@blackstaroblivion said:
Thanos' reaction speed is debatable. I'm still undecided on the topic myself. But Thanos does not need tremendous reaction speed to win this fight. He can endure whatever abuse from most other speedy characters until he reacts with a non-physical attack of some sort, most likely, telepathically. And Thanos has the telepathic chops to hang with Fernus. He's gone toe to toe telepathically with Galactus and Moodragon. More important, his TP resistance is of the highest order. And do I really need to elaborate on Ultron's telepathic feats, particularly in his time with the Phalanx in Annihilation: Conquest? I don't say this often about Fernus, but between Thanos and Ultron, he is outclassed telepathically here.
And please stop saying Wally is trillions of times faster than the Surfer. He isn't. Period.
I've read some of your incredible comments regarding Wally West. You have Wally's greatest (amped) reaction feat in the Human Race arc as some astronomically high number. I've seen you assign a speed of 14 trillion times the speed of light to Wally in a feat where the writer clearly says Wally was moving under the speed of light, not once, but twice. In the Human Race, you admit he is moving through the fourth dimension then go on to say "immediately after he wasn't".
Newflash: that feat in the Human Race was a trans time feat. The dude straight up traveled back in time prior to the instant the Cosmic Gamblers instantaneous arrival on earth to beat instantaneous teleportation from another dimension. Do you really think Grant Morrison thinks of Wally West as trillions upon trillions of times the speed of light the way you do? Or Geoff Johns? Or Mark Waid?
It's silly. Just stop.
No comic book feat stands up to the kind of rigorous scientific criteria you are subjecting Wally West's speed to. It is utterly ridiculous. More than likely, writer's think of (pre 52) Wally West as the Flash who was fast enough to routinely break the light speed barrier and time travel without the use of the cosmic treadmill. That would be about the extent of the differentiation writer's would make between Wally and Barry and the end of any scrutiny in terms of Wally Wests reaction speed.
And although the feat in the Human Race was amped, time travel is something Wally West has done on several occasions minus the melo-dramatic (non-required) amp from Krakkl, an entire planet and five so-called speedsters.
Surfer is every bit as fast as Wally reaction speed wise as both characters have routinely demonstrated consistent, accurate time travel (that would be movement through the 4th dimension) under their own speed. And please stop going on as if you know anything other than what you've heard around here about the Surfer's reaction speed. Everyone has an opinion. But not everyone around here has a truly informed, educated opinion. When it comes to the Silver Surfer, you are not one of informed ones. And your appraisal of Wally West's speed is fraught with inaccuracies, conjecture and bias.
Thanos has not shown Martian Manhunter's level of TP as far as I'm aware (atleast, not if we're using only high end showings). Heck, has Galactus even shown Martian Manhunter level TP? If you're going to use Thanos standing up to Galactus telepathically then I guess I get to use Martian Manhunter forcing The Spectre into another person's mind against his will (the Spectre, the Hal Jordan one specifically that Manhunter encountered, can and has mindwiped the universe before, pretty casually, too.)
I didn't say Wally was trillions of times faster than Surfer. Usually my stance is that he's on average in the area of thousands of times faster in reaction and he fights much, much faster (kind of hard to calculate an average on combat speed but Flash fights Lightspeed and FTL way more often than Surfer) and he has many combat speed feats in excess of Surfer's best. I mean, what is Surfer's best reaction feat? Nanosecond? Fraction of a nanosecond? Because that is something Wally has beat.
The Human Race is a trans time feat when he is actually racing the cosmic gambler and specifically has to beat him and instantaneous teleportation. When he arrives on Earth he is no longer time travelling because there's a very clear difference between when he is running through the time stream (you can see events flashing around him from different times) and when he's just running on Earth super fast. One of the giveaways is that the Gambler is already there when he does the feat, he's just doing it so fast the Gambler isn't getting a chance to levy his punishment on Kwyzz. If he was just moving around in the same instance of time with extreme time travel then there would be no need for him to measure the time it takes him to set the radios(thus the point about him figuring it out to the septosecond), by the by. Regardless, even if it was a trans time feat, the efficacy of it does put him at moving in those periods of time relative to the rest of the world. If the only thing he needed to be able to do to recreate that feat was "just time travel" then it wouldn't be even impressive because, as you mentioned, he time travels all the time. There was even that time he, unamped, moved so fast he beat himself in a race (one of those feats Surfer's never done, as I'm aware, that really kind of shows how absurd The Flash has been).
This is all super, duper irrelevant because we are not dealing with Human Race Wally and Human Race Wally isn't even who I am thinking of when I think of his best feats, just as I don't think of amped versions of Surfer when I think of his best feats.
I apply the same logic to every character. Wally doesn't get to be special. If you want me to not use math or logic to calculate he does and just go on my gut feeling that makes it even worse, considering how slow Surfer often fights. On the issue of writers, Morrison and Waid wrote Wally more powerful than Johns or Loebs. I agree. Morrison very specifically wanted to write the JLA as a group of modern gods. Had Superman wrestle an Archangel and everything. But that's just like how tons of writers have written Surfer or Thor at different levels of power, but we use many feats across many writers just the same. We tend to favor the higher end feats when we bring up stuff like "morals off" and "fighting to the best of their ability."
But sure, tell me how Surfer is every bit as good at Wally reaction speed wise. You say I don't know anything about Silver Surfer and that I am not an expert. Sure! I accept my shortcoming. For whatever it's worth, I've never claimed to know as much about Surfer as I do the Flash nor have I ever called myself a Surfer expert (though I'm certainly well educated on the subject). Now just prove me wrong. I don't mind being proven wrong. It's happened a lot. Go read my debate against Buckshot in the Zoro vs Midnighter thread, he proved me wrong about a character I've read tons of (Midnighter)! It's not even uncommon, I'm wrong all the time! But this is something I have asked of people who make this claim, after insulting me and saying I know nothing about Surfer and I've never read anything with Surfer and blah de blah for years and the very best they can give me is the failed Infinity Gauntlet grab or the time he shook off some weird alien thing draining his energy in a nanosecond (Surfer's nanosecond feats are few and far between), or like that one time he checked the Earth before Strange could finish a sentence off panel, in an entirely unquantifiable way(I'd love to use this feat if we just actually saw him doing something! It is a funny and neat feat!). If you want to go by regularity, Wally overperforms both in quality and quantity of speed showings. If you wanted to make this a race from point a to point b with hyperspace allowed and the distance was measured in thousands of lightyears (so that Wally couldn't cover the distance due to reacting to the "start" faster) then you could make a case for Surfer being able to get somewhere quicker than Wally, as hyperspace breaks the bounds of travel ability. But when it comes to reacting and using speed in a fight in any measurable, definable way Surfer has come short in nearly every unamped feat I can recall people showing me.
Like I said, I readily admit I have not read every Surfer comic. I don't know as much about him as I do Wally. But I've read a good number of Surfer comics (people seem to think I dislike or hate him but he's one of my favorite Marvel characters when Slott's not writing him) and I've certainly seen my fair share of hundreds, maybe even thousands of his feats on this forum. I'm not in the business of saying Wally wins every fight. I've probably called him the loser more often than the winner, really, due to the astronomical forces people put him against in battle threads, but I do call them how I see them and tagging Surfer shouldn't make someone fast enough to tag Wally. I'm not even really sold on Wally beating Thanos (though I have made the case before) just as a matter of durability vs consistent striking feats, but I didn't really make that case, so whatevs.
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