...There seem to be no end of "How fast is Thor in battle" threads on here just now. Does it matter if he has super combat speed or not? With mjolnir swinging at hyper speed, I'd say its kind of academic whether Thor himself can move like the Flash and anyway, Hulk manages to do pretty well in his fights without any acknowledged super-speed! How about some threads celebrating Thor's greatest victories in battle for a change?!

Agreed, if Thor Thor had super speed he'd be another Superman knockoff turning me away from the character entirely. I'll take his agility over speed any day.

As bizarre as it might sound, what you really have here is a giant clash of ideologies between comic fans. So in one way its not even really about Thor heh heh. On one side you have the "feats" people in which everything in comics can be broken down into "feats" and from these "feats" you can draw certain conclusions about what should happen in comics and if that doesn't happen then PIS happens instead. On the other side you have well the non feats people, people who tend to generally think its more nuanced than that, that thousands of comics with thousands of comic characters, hundreds of different writers, artists, editors, titles, stories, all that is too complex and inconsistent to try and come to hard conclusions about the in story consistencies/in story truths or facts. Naturally and this is important, you can have people that are somewhere in-between and or a combination of both those perspectives, its not as if there isn't any cross over. Just that there are certain questions about certain characters that tend to polarize people into two distinctive camps. Characters speed is one, characters experience is another. Whether Captain America is peak human or etc how many martial arts Batman has. Whether Hulk's strength is infinite etc with Thor its speed.

It's all because of the battle of the week with Faora.

THOR haters. (most likely hulk fanboys) like to ridicule and troll against THOR. by stating "THOR doesn't have any speed feats".

But it gets even more depressing how people can argue over fictional characters.

Funny, I'd never considered Thor's defining characteristic to be speed, more the all round powerhouse with no real weaknesses and a host of skills to fall back on...

I agree it's bigger than just Thor's speed. The emphasis Comic Vine places on combat speed is simply not present in comics, especially in Marvel. Almost everyone can hit everyone, with rare exception. There are certainly differences in speed, but in Marvel the ability to hit/evade your opponent seems more determined by skill than speed. That is why characters like Wolverine, Captain America, Black Panther, Daredevil, and Spiderman (he's an exception with Spider Sense) have such great success in battles despite over all less physical abilities such as Hulk or Thor.

@bezza said:

Indeed, many of Marvels writers would agree with you, and not just about Thor, but Hulk, Blackbolt and Silver Surfer and so on. Superman was the same, but his abilities fluctuated to suit whatever purpose whoever owned him desired. He gained flight and started moving faster, getting stronger and so on. A lot of characters personalities, power sets fluctuate, seem inconsistent, or are molded for various stories. Really in most of his stories Thor doesn't need to be fast so its not a defining characteristic nor likely to be one.

Yeah. Speed is really tricky thing to write. Much trickier than strength nor does it come as intuitively to the human brain. In a very general way the trend at Marvel has been to err away from trying to focus on characters powers and abilities and what that means for the character and more on the motivations and interpersonal relationships - so instead of Character A traveling at XYZ speed and what this means in that characters story, you get something more like Character M is enraged at Character K and they might do impressive things but we don;t really have a random arbitrary number or reference point to really awe over. Then when you do start having reference points some other writers may be compelled to reference it or surpass it. Even then not many writers are as serious about one certain numbers or terms may mean but a enthusiastic fan can google the term femtosecond and they start throwing the term around when a writer also googles it and arbitrarily applies it.

@sc: I geuss feats offer an oppurtunity to at least state which number is bigger

the nuanced school, while probably more reasonable, makes debates pretty much Nuh-uh vs Yeah-huh matches, which, probably more accurate to the way people write comics, are kinda boring and repetetive

@betatesthighlander1: Thats true, and if the characters were real then such a number could be used as a reference point of sorts. With fictional characters there is some intent as far as consistency and to not break suspension of disbelief but even then individual writers depiction of a character can be inconsistent and then we end up with different numbers and those numbers may not have been that reliable to begin with. In real life a sprinter will run a distance thats often very uniform hundreds of times, with no obstacles and the sole purpose of getting a fast time or being first. There times will rarely match up exactly but give us a rough idea of how fast they can go, and usually there fastest speed will never be replicated exactly and there is always room for them to surpass that speed as well. So the conditions and motivations and settings here as well as obstacles are all very low and measurable and we have hundreds of examples and even then the numbers are inconsistent. We also have a thorough science about the human body and how muscles work and body limits.

In situations where conditions, objectives motivations, obstacles and actions are being tested with characters whose biology is more made up than real and all those things aren't so simple and changing constantly and unknown and instead of hundreds of examples to get a rough idea we only have a dozen.

I personally find the more reasonable way the fun way, because debates are already going to be Nuh uh and Yeah huh as they already are but with a false sense of facts to try and explain why ones assumptions are more yeah huh than nuh uh. At least with more reason you have the potential to examine and weigh actual lines of thinking and reasoning instead of assumptions about limited scenes that may have more to do with the story and writer and context elements than the character.

I can see why others disagree though too. ^_^

@sc: makes sense to me

People think he loses to everyone that has better combat speed even if he has every other advantage. But his durability and reflexes (you need lightspeed reflexes to fly at lightspeed) should make up for it.

mortals have nothing better to do.

haha this guy is amazing