| rdfs:comment
| - There are several massive problems with using power-scaling for these two prominent franchises that have shared hundreds of different authors over several decades. Said writers naturally tend to have highly differing opinions and interpretations, which is reflected in their stories. Quite often internal story logic regarding relative power levels is ignored, and personal favouritism (along with plot convenience) decides the outcome of confrontations. While this is done to avoid making outcomes too predictable, the results are completely inconsistent, and most importantly, the enormous contradictions in continuities, power levels, and comparative hierarchies between the many different writers and editors over the decades results in a massive amount of confusion.
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| abstract
| - There are several massive problems with using power-scaling for these two prominent franchises that have shared hundreds of different authors over several decades. Said writers naturally tend to have highly differing opinions and interpretations, which is reflected in their stories. Quite often internal story logic regarding relative power levels is ignored, and personal favouritism (along with plot convenience) decides the outcome of confrontations. While this is done to avoid making outcomes too predictable, the results are completely inconsistent, and most importantly, the enormous contradictions in continuities, power levels, and comparative hierarchies between the many different writers and editors over the decades results in a massive amount of confusion. A few examples include that the Hulk has been beaten by Captain America, or an ordinary snake, and been severely injured by regular gorillas, or an everyday stop sign, despite that he caused an earthquake across an infinite number of planets, or had his power measured as infinite by the Beyonder, in other stories; Thor being rendered unconscious by an ordinary handgun, but also preventing the destruction of 1/5th of the universe; Gambit defeating Gladiator; Black Panther placing the Silver Surfer in an inescapable grip; Iceman defeating Oblivion; Dormammu beating Multi-Eternity in one story, only to be manhandled by Cyclops, or Frankenstein's Monster in other stories; or the Beyonders killing the Living Tribunal and all of Marvel's abstract entities, only to be killed in turn by Doctor Doom. However, this is not the only type of inconsistency. The fundamental natures, sizes, structures, continuities, etc. of many different concepts and objects also tend to vary greatly from story to story. A concept, object or character can be dramatically stronger in a story, and dramatically weaker in other stories. Just because a certain character displays a certain extreme degree of power in one instance doesn't imply that they will remotely possess the same scale of power in another, and that we can automatically scale another character from the higher end feat. Also, we cannot use the relative power levels for one author in the 1960s and apply it to another present day author, or vice versa. Again, one writer's canonicity cannot automatically be used to power-scale another's. To illustrate, Marvel's executive editor Tom Brevoort, who is also in charge of writing the official handbooks for the company, and is likely the highest current authority regarding the company's internal continuity and power levels, had this to say regarding the topic: "I get the sense that, somewhere, there’s a mighty battle boards-style discussion going on about the Sentry. And I try to stay out of those. But I will say that the transitive property has never applied to super heroes. After all, the Fantastic Four and Iron Man and even the Man-Thing have defeated the Molecule Man in the past, and doing so didn’t make them anything more than themselves." ”We need to stop thinking of these power relationships in such simple linear and black and white terms. if real life worked like that, there’d be no need for sporting events of any kind–you could tell which person or team was going to win without a game, from just looking at the stats.” The former Thor writer Dan Jurgens also stated that in his stories Odin was simply planetary in scale, despite destroying galaxies in previous stories. And according to Stan Lee, whoever wins in a fight simply depends on whoever the current writer likes best, or wants to win. Hence, Marvel and DC (the latter company functions in a similar manner, and generally has the same writers at different points in their careers) are primarily interested in entertaining the readers via storytelling, not in accurate power-scaling, which is perfectly fine and acceptable. However, said ideology runs contrary to this site's purpose, of accurately indexing the statistics of characters. We cannot continue to systematically gloss over this fact, as it creates extremely unreliable and misleading ratings. For example, if we use cumulative power-scaling for Marvel characters, in terms of that that one character defeated or stood up to an objectively far more powerful character, who did the same to an objectively far more powerful character, who did the same to an objectively far more powerful character applied to all of Marvel's history, we would likely eventually end up with Captain America and other characters of the same level power-scaled to the Living Tribunal. That said, we can obviously continue to use power scaling for more internally consistent franchises headed by a single or unified creative voice. The problematic key issue is the staggering amount of different writers and stories for Marvel and DC characters over their several decades of existence.
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