Feats or essence?

feats

Neither, you should take as much as you can into account, starting with logic and reasoning. No matter what people think, feats are open to interpretation by virtue of being fiction. Understanding and interpreting fiction requires some skill, talking about things where there is conflict or lack of consensus also requires skill, its why people contest actual important things like law, historic texts, so on require degrees and other types of qualification to establish credibility. Logic also entails axioms, or knowledge of axioms. Never trust a person whose default position rests on common sense, what's supposed obvious or just sheer vehemence.

Characters define their feats, not the other way around.

Feats are more important. But feats shouldn't be used as independent tools; they must be acknowledged to be a part of a larger whole. You cannot cherry-pick feats when the argument suits you. Example: you have a comic book where X beats Y in a fight, but in that same arc (same writer and everything), you have X losing to Z, despite the fact that Y is objectively better than Z (or that Y has beaten Z before). This becomes a matter of PIS, CIS, or WIS, or an actual circumstance where ABC logic fails (which it often does); you also have to take into account circumstances at hand which might not be repeated in another fight. You have to analyze everything before putting the feat forward.

Ideally, you wouldn't or shouldn't put forward a feat from a source that you are not familiar with, otherwise you might be taking the feat out of context.

Throwing feats at somebody is a useless waste of time if you are unable to analyze them. However, baseless ideas regarding the "essence" of a character are usually not noteworthy (unless the character is, is considered, accepted to be, and in a station of similarity to, omnipotence - which is an open-ended power that, taken to the extreme, cannot be overcome, only matched, which is an oxymoron in and of itself). "The Invincible Iron Man" is not, in fact, invincible (this sounds like a weird and obvious statement, but I have come across people who use this as an actual argument for Tony's supremacy).

Feats have and will always be worth less than the gum under the seats at the movie theater.

Every character acts, and fights differently depending on the story. Feats mean nothing, simply because they can easily contradict other feats from other stories the character is in. What one writer has shown a character to be able to do, another writer can quickly undo. Also there is no way to tell what a character would actually do in a fight, because they are fictional and cannot think for them selves so we think for them which makes and credibility void anyway, because we become the writer the second we start saying what the characters would do in a fight.

For example Captain America vs Spider-Woman, the minute you say Spider-Woman would Blitz, she "one shots", Captain America throws his shield or whatever, you become the writer since you are choosing their fate by saying that, and there are no variables in a factional battle besides the ones we make.

@jedixman: Arguments of essence are not without basis. A character's essential characteristics are solidified by their origin story, from which all their subsequent tales are abstracted. Batman's abilities and equipment, and the structure and rules of his world are subject to change according to the whims of the capricious mechanisms that produce Batman comics. Batman is, at his core, a rich man, orphaned by crime, who acts as a detective and uses a bat motif to scare criminals. Everything else is just the static of the ages, a string of discontinuities that obscure our perception of the character's birth in 1941, not as a prep-god, but a grounded, hard-nosed crime fighter. The continuous "canon" of Batman is worthless without the individual stories that comprise it, and each author's interpretation is in union with the others' only insofar as they were specifically fused together in the creative process. Thus, the illusion of feats is shattered, and we see that Morrison's Batman is connected to Kane's no more than Hollywood's Frankenstein to Shelley's creation.

I prefer a healthy mix of both but sometimes its just so much easier to convince people with a bit of judicious scan spam than arguing about essence of characters and their perceived place in their respective character roster hierarchy relevant only to a universe from which the said character is lifted from.

Essence, people say living tribunal would stomp the spectre based on feats, but that doesn't make any sense considering they're pretty much the same person in their respective verse. Trigon doesn't need lifting because he's known for conquering planets

Lol, seems like youre one of those dudes that posts wiki links. Feats give you a look at a characters powers and what they can do. Sorry but essence aint gonna fly in any battle site. Cant change the rules cuz your fav lost

1. I've never used a wiki link on this site.

2. I don't recognize whatever code of conduct you're invoking to legitimize your weak sauce argument.

3. Feats aren't reliable because they're cherry-picked for their deviant nature, from hosts of disparate interpretations of the characters. Essence is more reliable because it remains unchanged, for the most part.

Feats are more important but statements, in the right context, should count too, and too many people don't count them. For example, when Thor fought Minotaur he said that he has the strength of the Hulk. Given that Minotaur was destroying Thor and Thor has fought Hulk many times, that statement should be valid, even though Minotaur has very few feats to put him equal to Hulk.

Also if there is a character that is really powerful like a celestial or something but they only have statements or "essence" as feats, then they probably shouldn't be used in battles at all, or you'd just have to compare statements. Common sense should be used. The Presence may not have a wealth of feats but he should still defeat any celestial just because of who he is.

feats are overrated

people rely too much on them to justify A > B just because writer X wanted A to do "this" instead of "this" and writer Y wanted B to do "this" instead of "this"

feats should only be used to show what a character is capable of and how it can be applied in a battle situation not a contest of who is better etc