I’ve been playing a lot of the new video game Injustice:
Gods Among Us (see some of my thoughts about the game here) and it’s a fun
game. You get to see a bunch of beloved DC Comics heroes and villains fight
each other and really slug it out. Unfortunately though as I was playing the
game I realized that while for the game the characters are fairly well matched,
they are no where near their power set as they are in the comics. I was playing
as Nightwing and was delivering a thorough beatdown to Doomsday. Doomsday is
the monster that killed Superman and Nightwing is a former Robin and sidekick
to Batman. This is a very one-sided fight.
And it has me thinking about the various villains that
inhabit the rogues’ gallery of any particular super hero. The villains a hero
faces tend to be within that hero’s capabilities. So it seems to me that the
best way for the villains to win is to just switch. Doomsday would kill Batman
with relative ease. As much as I enjoy talking about Batman as this hero with
contingency plans and scenarios to deal with any possible situation, Doomsday
fought Superman to a standstill and the only way he was able to be defeated was
for the Man of Steel to fight until both of them died. There is no contingency
plan for something like that.
Similarly, I think that one of Batman’s villains could
probably take out Superman. While physically Superman is near indestructible,
he still has the mind of a man. And that’s where Batman’s rogue’s gallery
excels. Getting into a person’s mind. If you haven’t play the story mode of
Injustice, I’ll spoil it by saying the entire premise actually revolves around
The Joker messing with Superman leading to the Man of Steel creating a
totalitarian dictatorship with him in charge. The Joker drove Superman towards
committing atrocities. In essence he broke him.
This is why trading places would work so well. These
villains are equipped to dealing with such a specific set of powers and
abilities. And they are very good at it. And likewise the heroes have worked
hard to resist such attacks. Batman is for the most part immune to any
psychological games that could be played on him by the Joker. Superman is
forced to hold back his full power constantly so he does not hurt ordinary humans
so he is more than ready to unleash his full fury on a character like Doomsday.
But neither hero is ready for the opposites.
And it’s not just Batman and Superman. Aquaman probably has
no defense against a Flash villain like Mirror Master, who could literally turn
the entire reflective surface of the ocean into a weapon. Similarly the Flash
would probably not do well against a character like Sinestro, a Green Lantern
villain, whose ring allows him faster than light travel, easily keeping up with
the Scarlet Speedster. Essentially for every hero there is a villain who could
beat that hero if he would stop fighting his particular regular nemesis.
It’s not just DC either. While this blog entry was inspired
by a DC comics video game, this applies just as much to the heroes of Marvel.
Spider-Man can hold his own against Doctor Octopus but would probably not fair
well against an army of Skrulls. Captain America can defeat an entire battalion
of Hydra Agents but would probably not fair well against The Abomination. The
same reasons apply. They just aren’t used to handling those types of threats.
In all reality, these types of arguments are moot. Writers
are going to write the stories that work and that usually involves characters
fighting the types of villains they usually fight. Maybe a story will be
written depicting a scenario like I wrote above, such as Superman fighting the
Joker but that’s mostly to break up the monotony of the comic and not a serious
battle. For the most part, such matches between two completely incompatible
characters shall exactly solely in the minds of fanboys.
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