(but Legolas and Gimli's action is generally over-the-top, for realism).
Of course it's not realistic, they are an elf and a dwarf (which are not real) so how can we expect them to operate the same way humans do?
This is my philosophy on the matter, in full so you can see where i'm coming from. This is not meant to be argumentative it is just the basis of the logic of my argument.
Please do not take this as an attack on any of you.
If you look at the Many Worlds Theory (basically every time a decision could have gone another way it did in another dimension) if you go to a dimension where the change was far back enough, the whole of human development has completely altered what we would perceive as normal.
We judge something like LotR as not behaving the same as our world, but their history is totally different. They have had to deal with orcs, trolls, and evil magicians (if not far worse), they have had magic, elves, dwarves, all sorts of things that we have not had in our history. At the very worst, we've had psychos, bears, alligators, and sharks. This constant state of war has left them in what we would refer to as the medieval age for millenia (far longer than we experienced it), so they've had a lot of time to develop in and evolve to best suit that particular situation.
We can't assume that Dwarves and Elves have the same musculature and limits that we do. We can't assume that they make their bows and armor the same way we do just because our technology is better (modern science still can't recreate Greek Fire, yet we assume we are smarter than the people who did create it) the fact of the matter is that we aren't the masters of the physical universe
yet so we can only base our judgments on our own historical record (which often has huge chunks missing) and ability to recreate it in modern times (the above GF example relates how limited that can be)
Robin Hood is just a story, so it is really up to the director to decide to make it true to period or a true fantasy (with fantastic occurrences) If they try to tell you it is period or historical and it is not....then we have a right to complain, but if they chose to tell a fantasy story as a fantasy then complaining just shows your own ignorance to the concept of fantasy.
On the same note, LotR is not a period story, it is a story in a fantastic world that happens to have humans and a geographical location with Earth in the name. If one wishes for it to agree fully with our recreation of our past, we must remove elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, and magic as actual existing in the world, in which case it becomes the story of a LARPing group.
So, in short, because these worlds are
not exactly like ours, and because our own picture of our history
has flaws that are constantly being redefined, I see it as
plausible that in the course of their development the world has changed, that the physical stature of people has changed and the nature of materials (think composites) has changed from what we understand them to be, and culturally people have not developed the same so words and meanings won't be the same as they were for us (if they really were what we thought they were). This is my logical basis for allowing Fantastic occurrences in Fantasy worlds.
...
