#I cannot tell if this is an incoherent post or if I just REALLY need sleep #ehh I’ll take it as a sign to go to bed (via @jovibee)
Explaining the joke for the uninitiated and/or sleep-deprived:
Polearms – that is, weapons on the ends of long sticks – have a long history of people coming up with very complicated taxonomies based on very subtle distinctions. In fact, polearms are practically unique in that, unlike nearly every other kind of weapon, this isn't a modern phenomenon. When you see a contemporary taxonomy of, for example, swords, 95% of the terms on that list are basically just the local word for "sword" in whatever their original context was, but no so for polearms – we have complicated taxonomies of polearms going back centuries. It's not even just a Western thing; Chinese polearms also have a similar centuries-long history of people devising complicated taxonomies for them, off the top of my head. Critically, none of these taxonomies agree with one another, so "correct" polearm jargon is rich soil for nerd drama.
This polearm terminology fetish escaped from its academic context via Dungeons & Dragons, the early editions of which are intensely preoccupied with giving mechanically distinct stats to huge numbers of polearms. Early D&D employs a finer taxonomy of polearms than most, using hyphenated names to describe polearms that blend features of multiple types; for example, its weapon list has a specific entry for a fauchard-fork, which blends the features of a fauchard and a military fork. In particular, the text has a notable hangup for variants of the guisarme (a polearm with a heavy, pruning-hook-like blade); grabbing my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition (rev.) Player's Handbook off the shelf as a random example, its weapons list includes separate polearm stats not only for the guisarme, but also the bill-guisarme, the glaive-guisarme, and (naturally) the guisarme-voulge.
Consequently, both weirdly specific polearms and sticking random hyphenated prefixes or suffixes on the word "guisarme" have become memes among old-school D&D players (as exemplified in, for example, this Order of the Stick comic). Those memes are what the original post was referring to.
The first response is riffing on the homophonic similarity between the word "voulge" (an axe-like polearm resembling a meat cleaver on the end of an eight-foot pole) and the 2017 meme Who Woulge?, originated and popularised by Tumblr user @hollowtones – itself a deliberately nonsensical parody of the "Who Would Win?" meme format. This version replaces the user's cat with the user's (presumably hypothetical) polearm.
Finally, the second response is a double wordplay. "William" is a name whose familiar form is (among others) "Bill", and a guisarme is (as previously noted) a polearm with a hook-like blade, so the name "William Guisarme" can plausibly be glossed as "Bill Hook" – and a bill hook is, of course, yet another weirdly specific polearm that's historically received its own separate stat block in D&D.
annaxmalina
izzy806
areudirty
kaledo-art
baratheonpilled
prguitarman
