Ranma vs. Esdeath

[The Drunkard Kid]

So, after binging the Akame ga Kill manga, I got curious about this matchup, mostly because I have trouble placing Esdeath's physical stats beyond "whatever is most inconvenient for Night Raid at this exact moment."

Assume that Ranma's ridiculous resistance to cold lets him no-sell Esdeath's time stop. If she is sufficiently strong enough to oneshot him or no-sell his attacks, then give him the Gekkaja to at least be likely to cut her as well as Akame could.

[Rightoya]

If a character with another name than Bruce Wayne does with preperation this:



Is that typically a good indication that Ranma Saotome don't wants to be in that fight, and if we don't assume that Ranma just negates all ice attacks for some reason is this not a good fight, Esdeath has such a versatile power set that even a character who entierly outstats her could very easy still get in trouble.

[The Drunkard Kid]

If a character with another name than Bruce Wayne does with preperation this:



Is that typically a good indication that Ranma Saotome don't wants to be in that fight, and if we don't assume that Ranma just negates all ice attacks for some reason is this not a good fight, Esdeath has such a versatile power set that even a character who entierly outstats her could very easy still get in trouble.

That move actually *did* take prep, specifically her reabsorbing and redirecting the days worth of charge that she had used to build her ice army into that one shot. Also, it didn't actually do anything to the literal army of non-superhuman soldiers and civilians she was surrounded by, with its major threat being from the damage it would cause to the nation as a whole over an extended period of time if they didn't kill her soon.

Meanwhile, in addition to him learning the Body of Ice technique in order to maintain his body temperature while training in the middle of a hot spring and was able to weather a cold that gave him chills strong enough to freeze water by breathing at it (and at full power it gave him a fever high enough to instantly boil water on contact), Ranma's final major battle involved him getting hit with ice magic strong enough to withstand beams of fire strong enough to vaporize multiple mountaintops, the last time deliberately using that magic on himself in order to fight a guy who is able to fire that kind of attack pretty much at will, with no apparent negative side effects of note. Not to mention that Ranma's own skill set is very broad and weird, with him practically specializing in taking down people that outstat him to at least some degree.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Oh, and for Round 1 Esdeath doesn't have her Ice Army, and for Round 2 she gets the Ice Army but Ranma gets both the Gekkaja and the Kinjaken.

[BitVyper]

It's... tricky. Maybe close? Speed is going to be an important factor and they're both nebulously strong multi-mach. I've broken down Esdeath's speed feats elsewhere before and I feel like Ranma possibly has the edge there, but it's hard to say. Esdeath is drastically more powerful, but not in a way that's going to crush Ranma outright. Kind of like Saffron in that regard. She's got massive tenacity, and while she doesn't have quite as clean a library of feats for "skill" as Ranma does, she's probably playing in the same ballpark. She's definitely pulled off some of the sort of tricks I would expect from him. I don't think she has quite the same spur-of-the-moment creativity for asspull moves that Ranma does, but she's not lacking it either. Ranma's definitely got more raw strength than anything I can recall from her, but I doubt she'll be grappling with the kid. Aside from strength where I think he's way ahead of her, I'd say she's probably a little bit lower than him in most areas, but only a little bit, and then has a boatload of power that Ranma may or may not be able to do anything with. She has some potentially big AoE, but not so big that Ranma can't avoid it; again I'd say she's close to Saffron here. The big thing for her, I think, is something that just briefly comes up in the last battle: We find out that she's making the area around her so cold that it's at least a factor making Akame's life harder. Even being resistant, it might cause Ranma some trouble

I think it might be fairly even. I could see the fight going either way, and I think Esdeath is going to have a wonderful time. It's not too difficult to imagine Ranma pulling some Hiryu Shoten Ha type stuff in reverse, but he hasn't technically ever done that one thing, so ice might be a bit of a weakness for him. On the other hand, he has a solid range game when bloodlusted, and while I think Esdeath is good enough to be dangerous to him in melee, I doubt she's going to peg him at range. On the other hand, maybe she can ramp that cold aura way up if she's focused on it instead of on fighting an army.

I don't think he needs Gekkaja here.

[Rightoya]

That move actually *did* take prep, specifically her reabsorbing and redirecting the days worth of charge that she had used to build her ice army into that one shot. Also, it didn't actually do anything to the literal army of non-superhuman soldiers and civilians she was surrounded by, with its major threat being from the damage it would cause to the nation as a whole over an extended period of time if they didn't kill her soon.

I know that it took preperation, but even if we divide that by 500 or more, we still end up with an extreme versatile ice manipulator who could generate more than a mountain's worth of snow or ice. And that is very much out of Ranma's paygrade.

Meanwhile, in addition to him learning the Body of Ice technique in order to maintain his body temperature while training in the middle of a hot spring and was able to weather a cold that gave him chills strong enough to freeze water by breathing at it (and at full power it gave him a fever high enough to instantly boil water on contact), Ranma's final major battle involved him getting hit with ice magic strong enough to withstand beams of fire strong enough to vaporize multiple mountaintops, the last time deliberately using that magic on himself in order to fight a guy who is able to fire that kind of attack pretty much at will, with no apparent negative side effects of note. Not to mention that Ranma's own skill set is very broad and weird, with him practically specializing in taking down people that outstat him to at least some degree.

That still falls far short of ice magic that literally freezes time somehow, which Ranma definitively shouldn't be immune to, he or she just is because of your rule.

[BitVyper]

I know that it took preperation, but even if we divide that by 500 or more, we still end up with an extreme versatile ice manipulator who could generate more than a mountain's worth of snow or ice. And that is very much out of Ranma's paygrade.

That's a completely arbitrary, and definitely way too small number to divide it by. She got the big iceburst by dumping all the power she'd invested into an army of ice soldiers she spent weeks or months creating in a slow process. It's not remotely a factor in figuring her immediate combat output. It's like saying I can punch really hard because I could technically build a bomb.

That still falls far short of ice magic that literally freezes time somehow, which Ranma definitively shouldn't be immune to, he or she just is because of your rule.

Yeah that's the condition of the thread,so that's the condition of the thread. On the other hand, we literally know that adapting to the cold made Tatsumi briefly immune to her timestop, and that she only has a few seconds of subjective time when she does it, so it's perfectly conceivable that having big cold resistance could do the trick

Edit: I don't really feel like looking through the comic at speed stuff, but just a quick and dirty speed reference: Bullet timing is a thing from pretty much the start of the comic with clear dodges and deflections from several characters, but Akame most of all. Akame, when she's in an even situation, is generally able to run circles around most characters. Akame and Esdeath both have a clearly reflexive dodge on a real lightning bolt, which I tend to rate as a little bit beyond bullet time because of how lightning moves. Akame is generally fast enough to skirmish with Esdeath, but the danger presented by Murasame is absolutely a factor in that too, so Akame is decently slower than Esdeath, and in their fight at the execution grounds has to resort to a strategy that only really works because the slightest touch with Murasame = death, but she's still getting overwhelmed and knows she can't last. In their final fight, Esdeath is gradually getting tired from army fighting (she doesn't really show it, but Najenda makes it very clear that all the fighting is taking a toll), and a nebulously faster drugged up Akame is still slower than her (albeit scoring a single hit from stealth in the one second Esdeath stops focusing). When she unlocks Murasame's trump which seems to be just an all-around power up, she just barely starts to outpace Esdeath (who has been fighting an army and multiple teigu users all day) and still very nearly loses. So Es is at least one or two levels of nebulous anime abstraction faster than someone who can pull off a lightning dodge.

[Rightoya]

That's a completely arbitrary, and definitely way too small number to divide it by. She got the big iceburst by dumping all the power she'd invested into an army of ice soldiers she spent weeks or months creating in a slow process. It's not remotely a factor in figuring her immediate combat output. It's like saying I can punch really hard because I could technically build a bomb.

From where are you getting weeks or months? She talked about a few days, and i have a very hard time to believe she was truly 24 hours a day standing there and making them, without any breaks:



And your bomb example would just make sense if humans would have a magic that allows them to generate parts of a big bomb out of thin air, and smaller bombs in the size of the parts without preperation.

Yeah that's the condition of the thread,so that's the condition of the thread. On the other hand, we literally know that adapting to the cold made Tatsumi briefly immune to her timestop, and that she only has a few seconds of subjective time when she does it, so it's perfectly conceivable that having big cold resistance could do the trick

Ranma never withstood anything as whacky as literally freezing time, and if we rate Ranma's ice resistance in general based on a condition just created for this thread could we just make up a whole new character instead.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Considering how absolutely, completely, word-association nonsense using ice magic to freeze time without actually affecting the temperature of the area or the people that got frozen in any way was, or the similarly asspull-ing fact that Tatsumi randomly developing some nebulous degree of resistance to cold (possibly *while* frozen in time) allowed him to no-sell the few seconds of time freeze that Esdeath can manage per day, I'm comfortable stating that a guy who has specifically learned how to control his body temperature, has prior feats of being able to move around while his body was making itself cold enough that he can freeze buckets of water being thrown at him by blowing at it, and can use a magical artifact to freeze himself solid to the point where he's still visibly frozen after no-selling a beam of fire that instantly blew away two mountaintops and still be able to move around apparently unhampered in that state should have sufficient resistance to cold to deal with Esdeath's completely BS power [EDIT: given the very specific way to resist it that we saw].

As for that final attack, she explicitly needed multiple days worth of magical power stored up to do that, and she is definitely driven enough to dedicate the entirety of multiple days to construct the army of tens of thousands of reasonably powerful ice soldiers (each of them strong enough that Tatsumi said he had to be careful not to take them too lightly while he was running at Esdeath-level stats which allowed him to blitz stomp them) that she states that she crafted one by one, and it didn't actually do anything but be a spell/technique to alter the climate in general (especially since it instantly ended once she was killed), which isn't going to have a direct effect on this fight.

Edit: Wasn't Esdeath's lightning dodge also based on teigu-generated lighting rather than natural lighting? I'd put it on par with Ranma and Pantyhose Tarou dealing with Rouge's magical lighting, unless I'm misremembering.

[The Drunkard Kid]

I'm just wondering how her ice magic would affect her vulnerability to the Hiryuu Shoten Ha, since she's also pretty damn hot blooded, which is pretty much explicitly what he learned to use it on rather than actual heat (though he can definitely use that too), and freezing Ranma just makes the tornadoes he hits people with more powerful. OTOH, the fact that he can do that and that it uses temperature differentials is pretty much public knowledge, which has been used to turn it against him before, but he's dealt with that before and thanks to that final battle, the full extent of Esdeath's ice magic is even more common knowledge than Ranma's HSH.

That said, his Umisenken invisibility might throw her for a loop since that's definitely *not* common knowledge and works by hiding his presence (while still being able to attack with ridiculous amounts of strength and speed), the lack thereof being the weakness that she uses to deal with Tatsumi's invisibility.

Also, does anyone know why Akame was able to access her teigu's Trump Card at the end? She says its because she threw away her humanity and it looked to be because she mercy killed Tatsumi before he lost control to the Tyrant Dragon (who was apparently an Esdeath+ threat), but considering that it was revealed that she had somehow managed to aim her uncontrollable poison magic attack (that seems to affect things physically rather than spiritually) at just the Tyrant Dragon's life force instead of Tatsumi's weaker life force, that doesn't really make any sense? Or is this just something like freezing time with ice magic or resisting time freezes with ice resistance?

[BitVyper]

Edit: Wasn't Esdeath's lightning dodge also based on teigu-generated lighting rather than natural lighting? I'd put it on par with Ranma and Pantyhose Tarou dealing with Rouge's magical lighting, unless I'm misremembering.

Budou's teigu called the lightning bolt down from the sky. We might argue about whether it was generated in the sky or by his teigu, but it was pretty clearly operating under normal lightning rules in a way that the kind of lightning we tend to disregard usually does not. At any rate, it's not so wildly beyond where their abilities were probably at otherwise as to be unbelievable, as long as you have a reasonable expectation of what a lightning dodge actually means. Put another way, I expect Ranma could pull off the same dodge.

That said, his Umisenken invisibility might throw her for a loop since that's definitely *not* common knowledge and works by hiding his presence (while still being able to attack with ridiculous amounts of strength and speed), the lack thereof being the weakness that she uses to deal with Tatsumi's invisibility.

You know, somehow I got it into my head that Ranma had the yamasenken and not umisenken when I was thinking about this. Invisibility and total self erasure might win it for him, although somehow I feel like Esdeath will find a way around it by like, detecting temperature differentials or some bullshit, then Ranma will get around that with soul of ice, and there'll be back and forth.

Also, does anyone know why Akame was able to access her teigu's Trump Card at the end? She says its because she threw away her humanity and it looked to be because she mercy killed Tatsumi before he lost control to the Tyrant Dragon (who was apparently an Esdeath+ threat), but considering that it was revealed that she had somehow managed to aim her uncontrollable poison magic attack (that seems to affect things physically rather than spiritually) at just the Tyrant Dragon's life force instead of Tatsumi's weaker life force, that doesn't really make any sense? Or is this just something like freezing time with ice magic or resisting time freezes with ice resistance?

It's really poorly defined. It seems like a sharingan gotta-kill-your-friend kind of thing but then... she didn't actually kill Tatsumi. Maybe there's just enough wiggle room there in that she killed something in Tatsumi's body that it let her do it. It's also remarked upon that her ability to target a single life force was significant to her bond with Murasame, so the fact that she was able to pull that feat off might have counted too. It's a little unsatisfying.

[The Drunkard Kid]

I did some quick math, and if she had made only 10,000 Ice Soldiers rather than the tens of thousands that the spies that she allowed to discover her plan stated that she had actually made, then if she did absolutely nothing at all, she would have had to make 6.9 of them per minute to complete that batch in one day, and invested enough power in each that they could apparently be a potential threat to the Esdeath-tier (physically) Tatsumi if they had managed to land hits on him. Make of this knowledge what you will, I guess.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Budou's teigu called the lightning bolt down from the sky. We might argue about whether it was generated in the sky or by his teigu, but it was pretty clearly operating under normal lightning rules in a way that the kind of lightning we tend to disregard usually does not. At any rate, it's so not wildly beyond where their abilities were probably at otherwise as to be unbelievable, as long as you have a reasonable expectation of what a lightning dodge actually means. Put another way, I expect Ranma could pull off the same dodge.



You know, somehow I got it into my head that Ranma had the yamasenken and not umisenken when I was thinking about this. Invisibility and total self erasure might win it for him, although somehow I feel like Esdeath will find a way around it by like, detecting temperature differentials or some bullshit, then Ranma will get around that with soul of ice, and there'll be back and forth.



It's really poorly defined. It seems like a sharingan gotta-kill-your-friend kind of thing but then... she didn't actually kill Tatsumi. Maybe there's just enough wiggle room there in that she killed something in Tatsumi's body that it let her do it. It's also remarked upon that her ability to target a single life force was significant to her bond with Murasame, so the fact that she was able to pull that feat off might have counted too. It's a little unsatisfying.

That's the phrase that perfectly describes my feeling with the series as a whole. Like, overall I really enjoyed it, and they do arguably some of the best stuff I've seen with humanizing villains and not pulling the punches on how murdering people in the name of justice is at least a little hypocritical, but every time Akame ga Kill starts getting its momentum going, something happens that takes the wind out of it to at least a notable degree, especially with regards to its politics which aren't as detailed as Attack on Titans's and complete asspulls that I feel that AGK just isn't flamboyantly sincere enough to get away with unlike JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (especially with regards to Esdeath). Add to that the almost total lack of world building (did we ever even get a name for the country it takes place in, or of any of the nations/tribes they are at war with, or the child Emperor who is the technical source of the actual Big Bad's authority, or who replaces him after the kingdom was overthrown? was there any sort of special origin or nature to the danger/risk beasts, or are they just random encounters?), and it's like someone made an off-brand Berserk.

Don't even get me started on what happened with Leone's completely out of character actions at the end of the series.

[BitVyper]

Honestly, I like it pretty much the whole way through except for the fact that it tried to make Bols sympathetic. I realise that he's meant to be like the guy who just had to do the soldier thing for a living because his nation is messed up and military service was probably the only way he'd ever have some kind of life, but there's a pretty sharp limit on what I'm willing to let pass with that explanation, and Bols is way beyond it.

I think its politics are pretty straightforward, to be honest. Like there's not a lot of character nuance involved with the real bad guys because it's an empire in sharp decline (you might argue against this based on their military success, but that's really just Esdeath), run by a rampantly monstrous aristocracy who live to such inhuman excess that they can't get a rush off their power without doing deliberate harm. They have all the power and they just lie if they're negotiated with. Budou is trying to be an upstanding, honourable guy worthy of his ancestors and even he only manages to be a slightly growly lapdog who would absolutely have gotten his ass kicked by Esdeath the second he stepped out of line. The author has one clear point throughout the series, that the empire is not salvageable, and there's a debt in blood that has to be paid to get rid of it.

I appreciate that the villains are absolute scum and there's no more nuance to their motivation than being sadistic, ravenous, nihilists who want to maintain or expand their ability to inflict as much harm as possible. I like how the series kicks Tatsumi in the teeth every time he tries to be a shonen hero so that he learns to temper the idealism and burning blood with some practicality, and also that the "change-the-empire-from-the-inside" guys were as blindly ineffective as I'd expect them to be. I really liked Esdeath in particular just because she's absolutely designed to attract the kind of people who imagine they could change her for waifu purposes, and then it goes way out of its way to stomp that idea into the dirt.

[BitVyper]

As far as how long it took to make the ice cavalry goes, her saying "a few days" in that scan is wildly off base. She first shows them to Wave and Kurome offscreen in chapter 57. She first deploys some of them (again offscreen, only referencing her "new trump") in chapter 61. This is all well before the final battle. We don't know exactly how much time passes, but we know whole armies are advancing on the capital during this time, fighting minor skirmishes and travelling long distances overland. The alchemist lady has time to do a massive overhaul of the emperor's teigu, build her personal monstrosity, and conduct multiple raids on revolutionary camps. Generously, it could be weeks, allowing for time to have been abstracted a bit because this is anime, but the events happening could easily have covered months. Esdeath's dialogue tends to suggest that she started working on the ice cavalry pretty much the second the battle at the execution grounds ended.

We also know that she had to invest time in training them, so it took her a lot to get up to the numbers she had in the final battle.

Edit: It's also remarked upon in the final battle that the reason Esdeath hasn't been out fighting rebels while all their forces were advancing is most likely that she was busy investing all her power in the ice cavalry