The Problem With This Fight

 

Do you know when Hercules first shows up in the literary record?

 

He goes back to Homer. To 800 BC. And he likely showed up much older in oral tradition.

 

Do you know when the Monkey King first shows up?

 

Journey to the West. Written by Wu Cheng’en in 1592 AD.

 

It’s a work of the Ming dynasty.  It’s a work of the Elizabethan period. To put that further into context for those who were failed by their history classes (and I know that’s many of you), Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas 100 years before Journey to the West. It was published the same year as Edmund Spencer’s Fairie Queene. Firearms are common in the west. Romeo and Juliet premiers five years later.

 

Monkey King, though he certainly takes inspiration from the mythological figure Hanuman, is as much a legitimate part of Chinese mythology as Titania, Puck, and Oberon (Midsommer Night’s Dream, 1605) are legitimate parts of Fairy lore.

 

The Monkey King is closer, historically speaking, to any given modern character than he is to Hercules. Process that fact, then ask yourself why this fight even exists when Monkey King could have fought the Red Crosse Knight (protagonist of the Faerie Queen, who like Monkey King, was an Elizabethan character inserted into a preexisting folkloric framework and used to express the values of their authors). He would have won easily to, but it would have been much more fun and much more thematic.

 

We could have had a mythological strong man battle royal. Consider what was given up to bring us this fight. Hercules vs Samson vs Cu Chulainn vs Maui vs Gilgamesh vs Beowulf. It could have been so beautiful.

 

Now that we’ve dispensed with talking about how bad the matchup is from a thematic perspective, let me say a few things about researching a mythological character like Hercules.

 

There’s nothing wrong with using Monkey King for Death Battle. He’s not a mythological character. He’s got a single book by a single author. He is perfect for the kind of research Death Battle does. Sure, sure, if you want to get the “true and honest” power level of the Monkey King, you look beyond the book and what Wu personally wrote about Buddhism and Taoism and swank the shit out of whatever cool cosmological sentences you can find in whatever Buddhist tract, likely written in the past decade, you can find online, but that’s true of every character.

 

It’s not Superman/Green Lantern/Flash pushing against a cosmic concept that makes them powerful, its what other writers in other books have said about those cosmic concepts. Annotations are to character fights what steroids are to real fights.

 

The point is, Monkey King is no different from any given Death Battle contestant.

 

But then there’s Hercules.

 

You know how Superman has a lot of different canons and origins and interpretations? You know how he can go from being a guy that can’t fly to a guy that can fly to Alpha Centauri and back again before you blink? You know how he can go from getting knocked out by a large explosion to breaking the anvil upon which his multiverse was beaten into existence?

 

Superman isn’t even 100 years old.

 

Hercules first shows up in literature in the Illiad. That’s 800 BC, and he was likely in the word-of-mouth folkloric tradition for much, much longer.

 

Even in the fragments that come down to us as Classical mythology there are inconsistencies. Did he lose a finger to the Nemean lion? Some sources say yes. Others say no. Did his dad Zeus struggle against the dragon Typhon? Most sources say no, but one says he had his tendons taken out. Did he rape Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons? Marvel says no, DC says yes, and classical sources are divided.

 

How you build Hercules for vs battle? There’s no ancient Greek statbook. Do we give him the ability to merge with the World-Soul, because Proclus said heroes like Hercules could stay within the World-Soul as long as they wanted to? Do we give him the ability to become a multi-headed primal Titan hydra–because that’s what the Orphic mysteries tell us.

 

Speaking of weird stuff like that, how do we build the setting? You know how much vs battles come down to setting. Just look at every Marvel or DC fight. Setting=power levels, so what do we use for the “Greek mythology” setting? Anaximander’s infinite worlds multiverse? Platonism? Gnosticism? Neoplatonism?

 

How big is the Greek universe? Is it a multiverse? Is there a Monad and is Zeus?  What’s the power level of a single aetheric sphere?

 

Hercules and Greek mythology spans hundreds of years and several cultures. Do we treat the Interpretatio Graeca to apply feats from other mythologies to Greek mythology? The Romans believed that the Egyptian Gods were the Greek gods after they transformed into fish and swam to the Nile to escape Typhon. So does Apollo get scaled to the Eye of Ra because he’s supposed to on the celestial barge every night fighting off a dragon trying to eat the sun? The Romans believed the god of the Jews was either Jupiter or Dionysus, so does that mean the Greek Gods get YHWH scaling?

 

It gets weirder. Consider the existence of Vajrapani. Consider that the ancient Hindus believed Hercules was the Buddha’s bodyguard.

 

Does this mean Hercules gets Buddha scaling?

 

How do you build Hercules for a vs battle?

 

The answer: you don’t. You don’t event try and pretend there’s anything like a “canonical” mythology. You leave the myths alone and look to more specific versions. There are millions of them. Put Kevin Sorbo in, he could have a fun fight against Steve Reeds.

 

So Who Should Win?

 

Okay. Let’s keep this simple out of the gate. Raw power vs raw power, who wins the coveted bigatons award which has carried…damn near every Death Battle winner.

 

Lets look at this through normie glasses, without any esoteric interpretations.

 

Hercules held up the sky. The firmament. They thought he sky was a dome in which the stars were imbedded, and this dome was the body of Uranus, first ruler of the cosmos. This means Uranus was the predecessor to all those star-bodied characters. You know, Alien X, Nebula Man, Eternity, etc. After Cronus castrated and beat him, Uranus’ bulk was kept hoisted above the Earth by the Titan Atlas, who in some versions of the story not only supported the sky but turned it.

 

So when Hercules took over Atlas’ burden so he could go pick golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides for him, he either held up the entire sky including the planets, stars, sun, and moon or he held it up and moved it.

 

That’s a pretty solid strength feat.

 

But how big did the Greeks think the sky was? Because it always comes down to measurements. Superman and DC’s great cornerstone feat, after all, is a throwaway line in OWAW about Superman traveling one hundred trillion light years out in space.

 

It depends on what sources you use, because as previously discussed, we’re talking centuries of evolving, competing philosophies and religions. While the Greeks by and large rejected the idea of the physical universe being infinite (Anaximander was a noted exception and believed in an infinity of worlds, and if Anaximander gets played oh boy, good bye Monkey King) they believed in an infinite metaphysical universe. Aristotle, for instance, believed that above the firmament were spherical layers of spiritual aether each ruled over by a different spirit. These spheres being spiritual and beyond physical characteristics (space, time, dimension, weight, matter, etc) were only movable but what moves the spirit-love and beauty, because love and beauty is what moves the little bit of spirit that is in man.

 

Just going to put this out there–10/10 world building for Aristotle. It’s a beautiful metaphor for romantic idea that the small spirit of man is similar to the large spirit of nature.

 

So do we count holding up the firmament as holding up these metaphysical concepts, usually only movable by love and divine power?

 

I don’t think we need to go that far. That’s going a little out there, wouldn’t you say? We’d be bringing in the Orphic King Ghidorah Hercules at this rate. Let’s go for a conservative estimate–Eratosthenes figured out from pure mathematical measurements that the sun was about 93 million miles away from Earth, and he figured this out in 200 BC. For most of the Classical period, the Greeks understood that the sun, be it fixed in the firmament or carted in Helios’ chariot, was 93 million miles “up.” This was remarkably close to the real life distance to the sun–94.4 million miles.

 

So the firmament has to be at the very least 93 million miles above the ground. So this is the Atlas feat at minimum–Hercules holds up a solid sphere filled with stars that is 93 million miles “up” and doesn’t get tired, and if he did Atlas’ whole job, he also rotated it. I’m not sure how you would calc this, especially when the thickness of the firmament isn’t known, but even if its just paper-thin that’s a pretty big chunk of metal. And keep in mind, he did it without getting tired.

 

Another digression–how cool is it that when the Greeks looked up at the sky, they imagined a castrated, beaten elder god held up in perpetuity from his consort Gaea by his old minion Atlas who his usurper son intimidated into service? That’s pretty damn metal. Usually you have to go to Aztec mythology for something so metal. It’s so metal that Uranus is literally made of metal.

 

Lets compare this feat to the Monkey King’s best strength feat–holding up two big magic mountains and failing to hold up a third. This looks bad for Monkey just on the face of it–he failed in the end. Hercules didn’t get tired. His durability never gave out. Monkey’s did.

 

You remember those two Death Battle episodes where the man with no limits beat the crap out of a monkey with limits? Yeah. I remember them to.

 

On one shoulder, he holds up Mt. Sumeru, and on the other, he holds up Mt. Emei. Then Mt. Tai drops on him, and it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back–or in this case, monkey’s.

 

Mt. Emei and Mt. Tai are real mountains. You can visit them. You can climb them. They’re inconsequential for the fight and this feat. The only element of consequence is Mt. Sumeru, sometimes called Mt. Meru, the epicenter of the Buddhist cosmos.

 

Mt. Sumeru is said to be 84,000 yojanas high. What’s a yojana? It’s an ancient Hindu measurement. Scholars are divided on what exactly 1 yojana is worth. Some say 1 yojana=4 miles. Others say 9 miles. Let’s make 1 yojana=10 miles, just to be nice and give Monkey’s calcs a little more power.

 

Mt. Sumeru is thus 840,000 miles high. That’s relatively impressive. Relatively. The moon, for instance, is 238,900 miles away from Earth.

 

But the sun, going by Eratosthenes, is 93,000,000 miles high. That means that you could stack 110 Mt. Sumerus, you could stack the physical epicenter of Monkey’s universe 110 times, and still not touch the Greek firmament.

 

And more damning, the sun and stars and moon are not embedded on the mountain. Mt. Sumeru doesn’t support the stars and planets. They orbit around it independently. Even Wikipedia understands this and cites “the Sun along with all the planets circle the mountain.” This is why in Journey to the West, Mt. Sumeru leaps up, through the sky Monkey’s supporters think it supports, and crashes down on Monkey’s shoulder without a single star being disturbed.

 

Mt. Sumeru does not support the heavens, though it does support “heavens,” various domains built on the side of the mountain and ruled over by gods. The mountain is, after all, big. It’s bigger than the Earth on which it sits. But when people say “heavens,” they don’t mean a collection of mountainside palaces and pagodas inhabited by spirits. They mean the sky. And only one fighter in this matchup held up the sky.

 

So Herc wins the biggatons. Does he have any other advantages over Monkey?

 

Yeah. Several, in fact.

 

Hercules is famous for busting people out of divine imprisonment. He freed Prometheus and various people tortured in Hades. Monkey on the other hand is famous for suffering divine imprisonment. Buddha kept him pinned under a mountain. Tang Sanzang kept Monkey under control with a headband that would tighten upon command. Laozi kept Monkey imprisoned within a furnace, and Monkey had to wait until they opened the door of it and let him out. Time and time again Monkey finds himself trapped by things he can’t muscle out of while Herc is the “Hey little buddy, need some help lifting that?” guy.

 

Hercules is a brilliant fighter and in some accounts taught pankration to the Greeks. Monkey never learned how to fight at all.

 

Monkey was defeated when the Scorpion Queen stabbed him in the head, poisoning him and giving him such a headache that he ran away in defeat. Hercules is armed with arrows coated in the blood of the Hydra, which is so poisonous that even the gods feared it.

 

Monkey was completely humiliated by the big guy (in several respects) of his setting–the Buddha. He couldn’t even escape his palm. Hercules, though the episode is very obscure, once wrestled his father Zeus to a stalemate, and Zeus being the end-all-be-all of Hercules’ setting is such entry level knowledge its in the Illiad.

 

Now when Morning, clad in her robe of saffron, had begun to suffuse light over the earth, Zeus called the gods in council on the topmost crest of serrated Olympus. Then he spoke and all the other gods gave ear. “Hear me,” said he, “gods and goddesses, that I may speak even as I am minded. Let none of you neither goddess nor god try to cross me, but obey me every one of you that I may bring this matter to an end. If I see anyone acting apart and helping either Trojans or Danaans, he shall be beaten beyond the limits of universal order [kosmos] ere he come back again to Olympus; or I will hurl him down into dark Tartaros far into the deepest pit under the earth, where the gates are iron and the floor bronze, as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above the earth, that you may learn how much the mightiest I am among you. Try me and find out for yourselves. Hang me a golden chain from heaven, and lay hold of it all of you, gods and goddesses together – tug as you will, you will not drag Zeus the supreme counselor from heaven to earth; but were I to pull at it myself I should draw you up with earth and sea into the bargain, then would I bind the chain about some pinnacle of Olympus and leave you all dangling in the mid firmament. So far am I above all others either of gods or men.”

 

They were frightened and all of them of held their peace, for he had spoken masterfully; but at last Athena answered, “Father, son of Kronos, king of kings, we all know that your might is not to be gainsaid, but we are also sorry for the Danaan warriors, who are perishing and coming to a bad end. We will, however, since you so bid us, refrain from actual fighting, but we will make serviceable suggestions to the Argives that they may not all of them perish in your displeasure.”

 

Zeus smiled at her and answered, “Take heart, my child, Trito-born; I am not really in earnest, and I wish to be kind to you.”

 

Several things to unpack here.

 

–Zeus threatened to beat someone beyond the kosmos. He was going to straight-up yeet someone beyond the realms of existence. Calc that, Death Battle.

 

–“So far am I above all others either of gods or men” is a nice line, but I personally prefer the translation that says “that is how far I tower over the gods, I tower over men” because he’s telling the other gods they might as well be men before his might.

 

–Monkey boys that like to swank a later line in the Iliad about Nyx would do well to take note of the last line. Zeus is many things in many different stories, but he was always a symbol of order. He likes the relatively peaceful kosmos he runs and doesn’t want to beat up his family. It’s why even after he alpha dogs everyone he’s eventually talked out of his position because he’s first and foremost the patriarch of the Olympians. He’s willing to talk things out.

 

So Zeus is really, really powerful, but does Hercules really scale to him?

Yes. During the first Olympic games, Hercules couldn’t find anyone willing to wrestle with him (go figure), so Zeus comes down from Olympus and they wrestle to a draw.

 

The episode is referenced in Lycophron’s Alexandria:

 

Alas! hapless nurse of mine burnt even aforetime by the warlike pineships of the lion that was begotten in three evenings, whom of old Triton’s hound of jagged teeth devoured with his jaws. But he, a living carver of the monster’s liver, seething in steam of cauldron on a flameless hearth, shed to ground the bristles of his head; he the slayer of his children, the destroyer of my fatherland; who smote his second mother invulnerable with grievous shaft upon the breast; who, too, in the midst of the race-course seized in his arms the body of his wrestler sire beside the steep hill of Cronus.

 

“Triton’s hound of jagged teeth” refers to giant sea monster siced on Troy by Poseidon after King Laomedon stiffed him on compensation for building Troy’s walls. Troy dealt with the monster by sacrificing virgins to it (shades of Perseus!) until Hercules showed up and did his hero bit. The monster swallowed him, but Hercules killed it by cutting his way out, which means Hercules was the first to do the classic superhero move of “kill the monster from the inside.”  Thing did it to Namor’s pet Giganto (and with an A-bomb!) and I think Iron Man even did it in the first Avengers film.

 

“He the slayer of children” refers to Hera driving Hercules mad so that he killed his wife and kids.

 

“The destroyer of my fatherland” refers to Hercules sieging Troy when King Laomedon failed to pay him for killing Poseidon’s monster (you’d think a guy would learn…)

 

“Who smote his second mother invulnerable with grievous shaft upon the breast.” refers to an episode Death Battle covered in the preview–Hera was tricked by Athena into suckling baby Hercules who hit her breast which caused the creation of the Milky Way.

 

“Who in the midst of the race-course” refers to what I’m talking about. When Hercules held the first Olympics, he started things off by drawing a race track around Mt. Olympus (referred to here as the “steep hill of Cronus”). “Seized in his arms the body of his wrestler sire” of course, refers to Zeus.

 

This episode was elaborated on in a scholion (annotation) by Byzantine poet and grammarian John Tzetzes, who preserved many Classical documents.

 

Tzetzes’ commentary on the Alexandria has never been translated to English, as theoi.com reports (you know we’re into some Milo Thatch stuff when it’s 2022 and you’re looking at books without English translations), but if you want to cross reference what sententiaeantiquae.com lists for the scholion and Duke university’s digitally scanned copy of Tzetze’s commentary, rest assured that we at the FORBIDDEN Death Battle Prediction Blog have already done it. Here’s the line:

 

 

So yeah. Hercules scaling to Zeus is real and legitimate. Though if Death Battle leaves it out, I will be somewhat forgiving. Somewhat. It is an obscure bit of lore. But hey, if I can discover this fact within a day of it being announced as part of hobby they should be able to do it with months of prep work as part of their job.

 

Hercules also has a much better immortality than Monkey King. Hercules was born part god. I know, you’re probably thinking that’s no big deal. Greek mythology is full of demigods and they get killed all the time. They’re mortal. So why am I saying Hercules is immortal? Wasn’t it a big deal that he burned to death on a pyre? Didn’t Zeus revive him as a god after he died? It was like, an Altered Beast thing, right?

 

Read for context. Let me bring out the ultimate starter-guide to Western mythology, Bulfinch’s Mythology.

 

(I got my copy long, long ago as a pack-in with the collector’s edition of Age of Mythology. Damn, that was a good game, and the book was the best pack-in I ever got with a video game).

 

The gods themselves felt troubled at seeing the champion of the earth so brought to his end. But Jupiter with cheerful countenance thus addressed them: “I am pleased to see your concern, my princes, and am gratified to perceive that I am the ruler of a loyal people, and that my son enjoys your favor. For although your interest in him arises from his noble deeds, yet it is not the less gratifying to me. But now I say to you, Fear not. He who conquered all else is not to be conquered by those flames which you see blazing on Mount œta. Only his mother’s share in him can perish; what he derived from me is immortal. I shall take him, dead to earth, to the heavenly shores, and I require of you all to receive him kindly. If any of you feel grieved at his attaining this honor, yet no one can deny that he has deserved it.” The gods all gave their assent; Juno only heard the closing words with some displeasure that she should be so particularly pointed at, yet not enough to make her regret the determination of her husband. So when the flames had consumed the mother’s share of Hercules, the diviner part, instead of being injured thereby, seemed to start forth with new vigor, to assume a more lofty port and a more awful dignity. Jupiter enveloped him in a cloud, and took him up in a four-horse chariot to dwell among the stars. As he took his place in heaven, Atlas felt the added weight.

 

Let’s unpack:

 

–Atlas feeling the added weight is something Death Battle should, at the very least, mention. It’s one of those cool bits of lore that shows like Death Battle should try and circulate through the noosphere. I will be disappointed if they don’t.

 

–The fires only consumed the mortal part of Hercules. Zeus is very clear that the part of Hercules that he got from him isn’t harmed. Think of Hercules like the Terminator. You burn off the skin, you still have a shiny metal robot underneath ready to fight. You burn off Hercules’ skin, you have a shiny aetheric god underneath ready to fight.

 

–In the Odyssey, Odysseus sees Hercules’ shade in Hades and remarks that its only the shade of his mortal half. His god half is out of Hades and partying on Mt. Olympus. So yes, Hercules mortal side died. It died so completely that it left a shade. But Hercules was god and man in one being. The mortal half died and made a shade. The god half got out of the fire and went on to party.

 

–The above is such entry level knowledge that Marvel even made the shade of their version of Hercules a supervillain. It would be pretty sad if a Death Battle researcher got the concept wrong (spoiler alert: Lousey did).

 

 

So Hercules has the immortality of the gods, and it’s a really strong immortality. Consider that in all the cosmic wars the gods have fought amongst themselves, they best they can do to each other is to either beat, subdue, and humiliate their opponents (Uranus) or chain them up in Tartarus (the Titans). They can’t execute each other, because they can’t die. They cannot die. The Greeks called them athanatons for a reason. A meaning without or against and thanaton as in thanatos meaning death.

Speaking of Thanatos, Hercules actually beat him up once.

 

In one of the more touching Hercules stories, Hercules’ old Argonaut buddy King Admetus took ill. The 3 Fates appeared before him and informed him that he was going to die soon, and no amount of begging would change things. So he prayed to Apollo, and Apollo appeared. Though Apollo could not defeat the Fates, he got them drunk and forced them to reveal that that there was a loophole–if someone was willing to die in Admetus’ place, he would be spared. So when it came time for Admetus to die, he begged someone to take his place. No one would, not even his elderly parents, but his wife Alcestis came forth and offered herself.

 

Now that’s a waifu.

 

Doomed to die the next night, Alcestis went to bed to await her fate. But that evening, Admetus’ old friend Hercules drops by for a visit. Asking why Admetus looks so sad, Admetus tells him everything, and Hercules decides that Alcestis isn’t going to die. He decides that he’s going to wait by her bedside and when Thanatos shows up, he’ll give him what for.

 

And he did.

 

 

I like this painting by Pelagio Pelagi. I love the handing of light and darkness. I love Thanatos’ translucent body. But most of all, I love how Thanatos hauls ass. GET OUT OF HERE, YOU FFFFUCKER!

 

Who was that superhero famous for beating up Death? Oh yeah. Wally West.

 

How did his episode go again?

 

And keep in mind, Thanatos was acting on the orders of the Fates. Hercules went against cosmic order itself and won.

 

Who was that one guy that tried to change fate and ended up getting slapped down by a much stronger being?

 

Oh yeah.

 

Monkey King.

 

Now how does Monkey King stack up in the immortality department? His wiki page lists several sources of immortality. He gobbled up sources of immortality like Russia gobbles up Ukraine territory. He too pills. He took elixers. He took peaches. Most of these just extended his life by a set number of years, though a few conveyed a general, vague sort of immortality. He could be harmed, but he had a healing factor. He regrew his head once, but that was because it got chopped off.

 

So that’s one knock against Monkey King. He can be harmed. Hercules cannot.

 

Another knock against Monkey is that his immortality can be removed. How do we know this? Well, at the end of Journey to the West, Monkey King achieves Nirvana. He gets off the great wheel of reincarnation and eternal recurrence called Samsara. That means when he dies, that’s it, he’s non-existent. So enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense (Nietzsche called them a death cult for a reason), removed Monkey’s immortality. It can go away. And in fact, earlier in the book, Laozi figures that if they stick him in a furnace, they can finally destroy him by melting his body away and taking out the big wad all his immortality buffs fused into.

Gross, but it was going to work if Monkey didn’t crouch in a cool corner of the furnace–which shows, again, that it is possible to defeat Monkey’s immortality.

 

So yes, Hercules should beat Monkey King and beat him pretty handily. He’s got the bigatons. He’s got the skills. Monkey King can clone himself a bazillion times. It won’t change anything. It’s planet level vs firmament level. Hera’s breast milk spray would be too much for Monkey King.

 

But he won’t win. And I’ll explain why.

 

So Who Will Win?

 

Look, does anyone think a bunch of Dallas liberals are going to have Hercules win because the Greeks had a good estimate of how far away the sun was in 200 BC while the Chinese were using tiny unga bunga tribal numbers for their cosmological scales? Hell no.

 

Can you even fathom them getting on youtube and saying “The Chinese cosmology was relatively primitive. They, no joke, thought the Earth was round and that all the stars, planets, sun, and moon hung 840,000 miles up while the Greeks believed the sun, the closest star, was 93,000,000 miles up.”?

 

Not a single person on the team skipped out on voting for Biden. Not a one. They’re hard-wired to submit to their Chicom overlords. They’d sooner gargle broken glass than disparage the culture (what culture remained after Mao gunned down all the adherents of traditional Chinese religion that he could find) of great leader Winnie the Pooh.

 

Setting scaling only works for things they like. DC comics, for example. They won’t apply it to things they hate, like the Western canon.

 

But lets put politics aside and look at pragmatics. You think anyone on the team read Journey to the West before this episode? You think anyone on the team read Bulfinch’s Mythology? These are guys that drop soy faces whenever a new Marvel trailer drops, yet when it comes time to research fighters spend 10-15 minutes on reddit respect threads and call it a day.

 

And quite possibly no character on the Internet is as swanked as the Monkey King. He has that right mixture of exoticism, popularity, and approachability to be the quasi-mythological equivalent of Pokemon. His swank is so bad that even Jim McClanahan of Journey to the West  Research.com actually had to comment on it and dismiss a swank feat that Monkey King was able to hold up the Milky Way. His swank is so bad anthropologists who have devoted their lives to exploring and elucidating this work of world literature have to come in to set the record straight and directly address the vs community.

 

Who wants to bet that the Death Battle researchers are going to put in the Milky Way feat? I bet they will. And it will be hilarious when they do.

 

“I, a well-trained and well-respected authority on Journey to the West and Chinese culture, can safely say that it is bunk that the Monkey King held up the Milky Way. It’s not something he did, it’s not something he can do.”

 

“No! You’re wrong! I’m a  Death Battle researcher and I know better!”

 

Now lets talk about the researchers. Researching Hercules is DJTiki, who is the Wimp Lo of vs battle researchers. The dude thought that Jon Talbain, who is so much Bruce Lee as a werewolf that he uses nunchucks and does the finger wag, did karate. This is what Bruce Lee thought about karate. The dude thought that Kaneda kept up the Akira Empire in the Akira manga to honor Tetsuo.

 

The dude can’t parse video game lore. And they put him in charge of researching the character who by farrrrrr has the weightiest research burden.

 

And who is researching Monkey? Why, none less than the writer of the episode!

 

Ah, Death Battle. One day you’re bound to stumble onto this concept known as “conflict of interest.” I just hope its before you hit the nursing home.

 

Monkey is being researched by Lousey, and props to him for picking a good handle. Lousey is a notorious SMT swanker. He believes with all his heart and soul in the multiverse Wal-Marts. He watches this and drops a soy face over the billions of multiverses that evaporate in his mind.

 

OH MAH MULTI-VARSAL!

 

He’s going to make the sub-planet level “heavens” built on the sides of Mt. Sumeru count as universes. You know he will. You think he’s going to write “Actually, the axis mundi of Monkey’s universe is very small, relatively speaking. It fits within our real life solar system. Let me tell you what a yojana is…”?

 

Is my take wrong? Should I give Lousey the benefit of the doubt?

 

Take a look at this:

 

 

Ah. A Monkey King avatar.

 

They’ll understand “conflict of interest” one day. Maybe.

 

He’s statement about “pre-God” Hercules is odd in several respects. In the preview of the fight, he’s called the god of strength, but that could just be Death Battle being Death Battle. In the Monkey King preview, they erroneously state that Monkey King turned himself into a pitchfork when he turned his staff into a pitchfork…and they said this while showing lines from the text that contradict their statement.

There’s also no such thing as “pre-God” Hercules. That’s a fanfic notion bouncing around in Lousey’s head. That’s his headcanon. Hercules was always a god under his skin. “Pre-God” Hercules is a nonsense phrase like “pre-endoskeleton” Terminator. He was not granted godhood. He was granted recognition as a member of the Olympic pantheon.

 

If Death Battle can’t even get Hercules being athanaton right, I don’t see why we anyone should trust them to get this fight right. Lousey is going to swank Monkey King to Herculean levels–and beyond. And after he does so, I’m going to refer to him as Louxi.

 

Hercules’ only hope is that Swank comes to his defense as one of Superman’s inspirations. It’s conceivable that Monkey King getting smushed under three mountains leads to his defeat in a “limits vs limitless” case. But I doubt it.

 

UPDATE

 

Well, I didn’t see G1 going for Hercules. I didn’t see that coming at all.

 

Homies from my discord managed to sway them with arguments we’ve been formulating since the fight was announced and what do you know, it worked.

See, this is why Death Battle needs to take another page from its inspiration Deadliest Warrior. Debate is more elucidating–and fun–than consensus, and their current method of research is built on forming a consensus via an in-group. You need to have it like Deadliest Warrior–two groups trying to convince a third. That’s how trials are done, after all.

 

G1 was swayed for the same reason I destroyed Strunt, for the same reason Swank will never debate me–I know how to debate, they don’t.

 

But herein lies an issue.

 

I’m 99 percent sure Monkey is going to win. The sound track sounds like a Peking opera at the end. I’m anticipating Monkey killing Hercules and delivering a fruit to Pilgrim’s salad bowl after hitting Hercules so hard he becomes stars or his god-half ascends to the heavens. That’s the kind of feel the track gives me.

 

But say Hercules does win.

 

It’s going to be awkward reporting that G1 called it right for Herc and I called it wrong for Monkey.

 

So I’m probably going to take an L on this, but for the sake of leaving the record less confusing, I’m putting my marker on Hercules.

 

Levels of Possible China Capitulation

 

Fair interpretation, all things considered

 

While Hercules was stronger, Monkey King has made a career outwitting and defeating strong immortals. His magic and clone army will eventually overwhelm him. Hercules has shown, through Hera, a vulnerability to magical suggestion/mind control/illusions, and that may make Hercules vulnerable to certain spells given how you interpret them.

 

Average Joe Biden voter

 

Same as above, but strength is equalized by misinterpreting Mt. Sumeru.as holding up the heavens (as in the sky, sun. moon, stars).

 

BING CHILLING

 

Every “heaven” on Mt. Sumeru constitutes a separate, infinite universe. Ancient (Elizabethan) Chinese philosophers understood the scale of the real universe much better than the Greeks. Ancient Chinese philosophers conceived of a multiverse while the Greeks did not. Ancient Chinese philosophers have stronger metaphysics. Ancient Chinese philosophers strong!

 

Tiananmen Square was a justified police action

 

Monkey King has infinite, Wally West speed through gross misinterpretation and swank of the Buddha palming him and infinite, multi-versal strength through gross misinterpretation and swank of Mt. Sumeru.