BOTA Retrospective 2025

Hey, what's up, hello! Dash here, and for the past year or so I've been running a VS blog for whatever reason, and I think it would be good to look back on the past to reflect on some things.

Other Mother VS Aggie Prenderghast

This was my first blog, literally ever, so I don't hold myself up that much on its issues since I definitely have improved since this released. I started blogging because of this matchup, just because I wanted to show everyone how great I really thought this fight could be, and I think I definitely turned a few heads towards it. Coraline's my favorite film of all time, and ParaNorman isn't too far behind, but I really wouldn't change anything that the blog did. Maybe I'd actually calc a few feats here and there but overall I don't have much else to say on it. I love this matchup so much and it's the one that got me into VS blogging. Still in my top 10 ever! Thanks, Laika.

Flowey VS Giygas

This one was a lot of fun to do in the moment, I got to research parts of the Mother lore that really nobody else gives a shit about, and then I got to the end of the original Mother novel adaptation. And oh my god I did not expect that. Like... okay? The author just decided to... do that to Ana who's not even a teenager yet... alright then. Keep in mind I went into the novel knowing absolutely nothing about it at all. It was already weird throughout the entire read but that part in specific was just such an awkwardly chosen ending to an already awkwardly written novel. If you don't know what I'm talking about, probably better that you don't but... MonkeyNess's breakdown of the ending explains things pretty well.

Anyways, the actual blog itself. Yeah I still kinda like what came of it! After this released it definitely kinda reminded me that people actually read what I say on the internet and can... have different opinions on it?? Impossible!!! Since it's an Undertale blog, naturally it actually gained some traction and stuff, which was great to see. Afterwards I actually saw Multi+ Undertale become more popular in certain discussions with Flowey, which I can't say was exactly my fault, but hey I just noticed it. I honestly dunno if I still agree with the verdict though, I won't lie. I mean I definitely regret putting Giygas's dimensional form's Nigh-Omniscience as a... speed feat? Why did I do that? lmao Nigh-Omniscience isn't a speed feat, it's a state of being, silly Dash. Also Mother's cosmology section is just like... two sentences or something? Weird, I would've elaborated on that if I made it today. Honestly I would've changed like... a lot of this lol. Being completely honest, I kinda wanna remake this blog someday. I don't know when but I think I may have fooled a lot of people with some of the research in this blog and remedying that would be nice. Regardless I got to share my thoughts on Undertale scaling again in Gerson VS Oogway, and who knows, maybe I'll get back to Mother in 2026 as well? Hehe.

Piranha Plant VS Chomper

Ahhh the good ol' Plant vs Chomper blog. The best thing to come out of this was probably how I met two great friends out of this blog, which is nice, as it was the first blog that I actually had to work with a whole team on. A team of three people, me included, but a team nonetheless. Ruby did a great job with researching PvZ stuff that I had no clue on how to deal with, and Alfie really helped me hone in on the Mario scaling side of things. Explaining how Plant was gonna scale to Mario like, at all, was something I was dreading to explain, but Alfie did it perfectly. There's probably a few things I would've changed, like going more into the variants of both sides, and reformatting a couple parts here and there, but all in all I still really love the finished product.

How this one was received was pretty interesting. For some reason, it was nominated for a r/DBM award for best blog of the year, which is like... super weird lmao. Like, I'm never gonna take the opinions of various DeathBattleMatchups people as gospel, but damn. I mean granted I'm grateful that it was on there, especially since it's my third blog literally ever and all, but still it was weird to see. I mean I have better blogs that released this year I would've preferred to be on there lmao, but again I'm still super grateful! General reception seemed pretty good though, and I kept seeing Plant winning in more online circles of the internet after this one was released, again not saying we caused that but it's still something worth noting. Though there was one person who heavily criticized the blog, which was kind of refreshing honestly. I hadn't gotten anything super critical of any of my blogs yet (foreshadowing...) so I really was surprised and glad at the same time. Granted, they kind of like also weirdly made fun of me in a public Discord server beforehand, which I really didn't like, so I just DM'd them and was like "uhh hey can u pls critique me in like a respectful positive manner and shit haha pls dont hate me". And yeah they ended up doing so, and we had a very respectful conversation afterwards. I wish a lot more people could be like that, tbh. Anyways! In conclusion, String Theory PvZ sucks, and also this blog was fun.

Nagito Komaeda VS Milo Murphy

Oh god! Okay let me talk about the research period beforehand. It was really fun to work on, and it was a bigger team than Plant VS Chomper so I had to kinda lock in for this. I allowed for people to choose their own MML episodes after dividing them by the number of researchers, and I really had no idea how to do this kind of research in general. I learned later on but, yeah. Kinda felt a little bit disorganized, and unfortunately some of the GIFs in the blog are like really low quality but... yeah let's focus on the positives here, like Milo would. I guess my Nagito despair side was showing there, my bad. Of course rewatching Milo was great, it's such a great show and he's a comfort character of mine. Researching Nagito was another thing. So, quick backstory on my relationship with him as a character and just on the MU in general. I used to HATE Nagito. Especially back when I finished SDR2, I hated his anime snifling ass so much man. But then I replayed SDR2 like 2 years later. And I actually kinda fell in love with Komaeda's characterization so much. I don't know what it was, maybe it was the despair to hope in me talking, maybe it was the fact that I knew how he was gonna die, maybe it was none of that, but I just loved this stupid gay man so much, and I still do. And then when I got into VS blogging and saw this matchup I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It was honestly surreal, lmao. I just had to do a blog for it when I was thinking about matchups to do. And that my friends is when the realization struck.

PHINEAS AND FERB SCALING. For the holy love of Ferb. I had no idea how much P&F trumped Danganronpa as a verse. Even taking stuff at low ends, Nagito gets blitzed out of the water, and to make this fight even a little bit fair you need to disregard P&F's antics entirely. Which is what I should've done, or at least made a separate verdict entirely without P&F scaling. Since I truly believe that was my biggest problem when I covered this match. I mean really, Planet Level to MFTL+ Milo? Am I a comedian? Am I making jokes? I put that up against a guy who's realistically probably not even Small Building Level? Milo even has immeasurable arguments. I mean, they're not any good, like at all, but still. The fact that they exist for him just in general show you how much of a stomp this is with scaling. What the hell was I thinking, oh my god. Regardless of ALL of that bullshit, this was still a super fun blog to work on and I'm glad I did it. And currently I'm helping on a different Milo blog, that may or may not be released when this is posted? Idk. Anyways it's kinda gonna blow all of this Milo research like out of the water at least in terms of how it handles the Murphy's Law aspect of everything. But that's neither here nor there, so let's push on.

Bruce Nolan VS Michael Newman
(Bonus)

This was a fun one to do! Kinda worked on this in secret as Nagito VS Milo was rolling out, and eventually got it done while I was on holiday. Rewatching Bruce Almighty and Click was honestly a lot of fun, and I wanna powerscale more live action films sometime. Bruce Almighty specifically was nice because I actually tried to calc certain things in the film, which went alright I guess. I was new to calcing, still am honestly, and trying to get better. The more and more I figured stuff out about how both Bruce and Michael's powersets worked, the more I was like "how the hell can Bruce kill Mike?" Because realistically, Bruce takes every single category, but over time he doesn't. Mike has crazy fucking immortality and acausality that's hard to negate normally, but then I learned Bruce had time travel. Still don't know if I'd go with the verdict I did back then today, but still I think it's pretty accurate. The remote realistically would probably work on Bruce? But like, I'm sorry. Even saying that it does, Michael just has like no answers to anything Bruce can do. Bruce can disable the remote, stall Mike infinitely, and more. It was fun to talk about in this blog in this lens, as if the fight would go on for hundreds of thousands of years, with only Michael remembering any of it. It's really funny in a morbid kind of way, and I don't really care if people disagree with how I handled it tbh, since this was just a bonus blog I put together in like two or three weeks in between certain things. It's supposed to be pretty laid back, so I had a laid back attitude when approaching it. I love both... well, one of these films a lot, and it was cool putting it into the VS lens.

El Macho VS Fairy Godmother

Hey, it's the matchup that won the vote! Definitely not influenced by any certain reddit moderators or anything, this was the match that won the poll we had at the end of Nagito VS Milo, and I think we fully delivered. Researching this was really simple and a lot of fun, since both are only in one movie and in a few games, so research had a chill but also serious vibe to it. The debate for this was seriously just stats vs hax, at least at first, since Godmother has a lot at her disposal in terms of versatility, and that was super fun to debate and discuss. While arguing on Godmother winning I think I said "transmutation" about 900 times more than the average human does in their lifespan. It was great. And we did get Shrek and Despicable Me scaling slightly wrong, but it wasn't enough to affect the verdict too much. Speaking of the verdict... jeez. It was so complex that this was our first team verdict, and sadly only one person was on Team El Macho, who I'm pretty sure still stands on that ground of Macho winning, btw. Based asf. Stand your ground, Alfie.

And yeah, we decided to also include the games in the blog, since these two had little to pull from we thought it was pretty fair. For Godmother it meant researching two games she was in. For Macho that meant researching... Minion Rush? Yeah we didn't really see anything notable in it, except for... the beach realm. So Ruby pointed this out to me and I literally lost it for a second time during this blog's research period. You see, the minions get stolen in DM2 and are sent to this realm with a beach in it, and it's unclear exactly how they got there. Maybe teleportation or something, but when you factor in Minion Rush, this genuinely becomes a realm with a sun and goes on infinitely since Minion Rush levels are infinite. Yeah this kind of broke me when I found out about it. Why did Minion Rush of all things have to push an infinite pocket dimension argument that far?? Regardless though no one really scales to the realm itself and was kind of just an insane thing for Macho to have just on hand. Mans can't even BFR anyone there since the fucking hole in the ice cream truck is so tiny. El Macho genuinely just has so much weird tech and gadgets for a one-time movie villain and STILL can't win normally. RIP.

There's also the Before the Verdicts section which... yeah. We can't not talk about this blog without talking about HER. This was the origin. The origin of the Agnes running joke in the blog. Essentially, I found a calc on Reddit of Agnes Gru screaming so loud she broke quartz with her bare... sound? And somehow it was calculated to be LARGE PLANET LEVEL. Legit I had never seen a calc more wrong in my entire life, and it was so fucking funny discovering it, kinda wish I had a video recording. I just knew I had to talk about it in the blog and debunk the shit out of it, but Agnes after became a running joke in the BTVs of BOTA with her being alongside Outerversal characters and whatever because it's funny. Since then she's become the official mascot of BOTA, she's on the icon of the Discord server and everything. I honestly don't think there's gonna be a blog I'll make without her somewhere in the background. And all of it came from a stupid calc I thought was hilarious at the time.

Michael Character Blog
(Bonus)

Weirdly I don't have much to say on this! It was easy to work on, since it was all on my own and stuff. The Good Place is my favorite show ever, and powerscaling the series was sooo much fun. Seriously it's funny how powerful Michael is when everything is considered. And like. He's just a funny Ted Danson guy. As for the reception, a lot of people on Discord spaces seemed to like this, but I hardly got anything from it on Reddit, at least that's how it felt at the time. It was a little bit saddening to see a lot of work I did kinda go unnoticed in a sense, but those who appreciated this really appreciated it, and I couldn't be more happy with those people! And we're doing a Janet matchup in 2026, so be on the lookout for that! ...Eventually.

GLaDOS VS One-One

So this one has a bit of a weird history. Originally it was Mr. Freeze VS Amelia Hughes, but that already got a blog, but I didn't realize that until like halfway through research, so I reincorporated everything into GLaDOS VS One-One. I mean idk what the hell else I would've done tbh, I like Portal and I like Infinity Train so I might as well, right? It was cool talking about Infinity Train obviously, and someone helped me out with the GLaDOS research so this blog was basically just very Infinity Train-heavy. Which is fine, honestly. I enjoyed researching the series! And I seriously hope it gets picked up again. Someday. PLEASE WARNER DISCOVERY DO SOMETHING!!!!! I think listing every single train car might have been a bit of a mistake, since like the previous Infinity Train blog didn't do that but like... at the same time the completionist in me really wanted to... but like they didn't come into play in the verdict all too much... so... yeah maybe it was good to include it just in case. Oh hey GLaDOS is here too! Yeah finding out Portal wasn't even reliably Subsonic was kind of a letdown, at least for GLaDOS's sake. I was also surprised with the fact that GLaDOS being pretty stationary wasn't really much of a problem for the fight's sake, but kinda neutralizing both of their grounds I think fixed that.

Anyways uh... yeah people liked this one pretty much. Not my worst blog, not my best blog, but something great altogether that I'm still proud of.

Benson VS Nicole

Here's the big one! This is the blog that I'm most proud of overall, and really shows how much of a team effort can help with the quality of a blog. Benson VS Nicole was a matchup I loved for a really long time, but was worried that A. Someone else was gonna cover it first or B. I'd miss something in between both of their very long cartoon histories. But both of those problems were quelled when I had the biggest team yet helping me on both Gumball and Regular Show research, it was great. I will say though, I kinda started this blog to talk about how much of a fraud Gumball can be, but after very thorough research, ended up becoming the very thing I swore to destroy. At the very end of it all, I was convinced Nicole pretty much won more often than not. And I still stand by that, but Benson definitely has his ways to win... I just think it's like a 60-40 win ratio between Nicole and Benson. That's another thing I discovered with this blog, is that this matchup is SO debatable it's crazy. We went around in circles and it's still the closest match in BOTA yet.

Though I really gotta talk about some moments in the research period that I appreciated. For one, this was Moofie's first blog with us and he really fucking clutched up with the Gumball side of things debate-wise. He even made an entire Google Doc of every Non-Physical Interaction in the show's history. That's fucking INSANE. He really helped find Nicole so many advantages without being annoying or pushy about it and that's something I really respect. MonkeyBoi as well... researching Multiverse Mayhem and losing various hours of his life. And later on Low Multi Gumball got CANONICALLY confirmed in Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball S2. Your work really paid off there, dude. StoryDove's blog draft also came in handy and made for a really great blog overall.

And then there's that infamous viewcount feat. Thanks RedEric for that, lmao. That feat is like... honestly still really weird, but the fact that it exists is still hilarious to me. Funnily enough like, I saw other people talk about that feat and how funny it was or whatever, but not a single person ever questioned the name of that goofy ass number. As a reminder, it was 247 Sexnonagintacentillion times faster than light. That does not sound real. But people realized that the math actually added up, and the feat is actually potentially valid. And I think it's because of stuff like that that the blog had which really made people rethink Spongebob VS Gumball as a matchup. It's like... a lot closer than you'd expect, but now after the blog I genuinely saw people argue that Gumball won. Which is awesome. Because like, he doesn't, like at all, but it's refreshing to see that people now believe in my blue cat boy a little bit more than before. And that's pretty cool.

Siffrin VS TLQ

Lmao.

...

Okay fine I'll talk about it. Just gonna say that this caused probably the biggest blog controversy of this year, maybe even ever. I have a lot of regrets, but also a lot of just general thoughts on this blog now that everything's over with it. I no longer really care for Sif or TLQ in VS anymore sadly, and I think that's only natural. When this came out, at worst I received one death threat in my DMs, and then I received one message of someone threatening they were gonna report my blogger page, and there were a couple more but... ugh. Not saying we didn't deserve some of the shit coming to us, if my work is shitty then shit on it, but don't send me fucking threats on my wellbeing?? Any person who blindly followed the horde and messaged me on Reddit, telling me any of those things, I absolutely didn't deserve that. No one does. It brought back some really really bad memories, and I think that some of the people during that drama needed to remember that the people on the other end of the screen have feelings too. God DAMN after this was posted it was seriously one of the most stressful times of my entire life, I left social media for like a week or two after it was released, and ALL of this went down while I had finals, so that's awesome. Hope you guys can see why I wanted to remove this from my page, lol.

To give the research team their credit though, we got a lot of work done quickly and I had a genuine fun time with them. And I wouldn't trade that stuff for the world, truly. But holy shit dude. I wish I fully knew about all the drama beforehand people had with the Siffriel blog, which I wasn't fully put onto the severity of until AFTER our blog came out. Really really bad timing, and I should've done more research into the whole drama between some of the researchers, and just everything else. I know it's not directly my fault, but regardless I still should've known. Just saying it here though, me and the research team are all still on good terms, and we're all still friends and whatnot. I would never let internet drama get in the way of any actual friendships I have. I just kinda wanted to publicly separate myself from a lot of this so... yeah.

It's just so crazy that all of this happened to my blog specifically. Like why me bruh. My blog has the weirdest history to go from mostly fair/comedic and respectful critical reception of my blogs, as all creative projects should hope for, and then BOOM the biggest blog controversy of all time was just dropped onto me and everyone else. I had so much going on IRL at the time too that I REALLY wish this whole drama could've happened at any other time in the year. Another thing that did annoy me though, is that after the blog released I saw a few people say "haha Siffrin VS Asriel has less competition now!" Which was odd to me. Seeing others use drama that I got genuinely cyberbullied over to try and push their dumb little indie RPG powerscaling thing felt really wrong, and I get that most of the people doing that probably didn't know, but it still felt gross as hell. And please note I'm not trying to cancel anyone or something, I'm just saying my actual feelings here. Also it's not like I denounce any support of the matchup entirely, like what you like. Just in those specific instances, I couldn't help but cringe.

Of course that's just my genuine experience with the blog, other researchers have different thoughts and feelings and experiences with the stuff that happened, so maybe don't just take it from me, idk. I definitely shouldn't have released the blog in that form, done much better formatting on like... all of it, and probably shouldn't have even attempted to make it in the first place. And yes just to say it once more, I'm still sorry for everyone who was offended by this blog, if at all, and I'm sorry for everything that came of it. Reading messages of people who I genuinely respect in this community essentially losing what little faith they had in me and others was so fucking depressing, and I'm still sad about that fact. I'm really glad the apology I posted was accepted well, at least mostly, and I don't see too many people talk about the drama anymore. Of course it pops up every now and again, but what can ya do. If you're one of the people who disliked the blog, and are reading this now, I really hope you don't see me as the Siffrin vs TLQ girl because god damn have I gotten that a few times and it really, really stings. It still stings, and I really wanna get over this point in my blogging career. I'm hoping that giving my full experience about it here will do that. 

I'm aiming to do better, and I always will. No matter what. Aaaand hopefully this is the last time I talk about this ever.

Gerson VS Oogway

Considering this came out like literally a few days ago means that I don't have too much to reflect about here, maybe I'll reflect on it again next year, who knows. But yeah this was really fun to do! I FINALLY got to talk about Kung Fu Panda on the blog and got to reexamine a UT/DR character like I had also been wanting to do. And explaining both of Oogway and Gerson's cosmic arguments was really fun! It was so nice that these two had regular stats they could scale to but also crazy high end shit, making for a nice balance.

Not gonna lie, I almost had a panic attack publishing this blog when the day finally arrived, because I just thought I was gonna get hit with a swarm of "SifQuiet blog creator booo" etc., but thankfully I think the reception to this fully proved people were kinda over it. At least on my end. Don't really think we got anything wrong here imo, but others disagreed, which is always great, but again due to the relevancy of it there's not really anything I'd change. Though that final tally we had is the craziest gap in a blog I think I've ever seen.

Also this came out at the same time as another DR blog which was fun to see. I love when stuff like that happens and it just added to me really enjoying the reception of this one. If Bencole was the calm before the storm, Gersoog was the long quiet afterwards. Wait, did I just say- 

Afterword

Anyways, this was certainly a year. We had our ups... and certainly our downs. What definitely made it all worth though it was the people I met through blogs. Meeting new friends and getting new perspectives on verses was honestly really great and (ignoring that glaring fucking black hole on my list of blogs) I really couldn't be happier with how everything turned out.

See y'all in 2026.

- Dash Fish