the 'lost fight = bum" thing with powerscalers is SOOOO ANNOYING. Rn with Kashimo, and I saw similar w gojo when 236 dropped where dudebros saying shit like "he got low diff'd trash character" in the comments of stuff not even about powerscaling. Powerscalers act like it's illegal to enjoy a character after they lose a fight. The way they switch up on characters over exclusively loss/wins is such a painfully shallow and bland way to approach the story (and kind of ironic considering how strength is treated in the narrative...)💀

The thing that annoys me the most is that they refuse to think of anything happening in the story that leads to a character losing. Like even ignoring the elephant in the room of Kashimo because Gege practically gave us nothing when it comes to scaling his released form (I would have liked something, but I can also accept that him losing the way he did speaks more toward Sukuna's ability than it does Kashimo's), you have characters like Jogo that they'll call weak, when in reality he's incredibly powerful but had the misfortune of fighting the two strongest characters in the verse as his only showing. Does that mean he couldn't have mopped the floor with most of the characters in the series at the time? Absolutely not, but you'd never get that from the vacuum that most powerscalers seem to operate in.

As someone who enjoys deep diving into fights and the details of the power system, I find it incredibly boring and annoying to not consider any external factors when talking about a fight. There's so many seemingly little things that can lead to a character winning a fight that they shouldn't have from a purely ability-based perspective. Did they prep beforehand? How does their ability interact with their opponents? Are they getting help from another character or a tool? Are they being buffed or nerfed by anything prior to the fight? Are they injured? Were they caught by surprise? Etc, etc.

Take Toji, for example, who powerscalers love to hold up as a powerhouse probably more than he deserves. (Which isn't me saying he's weak, he isn't, but I feel like some people do overestimate him in terms of ability, despite how much the power ceiling has been raised since Shibuya.) Toji planned so much for his mission to kill Riko and his fight against Gojo. He used other sorcerers to wear Gojo out for three days straight before he felt comfortable to step in and still used cursed tools and curses on top of it. Does that mean he couldn't have done anything if Gojo was fresh at the time of their fight? No, but it certainly made it easier. Toji doesn't blow through Gojo as easy as he does without prep, but people will look at their fight without any additional info and use that as a definitive scale of where Toji is compared to everyone else in the verse.

I don't know, I have a lot (and I mean, a LOT) of issues with how a majority of the fandom talks about JJK that isn't just the issue of powerscaling, but at a point it becomes me beating my head against a wall with nothing to show for it but a headache. Like, if anyone wanted to read me rant for a couple thousand words, bring up the fandoms general perception of Sukuna being a bum despite the heaps of info that we have to the contrary. Even the most recent chapter highlighted how ridiculous he is in terms of strength and understanding of cursed energy and sheer ability, but people are still saying he only won because of Mahoraga.

At what point is it not worth it to argue with that? Cause there's always gonna be someone that's wrong and loud about it, but when that becomes the majority of fans about multiple aspects of the series, it starts to kill the enjoyment of the series for me. I don't like being in a state of seeing bullshit takes every time I try to engage with the fandom. It's tiring.