Capeworld Comics

You probably know about the “research team promotion.”

 

If you don’t, Death Battle used to be a lot less thorough in its research. Its hosts Ben and Chad did it all on their own. But they were casuals. They knew Toonami and MCU and “nerd culture.” They had funko pops. 

 

Now there’s nothing wrong with being a casual. There are many things in which I am a casual. Sports for instance. Even when it comes to superhero comics I do not consider myself a black belt of knowledge. I’m more like an orange belt. But Ben and Chad’s lack of thoroughness led to their record early on being a little spotty in terms of accuracy. 

 

This changed a little ways into season 3. There was a group of bloggers that Death Battle often consulted for information. Since they were good at doing research, Chad and Ben decided to make them part of the staff. Hence the term “research team promotion.” 

 

Since then, Death Battle results have been a LOT better. But there are still a few of them I disagree with.

 

For your entertainment, here are all the Death Battle results I disagree with before and after the research team promotion.

 

Season 1

 

Rogue vs Wonder Woman: They simply didn’t read the comics. They saw JLU and assumed that was the extent of Wonder Woman. They know better now, and you can see that they know better now with Wonder Woman’s wins over Thor and She-Ra.

 

In the comics, Rogue has overpowered beings like Thor through ambush. In a straight-up fight, she gets wrecked against Wonder Woman just like how Gladiator wrecked her. Power drain means nothing when you get punched through the moon as soon as the bell rings.

 

TMNT Battle Royale: Let’s be honest. Mikey would win. They short changed Mikey hard in this battle and even called him a retard in the pre-fight analysis which was kind of based–I wish they didn’t decide to cut out the grit after the first few seasons. Their characters are a mad scientist and hillbilly who force people to fight to the death for fun. Calling people retards is the least of their crimes.

 

Why would Mikey win? It’s a combination of him being the best all-around fighter (he won Battle Nexus) and the most fluid and adaptable fighter. He’s the one that would be most comfortable changing opponents mid-battle and redirecting his brothers so that they’d fight each other. He’s the one that’s least affected by who pairs off with who when the bell rings.

 

Zitz vs Leonardo: Stealth isn’t going to help you when your opponent is a super-strong body-morphing freak whose uppercuts send giant monsters flying through the air. It’s Leo vs a cartoony parody of a TMNT.

 

Bomberman vs Dig-Dug: Their argument rested on Bomberman’s bombs being dangerous to himself. That’s a moot factor assuming maximum skill of the player controlling Bomberman and the remobombs Bomberman gets before every boss fight. Bomber also has better overall feats than Taizo Hori having crushed galactic empires and supervillains. Ben and Chad were also wrong about Taizo having an advantage because he can dig. That’s the last thing he’d want to do in a fight against Bomberman. Bomberman kicks a few bombs down the hole, fire spreads through Taizo’s tunnels, and he’s cooked.

 

Starscream vs Rainbow Dash: No, “Starscream always loses” isn’t a valid answer. It’s not even a valid observation. “Starscream always loses to robot warriors with millennia of experience” would be a little more accurate, but even then it wouldn’t be valid. Starscream has a few legitimate wins under his belt in the G1 cartoon.

 

The fight is ultimately a colorful pony that can crack the sound barrier against a colorful starfighter capable of interstellar travel. That one episode that introduced Skyfire (or Jetfire, pick your favorite name for the bootleg Macross transformer) showed that aeons before the Cybertronian civil war, Starscream flew from Cybertron to Earth and back without space bridges.

 

Starscream just shoots her to death. There’s no reason he can’t, especially after that “surface to space in a second” calc Death Battle made for standard Autobot firearms in Optimus Prime vs Gundam.

 

You want to know what happened with this fight? I’ll tell you what happened. It’s 2011. My Little Pony hasn’t become as overtly creepy and degenerate as it would. You could still find threads on it on /co/. 

 

Death Battle knew it could earn some cheap “nerd cred” by featuring a pony. They learned about the le epic meme video where someone applies math to Rainbow Dash’s sonic rainboom move and went “This would make a great video! We have Rainbow Dash fight someone, anyone, and then show the video at the end so people will get surprised at how fast and powerful the pony is and will think we all have STEM degrees instead of liberal arts degrees!”

 

They had no idea My Little Pony would become. Forgive them.

 

Master Chief vs Doom Guy: No, Master Chief being able to keep up with a warthog without his armor on in one of the novelizations does not mean he can beat a much faster Doom Guy that can and will spam the BFG so that he’s overwhelmed by splash damage.

 

This is by far one of the more infamous Death Battles because you can simulate the match by modding Halo. Make a spartan that can go twice as fast and has a rocket launcher with increased splash damage and then have it fight a normal spartan. See what happens.

 

Oh well. They’ll likely have Doom Guy (now Doom Slayer) rematch against the Chief one day and use all his new abilities as cover for why “Doom Guy wins now.”

 

Doctor Eggman vs Doctor Wily: The roboenza virus doesn’t lead to Metal Sonic eventually killing over because…?

 

All Wily has to do to win is send out roboenza, wait, then send in a clean-up crew to murder Eggman. For a dude that has several back-up bases, this isn’t hard.

 

Cloud vs Link: Jesus. In terms of being a transparent screwjob this one is hard to beat. I don’t even like Final Fantasy. As a matter of fact, I dislike it (Dragon Quest was, is, and will always be the superior JRPG). But damn did they do a Montreal level screwjob against Cloud.

 

So Link gets all the gear from all his games, even though several Links are explicitly reincarnations of each other? Yes, this was before the whole “Zelda timeline explained” business, but people still knew back then that not every Link was the same Link. So the Link that Cloud fights is a Frankenstein monster version of LInk stitched together from the best parts of all the different Links and doesn’t actually exist in any game or story?

 

Okay. So what does Cloud get?

 

Basic gear. No end-of-game weaponry, no materia, no summons.

 

Cloud gets nothing because you see, that’s iconic for the character.

 

How did they look at this setup on paper and think it was fair? Did a Final Fantasy fanboy sleep with Ben’s girlfriend or something?

 

Pikachu vs Blanka: Really, they just wanted to murder a pokemon and have people watch it. I can appreciate a good trolling. I’m something of a salt farmer myself. I run blood warden in Dead by Daylight.

 

But come on now. Blanka killing Pikachu? 

 

A big chunk of their argument was that Blanka is immune to electricity. Pikachu can drop lightning on his head all day and it wouldn’t do a thing.

 

Come on now. Play a mirror match with Blanka. He’s not immune to his own electricity let alone a bolt of lightning.

 

Pikachu spams thunder until he dies. EZ PZ.

 

Season 2

 

Batman vs Captain America: I almost didn’t put this one here. Of all the fights I disagree with, this is the fight I disagree with the least. I can respect the argument for Bruce winning.

 

In every crossover, be it JLA/Avengers or DC vs Marvel, or Batman and Captain America, Cap has been depicted as the better hand-to-hand fighter–because he is. The super-soldier serum’s buff is commonly given as “peak human” but in a comic book universe “peak human” means something very different from what it means in our own. Cap has really good physicals, far better than Bruce’s own, and combined with his greater experience means in a fight with just punches and kicks he demolishes Batman.

 

But of course, Batman is more than just his kung-fu. Batman has his bat-toys, and if he’s willing to use them to kill he’s a LOT deadlier than he typically is. Bat-gas plus exploding batarang, for instance, is a very effective combo he would never use in the comics. Nor would he ever turn the bat-laser on a human, but he can in a Death Battle.

 

But I don’t think Bruce’s gear is enough to overcome the physical advantage Cap has over him. Cap’s fought hundreds of martial artists armed with weird gimmick weaponry. Bruce has nothing he hasn’t seen before. Bruce’s gear isn’t going to stop Cap from closing the gap and taking Bruce’s head off with the shield.

 

Deadpool vs Deathstroke: This is another fight I disagree with but respect as a call. Death Battle rightly called Deathstroke being the better fighter but argued that Deadpool would still win because of his regeneration. I don’t think his regeneration is going to save him. Deadpool gets his arms cut off, he’s pretty much done. Slade can cave in his skull for the incap win or if has to be more thorough for it to count he can just call his mercenary network to bring him a cement truck while carving up Wade every time he starts twitching.

 

Gaara vs Toph: They felt bad about Gaara being the obvious winner because Toph fans made a sprite sheet from scratch they could use for free and pulled “w-well Gaara’s sand has gold in it” out their asses to justify passing the W to Toph.

 

Just look at the other Naruto matches Death Battle has done. Look at how they’ve ranked Naruto and Might Guy and Kakashi and Sasuke. You think they would have given Toph the win if they had her fight any one of them? Of course not. Gaara doesn’t even need to use his sand to win. The dude can just beat her to death with his bare hands. It’s that lopsided of a fight.

 

Yang vs Tifa: Well, do I even need to talk about this one? This wasn’t the worst Death Battle in the sense of stacking the deck against the opponent. That would be Link vs Cloud. But in terms of pure bias? Oh yeah, this was the worst one.

 

Pro-tip guys: Learn what “conflict of interest” means.

 

Don’t use your own characters. Don’t put a big DEDICATED TO MONTY OUM sign up before the fight. Don’t put your characters against characters that influenced them.

 

If you break these rules, you’re going to look biased. Even if you aren’t, you’re going to look biased. If I ever run a fight with a Power of Stardust or Martin’s School character, I’m going to look biased if I have the character do anything but lose. That’s just how it is.

 

Say Marvel decided to write a story where Sentry beats the shit out of Superman. It would look kind of pathetic, wouldn’t it?

 

If it was just a matter of bad booking, Yang vs Tifa wouldn’t get the heat it does. But they cooked it to get their girl over.

 

“Yang is stronger because she cracked a pillar” was a travesty. Even a middle schooler would understand what’s wrong with treating the weight a pillar can support as being the same as the force required to break it horizontally.

 

Here’s an experiment you can try, geniuses: try and break a tree in half not by sawing it but by stacking weights on it until it bends.

 

What’s worse is that after the fight, episodes of RWBY had Yang lose to characters wayyyyy below Tifa’s level. Ben and Chad would have known about these episodes. Instead of waiting for these episodes to air, they pushed out Yang vs Tifa so Yang’s durability wouldn’t be shot.

 

Bad form. And now it’s an albatross around their necks and will be an albatross around their necks forever. They could be running Death Battle a decade from now and people will still question their judgement because of Yang vs Tifa.

 

Season 3

 

Bowser vs Ganon: “Saying Ganon can die to holy weapons is like saying Tupac can only be killed by drivebys.”

 

Bowser can kill Ganon just by sitting on him. What the hell is he going to do? He’s a jumped-up wizard whose best feats are ritual magic. In a straight fight he defaults to a big sword and bog-standard energy blasts.

 

I see Swan got some sweet revenge writing Dracula vs Ganon. “You’re a pig. And I want to hear you squeal.” Geeze Swan. Holding a grudge much? I never thought I’d see a Death Battle fight end with the winner going full Deliverance on the loser.

 

Tracer vs Scout: This is what happens when you want your waifu to win.

 

Scout: After drinking BONK becomes so fast he can stand in front of a turret with rockets and machine guns and just sway out of the way of attacks. Instead of using this to calc his speed, Death Battle uses a fan estimation of his normal running speed in the game.

 

Tracer: Teleported away when someone pointed a gun at her in a promo movie. This must mean she can move faster than a bullet and faster than Scout.

 

Scout: Shows cartoon durability in Meet the Medic surviving a bazooka.

 

Tracer: Is worried about being shot by a bullet.

 

Scout destroys Tracer.

 

Season 4

 

Nothing I disagree with.

 

Season 5

 

Carnage vs Lucy: This is kind of forgivable. On paper, you see that Carnage’s symbiote has a weakness to fire and that Lucy nuked an island. That seems pretty open-shut.

 

The problem is that it actually takes a LOT of heat to bother Carnage. He’s not like Venom where his symbiote freaks out against a lit match. Carnage has laughed at repulsor fire from a Guardsman. Repulsors can reach temperatures around 10,000 degrees Kelvin.

 

You might wonder why Firestar was able to mess him up during Maximum Carnage if he resists that much fire.

 

It’s because Firestar is actually really, REALLY powerful. Seriously. You wouldn’t think it from watching Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, but she’s powerful enough to power a stargate.

 

They also lowballed Cletus’ speed. Compare the speed they gave him to the speed they gave Miles in Miles vs Static.

 

Sonic vs Mario: Not that I disagree with the outcome as the fighters were presented, but it just seemed really petty to deny Sonic Archie comics feats in light of recent rulings on “compositing” characters.

 

Letting Static have his aura powers from the DCAU was okay.

 

Letting Sindel have a mountain destroying feat from the Annihilation continuity was okay.

 

Letting Leo have all the skills and powers of his multiverse of selves, including selves that have interacted with each other, was okay.

 

Sonic getting Archie feats? Over the line, run it back!

 

It just seems so petty that the only characters to have been slammed hard by the “no composites” rules have been Superman and Sonic.

 

Season 6

 

Nothing I disagree with.

 

Season 7

 

So far, nothing I disagree with. And I doubt there will be anything I disagree with. Death Battle’s gotten a lot better at what it does in recent years.