I feel like there are strong arguments for either, but I’m pretty strongly on the side of GreyPryde, both because of authorial intent and because technically speaking Illyana was six when Kitty was thirteen.
The Titan(s) was/were key defensive structure(s) to protect Braavos against a naval assault so having them in place before anyone knows that Braavos can be attacked would be very important.
I think they’re about the same, but Volantis is the waning and Braavos the waxing power. In a protracted war, I’d give Braavos the advantage because they’re better able to finance their war effort and to recover from naval losses thanks to their highly efficient Arsenal.
Yes, they were used, although probably a bit more often with horse archers who needed to have hands free for reins and the like. I’m pretty sure they evolved from an earlier practice of storing the bow in the quiver, as we can see here in the upper-right:
You’re right about the stringing and unstringing, since keeping a bow strung all the time is bad for the string and thus the power of the bow. However, if you were expecting a battle or an ambush or the like, you don’t want to be in a position of having to stop and string your bow, so you’d string your bow in advance and then you’d need a way to carry it around, hence a sheathe.
Carrying them on the shoulder is a really bad idea, because moving around with them that way is very awkward and it’s super-easy to catch the bow or the string on something or someone around you.
Longbows are a bit unusual, because they were long enough to be carried like staves, albeit with a cloth cover over them. But you couldn’t really do that with other kinds of bows.
Take the airport fight sequence in CA: CW, for example.
Part of what makes the fight so much fun is that you have all kinds of different power levels going on – non-powered spies like Hawkeye and Black Widow, supersoldierish folks like Cap and Bucky, tech-suited guys like Iron Man, War Machine, and Falcon (to a lesser extent), Black Panther is somewhere in the middle of those last two categories, then you’ve got Vision and Ant/Giant-Man and Scarlet Witch doing all kinds of crazy shit, and then you’ve got Spiderman somewhere in between those last two categories.
Thus, as the various fighters pair off in different combinations, you can show all kinds of different power dynaimcs: Ant-Man crawling inside of Iron Man’s suit or suddenly turning giant and grabbing War Machine and then getting ESB’d by Spider-Man, or Cap and Spider-Man having a shield vs. webs battle, or Scarlet Witch throwing a parking garage’s worth of cars at Iron Man, etc.
Now imagine that same sequence if everyone had Superman’s power set. Imagine how boring and repetitive it would get, with all of these flying bricks punching each other through buildings over and over again.
In terms of stuff I didn’t think of at the time, I do feel like more could have been done with AIdritch Killian – he doesn’t really interact much with Tony in a meaningful way, and him being all firey at the end is a bit dull – and especially more could have been done to put AIM up there with HYDRA as a recurring low-level threat/plot hook for MCU films.
There’ a lot of places which could qualify: Asshai; maybe High Heart; Chroyane definitely is one, given what’s going on with time and space in that vicinity; the Night Fort is a good contender; the Twins might become one although I think it might need to marinade a bit longer.
However, I think other places don’t fall into that category. We have other terms, like “hinge of the world” for places of power – thin places would be a subset which are places that are concentrations of human suffering as well. Winterfell doesn’t count – it’s clearly a place where human life is protected – and I think Storm’s End, etc. are in that same category, although less important to the narrative.
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