After-Thoughts: Death Battle

Death Battle is an animated ScrewAttack! series in which two characters from usually unrelated series are pitted against each other to see who would win in a fight. Although the creators of the show, Ben and Chad have gone on record stating that the series was inspired by the series Deadliest Warrior, the series itself doesn't seem to do so apart from the structure of the episodes. However, this is far from the only issue with Death Battle as a whole.

Before I go any further, I want to state that I do still like watching Death Battle. Although I generally only watch episodes containing characters that I know the movesets of, I do like the animations and effort put into the series as a whole. This post is going to be me critiquing Death Battle and its writers specifically because of flaws in the evidence provided in the topics rather than flaws with the presentation or topic itself. Secondly, I'm mainly talking about the main Death Battle series but I will also be discussing DBX as it generally highlights some issues that are less noticeable if you only watch the main series.

One major problem Death Battle has with many of its characters is the idea of compositing. A composited character is a character whose traits, abilities, and weaknesses, are drawn from various sources regardless of validity. The most obvious example of this in the main series is Dante vs. Bayonetta where the discussion of Dante's history comes up and panels from a comic tie in for the reboot are used despite that being a separate canon. Although in this particular case the compositing seems to be restricted to Dante's history, as Dante and Bayonetta are both restricted to moves they used in their respective game canon so it's not the worst thing in the world.

However, there are plenty of cases where this becomes a problem. One example I've talked about at length about why I dislike it is Cloud Strife vs. Link. Now the problem I had with this particular episode is not that I agree or disagree with the outcome. Although there are plenty of canon feats Cloud has access to that could put Link on tilt, the bigger issue is that the compositing gave Link an unfair advantage.

All of the equipment Link came with was working under the assumption that all Links have access to all of these items when they don't. Although most Links except Hyrule Warriors Link are all under the same canon, they are not all the same person. Although some versions of Link carry over from one game to another, like Ocarina of Time Link heading into Majora's Mask, Wind Waker heading into Phantom Hourglass, and Four Swords heading into Four Swords Adventure, generally any given Link you run into is an entirely different person with a completely different set of skills, abilities, experiences and relationships. This is an issue mainly because so many of the items given to Link for this Death Battle were not all held by the same Link.

The model they used for the Death Battle was adult Link so right out of the gate any items that are not used by the Link from Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword, are going to cause problems. This version of Link had both the Hylian Shield and the Golden Gauntlets which Ocarina Link possessed but Twilight and SkySword didn't. This Link also came with the Pegasus Boots, which are an item exclusive to A Link to the Past. This Link also had the ability to maneuver in mid-air despite the only Links that were ever capable of that being Smash Bros. and Hyrule Warriors, neither of which are canon, and Smash Link in particular being a different Link in every game. He also seemed to have Twilight Princess Link's movelist and while you can argue that Ocarina Link develops that movelist eventually, that only applies to Majora's Mask Link which is on a different timeline.

By contrast, Cloud was wielding his Buster Sword, had a single Lightning Spell, and wore the Pretty Pink Princess set, which isn't even an equipment set as much as it is just a dress, wig, and cologne Cloud used to rescue Tifa from Don Cornholeo so that doesn't even really qualify as an armor set until the Dissidia games. Do you see the problem here?

Firstly, Link is given all of his best equipment and skills throughout the entire canon of The Legend of Zelda even if they have to create a non-existent version of Link to achieve it. Meanwhile, Cloud has the Buster Sword, the weakest weapon he has in the entire game stat wise, and though very iconic to his appearance is only ever used by him in two actual Final Fantasy appearances, the original game and Dissidia. In the canon, Cloud had already abandoned the Buster Sword in favor of the First Tsurugi by the time the film starts and seems to have had it for well before then so the Buster Sword isn't even Cloud's primary weapon anymore. The pretty pink princess set was never an armor set except in Dissidia which was only there as a reference to Final Fantasy VII and I guess Final Fantasy VI as well given that Kefka can also wear it for some reason. And though I guess you could argue Cloud still has a lightning materia of some kind, Advent Children shows that Cloud most likely had Master Materia Primarily given how many spells Kadaj could pull out of a single materia. By the way, those materia are Cloud's, they were taken by Loz from Aerith's Church after he brutalized Tifa.

What I'm getting at is that so many advantages were given to Link despite most of them not being universal and so many disadvantages were given to Cloud despite even Cloud himself canonically not using stuff anymore that it just made the fight unfair. If Cloud was at full power like Link and still lost I would not have an issue with it.

Unfortunately, while this is the one that stuck out to me, this isn't the only one that has suffered from the compositing problem. In the most recent episode of Death Battle, Hal Jordan was given all of his feats from every different version despite each one being essentially a different Hal while Ben didn't have access to most of his movelist, which with the Omnitrix he currently has should not have been a problem. In addition, they were using information from an Omnitrix that Ben doesn't even have anymore, he's already on his third omnitrix variant in total if we include the Ultimatrix.

Even when characters aren't composited, though, the series still suffers immensely from favoritism toward one combatant or the other. For example, in Majin Buu versus Kirby, Kirby launching Buu into the sun to kill him was justified as Buu being incapable of Instant Transmission when pressed by a powerful attack. However, the footage they used is of Kid Buu being destroyed by the Super Spirit Bomb, and the explanation completely ignored the context of the scene. Buu didn't attempt to dodge the Spirit Bomb because he was actively pushing it back to try to kill Goku with his own attack, and Kid Buu, who is lacking in human intelligence, wasn't capable of recognizing that Goku had gotten his strength back somehow. In reality, if Buu were faced with an attack that could kill him, he would do what he can to avoid it because of his self-preservation instinct. In fact, we even see it in the series, Buu was afraid of the Spirit Bomb initially but noticed that Goku wouldn't fire it while he had Vegeta underfoot and though he may not have recognized why, he realized that as long as he had a hostage, he was safe from death. This means that even if Kirby fired an attack at Buu, he would more than likely use the Instant Transmission to dodge it rather than just let himself get hit by it.

Or what about Wonder Woman versus Thor which Wonder Woman won because she's apparently invulnerable toward all forms of damage except cutting?

Or Hulk versus Doomsday where Doomsday won because there's apparently a limit on Hulk's strength. The evidence for this was a battle between Hulk and Sentry where Wiz and Boomstick justify it as Hulk's healing factor having given out but in that panel on screen, Banner himself says that he pulled back the Hulk intentionally because the fight would've destroyed everything if the battle had continued. On top of this, it ignores the fact that A) Hulk's limits are specifically Banner's doing to prevent him from dealing too much damage, and B) Savage Hulk isn't the only version of Hulk even within the main canon.

To go over it very briefly, we have Joe Fixit, or Gray Hulk who is the first version and the one with the lowest base strength, Savage Hulk who is the one everyone knows, Beast Hulk which visually resembles Savage Hulk but doesn't seem to be sentient, Demon Hulk which is a reddish very bloodthirsty variant, the Professor who is visually similar to Savage Hulk with the personality of Bruce Banner but is overall the weakest version due to a hard power cap set on this Hulk specifically, Nightmare Hulk who resembles a gigantic insectoid, and The Green Scar who is by far the most powerful version of the Hulk, at least in terms of main canon and Bruce Banner specifically. This Hulk was capable of knocking out Thor in two hits, the Juggernaut and Red Hulk in one hit each, even after Red Hulk absorbed a great deal of his power, fought on par with Sentry, and took on and nearly defeated the entirety of the Avengers by himself.

Another big part of this is feat displacement. This is a term I created myself specifically to describe using feats from incorrect points in time to justify whether the current character can win or not. For example, in Goku vs Superman 1, the primary speed feat that Death Battle uses for Goku comes from Snake Way which isn't even Goku's best speed feat due to traveling around half the circumference of Namek in a single second in the following arc, I guess they just forgot about that.

It's also situations like this that demonstrate just how hypocritical the people behind Death Battle really are. In Goku vs. Superman 2, the part of the episode where they answer questions about the previous one, they said that they didn't use Superman being beaten by Doomsday because that would be like using Goku getting defeated by Raditz and that they're using these characters at their full potential. And that would be fine, normally. If you only used a character's maximum consistent ability, this is a fair argument. At least it would be, if not for the fact that you already did that in the previous Goku vs. Superman by having Goku's speed be based on Saiyan Saga Goku rather than something more current.

Or what about the Ninja Turtles all fighting each other and Raph killing the other three? Well, I get that killing your opponents is Death Battle's thing but for as angry and spiteful as Raph could be at times, he never wanted to kill his brothers, he just wanted to be respected by Leo specifically.

However, as bad as that is, it's not as bad as the absolute selling out that can occur within this series. One example is pitting Noctis against 2B in DBX, which I think it's obvious that 2B would win due to sheer durability and skill but the bigger problem is that there's no reason for these two to fight. Noctis isn't an inherently antagonistic person and wouldn't attack her on his own and 2B being a YorHa android would probably protect a human more than anything. More than that, there's no skill overlap apart from 2B gaining Noctis' afterimages when his falchion is equipped, there's no canon parallels of any kind, there wasn't even anyone who wanted the fight because Final Fantasy and the DrakeNier series are so drastically different that there really isn't a lot of fan overlap.

And let's not forget the RWBY characters. Keep in mind, I love RWBY unconditionally, for better and worse from my perspective, however, there are currently two total Death Battles featuring RWBY characters with a 3rd one on the way. The first was Yang vs. Tifa which Yang won because of the misnomer that Yang's strength would rise infinitely as she takes damage when even Monty himself the creator of the series previously stated that's not the case. Although there doesn't seem to be an upper limit on how much power Yang can gain if she can tank the damage, the problem is that firstly she's going to be taking damage and secondly the power she built up over the fight disappears after she exerts it, something that is further elaborated upon in RWBY Volume 6 with Yang vs. Adam. Both absorb kinetic energy through impact and unleash it as an attack, but Yang could only do so by contacting her body where Adam could do so through his sword. So although he had access to roughly the same amount of power that Yang did he could exert it far more frequently due to taking far less damage. So Yang had to time her buildup to where she could shatter his sword so he couldn't fight anymore. And this is assuming that Yang stays conscious the entire time, as both Neo and Adam himself were capable of knocking Yang out before she could ever use her Semblance on them.

In fact, Tifa's limit breaks and her Premium Heart are relatively similar except Tifa demonstrated during her battle with Loz that she is far more mobile than Yang is even without materia so Yang isn't likely to deal a lot of damage to Tifa or defeat her before Tifa can use her own limit breaks to defeat Yang. But Yang won anyway because it was a Roosterteeth series.

Then in DBX, Ruby Rose went up against Ragna the Blood Edge which seemed to coincide with the popularity of BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle but it was also sponsored by the RWBY Volume 6 series itself, indicating that Ruby winning was purely about the money. This is why when Weiss goes up against the red-head from Persona 3, I imagine Weiss is going to win, not because I think she should, not because I'm overestimating or underestimating either combatant. I think Weiss is going to win because if it's a Roosterteeth series character in the Death Battle, they're going to win no matter what.

Now, I actually want to talk about the Deadliest Warrior inspiration because while Death Battle itself doesn't have many connections to it Deadliest Warrior can still say a lot about the production of this series.

The way Deadliest Warrior played out in most episodes was that there'd be two fighters, each with a series of weapons and those weapons would be given to the fighter and with their stats configured the winner would be decided after an RNG for loop that iterated about 1000 times and whichever fighter killed the other more than 500 times would be the winner. This always played out in a way that made it seem like the better warrior would come out on top.

For example, during the Shaolin Monk versus the Maori Warrior, although the Maori warrior received 3 more advantages in the area of brute strength of the weapons, the Shaolin Monk still won because their hook swords took almost 600 kills by themselves.

By contrast the Comanche Native American versus the Mongolian warriors had the Mongolians take a minimum of 100 kills with each weapons but the Natives still won because their mid and long range weapons took too many kills to be overcome.

In fact, this is why the idea that the battle cinematic is purely for entertainment rather than how the fight would actually go. Because very frequently in the Deadliest Warrior episodes, the cinematic fight would either be won by the weapon that got the smallest number of kills, like the Katana, Katari Blade, the Spin Needles, or even the anal pike which wasn't a weapon as much as it was Vlad Dracula's favorite method of execution but the numbers would always reflect that the cause of victory was a completely different weapon.

In Death Battle, you don't really get that. Although the animation seems to be for entertainment only, the fact that the statements after the fight are more an explanation of what happened in the fight rather than why the outcome was what it was suggest that there's no underlying problem with the animation as a representation of the actual fight, especially since as far as we know, only one battle is taking place. By contrast, every battle in Deadliest Warrior either occurred with 1000 different people or occurred 1000 different times depending on how you interpret that data so even if the fight that's being demonstrated is a representation of a battle that occurred in canon, it would only be one of the total outcomes with a remaining 999 going unrepresented.

On top of this, Deadliest Warrior actually did stat measurements on the weapons in the forms of time to kill and damage in weight or pressure. And while I understand that's near impossible to do with fictional characters, that makes it even more imperative that you get your facts straight and make more of an effort to eliminate biases.

This is actually a major point if you think about it. In Deadliest Warrior, although there are biases that are present, ultimately, that didn't matter much because regardless of the side you rooted for, the numbers didn't lie. In Death Battle, they don't really have any concrete numbers except for approximations of what it would take to do what a certain character does but in order for that number to be valid, first we need to make sure that feat is something this character can do, and second we need to make sure the context it was present in didn't create some special circumstance that allowed it to happen.

So what will happen now? Well, I imagine Death Battle is going to continue for a long time because in spite of the obvious pandering, hypocrisy, selling out, and avoidance of responsibility, people will still watch this series. I will still watch this series. Honestly, though, after this, I won't be talking about Death Battle anymore. Mainly because it's such a toxic discussion that I don't want to have and the Death Battle group's inability to recognize that they are biased and pandering is well documented so I don't think I need to say anymore. All I can do is hope that they eventually get their heads out of their asses.