Remo Williams Vs. Kenshiro (1st Volume)

[Sharpandpointies]

Yeah, I just read through those new feats, and yeesh, Remo seems to have gone from being "stupidly beyond street-level, but no threat for the Avengers" to "ha, Avengers, don't make me laugh, next time bring your A game." (I exaggerate only slightly - he'd still maybe have issues with Thor and high end class 100s, but everyone else is, as Ken would say, already dead).

The series has gone in a very different direction than the original idea in terms of character capacity, to be sure. I would say 'power creep', but 'creep' isn't the correct word.

Edit: probably something like 'the power level jumped on a rocket ship while smoking crack' is a better way of thinking.

[Nik Hasta]

I mean, I get what you mean, but this;

Pressure point nonsense? Nope, Remo literally changes memories, mind controls, causes all the organ explosion stuff, heals people, whatever.

Kenshiro literally has feats of doing all of these.

And of course, even if Ken could do something to Remo, all that does is bring out Shiva, and Ken don't want none of that nonsense.

I didn't get what was impressive about Shiva from the quoted passages? He has a contextual "do a dance and the universe ends," bit. Otherwise, he fought one Sinanju Master with his undead army. That dude then got possessed by all the spirits of the masters, they hit each other like twice - messing up a street - threw some cars at each other and then Chuin talked him down.

Like, I get that the implication is "Shiva is as strong as 100 Sinanju guys all rolled into one," but the resulting fight seemed pretty underwhelming in terms of feats demonstrated. For all his "I'm beyond you as a god," the regular Sinanju guy (prior to the spirits showing up) eats several hits and is still alive.

[big_adventure]

I mean, I get what you mean, but this;



Kenshiro literally has feats of doing all of these.

Oh, definitely, I wasn't saying it was specifically an edge for Remo, just that it's no longer remotely an edge for Kenshiro, either. I was more going for "even the stuff that, prior, would have been a big edge for Ken, just isn't anymore, as Remo has the exact same stuff." Sorry if I wasn't clear. :-)

I didn't get what was impressive about Shiva from the quoted passages? He has a contextual "do a dance and the universe ends," bit. Otherwise, he fought one Sinanju Master with his undead army. That dude then got possessed by all the spirits of the masters, they hit each other like twice - messing up a street - threw some cars at each other and then Chuin talked him down.

Like, I get that the implication is "Shiva is as strong as 100 Sinanju guys all rolled into one," but the resulting fight seemed pretty underwhelming in terms of feats demonstrated. For all his "I'm beyond you as a god," the regular Sinanju guy (prior to the spirits showing up) eats several hits and is still alive.

Well, there are two things really:

One, Shiva really just can't die. Stuff that would kill even Remo just gets Shiva ready to play. Even to the extent that Remo has suffered fatal injuries and all that did was bring out Shiva, who proceeded to annihilate whatever dared wake him from his nap. Shiva is like Beerus in that way.

Two, Shiva has always worked on some sort of power scaling. Early on, when Chuin could rip up a battleship's armor with his bare hands, Remo was explicitly a lot weaker. But when Shiva pops up, the relative powerlevel was reversed: very early on, ShivaRemo tosses tanks around like a pissed off toddler with toys and rips open NORAD-style huge vault doors with ease.

There is also the feat of Remo consciously invoking Shiva to grant Chuin a power to enable him to beat up a literal god (this is one of his explicit "override intangibility" feats as well).

So at worst Shiva is Remo but basically unkillable and with a little extra special sauce. More likely, he's got some amount of extra mojo and some amount of extra oomph. YMMV.

For a fight against Ken, it doesn't really matter, Remo doing things like dodging lasers after they are fired and dodging neutron bombardment is way too fast for Ken: for once, it's Ken who's already dead.

Note: I'm basing this on reading all of the feats that Jadon Korr posted above. My personal knowledge of Remo comes from reading 50 or 60 of the old destroyer books in 1993 or so because my girlfriend's mother had a box of them. That version, as far as I can recall, would be more on the "can beat first volume Kenshiro but peters out before EoS Ken."

[Sharpandpointies]

For a fight against Ken, it doesn't really matter, Remo doing things like dodging lasers after they are fired and dodging neutron bombardment is way too fast for Ken: for once, it's Ken who's already dead.

Note: I'm basing this on reading all of the feats that Jadon Korr posted above. My personal knowledge of Remo comes from reading 50 or 60 of the old destroyer books in 1993 or so because my girlfriend's mother had a box of them. That version, as far as I can recall, would be more on the "can beat first volume Kenshiro but peters out before EoS Ken."

I basically stopped reading in the area of 'neutron bombardment'. And that feat is being presented in a way that doesn't quite line up with how things happened. Frankly, I'm not sure Murphy understood how fast neutrons travel - the point was that Remo was running directly toward the neutron bomb explosion, reached a distance from the explosion where the concentration of neutrons was getting to the point where he's eating them, and decided to skirt the edge of it after that. Which...if we're talking about the actual speed neutrons travel after said explosion, would be insane, but this is at a point in the series where that speed - for Remo - would be such a freakishly enormous outlier that we'd discard it if we looked at it that way.

None of which matters, really, because in the later books quoted it's clear the writers have been smoking power-crack, and explicitly have him dodging laser-fire AFTER the pulse of photons is already on its way. Which beats the neutron bomb feat even if we take it at it's most wildly optimistic, so the accuracy of the neutron feat is unimportant.

But yeah, I kind of died out of reading the series around Ground Zero (#84) and hadn't read most of the novels after about #60, anyway.

[Jaden Korr]

I mean, I get what you mean, but this;



Kenshiro literally has feats of doing all of these.



I didn't get what was impressive about Shiva from the quoted passages? He has a contextual "do a dance and the universe ends," bit. Otherwise, he fought one Sinanju Master with his undead army. That dude then got possessed by all the spirits of the masters, they hit each other like twice - messing up a street - threw some cars at each other and then Chuin talked him down.

Like, I get that the implication is "Shiva is as strong as 100 Sinanju guys all rolled into one," but the resulting fight seemed pretty underwhelming in terms of feats demonstrated. For all his "I'm beyond you as a god," the regular Sinanju guy (prior to the spirits showing up) eats several hits and is still alive.

More Blood is an anthology series. Where eighteen fans put in their own two cents. So, it's arguably non-canon. It is published by the same company, and I only brought it up as it's the only time anybody provided anything approaching a challenge to Shiva.

[Nik Hasta]

The amusing thing is Kenshiro also did the "I'm dead but now a spirit of some kind of god has possessed me and I still kickass thing once,"

Big old parallels.

Well, there are two things really:

One, Shiva really just can't die. Stuff that would kill even Remo just gets Shiva ready to play. Even to the extent that Remo has suffered fatal injuries and all that did was bring out Shiva, who proceeded to annihilate whatever dared wake him from his nap. Shiva is like Beerus in that way.

You mind clarifying on this? The feats on the other page for Shiva have him eating some regular-ass hits from super Sinanju man and not caring and that's it.

Like, Ken explodes Remo's head, Shiva presumably gets up somehow and then Ken... say... makes all the blood from his body shoot out through his skin or makes his skeleton forcibly eject itself from his body. What happens then? Does he regenerate or something?

Two, Shiva has always worked on some sort of power scaling. Early on, when Chuin could rip up a battleship's armor with his bare hands, Remo was explicitly a lot weaker. But when Shiva pops up, the relative powerlevel was reversed: very early on, ShivaRemo tosses tanks around like a pissed off toddler with toys and rips open NORAD-style huge vault doors with ease.

So it's a boost on Remo's regular power albeit none of things you list here are significant when you're messing around in Kenshiro's ballpark. Dude punches giant cyborgs to hard they smash through the walls of allegedly anti-nuke bomb shelters and junk. Again, this isn't to suggest Ken wins, speed is too off kilter for that but I'm trying to get a sense of what Shiva actually means in terms of feats etc.

Note: I'm basing this on reading all of the feats that Jadon Korr posted above. My personal knowledge of Remo comes from reading 50 or 60 of the old destroyer books in 1993 or so because my girlfriend's mother had a box of them. That version, as far as I can recall, would be more on the "can beat first volume Kenshiro but peters out before EoS Ken."

See this is it, I read the same feats and none of the Shiva stuff seemed that wild. A lot of fluff and narrative hype but nothing concrete in terms of his power.

[Nik Hasta]

More Blood is an anthology series. Where eighteen fans put in their own two cents. So, it's arguably non-canon. It is published by the same company, and I only brought it up as it's the only time anybody provided anything approaching a challenge to Shiva.

Wait... so it's not even canon?

So, the only feats you have for Shiva actually doing stuff in your list aren't canon?

[Nik Hasta]

I basically stopped reading in the area of 'neutron bombardment'. And that feat is being presented in a way that doesn't quite line up with how things happened. Frankly, I'm not sure Murphy understood how fast neutrons travel - the point was that Remo was running directly toward the neutron bomb explosion, reached a distance from the explosion where the concentration of neutrons was getting to the point where he's eating them, and decided to skirt the edge of it after that. Which...if we're talking about the actual speed neutrons travel after said explosion, would be insane, but this is at a point in the series where that speed - for Remo - would be such a freakishly enormous outlier that we'd discard it if we looked at it that way.

None of which matters, really, because in the later books quoted it's clear the writers have been smoking power-crack, and explicitly have him dodging laser-fire AFTER the pulse of photons is already on its way. Which beats the neutron bomb feat even if we take it at it's most wildly optimistic, so the accuracy of the neutron feat is unimportant.

I had the same thought process when I read the feat. I was like, "Well that's not how any of that works but I get the general intention... maybe?"

The lightning feat is the one that I was like "that's super solid,"

The laser feat, eh. Could be lasers, could be like a plasma blast, could be just narrative flourish etc. A little unclear for me. But lightning was big gorilla thumbs up for a solid unambiguous feat.

Amusingly, that same sequence had Remo and Chuin being like

"This door is too tough to knock down with our magic kung fu hands,"

"Let's make a battering ram out of this tree that is wildly less durable than our magic kung fu hands,"

"Brilliant as ever my disciple, truly we are very consistent and logical,"

[Sharpandpointies]

You mind clarifying on this? The feats on the other page for Shiva have him eating some regular-ass hits from super Sinanju man and not caring and that's it.

Like, Ken explodes Remo's head, Shiva presumably gets up somehow and then Ken... say... makes all the blood from his body shoot out through his skin or makes his skeleton forcibly eject itself from his body. What happens then? Does he regenerate or something?

So, waaaay back in the series (somewhat - not at the beginning or anything, but somewhere in the 50's I want to say) Remo sky-dives from a plane without a parachute. Being Remo, he messes it up, and ends up with his neck broken and 'dead'. Shiva then possesses him and proceeds to wander around with broken neck and glowing eyes, does the aforementioned 'tosses tanks' and so forth, and presumably heals Remo in the doing at some point so that when Shiva leaves Remo, Remo is essentially fine.

Later on, when Kali shows up (in the body of a young woman whose neck Remo has broken), that Goddess breaks Remo's neck again, Shiva possesses him, and they face each other in a somewhat hysterical fashion, both of their necks broken to opposite sides (I guess their eyes are meeting, then).

Those are the two showings I remember of Shiva actually taking control of Remo in-canon, after Remo has suffered a fatal wound. Both times, it's a broken neck.

Solely based on THOSE feats, 'comes back from exploded head' seems to be a bridge too far.

[Sharpandpointies]

I had the same thought process when I read the feat. I was like, "Well that's not how any of that work,"

The lightning feat is the one that I was like "that's super solid,"

The laser feat, eh. Could be lasers, could be like a plasma blast, could be just narrative flourish etc. A little unclear for me. But lightning was big gorilla thumbs.

That same sequence had Remo and Chuin being like

"This door is too tough to knock down with our magic kung fu hands,"

"Let's make a battering ram out of this tree that is wildly less durable than our magic kung fu hands,"

"Brilliant as ever my disciple, truly we are very consistent and logical,"

Murphy wasn't writing for Rumbles or science (I mean, THAT'S pretty clear). Now, we do need to take stuff as written if it makes any sense whatsoever (like if they are photonic weapons fired at Remo, and he's dodging them after they've been fired, welp, there it is), assuming it's not wildly SMvsFL or whatever. So if he's dodging lightning, clearly noted book by book as getting faster, and then starts dodging laser pulses, well...okay.

But the neutron bomb explosion is more of a 'excuse me, neutron bombs don't gently waft their neutrons out so you can skirt around the cloud at the edge of where the concentration is getting thin'. Remo, to that point in the series, is NOWHERE NEAR fast enough to treat a neutron explosion like it's some kind of stationary cloud of particles.

And really, it doesn't matter since there's the lightning, the laser feat, etc.

[Jaden Korr]

Though another thing to remember is practitioners of sinanju, and gods in general can manipulate energy in a wide variety of ways. Collateral damage is only a big deal if they don't manage the conservation of energy.

I mean early on in Dr. Quake for example. When Chiun returned all that energy to California without blowing it up, and even Sunny Joe who is not an official master can disperse and absorb kinetic energy like Sebastian Shaw.

Taken from Legacy: Homecoming.

https://i.imgur.com/SxL1gsp.jpg

[Jaden Korr]

Wait... so it's not even canon?

So, the only feats you have for Shiva actually doing stuff in your list aren't canon?

I said arguably. Not sure what the canon policy is regarding More Blood. Just that a lot of fans worked on it. Point I was making is that normally Shiva is far beyond everyone else in their universe. Also, note the above. Fights in The Destroyer are not always big on collateral damage but that's because a whole bunch of characters can manipulate things like energy, momentum, vibrations, etcetera.

The rest of the feats I posted weren't from More Blood.

[Sharpandpointies]

"Let's make a battering ram out of this tree that is wildly less durable than our magic kung fu hands,"

"Brilliant as ever my disciple, truly we are very consistent and logical,"

I can't check at work, but if Chiun did actually say something complimentary to Remo, it's further proof that the characters have dramatically wandered from their inception. Doesn't make it non-canon, just...ugh.

[Nik Hasta]

Though another thing to remember is practitioners of sinanju, and gods in general can manipulate energy in a wide variety of ways. Collateral damage is only a big deal if they don't manage the conservation of energy.

I mean early on in Dr. Quake for example. When Chiun returned all that energy to California without blowing it up, and even Sunny Joe who is not an official master can disperse and absorb kinetic energy like Sebastian Shaw.

Taken from Legacy: Homecoming.

https://i.imgur.com/SxL1gsp.jpg

I mean, you claiming "Sunny has the powers of Sebastian Shaw," based on a single line that could quite easily be read as just a description of him stopping punch with a slightly purple description. This is what I meant by some of your assessments of the feats being a bit suss.

I said arguably. Not sure what the canon policy is regarding More Blood. Just that a lot of fans worked on it. Point I was making is that normally Shiva is far beyond everyone else in their universe. Also, note the above. Fights in The Destroyer are not always big on collateral damage but that's because a whole bunch of characters can manipulate things like energy, momentum, vibrations, etcetera.

The rest of the feats I posted weren't from More Blood.

Yeah, but those were the only feats of Shiva actually doing something in your list. Everything else was descriptive fluff.

I can't check at work, but if Chiun did actually say something complimentary to Remo, it's further proof that the characters have dramatically wandered from their inception. Doesn't make it non-canon, just...ugh.

Artistic licence on my part, I don't know the characters myself.

[Sharpandpointies]

Artistic licence on my part, I don't know the characters myself.

Cool. ^_^

Basically Chuin complains about everything Remo does (often referred to as 'carping'), to the point of inventing a complaint to use when he can't see any issues with what Remo does (the infamous 'bent elbow').

...early in the series he complains plenty about Remo, himself.