Behind my mysterious obsession with archers

When I was about 10 years old, I decided to go to horse summer camp.

It was a really weird decision, given my complete dislike (and more-than-mild fear) of horses, but hey, my friend was going, and I was 10, so there you go.

The best memory I have of going to that camp (which, by the way, was a Christian camp, so that was fun for awkward, agnostic child me) was the archery range.

I’d always had a fascination with archery; I’d watched Robin Hood way too much, and I think I’d figured out by that point that astrologically, I was a Sagittarius, which is the one that uses a bow and arrow. I was excited to try my hand at it, because clearly, it would be in my nature.

It wasn’t.

I totally sucked at it, because as it turns out, archery is really hard.

But then I got another chance.

When Shane introduced me to Diablo 3 about 15 years later (jeez, I’m old), I had a presumably less embarrassing chance to try archery again. I wasn’t at all familiar with the character choices available in the game, but as soon as I saw the demon hunter used bows, that was it.

As I put it in one of my earliest posts here,

I chose my character entirely blindly, based on a bit of gut feeling and a lot of goofy realization that I really just wanted to be Robin Hood, skipping around the demon-infested woods and shooting arrows at baddies.

I made a female demon hunter, named her after Artemis (you know, the Greek goddess known for using a bow and arrows), and had at it.

It was every bit as amazing as I’d expected it would be, and it didn’t take long at all for demon hunters to become my favourite way to, well, hunt demons.

And it just kept going from there.

When we started playing Final Fantasy XIV, I ran into exactly the same problem as I did with Diablo 3. So many classes to choose from, and too much of a noob to know which to pick!

Sidebar, can you tell I don’t play a lot of combat games?

It was the same situation; I saw the archer, and knew immediately that was for me. I actually tried to name my female Miqo’te archer after Artemis, too.

I don’t remember exactly what my struggle was with the FFXIV naming, but eventually I gave up on Artemis and called her Diana, the Roman equivalent.

That class (along with machinist) became my main—I just couldn’t get enough of my virtual archery, even after the bard soulstone introduced some outlandish mechanics.

I’ve only had two adventures with playing archers in video games, but I don’t expect the adventure to end there!

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