Capeworld Comics

They didn’t know.

That’s the thing you have to remember about Ben-10 vs Green Lantern.

This wasn’t a fight where they anticipated feedback from a hurt fanbase and took precautions. This wasn’t Superman vs Goku II where they wrote up an entire scene where King Kai consoles Goku (really his fanboys) on his loss and then tied themselves in knots trying to justify why Goku, who cares only about fighting and food, is more relatable than a family man with a 9-to-5. This wasn’t Carol vs Billy where they worked very hard to memory-hole how they treated Carol in 18 vs Carol and low-balled both Billy and Zeus because they had to be nice to Carol now that she had a movie.

They didn’t know.

And that is what made Ben vs Hal legendary.

There were a lot of factors that made Ben vs Hal legendary. It was a “perfect storm” kind of deal. But the single biggest contributing factor was that the hosts were ignorant of what they were walking into.

Clearly they conceived of the match as a fight “for” Ben in much the same way as Beerus vs Galaxia was a fight “for” Beerus. Ben-10 is a large and long-running franchise and its fans made sure that Ben Tennyson topped the list of most-wanted characters on Death Battle. Ben’s fans wanted to have their boy strut his stuff. Specifically, they wanted Alien X to strut his stuff. They wanted a Superman vs Goku moment where Death Battle declared Ben a character too powerful for Death Battle and “beyond conflict.”

You see, Alien X was the “secret weapon” of Ben-10 fans. Every fanclub has a secret weapon, something powerful about their setting that people outside the fanclub don’t know about. People outside the Superman fanclub don’t know about Grant Morrison’s Thought-Robot. People outside the Dragon Ball fanclub don’t know about Xenoverse Goku. People outside the Star Trek fanclub don’t know that the Enterprise can fire into and out of warp.

And people outside the Ben-10 fanclub don’t know that Ben can turn himself into a guy named Alien X who looks like a chunkier version of Marvel’s Eternity with the power to recreate universes and has lawyer-friendly versions of Marvel’s Lord Chaos and Master Order inside his head.

The average person thinks “Oh Ben-10? He’s like alien Beast Boy right? He’s a boy that turns into 10 different aliens.” But the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than that.

Fans like pulling secret weapon trump cards. They like the tiny rush of someone going “Really? I didn’t know that (character) could do (big cosmic thing)! Are you sure about that?” and then giving them a comic scan or a youtube clip and going “Yep. (Character) can in fact do “big cosmic thing).” Fans get to assimilate someone into their pool of worthless knowledge through the awe-inspiring power of their favorite character. It’s a primal kind of thrill. You bet some ancient Greek priest felt it telling some barbarian about Zeus.

“No seriously, Zeus is several times firmament level. Atlas was a scrub-tier Titan and even he could hold it up. Zeus scales beyond the Olympians because Homer said he’s more powerful than ALL of them put together. By the way, I’m in pretty good standings with Zeus. You give me a little gold, I’ll put in a good word for you…”

Ben’s fans anticipated the fight going a lot like a secret weapon scenario. Whoever Ben got matched up against would struggle against Ben’s other transformations and then boom, out comes the cosmic god who disintegrates them without so much as a blink. Then the hosts would gush in the post-fight analysis about Alien X creating a universe declare him the most powerful being they’ve ever had on Death Battle and Ben 10 fans would by proxy be able to say that Alien X beats Superman, Goku, Dr. Fate, and Darkseid.

Adding to their anticipation was that Alien X had a lottttt of hype backing him.

Seth the Programmer (I’m sorry, Salt the Programmer) and Kuro the Artist are kind of unknown now, but they used to have a pretty sizeable pull on the Who Would Win community. Seth was known for his Death Battle “debunked” videos where he would pretend to have actually read comic books and get red in the face over Goku losing. He also begged Death Battle for a job once which was pretty pathetic. Personally, you couldn’t pay me enough to work with Ben and Chad. Men on the Roosterteeth payroll are without honor.

Kuro did a webcomic about Ben-10 and Danny Phantom as adults. As a fellow webcomicer, I wish him the best. Kuro was sort of dragged into vs battles by Seth who had him on a video where they debated about Alien X vs Goku. When faced with Alien X’s feats, Seth had to admit that Ben-10 would beat Goku.

This was huge. Goku was Seth’s boy. This was like Donny “No Donny No No No” Cates admitting Venom could be beaten or Jim Starlin admitting Thanos could be beaten.

Now a lot has changed since then. Seth has progressed through the stages of grief and has come to acceptance. He believes Superman would beat Goku, albeit only through his speed advantage. He still believes Goku has the higher damage output. Kuro has pretty much retired from Who Would Win to focus on his webcomic (I think this makes him smarter than I am). Given that Death Battle researchers (and I use that term lightly) Strunt and Ultraguy have made it so that a building now counts as the size of the observable universe (Dragon Ball’s Enma Realm), I doubt Seth now believes that Alien X could beat Goku.

But when the video of Kuro getting Seth to admit that Alien X would beat Goku went online, it made Alien X the end-all-be-all in the minds of a lot of Who Would Win fans.

When people complain about Hal posting (Ben-10? Pathetic), they have to remember that for a long time you had Ben fans enter threads and post his smug face. “Goku vs Superman? What’s the point. Alien X deletes both their universes.” The main reason trolls Hal post is the main reason all trolls post anything–it gets reactions. But the secondary reason is payback. Is it disproportionate? Probably. But when have trolls ever been about proportionality?

So with a huge fanclub and a huge reputation, Ben-10 entered Death Battle.

The problem the hosts faced was in deciding who he was going to fight. Beast Boy? Maybe make it a battle between two green colored shapeshifting boys from Cartoon Network? Danny Phantom? Nick kid hero vs CN kid hero?

Naw. The power gap was just too great. If they used someone that couldn’t stand up to Ben’s normal transformations, it would look lopsided. Nothing says bad booking like making the character with the cosmic genie in his watch beat his opponent without needing to bring out the cosmic genie in his watch. It would be like having Batman win a fight without having to use any of his bat-gadgets.

Robby Reed? Dial H was a huge influence on Ben-10. But how would you even run that fight? Ben can control what he transforms into. The thing about the H dial was that every time you used it, you transformed into a random, never before seen superhero.

Captain Marvel? The 70’s Shazam! TV show was another big influence on Ben-10. It’s what they got the RV and Grandpa Max from. But they already had Billy kill Carol a few episodes ago.

It wasn’t that they wanted to use Hal Jordan. It’s that they kind of had to.

It wasn’t a bad theme. In fact, it’s actually a pretty good one–young hotshots granted green alien weapons of incredible power. And Hal gave Ben fans and Death Battle what they wanted from Ben’s opponent–someone that could make it past Ben’s normal transformations and get to Alien X. Hal’s ring allowed him to do everything Ben’s transformations could do all at once and more. But then he’d run up against Alien X and get deleted from reality.

Death Battle thought they could make everyone happy. Ben-10 fans would get to see Alien X win and DC fans would have the consolation that Hal made Ben pull out his god card.

Then they started to research Hal Jordan.

Green Lantern hasn’t been as high-profile in Who Would Win spaces as other DC characters. Part of that is due to vs battlers being mostly composed of weebs whose knowledge of DC begins and ends with watching JLU on Toonami, and part of that is due to Green Lantern’s obscurity.

Vs battlers know Superman is a big deal. He murdered Goku twice. They also know that Wonder Woman is a big deal because she’s girl-Superman and that Flash is a big deal because of ATTOSECOND, THAT WAS FOR CHARITY, I AM SPEED scans. Flash is known to be faster than Superman and that alone says a lot about his power level.

But for most people, Green Lantern is Jon Stewart being pew pew laserman on JLU. He’s just one of a group of space cops who all got owned by Amazo who is comparable to Alien X. What’s Green Lantern going to do to Alien X? Stab him with a green spear?

Yes.

It’s easy to see how people got upset. Most vs battlers knew very well what Alien X could do. Most vs battlers knew very little of what Hal Jordan could do. They didn’t know about Emerald Twilight, or him defeating Krona, or him staking Mandrak, or him stealing the power of the Specter and Nekron, or him defeating Parallax.

They didn’t know.

Green Lantern? He flies around and shoots green energy. What’s the big deal?

You look at the bloopers for the episode and you’ll see Chad freaking out over learning that Hal is going to win. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand how such a thing is possible. His reaction was the reaction of a lot of viewers.

It was really simple why Hal won. He’s killed beings like Alien X before and he’s so fast he can create speed force anomalies. Alien X on the other hand is infamous for Ben having to negotiate with not-Lord Chaos and not-Master Order to do anything really big and cosmic. It was a cosmic level quickdraw match and Hal was MUCH faster on the draw.

Part of the freak out can also be blamed on Death Battle. They really should have done a better job explaining why Hal won in the post-fight breakdown. They should have gone “Okay, look. You know nothing about Green Lantern. He’s not pew pew laser man and he’s not Ryan Reynolds wrapped in lime. He’s a willpower freak who wields the greatest weapon designed by Smurfs that caged 99.9 percent of magic in the universe and put it in a star. His sidekick Tommy “Pieface” Kalmaku defeated the Justice League with Hal’s ring following instructions Hal brainstormed when Tommy asked Hal how he would beat the Justice League if he had to. You know how the JLU really nerfed Superman? Think that for Green Lantern but on possibly a larger scale.”

The way the fight was animated also rubbed people the wrong way. Yeah, I know that the fight is a dramatization of the results and shouldn’t be taken as how the fight would “actually” go, but people don’t take it like that. I know Swan wanted to do something creative for the kill and was tired of all the clean explosion kills Death Battle had done before, but this wasn’t the fight to involve time travel termination. It needlessly complicated the issue and made it seem like Hal “had” to use time travel in order to win. Swan should’ve had Hal smoke Alien X “clean.” A great idea for a kill that was floating around /co/ was Hal shoving Alien X into the central battery as the watch tries to keep Ben alive by cycling through his forms in a nod to his big “holding a big-bang” feat.

This all being said, I rather like the animation for the fight. I truly feel as if it’s one of the best fight animations up there with Captain Falcon vs Johnny Cage and Balrog vs TJ Combo. The character banter was on-point, the pacing was excellent, the scenes were great, and the music was one of the best Death Battle tracks of all time. I DON’T CARE WHAT KIND OF POWER YOU GOT has to be one of the best Death Battle moments. It may very well be THE best Death Battle moment.

I think Death Battle learned a lot from Ben vs Hal. Look at Booster Gold vs Cable and the way they did its post-fight breakdown. They know to give extra attention to justifying their pick for winner when its a dark horse. They also learned not to do “indirect” kills like time travel termination. In Booster Gold vs Cable, they made it clear that Booster could have killed Cable without time travel. And in Beerus vs Galaxia, they had Beerus kill Galaxia with raw power instead of hakai.

A lot of people ask me if I think we’ll ever get another fight that’ll produce as much salt as Ben vs Hal.

I hate to say it, because I love a good salt mine, but not really. Don’t get me wrong. When you get the inevitable Goku vs Superman fight or a fight that proxies it like Jiren vs Martian Manhunter you will see salt, but it won’t be as much salt as Ben vs Hal. Dragon Ball fans know that Superman and Superman-like characters are to be feared. They can conceive of a Dragon Ball character dying to a DC character.

The only fight I can think of that that has the potential to produce as much salt as Ben vs Hal is Amethyst vs Sailor Moon. All the ingredients are there. You have a popular character with a large fanbase whose feats are widely known (albeit in wanked form) against an obscure DC character best known through a weaker animated adaptation but who actually did the popular character’s gimmick first (a good argument can be made that Amethyst directly inspired Sailor Moon).

Like Hal, Amethyst is popularly known as a weakling but actually has a stupid level of power (Dr. Fate called her the most powerful being in the universe. That should give you some idea). And like Hal, she would demolish her opponent while reaction youtubers gape in shock.

The only thing that might prevent it from reaching the same amount of salt that Ben vs Hal did is that Sailor Moon fans don’t seem to be as high-strung as Ben-10 fans. But then again, maybe I’m wrong. A Sailor Moon fan did send the research team a death threat after their waifu bought it against a space chihuahua.

Ben-10 vs Green Lantern. Love it or hate it, we’ll likely never see it’s like again.