Something I've only just come to realize via Swordtember (annual appreciator) and hundreds of LARP fight videos and sword guy youtubes (having a weird time in my life)—wherein alarming sword guys who own a wide variety of murder tools teach me endlessly illuminating things about historical swordsmanship, bodily movement, society and stuff—is this:
My good old curmudgeonly, party-pooperist distaste for crazy swords of the imagination has always totally missed the point of what swords even are. It's more than a self-conscious, smirking, compulsive need to point out that "a sword shaped like X wouldn't do Y effectively," or whatever. It's actually an even more impossible desire for an imaginary thing; a sword ideal. It misses the much more difficult truth that swords take infinite forms based on a bewildering interaction of insular social context, etiquette, superstition, recursive logics and arbitrary mutual agreements, privileged sword jock panache, schools of zealots, rigid cog-in-the-machinification of people into armies for heterogeneous contest, and a never-ending arms race of geographically contextual materials science, economics and legal maneuvering. To name just a few things.
Swords are crazy because we are crazy. To imagine a sword one way is deadening. Many things are possible. The reality of things is a delirium, and the sword you imagine, any sword, is a kind of clarity the same as the clarity of a more literary fantasy.