The Deadliest Warrior

[trinityvixen]

bigscary and negativeq tried to distract me with one example of hegemonic masculinity issues in the popular culture, but I've been more absorbed by another: The Deadliest Warrior.

If you read the episode list, it just gets progressively more ridiculous. (Pirate vs Knight? Isn't that fight entirely decided by the environment?) Regardless, a scientific deconstruction of many different cultures' ultimate warrior classes is a pretty fun bit of speculation, and they have a doctor and a couple of engineers to monitor the data. (Nowhere on display: sadness that every major culture ever spent more effort creating killing machines than they did almost any other endeavor.) They go through more ballistics-gel dummies than the Mythbusters guys. The weapons are broken down into classes and compared against each other (as in, what damage they can do and which can do the most) and each round has a declared winner. It's dead fascinating (emphasis on dead), especially as various weapons/defensive armors are proven to have been crafted as they are for very good reasons. (Great example: the Samurai helmet has many different angled planes, and a Viking axe skidded off it almost immediately. Still probably brained the dude as the shock broke his spine...)

The real point of the show is to allow various dudes, who have dedicated themselves to mastering long-extinct methods of warfare, to hose each other down with their massive...skills. It's all the macho posturing even the UFC audience, deadened as they are on testosterone injections, can appreciate. For the love of all that is holy (aka these guys' GIANT COCKS), the studio in which they film this stuff is called their "Fight Club." ::rolls eyes::

It's still far too much fun to see these things put to use. If you can just ignore the two groups being riled up against each other (this is more fake than the WWE), it's worth it for the re-enactments and the scientific breakdown of exactly how each culture killed the shit out of their people. Because it's supposed to be a "mystery" as to who will win, it seems like they break down the four classes of weapons such that each group has an even number of wins. Which is exceedingly artificial, but, hey, it's television.

Comments

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

Having not seen the eps in question I can say anything 100%, but I somehow doubt they took a couple of the berserker's more interesting traits into account. The biggest problem of course is trying to separate out the fact and fiction of the berserker (like swords and spears being unable to "bite" their skin). Interesting parallels do exist though between what berserkers were known for and certain martial legends of other cultures. One of the easiest mistakes often made, at least from many accounts, was that berserkers were dumb brutes on the battlefield. Some accounts on how one becomes a berserker parallels shamanic training seen the world over. The hardest part of course is trying to quantify how one would continue to operate after the fatal blow is struck against them (best parallel I can think of for this involves animals such as bears and how they press an attack even after being shot in a vital spot).

...in short I'm curious what they quantified and to what degree ^_^ I heard about the katana test, and how many things it passed through on one stroke ^_^

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The long and short of it was that Samurai are disciplined, relentless warriors and Vikings were strong but not all that disciplined and relentless warriors. In the other fight I saw, the Apache vs the Gladiator, the winner was more decisive, both combatants being mostly cautious, especially up close. In the Samurai vs Viking, they went at it pretty hard. Like I said, this is probably because the match up was very close--as in, one would only defeat the other about 50% of the time. I felt like the loser, taking the defeating blow before the kill, gave up a liiiiiittle bit too easy, but they had to end it with a winner. That seems to be a requirement.