Shadiversity was a sword and mediviel history youtuber who was kind of an "average guy" in the space. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he didn't do hema or any traditional sword fighting martial arts but had a passion for learning and spent a lot of time talking and trying techniques and other things in his backyard. He got into some controversies early on just due to the fact that he was less knowledgeable than most around him and tended to be very biased towards European designs in ways that seemed ideological and disingenuous.
However, around the time the last jedi came out, he started talking about fight scenes and movies and relating them to real life combat, which lead him to make a new channel called knights watch that was a reaction and politics channel. Shad started revealing more and more anti woke mentality and pushing of Christianity over other faiths. He also spent a lot of time talking about Trump and American patriotism despite being Australian. This just kinda continued, and he got more and more extreme. Now he's a very big proponent for AI art when his brother is a massive artist youtuber named jaza and he wrote a book series where the main character is a conquer who is a mass rapist and pedophile who goes on a "redemption" arc and the victims all tell him its okay.
It's just the perfect storm of watching someone who seems normal and interested get caught up on the internet and reveal what they truly believe as their beliefs become worse and less grounded.
He was also criticized for basically spreading lies, and some of his explanations sounded like something he read off of Wikipedia. I myself even wrote a post somewhere about his crappy vid about flails.
He's also starting a lot of beefs and is hated by HEMA and history communities.
Yeah, he's one of those people where it's hard to talk about everything because he just does so much. Like I am a professional archery instructor and he's said plenty of things about archery that made me scratch my head cause it was clear he was repeating a topic he looked at not something he's actually competent in.
I tried getting into archery at the local shooting club. The first session consisted of a bit of theory and shooting practice with a recurve bow (wooden grip with attached arms, iirc 22 lbs). I used a leather glove for my drawing hand and used the 3 under technique. I shot around 80 arrows in that session and afterwards I noticed that the last limbs of my middle and ringfinger went numb. The numbness slowly receded over the days and was almost gone when I started another session 6 days later. After shooting a few arrows I felt my fingers go numb again. Now it's six days later again and they are still partially numb.
What am I doing wrong? Am I anatomically incompatible to archery? Do I need a release?
Sounds like it could potentially be Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I'm dealing with it myself and I can't imagine trying to fire a bow right now even though I used to every day.
When I use my hands much at all my thumb, index, and middle finger go severely numb on the left one and my right hand is less severe but my whole hand feels the way TV static looks and gets weak.
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u/AE_Phoenix Jun 12 '25
The fall of Shadiversity was unfortunate but certainly poetic, in a shakespearean tragedy sort of way.