Unreliable power level is a sign of bad writing

[Don]

Recently I went back to HXH, and it reminds me of one of the biggest pet peeves I have. Since the dawn of time people probably debated on whether X can beat Y, and while HXH is hardly the Anime that is responsible, it's a representative example of this growing trend where you have completely arbitrary power levels that goes beyond even plot convenience disguised as a deep system. Here, I'm not talking about say if Black Widow didn't die she can probably trade some hits with Thanos before getting tossed aside. I'm talking about series where literally any two people fight each other is about 50/50 no matter how big the difference is because the author himself probably has no idea what the heck is happening, even in the absent of plot bailouts. Obviously if things are to scale then half of the Avengers would've died the moment they run into Thanos in either Endgame or Infinity Wars and that wouldn't be too cool. But nobody seriously thinks that just because everyone gets to fight Thanos that means people are anywhere near his level. At the end you pretty much have only Iron Man and Thor that can even harm him with their own power, Captain America with external help, Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch can harm him because Thanos is weak against magic (Marvel universe characters are traditionally vulnerable to magic because they don't understand how it works and thus lacks the proper protection against it, despite feats of magic being pretty weak compared to what technology can do), and I guess Captain Marvel can harm him who came out of nowhere.

And despite all that, it's obviously a very improbable victory, one that only happens 1 in 14000605 realities saw by Doctor Strange. Again, this is not factoring in any plot necessity that Thanos has to lose every time or the universe would get destroyed and that'd kind of suck. There should be no question that if Thanos fought any one person or even all of these persons at the same time in a neutral universe he should indeed win about 14000604 out of 14000605 times.

I think it is probably hard to actually keep track of power level and make a convincing fight, whether it's a movie or a book or anything else. Sure, all the Avengers randomly have their moment in the sun against Thanos, but you got to make it look consistent so that people don't wonder why they didn't just overpower Thanos (and even here I think some people ask why couldn't the magic users just overpowered Thanos because they hyped up the magic users too much), so I guess it's easier to say 'well everything is totally 50/50' and pretend fights are decided by like smarts or tactics or something even when you're talking about guys that should win 99.9999% of the time in some hypothetical matchup. It's important to note that despite Avenger have their random technology bailouts for power level issue, it doesn't really work on Thanos because the technology he uses is just as, if not more advanced, than whatever Vibranium tech Avengers have. At best it just prevents the guys from getting one hit killed by Thanos.

Actually, another reason to have bogus power level is that maybe it's actually really hard to do even a good fighting scenes. Gu Long is a master in this, as his novels usually involve hyped up guys that never actually got into a fighting scene, because fighting scene isn't his specialty. But at least he keeps things pretty consistent, like if this guy is supposed to be the strongest guy in the novel, even if he's not sure how to portray that in a convincing manner, he'd tell you this guy just won all these fights instantly or behind the scenes. He won't have his top guy randomly lose to some unimportant guy even though a fairly common theme in his novels is that power is no match for treachery. At least, it's generally someone pretty important who backstab the most powerful guy that never actually fought anyone. I recently went back to watch some Matrix fight scenes, and it's pretty notable that people actually look like they're fighting in a cohesive way with proper team tactics even though the power level in the matchup is usually hugely lopsided (Neo versus anyone, Agent versus anyone not Neo). Compare this to say, the Final Fantasy style of fighting where you need DBZ vision to keep up because everyone moves too fast to be seen by the eye so you just see guys teleport for like 5 minutes and one of them dies. So yeah, I guess people do just suck at coming up with good fighting scenes let alone ones that make sense!

[Julius Seeker]

Reminds me of Hercules the Legendary Journeys, particularly the early seasons. But they were kind of making fun of that sort of thing, and others. They’d have worlds where they’d purposely make the men filthy and ugly, and then all of the women were beautiful. But Hercules would be fighting some guys, trading blows, and the. The next moment he’d be one punching someone through the roof only to have him land in the chimney 3 houses over. But it was all a joke.

With blockbuster films: my guess is the writers are fitting a tension mould the producer committee requires. That is, the producers tell the writers exactly the tension that’s required for the scene, and unreliability - Will they win or lose? - is one of the most useful mechanics to build tension - and logic goes out the window, because the tension from the sensory experience is identical.

Blockbusters are mechanically cookie-cutter, mostly. They have the same plot mechanics, the same tension levels, the same pacing. It’s one of the reasons I liked X-men films more than the others, it’s like they didn’t get the memo that their films had to fit these formulas until later - but even Logan, which is one of the most recent ones is paced way differently than the blockbuster status quo... until about the last 20 minutes or so, which then feels more standard compared to earlier parts of the film.

Another big blockbuster trend I’ve noticed is the overly contrived plotting. It’s like they start with a plot structure, determine all the types of scenes they need with a story-free outline. Then they write the ending and the setup, and just fill in the middle with scenes of how to get to the ending, how to fit in all their big characters and super moves, etc... I think the films that stuck out the most to me with were Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The thing is, people loved both these films, despite their egregiously inorganic plotting. They absolutely hated the Last Jedi, which IMO, was a fairly decent film, way more organic. Although I appreciated Rogue One the best, because it literally threw out all of the Block buster norms. Anyway, I think Star Wars fans disliked it because they actually wanted a contrived reimagining of the original trilogy - but the writers of the series had a completely different vision.

Speaking of The Matrix, I’ve begun to realize how much of an art form that film was in using the slow motion. I think I took it for granted that the slo-mo button was there. But then all these other directors began putting tons of slow motion into things... Zack Snyder is sometimes obnoxious with his slow motion; it comes off as ridiculously arbitrary, every single kill is some kind of big slow motion scene, sometimes the slow motion is just there to show some arrows flying, or a guy’s angry face as he lunges. It’s all over the place, randomly. 300 and Batman vs Superman were the biggest offenders.

But yeah, I’ve meandered. I’d say the producer committee demanded tension, plotting, and pacing are probably the main reasons for the sort of crap that appears in blockbuster films these days. The arbitrary power may come off as lazy, but it might be that they just need to make the scene happen, and they’ve already used up their non-action (fluff) quota to explain why the disparity exists - if they did explain it, it might ruin their pacing. So they end up sticking on the bad writing instead of letting the writer build a proper story.

[Don]

I think it boils down to having even a decent standard fighting scene is pretty hard. That's why a lot of stuff tries to do fancy stuff to disguise the fact that they've no idea what they're doing in the first place. Of course, it'd be even harder if you've to do fights with more limitations, like say X on 1, or 1 guy is a lot stronger than the opponent he's fighting. For example in the X on 1 most movies basically just have the side with multiple guys walk up 1 at a time to get beaten up, which looks pretty dumb but that's all they can manage. If you look at The Matrix, the Neo versus many guys actually looks like the side with many guys are trying to work together to beating him even if it turns out not to matter.

It'd be good if people do the equivalent of go back to schools to get the basics look okay instead of relying on gimmicks to hide the fact that they've no idea what they're talking about, or at least have a better understanding of how gimmicks work. Square Enix is like the opposite spectrum of what you said about slow motion. They feel like every scene you got to have 2 guys moving too fast for you to see what they're doing. I suspect that's because if you can't see the people moving then you don't have to actually worry about what they're actually doing other than showing some blurs and put some sounds.