Capeworld Comics

The Result

 

In a result that surprises absolutely no one, girl with swords lost to girl with swords, guns, force field, and clone powers. Come on, there was no way RT was going to have their bland minority stand-in be killed by a character from German fetish: the anime.

 

The Kill

 

Ben’s ryona fetish is satisfied once again as another kill gets added to the inevitable compilation video “Why are the deaths for girls in Death Battle so much more painful and brutal than the deaths for guys?” Poor Mikasa. Even the worst waifutrash doesn’t deserve to be impaled with her own weapon and then forced to stare as it slowly activates and then screams as she turns into Unicron from the end of first Transformers movie.

 

I’m not sure how a proto-bazooka round going off in your chest does that. Maybe it has something to do with how Blake’s arm stump is a goreless purple chunk?

 

What does it say that when a RWBY character dies she flies off screen in one piece like she just lost a round in a fighting game (Weiss vs Mitsuru) but when someone is killed by a RWBY character they scream in Biblical agony as their insides boil? It’s almost like RWBY was RT’s own show and they just shoehorn it into Death Battle as a form of advertising. Crazy idea, huh?

 

The Fight

 

Am I the only one that hates the trend of cgi animation that skips like its file is degraded? I couldn’t watch the lego films or Spiderverse because I kept thinking I was watching something half-finished and lazy. It also made me kind of sick, like a motion sickness thing except the problem was too little motion.

 

So yeah, not only did they blow the budget on a cgi fight for one of their OC’s vs a waifutrash flavor-of-the-month, they burned the money on choppy animation with no real sense of weight or impact. When you have characters that swing around all the time in combat, you need to take care to make sure the impacts of blows register and come across as really solid because otherwise you’re going to have a floaty mess–which this fight is. The fight also showed what a horrible mismatch the fight is. Mikasa’s strategy is to swing by on her bungee cords, then swing her swords. Blake gets to shoot at her, throw cables, make clones whenever she gets hit like a bad fighting game boss to totally no-sell anything, and Mikasa’s big moment is when she finds some rockets conveniently lying around…and then gets killed by one of them, which makes her look weak as hell. Nothing says “I was never going to win this fight” like picking up a random gun off the ground like Megatron in the first act of the first Transformers movie…and then getting killed by it.

 

When Mikasa does chop Blake’s arm off, it felt less like she deserved it and more like they put it in so that they could say the fight was “close,” because without the random arm chop the fight looks really bad for Mikasa, she’s on the backfoot pretty much the entire time.

 

I also didn’t like how the fight started. Am I the only that notices that the opponents to the RWBY girls are always written as total cunts? Poor Tifa was written as someone that employs creepers to work her bar and then gets in fist fights with customers on their behalf. Mitsuru was straight-up written to sound like a supervillain while Weiss got all the relatable protagonist banter. And Mikasa, good lord, she sounds like such a shrill harpy yelling at Blake to evacuate because giant humanoids are coming to eat her. She doesn’t sound concerned for Blake’s safety, she sounds pissed, and maybe that’s because they hired someone’s girlfriend to voice her but I think they just wrote her that way to help Blake slide into the protagonist position. And then she shoots a cable at Blake, which makes no sense even by the standards of Death Battle’s “everyone is a sociopath” policy. Imagine an EMT that decides to beat the shit out of someone that ignores them.

 

Guys, if the writing is going to be this trash, just have them show up and fight. It’s okay. No plot is better than bad plot.

 

It also hurts Mikasa’s character that they fight in a ghost town. There’s no titans, no running civilians, no other survey corps people, and the effect is that in the back of the mind of the audience they’re wondering why Mikasa had to act like a turbo-bitch when there’s no danger around for miles. They swing across the whole city and find nothing but themselves.

 

Last thing–what was up with Mikasa saying that Blake’s four ears meant she must have four times the hearing of a human? Was that a reference to anything or a bad attempt at a joke? I thought it was actually going to amount to something, like they’d show Mikasa’s tactical mind off by having her hit a bell or something to stun Blake. I kept waiting for it to pay off and never did. It just ended up being this weird line out of nowhere said for no reason.

 

The Music

 

This would have been the worst song of the season if the godawful screamo they used for Edgehog vs waifutrash didn’t exist. Brandon must be getting burned out on all the anime vs webcomics soundtracks he has to make because he phoned in Thunder Shroud and then some. It’s someone’s girlfriend autotuning over the drums from the Attack on Titan final season OP. Could they really not find any leitmotif from the catgirl to use? And the lyrics, oh my god, they make Lost Ice Storms sound good.

 

You monsters are people

despite all the evil

You monsters are people

despite all the evil

 

Good god. I don’t know who was responsible for the lyrics, but whoever they were they need to stop.

 

The Fighter Breakdown

 

Ow. Did the girl writer do this script because the low-key takedown of Mikasa being the MC’s fleshrobot was venomous, like almost on the level of “kick rocks, fanboys” as when they said Charizard was Red’s idiot slave and not his partner like Agumon was for Tai? I mean yeah, they’re absolutely right, Mikasa was clearly some lonely middle-aged Japanese man’s dull fetish fantasy, but don’t play favorites. If you’re going to call out trash writing, call it out in RWBY to.

 

Smooth-brains are probably going to take the Boomstick lines at complete face value, but everyone else with an IQ above room temp is going to pick up on the dripping disdain. I can almost respect them for being so brazen in their contempt for a character. I probably would respect them if they didn’t chicken out and try to veil their contempt by having Wiz agree with the lines.

 

In Mikasa’s profile I didn’t notice too much wank. It’s kind of hard to wank someone from a setting where howitzers are like space laser technology. But there was a little. They scaled the proto-bazooka “thunder spears” to the strength of the armored titan which is a little like giving a hypodermic the ability to hit with the force of Ivan Drago’s uppercut because it can pierce his skin.

 

Blake was where the wank was at, and I’m not sure why they did it since Blake is obviously stronger and more powerful than Mikasa. The one that made me roll my eyes the hardest was when they made Blake faster than lightning because some RWBY characters she fought dodged “natural lightning.”

 

Science pro tip, DB: If the lightning is summoned by someone, it’s not natural. It’s no more natural than fire someone pulled out of thin air.

 

So what’s the scene they showed showing these characters moving faster than lighting? Does someone fire a bolt of lightning and then it goes all Matrix and they juke as the arc reaches past them?

 

No. The character jumps out of the way before the lightning even appears.

 

Common sense pro tip, DB: If you move and someone shoots a bullet where you were, you didn’t doge the bullet, you dodged their aim.

 

That was only the second stupidest feat they used for their catgirl OC. The stupidest was then taking the strength a giant bird named Nevermore needed to break a stone bridge Blake was on as Blake surviving being hit head-on by the bird.

 

Is it time the researches went to the ophthalmologist? I think it might be. Or maybe it’s their favoritism sneaking in. They clarified that Mikasa only survived “shrapnel from a thunder spear” while their girl got to take big bird head on.

 

Death Battle, if you’re going to make up feats for your OCs, at least animate them. The people that animate the show are your coworkers! You can have them invent feats! How are you this inaccurate with a show you have control over?