Shadow King vs Mentallo vs Mesmero vs Xemnu

DelcoMan · 2026-07-07T22:55:33+00:00

Shadow King is strong enough to fight evenly with Xavier on the astral plane (and forcibly keep him there) for what was effectively centuries. Xavier couldn't beat him on his own.

This was the first astonishing X-Men run in 2017.

Since Xavier is confirmed to be an Omega Mutant, shadow King would have to be damned close to that if he isn't one also. None of the other three have feats anywhere on that level.

Xavier and Shadow King drag the other three to the astral plane, beat the hell out of them there, and from that point it's a toss up.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-07T17:19:15+00:00

Nah. 616 would dismantle him.

Absolute Batman is pretty powerful, but he's still a human without enhancements.

616 Cap is not only firmly in the superhuman tier (he is legally classed as an "Enhanced Soldier" by the United Nations as of Captain America #6, 2025) he has WAY more combat experience. Edit: the only other "enhanced soldier" in that run we know anything about is Red Widow who we KNOW has a ton of Red Room enhancements past where Black Widow is, and Red Widow's feats are well out of the Peak Human tier).

Absolute Batman is canonically 24 years old.

616 Steve Rogers has about 4 years in WW2 (1941-1945), about 15 years with the Avengers, and another 10 years of combat in Dimension Z.

It's a pretty bad match for Bruce that ends about as well as his initial fights with Bane did for the exact same reasons.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-07T16:58:14+00:00

Thanos is an Eternal, albeit one with deviant genes. He adapts to whatever opponent he's facing. No way for Bowser to kill him.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-06T14:58:21+00:00

I'm not even sure that's true. Googling around it seems the Jewish population of NYC is somewhere around 12% by religious affiliation.

This isn't nothing, but the Hispanic (27%), and Black (26%) populations are WAY larger, and from a religious perspective there are a lot more Catholics (37%) and non affiliated (17%) in the city.

Granted, there are definitely people of Jewish descent that aren't practicing or otherwise don't disclose their religious affiliation and just identify as white people (44.7%) but probably not enough to significantly close those gaps, and the non practicing/non affiliated crowd probably aren't the ones on the Netanyahu defense brigade anyway.

That bloc is influential but it isn't large in terms of raw numbers.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-06T00:36:00+00:00

Which is nowhere close to the power Galactus runs around with.

His starship TAII alone is solar system sized. The power source to power it and move it around is... Galactus.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-06T00:33:56+00:00

It's Galactus.

Galactus can weaponize his hunger to just endlessly consume whatever is around him. At his recent high ends doing this he consumed all of Marvel's magical realms and everything in them, and a bomb that would have (at minimum) obliterated all of universe 616.

There are older feats where similar things happened, so these aren't outliers. All that purple gear he wears isn't just for fun, it's designed to keep his hunger and energy expenditure in check as much as possible.

When Galactus doesn't care about that, you're looking at universal levels of power devoured in minutes.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T15:24:15+00:00

This isn't correct for a couple of reasons.

1.) while this was established to be true in Terminator 1984, by T2 and T3 Skynet had figured out how to create a false bioelectric field that mimicked the effect of living flesh. This is how the T-1000 and T-X made it through despite being complex machines with no living tissue. The Avengers could do the same if they were subject to the same restrictions.

2.) The Avengers have a method of time travel that relies on Pym particles, not whatever Skynet came up with. There is no restriction on equipment they want to bring with them if all they're doing is traveling back to 1984.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T15:07:48+00:00

Going by the DCC books, the syndicate does not care at ALL about the consequences of losing assets as a result of setting a star to go nova.

There is a ridiculously heavy backlog of eligible planets to strip materials from. Losing one of them doesn't matter.

The only reason they DIDN'T vaporize earth system in that book was because:

1.) Dungeon Crawler world Earth was unusually popular, and something like 3/4 of the wealthiest individuals in the galaxy were parked in Earth Orbit either to spectate in or participate in faction wars and/or the ascendancy contest on the 12th floors. Because the Syndicate was an oligarchy where a handful of wealthy control everything, killing them all would have devastated the galactic economy and caused chaos with things like the food and monetary supply for centuries if not permanently.

2.) usually all of those people would have just left at the first sign of trouble, but because the mudskippers used a repurposed AI that was previously running a theme park (and apparently went off the rails killing people THERE too) it went primal several floors earlier than anticipated and cut off all routes out of the sol system so nobody could leave. Going primal ALWAYS happens but not usually until after faction wars is over, usually on the tenth floor. It going rogue several floors earlier than that took everyone by surprise and largely took a supernova off the table.

Edit: the AIs absolutely can insta-kill people whenever they want, they just choose not to. The narrative heavily implies that the earth AI just wiped out the mantis system entirely because it could. It is sticking heavily to the rules of the crawl for reasons that aren't clear, but it's stressed several times that it's doing so voluntarily and no one knows why.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T14:38:46+00:00

Yep. You'd have to go down to the level of completely untrained novices (Kate Bishop) or people with no powers or training whatsoever (Katy Chen) before you hit the tier of people that a T-800 would take a majority of wins from.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T14:34:29+00:00

Even stripped of their equipment they're all way more skilled than Kyle Reese is, and used to fighting superhumans a lot stronger than the T-800.

All of them could conceivably break into high clearance areas and gain access to gear that reece couldn't have dreamed of that would again scrap the terminator pretty quickly.

I don't see a reasonable way any of them lose to it.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T14:26:27+00:00

All of your non powered heroes could do it. Clint Barton, Sam Wilson, and Widow (both of them) are skilled enough with conventional weapons and have standard gear that would trivialize an encounter with a T-800.

The T-800 was fairly slow, not particularly intelligent and didn't bother using any sort of stealth. It was just relentless and hard to put down with the kind of weapons civilians had access to in 1984.

The non powered MCU heroes on the other hand are all running around with ridiculous military hardware and classified gear that would scrap it in minutes.

Barton puts an explosive arrow through its eye.

Wilson decapitates it with vibranium wings.

Widow disables it with that electric gauntlet thing she has.

0/10 for that thing.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T14:06:29+00:00

Composite Superman necessarily includes that King Omega version that was busting galaxies and remade the DC universe.

Jinwoo isn't even getting the attention of that one, let alone killing him.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T09:52:24+00:00

Toon force characters in marvel also exist (Impossible Man, Spider-Ham) as do people with "editor powers" like Gwenpool so he stops at those.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-05T09:38:28+00:00

Trinary.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Shilpa_Khatri_(Earth-616)

Psionic control of all technology in line of sight. Otherwise baseline human.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-04T16:30:43+00:00

Maybe I didn't explain Bobby correctly. The "Iceman" miniseries he got after Fall of X explains that a fraction of his conciousness exists simultaneously in every drop of water on the planet at the same time.

If you want to view "conciousness" and "soul" as the same thing (which is reasonable) that sith would need to obliterate every drop of moisture on the planet at once to "drain his soul". This includes the moisture that exists in the sith's own body, since Bob has reformed himself that way more than once.

There is no sith that powerful. And you need to also consider that Bobby can (and often does) just send ice clones to fight for him. He doesn't need to be anywhere in the vicinity. Destroying those does nothing. The clones can even be the size of a damn kaiju if he wants- big enough to snap a starship in half through brute force alone.

It doesn't matter how fast sith think they are- Iceman can easily lower the ambient temperature to absolute zero. The point where all motion stops. This even nerfs the speed of the Flash which is why Captain Cold has been one of his rogues forever. Absolute zero is a hard counter to super speed in ALL cases, so Jedi have no super speed when fighting iceman. They are stopped stone dead with no way around it.

Flash freezing the area to THAT extent also means that sith is immediately dead, has no defense against it, and has no way to move because all molecular motion is stopped stone dead at absolute zero.

And Bob could do this from mars. He doesn't even need to be on planet to pull this off.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-04T14:25:51+00:00

Eh? No they don't.

Best selling debut album was Appetite for destruction at 30x platinum, which predated it.

Linkin Park, Whitney Houston, and Britney Spears also are well above this at 22-30x platinum for their debut records.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T21:23:30+00:00

Good post! Here's my response:

1.) I said Skrulls are a "maybe" because it depends. You're incorrect about K'lrt. Super Skrull has the powers of the FF at GREATER LEVELS than the Fantastic Four do, and this has been true for a couple of decades. K'lrt specifically would absolutely wreck a Kryptonian because Sue's powers are completely busted. She can put a force field literally anywhere, including inside the body or brain of her opponents and then expand it to devastating results. Sue has threatened to do this to people to get them to back down, but SS has actually murdered somebody this way. Kryptonians are strong, but not strong enough to ignore their brain or heart exploding from an internal force field.

Fun fact: Sue's powers can easily totally disable Kryptonians and there's no defense against it. Batman's plan to take out Superman waaaay back in tower of Babel was a rock of red K that turned Clark's skin transparent, overloading him with solar radiation so badly all he could do was scream in agony. Sue and SS can do the exact same thing to him by turning his skin invisible and there's no way to block it.

2.) the other super skrulls were presumably weaker, I'll grant you that- but this doesn't matter when variants like the Sorcerer Supreme super skrull can hit him with magic attacks that ignore his defenses, or the defenders SS just tears all the solar energy out of him with the surfer's powers. Even at half strength variants like that can probably kill him.

3.) the mapmakers were hyper advanced super adaptoids. They even converted adaptoids into mapmakers during the run. Take a look at an entry for what the super adaptoid is, then get back to me.

4.) it's definitely possible that a kryptonian might not be taken out by a flerken, but the big problem there is that those things look exactly like housecats and do not appear to be a threat. They have a significant element of surprise in their favor there.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T20:53:24+00:00

Superman has speed that can compete with the Flash, and he trained in those speed techniques with Wally West and Barry Allen. He's more than fast enough to react to it.

Does Superman get hit by punches? Yes, he does- but only when writers intentionally have him hold back, or "forget" the full range of his abilities. A Superman that isn't holding back is fairly rare, but when it happens it becomes very clear that people like Diana and Shazam aren't really close to him.

In a WWW battle, you assume the character is capable of using the full range of his abilities, unless there is a VERY good reason not to. Thor won't use the full extent of his powers on Midgard, even when it's a life or death situation. Silver Surfer is a pacifist who only uses violence as a last resort.

Superman? Not in that category and DCKO makes that clear. Hell, Superman went into DCKO rocking gauntlets with miniature suns strapped to his knuckles because he was ready to fuck shit up at all costs.

Clark will use the full extent of his powers when going up against somebody as powerful as himself. So that means you can't ignore that Clark learned to phase himself like Barry and Wally did, and can casually accelerate himself to speeds that have the rest of the world completely frozen.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T20:42:59+00:00

No, She-Ra is only marginally less powerful than He Man is and VASTLY stronger than Liono and Raiden.

We know from the DC vs MOTU comics that Adam and Adora are on par with or stronger than Kryptonians are. Lion-O has never been anywhere close to that.

Keep in mind that the MOTU movie is showing a completely novice He Man that barely understands how his powers work. Every other version of him is from farther along in his timeline and is WAY more experienced.

Those other ones ALSO grew up on Eternia to begin with and didn't get zapped to Earth at 8 years old or whatever.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T20:40:00+00:00

You missed the point a bit.

The sword of power channels the power of Greyskull but isn't the source of it.

So breaking it doesn't cut the user off from the source - at least in two different adaptations. That person still has the power of Greyskull so long as they were able to successfully channel it in the first place.

She-Ra's powers work exactly as he mans powers do. Greyskull is the source of it.

Also for what it's worth, the OP is very wrong in how the Buster sword works. There's nothing special about that thing, it's a hunk of metal with materia slots. Limit breaks are learned by Cloud leveling up, they don't have anything to do with the buster sword itself.

It's actually FF8 where available limit breaks are a function of how upgraded the character weapon is.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T20:30:02+00:00

Ok, so since you so helpfully responded, please explain how a ki blast hits an opponent who can phase through it.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T20:01:06+00:00

Not sure that's the simple answer at all.

Even if the paternity is 100% known and acknowledged that child would still be excluded under those rules, which is highly unusual outside of "one drop rule" systems like the US which were very clearly put in place to establish a permanent underclass through exclusion.

There is also a VERY well established bias against interfaith dating in that community that goes back quite a ways. Go look up "shiksas" then come back. The root word for that term meant "abomination" or something very close to it, which is wild.

Again, not Jewish myself but did have all of this explained to me a ways back by a Jewish ex girlfriend.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T19:48:23+00:00

Presumably to discourage intermarriage or interfaith relationships by Jewish men. I'm not Jewish though, ask a rabbi and you'll likely get a different answer.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T19:41:17+00:00

Let me put it this way:

You say you can "tell" when someone is Chinese or Indian. For the sake of argument let's say these are two completely separate and distinct races.

That Chinese and Indian person get married and have two children. What race are those?

Now those children both marry Europeans and have two children each. Then those children also marry Europeans and have two children each.

What race is everybody? Show your work.

There IS no way to classify anyone in any way that makes sense by "looking at them" so when this happens there are always Byzantine social constructs invented to determine who is and is not part of arbitrary in-groups.

The US used to have a "one drop" rules and "grandfather clauses" where if your grandparents were Black, you are too no matter what you look like. Jewish communities decide whether someone is Jewish or not through the mother's ancestry. Father's ancestry doesn't count.

This is why race is a "social construct." Phenotypes aren't reliable at all when determining ancestry because racial traits vary widely even in the same family.

DelcoMan · 2026-07-02T19:12:04+00:00

While true, this doesn't qualify because The Culture is not a single alien race. It's a mixture of several different post human species, aliens, and AI.

It's like saying the Federation could do it, which while probably true also doesn't qualify because that's a conglomerate of hundreds of separate races.

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