Chris Farrell , a bladesmith for 13 years and owner of Fearghal Blades in Austin was kind enough to sit down with us at Cracked in what was likely the closest we will ever get to actual journalism and explain why everything movies and novels have taught us about making swords is complete bullshit.

In fantasy novels and action movies, we like to see weapons at work but we don't particularly care how they were created, sort of like sausage. We want to see our protagonist double-wielding pistols while shooting holes in the faces of their enemies, but we certainly don't need a whole montage on who handcrafted those guns. Yet for some reason, swords are different. There's a special place in our hearts for knowing exactly where and how each blade was forged before the hero pokes someone with it. Some swords have even more elaborate origin stories than the characters who wield them. All the stranger then, that no one writing our favorite books and movies ever bothered to google how these weapons are really made.

6 Katanas Are the Greatest Sword Ever Invented

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If you've spent any time talking to Quentin Tarantino or listening to the pear-shaped vitriol seeping out of comic conventions, you know that the Japanese katana is essentially magic. Not since Nintendo or hentai has some quirky Japanese perversion of a mundane invention had so much cache among doughy white people with unsettling OKCupid profiles. Katanas are sharp and strong enough to cut cleanly through bone, metal, armor, and probably even the sun, if only someone could get close enough. That's all because of one very important reason: The steel has been folded over thousands of times, creating a weapon infinitely superior to shitty ol' non-folded metal. Somehow this strange Asian tradition remained a mystery to those idiot Europeans for thousands of years, which is why Bruce Willis didn't head for the broadsword aisle when he had some serious rape-stopping to do in Pulp Fiction.

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"Only a Japanese blade can end something this perverted."

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But actually ...

First of all, you don't need to fold good steel. Japanese swordsmiths used a metal known as tamahagane. It sounds fancy as hell, but so does anything you say in Japanese. Westerners knew tamahagane as "pig iron," which is considerably less romantic. They refused to use it in the west for weapons, not because they were stubborn morons but because it's loaded down with carbon and too much carbon will turn your sword into a brittle shower of metal shards during its first use. See, the process of folding a sword started as a way to iron out that extra carbon in a shitty alloy, turning pig metal into something more suitable for stylized murder.

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Because murdering people with a machete is just crass.

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Now think about folding a piece of paper -- doing it a few times is easy, but try folding it over 15 or 20 times. Likewise, you can fold steel maybe 20 times, if you were some kind of fold-crazed junkie. Real Japanese swordsmiths folded their blades about eight times. Folding much more than that would suck all the carbon out of the steel, leaving you with a soft, Play-Dohy katana that would be better suited for enemies like warm butter than anything you might encounter on a battlefield.

But more importantly, even the very best katanas are pretty much useless in the hands of anyone who hasn't gone through exhaustive training. There's a whole book's worth of rules for wielding one properly. In fact, just swinging one of these swords as hard as you can will undoubtedly end in your sweet Hanzo shattering to pieces, like the fellow in the video who was fighting against one of the most formidable enemies known to man: moderate amounts of wood.