Worst examples of jobbing?

[JonnyQuest037]

A good example might be the original death of the Hobogoblin in a Spider-Man/Wolverine special. Even though the character was supposed to have enhanced strength that made him able to go toe-to-toe with Spider-Man, he was still overpowered and killed by (IIRC) a group of ordinary henchmen.

This turned out to be the only plot hole that Hobgoblin creator Roger Stern needed to introduce a retcon that allowed the Hobgoblin to be REALLY revealed as the suspect that he'd originally intended (Stern had left the book before the ongoing mystery was resolved).

 

[DarKush]

Here's a more tricky one - At the start of JMS's Thor run (pattern emerging here) - he takes down Iron man with easy, saying something like "you are just a man in an iron suit, I'm a god and in this time and place, I'm not holding back" - is that an example of Iron man jobbing or not?

I don't think so. I mean, it is the god of thunder versus just a guy in a suit, despite the level of technology.

As for Batman, yeah, I don't like how Batman has been made into this near infallible, god-like being over the last several years. Defeating the Devil in RIP, it had me rolling my eyes. And he defeated Darkseid in Final Crisis around the same time. Sheesh.

The more human, fallible, driven, and possibly borderline insane Batman is preferable.

Another example that just comes to mind is Blade Trinity. I didn't get how Jessica Biel's Abigail Whistler was dispatching more powerful and faster vamps with ease, even while listening to an ipod, when she was just a normal human. At least with Hannibal King, he had once been a vampire and might have some inside knowledge to bolster his lack of strength or skill, so I gave him a pass, but it didn't make much sense for Whistler to be so kickass. (Granted, King might've imparted his knowledge on to her; but that still didn't work for me).

 

[Christopher]

There's at least one story in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology series where the Borg assimilate the Q Continuum. I mean, come on.

 

[Stevil2001]

I think the Dementors from Harry Potter would qualify for this. In their first appearance, one is enough to incapacitate you; by Deathly Hollows, you can get away from dozens on an elevator.

 

[DevilEyes]

How about almost every "uber-vamp" who got killed in the Buffy finale? The first one she fought nearly killed her... Then they show up in the finale and you see Dawn and Xander killing them.

That's what I was going to say. Andrew, too. How much experience did he have in killing vampires? Except in video games

How about almost every "uber-vamp" who got killed in the Buffy finale? The first one she fought nearly killed her... Then they show up in the finale and you see Dawn and Xander killing them.

Which is a pervasive problem even with normal Buffyverse vamps. Normal humans without Slayer strength shouldn't be able to drive a wooden stake through a vampire's rib cage with just raw muscle power, but we routinely saw Buffy's non-superstrong allies doing it all the time.

Really? I never thought that was the case. Vampires are superstrong and superfast, but it's not like a vampire's chest is made of iron. Anyone should be able to drive a stake through it, if they get a chance to. The problem, if you're a regular human, is just how to get into the situation where you can do it, without getting your neck snapped or bitten or killed in some other way. If, say, you somehow had a bunch of vampires chained up and unable to move and you gave the weakest human out there a stake and told them 'go and stake them', of course he/she could kill all of them.

If simply driving a stake through a vampire's chest required superhuman strength, then having just one Slayer would have been a catastrophic and idiotic decision on the part of the Shadowmen and the Watchers, since she couldn't be in every part of the world to stake vampires, and everyone else would be completely unable to do anything about vampires. While in fact, just as in other vampire lore, there are quite a few non-superpowered demon hunters who kill vampires, like Holtz. They have experience and skills, but no special strength, speed or ability to deal.

 

[sojourner]

^I think Christoper is referring more to how the wooden stakes are treated more like super sharp ginsu knives that can be pushed into the body like it's butter. There is a reason in the older movies that the vampire killers used a mallet. Flesh and bone are tough to get through.

 

[DevilEyes]

^I think Christoper is referring more to how the wooden stakes are treated more like super sharp ginsu knives that can be pushed into the body like it's butter. There is a reason in the older movies that the vampire killers used a mallet. Flesh and bone are tough to get through.

But then why wouldn't Slayers use knives or swords, instead of wooden stakes? If knives or swords were the best weapon to kill a vampire, then logic dictates that Slayers would use those, rather than wooden stakes.

But mythology says that metal objects don't kill vampires - wooden objects do - stakes, trees, even a chopstick. Which is why everyone uses wooden objects, usually a stake, to kill vampires. It follows that vampires are especially vulnerable to wood, for whatever reason. Of course it doesn't make sense according to the laws of science, but it's not an SF show, it's fantasy, and none of vampire lore makes sense if we look at them scientifically: neither does vampires burning in the sun, or vampires not having a reflection in the mirror (which, however, in Buffyverse doesn't stop them from being captured on film and photo).

With things like that, you just have to suspend disbelief.

None of this has anything to do with 'jobbing', since it was never established that one requires special strength to drive a wooden stake through a vampire's chest. "Jobbing" comes into play only if something is contradicting previously established facts in the verse. Like the changeable strength of uber-vamps.

 

[Christopher]

Really? I never thought that was the case. Vampires are superstrong and superfast, but it's not like a vampire's chest is made of iron. Anyone should be able to drive a stake through it, if they get a chance to.

The human (or vampire) heart is protected by a rib cage and sternum made of bone. Bone is pretty strong stuff, not easy to penetrate. And a wooden stake is far from an ideal tool for the job; there's a reason human beings put stone or metal arrowheads on their arrows instead of just using sharpened wood. For that matter, if the vampire were wearing strong enough clothes, like a silk shirt or a heavy leather jacket, that might be hard to penetrate with a wooden stake driven by ordinary muscle power.

In most vampire fiction, including Stoker's Dracula, driving a stake through a vampire's heart means finding a sleeping vampire, placing the stake on its chest while it lies there defenseless, and pounding the stake several times with a heavy mallet to drive it through the sternum.

If simply driving a stake through a vampire's chest required superhuman strength, then having just one Slayer would have been a catastrophic and idiotic decision on the part of the Shadowmen and the Watchers, since she couldn't be in every part of the world to stake vampires, and everyone else would be completely unable to do anything about vampires.

Driving a wooden stake through a bone sternum with one's bare hands requires superhuman strength. But that's why there are mallets and crossbows and other force multipliers. Humans are good at inventing ways to augment their strength. So it could be done by normal humans, it just couldn't be done in the specific way it was usually depicted in the Buffyverse, where a skinny 14-year-old girl could just lightly tap a vampire in the vicinity of its chest and have it disintegrate into dust. Slaying Buffyverse vamps reached the point of being like those Putty Patrollers in season two of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the ones designed with a big silver button on the chest that would make them fall to pieces if you hit it.

 

[DevilEyes]

^ Like I said, it's not a science-fiction show, and the basic premises of the mythology make no sense scientifically - vampires being especially sensitive just to wood and not to metal etc., the way they are staked, why they burn in the sun, why they don't have a reflection, etc. And nobody is even trying to base any of these on science, because it doesn't matter. But nothing there is contradicting the previously established facts of the verse.

Jobbing would mean that a fight is contradicting previously established facts of the verse about the relative strength of the fighters.

 

[Christopher]

Jobbing would mean that a fight is contradicting previously established facts of the verse about the relative strength of the fighters.

But see, I think it does, at least implicitly. The original idea was that the Slayer had superhuman strength, speed, agility, reflexes, etc. so that she could take on vampires (who were also superhuman in their abilities) and be able to win against them. But when the series got to the point that all of the Slayer's merely human allies -- even a frail little girl like Dawn -- were able to hold their own in fights against dozens of vampires or other superhuman monsters, it just seems to be blurring the concept.

 

[Jetfire]

There's at least one story in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology series where the Borg assimilate the Q Continuum. I mean, come on.

That is AWESOME!

Unless I missed it during one of the shows runs...have they ever explained why Q take the Borg so seriously? Has a book covered this in any depth?

 

[Christopher]

^I don't think it's that the Q feel threatened by the Borg, just that they're aware the Borg are dangerous to other beings and that it's a bad idea to stir them up. After all, though "our" Q (DeLancie's Q) has rarely lived up to it, the Continuum is supposed to watch out for the rest of the universe and treat it responsibly, which is why they punished "our" Q for his malicious pranks. So in "Q2," when Q yelled at his son about not provoking the Borg, I took that to be a sign that he was trying to be a responsible parent and telling his kid to behave and not cause trouble for the lesser beings, even though he wouldn't have hesitated to do it himself (and indeed, he had done it -- sending the Enterprise to encounter the Borg years ahead of schedule does kind of count as provoking them, I'd say).

Well, actually, I took it as a sign that "Q2" was a really bad and stupidly written episode in which very little made sense. But the above is how I rationalized it.

 

[Captaindemotion]

What about in the Marvel/ DC crossover where Wolverine beat Lobo? I mean, I like Wolverine, he's one of my favourite comic characters. And I don't really care for Lobo. But Lobo has beaten Superman up in the past. So surely he could take down Wolvie?

 

[Silvercrest]

Christopher wrote:
So in "Q2," when Q yelled at his son about not provoking the Borg, I took that to be a sign that he was trying to be a responsible parent and telling his kid to behave and not cause trouble for the lesser beings

Exactly. It's like telling your kid not to tease the neighbor's dog.

 

[DevilEyes]

Jobbing would mean that a fight is contradicting previously established facts of the verse about the relative strength of the fighters.

But see, I think it does, at least implicitly. The original idea was that the Slayer had superhuman strength, speed, agility, reflexes, etc. so that she could take on vampires (who were also superhuman in their abilities) and be able to win against them. But when the series got to the point that all of the Slayer's merely human allies -- even a frail little girl like Dawn -- were able to hold their own in fights against dozens of vampires or other superhuman monsters, it just seems to be blurring the concept.

I was referring to a human's ability to drive the stake into vampire's chest. If supernatural strength was required for that, then humans like Holtz couldn't be successful vampire hunters.

And Giles expected Xander - who didn't have any experience in fighting vampires at that point - to be able to stake Jesse, in the very second episode of the show.

Now, there were lots of fights where 'the good guys' were really unbelievably beating a bunch of vampires. Consistency on matters of strength and fighting ability has never been Buffyverses strong point. The Ubervamps in the final fight were the best example of depowering the villains so the heroes could win. Buffy's, Spike's, Angel's, Connor's strength changed according to the plot. And sometimes there were things done just for fun, like Buffy being able to lift the Thor Hammer with one hand while Spike couldn't at all, which they wrote just because they thought it would be funny, not paying attention to the fact that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

 

[Bonzo the Fifth]

Well, as far as the Troll hammer was concerned, I sort of assumed that what was required to lift it was more than mere physical power, possibly a kind of metaphysical/spiritual/magical strength. Unless we want to assume the thing was made of Neutronium or some other kind of super-dense material, which makes no sense, as it's mass would have caused all manner of other complications (like finding a floor that would support it, or the fact that, even given that someone as small as Buffy could hold it, the second she swung it should have propelled her in all kinds of crazy ways).

The 'jobbing' part, in relation to said hammer, though, would probably have been the entire fight with Glory. No amount of justifications and rationalizations in the world should have been able to reconcile that fight, or the fact that everybody wasn't immediately killed once they started to annoy her.

 

[Bonzo the Fifth]

^I don't think it's that the Q feel threatened by the Borg, just that they're aware the Borg are dangerous to other beings and that it's a bad idea to stir them up. After all, though "our" Q (DeLancie's Q) has rarely lived up to it, the Continuum is supposed to watch out for the rest of the universe and treat it responsibly, which is why they punished "our" Q for his malicious pranks. So in "Q2," when Q yelled at his son about not provoking the Borg, I took that to be a sign that he was trying to be a responsible parent and telling his kid to behave and not cause trouble for the lesser beings, even though he wouldn't have hesitated to do it himself (and indeed, he had done it -- sending the Enterprise to encounter the Borg years ahead of schedule does kind of count as provoking them, I'd say).

Well, actually, I took it as a sign that "Q2" was a really bad and stupidly written episode in which very little made sense. But the above is how I rationalized it.

I agree in that I'm sure the Q wouldn't be threatened by the Borg, at least in their present form. One could suppose it would be theoretically possible for the Borg to have someday assimilated enough technology, knowledge and power to become a credible threat to the Q (and by extension, the whole of creation), but given events in the novel-verse, we'll never know the answer to that... It can't be easily argued, however, that of the 'material' species in the Trek-verse, that the Borg didn't reign at the top in terms of technological powers in the Milky Way (one time encounters like Species 8472 notwithsanding), so if anyone could have usurped the Q, the Borg could have.

That being said, as an aside, I've always had my doubts about the supposed omnipotence and omniscience of the Q anyway. For a supposedly omniscient society, they had a surprising tendency to get surprised a lot, even by the actions of limited humanoids, which, in and of itself, can count as a form of 'jobbing'.

 

[Myasishchev]

What about in the Marvel/ DC crossover where Wolverine beat Lobo? I mean, I like Wolverine, he's one of my favourite comic characters. And I don't really care for Lobo. But Lobo has beaten Superman up in the past. So surely he could take down Wolvie?

What? This happened? Is this one of those dumb crossover fights where the fans vote on the winner?

 

[Nerys Myk]

What about in the Marvel/ DC crossover where Wolverine beat Lobo? I mean, I like Wolverine, he's one of my favourite comic characters. And I don't really care for Lobo. But Lobo has beaten Superman up in the past. So surely he could take down Wolvie?

What? This happened? Is this one of those dumb crossover fights where the fans vote on the winner?

Yep, I think they had Aquaman beat the Sub-Mariner as well. Aquaman is super-strong, but he's not in Namor's class.

 

[Myasishchev]

I dunno, that seems like instant defeat for Namor. Aquaman controls sea life. Namor is sea life. Aquaman can order Namor to walk repeatedly into a wall or the undersea equivalent thereof.

Even taking away the telepathy, Aquaman always seemed to me a rough equal for Namor, except Namor has the advantage of goofy flight, and is probably a better, dirtier fighter, but modern Aquaman is pretty mean, too. I'd really only give Namor a slight edge in a fair fight.

Anyway, it's not nearly as silly as some hairy Canadian with hard bones and some knives beating a cosmic menace like Lobo. You might as well have Wolverine defeat Thor, or Gladiator (and yet, somehow, I'm actually pretty sure that happened too).