YMMV / Deadliest Warrior

• 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? Some people liked it for its bigger emphasis in tactics and group warfare, while others think the show became less unique without its one-on-one warrior format.
  • The Ninja vs. Spartan episode. Countless flame wars have started by that topic alone.
• Canon Defilement: In the season 3 finale, Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide, is brought in. However, the zombies end up acting very differently from the guide. The on-screen zombification takes only a matter of seconds. The first zombie virus symptoms (muscle pain, hypothalamus damage) don't set in until at least four hours, and the virus doesn't kill until after at least sixteen hours. Reanimation doesn't occur until at least two to four more hours after death (any death, not just death from the virus itself).
• Creator's Pet: 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.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: KGB Agent-003 got a disproportionate amount of notice from viewers, many of whom were disappointed that she didn't survive the fight against the CIA.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Spartan's shield (382 kills PLUS a strong defense); Shaolin Monk's Hook Swords (566 kills; more than ANY weapon ever); the Mafia's Tommy Gun (499 kills)
  • The halberd, the Knight, Vlad the Impaler, and Hernán Cortés'^note His was a Spanish variation called the Alabarda mid-range weapon. It devastated its 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, its 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... 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: The show went through a nearly complete redesign in Season 3. It 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.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Green Berets' criticism of the Spetsnaz sounds a lot more reasonable after Sonny Puzikas (who was one of the two Spetsnaz experts on the show) negligently shot a fellow instructor during a training exercise and seriously injured him. (Arguably made worse when you realize that the Green Beret experts were almost certainly hamming it up for the show and didn't really mean most of it.)
• 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. Furthermore, three guesses who he faced.
  • 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. And in real life, Crazy Horse died from a bayonet stab. So technically he was never killed by a gun.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many viewers are just in for the simulated combat scenes at the end.
• Memetic Loser: Any warrior with a sling^note the Gladiator, the Aztec Jaguar and the Celt will get ridicule due to the weapon itself being too lame to have any real killing power and having only one kill in two out of three battles, with one exception still having the sling variant get much less kills than its rival weapon. Made worse by the fact that neither of the mentioned warriors won their respective fights, with two of them getting outright curbstomped in terms of kill count.
• 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.
• Narm Charm: For all its cheesiness and unscientifical methodology, the show was quite viewer-friendly. Its simulations, possibly the most known aspect of the show, were highly entertaining even at their goofiest, and several of them featured pretty good choreographies.
• 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.
  • Several of the tests are particularly gruesome. Even though the tests are done with ballistics gel and not actual flesh, it's easy to imagine the same damage done to real people. This includes the flamethrowers, people being impaled, and torture. 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".
• Replacement Scrappy: Among those who did like Max for his nerdiness and gleefulness, Mack and Robert Daly weren't too well received.
• So Okay, It's Average: There's an Xbox Live Arcade game out that's based on the show, and while it's no challenger to Soulcalibur's throne (it earned a 56 on Metacritic) it's a reasonably fun fighter that's reminiscent of the PS1-era classic Bushido Blade and better than expected. Its sequel, Dealiest Warrior: Legends, looked like it could be better, but it ended up earning an identical Metacritic score.
• Squick: The Viet Cong's punji sticks were smeared with shit. (Which is 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...
  • A minor one during the French Musketeer/Ming Warrior battle. At one point, a Musketeer sees a sword in the ground and pulls it out, which turns out to be a land mine that kills him. Hearing the explosion, the other surviving Musketeers come back to find their dead comrade on the ground. Seeing this, the Musketeers grimace and tip their hats as a brief gesture of mourning before they continue pursuing the other Ming Warriors.
• 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.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Knight (from Season One). His main reason for losing to the Pirate was that the Pirate had gunpowder weaponry (which is what made real life knights obsolete to begin with). However, the Knight could have been a worthy opponent for either the Spartan or Samurai in the Back for Blood special. ^note Knights and Samurais are both European and Japanese equivalents of each other, respectfully.
    • And speaking of such, the Pirate was later dismissed for a potential modern warrior in the Back for Blood special due to his weapons being "too primitive"; thus making his victory over the Knight completely pointless anyway.
  • The game discarding the Gladiator for the Centurion. It could be assumed from the Centurion's kill and victory animations, and the fact that the Centurion was the only Season 2 fighter featured before the DLC, that it was originally going to be the Gladiator, but was changed during development. Nevertheless, it could have been perfectly possible to include both in the game, with the Gladiator as a Berserker-type fighter and the Centurion as the more armored Champion-type.
• Win Back the Crowd: The infamous Vampires vs. Zombies episode ended up being received a lot better than most of the straight-forward episodes.