem like you know what you're talking about!