r/whowouldwin • u/Verlux ​ • May 05 '25

Event The Great Debate Season 16 Round 3!!!

Rules

Out of Tier Rules

  • For Out of Tier requests, simply ping myself and/or Chainsaw__Monkey and state your case for why you believe someone's combatant is out of tier, then proceed with the debate as per normal. We will evaluate that request individual of the debate itself and make our decision in judgments. Reminder: the Head Judges maintain the right to DM any user we believe to be skirting OoT lines and make our own OoT accusation, with said user having 48 hours to defend themselves.

Battle Rules

  • Speed will not be equalized for this tier.

  • All combatants are aware of the basics of their allies' combat abilities but are in the blind on their opponents (unless they have canon knowledge of said person via sharing a fictional universe)

  • Battleground:

[*"The Parthenon is a former temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, that was dedicated to the goddess Athena. The Parthenon is 45 feet tall, with an interior chamber that is 98' x 63' and a total area of 240' x 112'. For our purposes, the Parthenon has been fully restored, meaning the interior chamber is enclosed and contains a statue of Athena.

The arena of Great Debate Season 16 AKA Wonder Woman is the fully restored Parthenon.

Of note:

  • For our purposes, the total arena is Athenian Acropolis, which is 7.5 acres. This area cannot be left by participants. The area extends into the sky ~400 meters
  • Participants start inside the Parthenon interior chamber, on opposite sides.
  • The chamber walls are normal stone walls, and thus extremely destructible to participants; however, the columns of the Parthenon have the middle 80% made of untamperable WhoWouldWinium, making them detachable from the building but still usable as a weapon by the sufficiently strong.
  • The statue of Athena is behind the "team 1" side start. Destruction of this statue will make Wonder Woman very angry and substantially reduce her restraint.
  • Recreation of the Parthenon interior for reference
  • Recreation of the Parthenon front exterior

Opponents will start 90ft across from each other, in the central chamber of The Parthenon. Teammates are spaced 10ft apart from one another.

*All numbers are rough approximations and may not stand up to pixel calcing.

Submission Rules

  • Tier: Must be able to win an unlikely victory, draw/near draw, or likely victory against Wonder Woman in the conditions outlined above. All entrants will be bloodlusted against Wonder Woman, meaning they will act fully rationally and put down their opponent in the quickest, most efficient manner possible regardless of morality, utilizing any and all possible techniques/tactics/attacks if necessary. The bloodlust does not give any foreknowledge of Wonder Woman or his capabilities.

Debate Rules

  • Rounds will last approximately 5 and a half day days, hopefully from Monday until Saturday at noon of each week of the tourney; there is a 48 hour time limit both on starting (we do not care who starts, you and your opponent can figure that out) AND on responses, AND ADDITIONALLY each user MUST get in two responses or else be disqualified. If one user waits until the very last minute to force this rule to DQ their opponent without any forewarning to their opponents or the tournament supervisors, they will be removed from this tournament, no exceptions.

  • Format for each round: the one to go first gets an Intro + 1st Response, their opponent replies in kind, then both get a 2nd response, then a 3rd response in a back-and-forth style, and a closing statement individual of one another that can be posted any time after both 3rd responses are complete. FOR THIS ROUND, EACH DEBATER'S RESPONSES MUST CONSIST OF NO MORE THAN ONE FULL 15K CHARACTER-LONG REDDIT COMMENT FOR THE FIRST RESPONSE, AND 20K CHARACTERS FOR EACH FOLLOWING RESPONSE!!! You are allowed an intro post as stated above, which can include basic feats, of up to 5000 characters, but no arguments or comparisons may be made in comparison to the opponent.

  • Rounds will either be a full 3v3 Team Match, or 1v1 single matches. 1v1 matches are determined by randomization. Match format will switch every round, with Team Matches always followed by single matches, and vice versa.

Brackets Here

Determined by mod abuse, the first round shall be:

1v1 Individual Matches

Pick 1 vs Pick 1

Pick 2 vs Pick 2

Pick 3 vs Pick 3

With the top person in each bracket match-up being the left-side pick

Round 3 Ends Sunday May 11th, 12:00 CST

Special Note: Don't forget that combatants are spaced apart based on the reach of their striking capabilities. If you have a 10 foot long spear pointed at the Tier Setter, you start with the tip of the spear 10 meters away from him; if you are riding a giant monster, you start with the end of the monster's arms/shoulders/head at the 10 meter away point, etc etc.

Links to:

Tier Setter Page

Sign Ups

Round 1

Round 2

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u/Kirbin2 May 07 '25

Madalan vs Superman

Intro

I don't think this is a complicated fight in any way, both of the combatants are basically just straight up bricks with an energy attack on the side. As a result of the simplicity of both of them, I think it's fairly easy just to look at what they do and come to the conclusion that Superman is just going to get smashed into paste. I have no idea what advantage he has here, he is clearly hitting at a fraction the strength, he rarely actually uses a speed that is lower than the madalans anyways, and most of his feats just plain suck.

To like, what? Even the "good" Superman feats are buildings falling down and making huge dust clouds, they're not exactly comparable.

Madalans Are Just Better

The main boon on my side here is that the madalan have extremely consistently high damage output, on top of their extraordinary speed, both of these are clearly well above what Superman is accomplishing.

They just constantly are performing actions that so much more impressive than whatever it is that Superman is doing. Genuinely, what feat is comparable to these? The absolute highest end feat on Superman's RT is this one. An outright worse version of what the madalan is pulling off in a much better interaction, given that Superman and Zod both had dozens of meters to build up moment and charge at each other for what amounts to damage considerably lower than a punch.

This is all without even mentioning that this is a restricted form, and the madalan can power itself into a form that is explicitly even more destructive. And when in that state it gains access to more abilities, pushing or pulling from a distance, speeding up it's blows, launching gravity wells, when I already feel that even without these things, it is already so advantaged in the fight.

Subparman

The main difference here is that most of Superman's feats are practically nothing, whether they're just him not trying very hard or not the fact of the matter is the average level of output here has such a massive difference. I'm not talking about just collateral, I'm talking about whatever this is even supposed to be, genuinely, what is the comparison here? You could take half of the feats in the RT and they're worse than any given movement from the madalan, and it's not as if he's never hurt by anything lesser, he is regularly staggered and obviously damaged by blows that are so clearly weaker than what my character is outputting.

Even looking at the top end stuff, which is frankly only a tenth of his feats in general, he just doesn't stand up:

In terms of speed, is there a single moment where Superman fights in a way that is actively abusing speed?

  • This practically the singular scene of him being fast and he only even starts trying to do that after a different fast person appears, he would not even think to do it otherwise despite how much it would benefit him, and this is still slow compared to the madalan!

Conclusion

A madalan literally just beats Superman to death, there is nothing complex about it. They are much stronger, much faster, and actively dedicated to being lethal, Superman holds zero advantages. I don't think this fight lasts any longer than the time it takes a madalan to strike a handful of times, I see no way for Superman to contend with their level of physicals.

4

u/Kirbin2 May 07 '25

All Might vs Garou

Introduction

All Might's physical strength is not only massively outclassing Garou's own, it's well above anyone Garou has ever interacted with. He has no precedent for dealing with this level of strength, and has struggled against opponents of this type in the past.

While Garou's own strikes are nowhere this, and thus nowhere near enough to overcome All Might's durability which can easily take being slammed through several buildings.

All Might is Much Stronger.

Garou has never dealt with someone even half as strong as All Might, his casual displays of strength would be totally overwhelming for Garou, whose fighting style revolves around deflecting attacks so he can deal counters, except:

There's nothing that indicates that Garou has the durability to take blows from All Might, yet his fighting style would put him in a position where avoiding that is practically impossible. Garou needs to land an incredible amount of blows to overcome All Might's durability, and broadly the way he fights is to stand still and attack in rapid succession while relying on his technique to deflect blows. In this case, the reflection doesn't work, and standard blows, are just not going to do much damage against someone as tough as All Might.

My opponent's strategy is going to functionally to rely on Garou's high level of skill to try and invalidate whatever disadvantages he holds in the fights, but the fact of is that All Might doesn't really have to engage with that mode. The most equivalent fight to this one in the series just shows that:

It's not to say that Garou never dodges, it's just evidently not a priority in his strategy. Broadly, he avoids attacks that are piercing, heat, immobilizing, he doesn't avoid attacks that he thinks he can reflect.

Garou is Iffy.

Garou has several factors working against him in this fight, primarily that a lot of his speed is tied up in applications that aren't a general speed but closer to "being really good at doing this specific thing."

The vast majority of his speed feats are focused on narrow dodges, small movements, deflection, etc. Garou isn't dodging anything by body lengths because he's Mr. Skill, everything is a minor graze at best, but this puts him in a case where I have to question how fast he actually is. He has fast hands, but does that really help him against All Might?

If "just run straight at him and overwhelm his skill with force" worked previously despite that person being both far, far, slower and weaker than All Might, what stops All Might from just doing the very same thing? He has more than enough power to break through Garou's skill, and his raw movement speed is high enough that I don't know how Garou's "stand-still and deflect" is going to be anywhere close to effective.

There's also the fact that Garou isn't going to use lethal attacks against a human opponent, he kills zero people throughout the series and actively avoids using lethal styles against people that can't take the hits. As a result of that, the only potential way for Garou to get through All Might's durability is going to go utterly unused.

Conclusion

Garou's strategy just doesn't work against All Might, he simply brute forces his way through Garou's martial arts through methods we've already seen happen. All Might is overwhelming powerful, tough, and can cross huge distances at in moments, he's just going to rush down and overwhelm Garou.

2

u/feminist-horsebane May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25

Introduction

While Kirbin's team is forced to rely on low end interpretations, incompetence in his enemies, or just plain luck to push a win condition, Team 5BB can simply rely on speed and skill.

Alita has ample ways to put down Sukuna, Supermans' initial blitz alone puts Madalan in a terrible situation at best, and Garou's every hit does damage that All Might cannot interact with.

Alita vs. Sukuna

Alita will have ample opportunities to hit Sukuna before Sukuna has a single chance to hit Alita.

Sukuna cannot withstand Alita's offense.

Kirbin argues extensively that Sukuna only needs to land one blow on Alita- how many blows are we imagining Alita needs? How many times can Sukuna take a plasma attack or vibrational attack to the brain, or blows that crater massive amounts of earth to the temple, or stone slicing cuts through the head?

It's not like Sukuna's offense is anything that Alita can't handle.

The main metric through which Sukuna is argued to tag Alita is "she'll let him because she won't understand what he can do, like she let Caerula".

  • Sukuna does not look like a human the way Caerula does, he has multiple arms and random mouths coming out of him. Caerula was able to tag Alita because she is a precog who perceives time as a standstill in relation to automatic fire. Sukuna has no comparable mechanism to bypass Alita's skill and speed.
  • Sukuna's power system is unconventional, but what he does with that power system is just throwing ranged attacks and unskilled jabs. These are not such mind blowingly bizarre techniques that Alita will be dumbfounded by their existence.
  • Conversely, how does Sukuna understand what Alita is? Alita is a space age cyborg from 2584 AD, and Sukuna comes from an era that predates the printing press. No one in JJK moves in the way Alita does, particularly not if they lack cursed energy.

Sukuna cannot keep up with Alita's speed or skill, he relies on getting insanely lucky to even interact with her, and he can't resist her attacks in any meaningful capacity.

Conclusion

  • Sukuna is extremely easy to abuse a speed and skill disadvantage against, and he relies on simply getting lucky to land blows.
  • In the context of fighting a high rate of fire with a myriad of esoteric attacks and building busting blows, Sukuna is not durable whatsoever.
  • Any notion of "Sukuna is unfamiliar to Alita" is far more dangerous to Sukuna than the inverse.

Superman vs. Madalan

Superman blitzes the Madalan from the starting distance, initiating a grapple that the Madalan cannot escape.

The Madalan categorically cannot and will not evade this grapple, once they have been grappled they lack any way to escape or dodge attacks, and they lack the durability to withstand those attacks on any meaningful timeframe.Even if the Madalan counter attacked, it wouldn't matter. Though Madalans feats initially look impressive, any actual analysis of them tells us that Kirbin is overselling.

Kirbin cooks up an interpretation of Superman wherein he's drastically weaker by essentially posting a bunch of feats that happen to not have super collateral. This is a standard of proof that would cook Madalan just as hard.

2

u/feminist-horsebane May 09 '25

A running charge from Madalan only causes collateral that I would be embarrased to post in Spider-Man tier. If we judge this on the collateral alone like Kirbin does, the result is that Madalan sucks ass. * Most of the antifeats dumped for Superman are in his literal first ever fight, where he gets jumped in a 2v1 by more skilled peers, and still wins with minimal damage. The rest are from fighting Zod and Doomsday, who are similarly peers or stronger he ends up beating or drawing with. In virtually every feat posted, the result is that Superman just gets up and wins with no meaningful damage. * It's argued that Superman doesn't "use his speed"- Superman blitzes people literally all of the fucking time, I don't think he is once out sped in the entirety of his series, he just is normally fighting people at his own tier of speed. Conversely, Madalan has a very literal "speed things up" mode that it doesn't use even when fleeing for its life, the same way it doesn't use the Space Plate because it doesn't like to..

In general- Madalan is in tier based on being "vaguely weaker than WW", whereas Superman is in tier based on being stronger but less skilled. This de-facto creates a situation wherein Superman can take advantage of Madalan's tier status, but Madalan cannot do the same.

  • WW is defined as being able to bust tanks, cause medium sized buildings to collapse, shatter mountain peaks, and lift in the neighborhood of 500 tons.
  • As shown- Superman busts larger vehicles, causes larger buildings to collapse, similarly shatters mountain peaks, and lifts thousands of tons.

Superman is comfortably as strong or stronger than WW is. This means that either he is defacto stronger than Madalan under Kirbins interpretation, or that Kirbin's tier status is dishonest and her credibility in this debate is shot.

Conclusion

  • Supermans opening blitz+grapple+ram combo is not something that will be avoided, and it completely negates the Madalans ability to dodge or escape while doing damage they can't be shown to take.
  • Kirbin does not understand the character she is running, and as a result is barely even running a character. Her feats are misinterpreted and nowhere near as good as posited and are not overwhelmingly threatening to Superman.
  • The degree of antifeat spamming done here creates a standard that damns Madalan far more than Superman.

Garou vs. All Might

Garou is incomparably faster and more skilled than All Might. I mean this not in the sense of "Garou's feats are better", but in the sense of "All Might literally does not have feats to compare to Garou."

Kirbin argues largely "Garou must outskill someone stronger than he is", as if this is an absurd proposition. In reality, it's something that Garou does all the time, whereas All Might has never encountered an opponent even vaguely analogous to Garou.

Garou's offense is lethal.

Garou is taking far more actions than All Might is, is moving at speeds that All Might cannot move at, and is using those speed to hammer All Might with blows targetting his vitals and joints while predicting his moves.

All Mights defense is that he is supposedly so much stronger than Garou that Garou cannot compete whatsoever.

All Might instead relies on mimicing a specific interaction between Garou and Darkshine to land hits. The problems with this are:

Keep in mind- Garou can fight with a shattered rib cage and withstands blasts that decimate buildings worth of concrete and take blows that decimate full floors of buildings in weaker forms. All Might can shatter his midsection and Garou will keep fighting.

Conclusion

  • While Garou regularly overcomes strength disparities, All Might has no reference for overcoming a disparity in skill and speed as great as he faces here.
  • Garou's piercing attacks are obviously deadly to All Might, his redirection is something All Might has no counterplay to, and the simple method of "hit him a bunch" has no reason to not be effective.
  • All Might's only hope of landing even a singular attack requires Garou to act stupid.