Martial Artists at the Tournament of Power

[Sharpandpointies]

This is always the issue when one tries to break fighting skill down into what real-world people consider fighting skill. The issue is that in Fiction, 'Learned Fighting Skill' can cover an awful lot more territory.

- Stat boosts due to chi/ki/whatever, or even just 'because they're even more skilled';
- All kinds of energy blasts and other weirdness;
- Hitting impossibly hard;
- Esoteric stuff like releasing poisons from the body;
- Cutting through stuff with one's finger because of 'skill';
- Reading body language to an impossible degree;
- Time travel fighting

We could go on and on.

Basically, one might argue that pure humans from DBZ (like Krillin) aren't terribly skilled because they throw punches and kicks and the occasional grapple kind of thing, whereas in comics we see people like Batman 'hitting pressure points that paralyze people'...but really, does that make sense? Krillin's 'skill' and 'training' not only allow him to move faster and faster through the series, and hit hard enough to make comic book martial artists explode into wet goo, but his 'skill and training' also allow him to throw a disk forged out of his own life force that cuts basically anything. What are pressure points to that? And it's a double standard, as 'comic book pressure points' are about as real as tossing around chi blasts.

If we start saying 'Well, they can't use the energy projection that is part and parcel of their martial arts training', is that logical when comparing 'skill', when in their universe, with the capabilities of beings in their universe, that is an actual yardstick for their skill?

I get the idea - to discern who is actually better at delivering physical strikes, defending against such, initiating grapples without resorting to brute power, etc.

But that's a metric of 'skill' that's based on real-world ideas of such, and none of these people - not the comic characters, not the DBZ characters, nobody - have real-world skill. If we start disallowing magic energy projection, we should probably also disallow stuff like 'find weak points' based on skill', and 'magic pressure points', and 'hits waaaaaay above their weight class based on skill', and 'impossibly faster than a human being based on skill', and, and...

...and it starts getting really hard to do any kind of comparison, because the characters can no longer actually fight as they normally do. Everyone is gimped.