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

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's a really cool concept for a show because you learn about different weapons. You might think you know what's what, but you learn little things that are way more interesting than the smashy-smashy parts. Like the thing about the Samurai helmet. Or the fact that Samurai would, as part of their training with the yumi, could call out what body parts they'd hit and hit them. (For reals, yo, the Samurai they had testing weapons put out two eyes on a dummy from tens of feet away.) There are also interesting overlaps of the obvious and not-so inventions for fighting. Like the Apache and the Samurai were both bow fighters, but the Apache had an animal skin shield and no armor whereas the Samurai had lots of armor but no shield, even though both, as fighters, relied on quick, disabling movements. Learning about the cult of the warrior in different cultures is fascinating.

If you'd like to see some episodes, I could see that you might find a way to do that...