Death Battle Retrospective Eps 61-71

 

Season 3 was a “rough” time to be in the community. There’s a lot of episodes that resulted in some form of backlash. I also don’t remember all the details, but there was apparently a falling out with some of the 2D animators gained after Lang left. I remember particularly one of them was named Mali. A lot of them worked on this show named one minute melee during season 2. Then they left to continue that show on another channel. 

This is what led to the creation of “DBX”, a similar sprite animation show with no research. Though some of those first few eps had issues and that led to fandom wars with One Minute Melee at the time.

 

One thing that was nice though, was that the show  finally got a relatively set tri-weekly schedule. People might not be aware of this now, but during season 1 and 2, episodes mostly just came out when they were done. Link vs Cloud was delayed, Goku vs Superman was delayed, Kirby vs Buu was delayed, and so on. It wasn’t uncommon to wait for weeks with no new content. 

In general Death Battle kinda dominated what was left of Screw Attack. I remember later in season 2 they tried to get people interested in “The Industry” using Death Battle as an advertisement, but it didn’t seem to work. Death Battle also had another spin off named “Desk of Death Battle” where the character Jocelyne was created.

 

I became more aware of the various power scaling websites and DB fan sites around this time, as the loss of Screwattack kinda forced us to be more observant of those places. I remember they included.

Spacebattles: Apparently has been around for a billion years. No account. I very rarely checked it.

Naruto forums: Was actually a place where a lot of calcs were stored. I had an account, but I only spoke there once or twice. The website for some reason always seemed buggy and had tons of broken links.

Vs wiki: Generally had like decent lists of powers or stats for characters, but it became increasingly apparent that their comicbook profiles were pretty bad. I got an account but rarely posted.

Comic Vine and Reddit: Oftentimes had decent respect threads. Had an account, but never posted until years later.

Deviant Art: Actually had a pretty big community at one point with profiles, written fights, etc. I actually made a profile myself, but could never maintain putting stuff on it. Later on I deleted it. 

Death Battle fanon: A website for fan scripts. No account, but I occasionally lurked.

Death Battle Wiki: Basically just an organization of series info. I had an account. I often lurked, but rarely post.

Tv Tropes Forum: Basically just a message board on the show. I had an account. I occasionally lurked, but I’ve never posted.

I, Lousy and Akumath also became mods on SA forums sometime around then. Though frankly I wasn’t very good at it because I was too nice to doll out punishments or hold people accountable.

I also set up my own blogspot. Initially it just had my old blogs from Screwattack, but I added more stuff to it later. 

https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2016/03/death-battle-analysis-bowser.html 

Episode 61: Flash vs Quicksilver

I like this episode, but it’s funny to rewatch given how busted later episodes made the Flash characters out to be. I think this ep has Barry’s big durability feat being the time he got knocked into a tree and broke it? In comparison Wally West was stated to be able to destroy the multiverse or whatever. A bit out of Quicksilver’s league. I love how we brought Quicksilver’s death back during the Black vs Reverse Flash ep btw.

Episode 62: Joker vs Sweet Tooth

This was actually a fight that OFBDB had wanted for a while. Though on release I’m not sure what my thoughts were.

Back at the time a lot of people took issue with the fact that Joker won. The fact Sweet Tooth exited his vehicle to get up close to Joker was seen as forced. Many argued that it would have made much more sense for Sweat Tooth to just shoot him.  In fact Harley vs Jinx directly poked fun at it years later. That said, using current scaling Joker almost definitely wins. Heck modern scaling would probably say he could beat Sweet Tooth’s mech on foot and hand to hand(as dumb as that sounds),

Regardless though, I do think the fight itself was fun narratively and made good use of Joker’s chaotic personality. 

Episode 63: Mewtwo vs Shadow

I remember the original version of this script. It was much longer than the final episode. It had both characters use a lot more of their powers and Shadow even used a gun. I believe the story goes that the animator didn’t want to do Vs animations anymore or had some sort of IRL difficulty that ended up affecting the episode. It’s disappointing because Mewtwo and Shadow were one of the first characters I helped out with under the new research system. I really would like to see this get a proper remake one day.

Episode 64: Meta vs Carolina

G1 Blog: https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/07/death-battle-prediction-meta-vs-carolina.html 

This episode made the forums really really really really mad. They did not like that it was a Rooster Teeth Sponsored ep. They didn’t like it coming off Mewtwo vs Shadow. They did not like it being a same series episode. I remember they even got confrontational with Ben when he tried to post there to talk about it. IMO the episode itself is pretty harmless in hindsight. I wasn’t a fan of Red vs Blue, but Torrian did a good job with the animation as always.

You may have noticed the forums being negative keeps coming up. Honestly the forums kinda started to go downhill during season 3 and reached a boiling point during a certain episode in season 4(that’s gonna be a long story). To be blunt a lot of the people there were a bit self centered and elitist, and if the show didn’t go in the direction they wanted they were prone to throwing fits. The curveballs with verdicts, chosen episodes, the effects of the merger and some of their favored characters losing didn’t help. Add in herd mentality and them not always being respectful towards one another, and you have the ingredients for a very toxic environment(no offense to people from those days).

On a more positive note.

This was the first episode that the ODBFB replacement became active. 

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/06/announcement-blog-welcome.html 

The members of this new blog included Grand Blazer, Kirby Kid, MalcomBelmont, Rising Uppercut, ShadowGlyde, Xenos and Homestuck Lover. You may recognize them, as several later became part of the official Death Battle team and many of the others are still active in the community.

Unfortunately I would also say that a lot of the negative energy of the forums got focused towards many of their early blogs(though personally they were much better than our initial ones). But I’ll get to that later.

Episode 65: Cammy vs Sonya

G1 Blog:  https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/08/death-battle-predictions-cammy-white-vs.html 

This was another fight that made people mad. I remember there being a lot of arguments about what Cammy should scale too and what counted from the Udon comics, etc. Overall in hindsight I do think Cammy should have won. Though I do think that people getting mad about the show using the Test Your Might mini game is funny. At the time people dismissed it because it was a mini game, but from modern standards they’d probably just use it and consider it a bit of a feat.

Episode 66: Tracer vs Scout

G1 Blog: https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/09/death-battle-predictions-tracer-vs-scout.html 

I like this fight. Torrian did a good job. I really enjoyed the part where Scout walked through Tracer’s firepower. I would argue it happened a bit too early though. Tracer and Overwatch had only existed for less than a year at this point. So she didn’t actually have a lot to draw from. 

Interestingly the SA forum community wasn't angry about this one. At this point there were more people in the community that could calc feats, and they calced a feat from one of the Overwatch trailers that they felt gave Tracer the win. Ironically it was other communities, particularly the deviant art community, that got angry about the outcome. I only found out about that years after the fact when I noticed people from specific community backgrounds reacted to the fight in a different way than I expected. Apparently some people took issue with how Scout’s fighting and moveset was represented. I also imagine he probably had more of an instilled fanbase at that time, which added to the sentiment.

Episode 67: Ken vs Terry

G1 blog: 

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/09/death-battle-predictions-ken-masters-vs.html 

This was a pretty nice reprieve. I remember people really hyped up Terry for some reason and they seemed to enjoy seeing him win. I actually remember watching a lot of Street Fighter and Fatal Fury animations to prepare for the episode.  I honestly can’t remember much that happened in the fight though.

Episode 68: Amy vs Ramona

G1 blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/10/death-battle-predictions-amy-rose-vs.html 

I have STRONG opinions on this episode.

This is probably the first episode that made me realize that sometimes the community can have very blatant favoritism and how that can basically derail discussion. Liking a character too much simply gives people incentive to railroad the debate for their side.

When this episode was announced the prevailing opinion on SA forums was that Amy should lose. People argued that she didn’t scale to any of the major cast characters(Sonic, Shadow, Blaze, and Knuckles were “god tiers” of the verse or something). She didn’t have any notable speed feats either and was probably subsonic. Even using Sonic X, none of her feats from it were above “building level”. 

Ignore the kinetic energy of Amy knocking an airship that canonically weighs over 600,000 tons 100s of meters in 1 second

A lot of her “playthroughs” in various Sonic games also weren't allowed to count either, because we didn’t know if they were “cannon”. Something that was ironically derided when used against Tifa, but was acceptable here.  Essentially she was kinda just treated like a character that had to be rescued by everyone else.

In contrast I think Ramona was argued to be MHS and city block at the time. This is also years ago, so most people didn’t consider scaling to Todd to be legitimate.

Now I can def articulate nowadays that “Yeah Amy has fought Sonic, Eggman and others many times, or course she scales. I can calculate certain feats myself to show she’s much stronger and faster” but that wasn’t as clear back then. A lot of the community railroaded hard for Ramona to win and I remember them being pretty upset when Amy won. This even extended to deriding the G1 blog that sided with Amy for the most part during the fight.

In hindsight it’s pretty obvious that people just liked Ramona and were being unreasonably defensive of her because of that. Unfortunately this is something that has happened more than once with multiple episodes over the years. It’s generally only easy to call out years after the fact after the emotions surrounding the characters aren't nearly as heated though.

But drama aside, the actual episode is pretty good. It does lean somewhat into that early 00s characterization of Amy, but the animation had a pretty decent retro feel and made cool use of subspace.

Episode 69: Hulk vs Doomsday

G1 Blog: 

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/11/death-battle-predictions-hulk-vs.html 

This was one of the more well received fights of Season 3. I feel like most people agreed with the ending. I would say that the ending blow against Hulk is some of the most brutal we’ve had in an ep up until that point.

Episode 70: Zoro vs Erza

G1 Blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/11/death-battle-predictions-zoro-vs-erza.html 

Don’t remember this one much. I think it was good though and that the final blow had a lot of impact. I remember like a month later Fairy Tail got a big meteor feat that might have changed the result, but then people tried to claim the meteor took 10 minutes to get to Earth for some reason. Tbh I can’t help but think of Erza without thinking about an “inside” joke with some of the old G1s(Lucy x Natsu is my top 10 OTP!)

Episode 71: Deadpool vs Pinkie Pie

G1 Blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2016/12/death-battle-predictions-deadpool-vs.html 

This was the last episode of season 3. I would def say that MLP and Deadpool returning had a “reaction”.  I think a lot of people understood that it was basically a meme fight and probably wouldn’t be taken seriously. That said, the forums were still a bit salty that it was the finale, and got weird about it. I KID YOU NOT, one person on the forums posted NSFW MLP artwork (and it wasn’t anthropomorphic either). Leading to one of the most cringe moments of the forums and an instant ban for it.

I’ll admit I don’t particularly care for this eps, cause it leans so hard into memes and doesn’t really have a real winner. But I don’t think I was upset that it happened or anything like that.