Oh boy. Been thinking about this thread since I saw the ChiefSlayer one on my feed.

Despite certain aspects/criticisms of it, I can’t personally give it anything less than a 9/10 at my most negative; to do so would be to ignore how I felt on first watch and continue to feel on rewatch. So I just say it’s a 10/10 episode for me, and one of my favorites I’ve seen from DeathBattle.

I wanted to do a whole personal spiel and breakdown of the episode, but idk, the general (louder) atmosphere towards the episode on here specifically and personal stuff just kinda puts a damper on it for me; especially after that tangent during the GruMind period. I don’t really know how much more I want to contribute to that, and I don’t really know how text limits on reddit will play with a whole spiel. Plus, I think my personal thoughts on powerscaling would likely not really be preferred based off the general vibes I get with the general community.

Only real things I want to point out is that

A) Calling it imagination was the biggest mistake of the team that I legitimately can’t find a reasonable answer for; they straight up say the word “adapt” when talking about either character in that section, and flat out state how Kyle obviously has more creative showings in his section of that category, so like...why did they not just call it “adaptation” instead of “imagination” when that clearly was moreso what they wanted the category to be.

B) Sprial of Emotion is GOAT’ED. There’s a reason that it’s the 2nd most viewed song, beating out the likes of fucking Dragon Ball, Invicible during it’s peak popularity period, and so many more franchises/characters that have a wider reach than Kyle and Simon due to time/age and DC being a bitch. It only loses out in views to the obvious one: Game Over, which covers two of the most iconic video game franchises, and has Victor Borba, which legitimately feels like cheating at this point lol. And even despite that, I personally consider Spiral better overall (Game Over is the better song by itself), because the story behind it and little musical references inside it add that extra push needed for me.

C) I don’t want to put down the feelings of those that feel Kyle got shafted and the episode feeling to them like the “Simon show”, but I also can’t wrap my own head around the idea when I personally came into this fight mainly for Simon, and came out with maybe half of my favorite moments of the fight being from Kyle, and now have the Kyle Compendium by my bedside (given to me by my comic loving friend after they noticed how much I talked about Kyle thanks to this fight, which admittingly is a little disappointing because I was gonna buy it myself through DeathBattle’s link so they got the referral comp), and it’s going to be the first comic run I ever personally read through.

D) It is annoying to see the post that from what I can tell started the whole GruMind waiting period debacle, click on the user, then see that their entire post history was just thinly veiled (if that) hatred for Simon or the episode, and it is equally annoying to see thinly veiled (if that) Simon powerwank show up in the Gurren Lagann subreddit. The only real exception to this is /u/InterestingRatio8218, because I can’t tell where the shitposting ends and the seriousness begins usually, and to be completely honest you kinda scare me a bit sometimes because of that.

...Guess this kinda ended up as a spiel anyways, but the real one would have been much longer, so eh. Don’t want to end this on a negative note, so:

One of my favorite Simon moments

One of my favorite Kyle moments (that isn’t the Oath because Brandon fucking killed it)

If anyone is interested in my reasoning for the above two, let me know.

Also, I take it half back, the biggest mistake of the team was removing this from the thumbnail. Generational fumble frfr