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Capitalism ho! Let's Read Kengan Asura

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Kengan's particular hyper reality kind of closes off any arguments on biological limits or whatever. Like, I can get that for something like Ippo where bear-punching aside it's really pretty grounded and puts even more consistent importance on weight classes, height, and such while writing about a real sport which is actually segregated by gender instead of a no-rules deathmatch tourney. Kengan Ashura is a series in which a man can punch away bullets because he learned to punch at slightly oblique angles. It's a series where the Grandmaster of Jobbers can grip so hard he cuts steel because he's Just Built Different. In Omega, and I can't stress enough that this isn't the dumbest thing in Omega, Julius will invent a technique which turns his arm into drills because I guess he watched a ton of Gurren Laggan during the timeskip.

Having a tall lady with an unusually high muscle density is not all that wild for it.
 
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Yeah like, Kengan's something that puts a lot of weight on weight classes (geddit?) so having some lady off the street go up against one of the walking fridges in this tournament would be somewhat unreasonable unless they fought like Cosmo...but, hell, having the very male Yamashita go up against a Kengan fighter would end with him getting folded in half too.

But if you had someone like, say, Tenkaichi's Fuuma Kotaro (caution: a lot of midriff) who is just as much a walking fridge as the Kengan fighters? That's a different story.
 
Peanut-007 said:
Having a tall lady with an unusually high muscle density is not all that wild for it.
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If someone like Cosmo can pull off two victories in a row against opponents twenty centimeters taller and ~60% heavier than him—the latter of which won a match against someone 50 centimeters taller and nearly three times heavier without taking significant injuries—the lady wouldn't need to be that tall or muscle-dense.

And let's not forget Saw Paing defeating Karo Yoshinari (20 cm height, almost exactly twice his weight), despite being a pure striker. Or Rei defeating Nezu without breaking a sweat (42 cm height, 44% weight advantage). Or, before the tournament, Ohma beating Sekibayashi "Hell's Angel" Jun (14 cm height, 70% weight). And I've probably forgotten some examples, especially outside the Important Fights.

David beating Goliath is not unique to Cosmo (or grapplers in general), not by a long shot. He's just the most obvious example, because Cosmo is closer to a normal man than Akoya or Saw or Rei or Ohma.
 
I don't even think that you need to make the hypothetical lady a 6'8'' tower of muscle
You absolutely could have her one of the fighters that push the envelope in terms of human size and strength
But I don't think she needs to in order to be considered "reasonable"

I don't get the need to set an arbitrary standard for female characters to meet or else be deemed unconvincing in general
But especially not in Kengan where a fighter like Inaba is 5'1'', 137lbs and can fling people through the air and literally whip them around the arena
 
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I am aware that I am about to veer dangerously close to biotruth bullshit, and I'm sorry about that, but I still need to put this out there because weight class is something Kengan at least pretends to care about.

So we're all in agreement that Rei is the smallest, most twink-like member of this cast aside from Cosmo, yeah? So let's compare him to the woman who comes to mind first when I think of "grounded fighting manga focusing on women" - and maybe this is a bad comparison but that character is Natsuo Ishido, the villain protagonist of Teppu. Big girl, really good fighter, fair amount of muscle, could fold me in half, is genuinely terrifying. But against Rei...



holy shit his arm is almost as big as her torso

Like god damn, Natsuo's a pretty big girl but she looks like a bloody twig next to Rei. The living freaks in the Kengan tournament basically start at miniature Schwarzenegger and only go up from there. Maybe this is just an artstyle thing and Natsuo would grow twice as bulky under Sandro's pen, but to me this looks like a really nasty weight disadvantage against even one of the lighter fighters in the tournament. And like, comparing her to other fighters:



holy shit he's literally twice as wide as her

I mean, oh man, this is a really, really big bulk difference in a series where that sort of thing is a real factor in fights. Hence me suggesting Fuuma Kotaro instead of Natsuo in my other post. These guys are massive. They're terrifying.
 
Kengan Ashura has a lot of stylization in its artwork, which should be fucking obvious from the image of Rei you used, unless you think his eyes literally glow. So let's look at their canonical sizes.

Rei: 179 cm, 77 kg
Ishido: 182 cm, 62.5 kg

So yeah, Rei's about 22% heavier than Ishido, but he's also a little shorter. And that 22% is absolutely nothing compared to Rei's win against someone nearly a quarter taller and half again as heavy as him, let alone Akoya winning against Haruo.

The differences between male and female fighters are not as extreme as you think they are, and Kengan Asura does not care about weight classes as much as you think it does. This whole debate is absurd.
 
GreatWyrmGold said:
Kengan Ashura has a lot of stylization in its artwork, which should be fucking obvious from the image of Rei you used, unless you think his eyes literally glow. So let's look at their canonical sizes.

Rei: 179 cm, 77 kg
Ishido: 182 cm, 62.5 kg

So yeah, Rei's about 22% heavier than Ishido, but he's also a little shorter. And that 22% is absolutely nothing compared to Rei's win against someone nearly a quarter taller and half again as heavy as him, let alone Akoya winning against Haruo.

The differences between male and female fighters are not as extreme as you think they are, and Kengan Asura does not care about weight classes as much as you think it does. This whole debate is absurd.
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Oh good, it is just artstyle shit and Ishido would probably double in size in Sandro's artstyle. Nevermind then!
 
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I mean, part of it is just art style differences. You can't compare characters quite so closely when they're drawn by different artists aiming for a different effect.

But also yeah; Cosmo and Hanafussa are the closest things the manga has to lightweights and Cosmo is genuinely fucking shredded, his shoulder muscles alone could outweigh some shounen protagonists.

With that said here again Strike it Rich is interesting because it presents a spectrum of female combattants with various body weights, that range from genuine featherweight (45kg? I don't fucking believe that) Yuzuha Lee who is like "what if Nikaido Ren was a girl and also not a jobber" (it turns out Fa Jin is actually really effective???) to Sena Riko who is allegedly 83kg and I am seriously rolling go to disbelieve.

​

And the thing is, all these women are meant to be... Competent? They have a fearsome reputation? But they're kind of the bottom of the barrel of the women's illegal underground fighting circuit, except Yuzuha who's sort of the 'we scored a big ticket item because she seriously needs the cash' lucky break of the first arc. None of them are Wakatsuki-tier even within the context of the less popular women's circuit.

And they're still punching holes in the arena, Yuzuha there literally cracks the floor in a wide radius with a single stomp, Riko Sena gets punched through the solid ring barrier... And at the same time it has some of Kengan's strange balance of respect for weight classes without really taking them as seriously as they 'realistically' might be; one of the bigger fighters gets defeated by one of the smallest, only it's by a ring out and after the tournament the big girl is completely fine while everyone else it ten shades of beaten and will explicitly take weeks to recover.

It's very much like Kengan in spirit and that makes it all the more strange that the original manga only acknowledges Karla as being maybe potentially approaching a decent female fighter.
 
If you're wondering, btw, the actual smallest member of the fighters is Ryo, but you can't really tell because of his utterly terrible posture. He's 155cm and 62kg, or 5' 1'' and 140lbs.

This does make the figure given for Ishido in teppo pretty absurdly light for even someone as slimly built as her - she's 6 foot tall and about the same weight. But that again is also like, again manga stylisation - if you believe the Super Exciting Guide, Goku is the same weight as Isido and Ryo, and 175cm/5 8''ish.



140lbs, 62kg. This man.

The key thing to remember here, is that most manga writers don't know shit about weight and size - even in Kengan these men are actually very muscular for their given weights. Also extremely dehydrated. Cling Film skin I swear.
 
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I tell you what, it was quite a shock when I looked into height/mass ranges and discovered that when I put my Flagship OC into a realistic weight range for her height and muscle mass she was heavier than Goku and Vegeta combined. With enough of a gap to spare you could probably include Gohan and still have space for a heavy meal.

I know the Square Cube law is crazy, but holy shit. Manga/anime writers are genuinely working on moon logic with this shit.
 
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Fatphobia is a hell of a drug.

I can't count the number of authors and roleplayers etc I've seen over the years who make the most horrifying living skeletons with a simple keytap of "5'6" 95 lbs"

It's bad for all genders, although unsurprisingly girls get it worse. It's like there's a tiny gremlin in the back of the human mind that whispers at character creation "girls weigh about a hundred pounds right?" and proceeds to grace the world with a 7-foot-6 goliath barbarian with 18 STR and 16 CON who somehow tips the scales at a scandalously porky 150 lbs.

Look through the Chrono Cross female stats sometime - they say if you read them quickly enough your eyes will pierce the veil to glimpse the smiling horned visage of the Pit beyond.
 
Manic Dogma said:
I tell you what, it was quite a shock when I looked into height/mass ranges and discovered that when I put my Flagship OC into a realistic weight range for her height and muscle mass she was heavier than Goku and Vegeta combined. With enough of a gap to spare you could probably include Gohan and still have space for a heavy meal.

I know the Square Cube law is crazy, but holy shit. Manga/anime writers are genuinely working on moon logic with this shit.
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It's not moon logic at all. It's 'what will our projected audience find appealing', considering the standard for women's beauty in japan is 'short, petite figure, slim legs, great skin.'

that logic is the same reason Kengan doesn't have women fighters, most people in that audience do not actually want to see something like Akoya taking a literal bite out of a hypothetical lady Cosmo, or Wakatsuki deleting a female Murobuchi, or Removal Raian choking the fuck out of Sister Robinson.
 
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Dealer said:
It's not moon logic at all. It's 'what will our projected audience find appealing', considering the standard for women's beauty in japan is 'short, petite figure, slim legs, great skin.'

that logic is the same reason Kengan doesn't have women fighters, most people do not actually want to see something like Akoya taking a literal bite out of a hypothetical lady Cosmo.
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Manic is saying that given an arbitrary character design, authors will generally underestimate the weight of a person with that body type.
What character designs are common/popular/attractive is an irrelevant to that, unless the projected audiences preference is "Helium filled Amazonian"
 
The Kengan fighters can't get in a closed area with women, it makes them existentially nervous. Adam went one round with a twink and now he's in a committed relationship. We can't have that.

Except for Muteba ofc.
 
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Dealer said:
It's not moon logic at all. It's 'what will our projected audience find appealing', considering the standard for women's beauty in japan is 'short, petite figure, slim legs, great skin.'
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Bro, the literal last post before mine has a huge-ass picture of Goku on it as it rattles off his ludicrous helium balloon BMI, the discussion is clearly not just "bwuh I dunno why manga makes all its positively framed women so slinky and small". And even when it was about sexism in character design several pages ago, which this thread often talks about, it wasn't from a place of confusion about the underlying bullshit.

I appreciate the engagement but I beg you, please actually read the thread, or at least the last stretch of conversation. It's fun stuff, I promise you.
 
So as someone who's probably got even less of an understanding of what proper human weights for these beefy people should be than the mangakas seemingly pumping them full of helium, what would be a reasonable BMI for them?
 
GilliamYaeger said:
So as someone who's probably got even less of an understanding of what proper human weights for these beefy people should be than the mangakas seemingly pumping them full of helium, what would be a reasonable BMI for them?
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Around 200lbs, probably more tbh. Like assuming they've done a weight cut for whatever reason for the match, I'd clock most fighters to be around the two hundred mark, with like the slightly beefier guys (Kuroki, Agito, etc) at three hundred, maybe less, even ignoring freaks of nature like Julius and Wakatsuki.
 
For some of the shorter ones you can dial it down - Ryo is five foot one, he's not going to be 200lbs, and Kaneda explicitly has no muscle, so him being a light breeze away isn't too bad. But like, Ohma's six foot, he weighs more than 185lbs/85kg. For comparison, Mike Tyson is shorter than Ohma, by two inches/5cm, and had to care about weight classes, and he walked around at about 220lbs/100kg.
 
Estro said:
For some of the shorter ones you can dial it down - Ryo is five foot one, he's not going to be 200lbs, and Kaneda explicitly has no muscle, so him being a light breeze away isn't too bad. But like, Ohma's six foot, he weighs more than 185lbs/85kg. For comparison, Mike Tyson is shorter than Ohma, by two inches/5cm, and had to care about weight classes, and he walked around at about 220lbs/100kg.
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Yeah, definitely. This is at least a consequence of the artstyle shift. Like remember how Wakatsuki looked in his introductory chapter? In the first couple chapters, Ohma really did look like a middleweight fighter before he rehydrated to become the light heavyweight we all knew him to be.
 
GilliamYaeger said:
So as someone who's probably got even less of an understanding of what proper human weights for these beefy people should be than the mangakas seemingly pumping them full of helium, what would be a reasonable BMI for them?
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So, with the understanding that BMI isn't really useful as an indicator of health, especially for people like the Fighters, this was basically how Iooked at it. The healthy BMI range for an adult human is, as that theory goes, between 18.5 and 24.9. Between 25 and 29.9 is overweight, and 30 or over is obese. Now, since we know that BMI gets inflated by muscle mass, I'd say that most fighters in the tournament will be somewhere in the overweight range, with the more heavyweight fighters sitting somewhere over 30. When I was looking into it, I saw images of some Bodybuilders who have a BMI of like 35, and I can't imagine a lot of World's Strongest Man contestants being much different in BMI, given they're usually built like Karo Yoshinari. Of course we can disregard Wakatsuki in this, since that freak of nature would have a BMI of over fucking fifty. Well and truly Built Different.

So basically I guess my answer is "higher than the normal BMI range would call healthy."

(For reference, BMI is calculated by dividing the individual's weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared. From there you can basically calculate any one number of the three given some idea of what the other two are supposed to be for said character.)
 
For a realistic comparison, take a look at professional athletes from other sports - the NFL is good for this because it's got players of very different body types. Aaron Donald, a top-tier defensive lineman who's both very strong and very quick, would have a great build for combat sport - and he's 6'1" and 280 lbs. Rob Gronkowski, a tight end, played at 6'6" and 265. Emmitt Smith, one of the great running backs, played at 5'9" and 215. You hardly find any NFL players who weigh under 85 kg. Same goes for the NBA. If you play a contact sport professionally, you're going to weigh a fair bit just because you need that muscle mass to survive the impacts.
 
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