Image courtesy of New Line Cinema |
Image courtesy of Patrick Arrasmith |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Advantages
|
Advantages
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Disadvantages
|
Disadvantages
|
Strolling down the Street in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist stops in front of a new building he has never seen before. The edifice is a sheer cliff of rock with the outline of a stone door in the middle. The door is ajar and Hiro can hear the voices of a small party of men inside. Curious, he steps into the gloom.
Gandalf and the Fellowship halt in their tracks at the sound of footsteps behind them. Slowly a strange figure appears in the doorway wielding two curved swords and wearing a thin mesh coverall. “This foe is beyond any of you; run!” Gandalf urges as he pushes his companions on, running quickly over a small bridge spanning a gaping chasm.
The strange figure leaps toward Gandalf the Grey, katana drawn and eyes wild, swiping and stabbing furiously at the mighty wizard, who parries some blow with his magic staff, but is cut deeply when a slash gets through his defenses. Suddenly, a blinding flash emanates from the end of Gandalf’s staff, blinding Hiro and giving the wizard enough time to unsheathe Glamdring, magical sword of the Elves. With a cry, Gandalf strikes at the stranger, meeting Hiro’s blade with a terrific CLANG!
Hiro’s fine Nipponese blades are no match for the Elven steel and they shatter after a single blow, falling uselessly to the floor. Scrambling backwards, Hiro crouches as if to pounce on the tired wizard when Gandalf raises his staff and triumphantly slams it down on the narrow bridge, shouting, “You shall not pass!”
The bridge crumbles as Hiro plummets to his digital death. While falling he can’t help but wish he had Y.T.’s harpoon to bring the wizard down with him…
Predicted Winner: Gandalf Stormcrow
(Gandalf is a character from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series; Hiro Protagonist is a character from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash)
Y.T. didn’t have a harpoon.
That was Raven.
If this is occurring in the metaverse, then Hiro has to win. Home field advantage.
I would concur. In the Metaverse he would win as he wrote the swordfigthing software.
Everywhere else I am afraid to say I think Gandalf would win.
Sad to see Hiro go. He is such an immensely cool character.
Gandalf all the way. I’m sad to see this as the first pairing though, I was hoping Hiro would make it further.
@Marshall Y.T. is a Kourier and, like all Kouriers, uses an electromagnetic harpoon to hitch rides from cars.
Are you saying that Gandalf’s magic doesn’t extend to the Metaverse? I don’t buy that for one second.
If you think of it this way, wouldn’t the land of the Elves to the West basically be an analog for the Metaverse? And Gandalf is still super-powerful there.
Unfortunately, that’s how the seedings played out. For every Syracuse there’s a Winthrop, and so for every Gandalf and Cthulu there’s a Hiro and Lyra.
That said, there’s still plenty of time to vote, so try to rally the troops around Hiro if you think he deserves to be in the next round.
Do you really think Gandalf would win? You aren’t seeing Reason.
Man as much as I wan’t to go with Hiro, what character could really win against Gandalf? He’s practically a god, and certainly immortal. Reason is fine(if your in a low walled boat), but Hiro’s no wizard.
If Hiro were to kill him he’ll just come back as “Galdalf the Super White” or something anyway.
Gandalf the Super White might be my favorite thing to come from these Cage Matches so far.
Hiro clearly wouldn’t go into the door. he’d create a program to figure out what was goin’ on in the building.
How can you say that Gandalf is better? Hiro fights with his own strength and not some fancy light that was given to him as a child or some such nonsense. Gandalf is the problem with fantasy, too powerful and yet does nothing for the plot.
But otherwise Hiro loses because more people read Middle earth and whoreship it.
I think Hiro is one of the coolest characters in any book I’ve read but i really have to go for Gandalf
Raven threw spears that he cut with his glass knives, the Kouriers used magnetic ‘poons, but I can’t see those being useful against Gandalf – no metal for them to stick to.
And as for making Gandalf listen to Reason, doesn’t that need water for the heatsink? otherwise it would melt itself into uselessness before Hiro could even strap it on.
After re-reading the scenario above, I’m convinced that the fight is taking place in the metaverse (he never jacks out after going through the door) and so Hiro has a definate advantage. Starting with his control of the Graveyard Daemons, his plummet from the bridge will only result in him popping out of a tunnel where Gandalf least expects him, hacking the code to make his swords stronger against Elven steel.
And the Graveyard Daemons would have a thing or to to say about Gandalf returning as “Super White”. I think they would hold on to him until after the match is over and then release him when Hiro was proclaimed the winner.
Since apparently this encounter takes place in the Metaverse, I vote Hiro, who wrote the freakin’ code. Outside the Metaverse but in the world of Snow Crash, it’s a toss-up, magic versus technology. In Middle-Earth, where he’s literally a demigod in human form, Gandalf wins going away.
Hiro all the way since it takes place in the meta verse. NOBODY can beat him there.
YT’s “Harpoon” was her *ahem* insert. The one that knocked Raven out.
From the description, Hiro began in his own metaverse, but stepped through the door to the Mines of Moria. Any and all arguments for him winning because he is in his own world ignore where the fight took place. Disadvantages: He didn’t write the code for
Middle Earth. Gandalf wins. Hiro puts up a good fight, but Gandalf wins.
Sorry Gandalf wins hands down.. thousands of years of magic, battle skill, and the ability to face and survive a Balrog = Win.
After thinking it over for a while – I’m going to change my vote to Gandalf.
Yes – the initial fight still takes place in the Metaverse and Hiro wins there, but when Gandalf is disconnected from the Metaverse, he just tracks Hiro down in the real world and speaks a Nam-Shub to erase Hiro’s memory of ever even being in the contest to begin with.
And just because he’s Gandalf and doesn’t like to leave loose ends, he tracks Raven down, speaks another Nam-shub and suddenly Raven disarms his Nuke, and devotes the rest of his life to bringing higher education to the Aleut tribe in Alaska.
I’m a huge fan of both Stephenson and Tolkien, and I still have to give it to Gandalf. Swords are awesome, but magic blasts are ranged.
Unlike what was alluded to in the Aragorn battle, Gandalf is Jesus (hello, Resurrection anybody?). And even if we just take Jesus as a character in the Bible, he’s GOD capital G not like the godlings found in fantasy literature. So while Hiro might be the greatest swordsman avatar, Gandalf is the Avatar of the Greatest. Amen.
@ RFPII
Save a little of that snake-oil for the Aslan – Eragon matchup.
$%#$%@!$%$!&!
Why’d you have to put Hiro against Gandalf? Hiro could take half the other mamsy-pamsy paddycakes players on this bracket, but Gandalf…he’s going to be tough to beat, bar none.
Couldn’t Hiro hack peoples brains at the end of Snow Crash So he would just spout some Sumerian or something and crash Gandalfs brain
Actually didn’t realize Aslan was in this…but seriously, that’ll just be silly.
Y.T. had her own barbed weaponary device; I thought that was what Hiro was wishing for….hillarious if true!
Even outside of the Metaverse, I’d put some weight on Hiro. Elven steel might beat a katana, but we all know you don’t want to parry with the bladed edge of your sword, and I wouldn’t trusst Old Whitey’s arm strength (or skull) against 3 1/2 feet of lead pipe filled with cement.
Wow. An old man with a wooden stick and a strong addiction to smoking weird hobbit herbs, versus a nerd.
Hm. This one’s tricky.
I will vote for Hiro. He can always use a laptop as a hand breaker.
Hiro wins by subsuming Gandalf’s realm. History is on his side as the early pioneers of the meta-verse, text-based MUD players, were given charge of the evolution of the Middle Earth fantasy realms. With a quick program, Hiro will disect and granularize all of Gandalf’s high-level magical abilities and create a superior avatar to defeat him handily. It will be as simple for HIRO as hacking World of Warcraft using an invincibility cheat.
This is so a Hiro round. Hiro will plant the meta-virus, Snow Crash, into Gandalf’s brain stem by speaking in tongues (glossolalia). Hiro is the greatest sword fighter in both the metaverse and real time, so he will send Gandalf the White, beheaded, into the next wizard shade.
I think instead of Gandalf the Super White,as posted above, he would come back as Gandalf the Seriously White…taking names and kicking butt!
I’m kinda surprised everyone seems to think gandalf is reasonably powerful… I always thought he got the under-achiever of middle earth award… Elrond takes it if you just consider what happened in the LOTR and not the last alliance stuff…
Seriously I think I can count on a single hand the displays of anything remotely powerful that hes done…. He was a pretty wussy example of a maia (Sauron coulda taken him quite easily and his god was outta the picture quite early on) I mean he got trapped on a really tall tower for a good chunk of the book. His big accomplishment was getting his shop wrecked by a balrog and escaping it without dying… Frikkin elves (not lesser gods) were killing packs of them ages ago.
I love the books and I dont really mind him winning this battle, but I think people are giving him WAY too much credit… Elric would have wasted him, and by the same logic used in his battle I have to say Roland wastes him, and there is something unsettling about Roland getting into the 3rd round… He has no precognition, got his ass stuck on top of a tall building for a while and the most directly damaging thing you see him do is buts sarumans staff, which while badass might just get him shot in the face before he realized whats up with roland…
cs has somewhat of a point, and I look forward to continuing the discussion in future rounds. Tolkien wrote prior to the time that we expected fantasy writers to have a solid justification for their magic system. It’s very true that we don’t have a lot of evidence for exactly what Gandalf can do in a cage match. It’s also pretty clear that G doesn’t think he could directly break Sauron’s hold over his minions, else he would have challenged him more directly. However, the idea of will and personal strength is implicit in Tolkien’s notion of magic, not unlike other authors. It took a great deal of that to beat the Balrog, and that was as Gandalf the Grey. He’s now Gandalf the White (or the Snow White, according to some other threads here).
More practically, bottom line for the next round is whether or not he can stop Roland’s bullets before his “heat metal” staff effect forces Roland to drop his guns. Saving that conversation for then.
cs, I have to add that the Elves of the Silmarillion had some pretty serious problems with Balrogs. Orcs they cut down by the thousands, but Balrogs overran several of their kingdoms, if memory serves correctly. Of course, dragons were also in the picture as the years went on. On the flip side, Fingolfin would be a real contender in this match.
Thanks for commenting! Comments are now closed on this post, but you can follow this match’s winner in the next fight, open 3/15 at 10:30 EST!