SWORDS BROKEN
How Not(?) to Not-Break a Sword: The Shannara Chronicles (2016‒2017)
Austin Butler broke a sword on TV. He is an elf.
January 6th, 2026
Wil "The Shannara" Ohmsford (Austin Butler) must face difficult facts: his girlfriend has been irreversibly turned into a tree. Furthermore, he failed to defeat the Warlock Lord, he fucked up and broke his legendary sword, and he has daddy issues. He discusses these subjects with the tree girlfriend herself in a sort of extended tree-dream sequence on a metaphysical grief-beach―he’s inside the tree, where he can still go and talk to her about how she’s gone, which, already, is a bit having-it-both-ways.
WIL: "So, the one thing standing between my saving the Four Lands and total annihilation is the sword?"
[AMBERLE NODS]
WIL: "Then we have a really big problem." [IMPOTENTLY SHOWS HIS BUSTED ASS SWORD]
So, he’s pissed off, and he chucks the broken sword as hard as he can, not into the water like a normal person would, but along the shoreline and off into the sand where everyone can see his mess that he made.
It’s 2026 now, and we’re dragging ourselves ten years back to exhume The Shannara Chronicles, Season 2, Episodes 6 and 8. I’m given to understand this is not a very good adaptation of the books, of which there are 36(???) or more(???). I haven’t read them or much of anything about them, nor watched 99% of this show. My apologies to anyone who found this post in hopes of a deep dive into gnome lore.
WIL: "The truth that I saw is that the Warlock Lord wins."
AMBERLE: "Nothing about the truth is simple. The sword broke when your truth was revealed, because you weren't ready to face it."
The frustrating tautology of this TV dialogue mysticism is known, magically speaking, as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” a.k.a. “tilt,” a.k.a. “the yips.” He was failing, and he knew it, so his sword broke, which is itself the moment of failure. The problem is not the Warlock Lord, or his dad’s problems, or the inevitability of death and loss. The problem is that our boy is not yet become himself.
Necessarily counter/productively, Wil then goes and hashes it out with his dad (who’s also dead) via time-travel (again?) and/or tree VR or something. He learns that his dad once failed to face difficult circumstances in his own time of adventures and such. He was scared to risk loss. Wil processes something via this straightforward parallelism and eventually comes to face the truth of his own loss. He says goodbye to the Amberle that he knew, looks down at the sword, and yesss it’s whole again, awesommmee, and the story continues with him as a guy who has a sword. It was frankly insane, anyway, to imagine the show being about a guy who doesn’t have a sword.
...
My initial reaction to this was like: “You can’t just go to tree therapy and fix your mental sword. That’s not what tree therapy is for!” ...As if I ever actually go to tree therapy. I dunno, it just felt a bit backward or wishy-washy to have a guy, in finding acceptance of something broken, willfully un-break an object that represents the thing in its brokenness. It might be worse that the object is a sword, a thing for kicking ass and not being depressed, but this is a sword blog, so we have to pretend not to be embarrassed by that.
After a short period of reflection in my mind palace (tree), I now feel like it kind of works? It’s definitely simplistic, and it could have been handled with more subtlety, but there’s an annoyingly palatable riddley-ness to the basic shape of it―in the way that riddles sometimes don’t make any damn sense. It helps, too, that the events transpire within a non-real place. It’s like Yoda sent him into the tree, like that time when he sent Luke into a weird tree cave or something. I know Yoda’s from a different thing. They don’t have Yodas in this one.
It’s like a magic text adventure puzzle: Fail against Warlock. Accept failure. Get sword. Sword defeats Warlock.
Without saying too much about things the man has already discussed publicly and which are none of my business, and without showing too much behind-the-scenes of my apprenticeship at the institute of austinbutlerology, it is interesting to note the position in time and career of this show and his role in it and in the scenes in question.
“After my mom passed away, that put things in a different perspective where I started to question if this was a profession that could help the world.” (Access Hollywood)
I’m reaching, I guess; He didn't write or direct the show, and I don’t know anything about what it was like on set, collaboratively, in terms of where he was at emotionally, or if he valued then or ever thought about these scenes ever again. But there are parallels. It is undeniably weird to think about what’s happening when we watch actors, via empathy, becoming people that we empathize with, and all of us coming together to suspend disbelief to open up and play around a bit. The task may sometimes seem silly―maybe your girlfriend is a tree or you become Elvis arguably too much―but it’s “the work,” you know, it’s the thing you do, all the world’s a stage and all that. You learn something about yourself in the process, and you get your mind straight and pick up the dang sword and keep on fighting that Warlock Lord.
The show was not renewed for a third season.