Intro

 

Welcome to the “I wanted to do Wolfman vs Frankenstein’s Monster but ran out of time because Super Robot Wars 30 just came out and it’s been where all my free time has been going” episode.

 

Okay. This one is going to be short, because again, ran out of time and all that. I suppose you can see this as a failure. I prefer to think of it as half a failure–which means half a success.

 

Super Robot Wars 30 is so fun though…

 

The Fighters

 

What, no individual run-downs?

 

Yeah.

 

I told you this would be short.

 

This is a fight where run-downs of each character is superfluous. For those of you with a low power-level in supernatural serial killers, Freddy Krueger is a the ghost of a child killer empowered by dream demons to take vengeance on the children of the parents who lynched him. He kills by invading the dreams of his victims and twisting them into nightmares. What happens in the nightmare is reflected in the physical world. If he cuts you in the dream, you’re cut in real life. But Freddy can kill people through more colorful means than his big clawed fetish-glove. There really aren’t any limits when your power is to control dreams. This means Nightmare on Elm Street has some of the coolest movie kills of all time.

 

And lamest. But mostly they’re cool. Even the crappy post-Dream Warriors films had some awesome kills. Dream Child blew, but man, that motorcycle kill was awesome!

 

Freddy is empowered by two things–fear, and souls. Every time he kills someone, he absorbs their souls Shang-Tsung style. These souls typically reside inside Freddy but he can also summon them inside dreams to torture them as dolls or meatballs.

I LOVE SOUL FOOD!

The more souls Freddy has, the stronger he becomes. The series was never clear on what exactly this means as Freddy is kind of already all-powerful in the dream world just as a default thing. It likely refers to Freddy’s more esoteric powers which blur the line between dreams and reality. Remember how in 2 Freddy possessed a guy and then did all of this in the real world? Or how about in 3 when Freddy’s skeleton went full Jason and the Argonauts?

 

Who says slasher films can’t teach you things? Freddy’s skeleton demonstrates the ancient Egyptian distinction between the ba and ka. While Freddy’s ba is at work torturing kids in a dream of mirrors, his ka is kicking ass in the physical world.

 

The take-away here is that “Freddy can only kill you in dreams” is only true most of the time. He’s still got ways to kill you even if you’re awake and he’s in the dreamworld.

 

You can think of Freddy’s souls as determining the breadth of his abilities, but its fear that determines the potency of his abilities. Without fear, Freddy is nothing–quite literally. In the first film, Nancy defeated him by turning her back to him and totally letting go of her belief in him. This allowed her to survive longer than any other Freddy target. She lived so long after the first movie that she was able to recruit and train a group of teenagers plagued by Freddy to form the Dream Warriors. It was only by taking the form of her dead father, of something Nancy wanted to believe in, that Freddy was able to lower her guard and kill her.

 

Freddy can’t be killed in dreams (though that being said, its’ not as if he’s encountered any lucid dreaming greater than “summon knives” or “bolt 1,” so who knows what someone who lucid dreams himself as Galactus could do to him) but if you wake up while holding onto him, you’ll wake up with Freddy right next to you, and while he’s far more durable than the average man, he is killable in the real world. That being said, even if you kill Freddy, you can’t kill him for good. Nothing can kill Freddy for good. That’s his ultimate power–he’s a ghost. You can’t kill someone already dead. He can be disbelieved into non-existence, dragged into the real world and blown up with a pipe bomb, ritually killed by purifying his bones, but he’ll come back. He always comes back.

 

The next time you fall asleep, he’ll be there.

 

Candyman is the ghost of a man whose name is lost to history. The name was that of a human, and the Candyman is far more than human. The Candyman is legend, and legends never die.

 

The Candyman was the son of a Black slave lynched for loving a White woman. Being that his film is based on a Clive Barker story, his death was pretty over-the-top–he was tortured with bees, hung in the slowly-strangle-to-death way as opposed to the quickly-snap-your-neck way, and then set on fire.

 

But though he died, his legend continued.

 

A century later, a folklorist investigates the legend of the Candyman within the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects which in the 90’s looked like what all of Chicago looks like today. Her theory is that the legend of the Candyman with all its violence resonates with the inhabitants of Cabrini-Green. The truth is much worse.

 

The Candyman is a ghost powered by people remembering his legend, and seems to have absorbed a couple of urban legends into his ectoplasmic makeup. He’s summoned by saying Candyman three times in a mirror like Bloody Mary and he has a hook for an arm like the one-armed man. He can summon and control bees, and this is by far his most iconic power. Freddy opens his shirt to show off his soul collection, Candyman opens his shirt to show off his apiary. He can travel through mirrors. He can teleport. He’s a ghost, so physical attacks aren’t going to do much at all against him.

Candyman has a weakness to fire, given that’s what ultimately killed him (But not bees, in fact, he can control bees. It seems the rules are that what leads up to your death you can control as a ghost but what finally kills you is your weakness. Perhaps if he had died of smoke inhalation he would have gotten fire powers with a weakness to smoke.). When he tried to restrain the protagonist so that she would die with him in a giant trash fire and enhance his legend by ritualistically repeating it, she fled from him and he found himself blocked, hurt, and incinerated by the fire.

 

He also has the interesting ability to make people into legend-ghosts like he is, which is what ultimately happens to the protagonist–spoilers for a movie older than AOL!.

 

Though the Candyman was “killed” at the end of his movie, the sequel shows that death no more sticks to Candyman than it does to Freddy.

Eventually, someone remembers, and when they do, Candyman is born again.

 

So Who Wins?

 

This was a fun match to figure out because it’s decided by factors that won’t come into play in any other who-would-win match. It’s a match where the two combatants don’t really have a way of hurting the other, so you got to put some brain-work into figuring out how the two would fight and how one of them could win.

 

There isn’t really a way for either of them to permanently kill the other. In theory, Freddy could eventually find a way to absorb his soul, but that’s kind of stretching his powers. After all, he’s only ever Shang-Tsung’ed the souls of those he’s killed. He’s never soul-absorbed a ghost before. If he could have done that, he probably would have taken out his ghost mother in Dream Warriors to stop her from helping Nancy and the kids.

 

It’s hard to tell how the two would even interact. Do ghosts dream? How are Candyman and Freddy going to meet face-to-face to begin with? Even if Candyman can dream, he doesn’t have a physical body to reflect what Freddy does to him in the dreamworld. Freddy can’t hurt him anymore than Candyman can hurt him.

 

They would have to rely on patsies to get at the other, and in that case Freddy has a slight advantage given that he’s experienced both in manipulating people to do his bidding and straight-up possessing people. He could possess a hapless teenager and then use his Nightmare on Elm Street 2 fire powers to defeat Candyman with his own weakness–though that wouldn’t destroy Candyman, that would only make him go away for awhile. And Candyman could retaliate by getting a patsy to drag Freddy into the physical world where he could teleport behind him and nothing-personal-kid him with his giant hook–though that wouldn’t destroy Freddy, that would only make him go away for awhile.

 

So how does anyone win?

 

Break them down to what they are at their most basic–memetic ghosts powered by people having knowledge of them. They’re two competing viruses and their host is the human noosphere. Though they can’t completely erase the other, one could fix it so that they’re the one remembered and feared by the people of whatever town they’re fighting over while the one is rendered relatively powerless by not being as popular.

 

And in that sense, Freddy wins.

 

Let’s keep with the virus metaphor. Do you know how viral outbreaks resolve without intervention, without vaccines or cures? What typically happens is that a less-lethal, more infectious mutant strain arises and outcompetes the wildtype. It’s simple evolution at work. Say you had a virus that instantly killed whoever got it. That would be a horrible virus from the perspective of evolutionary fitness. It can’t spread. How can it spread if everyone it infects drops dead? The ultimate virus would be one that produces no symptoms at all. Such a virus could easily spread across the entire planet.

When viruses compete, it’s the weaker ones that win because the weaker ones spread easier. The stronger ones are more likely to kill or incapacitate their hosts and thus prevent spread. This is why you have to be careful with antibiotics and vaccines as they place selective pressure on stronger variants of whatever they fight (cough delta cough). An asymptomatic spreader is the ideal host for a virus.

 

Candyman is like a wildtype strain. His preferred method of spreading his legend is to gut someone and leave the body for people to marvel over. Freddy is a less-lethal mutant. He likes to taunt his prey and play with them. He’s known to let people escape his nightmares so that they’ll spread his legend. The more people that know about him, the more people that dream about him.

 

This is why Freddy beats Candyman. You catch Freddy, he’s going to torture you for a few nights and then finish you off, probably while making puns. You catch Candyman, he’s going to come through your mirror and feed you to his bees. Freddy recruits patsies to tell as many people as possible about him. Candyman waits for you to say his name three times in a mirror. Freddy is obsessed with spreading his legend while Candyman is obsessed with bringing people into his legend.

 

Overtime, unless Candyman changes strategy (and given his obsessive focus on making individual people part of his legend instead of spreading that legend to as many people as possible, it’s unlikely he would change) Freddy is going to outcompete him. Candyman will find his power quickly diminishing as everyone he haunts already learned about Freddy a week ago.

Eventually, Freddy will be a legend while Candyman will be a rumor.

 

All hail Sharp Hand Joe, the superior meme.

 

 

So there you go, a short and simple treat for Halloween. Happy Halloween!

 

….Oh wait, I forgot to put in an obligatory politics joke. Can I just skip this one? Biden soiled himself in front of the Pope what, yesterday? How do you top that?