Tumblr mobile done fucked this post up.
@big-mood-energy told me to elaborate, so here we go.
Okay, so basically the tldr is a bowstring is a nearly unstoppable force and your nose is very much not an immoveable object.
The longer version is a bowstring has a couple hundreds of pounds of force behind it on average - it’s what makes the arrow go. It’s why you never dry fire a bow (all that force goes to the arms instead of the arrow and damages them), why you shoot odd color out (the bow will strip off the fletching otherwise, I’ve done that before) and why archers wear bracers. The string has a nasty habit of smacking into your arm, and at best it will leave you with a giant welt and a nasty bruise, at worst it’ll take a good strip of skin off. I’ve done both. My arms are ridiculously short just like the rest of me so the string would smack me right in the crease of the elbow where standard bracers don’t reach. Here’s the type of arm guard I wore back when I was a more active archer because of that:
The leather part goes on the inside of the arm, not the outside, I don’t care how “unfashionable” it looks!
(Btw, I primarily use recurve, but this is all true for compound as well. The whole point of compound is more force for less effort.)
Now you do want to anchor somewhere on your face in order to sight properly, but if you put anything in the way of that string - chin, nose, hair - you better be prepared to lose it. Here’s the worst offender:
Typically, you specifically want to anchor somewhere on your cheekbone or at the corner of your mouth. By corner of your mouth I don’t mean corner of your lips. If you run a finger across your mouth, you should feel a little bump right in the corner. That. You want to anchor right on the side of that bump. Your thumb or pointer finger should be right there. I typically anchor on my cheekbone right below my eye, but for the most part, it is a matter of preference.
Also, face the target, not the bow! Your face should be pointing straight forward, down the shaft, not - not that, look at her chin, oh my god, Katniss:
(This gif is saved to my phone as KatnissMarvoloRiddle.gif)
And while we’re on the subject, I get that movies have to make it look cool, but this is pretty much any archer’s preferred stance:
T-pose with feet shoulder width apart, front foot pointed toward target, bend your arm at the elbow, pull back with your shoulder.
Also, at least they got this part right:
You don’t want to cut off the pads of your fingers because you couldn’t move them away in time, and you really don’t want to put hundreds of pounds of force directly on a joint when you have nice weight-redistributing fat right there.
And don’t squeeze the nock! The arrow will stay on the string, that’s what the nock is for. Your fingers are to keep it on the bow and guide it back.
And by the way, this? is like… the fastest way to get tendonitis:
See how his wrist is turned out? It means he has to pull with his elbow. I’ve done that before. It’s a rookie mistake, and it fucking hurts for a very long time after a very short while.
(Although it is interesting that while it wrecks your arm, it is technically faster to nock, loose, and renock that way if you haven’t had much training, like the Uruk-Hai.)
Tl;dr: Movie archers are dumbasses, and having to watch them be dumbasses is my #1 media pet peeve.
One last thing, re: terminology. You don’t load a bow (unless it’s a crossbow), you nock an arrow. Not knock, N-O-C-K. And you don’t fire an arrow, you loose an arrow.
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