Favorite Superhero Fight?

[Tyndmyr]

Ward is one of the worst stories I've ever read and it's not due to any supposed retcons, it's just that the story always seemed like an act of deliberate spite. Wildbow is on record as not want to write a Worm sequel but people kept pestering him about it so he wrote a story deliberately designed to be as unpleasant and nihilistic as possible, with an ending that definitively locks off any potential future sequels. The poor writing shines even brighter in completely garbage characters like March who break standard conventions to have some of the most blatant plot armor seen in the series.

God, I hated that. The fans were like "oh, but the plot armor is her power." Okay, but that's a really bad power, and kind of dumb. The fights in general were far less interesting than in Worm, and mostly boiled down to "and then I punched them, and punched them, and then punched them, and punched harder." A mostly indestructable punching machine that...punches lots is like a terrible parody of what bad Superman plots look like.

She *could* have been interesting, I suppose, and was a great deal more so in Worm, but as a POV character, it was brutal. And the worldbuilding....literally everyone chooses to live in the same place because...reasons. Okay. And they don't even bother to name it, just calling it "the city." This is probably the worst worldbuilding of all time.

I've read Worm a few times, and enjoyed it greatly. It isn't a perfect work, but it is an interesting work, and a very ambitious one. I really did want more of that. Ward....wasn't.

[Ramza00]

My biggest spoiler-free problem with MHA is that many of the villains have a good point - a society where the power everyone gets is immutable and almost wholly lottery-based is inherently unequal and inequitable, especially when many of those powers are inherently harmful to the user or those around them by their very nature, and the folks running said society seem to have made no effort at all to rework said society to account for these inequities.

But whatever point the villains have is practically squandered by them throwing in their lot behind the most cartoonishly evil guy on the planet and his chosen disciple/vessel, a guy who quite openly has no problem with devouring / slaughtering any of his followers who've shown themselves to no longer be useful. But that's a problem pretty much every superhero medium ends up being faced with, because writers in this medium can't help but want to have their cake and eat it too - they want nuanced and deeper villains but nevertheless want the heroes to be seen as heroes for stopping them, so they end up pushing them past the moral event horizon eventually.

This is definitely my biggest issue with the plot in a nutshell, yeah. Stain was a really good starting point for a sympathetic villain; a Punisher-esque vigilante who went after heroes he saw as flaunting their position or shirking their responsibilities. He came of as clearly evil, but still actually redeemable. There's a lot of this in Gentle Criminal as well, who acts as a really good argument for WHY hero regulations should exist while still being in pretty much every aspect the person in the moral right in a lotof ways. "He's kinda confused but he got the spirit" villainy is interesting to me.

Shigaraki being the main villain was a mistake. His primary motivation for mass murder is "daddy issues" with not much else tagged onto it than that.

Spoiler: My Hero Academia Spoilers

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just a reminder that the mha japan (who knows other nations) does extrajudicial killings against quirk users, without trials, and without official charges

we find this out in the sniper arc where deku fights the gal who uses her hair as telekinetic bullets (her name is
Kaina Tsutsumi and her quirks are rifle and air walk)

that type of government is often giving epiphats like fascist if this was real life and not fantasy. There is no reforming that from the inside, you will need some form of confrontation like a violent take over, mass resignations, large protests, etc to create a break from the status quo.

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Of course My Villain Academia, the Meta Liberation army, and All for One/The Demon Lord are totally cartoonish. The sad thing is they came close to thematic but not cartoonish villians.

And I argue Tomura Shigaraki having daddy issues as his motivation is not a mistake. It may not be for everyone, but a person not giving up their grudge, and their grudge being all too human yet petty … well that is what society is. Society is about repression and representation^{the symbol for peace}, for repression and representation allows sharing, trading, cooperation, and communication. Yet the self-I feelings are just as important, our intense psychic life is why people get angry, why we say this is important to me, please listen, you can not ignore this. The same repression that makes society possible also makes society unbearable.

Thus we can not solve this from first principles, instead we solve this via meeting people where they are and listen to others who need help. Sometimes a support system from a stranger, later a friend in need, can radically transform the situation. Izuku offering his hand to Bakugou even though elementary school kid Bakugou did not need help. Well the same applies with Deku and Shigaraki.

[Psyren]

This is definitely my biggest issue with the plot in a nutshell, yeah. Stain was a really good starting point for a sympathetic villain; a Punisher-esque vigilante who went after heroes he saw as flaunting their position or shirking their responsibilities. He came of as clearly evil, but still actually redeemable. There's a lot of this in Gentle Criminal as well, who acts as a really good argument for WHY hero regulations should exist while still being in pretty much every aspect the person in the moral right in a lotof ways. "He's kinda confused but he got the spirit" villainy is interesting to me.

Shigaraki being the main villain was a mistake. His primary motivation for mass murder is "daddy issues" with not much else tagged onto it than that.

Marvel does this a lot too.

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Killmonger: "Hey, we're hoarding all this technology that could be shared instead, to solve a lot of racial inequality around the world. Staging a coup is literally the only way I can convince you all to abandon the isolationist policies of the current dynasty."
Dora Milajae: "You know what, that actually sounds-"
Killmonger: "By "sharing" of course I mean we're going to mail weapons of mass destruction around the globe and spark the bloodiest conflict in history. Oh, and I'm also burning all the of the magic flowers that empowered me so that no one else can possibly challenge my rule in the future."

Flagsmasher: "Hey, the very concept of borders are inherently oppressive, especially now that we know for a fact that not only does alien life exist, but that it can provoke genocide of our species on a global scale. The entire world should be treated as one country because, galactically speaking, that's what we are."
Falcon: "Honestly, you raise a-"
Flagsmasher: "To strengthen my argument, I'm going to create a private army of super soldiers under my control, burn down the orphanage I grew up in murdering everyone inside so my origins can't be traced, and bomb the United Nations."

Namor: (see Killmonger)

Gorr: "The alien creatures that call themselves gods are not worthy of the name, much less our worship. They're parasites who consume offerings from less powerful races, squablle amongst themselves to our detriment, and give us nothing of value in return."
Thor: "When you put it that way, we really should try to-"
Gorr: "Therefore I've decided to go murder every last one of these aliens, whether they even consider themselves gods or not and whether they actually try to help people or not, as well as slaughtering all their innocent children."

Scarlet Witch: "My entire family got taken from me twice. This reality holds too much tragedy for me, I'm going to use magic to find one where my children still exist, maybe even my husband, so that I can be with them and finally be happy."
Doctor Strange: "That's not a bad idea, I can even help you find-"
Scarlet Witch: "But finding a reality that lost their Wanda is too much work, so I'm going to just pick the first one I come across, even if that means murdering their mother and taking her place. Also, I don't have time for America to learn how to use her powers to help me willingly, so I'm going to take them from her by force, murdering her too."

I'm not saying it's an entirely bad trope - after all, if the villains were reasonable there wouldn't be a movie. But it's starting to get a bit old.

I think it's one reason why the Guardians Trilogy is so well-received - its villains so far (Ronan, Ego, The High Evolutionary, and I'll even count Thanos) are refreshing in that they are unapologetically villains, but still have a fair amount of depth to them without needing this whole I'm-actually-misunderstood-until-whoops-I'm-not trope.

[Rynjin]

I didn't watch Love and Thunder, but I'll got to bat for Gorr as a good villain in the comics, mostly because his hypocrisy (as essentially setting himself up as a new god, complete with a religion that says his people should reject all gods and worship) is actually ADDRESSED BY THE PLOT and is a critical element of the climax of the story.

I think that's an important element missing from the other examples; they are treated BY THE NARRATIVE as irredeemable and objectively wrong, while the subtext you can read into it is "they have a point I guess". So things come out very confused, and making them "sympathetic" is pointless because nothing is done with it.

[Forum Explorer]

Actual Superhero stories? That's tough, but I'm going to say Worm, particularly Skitter vs Mannequin and Armsmaster vs Leviathan.

For actually film/animated stuff? I'm going with the fight against Thanos with the nearly completed Infinity Gauntlet. With Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy.

Extending it out to basically superhumans, I'm going with Kirisugu Emiya vs Kotomine Kieri which holds on as my number one fight scene period.

The best way I can describe Worm is that it's a nobledark cosmic horror story pretending to be a grimdark superhero story.

It has a hopeful ending but **** goes to hell and stays there for a long time befor hty get there.

The sequel is similar, though a lot of people dislike it for supposedly "retconning" a bunch of stuff when really all it did was debunk a bunch of headcanons that had no actual basis in the source material.

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God forbid that the character who acts like a narcisist in almost every scene she's in, refuses to accept help with her problems, runs away from them when it's too much, in her introductory scene psychologically turtures someone into consenting to something while making Freudian threats and bragging that her conenctions will keep her from suffering consequneces, once expressed a sadistic desire to violat someone's body, later got offended when that person doesn't trust her and then gaslites that person into think she's going to be railroaded by the authorities and that one of her friends is dead out of spite, rwrot someone's brain to change their sexuality and acted like she didn't have a choice to do it when she had the presence of mind to know sh was tempted to do it and warn someone not to touch her and thus had the presence of mind to resist temptation, then later kidnaped that person and altered their body despite their explicit refusal to conscent and made mutible modifcations to it for her own pleasure turns out to be a narcisistic rapist who refuses to admit that she's a bad person and not a poor, widdle misunderstood woobie.

I'm problems with Ward really started with its world building and carried on from there.

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Namely that for a world that supposedly went through a global apocalypse a couple of years ago it seems way to coherent and unified, with the distinction of heroes and villains still being a big deal. ****, the main character begins with having trouble joining a hero team.

Oh and then there is the whole thing where people kinda actively pretend that Khepri doesn't exist and that actually works across the board.

Or the part where the Undersiders, who were well established as warlords and pretty much not villains, somehow regressed and aren't literally running their city, that they openly ruled beforehand. And despite everyone else having amnesty, they are still somehow considered 'villains'.

This is definitely my biggest issue with the plot in a nutshell, yeah. Stain was a really good starting point for a sympathetic villain; a Punisher-esque vigilante who went after heroes he saw as flaunting their position or shirking their responsibilities. He came of as clearly evil, but still actually redeemable. There's a lot of this in Gentle Criminal as well, who acts as a really good argument for WHY hero regulations should exist while still being in pretty much every aspect the person in the moral right in a lotof ways. "He's kinda confused but he got the spirit" villainy is interesting to me.

Shigaraki being the main villain was a mistake. His primary motivation for mass murder is "daddy issues" with not much else tagged onto it than that.

Spoiler: MHA Shigaraki complaints

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I don't mind him being a complete monster. I do mind that all of his followers don't seem to notice that. And I do really really mind that they go through the effort of saving Shigaraki when Toga is right freaking there, infinitely more deserving of redemption, and actually sacrifices herself when Bakugo gets a complete stranger to sacrifice themselves for him in the most BS way possible and that simply works.

Like, I'm sorry, but if you are going to pull that guano, then you can find a way to keep Toga alive who is just suffering from blood loss and not the complete loss of his heart. And if you are going to be trying to save/redeem Shigaraki, then you better extend that courtesy to every other one of the league of villains because they all deserve it so much more than he does and have harmed so many less people.

[TeChameleon]

I'm going to be odd and pick from old-school comic books. Although it's definitely strange... for me, the ones that stick in my memory really aren't the big slam-bang super-dramatic punch-ups. They tend to be... quirkier.

* Basically anything from Astro City. Mostly because the vast majority of the time the physical action is solidly in service of the story- exploring the themes that the dialogue has established, expressing character traits on an even larger scale. And it's usually decidedly pretty, to boot. Great art.

* The finale of The Promethium Exchange (Excalibur vol. 1, 37-39), a crossover between Excalibur and the West Coast Avengers, with Doctor Doom as the villain. To get it out of the way, the artwork is... bad. Just kind of on the low end of mediocre-to-crap. You can tell what's going on, but that's about the best that can be said about it. It's seriously janky. That being said, the dialogue is hilarious, loaded with snarky wit, and the character focus on Doctor Doom and one of his rebellious creations, Darkoth the Demon, are surprisingly poignant in places. And the barely-coherent superhero 'demons' summoned by Doom's subconscious that provide the majority of the brawling action are genuinely funny, highlighting how little Doom has really understood of the various do-gooders who have thwarted him through the years. A surprisingly good example of the 'villain has understandable motives, but is still definitely an unrepentant villain', despite all the nonsense.

* And a brief one-off that stretches the 'superhero' tag a bit, the handful of panels when Doctor Doom has the Purple Man/Killgrave lashed to one of his machines to take over the world, and Killgrave is complaining about how Doom doesn't deserve any of this, it's his power doing it, and how Doom is just protected by his mask. So Doom takes off his mask and just looks at him. Killgrave immediately starts trying to order him to kill himself, harm himself, free Killgrave, before winding down with a whimpered "Impossible. Nobody's will is that strong!" as Doom impassively puts his mask back on and simply asks "Now. Who deserves to rule?"

[Ramza00]

Extending it out to basically superhumans, I'm going with Kirisugu Emiya vs Kotomine Kieri which holds on as my number one fight scene period.

so many anime’s are trying to recreate that scene and dynamic, I am thinking of one in particular, but then again I read 120 chapters of this buddhist themed manga over christmas while most of the family watched 3 football games, spoilers ( Jujutsu Kaisen )

Spoiler: MHA Shigaraki complaints

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I don't mind him being a complete monster. I do mind that all of his followers don't seem to notice that. And I do really really mind that they go through the effort of saving Shigaraki when Toga is right freaking there, infinitely more deserving of redemption, and actually sacrifices herself when Bakugo gets a complete stranger to sacrifice themselves for him in the most BS way possible and that simply works.

Like, I'm sorry, but if you are going to pull that guano, then you can find a way to keep Toga alive who is just suffering from blood loss and not the complete loss of his heart. And if you are going to be trying to save/redeem Shigaraki, then you better extend that courtesy to every other one of the league of villains because they all deserve it so much more than he does and have harmed so many less people.

yes

[Sapphire Guard]

I'm fond of the Doomsday fight in BVS, it showcases a good range of the trio's abilities without just being generic punching. Clear stakes, clear ticking clock, clear characterisation for all parties.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Regarding Worm: I tried reading it, but it was just too bleak. And I'm told it gets even bleaker than its opening chapters.

Oh man, the first chapters of Worm are brutal. I stopped reading twice because Taylor getting bullied was so unpleasant. But I was assured that it got better... and it did. I read the whole rest of it in basically one go, and while it does get as dark again in the final arc, at that point I was fully invested in the characters, plot and setting, so it was more intense than unpleasant.

[Talakeal]

This question would require way more thought and research than I have time for. Maybe will update later.

Off the top of my head:

Superman vs. Phaora in Man of Steel.
Batman rescuing Martha and BvS.
Rorsach vs. Dr. Manhatten in Watchmen.
Phoenix vs. Set in What If? #24.
The fight vs. Thanos on Titan in Infinity War is probably the best in the MCU.
Batman vs. Mr. Freeze in Arkham City.
On paper the final battle in X-Men: Apocalypse. In execution not so much.

Also, Doom vs. the Kilgrave as mentioned above isn't really a fight, but it is awesome.

[Anarchic Fox]

Oh man, the first chapters of Worm are brutal. I stopped reading twice because Taylor getting bullied was so unpleasant. But I was assured that it got better... and it did. I read the whole rest of it in basically one go, and while it does get as dark again in the final arc, at that point I was fully invested in the characters, plot and setting, so it was more intense than unpleasant.

Okay, I'm convinced. I'll give Worm another try. I'll skip the sequel though.

I'll probably also continue MHA, but in smaller doses this time.

[Anarchic Fox]

Turns out Worm is as good as people said!

Oh man, the first chapters of Worm are brutal. I stopped reading twice because Taylor getting bullied was so unpleasant. But I was assured that it got better... and it did. I read the whole rest of it in basically one go, and while it does get as dark again in the final arc, at that point I was fully invested in the characters, plot and setting, so it was more intense than unpleasant.

Yeah, that's why I stopped. I didn't even make it past the first chapter. But I put the effort in, and... wow. This is the best superhero story I've found, in the text format, better than even The Perfect Run. I just made it to the point where

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Behemoth dies

, so please no spoilers.

Oh, somebody upthread (I forget who) inquired about the purpose of this thread. It's... to share your favorite superhero fights. Nothing more, nothing less.

[tonberrian]

One of my favorites is Shazam Captain Marvel vs Superman in Justice League Unlimited. They're fighting in a new city without residents so they're free to absolutely trash the place, and the whole thing was a setup by Lex to make Superman look bad (and he succeeds). Very much a perfect shot of what it would look like for two evenly matched physical gods to go absolutely ham on each other. You can see the whole thing on youtube here.

[Bohandas]

The one that comes most immediately to mind is the swarm of Agent Smiths scene from Mateix 2

Also, the haunted bowling ball destroying the doomsday device in Mystery Men was kind of cool, if that counts

[NeptunianOM]

Probably not my favorite but one I really have always liked is Superman vs Darseid from the Superman Adventures cartoon. It is not a wild and crazy DBZ fight. It is slow and methodical with a clear beginning, middle and ending. I also love what Darseid says to Superman at the end of the fight. Always stuck with me.

"I am many things, Kal'El, but here, I am god."

I have always tried to imagine demons, devils & other supernatural beings thinking & saying the same thing if PCs ever defeat them within their own domains.

[BananaPhone]

I've never really been a fan of the big, ridiculous, supa-powa-ful fights where combatants level whole states/nations etc. I don't feel as invested in those.

My favourite fight from the MCU, whether you'll believe it or not, is the first time Captain America fights the Winter Soldier in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

There's no over-the-top special effects, there's no ticking time bomb scenario, there's no intrusions or gimmicks etc, just really good choreography against men of relatively equal power/skill with an emotional pay-off/twist/surprise at the end.



If we're adding greater scale super powers to it, I actually really enjoyed the Superman vs Faora Smallville fight, as it has a bit of everything. We see how overwhelmingly powerful a Kryptonian is to a normal person (Faora vs half a platoon of US Rangers, who themselves are IRL badasses and she beats them all in about 1-2 seconds), Faora handing SUperman his ass initially with her superior skill vs his superior strength, the borderline horror moment of the big Kryptonian popping the human pilot of the A-10 warthog, Faora tanking a missile, the thrown train, the tag-team vs Supes etc. I know Man of Steel isn't everyones cup of tea, but I thought it was a great scene.