Arcanaville

On the subject of size verses strength, I'm reminded of the reasons why they cast Robert Patrick in the second Terminator movie. At first, they were actually thinking conventionally: find someone even bigger and stronger looking than Arnold, and having some difficulty with that. Then it occurred to them that they didn't want someone that looked bigger and stronger, they actually wanted someone far smaller and less physically impressive. Why? So that when they finally fought and you saw this small guy throwing around Arnold, it would reinforce the notion that the T-1000 was a more advanced terminator. That might have been a cognitive dissonance moment fifty or a hundred years ago, but in the computer age we see "smaller" and "more powerful" and we don't think "wrong" we think "more advanced." When it comes to technology, we think of power as something we can just have more of. That's why we don't generally question when Stane knocks Stark around and his armor loses power rather than falls apart.

This intuitive sense that power is something you can just have, if you're advanced enough, has an analog outside of technology. In the old school martial arts movies, power comes from skill and experience. Therefore, the really old guy that barely pushes a hundred pounds can break rocks with his fingers and throw the two-fifty guy through a wall. There is this sense that skill can somehow leverage physics to do almost anything.

So "strength" isn't locked to size. Bigger equals strength, but stronger doesn't mean bigger. The big guy is definitely strong, but the little guy can be just as strong or stronger if he's more advanced in some way.


However, none of these intuitive cues seem to work for things like agility and flexibility most of the time. Big and agile is so counter-intuitive it often happens for comedic effect. In fact, here prejudices work against the metaphor rather than for it. The presumption is that it takes effort to build muscular bulk, so if you can be powerful without it, why not. But conversely, size isn't an advantage to being agile, so if you don't need it why have it?

This eventually heads into body image territory I'd rather not pursue, but stopping short of there I think its fairly obvious why power isn't as coupled to size as dexterity is.

On the general subject of how mutant powers work in general in the Marvel Universe, in-canon the characters themselves generally do not exactly know this: most of them are not physicists or doctors, nor do they study the limits of their own powers. So most know and describe their powers based on past experience. No one can stop the Juggernaut because no one has, not because there's a specific reason (beyond "its magic"). Presumably, anyone more powerful than the actual god Cyttorak can probably stop the Juggernaut.

Similarly, what we know of Shaw's powers comes from observation and the pronouncements of the other characters in the stories (things like Marvel Universe notwithstanding) and I don't think Shaw has ever actually volunteered to be tested to see what his powers actually do. So when we say he absorbs "kinetic energy" we mean attacks that deliver concussive force, because that's what he's been observed to absorb. He hasn't been observed to absorb fire, so he doesn't absorb heat energy. Why this is true is the subject of conjecture, but any explanation for how his powers works must start with the observation of what his powers do, not the description of what his powers do from what we have to assume are unreliable narrators.

In the comics, as I remember Shaw he was able to absorb *nearly* all the kinetic energy directed at him. This meant trying to defeat him by any means that essentially involved hitting him would tend to be futile.

However, there were three distinct ways to defeat him.

1. His kinetic energy absorption ability was not 100% perfect. What made Shaw difficult to defeat was that he was himself increasingly invulnerable to damage the more you "charged" him up with kinetic energy, and he could continue to absorb that energy. The weak link was that he wasn't absolutely invulnerable so a strong enough hit could hurt him because he couldn't absorb all the energy and he couldn't shake off the remainder. And this varied depending on how invulnerable he was in the first place.

In other words, in a toe to toe punching match with the Hulk, with each punch by the Hulk Shaw might be absorbing 99.9% of the energy in each punch to get stronger, and by getting stronger he could shrug off the 0.1% of the remaining energy of the punch. But if Shaw was in a relatively depowered state and suddenly ran into a raging Hulk, the Hulk could still theoretically take his head off: Shaw would absorb the same 99.9% of that punch, but the remaining 0.1% would then squish him.

It was all a question of how long you allowed him to ramp up his power, which was positively reinforcing.


2. Shaw was vulnerable to psionics, without assistance. So any powerful telepath could just scramble his brain.


3. Shaw was vulnerable to physical attacks that did not involve kinetic force. So Shaw is correct to run like heck from a being like Dark Phoenix, which could simply disassemble Shaw's atoms. He could also be suffocated, poisoned, restrained, drugged, frozen, or incinerated so long as these attacks did not involve actually hitting him, although in a highly powered state he would be at least resistant to things like heat and cold. But not absolutely invulnerable to them.

And the Shaw of the comic books would have been vulnerable to the same two-pronged attack that did him in at the end of First Class: psionically incapacitated, and then killed by an object striking him with virtually no kinetic energy, just slow, irresistible force.


I don't specifically remember, but I suspect Shaw would also be vulnerable to magic and attacks of that nature.


As to Shaw literally getting into a punching match with the Hulk, I suspect as long as the Hulk continues to get increasingly angry, eventually the Hulk would simply overwhelm Shaw's energy absorption power. Its not infinite, and conversely the Hulk was always been depicted as having theoretically unlimited strength, bound only by his ability to access it through rage.


The Hulk is a bit unusual in that he's literally been depicted to have no real limit to his power in theory, he's only limited in his ability to tap it. Practically by definition, the Hulk *can be* stronger than anything else given the right circumstances, no matter what that other thing is in the Marvel Universe.