ironically it is a problem of western comics, not manga.
Like how Goku can blow up planets one day and can't blow up a tree the next day? Was bulletproof as a child but gets bruised by bullets as an adult? Can't budge 500 tons despite being a planet buster?
Black Clover isn't actually bad. It's generic and has a slow start, but it has great team fights. The main character hasn't really defeated anyone his own and it's always multiple characters working together to bring down stronger opponent's.
One Piece has this weird ass pseudo power-level system with its bounties. You could say they're not actually power levels, and of course that's true, they aren't, but people in universe don't seem to treat them as normal bounties either. A bounty in the real world generally reflects how badly someone else wants you to dead, and to a certain extent how hard it would be to actually kill you. But in One Piece people seem to almost exclusively consider them as "how strong this guy is", with the notable exception of Nico Robin's bounty.
And well, I think One Piece overall managed to keep pretty consistent with how strong people are throughout the manga, which for such a long run is a pretty impressive feat.
The thing about Buggy is that everyone is convinced he's stronger than he really is, that's the entire reason he accidentally stumbled upon a crew. So it makes sense that his bounty contradicts his personal power, it is part of the joke (and kind of reinforces my point).
What makes the bounties in one piece work is that its not really a showcase of strong you are but how much the navy wants you captured or killed. While it can coincide with how strong you are there's enough exceptions to the rule that the audience knows to not take it to seriously
True.
Hw liked the shitty Author and Merlin characters.
Both of which the fanbase hated.
People on Cinemaphile all talked about dumping theseries if the rumor of him killing off escanor to give sunshine to Arthur was going to happen.
Now escanor is dead and forgotten and replaced by some random b***h in the sequel series.
Power levels are just "we don't have time to visually show how strong this character is" that are just used as a crutch to usually pull off some mostly bad storytelling ideas.
"Oh this guy is way to tough look at his number he is the goal for our hero to try to achieve by the end of this arc"
"Wow we said this character had a number and this other character beat him easily they must be REALLY BIG NUMBER"
"this threat is the biggest threat ever! It's like 10x a bigger number that threat 3 arcs ago (proceeds to visually be the same level of physical action)"
Power levels sometimes is what keeps the writing from being as bad as the worse 1987 TMNT cartoons where the villain with a high power level gets beaten by some idiot who wasn't paying attention.
They canned them even earlier than that. Freeza stopped counting his PL at his second form. I guess Torriyama just figured any number higher than one million is just too high.
Ideally the author should have a relatively solid idea of what someone is capable of and that's it. Giving the reader a clear number will make everything predictable or inevitably lead to inconsistencies. The comics approach seems to take after pro wrestling, and manga from roleplaying games.
its a good tool to quickly establish a pecking order and set expectations or comparisons. But the trick is the actual numbers don't matter, only the context they provide. They become a problem when the writer expects the audience to care when character X's power level reaches [huge number] just because its [huge number]. There are more subtle context clues that can do the same thing with less risk of backfiring, like how an established strong character acts around a character they know the strength of but the audience doesn't, power levels are just a shortcut to the same result.
I'm surprised the nepotist hires in CA haven't already. They've "embraced" nearly everything else from anime.
But no, they shouldn't. Power levels are a really lazy crutch, and often one that's completely unnecessary. They don't really add anything to the story or fights, other than something stupid for rabid moron fan-losers to froth at the mouth over.
Powerlevels, as autistic as they are, are important, they dictate the story, Namek would've been a whole lot more boring if Frieza wasn't powerful. >the fight against Frieza himself begins >Vegeta is a match for him, things alright so far, Frieza was originally considered to be invincible before and he's pissed because he can't get his wish >Frieza transforms into his 2nd form, bit dicey but Piccolo's got this >Frieza transforms into his 3rd form and the only fighter who can threaten him is Gohan because he's Gohan, but only during a rage boost >Frieza transforms into his final form, no one stands a percent of a chance, he starts playing with his food >Goku, who is fully healed, arrives on the battlefield just long enough to see Vegeta be murdered >Even as strong as Goku has gotten, he's also nothing compared to Frieza >the closest Goku ever gets to beating Frieza in his normal state is with Kaioken X20 (this fricks his body tremendously) and a Spirit Bomb (that takes fricking forever) >Frieza survives it, Piccolo might die which would frick the Earth Dragon Balls, Krillin is dead and Frieza thinks Gohan should die next >Goku is so fricking pissed off that he breaks as a person, he tells his own son that if he doesn't leave to let him murder Frieza that he might even kill him >Goku dominating Frieza is Frieza's 3rd act breakdown, in all his years of casual invincibility, suddenly he's being bested and by a fricking MONKEY of all things
They matter, just don't get TOO autistic with them.
They had power level type shit on the backs of those trading cards from the 90s. But just like with Manga, none of it actually means anything, stop sperging about fictional characters
Nobody should embrace it. It made sense in Dragonball, they had special devices to analyze someone's ki and convert it into a readable, easy to understand 'battle power', the power levels we know today.
Even Dragonball ditched the concept because it has serious flaws. Japanese manga writers simply aren't competent enough to prevent the power creep from making it completely moronic.
The same thing would happen with comics. We're talking about manchildren here, who just happen to have jobs writing for the big two. These aren't serious writers, these aren't critical thinkers; they're dumbasses who just want to push their social agendas and draw capeshit.
So no, comics should not embrace power levels. Just like they shouldn't have embraced politics or gender studies or anything else that's going on right now. But they did, and so they probably will. And it will fricking suck, and just like with Dragonball it will lead to millions of pointless arguments about fictional numbers.
Frick that shit.
The secret to understanding power levels is that they aren't mathematical facts.
Their purpose is to set the gambling odds.
Tap into the part of your brain that loves the racetrack. The narrative of betting on the lowest odds with the highest payout.
Manga is just stories of mangaka horseracing addiction.
Most of the time power-levels just exist to be broken.
Escanor's power-levels are bullshit, regardless of the numbers he has he rarely loses because his whole character is that if you fight him when he is good shape he is going to stomp you into the ground. Regardless of whether you are the main villain or a mid-boss.
Having a characters statistics and skills represented by numerical values is useful in videogames, but it seems a bit awkward in any other media.
You can show a character's strength by simply telling the story. Like maybe you have a really strong character who doesn't even break a sweat while fighting thirty enemies, or maybe another character pants and collapses after fighting one enemy, or maybe a character has obtained totally overpowered armor/superpowers but they struggle at fights because they're too inexperienced with their abilities and fail to use their full potential, or maybe you have a guy who ends his fights in just one punch. You can communicate a character's strength by showing what they're capable of doing and what kind of stuff makes them struggle. "Show, don't tell" is the most basic rule of storytelling.
While Dragon Ball is a famous case of using power levels, even that story had plenty of moments where the power level scouters were useless or not needed. The characters either suppressed their chi in order to hide, or they allowed others to sense a massive chi for intimidation purposes. That works fine enough. You can just let the characters sense that someone is strong, you don't need exact numbers.
The whole point is that your autistic dumb numbers don't matter. They are established so they can be proven wrong.
The human soul > your souless computer brain ran by numbers. ALWAYS.
>find 2 fruit >one fruit is bigger and juicier >big fruit > normal fruit
The modern day equivalent is >2 guys fight >one guy has fire powers >fire guy > normal guy
It's the same on a base level.
No, it's still the same, you can measure the nutritional value of the big fruit to determine exactly how much better it is than the normal fruit.
People powerlevel in real life, a heavyweight boxer (175+ pounds) would ruin lightweight boxer (up to 135 pounds).
There is no problem.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Are you a man?
Or are you a computer?
Heavy weight wins because he is bigger and stronger. Not because he is a number.
2 years ago
Anonymous
The only way we know the heavyweight is a heavyweight is through his weight being measured as greater than 175 pounds.
The reason why we do this is for the sake of fair fights, so we don't put lightweights up against impossible odds.
He himself isn't a number, but his strength can and is measured with numbers.
Measuring things > estimating things
2 years ago
Anonymous
We would know he is the heavyweight when he beats up the other guy.
You are just trying to justify your computer brain by throwing around meaningless words and jumping through pointless mental gymnastics.
2 years ago
Anonymous
power levels exist to satisfy japans autism when it comes to ranking
everything in japan must be ranked
from your position on the totem pole based on your birth order to how low you should bow to your boss based on your paycheck
western media tends to go for a less rigorously well-defined level of strength because social interactions arent nearly as rigid
stuff like star wars has totally enshrined a more mystical approach with vague comments like "the force is strong within this one" as a feeling that this person is special rather than a precise number
and this will always just feel more right to a western audience
in real life, you cant directly compare weights down to the pound
all you can say about someone who weights more than someone lighter is that he will have the advantage, but the idea that you can translate this to a specific number is pretty dumb
as you have situations where featherweight manny pacquio pummels welterweight opponents without even breaking a sweat
2 years ago
Anonymous
>in real life, you cant directly compare weights down to the pound
Pretty sure you can as that is what weighting scales are built to do, once you measure the weights of both fighters you then compare them, if only one of them meets the conditions of being a heavyweight then the other isn't allowed to legally fight him because it wouldn't be a fair fight as one holds a significant objective advantage.
You can measure pretty much anything, down to how much force is exerted in a single punch, my point was that lightweights, more often than not, should not fight heavyweights as they are going to get their asses kicked most of the time.
We would know he is the heavyweight when he beats up the other guy.
You are just trying to justify your computer brain by throwing around meaningless words and jumping through pointless mental gymnastics.
>We would know he is the heavyweight when he beats up the other guy
Did you read my post? Weighting him was for the explicit purpose of making sure that if the other guy wasn't also a heavyweight that they could not fight.
Not one of my words isn't meaningful, you just don't know the meaning of them, that or you've been baiting me this entire time in which case shame on me and shame on you.
Just use it as a guideline to place where characters stand in the food chain but no need to quantify it. Like it should prevent Captain America from blindly attacking a group of super villains he has no chance of hurting or Punisher somehow easily shooting down demons and monsters.
Sometimes the story you want to tell doesn't work if the Hulk can destroy cities by stomping the ground or clapping his hands. If you're just one guy perennially writing the characters it can work, even if it severely restricts the stories you can tell; the comic book medium, especially in the big two give themselves to writing chaos due to myriad writers with crackpot ideas about things. Numerical power levels would also only "work" if they're not logarithmic, so uhh... Colossus beating the Thing would be feasible even if his power level is lower.
If you ever feel bad or pathetic remember there's people who seriously try quantifying how fictional characters rank in terms of magical made up power bullshit. A heroin addict has a more exciting life than you homosexuals.
Frick no.
FPBP
Like how Goku can blow up planets one day and can't blow up a tree the next day? Was bulletproof as a child but gets bruised by bullets as an adult? Can't budge 500 tons despite being a planet buster?
Please excuse Toriyama he has Alzheimers since he was 18.
Unrelated, but I fricking hate strength inconsistencies. One day a guy's max is 20 tons and the next it's 200 tons because the plot called for it.
ironically it is a problem of western comics, not manga.
>not manga.
It's a problem with both.
Are there manga with power levels that *didn't* end up being dogshit?
Black Clover.
Mainly because it tied into the plot.
Black clover is generic as all hell.
>Black clover is generic as all hell.
that is not a negative
Are you fricking moronic?
mickey mouse clover is terrible
No,kys
He asked for something that isn't dogshit
Black Clover isn't actually bad. It's generic and has a slow start, but it has great team fights. The main character hasn't really defeated anyone his own and it's always multiple characters working together to bring down stronger opponent's.
Wow team fights, totally changing my opinion now. I love Blacked Lover
I guess you just don't battle shounen in general.
>If you don't like Black Clover you don't like battle shounen
Why are you people so fricking delusional.
>It's generic
And it stays generic. But it has its charm, I like it way better than MHA for one.
Yes,hxh
One Piece has this weird ass pseudo power-level system with its bounties. You could say they're not actually power levels, and of course that's true, they aren't, but people in universe don't seem to treat them as normal bounties either. A bounty in the real world generally reflects how badly someone else wants you to dead, and to a certain extent how hard it would be to actually kill you. But in One Piece people seem to almost exclusively consider them as "how strong this guy is", with the notable exception of Nico Robin's bounty.
And well, I think One Piece overall managed to keep pretty consistent with how strong people are throughout the manga, which for such a long run is a pretty impressive feat.
Anon, did you forget Buggy's bounty is like 2.5 million at this point? His existence alone shows the Bounty system has exceptions
The thing about Buggy is that everyone is convinced he's stronger than he really is, that's the entire reason he accidentally stumbled upon a crew. So it makes sense that his bounty contradicts his personal power, it is part of the joke (and kind of reinforces my point).
Didn't Ussop get a huge bounty because he pissed Doffy off?
What makes the bounties in one piece work is that its not really a showcase of strong you are but how much the navy wants you captured or killed. While it can coincide with how strong you are there's enough exceptions to the rule that the audience knows to not take it to seriously
Toriko
They should embrace not having shit like spider-man fighting hulk, buy also not to crawl up their ass about it.
Marvel has that, doesn't it? It goes from 1-7.
OP doesn't read comics
No,the power levels in anime are either inconsistent or just dropped from the story
>No,the power levels in anime are either inconsistent
False
Escanor was the best character in that story. Shame the author liked the other more.
True.
Hw liked the shitty Author and Merlin characters.
Both of which the fanbase hated.
People on Cinemaphile all talked about dumping theseries if the rumor of him killing off escanor to give sunshine to Arthur was going to happen.
Now escanor is dead and forgotten and replaced by some random b***h in the sequel series.
I don't like that he keeps making his protagonists look like little kids. Percival is more annoying than Meliodas.
He is REALLY into straight shota I think.
Which is ironic because the top two characters are Escanor and Ban.
Power levels are just "we don't have time to visually show how strong this character is" that are just used as a crutch to usually pull off some mostly bad storytelling ideas.
"Oh this guy is way to tough look at his number he is the goal for our hero to try to achieve by the end of this arc"
"Wow we said this character had a number and this other character beat him easily they must be REALLY BIG NUMBER"
"this threat is the biggest threat ever! It's like 10x a bigger number that threat 3 arcs ago (proceeds to visually be the same level of physical action)"
Power levels sometimes is what keeps the writing from being as bad as the worse 1987 TMNT cartoons where the villain with a high power level gets beaten by some idiot who wasn't paying attention.
Power levels wouldn't change that at all.
They shouldn't but my monkey brain likes seeing big numbers. Its like fricking crack I tell ya
everything has power levels.
>everything has power levels.
What is the power level of SpongeBob SquarePants?
6
No. Power levels are moronic. They should make more dynamic fights though.
Nah power levels suck.
Even DB hasn't used them since like early Android.
They canned them even earlier than that. Freeza stopped counting his PL at his second form. I guess Torriyama just figured any number higher than one million is just too high.
People wank off JJBA and HxH 24/7 and those series largely don't give a shit about power levels.
If you're going to rip off manga, rip off the good ones
Found the Mexican.
cuck
Ideally the author should have a relatively solid idea of what someone is capable of and that's it. Giving the reader a clear number will make everything predictable or inevitably lead to inconsistencies. The comics approach seems to take after pro wrestling, and manga from roleplaying games.
its a good tool to quickly establish a pecking order and set expectations or comparisons. But the trick is the actual numbers don't matter, only the context they provide. They become a problem when the writer expects the audience to care when character X's power level reaches [huge number] just because its [huge number]. There are more subtle context clues that can do the same thing with less risk of backfiring, like how an established strong character acts around a character they know the strength of but the audience doesn't, power levels are just a shortcut to the same result.
ShoneBlack folk are just capeshitters with an unearned sense of superiority
capeshitters are just ShoneBlack folk but pretentious
I'm surprised the nepotist hires in CA haven't already. They've "embraced" nearly everything else from anime.
But no, they shouldn't. Power levels are a really lazy crutch, and often one that's completely unnecessary. They don't really add anything to the story or fights, other than something stupid for rabid moron fan-losers to froth at the mouth over.
Powerlevels, as autistic as they are, are important, they dictate the story, Namek would've been a whole lot more boring if Frieza wasn't powerful.
>the fight against Frieza himself begins
>Vegeta is a match for him, things alright so far, Frieza was originally considered to be invincible before and he's pissed because he can't get his wish
>Frieza transforms into his 2nd form, bit dicey but Piccolo's got this
>Frieza transforms into his 3rd form and the only fighter who can threaten him is Gohan because he's Gohan, but only during a rage boost
>Frieza transforms into his final form, no one stands a percent of a chance, he starts playing with his food
>Goku, who is fully healed, arrives on the battlefield just long enough to see Vegeta be murdered
>Even as strong as Goku has gotten, he's also nothing compared to Frieza
>the closest Goku ever gets to beating Frieza in his normal state is with Kaioken X20 (this fricks his body tremendously) and a Spirit Bomb (that takes fricking forever)
>Frieza survives it, Piccolo might die which would frick the Earth Dragon Balls, Krillin is dead and Frieza thinks Gohan should die next
>Goku is so fricking pissed off that he breaks as a person, he tells his own son that if he doesn't leave to let him murder Frieza that he might even kill him
>Goku dominating Frieza is Frieza's 3rd act breakdown, in all his years of casual invincibility, suddenly he's being bested and by a fricking MONKEY of all things
They matter, just don't get TOO autistic with them.
did dragonball invent powerlevels?
You have to have a number so the underdog can overcome it and prove that the numbers don't matter.
Can't we just have a normal Death Battle thread instead of this?
They had power level type shit on the backs of those trading cards from the 90s. But just like with Manga, none of it actually means anything, stop sperging about fictional characters
Nobody should embrace it. It made sense in Dragonball, they had special devices to analyze someone's ki and convert it into a readable, easy to understand 'battle power', the power levels we know today.
Even Dragonball ditched the concept because it has serious flaws. Japanese manga writers simply aren't competent enough to prevent the power creep from making it completely moronic.
The same thing would happen with comics. We're talking about manchildren here, who just happen to have jobs writing for the big two. These aren't serious writers, these aren't critical thinkers; they're dumbasses who just want to push their social agendas and draw capeshit.
So no, comics should not embrace power levels. Just like they shouldn't have embraced politics or gender studies or anything else that's going on right now. But they did, and so they probably will. And it will fricking suck, and just like with Dragonball it will lead to millions of pointless arguments about fictional numbers.
Frick that shit.
The secret to understanding power levels is that they aren't mathematical facts.
Their purpose is to set the gambling odds.
Tap into the part of your brain that loves the racetrack. The narrative of betting on the lowest odds with the highest payout.
Manga is just stories of mangaka horseracing addiction.
What an interesting analogy, I like it.
Most of the time power-levels just exist to be broken.
Escanor's power-levels are bullshit, regardless of the numbers he has he rarely loses because his whole character is that if you fight him when he is good shape he is going to stomp you into the ground. Regardless of whether you are the main villain or a mid-boss.
Kino
Having a characters statistics and skills represented by numerical values is useful in videogames, but it seems a bit awkward in any other media.
You can show a character's strength by simply telling the story. Like maybe you have a really strong character who doesn't even break a sweat while fighting thirty enemies, or maybe another character pants and collapses after fighting one enemy, or maybe a character has obtained totally overpowered armor/superpowers but they struggle at fights because they're too inexperienced with their abilities and fail to use their full potential, or maybe you have a guy who ends his fights in just one punch. You can communicate a character's strength by showing what they're capable of doing and what kind of stuff makes them struggle. "Show, don't tell" is the most basic rule of storytelling.
While Dragon Ball is a famous case of using power levels, even that story had plenty of moments where the power level scouters were useless or not needed. The characters either suppressed their chi in order to hide, or they allowed others to sense a massive chi for intimidation purposes. That works fine enough. You can just let the characters sense that someone is strong, you don't need exact numbers.
The whole point is that your autistic dumb numbers don't matter. They are established so they can be proven wrong.
The human soul > your souless computer brain ran by numbers. ALWAYS.
Comparing things we have to find the best one out of them all is something we did as hunter gatherers, it's human to compare shit.
Hunter-Chaderer's tool for comparing is the soul.
Numbers are the tool of the virgin enemy: AGRICULTURE.
>find 2 fruit
>one fruit is bigger and juicier
>big fruit > normal fruit
The modern day equivalent is
>2 guys fight
>one guy has fire powers
>fire guy > normal guy
It's the same on a base level.
These make common sense.
Now if you tried to reduce these into numbers then there would be a problem.
No, it's still the same, you can measure the nutritional value of the big fruit to determine exactly how much better it is than the normal fruit.
People powerlevel in real life, a heavyweight boxer (175+ pounds) would ruin lightweight boxer (up to 135 pounds).
There is no problem.
Are you a man?
Or are you a computer?
Heavy weight wins because he is bigger and stronger. Not because he is a number.
The only way we know the heavyweight is a heavyweight is through his weight being measured as greater than 175 pounds.
The reason why we do this is for the sake of fair fights, so we don't put lightweights up against impossible odds.
He himself isn't a number, but his strength can and is measured with numbers.
Measuring things > estimating things
We would know he is the heavyweight when he beats up the other guy.
You are just trying to justify your computer brain by throwing around meaningless words and jumping through pointless mental gymnastics.
power levels exist to satisfy japans autism when it comes to ranking
everything in japan must be ranked
from your position on the totem pole based on your birth order to how low you should bow to your boss based on your paycheck
western media tends to go for a less rigorously well-defined level of strength because social interactions arent nearly as rigid
stuff like star wars has totally enshrined a more mystical approach with vague comments like "the force is strong within this one" as a feeling that this person is special rather than a precise number
and this will always just feel more right to a western audience
in real life, you cant directly compare weights down to the pound
all you can say about someone who weights more than someone lighter is that he will have the advantage, but the idea that you can translate this to a specific number is pretty dumb
as you have situations where featherweight manny pacquio pummels welterweight opponents without even breaking a sweat
>in real life, you cant directly compare weights down to the pound
Pretty sure you can as that is what weighting scales are built to do, once you measure the weights of both fighters you then compare them, if only one of them meets the conditions of being a heavyweight then the other isn't allowed to legally fight him because it wouldn't be a fair fight as one holds a significant objective advantage.
You can measure pretty much anything, down to how much force is exerted in a single punch, my point was that lightweights, more often than not, should not fight heavyweights as they are going to get their asses kicked most of the time.
>We would know he is the heavyweight when he beats up the other guy
Did you read my post? Weighting him was for the explicit purpose of making sure that if the other guy wasn't also a heavyweight that they could not fight.
Not one of my words isn't meaningful, you just don't know the meaning of them, that or you've been baiting me this entire time in which case shame on me and shame on you.
Just use it as a guideline to place where characters stand in the food chain but no need to quantify it. Like it should prevent Captain America from blindly attacking a group of super villains he has no chance of hurting or Punisher somehow easily shooting down demons and monsters.
Sometimes the story you want to tell doesn't work if the Hulk can destroy cities by stomping the ground or clapping his hands. If you're just one guy perennially writing the characters it can work, even if it severely restricts the stories you can tell; the comic book medium, especially in the big two give themselves to writing chaos due to myriad writers with crackpot ideas about things. Numerical power levels would also only "work" if they're not logarithmic, so uhh... Colossus beating the Thing would be feasible even if his power level is lower.
Power levels are a blight on any manga with them and you wanna frick up comics even more by introducing that cancer to it
>westerngays have to steal japanese concepts to survive.
What a joke of an industry.
If you ever feel bad or pathetic remember there's people who seriously try quantifying how fictional characters rank in terms of magical made up power bullshit. A heroin addict has a more exciting life than you homosexuals.
Power levels are good because they make things consistent. No more Batman with the Bane-serum beating up Superman.
wait... are you telling that other anime outside of dragon ball use the same measuring system as dragon ball?
what the frick????