Why Invincible gets hit with the powerscaling complaints more than other superhero stories
So if you’re even slightly interested in Invincible, you’ve heard the complaints. About how the power levels are all over the place and nonsensical. And you’ve also probably heard the complaint about why Invincible gets criticised for it so much.
And in my opinion it comes down to a couple reasons
For starters is the fact that in many other superhero stories, how strong the hero is isn’t ever plot significant. In a general sense yes, you do need to know how powerful a character is for stakes and consistency. But in the case of Invincible and Mark, we are told time and time again by the writers how he’s the strongest hero on earth, how he’s the only one who can fight viltrumites, and how Earth would be fucked without him.
Yet repeatedly he is shown to not be the strongest, plenty of other characters can fight Viltrumites pretty alright, and Earth seems to do fine without him. Imagine if you were watching JJK, and got introduced to Gojo and how’s he’s so powerful his very existence altered Jujutsu society. And then he lost his first fight in the series. And then the show just kept trucking along like he was the strongest. You’d call bullshit.
And the second reason comes down to the show’s addiction to the ‘flying brick’ category of characters. 90% of the shows characters are some variety of strong guy who punches hard, and the 10% who aren’t rarely ever get a chance to fight. So when a guy who’s strong and can fly fights a guy who’s strong and can fly, it becomes very easy to scale down to real world terms how the fight should go. Every fight in Invincible is basically a skinny 12 year old vs prime Mike Tyson. The kid has no other powers, no strategy, no weapons. Nothing. Yet somehow the kid wins. And the kid here can be an analogy for Mark somehow winning to random fucking bugs somehow winning
Flashy and diverse powersets can really help bridge the gap between fighters and avoid blatant inconsistencies like this. There will still likely be inconsistencies sure, but most audience members won’t care. Going back to my JJK comparison, take the Sendai colony fight. It’s Yuta vs Ryu and Uro. ‘But Yuta was said to be second only to Gojo! How is he struggling to these guys?!’ Because look at them! I don’t care if he’s above Gojo, he’s still gonna struggle against someone with laser blasts that can follow you, and the woman who can bend the damn sky.
There are other reasons too of course. Like how some people have pointed out how the Viltrumites seem to act on video game logic with their knife hand move. Only using it after punching the opponent for 10 minutes achieving nothing, to win instantly with the knife hand they could have used right away like they were filling up a combo meter. But I think the two points I listed are the main ones I haven’t seen people talk about much.
Uhhhh anyways. Bye 👋