With regard to the Saint of Killers, he’s not omnipotent - all he can do is survive and kill - and he had to be released from imprisonment by an angel.
And Hulk as War.
Most of the time, when God is portrayed in fiction, He’s a wimp. Many writers have a tendancy to just use Him as a benchmark to show off how powerful their pet über is. Which is really lame, since after all, once you’ve defeated God, what is there left to do?
With a few notable exceptions. God, as portrayed in Carl Sagan’s Contact, is so powerful that He was able to shape the laws not merely of physics, but of mathematics, to His whim. Now, that’s power.
Incidentally, regarding the Saint of Killers’ power, he kills whomever he aims at. But is there any stipulation that his target stays dead?
My vote would be for Harold, at least while he is holding his purple crayon, the imaginative little bastard.
not goin for it? ok, how about Particle Man, no, no, damn that triangle man
Seriously, maybe D’Hoffryn.
Let us consider Illyria who can manipulate time flow fully to her will. Full power of course…she’s got a LOT of muscle…old one and all.
Good point. Actually we’ve seen the Saints victims after death, as mutilated ghosts and restless spirits. I’m also pretty damn certain he shot Cassidy the Vampire early on to no ill effect to the vampire.
My vote personally is the AntiChrist in Good Omens, ADAM. Just think what he’ll be like when he’s an adult.
I’ve only ever been able to chalk that up to a continuity error. Does anybody have a better answer?
Don’t tell me that the Saint’s gun can kill god and the devil, and the sun can kill Cassidy, but the Saint’s gun can’t kill Cassidy. Does not compute.
Sure. Cassidy is already dead. But the Saint’s bullets don’t necessarily prevent one from being animate in the manner of supernatural beings, like the ghosts I mentioned. So it kills angels and demons and God on one level, and cannot prevent Cassidy from remaining animate on another level or prevent his many victims from being ghosts. The Saint isn’t omnipotent, just deadly.
God, Satan, and the entire Heavenly Host stayed dead.
Adam
So…what happens if the Saint shoots an artificial lifeform—like a robot, or an android? (Assuming they’re a sentient machine, which at least gives a fair basis to argue that they’re “alive.”)
Ranchoth. I think if the Saint killed an artificial being, it needn’t be permanent. Oscar Goldman said it best: “Gentlemen. We can re-build him. We have the skills. We have the technology.”
I think if the Saint shot Dr. Manhattan, he’d succeed for about ten minutes, then Doc Man would dramatically re-appear as a sixty foot tall giant intoning, “I AM DISAPPOINTED, SAINT. VERY DISAPPOINTED. A LIVE BODY AND A DEAD BODY CONTAIN THE SAME PARTICLES. DID YOU THINK THIS WOULD KILL ME?”
And then the Saint would say, “Reckon I give a damn?” and blast him all to hell again.
I am a fan of the show, and I must disagree. By the end of DBZ, the power levels are in the hundreds of millions, according to the figures I’ve seen - and in the show itself, they’d long ago stopped mentioning “power levels”. No one destroyed a universe, or demonstrated the capacity for such. Very few of them could use the “Instant Transmission” teleportation trick, and it seemed to have been limited in “real” space - after he first learns it there is dialogue indicating that it’s “only” as fast as light.
The Golden Oozaru (as I’ve seen it spelled) bit is from Dragonball GT, the sequel series. It’s cheesier than DBZ, but for the sake of argument, we can consider it - even the most mighty characters presented there have purely physical powers. I stand by my choice of Death of the Endless as the most potent character in fiction.
I’ve yet to read Preacher, and I intend to, but I have to call foul on this Saint of Killers not being able to off a vampire, when he’s able to off the Almighty. Even stretching the definition of the Saint’s powers to exclude supernaturally animated corpses - it’s not like the Almighty’s a physical being with a biology, and therefore has life functions to terminate. A Vampire would have more of a pseudo-biology than a spiritual-energy being.
Unless that was a very strange universe.
PREACHER is a weird universe.
I find it easy to accept that the Saint of Killers’ guns can kill everything except ghosts and vampires. I think it’s appropriate actually.
This isn’t to say vampires are unkillable. Merely that to off one, the Saint would have to resort to the traditional means of dispatching a vampire, with silver, sharpened wood and sunlight. I can picture him grabbing up Cassidy by the scruff of the neck and dragging him out to the sunlight, easy.
It’s been about three years or so since I last read PREACHER, but the only reason the Saint was able to kill the off Almighty, IIRC, was that God vacated Heaven at the time and wasn’t on His Throne of Power which the angels died defending. So The Saint was laying in wait for God to return when he done Him.
See, that’s the thing… Holy Ghost, anyone?
It just seems really cheesy and contrived - I suspect just for shock value. I kinda expected better from Ennis.
CandidGamera. I really should have spoiler-boxed that ending because I forgot just that quick you said you hadn’t read it. It makes more sense when you read it organically than how I’ve summed it up. Kinda just read it and get back to me.
I will say that God in PREACHER is not depicted as the Trinity, so the Holy Spirit doesn’t apply.
Well, Trinity aside, I’d expect him to be a being of spirit and energy, just like a ghost.
Oh… kwitcherbitchin and read the goddamn books, man, and stop relying on generalizations and speculations! LOL. Look, I’ll even mail you the first two PREACHER trades if you promise to mail them back to me when I move to Stone Mountain next week. How’s that for a summer reading program?
I’m going to take this thread another direction. I’ll offer up either Paul Atreides or his son Leto. Paul had not only the power of prescience, but the ability to pick one potential future and set it in stone. Leto had both prescience and the ancestral memories. Leto was the only one who could undo what his father had done. Also, he lived for what, 3500 years?