Death Battle Retrospective 72-80

 

Character assassination

Episode 72: Lara Croft vs Nathan Drake

G1 blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/01/death-battle-predictions-lara-croft-vs.html 

This ep def makes me realize that how you package the loss of a character can alter reception. The fight animation is objectively good, Lara obviously wins and all the information is correct. But Nathan losing because of the helicopter propeller at the end made many of his fans upset, as they saw it as just being a result of dumb luck. Tbf that was kind of the point, but I think in execution it backfired.

Episode 73: Scrooge vs Shovel Knight

G1 blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/02/death-battle-predictions-scrooge-mcduck.html 

This is the fight that killed SA forums. 

Up until this point it had kinda been in this downward spiral of toxicity, but this brought it all to a boiling point. 

Shovel Knight was a VERY popular character when the fight was announced. His game had just come out, he was getting guest appearances in everything, and everyone loved him. Similar to what happened to Amy, this incentivized the community to railroad the debate hard in his direction. Despite Scrooge being a character that’s been around for 50 years, Shovel Knight was declared the winner almost immediately after the fight was revealed. Then the community spent a lot of that time actively belittling anyone who wanted to argue in the favor of Scrooge or even bring up arguments that he could win.

The G1 blog also had it super rough. Unlike the ODBFB, they were often much more often mocked if their blogs didn’t agree with something the community wanted. In this fight they ended up leaning more with Scrooge and it made them a target. I even remember some people on the forums made their own competitive blog, where they put much less effort into Scrooge than the G1s did(no offense to those people). The person doing calcs for the G1s even actively wanted to stay anonymous to avoid them and people in the forums proclaimed how they should “laugh at how bad their calcs were” when the blog was released. A lot of people also ended up talking badly about others behind their backs on skype, which led to tons of drama when that somehow leaked out in public. I swear there are people who have PDST over this debate.

When the episode sided with Scrooge, they went ballistic. I remember they threw a fit towards Jetz too, who animated the episode. It also emboldened any other little criticism people could come up with. I remember people saying that Shovel Knight “rubbing his hand together excitedly for treasure was ” character assassination”. People also proclaimed that “he wasn’t a treasure hunter, he’s an ADVENTURER”. As if that was some notable distinction.

Shovel Knight is not a treasure hunter

Pretty much everyone got fed up with the forums and many people left Skype as well. This led to many people migrating to discord.  We ended up making our own server formed with the researchers and what was left of the community. 

…. We later ended up dissolving that server due events involving some members having “concerning” reactions to the 2020 presidential election. But overall this ep is why a lot of the Death Battle community is so centered around discord these days. Even the Official Death Battle discord was initially just a random discord server formed of old G1 members. Many years down the line they were just given a chance to sign on with the show to become officially integrated. 

Anyway do I still think Scrooge wins? I dunno? At the time I think it was way too heated for the discussion to progress well and no one has really looked into Scrooge since. He probably just scales to Donald, Mickey or Goofy, who did something crazy in some random animated short 60 years ago tbh. That said I don’t think it matters if Shovel Knight was unga-bunga-versal or if he wins now, it doesn’t excuse the behavior at the time.

Is the fight good? Yes, the fight was good. Luis did a good job with the 8 bit visuals and it was one of the best animations on the show up until that point. One of the things I realized watching older DB episodes is that a lot of episodes are much better when you’re not that engrossed in the power scaling aspect of the discussion. This is one of those episodes where you wouldn't have all these bizarre reactions if you were just a casual fan watching on youtube. I would also say that unfortunately one of the highest reasons for cutting off relationships with people in the fandom, is drama over episode outcomes.

Episode 74: Venom vs Bane

G1 Blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/03/death-battle-predictions-venom-vs-bane.html

I don’t remember much about this fight. I recall it being kinda hard to see, and wondering what the connected elements for the characters were supposed to be.

Episode 75: Power Rangers vs Voltron

G1 blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/04/death-battle-predictions-power-rangers.html 

I think I would say that this is probably where the show started to get out of the slump that had started in season 3. It was fairly ambitious with multiple voice actors, did justice to both sides and I don’t recall any issues with analysis. 

I probably remember it the best for Matt Patt being in the episode.

Episode 76: Natsu vs Ace

G1 blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/04/death-battle-predictions-natsu-vs-ace.html 

This is also in my opinion a fairly good episode, and it gave us the super funny Ace face melting Gif. I think I actually recall some of the researchers believing that Ace should have won at the time. I feel like Natsu  probably does just win outright nowadays.

Episode 77: Sub-Zero vs Glacius

G1 Blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/05/death-battle-predictions-sub-zero-vs.html 

There was this period of time where I think the show was a bit odd about Mortal Kombat. They won several fights in this era via reasoning that I think was highly contested at the time. I remember this fight in particular had this calc for freezing (13,000 times colder than absolute Zero?).  Sub-Zero probably still wins, but it's jarring looking back.

Episode 78: Android 18 vs Captain Marvel

G1 Blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/06/death-battle-prediction-android-18-vs.html 

I remember feeling like this episode was being odd with scaling 18 to a lot of other Dragon Ball characters. It also used the absorption power from Xenoverse, which Ben had to retract on twitter.  I also recall the ep having to fix something regarding the speed values, which were copied from Goku vs Superman. I think it had the mentality that Marvel probably wouldn’t be able to activate Binary on her own, which is why she lost.

Anyway I enjoyed it. 18 was one of my favorite Dragon Ball characters as a kid, so I’m glad she won. I don’t think she could have pulled it off had they used Binary though.

Episode 79: Metal Sonic vs Zero

G1 Blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/06/death-battle-predictions-metal-sonic-vs.html

So this episode is interesting because the outcome is very much a product of the opinions of Sonic and Megaman at the time.

At the time the general consensus was that “super form” Sonic characters COULD NOT scale to bosses or feats that happened after their introduction. As a result, no one would scale Metal Overlord to Dark Gaia or Solaris.  There was also debate on how strong Perfect Chaos was, because Sonic beat him in base form. Chaos flooding station square took awhile, so people used that as an excuse to lower any calcs on it.

Base Sonic characters in general were also much more heavily scrutinized. At the time no one believed base forms had relativistic or light speed feats. Sonic was largely considered MHS by the vast majority of the community. There also weren't a lot of physical feats that had been calc-ed up until that point. 

The Sonic OVA was also considered much more on the table than I think people consider it now. Particularly for Metal Sonic, since that was one of his only major appearances in the series. Remember Metal Sonic disappeared from the franchise for a pretty long time before Heroes served as his big return. 

Anyway I recall at the time Swan calc-ed the stalactite mountain split feat from the OVA. That feat was about Town level, and was considered to be Sonic’s best “base form” feat for several years after the episode. I actually remember it getting some ridicule and pushback for being a “calc that placed Sonic so high”.

In contrast most people argued Megaman characters were MFTL and plant/star level from the get go. Zero in particular was also super popular, so naturally there was some bias in his direction. At the time I also argued for Zero to win. 

In hindsight I would probably say that Metal might stomp. Regardless I still liked the episode and it was epic seeing Zero take the win back then, cause a lot of people had the assumption “we’d get it wrong” at the time.  Him reversing the chaos control in particular was nice.

Episode 80: Lucario vs Renamon 

G1 Blog:

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2017/07/death-battle-predictions-lucario-vs.html 

The first Pokemon vs Digmon fights since Red and Tai. I think it’s enjoyable, but it's a bit short. I kinda wish we could bring Lucario back and use him in a more extensive animation. I also remember this episode being very reliant on the idea of “blue ice” in the verdict, but I think that reasoning is a bit sillier by modern standards.

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Anyway, random fun fact. Back at this point in the show various people used to give occasional “hints” on future episodes. Lousy even used to give riddles!

https://vxtwitter.com/BenBSinger/status/781204341289922561 

There was also one other “event” around this time period. Lousy If he’s reading might get this inside reference