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The FORBIDDEN Death Battle Prediction Blog Episode 36

 

Prediction 15

 

Dr. Doom vs Lex Luthor

 

If there’s one good thing about this season it’s that the fights are so easy to call I’m able to print my predictions faster than a DNC ballot printer.

 

Okay. Short answer is that Dr. Doom wins and DC gets its first losing streak. Unless they do something really weird like have Apex Lex fight regular Dr. Doom, Doom is going to join Superman and Godzilla (Kiryu counts as a Godzilla) in the coveted reverse oxygen club.

 

Look at it this way. They had Iron Man beat Lex. Doom on a bad day is equal to Tony and on a good day surpasses him. Doom is Tony plus magic powers. Thus we can safely call the fight for Doom for the same reason Batgirl vs Gwen was a sure bet after Jason vs Bucky.

 

Doom also retains his funky Ovoid mind transfer technique from the silver age, and has even used it in the modern age a couple of times. To make a very long story short, Doom learned how to body-swap from a race of aliens called the Ovoids. It’s the Captain Ginyu technique, or if you prefer, the Scanners-final-battle technique. So even if Doom finds himself losing, he just pulls this power out and he wins. It’s one hell of an ace up his sleeve, or if you prefer, a reverse uno card. Would Lex with his vast intellect capable of grasping concepts that would brain-fry that average man be able to resist the mind transfer? I’m going to say no. The first time Doom ever used it was on Reed, and Reed is at the very least comparable to Lex.

 

Could Lex win? Is there a path to victory? He has a very slim one. He could win if they give him the Lexor suit from pre-crisis which was said to be able to match Superman and then apply Strunt wank to make Lex worth (insert an absurd number of universes here). They shouldn’t do this, as several stories in the bronze age established that Superman vastly tanks against his opponents and has psychological blocks that prevent him from going all out unless in a certain emotional state (such as when he helped the Forgotten Heroes by travelling back to the birth of the multiverse or that time Brainiac drove him into a berserker state by making him remember the death of Krypton over and over again). A pre-Crisis Superman not sandbagging would have fed Lex his own suit in a zeptosecond, and this conclusion is supported by his first fight with Lexor Lex. Superman was surprised that Lex survived the destruction of Lexor which indicates he wasn’t hitting Lex with planet-destroying force when they fought.

 

That being said, Lexor Lex was completely unphased by a planet blowing up in his face. He’s powerful and fast, and without Doom’s magic and mind trick, would probably defeat Doom. But Doom just has to survive against Lex long enough to body-swap, and he can do that.

 

But the above is largely irrelevant if the preview doesn’t show him in the Lexor suit. If it’s the bulky post-crisis Apocalypse armor or the blue Nu suit, Lex is doomed and then some, or if you prefer, DOOMED.

 

Doom also has a “time-circuit” in his suit based on his time platform that lets him travel through time and has used magic to banish Morgan Le Fay to the distant past. And you know how Swan likes to use time travel. While it’s true Lex has made time machines before (he once accidentally stopped Superboy from preventing the assassination of Abe Lincoln and felt real bad about it), he’s never integrated his time machines into his armor, so I don’t think time travel is going to be an option in this fight as it would be with Doom.

 

With time travel and the Ovoid mind-transfer technique, Doom has two reliable reverse uno cards to pull if he finds himself losing to Lex. That’s way too much of an advantage for Lex to overcome.

 

I’m hoping for a cool fake-out ending where it looks like Lex has killed Doom only for him to walk up, put on Doom’s mask, and look at the camera showing his eyes are Doom-blue instead of Lex-green.

 

Too bad it’s probably going to be another explosion death.

 

UPDATE!

 

Well, it’s appropriate a fight between two superscience masterminds would have some twists and turns, isn’t it?

 

5 quintillion times the speed of light? Oh good lord. That’s more than they had Hulk and Broly.

 

For those of you that don’t get what I’m talking about, the previews for Doom and Lex have dropped…and they don’t look good for Doom.

 

Lex got to be scaled to Larfleeze, Agent Orange, the lantern of greed who absorbed all the other orange lanterns. You see, Lex’s shield withstood a attack from him, and Lex sucker punched him, therefore the “researchers” get to cross out Larfleeze’s name on top his character sheet and put “Lex.”

 

5 quintillion times the speed of light…even guys with usernames like Luthor666 who go on about how Lex “was right” don’t think he’s that powerful.

 

But wait, it gets worse.

 

They gave Lex the planet destruction feat from the Lexor suit and the motherbox of the blue Rebirth suit he briefly wore while LARPing as a superhero. So we’re dealing with a composited Luthor that doesn’t actually exist. It’s a little like when they combined all the different versions of Link together in Link vs Cloud.

 

So what did Doom get for his preview? Maybe the freaky Leatherface armor he wore during the time he briefly became a magic god? That would be fair, right? Since Lex gets the mother box from that specific blue suit he wore for that one specific, brief period?

 

He broke out of an adamantium coffin once.

 

So yeah….

 

Does this mean Lex wins? I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think, for the first time, I got to move my marker. Lex shouldn’t win. He’s winning because Swan and Strunt have gone mad with power and insist anyone that so much as spits next to a Green Lantern is worth (insert preposterously large number here) universes. But the point of this blog is to predict who will win on the show, and I think they’re going to give it to Lex.

 

There is a caveat, though. Swan’s the kind of guy that loves writing Death Battle as a “gotcha” show. He thinks writing “Oh my god, that guy actually won?” episodes makes him smart when really it means he can’t write fighter previews to save his life. We shouldn’t have to guess what insane fanfic calculation is swirling around his head. Just tell us upfront how strong this character is and how strong that character is. But I digress. The point is that we’ve seen fights before where one fighter is totally hosed in the previews but still pulls off the win. If you knew nothing about Archie Sonic and Wally West besides their previews, you would have put your money on Archie Sonic. The same goes for Cable vs Booster and Ben vs Hal.

 

But on the other hand, the two previous combatants that were teased in the season trailer, Ryuko and Yoda, lost. Doom might make three.

 

So it looks like Lex is taking the stat advantage. Can Doom still win through his tricks? Can he win through magic or time travel or the Ovoid mind transfer? Not if they scale Lex’s motherbox to other motherboxes. Those things are capable of quite a lot. They shouldn’t do this, because individual motherboxes have to be programmed for certain functions. This goes back all the way to Jack Kirby. The motherbox Orion used not only looked very different from the mother box the Forever People used, it did different things. It’s like a lantern ring. What it can do depends on what the user knows, and Lex never really used his to more than make guns. Cyborg in opening up portals to hypertime did way more than his. But if they’re willing to give Lex Orange Lantern stats based on what was obviously Larfleeze not going all out on the bald man in armor he just wanted to talk to, they’re probably stupid (or dishonest) enough to say all motherboxes are equal. In that case, not only is Doom doomed but so is whoever draws the short straw to fight Cyborg. The miracle machine from Final Crisis was a “cargo cult mother box.”

 

Can Doom still win? Maybe. Say that despite the preview, they’re secretly scaling him to Dr. Strange. Should they do that? Of course not, but they also shouldn’t scale Lex to Larfleeze. Now it becomes Dr. Strange vs Larfleeze, and I think herein we see the flaw of modern Death Battle. We’re no longer talking about character vs character. We’re talking about the strongest character this character interacted with vs the strongest character that character interacted with. Tactics don’t matter. Personality doesn’t matter. Powers don’t matter. The only thing that matters is this–who did you sucker punch and is there any scene where they do something involving a big number.

 

I’m of mixed feelings about this fight. On one hand, watching Marvel’s villain sue die to one of the original mad scientists would be cathartic. On the other hand, Lex winning will, like Beerus vs Galaxia, mark a further state of decay for the show. Beerus vs Galaxia ushered in the age of universe bloat, where the only thing that mattered was how many universes your setting is worth (while conveniently ignoring that some universes are explicitly infinite/transfinite/endless/incalculable). A Lex victory will usher in the age of scaling madness. Everyone in DC is Green Lantern. Everyone is Dr. Fate. Everyone is Superman.

 

And when everyone is Superman, no one loses.

 

Closing observations–I’m going to try and hold off writing these until after the previews. I have to do that now, because Death Battle is becoming less about the characters as they appear in their stories and more about the characters as they appear in Swan’s warped imagination.