Po vs Iron-first Q and A(Feat Grand/Lousy)

"The following is the opinion of only those involved in its writing. It is not officially endorsed by Rooster Teeth Productions or necessarily representative of the views of the Death Battle staff at large."

 “Why did you use Po dodging Jin Tian’s Tempest lightning for his speed?”

The Jin Tian’s Tempest is described as allowing the user to shoot “lightning bolts” rather than standard electricity and it visually behaves like it, similar to lightning bending from Avatar. The feat is also fairly well-corroborated by Po chucking a hammer into low orbit in seconds. Which is honestly probably a better speed feat anyway (Po dodging the tempest only nets mach double digits). There’s technically other feats in this ballpark we could have used for his speed, but from a casual perspective “dodged lightning” is the easiest one to digest.

Admittedly, we do usually prefer to use lightning attacks for speed feats when there’s a bit more evidence to suggest their legitimacy (cloud to ground lightning, ETC). But even with its inclusion, Po lost the speed gap by miles, so being a bit generous in that field wasn’t uncalled for.

“Can’t Po only use his Mastery of Chi powers in the Spirit Realm?”

There isn’t anything to suggest that these powers are limited to the Spirit Realm considering, well… It’s Po’s Chi. It quite literally comes from him, and there isn’t anything to say that the Spirit Realm has some augmentation effects. There seems to be some misconception that the Spirit Realm is made out of Chi or something and Po is powered up by it, and that doesn’t make much sense since Chi is the energy within living beings. Heck, the lake that Oogway lives by is said to be made out of Chi itself, which would imply that everything else in the realm isn’t (otherwise it wouldn’t be a lake, it would just… be). 

The only thing that sort of suggests Po’s power is dependent on being in the Spirit Realm is that when he returns from the Spirit Realm at the end of KFP 3, he loses his attire and falls down. But the fact that he was still using it even briefly in the Mortal Realm suggests that this was more-so just him not needing to actively use its power. Realistically, he should be able to access its power even in the Mortal Realm. In fact, he does in Paws of Destiny and when he briefly gets it from the Peach Tree in the Ke-Pa episodes of Legends of Awesomeness.

And even if for some reason he couldn’t use their power in the Mortal Realm, he could always just Wuxi himself and Danny to the Spirit Realm.

“Is the Wuxi Finger feat only town level?”

It probably depends on how you calc it, but we got Large City level as a low end just through ang-sizing the distance to a mountain in one of the backgrounds. It’s semi-moot since the meteor feat is the big important feat, but it helps as corroborating evidence.

“But not all of the clouds are dispersed by the Wuxi Finger”

Shouldn’t matter. We can still get a yield that accounts for the fact that not all of the clouds were dispersed by just cutting the volume of the clouds by a certain percentage. Since clearly a large portion of the clouds were dispersed. Similar things have been done with other cloud dispersion calcs.

“Can you really quantify the Wuxi Finger’s power when it isn’t a traditional attack?” 

Yes, we can. It disperses a large cloud formation in Paws of Destiny. And like with most instances of cloud dispersion in fiction, we can calc it and get a yield for the Wuxi Finger’s power. If it releases energy, and that energy can be measured, we can calculate it.

“But all the Wuxi finger does is warp people to the spirit world. Nobody actually tanks the energy.”

Whether or not this move is being used as a traditional attack doesn’t matter. It clearly required a ton of energy. And we can get a number for how much energy Po would need to generate to perform the feat.

No VS. site (that we know of at least) has any rule that states a move or ability needs to be used as an attack in order to be considered a valid feat. Barring extenuating circumstances, as long as something can be quantified and be reasonably attributed to the character’s own power/energy, it should be fair game. Newton’s second law, and the fact that Po is able to generate this energy without exploding would also corroborate the feat scaling to both his destructive power and durability.

Similar feats such as Abigail dispersing clouds across the continent in the Devil May Cry anime, and Gargos’ giant portal have been calc’d by most VS. sites. Neither of these were ‘attacks’ in a traditional sense. The former was just an after effect of Abigail transforming and making a giant sigil, and the later was Gargos just making a grand entrance to Earth. I.E ‘warping’ to a dimension, not all that different from how Po ‘warps’ foes to the spirit world. Both of these feats have been pretty widely accepted. We see no reason Po’s Wuxi Finger feat would be the exception.

Even then, we know that Po’s Chi techniques are stronger than the Wuxi Finger Hold since he says it was his best move before he mastered it, and this is further supported by the power shown off by the Black Tortoise in Paws of Destiny. It stands to reason that the Hero’s Chi can be scaled up from what the Wuxi Finger Hold is capable of. Speaking of which… 

“Is the Black Tortoise’s meteor feat legitimate?”

It is. The meteor in question was clearly very large and comparable in size to Earth. We used 100 teratons of TNT in the episode, but that was a huge lowball, using a real life example as a minimum value for an extinction level event (considering the on-screen meteor was far larger than the one in K-Pg extinction). We actually did a different calc that assumes the shell used to block the meteor had the diameter of Earth (since it covers and eclipses the planet before being shot out to block the meteor). Which comes out at over 47 petatons (about 470 times stronger than teraton estimate). And Po would scale to the Black Tortoise at the very least by the time he gained the Hero’s Chi.

“But the flashbacks in Kung Fu Panda are exaggerated.”

We think the people arguing this are confusing Po’s dreams/fantasies with flashbacks. The dreams Po has, such as the opening to the original Kung Fu Panda, are exaggerated, and wouldn’t be considered fair game (though there’s no worthwhile feats in them anyway). The flashbacks and stories however, while slightly more stylized, aren’t exaggerated or any more cartoony than what’s already in Kung Fu Panda. 

In fact, since the flashbacks usually tell the story of either a legendary kung fu figure (the Black Tortoise), or a tragic backstory (Po’s past or Oogway’s brotherhood/conflict with Kai) they’re usually LESS cartoony and exaggerated than the slap-stick fighting we see Po get into during his present stories.

People also seem to think that Po makes up a lot of the stuff he talks about and that it’s all fiction, but that isn’t the case. They make it clear from day one that Po is a guy who LOVES kung fu and has fully absorbed himself in the stories of the old masters. He knows their techniques, their weapons, their greatest battles, and even some uh… dark secrets we’ll say (Tigress what was wrong with you as a teenager (19:20)). When he’s talking about the Four Constellations to the village kids, he’s very much trying to make it clear the level of power they have at their fingertips, and it doesn’t make sense for him to just lie about that.

“If Iron Fist didn’t have the Book of Iron Fist, couldn’t he have just beaten his way out of the Spirit Realm like Jindiao did?”

Eventually, possibly. Immediately, probably not. Jindiao essentially found a weak point in the realm to bash his head against in order to break out of it. In order for Iron Fist to do the same, he’d first need to somehow find the weak point while knowing that it’s a weak point, get to it, and then punch it hard enough to escape. Given the time this would take due to his unfamiliarity with the realm and limited mobility in comparison to Jindiao, it’s unlikely he would be able to break out of the Spirit Realm through brute force quick enough for us to say the fight can continue.

“Can you explain the whole ‘coming back to life’ argument?”

To save everyone in the Panda Village from Kai, Po grabs a hold of the bullman and uses the Wuxi Finger Hold on himself, transporting him to the Spirit Realm and taking Kai with him. After defeating Kai, Po meets with Oogway who tells him that he can choose whether or not he wants to stay in the Spirit Realm, and so Po uses his new Yin-Yang Staff to teleport back to the Mortal Realm, right where he left from. In Paws of Destiny, Po specifically says that doing this “killed” him, and Oogway implies that he’d be able to go back himself if he wanted. So it stands to reason that if Po were to be killed in battle, he realistically could just return to the fight if he wanted.

“Doesn’t that make Po impossible to kill for good then?”

No. There are many ways someone could still kill Po even with this caveat. Just off the top of our heads, if his spirit were taken or destroyed he wouldn’t be able to return from the Spirit Realm (since his soul wouldn’t go there in the first place). Something that erases his existence across timelines and reality (Hakai for example) would also do the trick. Someone with the power to destroy the Spirit Realm could simply ‘kaput’ it, along with Po. And even supposing an opponent of Po’s had none of these tricks, as long as they were crazy stronger, faster, and tougher than Po, there would be nothing to stop them from just…killing him over and over again no matter how many times he came back.

By no means was the resurrection bit at the end of the analysis meant to say Po can’t be permanently killed at all, hence why Wiz specifically says it was questionable if it could be done “through conventional means”. All that said, it certainly merited being brought up since Iron Fist didn’t have any real way around it, and in general was just an interesting thing to talk about.

“Are Legends of Awesomeness and Paws of Destiny non-canon?”

Despite what the wiki says, there isn’t anything substantial in the shows to say that they absolutely could not co-exist with what’s presented in the films. It’s clearly meant to be the same Po that we see on the big screen given they reference the events of the movies in the shows, and it even adds a lot of background to Shifu, the Furious Five, even Oogway and Tai Lung. It doesn’t really make sense to ignore them, especially when it’s where Po gets the vast majority of his special techniques like the Golden Lotus Clap or Thundering Wind Hammer. Heck, the entire concept of Chi, which is central to KFP 3’s plot, is introduced in Legends of Awesomeness and it gets expanded on a lot more in Paws of Destiny.

The one thing that you can really say is “contradictory” is that they reintroduce Chi in the third film as if it were a new concept that Po is unaware of, but frankly this can just be chalked up to the fact that the movies gather waaaaaaaaay more of an audience than the shows do, so they needed to re-explain things for those who hadn’t heard of it before. 

“Is Po a universe-buster because of Spirit Realm stuff?”

There’s an argument for Po being universe level that comes from how he turns the Spirit Realm from green to gold during his fight with Kai in the third movie after he learns mastery over Chi. According to one of the Four Constellations “the Spirit Realm is defined by those within it, there are no true borders” and it’s stated by the film creators to be another plane of existence. These statements have been used to argue that Po turning the Spirit Realm gold is a universe level feat, but to me, the statement that it has “no true borders” doesn’t seem to mean it’s infinite in size.

When the panda kids try escaping the Spirit Realm while they’re trapped in it, they keep going through one end of the realm and find themselves entering back from the other end in a loop, like a Pac-Man maze. Jindiao also escapes the Spirit Realm by finding a crack in it and then attacking it until it breaks, leading him back to the Mortal Realm. There’s also the fact that there appear to be several different areas in this realm for each of its citizens. The Four Constellations reside on a beach, there was a demon at an infinite dumpling bar, Oogway hung out by a peach tree. All these sections are even colored differently, from orange, to pink, and to gold. The Spirit Realm isn’t uniformly a single color at all times.

When the Four Constellations say that it’s defined by those within it and there are no true borders, they seem to more-so mean it in the sense that the Spirit Realm is shaped by the individual's perception of it. The panda kids only think of the Spirit Realm as this beach they keep ending up on, so that’s why they aren’t able to escape from it. But when Po and Jindiao come into that pocket area and leave for another without any looping issues, the kids realize this isn’t the case and manage to do the same to follow after them. 

So basically, Po likely only transformed the part of the realm that he and Kai were in. Which to be fair, seemed decently big in itself. We don’t really have a way of measuring it due to the nature of the setting, but eyeballing it I would guess it’s probably about the size of a city or an island. Definitely not an entire universe though. In fact the entire point of the Spirit Realm is that it’s supposed to be where kung fu masters go after they die, and it’s established in Legends of Awesomeness that kung fu masters are primarily native to China rather than anywhere else, and even then that’s such a select few in terms of the greater population. The realm wouldn’t need to be all that big to house them.

But even then, the changing of colors in the Spirit Realm is more-so to reflect the power dynamics that exist in the Realm at the time, rather than the direct power of any individual. What I mean by this is that when we’re first introduced to Oogway in the third movie, there’s a bright gold light behind him, and it’s there constantly even during his battle with Kai. Meanwhile everything else is green, representative of how Kai has stolen the Chi of every other master in the Spirit Realm. You can even see that as soon as Kai manages to capture Oogway in his chains and begins to absorb his Chi, Oogway’s golden light fades away from behind him as Kai is now the top of the food chain (well, more like he just is the food chain since there’s no one left).

Po changing the Spirit Realm back to gold at the end of the movie is likely just the same thing - he isn’t changing it directly through his own power, it’s just reacting to him now being the biggest dog in the Spirit Realm, and the fact that it’s the entire realm makes sense given how easily he mops the floor with Kai for the rest of their fight.

“What about the Wellspring? Is that universe level?”

So the Wellspring in Paws of Destiny is stated by Jindiao to be “the source of all Chi in the universe”. Jindiao absorbed the wellspring, and Po managed to hurt him in the Spirit Realm, and it’s been argued that this gives him universe level power. There’s a couple of issues with the argument though.

For one, Chi is the energy in living beings. It doesn’t exist everywhere in the universe like say, the Force does. You could find it in all the animals, in peach trees, and in flowers, but you’re not going to find it in the depths of space on desolate slabs of rock and gas where there’s nothing living, so equating its power to the energy of the entire universe doesn’t make much sense. Secondly, it’s only the source of all Chi - it created and produced Chi, but it isn’t literally all the Chi that there is. The fact that the pandas still had their own Chi after Jindiao took control of the wellspring proves as much. To be fair, when the wellspring disappears later in the series, Li Shan remarks that he’s unable to use his Chi since the wellspring was taken, but it’s visually shown that he still has his Chi through his paw glowing when he tries using it, he just isn’t able to fire a beam like he was trying to. It’s likely that the wellspring being gone simply made them lose their ability to control it, rather than it being outright taken from their bodies because “the source of all Chi in the universe” went missing. It shouldn’t be assumed that Jindiao just has the Chi of literally everything in the universe now.

It’s also stated to be “the source of all light in the universe”, but frankly… what the hell does that even mean? Did light just not exist before the Wellspring appeared? That doesn’t really make sense given light is needed to sustain a lot of living beings, or at the very least their food supplies, and no living beings means no Chi. Did the sun come into formation and just produce heat and no light until the Wellspring showed up? This just sounds like some flowery words to make it seem extra special, and there isn’t anything to really indicate what that means. The Chi statement is one thing since we actually see it relate to the Chi the pandas wield, but when the wellspring went missing, it’s not like the sun suddenly went out in the same way the pandas lost their connection to their abilities. Even if we do take the statement as that, given what’s going on with Chi, this is likely something similar where it isn’t literally all the light that there is, it’s just the thing that originally produced it.

Not to call anybody out of course, but this argument feels like people just heard the word “universe” in a sentence related to a power source and just ran with it since it seemed to justify other “universal feats”, rather than consider what was actually being said and how it compared to what was presented in the series. (*Sailor Galaxia flashbacks intensify*)

“Does Jindiao breaking the Spirit Realm and escaping back to the Mortal Realm make him universal?”

This one is a bit silly. Basically Jindiao just… finds a hole in the Spirit Realm and blasts it with some lasers to make it bigger. How did he do that? No clue, the dude flies off from the beach the Four Constellations were on and then the next time we see him, he’s shooting lasers to make that hole bigger. What is that hole? A weak point in the Spirit Realm? Its border? Was it there before or did Jindiao shoot at a random spot and create it? Also not explained. Black Tortoise speculated that the power of Wellspring granted him the ability to “find a way out”, but that’s such a vague phrase that we can’t really quantify in any meaningful way. 

Even ignoring how we basically have no context for what this hole blasting feat is and giving the benefit of a doubt that he just created it himself, it’s a bit absurd to assume blowing a hole (that later seals up) into the Spirit Realm somehow “overcame the Realm’s power” and makes him universe level. That’d be like saying I’m planet level because I dug a really big hole in the ground, or I’m building level because I punched through a window. Destroying a part of something =/= destroying all of something. This is a pretty common logic fallacy.

“Sun Wukong created a star! That has to be good for it, right?”

This one, definitely not. Rule of thumb, unless there’s very clear evidence to say otherwise, don’t rely on the manipulation of dream worlds to determine a character’s power. We learned this lesson a little while ago with Kill la Kill: IF.

So in one episode of Paws of Destiny, Po and the panda kids face the monkey trickster god Sun Wukong. He attacks them in their dreams and messes with them a ton in them. He messes with one of the kids, Fan Tong, by having him see his own shadow since he has a fear of it. There’s an argument that says that since Sun Wukong created that dimension, and his plan was to scare Fan Tong with his shadow, the light source in it must have been a sun. I find that there are three major problems with this argument however.

1. It’s the classic trope, but dreams don’t need to follow the rules of reality. Anything is possible in them because you aren’t bound by any actual physical limitations, everything is taking place in the imagination. Sun Wukong makes characters turn into 2D pieces of paper in this dream but he never displays that ability in real life despite how much it would’ve been useful on a number of occasions. In general, he’s clearly much less powerful in the real world in comparison. I think everyone has had dreams of their own where they get superpowers or something like that, but obviously that isn’t reflective of the real world.

2. There’s nothing to really suggest that there was a sun in that dream, other than the fact that it’s a source of natural light and the place wasn’t just magically lit without any clear source (hence the shadow). It’s just the easiest assumption, and to be fair that’s what Occam’s Razor might tell us to go with if it wasn’t for… 

3. Sun Wukong later challenges the kids to find his real self amongst his clones before the sun sets, and this happens while they’re in a dream though they don’t initially realize it. When the kids do realize that they’re in a dream, Bao literally reaches out and grabs the “sun”, except it’s just a tiny bright orb that fits in the palm of their hand. And then he gave it to Fan Tong, who ate it (19:30). So it definitely wasn’t an actual star, and it’s safe to assume that this is what was happening in Fan Tong’s dream too.

“Any chance on the Eternal and Anti Chord stuff?”

Four rolls and no dice. We’re as disappointed as you are, cuz universe level Po sounds awesome, but ‘tis what ‘tis.

To be fair, the “feat” on this one is actually legitimate. The Anti Chord will unmake the universe unless the Wu Di instruments produce the Eternal Chord to counteract it. Po essentially fills in the role of one of the instruments by making the tone with his own body, but that doesn’t really translate to his own destructive prowess since it was pretty much just him… smacking himself in a certain way. And there isn’t any evidence to suggest that Po’s Hero’s Chi is comparable to it in any regard besides both having more power than other things in the verse, so it’d just be a huge leap in logic to say “Po can destroy the universe because the Anti Chord can, we know this because both are strong”. Especially since the Eternal and Anti Chords are showing off levels of power WAAAAAAAY above what we can safely say Po has.

“Can you address the various herald level arguments for Iron Fist?”

(The fact that this argument started getting popularized literally a month before this episode was announced smh lol.)

Anyways, Iron Fist thankfully doesn’t have quite as elaborate of arguments for universal/herald level power that Po does. That said, by and large, most of them are just scaling via scans or feats taken out of context. Iron Fist either doesn’t harm the foe, doesn’t do any significant damage, or was fighting them while they were disempowered.

Just to list a few examples…

Knocking out Hercules

https://imgur.com/fhYH2G5 

Hercules had been stripped of his immortality at the time, and wasn’t as powerful.

https://i.imgur.com/0u1enoa.png 

Punching apart Iceman

https://i.imgur.com/nT3tNiQ.jpg 

It was technically an ice duplicate of Iceman, and Iceman one-shots Danny panels later.

Iron Fisting Skaar

https://i.imgur.com/PdZWc5o.jpg 

Skaar was unharmed by the punch and charging back into the fray 3 pages later.

https://i.imgur.com/6J9GQDA.jpg 

Punching the Hulk

https://i.imgur.com/H2Aryzc.jpg 

It was a training session, and Hulk wasn’t even scratched by it. He does ask that Danny teach him the strike, but the page that follows elaborates that Hulk wanted skill comparable to Danny’s so he would be able to overcome an opponent who is equal to him in strength. It wasn’t the power or force of the strike he wanted taught to him, it was the skill and technique behind it. Which makes sense given Danny is far more skilled than the Hulk typically.

https://i.imgur.com/ktG7RkN.jpg 

Danny obviously still scales well-above virtually every street level character, and has more consistently fought with and defeated them. He’s by all accounts a mid-tier in Marvel’s universe. Which is very impressive, but doesn’t net him the stats to overcome Po.

“Who has the better training and experience?”

This goes to Iron Fist handily. Po only started training in kung fu when he was in his 20s, and while we don’t know exactly how much time has passed during the series since then, it likely hasn’t been more than five years to give a generous rough estimate. Po’s masters include Shifu, who Po himself described as “the greatest kung fu teacher in all of China”, Bunnidharma in certain Chi techniques, and he learns some of the Impossible Moves from Fenghuang.

Meanwhile, Iron Fist has been raised and trained since he was a kid by K’un-Lun and Thunderer, obtained the mantle of Iron Fist at the young age of 19, and has kept it going for over a decade. Not to mention he has learned numerous fighting styles over that time. In the world of KFP however, martial arts “styles” are made specifically for an individual’s species and physical characteristics. As such, Panda Style is the only form of martial arts that Po has learned.

In Po’s defense however, he is a very fast learner, and has mastered extremely difficult kung fu techniques in far less time than many other masters such as Shifu and Oogway, hence how he’s defeated the likes of Tai Lung and Kai when the Furious Five and Shifu were unable to, even when those two have had a lot more combat experience and training than Po did at the time of their fights. So while Iron Fist is certainly the more experienced and better trained of the two, Po should be able to keep up at least to some extent.

“How could Po resist Iron Fist’s Hypnotic Fist?”

Iron Fist has the ability to give people suggestions that they believe to be true, similar to a Jedi mind trick. Po has encountered a number of mental attacks before however, with varying results

• Was affected by the Mind Fluttering Fingerslip, which erases memories

• Was possessed by Master Ding, though he managed to break out of it in time

• Managed to resist Rice Weevil’s mind control for a long enough period of time to physically beat it out of his head

• Resisted Pang Bing’s mind control by focusing on only a single thought. She said simple beings were harder to control.

• When Po began to focus on more things, he fell victim to it

• The panda kids used their chi to fend off Jindiao’s mind control from Jing

So there’s some back and forth on how much Po is affected by these attacks, but there’s enough evidence to suggest that Po could resist Iron Fist’s techniques. While memory manipulation and possession worked on Po (albeit briefly in the latter’s case), those aren’t exactly what Danny does. 

His mind control powers are much more similar to the actual mind control powers we’ve seen Po face, two of which he managed to resist for a long enough time to act against them. It’s also worth noting the two instances of him being affected by mind hax were before he mastered Chi, which allowed him to defend from Jindiao’s attack in his dreams and which the panda kids used to sever Jindiao’s control over Jing’s mind. It stands to reason that he should more likely than not be able to resist Iron Fist’s powers.

“How do Iron Fist’s pressure points and Po’s nerve attacks compare?”

Both characters have been trained in pressure point combat, but only one of them really has the means to take advantage of it. Even if Danny can locate the pressure points on Po’s body, it has been shown in his battle with Tai Lung that those types of attacks don’t work on him since his fat body makes them difficult to strike. While Taotai and Mantis were able to hit his points, this is due to Taotai doing EXTENSIVE research into Po’s body (don’t take that out of context) and Mantis’ “thingies” giving him extra minute precision, neither of which Danny would be able to replicate. Meanwhile, Iron Fist doesn’t have any resistance against them himself however, so Po should be able to immobilize or knock Danny out. 

“Could Iron Fist absorb Po’s Chi?”

This is probably going to be one of the biggest questions of the match outside of just feats, and the most likely answer is that he won’t be able to. While Po is not immune to having his Chi absorbed, he has been shown to have resistance to it on multiple occasions.

When Jindiao tried absorbing Po’s Chi while Po was dreaming, Po was able to blast the evil bird out of his mind and prevent him from having his Chi absorbed. When he later confronts Jindiao again, Po says that he’ll “never take [his] Chi” and Jindiao admits that he’s too weak for that. So instead, he has Jing absorb Po’s Chi, and Jing then gives it Jindiao. What’s important here is the distinction that Jindiao is too weak to absorb it, meaning that whoever is absorbing Po’s Chi would need to be in his ballpark or stronger. This is how Jing managed to do so, since she has the Hero’s Chi of one of the Four Constellations. Given how much stronger Po is compared to Iron Fist, it’s questionable if Danny would be able to successfully take his Chi.

Po also actually used Chi absorption to his advantage against Kai in their final battle. Kai’s entire goal in the film was to take Po’s Chi in order to achieve a greater power, and Po gives it to him at the end of the film. But Kai then says “it’s too much” and dies from the overload. So that would mean that Po’s chi reserves are so large that they overpowered the Chi of a Spirit Warrior who had collected the chi of dozens of kung fu masters at that time. Iron Fist reserves do have a limit, so it’s possible that he could be overtaxed and die the same way Kai did.

Finally, Po should actually be capable of Chi absorption himself. This technique is used by Kai, Jindiao and Jing throughout the series. The issue is that it’s generally presented as an “evil” technique, which is where the conflict between Kai and Oogway in the third film comes from (Kai wants to take it for himself for power, Oogway believes it’s meant to be given to others). Regardless however, it is still within Po’s wheelhouse, and in the context of a Death Battle where most morals are off, we think it’s fair to say he would at least steal his own Chi back while not necessarily taking Danny’s.

“How would Iron Fist deal with the Golden Lotus Clap?”

Po’s Golden Lotus Clap blinds anyone who sees it and the only defense against it is just not looking at it. The only way to restore your sight is for the user to undo it for you. Luckily for Iron Fist, he has been trained to fight without his vision and shown he can fight with his other senses.

https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Power-Man-and-Iron-Fist-1978/Issue-53?id=39946#18 

So while this will likely still be detrimental, it certainly won’t immediately take him out of the fight.

“What are your thoughts on Paws of Destiny?”

AIGHT NO ONE WAS ACTUALLY ASKING THIS BUT I’VE BEEN WANTING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS SHOW FOR MONTHS SO IMMA JUST DO IT HERE
- GB, all further thoughts and opinions are his alone. (Paws of Destiny fans, turn away)

To start off being fair to the series, it did sort of get a bad card draw being set after the third film. Don’t get me wrong, Kung Fu Panda 3 is a good movie, I saw it twice in theatres, but I did take more issues with it than the first two, with one of the big things that bugged me about it was the use of the pandas. Now, I love Po and I love Jack Black, and I think the classic lots of eating, being fat and general doofus-dumbo jokes are for the most part pretty good. The problem with the third film is that they then apply all of those to all of the pandas, and it feels a lot more overdone by characters that don’t have the charm that Po does since being background characters sort of forces them to only be defined by one trait.

So how do you follow that up? Make a TV show set completely within the Panda Village that feature ONLY pandas as the main cast. And a goose. Mr. Ping gets his appearances and there’s a few miscellaneous characters on the heroes side like the giant spider and Bunnidharma, but Shifu and the Furious Five don’t make any kind of an appearance in this show, which was a bit frustrating since I think the Five still all really need a chance to shine on their own outside of being with Po.

Instead we get these four panda kids, and my god do I hate all of them. Some less than others, Nu Hai is… fine. Fan Tong I dislike but not enough to rant about him, I just wish the dude would grow a pear at some points. But for the most part it feels like they all fit into very cliche “this is the leader, the cocky one, the gentle one, and the angry one” without much nuance beyond those characteristics. Outside of the part where an entire culture thinks Bao is their god because of the book he wrote about himself (which was actually pretty funny), I could not stand this shitty kid who just constantly constantly talked about how cool and awesome he was, and frankly just acted like… kind of a dick the whole time.

Jing is again, just the angry one. All she does is be angry. She gets the groups into multiple fights that they could’ve avoided just because someone said some slightly off-putting thing. There was a scene where Nu Hai is trying to talk to her about the princess or some shit, and out of nowhere Jing brings up the fact that a person she healed nearly got the princess killed and just mopes about it some more. After constantly talking about it for the past episode as well. Get the fuck over yourself.

When I said that the background characters were defined by one trait, I can forgive that. But when the main characters get that shit? I hate it.

Speaking of which, even the returning characters are watered down. Po appears more mature now that he’s in a teaching position and has a lot of experience under his belt, and that’s cool to see, but you don’t really get a lot of the character struggles you got from the movies. I think you can argue in a fair sense that this is because his character was resolved, and I think that’s fine, but it’s still just less interesting to watch. Mr. Ping and Li Shan though, holy shit what did they do to you guys?

Wanna hear a funny joke? Cart. Cart Cart Cart. Ping loooooooves his cart. It’s AAAAAAALL he talks about in this show. Every single gag is “cart”, he takes it everywhere with him, he’s constantly trying to save it, he cries when it gets destroyed, it’s more important to him than Po. Oooooo funny, really funny the 40th fucking time I’ve heard this joke in the series. Running gags are a good thing, but there’s a difference between occasionally referring to an ongoing joke and then making the EXACT SAME “JOKE” EVERY FIVE SECONDS WHEN HE’S ON SCREEN.

Li doesn’t get it as bad, but all he does is worry about Po and do this super lame “oh what EVER shall we DO in this predicament?” routine. And while it’s less annoying compared to Ping not shutting the fuck up about his cart, it kind of goes back a bit on what he learned in the third movie about trusting in Po and letting him fight, and learning to fight as well. Not that he doesn’t, but I wish he’d have just gotten into action sooner without “oh noooooo”ing about it beforehand.

Jindiao is also lame as shit. Tai Lung, Shen and Kai are a hard act to follow, but ffs even the Legends of Awesomeness villains were more fun than this guy. He’s just such a straightforward and bland “oooo I’m evil” personality that’s so boring to watch in comparison to the great stuff the other characters did. I get that the entire point of his bird design is that he looks non-threatening ‘cuz that’s like his punishment or whatever it was that got him sealed in that stoner bird, but then when he’s actually trying to be threatening by using his real voice or making himself look bigger, it’s impossible to take seriously. And his dragon form is just kind of lame honestly.

And then there’s the side characters, and again. Grandma Panda is just crabby all the time, please laugh as she insults everyone around her to the point where she once just straight up said to leave Ping behind AS HE’S SURROUNDED BY LAVA AND IS ABOUT TO DIE WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM LADY? The Four Constellations are just… boring, as is Jade Tusk and the cat princess lady. I honestly don’t even remember who the antagonist for the second half of the series was. Not even an exaggeration I deadass don’t know who they were fighting in the last few episodes, they were that unremarkable to me.

The part of the series that had me most excited when I first got to it was when Po and the kids go to Gongmen City. I thought “oh cool! They’re back where KFP 2 happened! I wonder how the city is doing now that Master Rhino and Shen are dead? What state is it in? Will we get a callback to that movie?” They don’t even reference its events outside of some wolves now being the police guards. It’s just a place for them to stop and run before getting onto their next thing but it’s like, what’s the point? Where go back to the setting of the film that’s probably most agreed upon to be the best of the franchise and then just do… nothing with it? That just about sums up my thoughts on the series as a whole, they could do something interesting with what they have, but they just… don’t.

I could honestly keep going, but it’s been a few months now so I don’t remember everything that pissed me off, so I think that’s enough. I’ll give it points for the animation quality and the voice actors are pretty good. And hey, thanks to what it showed off Po got the win over Danny so that’s cool. But man I definitely don’t want to watch it again.

TLDR: Iron Fist is faster and more skilled than Po, but Po is significantly stronger, tougher, can resist or counter all of Iron Fist’s abilities, and has several miscellaneous abilities of his own that would help him finish the fight. Most of the universe+/herald level arguments for both characters involve taking stuff out of context, or are far too vague and unsubstantiated to be accepted. 

Stan Legends of Awesomeness