Editing Helmet (section)

== Helmets and Faces ==

[[Image:Imperial_Stormtroopers.jpg|thumb|300px|left|[[Star Wars|Imperial Stormtroopers]] have full body armor, including helmets which conceal their faces. This tells the audience that it is alright for our heroes to gun them down ''en masse''.]]

Helmets are the most common type of combat armor employed in History and it's easy to see why. Helmets protect your brain, your most important organ, from damage. Some also protect some combination of the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, all of which are nearly as vital. When compared to a breastplate or other such article of torso armor, helmets are fairly easy and inexpensive to make, while being easy and unobtrusive to wear. If you had to have just one bit of armor, you got a helmet. Helmets came in many shapes and sizes. Even a re-purposed cooking pot will do in a pinch.

Covering as much of the head as possible often improved a helmet's performance in a purely functional-as-armor sense. This did come with some downsides; if your entire head is sheathed in vision-obstructing, hearing-distorting, badly-ventilated metal with a few small holes to look and breathe out of, you clearly have some disadvantages over a fellow wearing one of its skimpier but less-obstructive counterparts (this is why visors were eventually used for medieval warriors, who would lift their visors while under ranged attack and lift them to be able to see better as needed), which is why most modern militaries eschew them. Never-the-less, full head helmets have been used by a wide variety of cultures all over the world, and they were much more valuable in the ages of medieval cavalry when the horse was doing the stamina-draining grunt work anyway.

However, for visual fiction, full-face helmets can be problematic as they hide the faces of the character and as such, limit what emotions and features can be shown to the audience, as well as concealing his/her identity and making them less relatable, ironically serving the opposite function of all other varieties of [[hats]]. For this reason, full-head helmets are usually reserved for faceless enemies employed by the bad guys to be killed with a minimum of audience empathy, while heroes wear helmets which leave their faces exposed, or simply go helmetless into combat situations. The most common exceptions to this rule are characters whose identities are meant to be concealed from the audience. Generally, this means that the wearer is either another important character pretending to be someone else, who won't speak so no one knows who they are until the plot says so, or female, so she can prove her martial skills to military leaders and higher ups who hold to [[-4 Str|pre-modern prejudices about gender]] and shock them with a surprise revelation when she removes it. You can also occasionally see a few characters whose face is effectively the helmet and never take it off (or at least are never seen doing so).

Note in particular that the less face-covering the helmet, the more likely a named or speaking character will be shown properly using one. Luckily for characters in more modern settings, full-face helmets are out of style around battlefields everywhere these days<ref>Or at least everywhere where you're not wearing a gas mask</ref> and characters' faces can be seen while also being as logically well-protected for combat by a helmet as one would expect of someone going into a battle.

[[Category: History]]

[[Category: Weapons]]

[[Category: Medieval Weaponry]]

[[Category: Armour]]

{{MedievalWeaponry}}