Deadliest Warrior/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Scrappy: A lot of people were unhappy when Max left and weren't too happy about his replacements either.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: The Show, the Hosts, and the Experts do not take this show seriously and know that it is primarily "for the lulz". But they act as if this is Serious Business (taking into account the number actors who show up as experts) for the entertainment purposes. This goes double for the higher profile fights, like Israeli Commandos Vs. Navy Seals.
  • Broken Base: Are the new Season 3 format and hosts better or worse? Also manages to get one after every single episode, because of fans' arguing over whether the ending was right or not.
  • Complete Monster: Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot. That is all.
    • Vlad the Impaler also gets this treatment, but only in the narration. The (unnecessarily creepy) Vlad specialists seem to think of him as a Badass.
  • Freud Was Right: Most of the Zande weapons in Aztec Jaguar vs Zande Warrior are purely phallic symbols and it is noted by Max and Geoff in the show.
    • As a Shout-Out to the Trope Namer, when demonstrating the exploding cigar, the CIA expert quips, "Sometimes a cigar is not a cigar."
  • Game Breaker: Spartan's shield (382 kills PLUS a strong defense); Shaolin Monk's Hook Swords (566 kills; more than ANY weapon ever).
    • The halberd, the Knight, Vlad the Impaler, and Hernan Cortez'[1] mid-range weapons. It devastated it's target in every test and was one of the few weapons to consistently dominate in the sim. The one time it lost was when it was up against the Pirate's Blunderbuss, it's most effective firearm.
    • In the game, the new DLC warriors look set to become this:
      • The Shaolin Monk has a just plain ridiculous damage output. A simple 3-hit combo can take half of the health from a knight in fullplate.
      • The Zande has a shield as a guerilla. When you can play a guerilla without even dodging... Not to mention that the penis blades do pretty heavy damage.
      • The Rajput doesn't look all that much on the surface, but he has a combo that is almost guaranteed to break an enemy's legs and another one that is although less likely, still likely to break an enemy's arm.
  • Growing the Beard / Jumping the Shark: The show has gone through a nearly complete redesign. Season 3 seems to put more emphasis on comparing warrior battle tactics, with a new, apparently more accurate sim, which includes X-Factors by giving things like "Leadership" a numerical value. The show consults warrior experts to comment on battle tactics. The battle simulations are also run 5,000 times as opposed to 1,000. This seems to address some complaints about the secrecy regarding the simulations and the amount of testing done. On the other hand, other fans of the show want the less technical, Deadliest Warrior back, and hate the inclusion of X-Factors. It doesn't help that, on average, fewer weapons are being tested per warrior.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In the Mafia vs. Yakuza: Aftermath show, a viewer writes in that the British Sten was lighter than the Tommy Gun and thus would have been quicker on the draw. Max Geiger then mocks the comment by saying that it's not a quick-draw fight and it isn't a Western-style battle at high noon. Annoyingly enough, in the next season, we have Jesse James vs. Al Capone, where Jesse James being quicker on the draw compared to Capone and his Thompsons is given as a reason why he won the fight.
    • In the Aftermath with Richard Machowicz, Kieron Elliot states that Genghis Khan couldn't be an opponent for Hannibal Barca because Genghis was represented by a generic Mongol in Season 2. In a podcast for Season 3, Snake Blocker mentioned that the DW crew were looking for experts on Genghis Khan.
    • At the end of IRA vs. Taliban, after the winner was revealed, Skoti Collins said "No one's ever beaten the IRA. And no one ever will." Then came the Back for Blood matchup, where the Spetsnaz beat the IRA in the most one-sided fight to date.
    • In Season 2, the X-Factors were constantly said to be "something that can't be measured in a lab," and only one per warrior was examined. Come Season 3, the computer that analyzes the battle data takes into account at least 100 of them, and the experts even discuss a few X-factors with each other.
    • In Pancho Villa vs. Crazy Horse, it was mentioned that Crazy Horse was inspired by a vision that bullets couldn't kill him. He died when Pancho ends up stabbing him with a bolo knife.
    • A few days before Vampires vs. Zombies aired, Cracked.com came out with this, basically turning Vampires vs. Zombies into Democrats vs. Republicans. Democrats win. Goddamn liberal media.
  • Historical Villain Upgrade: Vlad and Ivan get this big time, going from "tyrants but relatively competent leaders whom their people still respect" to Axe Crazy lunatics and mass murderers For the Evulz.
  • Hype Backlash: Not in regards to the show itself, but after saying that they'd have BIG NEWS in three days, it turned out to be announcing season 3 next summer... which they'd already announced, just not officially. YMMV, of course.
    • Another example might be the Vampires vs. Zombies match. Out of the thousands of replies on the Facebook page, the majority are flames and hate.
  • Internet Backdraft: Every single episode has this in some form, for varying reasons. As mentioned before, some people have legitimate complaints about historical accuracy, testing, and the way the warriors are represented. Others are just nerd raging.
    • The "Spartan versus Ninja" episode provoked a lot of this.
    • The claim in the first episode that Gladiators were specially trained to kill set the show on the wrong foot for some, since they were much closer to being very... aggressive actors--actual execution in combat was much rarer than pop culture made it out to be.
    • The "IRA versus Taliban" episode also provoked a fair bit, with people accusing them of glorifying and/or exploiting terrorism. Since there's no such thing as bad publicity, the show embraced the controversy and advertised the episode as "the most controversial episode yet."
      • However, every time they returned from commercial break, it came with a disclaimer denouncing both of their policies. They even made a donation that helps civilian victims of landmines.
    • Host Max Geiger stated that the show would not attempt a Ninja vs Pirate episode because of this very reason.
    • One of the most frequent pasttimes of viewers is to post reviews/responses on YouTube that critique various claims made by the show, some attempting to debunk and others just ranting for some time.
    • Every time an American warrior wins. See The Scrappy. Since the Green Berets VS Spetznaz episode, which itself caused a lot of Internet Backdraft among American fans, American warriors have won in every single episode that they have been in. This suspicious winning streak has caused many people to denounce the show as mindless, nationalist chest-thumping and appeasing the American fanbase at the expense of everyone else. This is especially true for George Washington VS Napoleon Bonaparte, which was an upset. To be honest though, most of it comes down to Misplaced Nationalism and Cultural Posturing on the part of the American fans, and mindless America bashing on the part of the America haters, due to America's status as an Acceptable Target for hatred these days.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: Many viewers are just in for the simulated combat scenes at the end.
  • Jumping the Shark: The Vampires vs. Zombies episode was seen as this by some fans.
  • Memetic Mutation: Vlad's Trollface. Specifically his grin after shooting out Sun Tzu's tea pot.
    • KILLSHOTS KILLSHOTS KILLSHOTS KILLSHOTS
    • Season 3 replaced KILLSHOTS with INSTANTKILLS.
  • MST3K Mantra: Good lord, are you ever going to need this.
  • Narm Charm: For all its cheesiness, the show's pretty badass.
  • Nausea Fuel: The Viet Cong's punji stick were tipped with...human feces. During the testing of the spike pit, the sticks were tipped with mud, but it's impossible to not envision it as feces.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • Dr. Dorian (and sometimes Geoff) goes into every little detail about what the weapons will do, describing how arrows and spears will pierce veins and vital organs and how the movement of them will cause more damage, and what the cuts from the throwing weapons will do bones and innards.
    • The IRA's flamethrower (and the Waffen SS' Flammenwerfer) seem to be the worst of them all.
    • Seeing the test of what exactly Vlad did to his enemies when he impaled them. It may have been a ballistic gel torso, but still.
    • The Taser test, seriously those prongs look NASTY especially compaired to the short range arching variety I used to picture.
    • Anytime torture is shown. Especially in the Saddam Hussein vs. Pol Pot episode.
    • Kilong Ung mentions how Electric Torture is one of the less horrific tortures Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge used. Also, the fact they murdered a quarter of Cambodia's population.
    • The scene in Vampires vs. Zombies where one Vampire gets torn apart by a horde of zombies. Sure, it's a blood-sucking predator, but you can't help but sympathize with it in its final, painful moments. Most of that episode was this.
  • Pandering to the Base: It's likely the inclusion of Richard "Mack" Machowicz as a tactician specialist and data into the strategies and mentalities of the warriors being tested in the third season is meant to address criticisms of the show being more "Deadliest Weapon" than "Deadliest Warrior".
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: There's an Xbox Live Arcade game out that's based on the show, and while it's no challenger to Soul Calibur's throne (it earned a 56 on Metacritic) it's a reasonably fun fighter that's reminiscent of the PS One-era classic Bushido Blade and better than expected. Its sequel, Dealiest Warrior: Legends, looked poised to avert the trope almost entirely... but it ended up earning an identical Metacritic score.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Among those who did like Max for his nerdiness and gleefulness, Mack and Robert Daly weren't too well received.
  • Ruined FOREVER: Many fans are claiming this over the Zombies vs. Vampires 'fantasy' episode.
  • The Scrappy: Slings, to many of the fans. Not as much as seige/artillary weapons though.
    • Max Geiger was, at least for the first two seasons, allowed to weigh in on tests, give the edge to weapons, and give commentary on simulations and tests. The data-entry drone was treated as an expert. Combine this with his horribly unprofessional dress sense (appearing on the Aftermath several times in...questionable at best attire and once even with a blatantly-unshaven neckbeard) and his corny jokes, and his removal from Season 3 was mourned by few.
    • American warriors are becoming such, due to their constant winning streak ever since Spetsnaz VS Green Beret--a couple people are even accusing the show of having an American bias. This is made fun of in the Aftermath of Theodore Roosevelt VS Lawrence of Arabia, in which the director wonders if he should include an X-Factor called "Being American". And then Geoff cracks that, being Canadian, he has no American bias.
  • Squick: The Viet Cong's punji sticks were literally smeared with shit.
    • Truth in Television combined with Combat Pragmatist. It's a cheap way to ensure the sucker that steps on them gets an infection that'll require extensive medical treatment, instead of a simple puncture wound that could be dealt with by a field medic.
  • Tear Jerker: The younger vampire screaming in pure terror as he's eaten alive by zombies, as his friends can only look on horrified.
    • For some fans, watching the warriors they support die, especially when they hold these warriors quite close to their hearts. Let's take a moment to remember those who weren't fortunate enough to make it this far: the Ninja, the Viking, Shaka Zulu...
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Some fans are very angry that they replaced Max Geiger with Richard Machowicz and got a new simulator in Season 3. It doesn't help that the first few episodes of the season featured shorter, less frequent weapon tests.
  • Too Dumb to Live: In George Washington vs. Napoleon Bonaparte, only Napoleon and Washington are left, and Napoleon successfully knocks Washington off his horse with his sword. Instead of charging at Washington and attempting to slash him with his cavalry sabre, he gets off his horse and runs over to duel him, which ultimately leads to his demise.
    • In Theodore Roosevelt vs. Lawrence of Arabia, the last nameless Rough Rider has Lawrence of Arabia, whose armed only with his jambiya dagger, at gunpoint in trench. He immediately runs over to Lawrence and tries to strike him with the butt of his rifle. Predicably, Lawrence dodges and slashes him to death.
    • In Crazy Horse vs. Pancho Villa. one of Pancho Villa's rebels charges by himself at a full gallop towards Crazy Horse's advancing Lakotas. It doesn't end well for him.
  • Too Good to Last: Canceled after Season 3, as per Geoff's twitter feed.
  • Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: The basis of the entire show.
  • Unfortunate Implications: the show's format of presenting opposing sides, combined with the natural tendency to pick one, means that one can end up cheering for some pretty nasty characters, like Vlad the Impaler, Saddam Hussien and the Nazis. Yay?

Charlie: Come on Nazi, kill him...YES! YES! HOORAY FOR THE NAZIS! DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES! HURRAY, HURRAY FOR THE NAZIS, YES! (Beat) Please don't take this out of context and put it on YouTube.

  • Win Back the Crowd: The infamous Vampires vs. Zombies episode ended up being received a lot better than most of the straight-forward episodes.
  1. ↑ His was a Spanish variation called the Alabarda
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