After doing Zeus VS Odin, I realized I really like doing these versus blogs and that I want to make more of them. While I’ve already decided the matchup for the next blog, I’ve included a poll in that post to help me decide the matchup after that one. I know it’s pointless because I have like, a non-existent audience, but whatever, it’ll get at least one vote.
To go along with that poll, I decided I’d also write out a post explaining the matches, why I like them, and what I’d do for the blog. This is that post.
Dominic Toretto VS Carl “CJ” Johnson
I’ve seen a lot of matches flying around for Dom lately, and I have to say… I am not a fan of most of them.
The thing that a lot of Dom matchups miss is that, while yeah he’s a good physical fighter, the draw of the action in the Fast and Furious series is the cars. All the most ridiculous stunts take place in cars. I mean, the “fast” in the title… it’s referring to cars, guys, that’s what the “fast” is there for, it’s for the cars. In my eyes, you can’t have a Dom fight without his Dodge Charger having the starring role. In Death Battle, it really hasn’t been since Sweet Tooth VS Joker that we’ve seen an actual, honest to goodness car fight. (Don’t ever, ever mention Death Race to me).
Talking about the DB community specifically, the biggest one is Dom VS Kiryu from Yakuza. I know that Swan vouched for Dom VS Kiryu from Yakuza on the podcast, which drew a lot of attention to it, and it was recently the topic of an entire podcast as well.
I get it. It’d be funny if Kiryu did a piledriver on Dom’s car. But that’s about where it begins and ends. With that match, you kinda lose out on the most interesting part of both characters’ fighting styles, which is Dom’s ridiculous car stunts and Kiryu’s awesome hand-to-hand combat skill. Dom, while an impressive combatant in a brawl, isn’t exactly Bruce Lee doing kung fu. Dom not getting to use his Charger for the majority of the fight would just be lame. I think Kiryu is much better off with an opponent who can really give him a match in close range combat, so we can get a really exciting martial arts battle, with a lot of scenery damage and cool props and stuff. Someone like Wei Shen from Sleeping Dogs, or maybe Ryo Hazuki from Shenmue. Something where you can just have a cool close-quarters fight that plays to both characters’ strengths, without having to worry about cars or guns or anything. (In fact, is there a Kengan or Baki character that could fight Kiryu? That’d be sick.)
To sum it up: Kiryu VS Dom is Fast & Furious without the Fast. It robs both characters of much better and more appropriate fights.
Who else? I’ve seen some people say Dom should fight John Wick or Sweet Tooth, which is just… those have zero connections outside of “guy who fights other guys” and “guy who owns a car.” Sweet Tooth literally just flattens Dom with his giant rocket-propelled skyscraper-smashing missile-launching robot, and Wick is just kinda… I’ve seen too much of this guy recently. Seems like any time there’s a vaguely street tier character people just immediately jump in and say they should fight Wick. Is using a little creativity really that hard? There’s also Lightning McQueen, which is just… I mean, it’s funny as a joke match, I guess. The one I’m closest to liking is Speed Racer, but I have another matchup I like better for Speed.
I think the perfect matchup for Dom, someone who could give him a high-octane vehicle versus vehicle battle, along with a gunfight or fistfight if it gets to that, would be Carl Johnson from Grand Theft Auto. Really, any GTA protagonist works here, but CJ’s the one with the most connections (and I would say, the most collective nostalgia) behind him.
CJ and Dom are both highly lethal but surprisingly affable criminals from the West Coast, specifically Los Angeles or an analogue of LA, who participate in both high stakes heists and illegal street races. A lot of their motivation comes from their dedication to their family – it’s a meme how much Dom talks about family, but CJ is driven by the deaths of his mother and younger brother, is very protective of his sister Kendl, and works with his older brother Sweet for the Grove Street Families as a way of supporting their community.
There’s more to it than that, but honestly I don’t think I need a bigass /r/DeathBattleMatchups essay of connections for it to work. It’s two family-oriented West Coast criminals who mostly do their dirty work with cars, simple as that. Both series are very big names, and looking at it if Death Battle were to turn it into an episode, I think it’d be more of an audience draw then you’d think. F&F is constantly relevant and popular since they just can’t stop releasing sequels, and GTA videos still get tons of views on YouTube to this day, with San Andreas in particular seeing tons of memes. (Remember when Big Smoke’s order blew up out of nowhere? Remember when “ah shit, here we go again” got popular? Do I even need to talk about the mission with the train?)
I think it has a lot of potential for a fun fight animation too, but I’ll get more into what I’d want to see out of that when I end up writing this blog. The research would be a little annoying to do by myself – there’s no good Respect Threads or profiles for either of these guys online, so I’d be doing everything from scratch. Dom has like 10 movies, with more sequels on the way, and video games and a cartoon if I want to dip into that stuff. Since San Andreas is a pretty expansive open world game, I’d have to record a lot of footage myself to get everything that’s possible for CJ to pull off. But I think it’d be fun to do regardless.
Nemesis-T Type VS Subject Delta
Yes, the T is attached to the Nemesis, not the Type. Blame the Japanese.
I don’t think I really need to sell people on this fight, since basically everyone already agrees it’s cool. It’s two manmade monstrosities duking it out with heavy weaponry. I’m betting this one wins the poll, actually. If only Death Battle would do this as an episode, that’d be awesome.
The blog wouldn’t be too tough to make. There’s already pretty good resources out there for both characters (I already made a Respect Thread for Reboot Nemesis, though obviously I’d be drawing from more than just that) and there’s no confusing canonical knots to unkink. Both series are pretty straightforward in what should be included and what shouldn’t.
I’m willing to pull from both the main game canon and the reboot for Nemesis, but I don’t think I’d include stuff from those weird American novels, or those movies where some random lady in a tight leather outfit does backflips for 90 minutes, or the manga where Leon becomes a wizard, or any of that crap. There would be no crossover scaling involved either, so no Marvel vs. Capcom, no Project X Zone, no Dead by Daylight, no Teppen (whatever the hell that is), none of those things.
For BioShock, the expanded universe is pretty slim. Obviously I’m also not going to use crossover scaling from Playstation All-Stars or that “To Michael!” commercial, but I think the Rapture novel would be fine to include as a source. (I know Ken Levine said it wasn’t canon in a Tweet, but with context, he’s clearly just joking. I’ll explain this further in the blog if I end up doing it.)
So yeah, it’d be pretty easy to do. Maybe getting my hands on some of the Japanese Resident Evil stuff might be tough, but that’s about it. I feel like it’d take me a week or two tops to get this out. Why not Nemesis VS Pyramid Head, or Nemesis VS Magician? Because I like this one better. Simple as that.
Bill and Ted VS Marty McFly and Doc Brown
I shill this fight all the time, and that’s because I think it’s really funny. Obviously it’s far from your average matchup, since neither of these characters are from series with a focus on combat. However, they both have some pretty insane feats when you dig into their side material, and I’d be interested to see who really comes out on top in the end.
Yes, I’d be doing this as a composite fight, just because that makes things infinitely more interesting. There’s already a really good composite Bill and Ted Respect Thread you can find, but I’m not sure if it includes some of the more recent Bill and Ted media releases. Yes, there’s still a steady drip of it on the comics side. And I’ve been meaning to do a big BTTF Respect Thread for a while now. If this fight wins, it’ll give me the reason to finally pull the trigger and get on with it.
As for any certain rules I’d put into place, despite the fight being composite, I think I’d mostly stray away from crossover scaling. If you don’t know, both of these series have had a lot of crossovers. For a little taste of how wacky this blog would get, allow me to expand on this for you.
There’s the Halloween Horror Nights stage plays for Bill and Ted which were performed at Universal Studios, which… well, they suck, but they feature Bill and Ted meeting basically every pop culture character you can think of, usually so they can make dick jokes. However, the appearances from other fictional characters weren’t officially sanctioned, and even got the production in some legal hot water. So, while these plays may have Bill and Ted cross paths with Star Wars or Lord of the Rings characters, I’m not going to be scaling them to their canon counterparts. I’ll only scale off of feats those parody characters perform elsewhere in the play.
There’s also that one Super Bowl commercial where Bill shows up to buy groceries at Walmart, and there’s like a dozen other pop culture characters thrown in: Flash Gordon, Marvin the Martian, the Guardians of the Galaxy, just whatever Walmart could get their hands on. Unlike the characters that show up in the Halloween plays, these appearances are all officially sanctioned, but it’s not like Bill does anything here to interact with them. He just gets groceries with his past self. So I’m sorry, he’s not getting Looney Tunes scaling.
For Back to the Future, there was a TV special in 1990 where Doc Brown teamed up with Doogie Howser, ET, and a bunch of other characters to talk about global warming. Sam Malone from Cheers is there, as is Frasier naturally, and a character that’s supposed to be the brother of Ghostbusters’ Egon Spengler shows up. And of course, you can’t forget about celebrity cameos like Will Smith, Donna Summer, Ice-T, Kid ‘n Play, Carl Sagan, Magic Johnson, and Bugs Bunny. It’s called The Earth Day Special, I think it’s still on YouTube. While Doc Brown appears in this, it’s not like he throws hands with Bill Cosby or Kermit the Frog, so, yeah while it’s neat you can’t really scale or anything.
Of course, there’s also the Back to the Future/Transformers crossover comic. Now, Transformers has a pretty well-defined multiverse where every individual series is split into its own universe, and thus we can infer this comic is set in its own self-contained continuity separate from any previous Transformers incarnation. So, while Doc Brown might whip up an energy gun capable of taking down Cybertronians, I’m not going to be scaling him to feats from other continuities such as the G1 cartoon or the Michael Bay movies, just ones shown by the robots in this four-issue miniseries.
And we’re not done yet. There’s another Walmart commercial where they threw together a bunch of licensed properties, specifically focusing on famous cars. There’s the Batmobile, there’s KITT, there’s the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo, there’s Bumblebee (another Transformers crossover, what?), Ecto-1 shows up too (wait, Ghostbusters again?), and of course, the DeLorean flies in at the end. Again, while it’s there and it’s next to all these other famous fictional automobiles, it doesn’t do anything to interact with any of them. So there’s no real opportunities for scaling.
Do you see why I want to do this blog? The lore goes deep, I tell you. Obviously though, with the breadth of material, I’d need more time to get it done than some of these other blogs.
Superman VS Captain Marvel (Golden Age)
I don’t like a lot of comic book matchups, since I’m just generally not that interested in Marvel or DC. I also find it kind of redundant to cover characters or verses that everybody has already talked to death about. Since Marvel and DC are the two most popular series in the versus debating sphere (well, DBZ might be on top actually) pretty much anyone who’d ever even want to read a versus blog already knows all the feats and scaling for every comic book character.
This one is a little different. I mean, even Golden Age stuff has been talked to death, but it’s been talked to death slightly less. If you don’t know, there’s been several different eras of comic books, and I’d only be pulling feats from that era for these characters. So, it’d be the original incarnation of Superman versus the original Fawcett version of Captain Marvel. It’s not a “boring same series match” as I’ve seen people call it, it’s two totally different universes. I’m going to be honest, I’m not exactly sure when the cut-off date is here, but I’m sure it’ll be easy to settle on if I actually started researching this.
I’ve heard that both of these characters have crossed over with whatever the current DC canon is (I can’t keep up with the terminology) as multiversal versions of their “mainstream” counterparts. However that works. And I’ve heard something about all of DC history being retconned or whatever so that everything is canon? I’m going to be honest, I don’t know about any of that crap, and I’d just stick to the classic comics anyways – no modern day additions, no multiverse crossover scaling, no weird canonical BS, just the Golden Age stuff.
The Brotherhood of Makuta VS The Decepticons
This one would take a really long time to write (there’d be over 100 named combatants to cover) but it’d be also be very, very cool. If you don’t get it, it’s basically the bad guys from one line of toy robots versus the bad guys from another line of toy robots in a massive army battle. I’d be specifically featuring the version of the Decepticons from the Transformers Animated continuity, for a number of reasons. Mainly that it’s likely the most even match for the Makuta, it’s less talked about than other Transformers continuities, and it’s also the most feasible for a single researcher (me) to cover.
I’d also have a number of stipulations in place. First off, backstabbing wouldn’t be a factor. We’d assume both factions are working together as cohesive units, though they’re not going to be pulling off outlandish hypothetical strategies they’ve never actually performed. They’d be hampered by the same issues in communication as usual, so the ability of each faction to strategize as a unit would still be important, but there’d be no threat of Starscream turning on Megatron, or Icarax and Teridax coming to blows. Otherwise this would just descend into total chaos.
Second, I think I’d have to leave out a few feats/forms just so this isn’t a total wash for one side or the other. I don’t know this for sure, but I’ve heard there’s some MFTL galaxy crossing feats in Transformers Animated. If those were included, then yeah the Makuta just get torn to shreds before the thought “we’re boned” can even pass through their minds. I don’t think I’d speed equalize things – maybe I’ll do that, I don’t know – but just for the sake of having some kind of argument and not having the whole blog be a total waste of time, I’d ignore those galaxy crossing speed feats. I’d make note of them, and acknowledge that the Decepticons should realistically just stomp if they were included, but then go on with the analysis with them excluded.
And then on the other hand, if I included Teridax in the body of the Great Spirit Robot, a planet-sized robot capable of destroying stars and traversing vast cosmic distances, yeah I’d say that’s not fair to the Decepticons. So I’d cover it, but I wouldn’t take that into account while writing the verdict, even if its technically the final, most powerful form Teridax takes in the story. Cause, y’know, this is all just for fun at the end of the day, it’d be boring for the verdict to just be “Decepticons blitz gg” or “GSR claps gg.”
There’s other things like that which I’d want to iron out when laying down the rules. Like, would the Decepticons get previous associates like Lockdown in their ranks? Would the Makuta get the Shadow Takanuvas or some of the Rahi they’ve controlled in the past? What would I do about long deceased characters that only show up in flashbacks, or characters who defected from their faction, like the Toa Hagah or Brutaka? What about one-off items or upgraded versions of characters? Well, I’ll cross that space bridge when I get there.
Deciding what sources to use for each side would also be a process in and of itself. Both series have a surprising amount of ancillary material (there’s a bunch of Transformers Animated children’s activity books I doubt are scanned online, as an example) but I guess I’d just use everything I can scrounge up and just point out feats drawn from potentially non-canon sources. Probably the most fair way of doing things. I wouldn’t dip into other incarnations of the series, though. So, no G1 or Michael Bay stuff for the Animated Decepticons, and no G2 stuff for the G1 Makuta.
Gipsy Danger VS Kong
Gonna be honest, the connections here are kinda thin, but the characters are cool enough that I don’t really care. It’s an American giant robot versus an American giant monster, both from 2010s movie franchises produced by Legendary Entertainment (this is specifically the Monsterverse version of Kong). Both characters fight monsters that come from below to protect humans. It’s not complicated or super thematic, but both characters seem like they’d be fun to talk about, and I mean, come on. It’s a giant ape fighting a giant robot, what about that isn’t cool?
I’ve always liked matchups where it’s not just like, two similar characters, but two characters that would naturally be adversaries to one another. So instead of a vampire fighting another vampire, I’d rather see a vampire fighting a werewolf, or a vampire fighting a vampire hunter, something like that. Kaiju versus kaiju would be fun, but kaiju-slaying robot versus kaiju, that’s a bit more interesting to me.
As for how long this would take to research… probably not that long. I think it might be the shortest out of all these matchups. Pacific Rim in particular hasn’t been very heavily researched. I would probably just go through everything, even though I know Gipsy Danger isn’t in the sequel movie or the spinoff anime series – there’s probably still some scaling you can do, or some additional information to be found. There’s also novelizations of both movies, a handful of comics and graphic novels, and a few video games. The Monsterverse is pretty similar in scope, just with a bunch of mobile game crossovers thrown in. I’d do composite on both sides, with the solidly canon stuff given more weight, and no crossover scaling taken into account.
So those are your options. There’s also the option to shill me a matchup of your own, so I can get some ideas for future posts. Maybe if I like it enough, or if it’s shilled enough, I’ll make it the next blog instead.
Yet Another VS Blog 