The Daily Debater(Back in Business!!)

@masterbuster666@sirfizzwhizz@asgardianweapon @thor-parker

@darthor@hellothere5432@ouroborik@battle123axe@geekryan

@rac95@frozen@mike_strike10@sirkaboom15@blackspidey2099

@godlyshinigami@pyrofn@kangconquers@terry2012@supremegeneration@higherpower

@kevd4wg@punyaamrit@kaijuking@killerboi@ultraphoenix@maestromage

@chronicplane@thevoidofdeath@themadtitan6000

@teefurtree@majinblackheart@princesscadenza@noone1996

@del_torro@jashro44@beatboks1@maalik@lettsplay10

@god_spawn@sweatboy@koays

@byondeon@cheatcode@themidnightking@xthemanofmightx

@blackpantherisb@novaprime2@vinervvvvv@eredin12

@achillesspawn@death4bunnies@deadmanwalkin@darthjhawk@kurt_saulenne

@manofmanynames2@killianduclark

@slash03@life_without_progress@destinyman75@mooty_pass

@thealtone003@americanspeeddemon@sirkaboom15@mr-yes@xebec @italian007

Here we have an interesting Star Wars gauntlet by @ieatnettles. One that appeals to many different types of fanbases. It seems to be time to match SW against a more expansive audience.

Now, we have a fun matchup for our anime fans out there. @sixpathsofcapra puts two very versatile characters against each other,. With how popular JJK has been on this site, it only makes sense to get some people in on this conversation.

Maybe I don't get it, but Viners love their Halloween themed battles, especially at this time of the year, and this is one of them. @kreigastartis represents Riddick, Vin Diesel's 2013 movie version, opposite to @jaylinfreeman representing a Halloween classic in Michael Myers. The CaV just started, with the latter user having made their first move. Check it out for more!

This is a battle between warriors, a pyrokinetic soldier and a mech, from two distinct anime franchises, Fire Force and Gundam. Arthur Boyle is represented by @killerqueen, while RX-0 Unicorn is represented by @chris2kzombieki, who opened the debate less than a week ago. Battles between man and technology are always interesting to me, and as far as I can tell, with no prior knowledge on either opponent, this is one difficult machine to take on. Keep in touch if you like the concept too.

@geekryan's Corporate Wars Tournament hasn't been successfully held since 2020, but it's finally back! One of the most intriguing, fun and diverse tourneys on ComicVine is already underway, with the six matches of the first set including scenarios such as a hostage rescue, a search and destroy situation, and protecting an NPC. The teams of the participants, most of them well known in the Battle forums, are equally inventive, combining characters from verses like Mortal Kombat, DC, Marvel, Avatar, FMA, Harry Potter and so on. Creativity in team making, careful planning and matchups all factor in to eventually decide a final winner. All debates have started and the links can be found in the final post of the above page (#287). Tourneys are particularly easy for readers to follow because there's a set schedule, so make sure to not miss out!

Wow! Spider-Man has many versions, but I decided as a minor detour from my epic disrespect threads that I would instead cover a fairly unique and fairly strong edition of the character that many people simply do not know about. I do a good job of explaining who the character is and why he should be respected; nothing more or less needed, really.

MCU Gorr may have been of questionable quality in his debut movie. That said this RT arguably did even more justice to the character than anywhere in that movie, so there. @justneedhelp definitely didn't need help making this any better than it could've been, that's for sure. Another solid RT out from him.

Another epic mystic RT by the always on-form @wastelandman once again. This time he's covered SEVEN characters at once in the form of the Salem Seven, a fairly obscure villain group that mostly got random appearances despite starting off as a potential spin-off from appearing in Fantastic Four comics. A great group of mid-tiers indeed.

Lore. It's a four letter word on its own, but means so much more in more vague and mystical circles. The Elder Scrolls is a verse that people have been able to scale insanely detailed chains around using the power of novel statements to basically make everyone there at least universal if not more. It is the existence of threads like these then that focus purely on the physical that will provide some tangible sanity to those looking from the outside in. @bendtome

This is a battle that, as classic Marvel would say, is SO TITANIC, SO INCREDIBLE, SO SENSES-SHATTERING, that even though it takes up the entirety of this issue, it actually takes up a good chunk of issue 14 and continues into issue 16. But issue 15 is the bulk of it and is the most entertaining. Like it? Go buy it and the other issues, of course!

The creator: Jack Kirby wrote and drew the issue.

The participants:

• Ikaris, chief warrior of the Eternals, capable of various energy beams, significant superhuman strength and a nearly indestructible body, flight, and (although we don’t see them here) various psychic and matter-manipulation powers.

• Sersi, the Eternal that Circe of the Odyssey was supposedly based on, who also possesses all of Ikaris’s powers but focuses especially on matter manipulation and illusion casting.

• Makkari, also an Eternal, possessing lightning speed.

• Cosmic Hulk, who…was a college science project based on the in-universe comics version of the Hulk gone wrong? (This reference to the Hulk comic "character," and even the fact that it's a Hulk robot instead of the actual Hulk, was due to the fact that the Eternals series, at this time, was only tangentially part of the rest of the Marvel universe, and was playing footsie with the idea of being in a universe slightly removed from it, a concept that now seems hard to grasp to modern readers, given that the Celestials, which were introduced in this series, are now so integral to Marvel cosmology).

Basically Cosmic Hulk is a robot who can absorb cosmic energy to become close to the Hulk’s own strength and durability. In this case, he got power from the Eternals' Uni-Mind.

We join the battle in mid-fight. Ikaris busily blasts away at Cosmic Hulk while making sure he has time to make misogynistic comments about Sersi’s easily-snapped neck.

Sersi goes for the smart attack, and tries to one-shot Cosmic Hulk by changing him into stone made of “heavy density molecules” (Kirby was always big on these pseudo-scientific terms). It works!

Until it doesn’t. Cosmic Hulk somehow changes himself back into his normal state. Ikaris, always a jerk, throws off another line showing how little he thinks of Sersi’s ability to take care of herself.

Of course, this plays out in reality as Sersi is quickly captured by Cosmic Hulk.

Makkari (here spelled "Makarri") shows up in this hilarious ship, which dodges a spire that Cosmic Hulk throws at it.

Then Makkari takes the initiative and, in a nice move, rams Cosmic Hulk with the ship at great speed.

Cosmic Hulk returns the favor when he whiffs a punch at the ship but the shockwave that comes purely from the movement of his arm through the air knocks the Eternal ship back like a pinball.

Then in a funny moment, Ikaris, who got smacked pretty hard by the Cosmic Hulk a couple minutes ago, gets mobbed by a gaggle of reporters who want him to take just “one minute,” because he’s not busy or anything, to give them some play by play.

Sersi, meanwhile, continues to be the brains of the Eternals bunch, and has Cosmic Hulk on defense by surrounding him with fire and bizarre monsters.

But after telling her "Bravo," Ikaris decides it’s time to step in and, you know, put her down, MAYBE because as he says the fight is destroying the city, or just possibly because he is, as Sersi says, an “arrogant male” who can’t stand the fact that she’s actually affecting Cosmic Hulk and Ikaris isn’t.

At this point the army gets involved and Cosmic Hulk smashes some more of the city. I guess Ikaris was both misogynistic and correct about the collateral damage.

Ikaris decides to tell Sersi to leave again, this time backed up by Makkari, because it’s not like she was the only one doing anything useful here or anything. Then Zuras, the Zeus-like leader of the Eternals gets involved, and things move on to a conclusion in the next issue.

All told, this is a fun and absurd battle with a lot of goofy ‘70s social context (I didn't even include all the "alas, I am so weak" comments by Sersi). It shows that even a college-prank copy of the Hulk (granted, with a comic power boost...ok, there's a little more retconned backstory to it now) can walk all over a group of Eternals, who are no pushovers themselves. Jack Kirby’s art is, at this point in his career, pretty stylized, with some of the visceral impact of his art from the ‘60s but also an increasingly baroque set of graphic shorthands that can look pretty silly (and borrow as much from Roy Lichtenstein pop sensibility as Lichtenstein did from guys like Jack)--for instance:

His writing, like that in the more or less coeval Devil Dinosaur, is also full of eccentric ideas and bombastic dialog that simultaneously show that maybe Stan Lee was not a totally useless part of their team back in the ‘60s (as Jack increasingly stipulated around this time), but they're also are pretty entertaining to read.

@masterbuster666@sirfizzwhizz@asgardianweapon @thor-parker

@darthor5432@ouroborik@battle123axe@geekryan

@rac95@frozen@mike_strike10@sirkaboom15@blackspidey2099

@godlyshinigami@pyrofn@kangconquers@terry2012@supremegeneration@higherpower

@kevd4wg@punyaamrit@kaijuking@killerboi@ultraphoenix@maestromage

@chronicplane@thevoidofdeath@themadtitan6000

@teefurtree@majinblackheart@princesscadenza

@del_torro@jashro44@beatboks1@maalik@lettsplay10

@god_spawn@sweatboy@koays

@byondeon@cheatcode@themidnightking@xthemanofmightx

@blackpantherisb@novaprime2@vinervvvvv@eredin12

@achillesspawn@death4bunnies@deadmanwalkin@darthjhawk@kurt_saulenne

@manofmanynames2@killianduclark

@slash03@life_without_progress@destinyman75@mooty_pass

@thealtone003@americanspeeddemon@sirkaboom15@mr-yes@xebec @italian007

@blackspidey2099 made this interesting battle between Utgard-Loki and Utgard-Thor vs Phoenix and Legion that has a lot of intense and interesting back and forth, even if it is largely unrelated to the topic. I also appreciated Raj's Lance Bastro-style chaining of mythological/story references, in this case about the Utgards instead of Cytorrak. Come for the Utgard, stay for the getting into the weeds of the Phoenix, then come back for the Utgards again?

This battle by @princex is the most in-depth anime battle that came up in the last two weeks, busting out a quick 7 pages of what seemed like mostly reasonable argument along with the expected comments about people feeling like they lost their soul reading the other person's post. There's also some interesting discussion about translation as sometimes comes up in manga.

Obviously I'm going to endorse all of these given they have immensely high quality debaters involved and most already have a post or so done: check them out if you want! We are currently at the quarter-finals and things are picking up well if I do say so myself.

New threads include some really cool mixes of new and old talent that I'm proud to have on board for the rebooted version.

Emperorthanos has been a huge help with just general upkeep and whatnot, so I want to give a big thanks to him here as well.

With that said, please do enjoy the new threads and make sure to vote when they are done!

For this one I wanted to mix things up and discuss something a little bit different...

Of the Avatar fandom on CV, two that have stood out have been ANTHP and Arcus1, namely in regards to their standing in the community. The idea of them starting and finishing a CAV (especially ANTHP, who's been off and on for a good long while) while interesting didn't seem totally realistic, to be fair to them.

Really, who would've thought it could have been done? And yet, it's been finished all the way to voting.

Usually we'd have to deal with delays (which, to be fair, this did have!) but it's gotten to the finishline and as a result became a very obvious candidate to stick on here from the possible selections at the time.

Massively suggest reading through this one in particular; surprising amounts of nuance to be had.

Battling for the last featured spot here was this matchup if only because of the interesting contrast between the two teams given it's a Batman/Batman battle!

At the very least I think Chris' post to start off is interesting enough in regards to what he's putting on the table here. I'm not yet convinced by Arkham scaling (especially with the nebulous lore recently for that lad) but it is interesting to see if it can be applied in such a way that it actually looks legit compared to comic scaling. It's a interesting test and I hope it can pass etc

Do give this a watch as well if you can.

An Awesome RT of a fearsome and iconic character. About time this dude gets some respect! One of the very best RTs from one of the very best, @professorrespect

The Shadow King is a psychic, multiversal entity with a complicated backstory, including several retcons. Although his first host was Amahl Farouk, a telepath with ties to Storm and Charles Xavier, he has taken on other hosts and has been host-less as well. He has been a recurring villain for the X-Men and a huge threat to the world on several occasions. There's a good reason why many of the X-Men's most powerful psychics, including Charles Xavier, have almost succumbed to his immense telepathic power.

This RT is totally complete, detailing all of Shadow King's feats with hosts and while host-less, as well as demonstrating Amahl Farouk's own telepathic powers sans the Shadow King using him. Current, detailed, and accurate, which are all of the essential parts of a great respect thread.

RT from @PsiViners319.

Although his most common foe has always been the Hulk, the psychic alien Xemnu has had dealings with Dr Strange and Moondragon as well. Equipped with physicals capable of matching the Hulk, telekinesis, telepathy, and hypnosis, Xemnu has proven himself to be a threat to psychics and non-psychics as well, with several attempts at controlling all of the Earth.

An excellently formatted, updated, and complete respect thread for a cool character that deserves more attention. It also does a great job at clearing up the differences between Xemnu's hypnosis and his telepathy.

Another RT from @PsiViners319.

Last week a New Forum Board was created called "Feats and Analysis", the forum has been slowly picking up and I wanted to write a few words about this new board. As I'm sure many of you have noticed in the past few months the Gen Discussion Board was mostly filled with a lot of battle-adjacent threads. Threads that are not actual battles but are related to versus debating in some way. For a time we had the all-encompassing Can X Do This thread but that wasn't used as often and people still create these threads just in another forum. As mods, we discussed the idea of creating a separate Board for these threads something we have seen in other forums such as KmC and Spacebattles. The main goal was to get Gen Discussion to be more focused on Media discussion aside from battles, while this new forum is for the threads that are related to battles but don't belong in the battle forum. An example of the types of threads that should be posted are "Can X Do This" threads, Power Scaling Threads, or even just discussing new feats. The hope is that the forum starts to go grow and become active enough that we can have lengthy discussions. I would like to thank Dtoast for making it even possible, he has been an active staff member who made this change even possible.