the Hulk – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

My wife just showed me this tweet:

And I horribly disappointed her by not having the slightest idea what the hell could possibly be going on. Apparently– and you’re just going to have to believe me on this, as I refuse to look for it– there has recently been a discussion on The Twitter about why Ant-Man didn’t simply defeat Thanos by crawling inside his asshole and then growing.

Look, damn it, I need something more ridiculous than British money to talk about around here. These are the posts. 🙂

It is unclear exactly how much force Ant-Man is able to exert while growing. In fact, two damn near successive images from this trailer make the problem pretty clear:

You only need about the first thirty seconds, but you see two things here associated with growth: first, whatever system they have built inside the van is strong enough to fling another van off of its wheels and into the air. However, the system in Ant-Man’s actual suit isn’t able to put out enough force to break either the drop ceiling above him or the drywall around him. One assumes that you could use Pym particles to generate quite a bit of force, then, but that capability doesn’t seem to exist in Ant-Man’s suit, no doubt because his actual flesh is weaker than the metal frame of the van.

For the sake of argument, I’m willing to accept that Ant-Man or the Wasp are both able to shrink down enough to get inside Thanos’ suit of armor, and from there, provided that he is not actively clenching, one assumes they could work their way into his asshole if it were absolutely necessary. However, any suit that can’t grow Ant-Man with enough force to break drywall is surely not going to be able to overcome the pressure that the rectal wall of a man able to box the Hulk into unconsciousness could exert.

The good news for Ant-Man is that his suit does appear to have some sort of failsafe in it so that he can’t accidentally grow beyond the point where he hurts himself, or he would surely be larger than the room in the scene above, which I’m pretty sure is from a part of the movie where the suit was actively malfunctioning. I therefore posit that Ant-Man is only able to grow large enough, once ensconced in Thanos’ rectum, for Thanos to notice him, at which point one assumes that Thanos would clench, and things end poorly for Ant-Man, who has no particular level of enhanced strength or invulnerability, especially at that size. If his suit does not have the failsafe built in, Thanos clenches anyway, and one way or another the big purple dude is gonna need an oversized bidet to clean up the mess, which isn’t gonna be pretty.

The correct way, by the way, for Ant-Man or the Wasp to defeat a being on the level of Thanos is not to fly into his ass, but to fly into his ear. I’m pretty certain that the Wasp dropped the Hulk himself at least once by flying into his ear and directing an energy blast directly into his eardrum. Or, in a worst-case scenario, shrink down a bit more and head for his brain, which I’m pretty sure she did to the Red Hulk at one point.

Or, y’know, there’s always distraction. Yeah, this happened. God, The Ultimates was terrible:

There’s a weird kind of freedom in today and tomorrow’s posts, because judging from the traffic yesterday and what I’ve gotten so far today, I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that absolutely no one is going to read anything I write for the next two days. So: nerd post. Huge nerd post. Unforgivable nerd post.

Let’s talk about what would happen if Hulk fought Superman.

Yes, that’s really what I’m writing about. Feel free to tune out right now. Or not, because you need to watch these first. I just discovered these videos yesterday, since the most recent bit has just been released, but an animator by the name of Mike Habjan has apparently spent a good chunk of the last three years of his life putting these little CGI videos together. Part one, I’ll admit, is not going to blow you away. The next three, though? They become progressively more and more awesome each time.

So, watch some videos and then I’m going to geek out:

Literally my only gripe is that Superman isn’t bleeding after the ass-kicking he gets in Part 3. It’s obvious that he’s in a hell of a lot of pain but there ought to be some visible wounds– although maybe that’s too much modification to the model or something; I don’t know– it still looks fantastic. What’s awesome about these fights is that they go exactly how you’d think they might– Superman uses his heat vision and speed a lot, and Hulk just sort of sits back and waits for Superman to screw up enough for Hulk to grab him, which results in the tremendous ass-kicking that Superman catches at the beginning of Part 3. Superman, it should be noted, isn’t going to be terribly used to getting hurt— he’s got one, maybe two other villains who can challenge him on the level that Hulk does. Hulk, on the other hand, you can hurt– it just doesn’t matter, because it’s going to heal anyway and because being hurt just makes him angrier, and that’s always a bad idea.

There’s two ways for Superman to win this fight, at this point, since “End it as quickly as humanly possible” is no longer an option: 1) Get Hulk out into orbit, where the sun’s rays are rejuvenating Superman constantly and Hulk doesn’t have any leverage to counteract Superman’s speed and eventually strand him on the moon or toss him into the Sun or something; and 2) play possum, and just hope he can survive the beating until Hulk loses interest. Note that if you survive a fight with the Hulk? You won.

The longer it goes on punch-for-punch, the angrier Hulk gets, and the more impossible it becomes for Superman to win the fight. You cannot outlast the Hulk. Superman’s reserves aren’t literally unlimited the way Hulk’s are.

Actually, one more gripe, but I’ve had this gripe with every incarnation of the Hulk ever because it may actually just be my idea– I’ve always thought that if we’re going to stick with this angry = strong idea for the Hulk, he should get bigger as he gets angrier. His size has always been inconsistent; let’s actually use that.

Can’t wait for Part V. 🙂