Captier America Semi-Finals

[u/IAmNotAChinaboo]

UPDATED BRACKET HERE

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Round 1 + Results

Round 2 + Results

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Due to some chicanery, this round will last until Saturday 29th, and will be locked at 12:00 AM, MST.

[u/feminist-horsebane]

Opposing Team

Death Knight

Death Knight's statblock just isn't impressive. He can strike with force somewhat comparable to Cap+ "has a sword", but has far weaker durability, and his speed is outweighed by his lumbering size making him too difficult of a target to miss.

• Skill: Death Knights speed is a wash. The massive distances he has to move counterbalances it to the point he is functionally no easier to hit and no easier to avoid hits from than a regular human being. Swords like DK's also represent an inherent decrease in rate of fire, as the need to cross far more feet per attack arises.
• Offense: This striking feat you post is, like you have pointed out, difficult to replicate against my team due to factors like it using a leg and gravity as assistance. Zuko, Terminator, and Bucky have all taken force comparable. The feat for bisecting an armored knight is good, but not sufficient to get through Bucky's shield or Terminators superior armor.
• Durability: The only presented feat is a sword shattering. Sword steel is notoriously brittle, leading to swords snapping regularly with heavy use. Bucky destroys far more of a stronger material with a blow even before you add the force he can add with a shield. Terminator and Zuko both destroy large masses of stone, showing superiority to this.

Rook

Rook has versatile offense and is acrobatic, but many of his vectors of attack are straight up worthless, and his durability does not support him functioning in a fight long enough for him to reliably use an option that works in time, particularly when his durability does not consistently keep him from taking hits at either range or melee distance.

• Speed/Skill: People tag Rook with ranged attacks, even extremelytelegraphed ones, all the time. Even when he is avoiding fire, he's unable to counterattack, close distance, or defend in any way other than running. In the only presented instance of him posited as "dodging aim", the shooters are clearly just missing most of the time, with Rook stopping to pick up and throw a body while they fire, still not hitting.
• Offense:
  • The main thing proposed is electricity. Zuko tanks far more powerful lightning, Terminator can pull power cords out of his chest without issue, and Bucky has a shield with better electrical resistance than anything Rook can offer.
  • Rooks striking is extremely poor, and he uses it far too often for it to not be talked about. His best feat is launching a man with some vaguely heavy gear 10ft. This is an extremely weak striking feat for the tier, and it does not challenge my teams durability.
  • The energy sword can't get through Bucky's shield, and if it can only phase through electronics then it can't get around the layer of living flesh around Terminator either. Outside of the phasing technology, it's just a generic sword that can cut through metal, but can't penetrate Terminators plating or Bucky's shield.
• Durability: Blows like what Bucky dishes out with a downgraded arm send Rook reeling. Terminator and Zuko both destroy more material in spades. The heavier blow he takes would launch him far enough to just lose his space on the map.

Blue Marsallis

Blue largely benefits from fighting marines that act more like Crystal Lake teenagers than they do marines. Her durability is poor, her striking is poor, and her skill/speed is just misinterpretations of what's happening in her scans.

• Skill/Speed:
  • This feat is specifically the Marines not being able to shoot her because they are worried about friendly fire, with the narrator mentioning he's unable to get a clean shot. It's just fast in the initial moments because it has a surprise element.
  • In this feat meant to showcase how Blue specializes in running down multiple enemies at once, not a single person makes an attempt at attacking Blue. There's no reference for anyone even shooting at her. The closest is one person reloading before she eats their head. This is much more an antifeat for these marines sucking dong, like Marines in Alien always do, than a commentary on Blue's "skill".Even the tail "striking at unpredictable angles" scan is just her stabbing someone who isn't looking.
• Strength:
  • The only feat for Blue's strength is chipping off bits of armor that is meant to resist Xenomorph strikes. Xenomorphs are hardly consistently strong, and this armor clearly cannot be that good at actually protecting Marines, since Marines are killed by Xenomorphs all the time anyway.
  • Her piercing has no relevance to Terminator or Bucky's shield.
  • For how often she engages in grappling, her strength sucks. The only feat she has is pulling off a persons head, something not comparable to what Bucky scales to or what Terminator can put out.
• Durability: All that exists is scaling to a Xenomorphs striking strength, when that same creature is making her shriek in pain despite being her inferior in every way.

[u/Wapulatus → u/feminist-horsebane]

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Captier America Semi-Finals, Response 2

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The Ranged Fight

Team Darg's Offenses

Fem doesn't really engage with Rook's own ranged weapons and Blue's pulse rifle very much past arguing Zuko's electrical durability and Bucky's shield. Even this is suspect:

• In the feat where Zuko "tanks" lightning, he has the time to react to it and start the process of redirection for some time, and he still is left prone on the floor. Every feat where Zuko interacts with electricity he has time to react, recognize it as a threat, and focus.
  • Rook gives him none of these options. His Proto-Tool either fires energy shots with an electrical component that are not readily noticeable as "lightning", or he fires leg restraints Zuko obviously can't lightning redirect / uses a taser Zuko has no experience with dealing

Which leaves what fem did not engage with:

• Blue's rifle that pierces four inches of metal and four feet of concrete, very few members of fem's team have recourse to this, Terminator / Bucky are not argued as durable enough to take hits from it without severe damage to their robotic components and Zuko doesn't know what a gun is.
• Terminator is sent flying back and left prone by hits far below the metal warping attacks Rook dishes out with his blaster and wouldn't have the mind or ability to dodge. Zuko's durability is argued as stone-chipping to stone-with-no-collateral and he still would not recognize Rook's tool as a threat at go, leaving Bucky as the only character with the capacity to block the proto-blast hits via his arm or shield.

Some of this is just fem's style of argumentation, but I wanted to reiterate these to demonstrate that my team has ranged capabilities as well.

Team Fem Offenses

yea this is just Zuko

His argued AoE still is not consistent.

• He lobs visibly trackable individual fireballs that can be reacted to or dodged, even when he is surrounded by targets he fails to try to flame blast more than one at a time. This is far more consistent than him than any AoE argued by fem regardless of when the feat is pulled from chronologically
• Even in the few cases he flame blasts over a reasonably large area, he stands and waits to see the collateral of whatever blast he fires does like some RPG fighter. He doesn't fight dynamically and would be standing wide open to return fire from Blue's gun or Rook's blaster.

At best, Zuko is looking at hitting one of my team members with a ranged force vector that takes them off their feet while they are firing shots that outright down or kill him on the spot. At worst, they can be easily dodged by both mobile characters of my team and open Zuko to return fire he cannot take.

Team Darg's Defenses

My opponent attacks my team's ability to take ranged hits mostly through making claims that flat out do not address core context in the feats or opt hyperfocus on "lacks specific X feat".

Death Knight

Ballistics would very obviously be ineffective against it. Yes, it does not have a specific "is not pierced by gun" feat however it is obviously too large for guns to be an issue, has a large, ultra-durable shield, and does not care about being pierced for the most part.

• Death Knights are massive. A full overhead swing does not even reach to its midsection, it's easily 12+ feet in size.
  • A larger body means thicker flesh and bones - completely normal animals can have bullets stopped by bone/flesh, Grizzly bears can continue charging through point blank shotgun blasts Death Knight has the advantage of a larger size compared to these, alongside having flesh so durable metal shatters over it and being mostly covered in metal armor
• Undead do not care for being shot through the body. It has no essential organs, firing it through the chest will have no effect on it.
• Death Knight's tower sheild resists bullets by virtue of simply being a large and thick piece of metal. It is more resistant to being penetrated than steel with their own bodies being no less piercing resistant.
  • Terminator's best metal piercing feats are against car sheet metal and Bucky's guns cannot breach the cover of a car, which is laughably thin compared to any of Death Knight's cartoonishly thick armor or shielding. Here is a 3-quarter inch thick piece of steel completely blocking a variety of rounds up to a .50 cal, only failing against special armor-piercing rounds.

While some of this individually might merit some of fem's critiques, I think the combined attributes of "is hard to stab to steel piercing claws", "is large and covered in cartoonishly thick metal", and "cannot die to otherwise lethal damage" makes any kind of gunfire ineffective against it.

Blue

Fem misses a lot of context here.

• Blue is hurt by bullets from guns that pierce up to four inches of metal - 3/4s of an inch is sufficient to stop .50 caliber ammunition and even anti-tank weapons are more focused on dislodging vs. piercing through pieces of metal a twentieth to half as thick that pulse rifles fully pierce.
  • Even then, her armor ricochets these bullets if they don't hit her directly and shots to the skull or bone with these weapons fail to penetrate Xenomorphs
• The "jumping" here is likely the Xenomorph moving of its own accord, or just being startled - the important part is the rounds failing to penetrate and flattening over Xenomorph carapace.

Even in the limited "fail to pierce her from bad angles, do some damage on direct hits" sense being able to ricochet depleted uranium shots that pierce better than anti-tank weapons is way better than a minigun or assault rifle. And to add on top of this, Blue still grapplefucks a marine and kills them right after being shot by pulse rifle fire.

Rook

Rook is more than agile enough to dodge the gunfire, or more than resourceful enough to hind behind the 12 foot tall moving wall of metal the Death Knight give him. Fem gives a lot of arguments for how projectiles here and here are slowly tracking him, but:

• Terminator's only use of his minigun has him do slow sweeps that are highly choreographed and mechanical to a point where normal humans can cover large distances as he aims it
• Bucky is perfectly content with spending minutes in very easy to track cover-fire shootouts where he misses easy opportunities to land shots

Like yea maybe some of these feats are in part due to bad aim, but fem does not present any kind of argument for Bucky and Terminator's aim and what is given is arguably worse than what Rook dodges.

Rook also has very little available cover in most of his feats, while in this fight he's standing directly next to a 12-foot tall wall of metal that can shield him and stick to him on command.

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Team Fem's Defenses

Bucky

I hate to argue in this way specifically but I feel like the version of Bucky fem is running doesn't exist.

• Bucky is stipped to be working under HYDRA, being commanded to kill an enemy, but is also stipped to have Cap's shield as gear, alongside simultaneously holding his assault rifle with grenade launcher attachment, handguns, and knives
• During Winter Soldier, when Bucky was brainwashed by HYDRA, every instant he's holding or otherwise interacting with Cap's shield is after he has already abandoned his guns or while he's unarmed.

This swiss army knive version of Bucky as argued by fem isn't something that tangibly exists in the movies. If Bucky is argued to have Cap's shield, he is not peppering my team with assault rifle fire.

[u/Wapulatus → u/Wapulatus]

Continued

Even if it does exist, if Bucky has all this gear, fem has consistently argued Bucky's first thought on entering the battlefield is engaging with his rifle, something he uses both arms to fire.

• Bucky has no feasibly quick way to exchange his rifle for the shield (where is he even keeping the shield when not holding it, it's a looted weapon) and would be much more liable to try and block with his arm against bullets that penetrate up to four inches of steel which would ruin one of his arms or impacts well above those that leave him stunned for seconds.
• Obviously if he isn't turtling behind the shield Rook's electrical attacks hidden in what appears like sci-fi blasters threaten to one-hit KO him.

Bucky is in no position to leverage his shield offensively, and the combination of gear he's stipped to have is something that either doesn't exist or forces him to choose a lane that curbs his ranged offense or just gets him killed.

Terminator

This is pretty straightforward.

• He doesn't dodge and his argued feats are against rifles far, far weaker than Blue's super-penetrating scifi guns.
• He doesn't dodge and shots from Rook's blaster, while maybe not enough to put him down in one go, are more than enough to cause him to loose his footing and immediately cease being a ranged threat upon dropping his minigun.

Blue or Rook landing a shot on him makes half of fem's ranged argument fall apart, and the other half is on the shaky premise of Bucky's gear stipulations.

Ranged Summary

• My opponent's ranged win-conditions mostly hinge on claims which ignore context or put too much focus on one vector or avenue of attack.
  • Despite many claims putting forward the opposing team's ability to push forward a ranged offense, they are not claimed to have any kind of feasible defense against my team's ranged attacks.
• My team gets kills early on while taking only minor injuries or stunned fighters.

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The Melee Fight

• My team is more mobile and more capable of pushing forward their offenses. Fem's main attacks on this are all points that can be made on basically any fighter.

Team Darg Speed

Rook

"He gets tagged by slow attacks" is like, yeah, that will happen over the course of 80 animated episodes that he is in each but a couple of.

Zuko is a semi-recurring villain who becomes a more regular character in the last season over the course of 61 cartoon episodes and he suffers from similar:

• Fails to dodge projectile bending attacks that take several seconds to reach him, not putting up any kind of shields or dodging into an open door next to him
• Hit by easy to track waterbending attacks
• Tagged by swung flails
• Walks in a straight line and stands to physically parry and then still fail vs. slow rock attacks instead of dodging
• If you extend antifeats to other stat blocks, Zuko is downed by the blunt force of an arrow

Rook has better interactions with the same characters or similar attacks to what fem brings up - in more noteworthy fights where larger stakes are at play he's portrayed as a skilled and swift fighter and replicates the same "strikes many time under a second" feats Zuko holds.

I don't think Rook is ridiculously faster than Zuko or Bucky, however I will maintain he's still more maneuverable over larger distances.

Blue

The more relevant aspect of this feat is Blue being faster than other Xenomorphs while being more willing to leverage that speed - Xenomorphs trying to dodge attacks can evade close range fire from a more limited position and cover large distances while humans barely have any time to retaliate or respond.

Death Knight

Fem uses one screencap of my OOT defense claim as a complete dismissal of Death Knight's feats when my main arguments are that it strikes with speeds well within the tier.

All the speed feats I provided are it outspeeding humans despite its size, obviously being able to hack apart normal humans in the span of breaths and the like would be a noteworthy speed feat if it was performed by a normal-sized dude.

I don't think it is going to dodge hits, but it is more than capable of blocking with its thick metal shield as tall as itself and would not care about accrued damage regardless in ways that would make it easy to capitalize on and swing back on enemies.

Team Darg Offense/Durability

Rook

• Terminator will never have the opportunity to hit him before being bombarded by hits from Rook's blaster and is just too slow to catch him.
• Fem gets on Rook's case with him reeling from hits infight with Khyber compared to Khyber's striking but this is literally how Bucky interacts with weaker/comparable impacts, reeling before getting back into a fight, this even being true for Zuko
• This type of durability would obviously let him engage the opposing team with his sword, where he fights evenly with the aforementioned character leveraging his own weapon or taser, which he deploys against enemies very similar to Bucky

Rook's sword ought to work.

• Bucky's shield is a suspect item on the battlefield in general, and based on his litany of equipment that he more commonly uses as ran it's not a reliable defense against the electronics-disrupting weapon.
  • There's no real reason the sword wouldn't be able to pierce Terminator's flesh before disabling the machinery - fem supplies no feats of it being particularly piercing resistant. It would become abundantly obvious that Terminator is a robot within seconds of Blue or Rook firing on it.

Death Knight

Fem focuses on its main blunt force durability feat and again fails to address the mitigating factors of its size, resilience, and its sheild.

• This feat of tanking a sword shattering over it is absolutely not its "maximum", it's not moved, harmed, and hardly takes notice of the event. A theoretical attack that harms it would be leaps and bounds over this.
  • Swords can snap with extreme overuse, but they don't break into dozens of tiny fragments and the sword used by the knight is abnormally thick compared to the tiny width of normal swords
• Death Knight's shield is a giant wall of metal, as brought up earlier - Death Knight uses it defensively and it's shear size makes it so that Bucky or Terminator would just be chipping off parts of it with his strikes at best or just not at worst.
• As mentioned previously, Undead do not care about being physically harmed - even in the event where it trades blows with an opponent it will survive damage that kills the opponent.

This is relevant due to its metal armor bisecting sword swings.

• While I agree with fem that this wouldn't fully pierce Terminator or Bucky's arm it will at the very least do sufficient damage to prevent them from moving a limb.
• It certainly kills Zuko through his swords that he tries to use to block attacks which he is stipulated to be carrying one of.

Blue

this is going to just be rebuttals, on the last stretch of this response and want to get it out faster

Marines are killed by Xenomorphs all the time anyway.

PRAE armor is entirely unique to the book where Blue is from and doesn't exist anywhere else in the franchise, no other marines in the alien franchise use it.

Xenomorphs are hardly consistently strong

I supplied like 4 "dents metal" feats of comparable potency from across multiple book series and movies.

While some stuff is, yeah, not very consistent, I feel like this is something pretty easy to make a claim out of.

While denting may not be as great as breaching, the quantity and thickness of metal they interact with is much greater than Terminator and Bucky's feats.

Piercing

Bucky is limited to his arm for real defense in a grapple after being tackled, something his defensive, parrying style of CQC has him liable to get grabbed in.

Being able to shred metal is noteworthy even against Terminator, whose arm has hydraulics that, if damaged, cause it to freeze up - partially piercing him can down him with multiple hits.

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/u/feminist-horsebane

[u/feminist-horsebane → u/Wapulatus]

Introduction

Key Points:

• There's a distinct difference between my teams stats and Dargs that is getting glossed over in favor of fancy terms and niche arguments like "spot mobility". Compare the weak end of my teams offense,a blow from Bucky that doesn't have the shield, to the high end of Darg's defense, a blow that shatters a comparable amount of metal. Darg's team is thoroughly lacking in durability in a way that makes protracted fights untenable.
• Virtually none of Darg's team is actually fast in a way that matters. Rook is tagged just as often as not and is mostly argued to just somersault around, Blue is tagged by generic marines and space aliens who she should be far faster than, and Death Knight straight up isn't even argued to dodge in favor of just puttering around with a big piece of metal.
• None of Darg's characters are actually likely to engage in a ranged battle; the standard used to suggest Bucky isn't a competent shooter of "threw a punch at someone charging him with an indestructible shield before shooting at them" is a standard that destroys Blue and Rook several times over.

Team Gonna Kiss Hyrule Straight On The Lips

Initiative/Ranged Fight

Arguing from the point of view of "Darg's team immediately starts shooting" and "they are able to do this before my team can", two things that aren't actually true, we can see that this would still end with the opposition being defeated.

Let's say Blue and Rook start shooting first.

• Bucky is able to block energy projectiles from closer ranges and faster parties than Rook with his shield. Rook's blasts have a tendency to rebound when blocked by shields, incapacitating him. Blue's bullets similarly are blocked by the shield, and she lacks any feats of shooting someone as fast as Bucky or Zuko.
• Zuko slaps projectiles stronger than Rooks out of the air from closer ranges while advancing and is fine- and Blue similarly lacks any feats of being able to tag a party like Zuko. I'll address "guns and Zuko" later, but "gee I haven't seen a gun before so i guess when one is pointed at me i'll watch what happens without any defensive actions, despite knowing I am in a fight to the death" is dumb on its face.
• Terminator is self evidently more than "4 inches of metal" and has titanium plating, and benefits from many of the same advantages you use for Death Knight. 95% of the feats the blaster has would be shrugged off by Terminator. At best, he is launched and damaged, but still in the fight, and the time it takes Rook to shoot him leaves Rook vulnerable to Bucky and Zukos own ranged attacks, both of which kill Rook. Terminator is launched a few feet, then shoots you after you think you've beaten him.

So even if you have initiative and you start shooting, you still lose. Now, let's look at what happens in the absence of those things.

Zuko and Bucky are faster than any member of your team, and Terminator is just too durable to be put down.

• Bucky can react to a grenade launcher fired from 50ft away. He regularly fights other fast superhumans, blocks their ranged attacks, and hits their projectiles out of the air.
• Zuko can swat a shortbow arrow out of the air from30ft away when it is fired behind him, generates multiple attacks per second.
• Even Terminator is reliably human speed and has a pattern of shooting before attacking other ways, and a robotic, calculative mind great at mapping trajectories to ensure he'd fire before someone like Blue.

Melee

The speed feats I applied above for my team continue to be reliable here, and it's noteworthy that pretty much all of my team reliably uses their ranged combat abilities in melee, with Zuko blowing the feet out from underneath people and generating close range weapons, and Bucky + Terminator being willing to pull guns in CQC range. On top of that, they all have secondary win conditions, like swords and grappling, seen in my first post.

• Blue hisses and shrieks from shrapnel that can cut metal, Rook has no piercing durability to speak of, and DK does not have the durability to support taking boulder busting force.
• DK and Blue have no comparable lifting feats, and all three can have limbs busted by grip feats like this. This is particularly detrimental to Blue, who is actually argued to seek out grapples.
• All three are capable of launching heavy masses notable distances, something particularly dangerous in an arena prone to BFR such as this.

This is on top of the supplied striking feats from my first round, literally all of which are "meets or surpasses the durability of your team.

Death Knight

This character just dies. Death Knight is not argued to evade or dodge, so his speed doesn't matter. He's just "proactively striking", something he cannot do from across a 40ft starting distance.

This durability is trash, it isn't clear if it's hitting DK in his armor or one of the many exposed places on him, and whether the sword that snaps on him is thicker than a normal sword doesn't matter. The force to destroy boulders and shatter crystals is not something this character can take. "He doesn't move and he doesn't respond to this attack" yeah, he's a 1000lb zombie, why would he? That doesn't make him durable enough to withstand attacks that surpass this several times over.

The only other way he's argued to avoid hits is his shield, which he doesn't even use to defend himself. His one interaction with multiple shooters is just him letting himself get attacks dumped into him over and over again. Even if his shield could protect him, you've only provided evidence for its thickness on the edges, which are almost always thicker than the body of a shield, and you yourself are plenty aware that ballistic piercing =/= blades.

I do not care that DK is dead. He still has a spine he needs to move, limbs he needs to make attacks, muscles that can be cut and torn and destroyed, he still has a body that requires intact parts to press a win con. His center mass, face, and limbs are not protected by armor, and he does not bother protecting them. Even if DK is still technically "alive" in the vaguest sense of the word, he cannot press a win condition after a hail of fire from my team.

[u/feminist-horsebane → u/feminist-horsebane]

Even if he crosses the distance, it does not matter.He doesn't even elect to use the sword that's the only part of his win condition unless people are retreating from him, and if he did, it would not matter.His speed is "Vaguely Fast" with the anchor of "but is 12ft tall" around its neck.

• I have shown Zuko and Bucky are both able to respond to Vaguely Fast attacks. Both have multiple ways to disarm DK's weapon, surpass his durability, hit him more frequently than they are hit.
• If Death Knight enters melee with Terminator, he has lost, because his durability is wildly dwarfed by Terminators striking, Terminators lifting can yeet any weapon and rip off any limb he encounters, Death Knight is not fast enough to prevent this from happening with his massive Dark Souls esque structure, he does not dodge attacks, and his argued win condition is "well if you hit Terminator in the right area maybe you can give him the equivalent of a finger cramp."

This character contributes nothing to the fight.

Blue

While Blue has the faculties of a human adult, she is limited by her physicals, being essentially just a brain transported into a 20ft+ tall Xenomorph Queen body. I really just am not willing to entertain the idea that this hulking monster is able to evade the fire of three shooters perfectly due to it's nimble agility or to treat it as some cover based shooting character on the back of a single scan where it used a gun once.

It is a wild double standard to say"Bucky's comfort level with a gun is iffy, because when Cap charges him with a bullet proof shield, Bucky punches and launches Cap backwards before shooting at him",and then in the same breath say "My space dinosaur will CoD your entire team before they can react based on this singular time they held a gun". Blue disarms people left and right and only once picks up a gun to use, and doesn't even do so particularly fast as a Marine just watches dumbfounded as she starts shooting.

Blue has only avoided aim from Marines pissing themselves and can't even do that reliably. Most of my team is faster and all are more accurate than this. She is a 20ft tall space demon made to resemble dicks from Hell. She absolutely takes fire. Given that her only durability feats are "takes a bullet to the head but dies to several in the chest" and "shrieks in agony when hit by the force to deform metal of no given thickness", there's no means by which they can survive massive stone busting force or a hundred bullets a second. Sure, there are parts of her that are more durable than others in the same way my femur is more durable than my stomach, but Blue has only resisted

Blue's speed is "vaguely faster than another Xenomorph", with the Xenomorph feat being scaled to being "dodges aim from a normal man shooting over his shoulder while climbing a ladder and carrying his friends on his back in a wheelchair"- andthe kicker is that the Xenomorphs Blue is fasterthan still hit her, despite her supposed speed advantage. How fast Blue is doesn't even matter when you do not need to be as fast as her in order to hit her. Consider that you consider massive size to be a notable nerf to Death Knights speed. Now consider that Blue's speed is even worse and she is even bigger.

Even if this scaling was valid, so what? Blue has a feat wherein she could not be tagged by Marines. Marines are not fast or skilled or otherwise intimidating. Marines cannot snatch knives thrown by superhumans from the air feet from their face. Marines cannot slap arrows out of the air. Marines cannot spray populated areas with minigun fire and perfectly avoid all injuries or fatalities. The abilities of Space BootBoy#29012 are not relevant to my team

The portrayal of this character, a 20ft tall space lizard, as some hyper competent marksman aim dodger is just nonsense. This character has next to no durability, virtually no speed, and clearly prefers to just run around ripping and tearing.

Rook

The fact that 90% of Darg's defense of this characters speed is just to try and antifeat post Zuko just shows that there isn't a real justification for this character being fast. I don't know why we're talking about this character in terms of "welllll, I guess I don't think they're wildly faster than Zuko or Bucky", yeah no shit, why would he be? You're trying to claim that because Terminator is the speed of a human and Zuko's blasts are visible, Rook will perfectly dodge all of them. That doesn't work when your character has a pattern of being tagged repeatedly by visibly trackable projectiles and slow, lumbering parties.

• An energy blast from a giant monster knocks him unconsciou
• Hit by a reflected shot from his pistol and downed
• A charged beam lands on Rook, knocking him unconscious
• A monster vomits at Rook and knocks him down twice.
• A blow comparable to Terminators puts Rook on his knees.
• A giant, generic elephant monster hits Rook by throwing a car at him after several seconds of telegraphing
• A giant tiger monster with strength comparable to Terminators launches Rook
• Rook sits and watches while a giant rhino monster charges him into a wall, incapacitating him

This is not "sure, an antifeat will pop up every now and then", this is a pattern of Rook being hit by the exact things you are claiming are thoroughly incapable of hitting him, and "Zuko gets hit sometimes too" does not change that.

Rook is argued to only use his blaster, sword, and some form of electricity. This represents an extremely small subsection of his offense. Rook is very willing to just trade blows, use the tool as a generic staff (neither of which threaten my team), generate arrows that cannot threaten my team, or as some kind of generic grapnel. The only real damage output he has that threatens my team is a high end shot from his blaster, something that makes up like 1/8th of his offense.

[u/feminist-horsebane → u/feminist-horsebane]

Note that in all of the scans that Darg generates to showcase Rook being a "skilled and quick fighter", he's just punching and kicking, not pulling off this blaster shot + electricity + phase sword combo he's supposed to do. I'm not claiming that Rook is incapable of or unwilling to use these weapons, but they absolutely are not the chief component of his offense, he shows himself time and time again to be willing to just engage in generic melee fights even with people who are far stronger than him. Against my team, who all wildly overcome his durability, this gets him killed.

• The periphery of an explosion launches Rook. Bucky's grenade launcher will accomplish the same thing.
• Downed from the force to shatter a wooden door. Even a non-vibranium based attack from Bucky destroys a comparable amount of a more durable material.
• Shields wildly inferior to Cap's rebound shots at Rook, downing him.
• Knocked unconscious from being thrown into a light pole. Stronger metal is busted by a swing of Bucky's arm.
• Knocked unconscious from being dropped to the ground without any noteworthy collateral. Bucky takes superior fall damage and is fine.

Rook's in character behavior, his speed, his durability, and his offense are all weak points, he has a shown history of being easily incapacitated or damaged by force below what I am presenting.

Rebuttals

Zuko vs. Gun

Let's dispel the idea that Zuko will stare dumbfounded at a gun and just let it shoot him.

• Single shot hand cannons have existed in ATLA for 100+ years at the time Zuko is born.
• Weapons like harpoon guns are considered extremely common in the age when Zuko is born.
• Cannons exist in ATLA for firing energy and projectiles.

Yes, due to rating issues generated by ATLA being a childrens program on Nickelodeon, you never see Zuko vs. a gun, but guns do canonically exist in his setting and he, as a character in that setting, has no reason to be deeply unfamiliar with guns.

Even if Zuko had never seen a gun before, Zuko is in a situation where he knows that the people across from him are going to kill him, is familiar with the concepts of "ranged weapons" and "aim", and is not so dumbfoundedly stupid that he cannot put 2+2 together to figure out what is being attempted when an enemy aims a gun at him.

Zuko vs. lightning

This feat is being misconstrued. Azula blasts at Zuko, Zuko redirects it, Azula then redirects it back at Zuko to take him by surprise, hitting him full force in the chest, and Zuko goes "I'm okay". There's no "he's already redirecting it" or "he starts reacting to it", he's taken by surprise and shrugs it off.Azula's lightning is straight up lethal topeople with superhuman durability, and Zuko can shrug it off. Rook has a taser, a fundamentally nonlethal weapon. This dwarfs whatever electricity he can output.

Zuko vs. AoE

Zuko does not need to AoE. Sure, he can, and it makes sense to in the context of someone he couldn't tag normally, but he generates attacks at a faster rate than your team, who fails to dodge and have poor durability. I also don't know why this is "standing still like an RPG fighter", he makes a big attack and then generates fire weapons to make more attacks.

Zuko vs. antifeats/arrow

Literally all of these people are just faster than your team is. Katara is fast. Aang is fast. At best, you have 1 antifeat of Zuko being tagged by a regular person. Compare that to your fastest member, Rook, who goes through the same experience like 20x more often. The arrow thing is just a dumb outlier for Zuko's durability, he takes wildly superior force time and time and time again.

Bucky vs. Stipulations

This is such a dumbshit waste of time. This tournament has no rules regarding gear like tri tier did. Bucky holding a rifle and a shield are not contradictory ideas, he has had and used both, he has two arms, he's motivated to kill like he has been before, I have no idea why you're debating about whether Bucky's shield exists or not like it's some cryptid and not just what is in stipulations. 95% of the gear you're complaining about is just shit Bucky uses at the same time + a shield he used in the same fight.

Bucky vs. using a gun and shield

He has two arms and can use one with both arms. This is a nonissue.

I hate to argue like this

Then don't??

Terminator vs Terminator feat

I don't know why this is being touted as an antifeat. Terminator taking a running kick from himself to the chest and then continuining to fight is a better feat than anything on Darg's team except a high end blaster shot from Rook. Terminators weigh enough to be used as wrecking balls, sending one flying is a feat in and of itself, this is not just "dents metal a little bit."

Electro Sword

This is so clearly just "I, as a debater, know that Terminator is a robot, and will leverage that in the debate in ways my character won't know to do in round". This is like one interaction in your characters entire canon, he has no reason to opt for this against what he perceives as Arnold Schwarzenneger, and he doesn't have time to figure it out with his speed and durability issues.