Simon the Digger vs White Lantern Review

Well, here we are. It’s finally time to talk about Simon the Digger vs Kyle Rayner, or Gurren Lagann vs White Lantern, or Simon the Digger vs White Lantern they flip flopped with the name a bit, but you all know what it is. By far one of the most requested episodes in Death Battle history as well as the most hyped. People are stoked for this episode. I am not one of them.

Yeah, I wasn’t actually that excited for it, as a matter of fact I was kind of dreading it.. It’s not like I was vehemently against it or anything. I understood the appeal behind it and there were some parts of it I was looking forward to seeing.

I think the issue was I’m just not a big fan of either character. I’m only vaguely aware of Kyle Rayner with the only thing I know about him is he took over for Hal Jordan and he hates fridges. As for Simon, look I’m going to level with you I can’t stand Gurren Lagann. I watched it before this episode to get a read on the character, and I didn’t enjoy it at all. I won’t go into the reasons why here but suffice to say it was not for me.

But not being a fan of the characters isn’t why I was dreading this episode. No, that was because of the debate itself. To be blunt, this is the most complicated vs matchup I have ever seen. I should have known that going in considering Gurren Lagann runs on pure bullshit and DC’s cosmology is so convoluted it’s like Cthulhu made it to drive people mad, but Jesus Christ I did not expect this.

I already don’t like cosmic fights like this anyway with a few exceptions, and this is the most cosmic fight they’ve done. We could potentially be entering into the dreaded realm of dimensional tiering. Death Battle have dipped their toes into this before, and this could potentially be the episode where they dive into it more in depth and I am not ready for that.

But I was looking forward to it for one specific reason. The animation potential is insane. These guys have so many abilities to work with, and Gurren Lagann is one of the most insane visual spectacles in animation. It may be the stupidest fucking shonen bullshit I’ve ever seen, but it’s also the most epic stupid fucking shonen bullshit I’ve ever seen.

So at least the fight will be good. And I’ve enjoyed confusing matchups before so hey, I’m going in with an open mind on this one. So how did the episode turn out? Let’s take a look shall we.

Analysis

This is a hard one to talk about. First off, in terms of covering the characters and their stories it’s mostly fine. For Simon it did feel like it skimmed a lot of his story, but that might be because there wasn’t much to it to begin with. It’s a 26-episode anime series so there isn’t that much to talk about. But they do at least cover everything which is great.

Kyle’s was great too, though I did find it funny that they had an entire segment talking about the infamous fridge moment. Even mentioning the trope it helped create. I mean, they kind of had to right. It’s one of the most controversial moments in comic book history, but I was expecting a brief aside to mention it not a whole segment.

Still when it comes to the character analysis it’s great, but then we get to the scaling, and this is where the episode starts to crumble. First off though, they do a good job of explaining each character’s abilities and how they work.

They cover that stuff really well. I was enjoying Simon’s analysis at first because they were covering everything really well. And then they brought up the dimensional tiering shit, and that’s when this entire episode takes a hard left turn off the damn rails.

Look, I hate dimensional tiering in general. I think it’s pure cancer and sucks all the fun out of vs debating, but I understand that they had to do that for this episode because it’s the backbone of the entire debate. I’m not mad at the show for doing it, I’m mad that they didn’t slow the fuck down to let the information sink in.

This episode has a chronic problem of being way too fucking fast. It flings a ton of information at you so quickly and never gives you a moment to think it through. I know other Death Battles have this issue, but in most of those episodes the results and scaling are straightforward enough that it’s not hard for the average layperson can still follow along.

This episode on the other hand is far too complex for that. It almost requires you to pause it just to figure out what the hell they’re talking about. or to just read the black boxes they throw up every now and then, which has information that really helps to build their argument. The black boxes are really becoming a problem. They were useful in giving supplementary information in past episodes, but in episodes like this it feels like a crutch to save on run time.

I get this is a show and they need to focus on pacing, but you can have longer episodes guys. You can slow down on occasion to go over everything you need to without relying on Black Boxes to give information. I have to pause to read them anyway since the human brain can only process so much information from alternating sources at once. The episode is already slowed down at that point so just put it in the main argument at that point. I know you run the risk of making it a physics lecture, but you can do it in a way that’s still entertaining. You’ve built a dedicated enough audience to get away with it.

To Death Battle’s credit, I was able to follow along with it relatively well. They explain it in a way that’s easy enough to understand. The problem I have is the concept is too overtly convoluted to begin with.

Look, multiverses and infinity are already abstract concepts that are hard to wrap your head around. When you add increasingly infinite spatial dimensions on top of that, it just becomes too much. This is the moment in power scaling where I check right the fuck out, because you’re not even really scaling or measuring how powerful a character is at that point. It basically just becomes, “your character might be infinity, but mine is infinity plus one.”

I have a theory that in power scaling, not just the online space but just in writing in general, there is a point where characters become so powerful it stops being impressive or fun and starts being stupid. It’s why in Gurren Lagann itself they only talk about the universe being destroyed because that’s an easy enough idea people can understand. If they talked about all this dimensional tiering stuff in the show, let’s be honest people would clown all over it.

I think the limit is different for most. A lot of people tap out when multiverses are involved, and that is close to my limit, but dimensional tiering is where I truly draw the line. This shit is not fun for me at all.

The writing for the analysis also seemed a bit off. They mention higher dimensions so much that you could make a drinking game out of it. Take it as someone who writes as a hobby, repeating yourself like that is often something you do in a first draft. Which kind of makes it feel like this was rushed. It needed an extra revision to tighten it up.

The analysis isn’t terrible. The editing is really nice, and some of the jokes and call backs were funny. I especially love the moment where Chad broke character explaining how comic writers come up with the craziest shit. I love little bloopers like that.

But again, it just goes by too quick. For as complicated as this debate is and the concepts it covers, it needed a longer analysis that slowed down so the audience could better comprehend it. It also, unfortunately, gives away the winner if you pay attention to it. When they brought up the dimensional tiering for Simon, but not for Kyle I knew that White Lantern was cooked. But before we get to that.

Fight Animation

This is the highlight of the episode. No matter what I say about the analysis, the animation is damned spectacular. It had all the spectacle you could want in a fight like this, it had great escalation, it used the power sets in really cool ways and it had a really awesome music track.

In fact, let’s cover that first. While some will bemoan the lack of Will of the Drill, Spiral of Emotion is still a damn great track. It’s a high energy rock track that really captures the hype nature of this matchup. And there are still references to Will of the Drill there for fans of that, so I think everyone will be happy with it.

The performances from Kieran Rogan and Brandon Acosta were great. Kieran really sounded like Yuri Lowenthal and had the same kind of energy Lowenthal’s performance had. Plus, Kieran finally got a win so good for him. Brandon was great as Kyle as well, but obviously there’s not much to compare him too since Kyle doesn’t have too many appearances, but he sounds exactly as I would imagine he would, a younger Hal Jordan with a nerdy anime kid tone.

I will say that I wasn’t too keen on the banter. The dialogue is good and fits the inspirational vibe of each character, but it also felt like it leaned into that a bit too much. Like it was so focused on that it forgot to have actual good back and forth between the two. There was some of that, but it was only in the beginning. After that it felt like they were just reading inspirational quotes.

It also felt like the dialogue was basically going through a checklist of the character’s most famous lines. That is an issue with some Death Battle’s where the dialogue does feel lifted from other sources and just put in because it needed to be there. Fortunately, they are done well and help add to some of the more epic moments of the fight, so I can’t complain too much.

Then there’s the animation, which is just fantastic throughout. I love the hand drawn style with the comic book flourishes. It perfectly reflected both series and you’ve always got to love hand drawn stuff. It had a great style to it that made it stand out from other hand drawn episodes. If Moro hadn’t gotten involved in the show, this would be the best hand drawn episode by a mile. But hey, taking gold is still good next to platinum.

There’s a lot of expression in the characters which gives the fight a lot of charm and personality. I also loved the brief sprite work when Kyle created Balrog from Street Fighter. Makes me wish there were more references like that, but I’m guessing they didn’t want to bog the episode down with that since it would devolve into spot the reference.

Then there’s the sense of scale. With characters like this with insane cosmic might, the episode shows off the absurd lengths these guys could go. We see these guys dwarf entire universes, which is a scale we haven’t seen since Galactus vs Unicron. But, if I’m being perfectly honest, I felt like that episode did it better.

While the sense of scale was impressive, it felt like it lacked the weight that scale required. Going back to Galactus vs Unicron, that episode made you feel the sheer scale of the combatants. It wasn’t just about looking big; it was about making you feel the sheer scale of the brawl. Even Kratos vs Asura got that right.

This episode has the look, but not the feel. Even though I can see the characters size, the characters still move like they are normal sized. They don’t move like you would expect beings of this sheer scope to move and that creates a bit of a disconnect. The most weight I felt was in the end where there just normal guys and that doesn’t feel right.

Admittedly this could be an issue of adhering to the source material. Gurren Lagann did have this issue of having these absolute mega sized characters move lightning fast, making it so you never felt the weight that they should have. It works well enough in a show as flash as that, and Death Battle does capture a lot of the shows style so I can’t fault them for that. I guess this is just a preference for me so take this critique with some salt.

But this episode’s critical flaw is it’s pacing and the fight animation is sadly not exempt from this. It starts as you would expect with the two fighting in their base forms on Earth, then they fly into space and battle around some planets before they immediately go into the universal fight with Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and the White Lantern. We already got to the Ultimate forms, and we didn’t see the Champion ones, to use Digimon terminology.

This is what people want to see but you can’t just rush to that. You need to take your time and build up to it. The fight animation has a lot of cool moments, but it fast tracks through a lot of them, so you don’t have enough time to really enjoy any of it.

The funny thing is the fight is nearly four minutes. That’s pretty long by Death Battle standards, modern Death Battle anyway, and yet it still feels like it goes by too fast. There are slower moments, but even those don’t last all that long and barely give you a moment to breathe.

Despite the impressive scale, with how fast the escalation is, and the lack of weight in the fight, it doesn’t make the fight as big as it should. In Galactus vs Unicron the combatants weren’t nearly as big, but they felt bigger because of how it was presented. Even episodes like Bowser vs Eggman felt much grander despite it being much smaller in scope.

I think this is a perfect example of scope not being equal to grandeur. You can have the fighters be bigger than multiverses, and it would still not feel as big as two guys throwing blows on the street. It’s all down to presentation, and this animation definitely has a lot of flash and style, but it needed more to make the audience feel that sense of scale it was going for.

But it’s still great. Gurren Lagann fans will absolutely get a kick out of it. I can’t say it’s quite up there as one of the best, but it’s certainly a high tier animation. Certainly, among the hand drawn episodes they’ve done.

Mind you I thought the kill was a little weak. I understand why it ended with a fist fight, given it’s a reference to the Gurren Lagann movie, but it still felt odd that after all this cosmic bullshit it ended with a fist fight. Made it feel a bit anti-climactic. But now that we reached the end, let’s get to that result.

Result

Let’s get this out of the way, there was no good result to be found here. I don’t mean in the episode itself, I mean in the match-up. This match-up is impossible to get down simply because both characters run on grade a, prime cut, crystal white bullshit.

Theres so many arguments for both characters that it could go either way. VS debates in general are all about interpretation, and this is the most interpretative match-up you will ever see. There’s no way to give any kind of definitive answer to it.

So, what I’ll do here is just look at the argument Death Battle presents and whether it holds up. Keep in mind if I disagree it isn’t because I think Death Battle were wrong, but simply because I felt the argument presented was weak.

The categories this time were a little different, being imagination, will power and potential. Their justification being that because both characters were so absurd, it was impossible to judge them in conventional ways. This makes sense. With characters this impossible to measure it focusing on their abilities rather than stats is the logical move.

They made imagination a tie, which I disagree with just on the face of it. While both can do anything the other can do and adapt to whatever is thrown at them, Kyle has shown more creative use of his powers. They even say his imagination is unmatched, yet he didn’t win that category? Doesn’t make sense. I get that Simon can adapt to Kyle quickly, but I feel like Kyle’s showcases of his powers are more creative overall.

But the big ones were willpower and potential. They state that willpower is the most important one and showed that Kyle was stronger at a base by comparing the dimensions both could affect. However, they then state that because Simon gets stronger with Spiral Power to the point of jumping several spatial dimensions at once, he could get stronger overtime, especially with his regeneration allowing him to last long enough to do that.

So that’s a bit strange. They say will power was more important, but that the greater will power was determined by potential. So shouldn’t potential be more important? Again, this feels like a first draft. Something about the presentation of it feels off.

But let’s get into the nitty gritty. On the surface, this is a fine argument. It’s internally consistent and easy enough to understand which for Death Battle is more important. But if you think about it for even a minute, and look into the characters more, it completely falls apart.

First let’s discuss the spatial dimensions. They capped DC’s multiverse at 12.5 dimensions since that’s what was shown in the comic they used. However, from my knowledge, DC’s cosmology is significantly larger than that, having infinite spatial dimensions. Now I’m no expert on DC, I’m only able to gleam this from others, one of which is Death Battle itself.

In previous Death Battle episodes like Goku vs Superman, they had a black box stating that DC had infinite spatial dimensions. This presents a problem, because Death Battle have now directly contradicted themselves. Something that anyone paying attention can call them out on. So, Death Battle is clearly wrong, they must be otherwise there would be no contradiction. The question is, were they lying then or are they lying now.

This is the kind of shit that makes people question the shows credentials, as stupid as that is since it’s fucking vs debating not hard science. Conflicting information is normal for this show; how many Thor speed caps were there exactly? But at least that can be excused as the series growing and getting better information over time.

This is a blatant contradiction to what was previously stated. Not directly mind you, this was all in the black boxes, which again only proves why these black boxes are a fucking problem. This kind of information is easy to forget since it’s supplementary, even if it can prove critical to not only the debate it’s in, but to future debates as well.

And the problem is, if Kyle can affect potentially infinite spatial dimensions, how does Simon overcome that? Spiral Power makes him stronger, but surely not to that degree. Which leads me to my second problem. The way Spiral Power is described makes it feel like Simon could potentially get stronger infinitely to match whoever he’s fighting. Even claiming that is how Gurren Lagann works. Simon gets his ass kicked and then gets stronger to beat his opponent, which to be fair is true.

This, to me, feels like a no limits fallacy. First of all, saying Simon could affect dimensional realms higher than 11 is already a bit of a stretch. His cosmology caps at that level or at least that’s how high it was shown, they debunked the 20D thing in a black box, so the idea he can affect anything beyond what he’s shown feels like you’re giving him far too much leeway.

Its odd Death Battle have done this considering they’ve avoided such fallacies in the past. The last Goku vs Superman went out of its way to avoid the “Superman is limitless” argument, and while Hulk is stated to get stronger to an infinite degree, they still give him harder limits in other areas.

But here they just say Simon can just will himself stronger with no real limit. Even going beyond a cosmology he’s never actually shown. But I guess that’s fine. I mean the whole point of Gurren Lagann is the endless evolutionary potential of humanity. It’s not like there’s anything in the series that contradicts this. Oh wait.

One of the major plot points of Gurren Lagann is the Spiral Nemesis. The idea behind it being that Spiral Power, if not kept in check, will go out of control and destroy everything. The theme of Gurren Lagann is that human potential is limitless, but also dangerous if left completely unchecked, and it should be up to individuals to manage that not some force that determines what others can do.

To me, this means that there is a limit to how far Simon can go. Since he’ll reach a point where the Spiral Nemesis will tear reality apart. And since Simon’s cosmology has a clear limit, he obviously won’t be able to reach infinite spatial dimensions before the Nemesis destroys everything, including him.

Death Battle never bring the Spiral Nemesis up aside from a brief mention in Simon’s analysis, even though it’s important to the theme of the show and could potentially alter the result. And yet, that same scrutiny is given to Kyle and the Life equation. They said Kyle couldn’t properly control it which is why he split it up.

But how long did it take until he lost control? Was it right away or did it take time. If it’s the former they would have a point, but if it’s the latter, well Simon is fucked. Because Kyle gains reality warping with that on a much grander scale. If he can control it for even a little bit I don’t see how Simon could stand up to it. Even his regeneration has a limit.

Details like this matter, and I’m tired of Death Battle ignoring them. They did the same thing with Vader vs Obito and how long the Infinite Tsukiyomi took to manifest but then mention the time limit for the Egg Field in Bowser vs Eggman. Do you see the issue folks?

It feels like the gave Simon every benefit of the doubt while affording Kyle none. I hate the Death Battle is biased critique since it’s very easy to debunk but shit like this is how they get that reputation. Remember folks, even if you aren’t something deep down, you can be perceived as that through your actions.

They did try to give Simon something equal to the Life Equation with him bringing a fictional version of himself to life. Saying that was equal to the higher dimensional stuff of the Life Equation. No, no that isn’t what that was. He was just bringing a fictional version of himself to life. That is something that exists in tons of media. If bringing fictional characters into the real world is outerversal, then Doug Walker is outerversal. The fucking Nostalgia Critic is outerversal now because he did the exact same thing.

This is another reason I despise dimensional tiering. It overcomplicates simple ideas just to make characters stronger than they reasonably should be. Power scaling in general has an issue of fans misinterpreting feats and statements to wank characters, and dimensional tiering is that taken to its logical and stupidest conclusion.

Remember, I’m not saying the result is wrong. This debate is a 50/50 split so they’re wrong no matter what, but the argument they made doesn’t hold up to scrutiny in my opinion. On a surface level, it’s serviceable, but if you dig into it for even a little it does not hold water. But hey, a service level presentation that crumbles under any logical thought is perfect for a Gurren Lagann victory.

Conclusion

This episode is very hard for me to review. By all accounts it is what people wanted. It captures the inspirational tone of both series, it has a spectacular animation, and it does show respect to both characters. If you are a fan of either, you are going to love this episode.

I am not, and because of that the episodes underlying flaws are hard for me to ignore. The pacing is far too fast for an episode this complex, and the fast pacing also affects the animation since it gives you no time to breathe. That’s on top of the result having a lot of holes in it if you bother to look into it, some of which are caused by Death Battle contradicting its own logic.

I also get the general feeling that this episode was an attempt to rectify Ben 10 vs Green Lantern, by far the most hated episode in the show’s history. Between all the callbacks to it, and the fact the results felt overly detailed compared to B10vsGL, which is criticised for not explaining itself well at all, only adds to that feeling.

I’m not saying that’s what this is, just that it’s how it comes across. If that was the case though, they overcorrected with this. They were so detailed in the rundown they may have actually missed some aspects of the debate. A proverbial missing the forest for the trees moment. And considering they capped Dc at 12.5 dimensions and Ben 10 fans have gotten his to 26, that’s only going to make them question the result even more. Liam, how did you screw this up twice?!

I just didn’t enjoy it as much as others will. I liked moments, but not the whole product. But I know it’s not a bad episode and that fans will absolutely love it. So how do I score it? Well, I can’t. Any score I give would be disingenuous. My own rating would be too low and to give it a higher rating would be more objectively correct but personally dishonest.

So, like with Omni Man vs Bardock, no score this time. Hopefully the review itself will give you an idea of what I thought of the episode. I have a feeling that I’m going to piss people off with this, but I stand by what I said, and I’d rather be brutally honest than lie and just tell you it’s peak when I don’t think it is. I respect you guys too much for that.

On a positive note, next time should be a ton of fun. It’s the episode we’ve all been waiting two years for, and while I may not be big on DC or anime, classic cartoons are definitely up my alley.