. I’m boggled in the mind over just how exactly anyone can go read more than half a dozen Spider-Man comics and actually conclude that Peter Parker is "hypersonic" or "Mach-this" Seriously, do you people just ignore all the shit that is going on every other page? Do you not read the stories or do you only know this character by a few dozen scans that get passed around on battle forums? For crying out loud It took Spidey 9 minutes to cross New York City. He was not casually swinging around either, he thought aunt may was about to die here. That's 40 kilometers at best. "He can only go ‘x-sonic in dodging over short bursts" Spider-Man only had "one shot" at webbing up a few arrows before they hit a crowd. Then he fails to stop a new one. see how the arrows take more than two whole seconds to explode. Freaking arrows.
Venom, who is faster than Spider-Man, has a consistent problem with sound. Do you think this problem would be nearly as crucial to the symbiote if Venom was significantly faster than said sound? Or the even faster Carnage for that matter? Spider-man’s incredible acts of dodging have always been founded on freakish contortionist agility backed up with precognition.
“You’re just fishing for anti-feats.” Well if you’re basing you’re perception of Spider-Man off the mythologized version of comics spiderman who is ‘King of street tiers’ pushed by battleboards than frankly every time he gets tagged by anything at all it's an ‘anti-feat,’ I don't really know how fast the average person on these boards thinks Spider-Man is, but good god man he’s not breaking the sound barrier when he does a dab.
I am not just someone who has read spider-man respect threads and looked at wikis. I am getting close to having read EVERY single Spider-Man comic, been researching it for a long time to make a general blog about it, and I still don't agree with this logic.
Let us agree first that Spider-Man does possess supersonic showings. In fact he has one of the most objective supersonic feats I have ever seen that doesn't outright say "supersonic" or "faster then sound":
Comic literaly gives you the timeframe and distance. 2 miles = 3,218.69 meters. Divided by 5 for 5 seconds is exceding 640 meters per second. The speed of sound is 340.29 meters per second. This is as objective a speed feat as you can get with the timeframe and distance literally given to us with no assumptions.
Now the argument in the post doesn't seem to be Spider-Man has no feats like this, it's that it causes plot holes for Spider-Man to be fast.
It absolutely does. It causes major plot holes for Spider-Man to be able to move this fast. And thus I must ask.....so?
If you watch or read any story and two events contradict that does not suggest that neither event happened, it suggests the writer made a plot hole. Such plots holes can be found throughout comics, especially of the type the original poster suggests. If the Flash and Superman moves much faster then light, why is it that crime still exists on DC Earth if they can simply be anywhere and stop them? If Batman has no powers, why is it that he can perform superhuman feats. Hell, if Peter is a scientific genius like the comics proclaim him to be why can't he just perform scientific discoveries to get money so he's not constantly near bankruptcy? His web-spinners alone would be enough for a major patent, something that the comics have acknowledged before. You can take this out of comics for any series that has characters who have broad and potency metahuman abilities. In Sailor Moon, if Usagi cna resurrect people at will, why is it that the no longer brainwashed Heavenly Kings are still dead mostly. In Dragon Ball Z, why didn't Krillin hit Freeza with a kiezan after he was blinded by the solar flare. Why doesn't every character who ever gets a genie circumvent wishing for most wishes by just wishing for more genies?
I don't see any reason why the existence of plot holes means that a feat can't be used. I try and test the logic of something by making an analogy to something else or taking a rule to it's extreme. If I think of literary analysis outside vs debating, if two events cause a plot hole I don't use that to say "one of the events should be ignored", I just say "yeah that's a plot hole, they really should have fixed that." If I say a movie where two events contradicted each other unexplained I wouldn't think "one of those events just didn't happen" I would think "Wow, that really did not make a lot of sense." And thus I must apply the same logic. It doesn't make sense for Spidey to have the feats he does, that is true. That doesn't mean they didn't happen, it just means we have to take a vs standard and apply it as constantly and consistently as we can to get through the inconsistencies of narrative.
I don't get the argument "It's inconsistent with plot so it can't be used." Just because something doesn't make sense doesn't mean we can't use it. FTL speed for instance. Some characters move FTL. That's impossible by what we currently know in physics, and moreover even if it was possible you'd expect something like going backwards in time and creating massive cherenkov radiation yet we don't say the lack of these things means FTL characters are not FTL.
And in case someone is going to bring up the point that this would mean Spider-Man is a cosmic entity due to his fights with herald level entities, I have adressed this before in my blog "The Problems with Scaling Spider-Man" where I noted that Marvel in particular will sometimes treat Low Metas like Spider-Man to be relative in strength to High Metas and sometimes not, but regardless I use that exact same scaling: I conservatively scale characters, scaling only if every instance between them shows them to be relative, equal or superior to the character to cale to. In other words yes Spider-Man does have feats where he will make Herald Class entities bleed, but he also has showings where they tank his blows and so I don't scale them. I apply this standard consistently with scaling. Spider-Man fighting Fear Itself Thing could be seen as a feat for Spider-Man or anti-feat for Thing ambigiously so I don't use it for either wheras when Spider-Man has a direct feat of doing something like unambigiously moving supersonic, there is no ambiguity there. It is only contested by the existence of other anti-feats, the feat itself is unambigious in presentation.
That may be have been confusingly worded so to put it another way, in interpreting series if a character clearly does a feat, then that character clearly did the fact and times when it would be have useful if they could replicate it but don't either suggests there is an in-universe reason or a plot. And ploe holes don't negate the existence of an event in a story like a feat. Scaling is different because it's not the character doing the feat exactly, it's the character doing something to another character who themselves have feats but if this causes a plot hole, then the feat itself is undefined.
This is an umabigious supersonic speed feat. He moves a distance in a time.
This is not an MFTL+ speed feat because Spider-Man might be outlandishly faster then normal or Nova might be outlandishly slower then normal to allow this to occur. I only scale A to B when every showing has A being relative, equal or superior to B. Spider-Man is definitely just street level, even if I think he's pretty high up in the street hierarchy.
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