TLDR: I don't think Post-Crisis Superman is universal but I think I probably acted too rashly and didn't address the arguments for it which was unfair.
Long Version:
Let me tell you a story: I joined the versus debating community back years ago. Back then Superman and Goku were both considered planetbusters. Being a planet buster meant being in the big names, Heralds of Galactus were Star Level, Gold Saints being above Star Level was contested, and being star level was being op. Being Galaxy Level meant being super freaking powerful. Back then being city level meant being a high tier in the HST.
Back when I joined, the very first thing I did was make a respect thread for the anime version of Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon is my favorite character and back in the day people thought she was a glass cannon with low galactic dc and planet level durability.
I remember being friends with another SM fan named Echelon9 who became active at around the same time as me and wanted to upgrade SM to galaxy level with stellar+ dura from what I remember.
I reread the SM Manga fairly often, as I greatly enjoy it. While I still was an amateur, it felt weird that she would be ranked that lowly when such feats were in the series. Eventually I began my general push to upgrade the verse that made me somewhat controversial, though now is considered fairly mundane, even lowballing if you go on vs battles wiki.
My pushing for it be upgraded happened while a lot of verses were getting upgraded either from new info or because people were just rethinking the feats. As such I didn't think it would be a big deal. Turned out to be so, some people got really angry at my claims. Regardless of the accuracy, the toxicity of the argument eventually caused me to leave the OBD. And you know, that's all fine and good, I am not gonna try and police how people can behave, even if I could.
That said, it is the general assumption that what we desire in a versus debating format is truth. Truth can be intuitive or it can be counter-intuitive. The truth can be something we find highly counter-intuitive in fact. I've seen people try to claim SM isn't universal under what is essentially veiled arguments of incredulity.
I have come to greatly despise the argument of incredulity as my most disliked fallacy. To me that someone could be counter-intuitive but true is, if I am honest, something I greatly enjoy in this activity, that something could seem impossible but being supported by evidence is fun. I enjoy when people think Magical Girl-verses are street level and being able to demonstrate that they are actually cosmically strong. To me that's funny and enjoyable.
Moreover however the argument from incredulity is a shut-down of debate. Something being seemingly absurd is not an argument. It's not even remotely an argument. It's worse then an argument it is the end of argumentation. It is a faith claim, that something is too absurd to be considered.
While obviously this ideal is impossible to live up to completely, I do believe it would be a correct ideal to never dismiss a claim consciously or subconsciously by it's seeming absurdity but instead solely on evidence regardless of intuition. This does not mean accepting every claim, merely that all claims must be addressed beyond "clearly this is an outlier/hyperbole/absurd". I believe this is a correct ideal to align with, because this is the ideal of rationality and objectivity. This is the ideal of not biasing oneself based on pre-existing beliefs. Obviously it is impossible for a human to reach this ideal, but nonetheless to increase our connection with it seems best if our aim is actually the truth and not merely the justification of our current beliefs.
Allow me to share a bias of mine. I greatly dislike the discarding of information. I hate that outliers exist, even if I understand their rational necessity to maintain self-consistency. That said I only will use them if there is no other explanation for why a character is acting out of bounds of their normal power level, even if it a very flimsy reason. It annoys me that people are so willing to dismiss information instead of trying to reconcile information as best as possible. That seems to me the way to understanding truth in the real world, to be able to reconcile as much information as possible cohesively. Fiction is different in that it can objectively self-contradict, but such cases are rarer then people think.
My private campaign to upgrade SM, despite the harsh opposition got supporters fairly fast and now it's a fairly mundane position to have that SM is Universal, though some people have gone too far in the other direction in my view and make claims like Usagi is Multiversal with infinite speed, claims I find very distant from the very familiar text I love. I do not believe this to be my intuition either as I have explained my reasoning in the blog directly prior to this one.
So let me move to a far less accepted position, one I do not currently hold, and one that I must confess I feel embarrassed to even bring up due to it's current connotations in the vs community. Namely the position that Post-Crisis Superman is Universe level.
Sailor Moon is my favorite character and Superman is my second favorite. I have a pretty strong knowledge of the character and I would say I love the character, one of the best characters in my opinion. I say this merely to impress that I have awareness of the character's abilities, that I understand what the intuition is towards the character's abilities, and what the current versus conception of him is.
An OBD member known as Tonathan100 began a campaign to upgrade Post-Crisis Superman to universe level. Superman's current position is at low galactic. The push of a low galactic character to universal may seem like only a small connection to my story, but it is enough to "give me pause".
If I am honest with myself I did not properly give the information a fair chance to sway me. That Superman would be Universal in the Post-Crisis era seemed absurd to me. It breaks my intuition of how strong things are. There's a nice neat orderly power rankings where Superman and Wonder Woman are comparable, both have star level feats somewhat early on and later on they can both take several but are harmed by infinite mass punches which are star level, suggesting they are above but not massively above that level. They also both have 1 or 2 low galactic feats I am aware and scale to a few such galactic feats from the Lanterns. All this led me to think that it was a consistent position that Superman was low galactic Post-Crisis. This was my intuition.
That does not mean I am suddenly taken in by the argument. I would need to honestly assess the argument, because if I am being honest I did not do so in good faith the first time. I did so under the mental state that such was absurd and could not be, but this as I have explained above is a wrong way to think of it.
My apologies.
The take-away from this should be that our intuition is not infallible. If your opponent provides even minor evidence that something is the case, then it becomes your prerogative to debunk the claim. SCANT evidence still supersedes NO rebuttal regardless of how seemingly ridiculous the claim is.
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