Darkseid vs Doctor Manhattan

[Kirika]

Seeing how the justice league fared against Doctor Manhattan, and thinking this is important, Darkseid decides to see about putting Doctor Manhattan in his place himself.

1: Straight fight.

2: Darksied does what he'd do deciding that Doctor Manhattan needs to be dealt with naturally in the same story/universe upon learning about him.

[JohnDiggle]

I'm going with Doc.

[Guy Smiley]

I took a few minutes to look up some scans from Doomsday Clock, but I haven't read the whole thing, and have no idea if he's shown any further feats that would contradict my understanding of his limitations. Since you didn't specify a version, I assume we're using current Darkseid, and I'm also not sure what level the guy's currently standing at considering how much he's flip-flopped power-level-wise over the years.

That said, Manhattan appears to have two glaring weaknesses in this fight: He doesn't have understanding of a number of the more esoteric energies and particles found in a more comic-book-y universe than Watchmen, and typically gets hit by stuff the first time before he starts figuring things out. Guy breaks his neck before he breaks down what a Lantern ring does, he gets bathed in mystic fires before figuring out magic, and expresses fascination with a bunch of exotic energies he gets attacked with further on. He also does not display any particular mental resistance to telepathy, with Martian Manhunter being able to read his mind.

Darkseid brings a few things to this fight that could likely win at older, classic power levels. The Omega beams have ranged from being a mean pink energy blast, to teleporting people into personal hell dimensions, to flat out conceptual annihalation. At that last level, Manhattan presumably isn't rebuilding himself if he gets hit, (and he *is* getting hit because he won't know how to control the esoteric energies of the beams before he gets struck) and being in multiple places won't save him. On the other hand, if Darkseid's at a lower ebb, he's just blowing away Manhattan with a pink beam, and Manhattan has no issues coming back. And yes, Darkseid is getting that blast off. Osterman can alter the past, but he moves and thinks at normal speeds, while Darkseid has shown some levels of super speed once or twice in his publication history. (Although, once again, this is going to be dependent on his current power level.) He should be getting a blast off before Manhattan can think to retcon the fight.

Darkseid also has shown telepathic abilities and anti-life related mind control at a number of points in his past. Assuming he still hs some measure of these abilities, I could see him mind-whammying Manhattan at the bell.

Meanwhile, Manhattan's abilities all stem from particle and energy control. He might be slowed down a lot by Darkseid's various New God traits, like actually being a planet-dwarfing giant shrunk down to humaan sie by boom-tube spacial relativity, or being an avatar of a multidimensional super-Darkseid, or being a receptacle of Omega energy, or... I'm not sure he's instantly detonating Darkseid even if he does get the jump on him, is what I'm saying.

The second scenario is trickier. Manhattan can retcon stuff as needed, since it no longer counts as prep time. However, Darkseid would just have to get lucky to permanently infect Manhattan with soul-crushing despair and feelings of futility. (Which Manhattan has already been vulnerable to feeling normally...) Manhattan would just have to see his future self getting a good soul-crushing, and that would propagate backwards to his present self, preventing him from mustering the willpower to change things. I'd say it all depends on the author, even moreso than usual in this case.

[Hiromi]

I mean he seemed more or less impervious to magic despite never having seen it before and could basically instantly manipulate it



(not to mention the whole disassembling a Green Lantern ring immediately upon seeing it)