Supervillain Smackdown S2: Doom vs. Mystique
Here at The Correctness SportsishNetwerkkz, we offer our be-all-end-all absolutely correct answers on which supervillains would win in a fight. Lex Luthor has bankrolled the competition.Which of the 8 will come out on top? The playoffs continue this week in the Pengrowth Deathdrome. It’s brutal, ugly, violent, and soul rending…and that’s just the comment section!!!
The Rules, and the Bracket were laid out in advance, in this post. Two days of prep, battle is held in the stadium, and it’s to the death. Game on.
THIS WEEK: The second Semi-Final: Doom vs Mystique. Steel vs Blue thing.
TONY
Let’s play a game.
This game is called “How long can Mystique stay alive before Doom completely and utterly destroys her?”
I suppose she could hide in the audience and he’d have to play Where’s Waldo for awhile, but something tells me he’d just sit cross legged, mutter a few incantations and the next thing you know she’d be all highlighted like an item you need to pick up in a video game. And then he would completely and utterly destroy her. And even if he didn’t do that, he’d just eliminate the crowd from the equation…and completely and utterly destroy them all.
She could show up as Squirrel Girl and fill him with terror…
In the deepest part of his soul...where fear lives...he can still hear them chattering.
but when the Squirrels didn’t actually show up…he would completely and utterly destroy her.
Assassin tricks? Poison his ridiculously over sized golden goblet? He didn’t get to be the Ruler of Latveria by being an idiot, he’s not just going to drink things willy nilly plus he probably has tasters. And, being all unpoisoned…he would completely and utterly destroy her.
Having said that…I think Mystique will still be alive at the end of this.
Doom knows the value of somebody with her talents. He knows who he is up against next round, and he knows the history. I think he would offer her a chance to surrender, provided she did him a few small favours, ie: Tell everything she knows about Magneto. Be his person on the inside. He would probably even offer her some side work…
I think Raven has Daddy issues and might even be swayed by a powerful older man with European charm…it has happened before…but would she betray Magneto?
Perhaps not…but I believe she would at least play it cool and agree to the terms until she could think of something better.
So here’s how I see it going down…Doom and Mystique come to terms before the fight, perhaps when he catches her trying to assassinate him beforehand. The day of the fight, they put on a show, (But not too much of one, everyone knows she is overmatched here) and he appears to completely disintegrate her. What he has really done is transported her to and undisclosed location.
And now…she has some thinking to do.
But both officially, and in a larger sense, the winner here is
DOOM
DAVE:
So, I know what you’re thinking: How could this mismatch possibly happen? And I have an answer: It just did. Real life brackets have mismatches too, so enough with the whining and moaning about how it’s fixed, or that we planned for a specific outcome. We didn’t. That would be boring. Blame the comic book writers for having wild varying levels between their villains, I guess. The whole exercise is to have fun and make assumption as to what would happen in these imaginary battles.
On to the match.
Mystique is a cunning strategist who generally uses surprise and her shape-shifting abilities to make events go the way she needs them to. She’s held her own for decades, and always manages to come out on top, or at least get away in the nick of time. She’s been the leader of a number of teams, and those teams have beaten the X-Men, which is not an easy task, as there’s like 87 of them at any given moment, 6 of whom are Wolverine. She was also played by Rebecca Romijn, which is awesome. She has a scaly blue rack, which is less awesome, unless you’re into that, or maybe you have an Avatar fetish or something.
Doctor Doom is a friggin genius, almost rivaling Reed Richards. He built a time machine. He’s the leader of a nation, has a army of lifelike robots that he built himself, and oh, he built a TIME MACHINE. He could use this time machine to ensure a win, but he wouldn’t need to, nor stoop to that. Because he could beat Mystique without anywhere near that much effort. This is a man who fought his way through time and space, can change bodies with people through eye contact, and has a healing factor. Wait, no, he doesn’t have a healing factor. He’s, in fact, only one of 4 people in the Marvel universe that doesn’t have a healing factor.
Doom is used to taking on the entire Fantastic Four, all of whom have epic powers, except Reed Richards, who isn’t that cool, but he’s really smart, so there’s that. But if he can take on a guy who can burn as hot as the sun, a giant rock monster who can lift trucks for fun, and a successful modern woman who can turn invisible and make air bubbles around your head, and shields and such, as well as stretchy guy, AT THE SAME TIME, what makes anyone think he’d have the slightest amount of trouble with face-changy lady.
There’s only one person Mystique could become that would even momentarily distract him: His mother. Doing this would only enrage Doom further, ensuring that rather than just killing her, he’d remove any molecular trace of her from existence. Over in one.
Winner: Doom
Rob:
Unlike our villains today, I was created long after the Silver Age of comics sometime in the late seventies. This is known to comic book aficionados as “The Brown Age” of comics, due partially to the tint the paper of the books took on after sitting in a tree fort for years, but primarily due to the quality of the writing.
Because of my extensive experience reading weathered, dog-eared and tragic copies of Conan and, to a much lesser extent, Kull, I may have a key insight into which of these two villains, Mystique or Dr. Doom, shall win this fight today. The fight will be determined by one of the fundamental laws of science fiction narrative. Allow me to continue this line of thinking, no I insist, please, after you:
Along with all the warrior nonsense like Conan, and books like the EC comics (God, how I miss EC), I sometimes wish I had been reading Heavy Metal during the halcyon days of my youth, not as much for the boobies as for the awesome pulp-fantasy aesthetic. This aesthetic, both narrative and visual, still utterly defines my sense of what “awesome” is.- Oh, and by “halcyon days” I mean medically tranquilized, but that is a story for another time, and those records are from when I was a minor.
Regardless of my drooling, reading fantasy comic books was secondary to my efforts to read every science fiction and fantasy novel ever published. I can assure you, I read some pulp shit that would make your eyes bleed, it was so goddamn pulpy. The pulp was so pulpy it was actually abrasive and could dissolve your flesh. I swear to you, I can still smell a terrible novel (remember that smell?). It didn’t matter to me how good the story was, it only mattered to me that somehow, in my young brain, I began to associate certain concepts directly with the concepts of “funny” and “awesome”. Pulpy concepts about lasers, magic, and the occult…
A Brief Departure:
Requiem for Fur-Bikini-Clad Warrior Lady: A Haiku
Dinosaur riding,
you have lasers and a sword.
Will you marry me?
The books, and comics, influenced by Robert E Howard and the other pulp masters were all subject to the same basic rule- a rule invented by a man who I was as yet to discover in my childhood. All of this terrifying junk I was reading (and by “terrifying” I am referring again to the aesthetic, both visually and textually) was so hilar-awesome it eventually led me to the darkest, scariest, pulpiest corner of literature: HP Lovecraft.
Lovecraft is an appalling author. Just the goddamn worst. Reading Lovecraft is like wading through a murky bog, discovering the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe, getting inside, and dry humping his fetid corpse. I love/hate Lovecraft so much that I need counseling just to comprehend the conceptual contradictions inherent to my feelings about his writing. He is the mighty nexus of funny and awesome, lacking only the presence of scantily-clad female characters in his greatest works. What is essential here is that Lovecraft taught me something of vital importance to our fight today:
People who tangle with the occult either become frighteningly powerful, or go completely mad.
Lovecraft doesn’t just mean “booga booga” crazy, he means existential crisis, feces throwing, gouge-out-you-own-eyes crazy. The things that have been seen by the hapless protagonists of Lovecraft’s longwinded shitscapades are so mind-bogglingly nightmarish, so demoralizing, so utterly incomprehensible by the feeble human brain, that they cannot be unseen for all eternity. Once you have laid eyes on the decadent ruins of the cities of the Great Old Ones, ones you have smelled the salt air and decay, once you have summoned the Cthulhu from their slumbers in R’Lyeh, you are hooped nine ways from Friday, mind-wise. This is the Law of Lovecraft: Some sights and sounds can shatter your reality in an instant, and obliterate your precious sanity forever. The Law of Lovecraft is a vast, incomprehensible, interdimensional umbrella that covers all science fiction, fantasy, and occult narrative, like some kind of vast, incomprehensible, interdimensional umbrella. Batman created the “Batman of Zur-Enh-Arrh” alternate personality specifically to deal with sanity damaging experiences like those governed by Lovecraft’s Law.
Mystique simply does not have a chance, because Doom has meddled with things beyond our world and beyond her conception. The revelation through a cracked mirror of just one glimpse of the occult universe that Doom has seen would make the shapeshifing Mystique seek refuge the form of something innocent and harmless forever. Doom has seen these horrors, he does not fear them; He is a sorcerer and alchemist of the great weird beyond. Stan Lee said so.
Doom would step into the arena, and show Mystique a glimpse of an existence beyond her meta-human comprehension. Mystique, guised in the only form she could think of that would guard her ravaged psyche from complete annihilation, would become Hello Kitty. The last sight she would see, as she sobbed giant, anime tears into an ever growing lake of her own destruction, is the masked face of Doom and his gloved hand pointing at her as the sound of his hideous laughter echoes into eternity.
Winner: Doom
Loser: Hello Kitty
Biggest Loser: Me for reading all that Piers Anthony
Decision: Doom
So Doom moves on to the final to face Magneto in a smackdown for mastery of the Supervillain Title!
Tune in Next Week! Tell us we’re wrong and unfunny below!
