Minecraft's new Piglin Brute mob is a solid 8/10 brute

I appreciate a good brute. I like the word itself, apart from anything else. It just sort of falls out of your mouth like a lead ball, that’ll probably break your toe when it lands. It’s a dim, mean-spirited word, like “fruit”, but too preoccupied with simplistic violence to know how to spell itself. “Brute” has the same sort of mouthfeel as “dunce”, “thud”, “trudge” and “bludgeon”, which is appropriate, as these are all brutish concepts. And as for brutes as a concept, well, they’re just superb. As villains, their horrible power is mitigated into faint safety by their sheer ineptitude, while as heroes, their ineptitude is mitigated by their horrible power. There’s a black comedy to brutes, in the sheer unthinking urgency of their violence, that can also be a potent sort of horror, depending on whether you’re the person they’re bruting.

Imagine my pleasure, then, to learn that Minecraft, as a sort of chaser to the pint of content that was the 1.16 “nether” update, now features brutes. Arguably it already had them, in the form of the blundering, sausage-nosed Iron Golems, but I feel like they fell too close to “gentle giant” territory to be considered authentically brutish. There is no such argument, however, to be made about the Piglin Brute. It takes the Piglin, a mob that was already a good five or six on the brutometer, and cranks it up to a solid, grunting eight. So, let us consider the Piglin Brute.

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