Death Battle Analysis: Gumball Watterson

Welp, Happy Birthday to me, lol, and to celebrate I am doing a blog on one of the greatest Cartoon Network characters of the decade. The Amazing World of Gumball first began in 2011 and has been consistently pumping out new episodes before ending just recently this year. In that time it has become one of the Longest franchises in CN’s catalogue, won tons of awards and taken the internet by storm, so to commemorate it I am gonna give my full analysis on its protagonist, Gumball Watterson.

Disclaimer: Sorry in advance for using outside music for this blog, I didn’t have much choice given almost No Gumball music is available, I did do my best to get music that sounds like that used in the show.

Background

Welcome to the Magical World of Elmore, the strange cartoon city in northern California, where anything and everything can be alive.

In this town, all forms of cartoons and characters, can and do exist, from robots to ghosts to dinosaurs, video games, sentient food, mythical creatures, celestial bodies and even whatever the f*ck Sussy is. In this Amazing world, anything can happen, anything fits in, and it is an endless haven for Cartoon Creativity. As such, it is a perfect world for Gumball.

Gumball Watterson was born to a lazy, goofy bunny named Richard and a Hardass, Badass cat named Nicole (Whom he definitely took more after). While young he was quite a massive troublemaker, though it was also completely out of his natural curiosity and hyperactiveness rather than any form of malice. This changed however when his parents bought him several pet goldfish, one of whom eventually grew legs and lungs from the care he provided. Growing up in a lower middle class suburb, Gumball loved fun, hated school and used his creative mind to do as much of the former and as little of the latter as possible. Him and his entire family are, for better or worse, very influential on the town of Elmore as a whole, due to their actions being off the wall even by that worlds standards, which has made their family quite infamous and secured them as the main characters.

Gumball goes on all sorts of adventures and mischief all throughout Elmore with his Adopted, Goldfish Brother, Darwin and his Younger Sister Anais. Be it helping others, winning his girlfriend(who is a celestial emotional angel creature)’s heart, clearing his family's name, battling his Arch Nemesis Rob or even saving the entire city from metafictional threats. Gumball Watterson is always there to, well do something to try and help.

Personality

Gumball is a really clever and funny cat, he’s very curious and imaginative, and despite being snarky and sarcastic is extremely optimistic. He loves to have fun and will come up with all sorts of harebrained schemes to have the maximum amount of it, that being said he’s not a troublemaker, any harm he causes is almost always an accident and he’ll do whatever he can to make it right. Gumball can be very sweet and helpful, but also lazy and cowardly at times. His biggest character flaw is his massive ego which his good natured makeup often struggles to contain. He wants to be the center of attention and star of whatever is happening, even if he’s got no idea what he's talking about. He’s a good kid though, good older brother, a loyal friend and supportive boyfriend. His likes include Video Games, Adventure, Movies, TV, Playing Outside and Being Awesome.

Intellect & Skills

Despite not being portrayed as super smart that often, Gumball is actually Remarkably Intelligent. He has been able to make super impressive multi-layered plans, accounting for every possible variable and perfectly predicting the precise actions of everyone around him, as early as the pilot episode of the series. In fact, this is pretty consistent with his clever and more sneaky nature, Gumball can in the heat of the moment manipulate events and people to get out of jams and into more favorable positions. Additionally he's impossibly skilled in sleight of hand and pick-pocketing. Probably Gumball’s Best intelligence feat is when he got a job at Joyful Burger, only to quickly work his way up and become the CEO of the entire company, sell his shares and retire as a multi-billionaire, all in just ONE Day.

Powers

Likely due to being part of a wacky cartoon world as strange as Elmore, Gumball manages to have quite a few handy powers at his disposal.

• Claws:

A relatively simple power to start with, but Gumball ultimately is a cat and as such, has claws on his hands and feet which are sharp enough to damage other characters or carve tunnels to escape through while he’s barely moving.

• Can Breath Without Oxygen:

Gumball is able to survive underwater and in the vacuum of space without needing to breathe.

• Viral Immunity:

Gumball is completely immune to all forms of Virus, Mutations, Diseases and even Poisons due to his ability to completely control his body, and can use himself to cure others.

• Elasticity:

A consistent feature of the series, Gumball has incredible Elasticity Powers. He is stated and shown to have full control over his entire body, able to rearrange his features, limbs and internal organs in any conceivable way without negatively affecting himself whatsoever. 

Gumball can stretch so far he can enter into outer space, remotely control his separated limbs, compact his body through impossibly small areas, massively change his size, or even divide his body in half and control both sides. 

Gumball is able to inflate his body like a balloon or change his state of matter to liquid in order to gain flight and logia respectively, and naturally Gumball also has great Shapeshifting capabilities because of this.

With said Shapeshifting powers, Gumball could take on the forms of other characters and creatures (made even more convincing as he has shown he can perfectly replicate anyone's voice), turn his finger into a key to pick locks, make his body 2 dimensional, and even perfectly replicate the floor of the school.

• Regeneration:

If Elasticity wasn’t enough, Gumball also has extreme regeneration abilities, which have allowed him to near instantly come back from even the most grievous of injuries. He’s been turned inside out, shattered to pieces, had his head explode, had everything BUT his head explode, been reduced to a puddle and reduced to a skeleton, all of which were so casual he may do it to himself intentionally just to avoid cleaning himself.

That being said all that is Child's play to Gumball, he's multiple times had his entire body reduced to nothing but ashes or dust and been completely fine, and his regeneration actually stops his deterioration of matter, not only does this allow him to age at a significantly slower rate, but it has twice allowed him to regenerate from someone using aging hax to turn him elderly.

But the MOST impressive feat of Gumball’s regen in action is when he and Darwin ate themselves, literally erasing their entire physical beings from existence, and they Still came back. At this level, this would be considered a Low-Godly Healing Factor which means Gumball basically cannot be killed through physical force alone.

• Age Manipulation:

And Speaking of Aging Hax, Gumball, though his incessant chatter, can rapidly age and deteriorate a person into being decrepit and elderly.

He can also cut out the middleman and make foes rot and decay, merely by looking at them in anger.

• DNA Manipulation:

Gumball can disturbingly create projections of his own DNA, and manipulate it himself to genetically mutate his body in any conceivable way, he can do this to change his species, physical traits, voice, you name it.

Gumball was also able to manipulate his DNA to physically and mentally turn himself into an adult woman….yeah that's a thing.

• Matter Manipulation:

Gumball can easily manipulate matter in a variety of ways, though the most common method is through things like molecular fusion. Not only can Gumball fuse with someone normally but he can also forcibly merge with someone turning them into a brain controlled zombie mushroom thing, which is quite unsettling. Gumball also has matter manipulation resistance as he was able to enter into Wasamie’s tornado, which scrambled the matter of all who entered it, with no negative repercussions. 

• Energy Manipulation:

Similar to his mother, Gumball is able to control and manipulate energy, and can use this to create energy bursts from his body, turn super saiyan, and even do things like create clothes for himself.

• Flight:

Gumball is capable of both levitation and flight with total ease.

• Gravity manipulation:

Gumball can also drastically increase and decrease the amount of gravity affecting himself and others.

• Teleportation:

On a few occasions, Gumball has also shown the ability to teleport as well.

• Non-Physical Interaction:

Gumball is able to physically grab and interact with steam, gas, liquid, his own emotions and can even run on clouds. Past even that he's shown the ability to physically interact with Carrie, who is an intangible ghost, in fact in another instance, Darwin physically grabbed his own soul. Meaning Gumball has both Anti-Logia And Anti-Intangibility.

• Possession Resistance:

Gumball past that was also able to fight against possession from Carrie, giving him some resistance to possession hax, this leads me into,

• Mind Control:

Gumball has powerful mind manipulation abilities, his first and most basic being his ability to control someone's mind. Sometimes he likes to use a watch or video but ultimately he’s shown to be able to do it just by looking into their eyes. Gumball’s Mind Control abilities are powerful enough to hypnotize an entire mall full of people at once and not only will people under his control do anything he tells them to do, but he can even make people visit their past lives, give them new allergies, make them fluently speak other languages or even change their weight and have it become physically true.

• Telepathy:

His powers of the mind extend far beyond this however, after bathing in Toxic Waste, Gumball gained Telepathic Abilities as well. Gumball can now read people's thoughts, place images in their mind, see and experience their memories and even physically interact with their imaginations on the mental plane. Also he can somehow absorb knowledge from books by eating them.

• Power Ignore: 

A rather specific ability Gumball has, it allows him to literally prevent himself seeing or hearing anything he doesn’t want to, this also prevents the metafictional audience from doing so. This ability is so strong that he was able to completely not acknowledge the existence of any of the kids or staff in the school not in his classes, and was only able to upon turning it off.

• Thought Constructs:

Gumball can also use his imagination to make thought constructs, like an imaginary car that can actually function in the real world, or even weapons like guns as his sister Anais displayed.

• Emotional Manifestations:

I’m not sure how useful this is but Gumball can peel himself back into his different emotional states which make up his entity.

• Spatial Hax:

Gumball is able to manipulate space quite casually, separating things or attaching them somewhere else by manipulating the spatial area they exist in.

• Time Manipulation:

Gumball is capable of creating metafictional Countdown clocks, which he can interact with, to bend time to his will! While he has shown time manipulation without it a few times, this can effortlessly allow him to Time travel to any point in history or the future and make changes accordingly.

Gumball can also use this to both rewind and fast forward the flow of time, slow the rate of time around him, or even stop time completely.

And if that wasn’t enough he can use it to call upon copies of himself from other time periods for backup giving him duplication abilities as well.

• Montage:

Montage is basically a power that allows one to, by abusing the cinematic timing of the medium they are in, do a task that would normally take a lot of time in effort in only a very short amount of real time by showing only the implication you put a lot of time and effort into it. Through using this power they got their super overweight dad into shape in a time stated to only be 1 minute. This can potentially be used for Gumball to quickly learn basically any skill in the world or accomplish any reasonable task in an extremely short timeframe.

• Immersion:

Gumball’s Immersion power allows him to enter into any medium he wants as if it was its own pocket dimension. Gumball has entered into Photographs, Movies, and even written books changing the words within to have them in the story. In one instance he and Darwin even ran across every channel on a television as their dad flipped through the channels and then were stated to be running in a book he picked up immediately after.

• Tongue-Fu:

After scouring the toxic website Ramblur, Gumball learned the BS Argumentative styles of the Social Justice Warrior, and can actually use this to attack by turning basically anything someone says on its head to knock them back.

• Metafictional Manipulation:

If it hasn’t become clear by this point, Gumball’s metafictional powers are very potent, Gumball is able to reach back and rob his past self through comic panels, metafictionally grab the dialogue boxes and use them as weapons, manipulate subtitles to literally change the script and he’s even aware he's a fictional character.

• Reality Warping:

And if that wasn’t enough, Gumball is also a reality warper, able to affect and warp the world in ways he sees fit. Gumball’s reality warping is impressive enough to change the day sky to night and back again, and versatile enough to create the game Dodj or Daar, which, with its Dodj cards can manipulate reality to make the ground feel like Lava, puppetmaster someone's body, give people nonexistent mental disorders, cause dramatic music to play over the cartoon, put people in stasis, make gravity turn against someone, transmutate someone and stop people from breathing.

Feats

Speed:

• Moved at speeds so fast, he burst into flame and shattered everything around him in a flaming mach cone.
• Piloted Santa’s Sleigh, which obviously is capable of the ‘go to every kids house in one night’ feat.

• Gumball once dodged a microwave, like a literal Microwave, the radioactive wave that travels at lightspeed.
• Can Dodge lasers from Bobert.

• Gumball and Darwin can move so fast they were able to paint Mr. Robinson’s fence about a dozen different times at speeds so fast people staring right at them couldn’t even see them move. Not to mention right before they did this they, in seconds, cut Mr. Robinson’s entire lawn with nothing more than a Nail Clipper.
• When his dad thought he had a Real Magic wand, he and Darwin granted every wish his dad made via instantly running out and causing whatever ridiculous thing he just asked for to happen at speeds so fast other characters couldn't perceive them do so.

• He casually had an entire conversation while an Explosion appeared nearly frozen in time.
• He, really impressively, took over Larry’s responsibilities for 5 whole minutes, to give him his yearly break. Larry is overworked to the point he works easily well over 3 dozen jobs across all of Elmore simultaneously, and is so fast he's basically omnipresent at each position. And Gumball could manage to replicate this for the duration of the break.

• Gumball’s Girlfriend, Penny, is so fast she’s casually able to fly into deep space with a passenger at speeds clearly Massively Faster Than Light. And for comparison, Gumball in one instance, ran so fast he got out of Penny’s grip, grabbed Darwin, swapped clothes with Darwin, put Darwin into Penny’s grip in his place, then left the room, all before either of them could perceive it.

• Lastly, Gumball, Darwin and Sussy were all fast enough to fly into outer space and to what appears to be the center of the galaxy, (yes this whole trippy sequence happened exactly as presented) in about 5 seconds. The distance to the center of the Milky Way galaxy is about 25,000 Light-years, with that they must have been flying 157 Billion times the speed of light, which is consistent with the Penny and Larry feats.

Strength:

• Threw a f*cking treadmill through the f*cking toilet pipes so hard the toilet exploded
• Physically defeated His Arch Nemesis Rob.

• Scales Past Penny’s Father Patrick, who threw a shoe all the way to the moon and left a scuff mark on it.
• On More than one occasion he has also physically beaten himself up, proving his Strength can match his own Durability.
• Knocked Out the person whose name isn't jodie by throwing a shoe at her.

• He Scales Past Darwin who once broke every single television their cartoon was being played on with merely his voice.

Durability:

• Was able to Tank one of Darwin’s devastating sneezes at close range! For reference:

These same sneezes are powerful enough to cause an earthquake that sent all the objects in the city into the stratosphere, launch Banana Joe’s entire family all the way to China, and even hit the 4th wall!

• Tanked Terminal Velocity fall.
• Endured the destruction of Gorgoroth The Devourer, a planet destroying entity who created a massive explosion the size of the school.
• No-sold the impact of a Meteorite.

• Tanked a MASSIVE NUKE from Bobert which devastated the entire city and caused even the distant mountains to quake. 
• Tanked a punch from Bobert that launched him through multiple walls, Bobert is strong enough to kick balls into the sun.
• Was launched so high that he flew into outer space near jupiter, then fell all the way back down.
• No-sold a building buster blast.

• But most impressive of all is when they teleported back to the beginning of time and casually tanked the Big Bang like it was nothing. The Big Bang exploded with a force of at least 40 Septillion FOE, and its initial blast covered an area of an estimated 17 centimeters, Gumball himself has a surface area of roughly 1,550 cubic inches, and the distance between them appears to be the length of 5 spiral Galaxies, or 9.5 Sextillion Meters. Tanking this at that distance with that surface area would require a force equal to over 61.8 Petatons of TNT, that's multi continent level.

General:

• Defeated his arch nemesis, Rob, in a massive Metafictional War.
• Endured Extreme Reality Warping Effects.
• Endured all of reality being reset.
• Once Dealt with a multitude of extreme threats and saved his entire family on his Day Off, where he was intentionally putting forth as little effort as physically possible.
• Traveled into The Void, the metafictional drawing board where all mistakes are banished from existence, history and memory to rescue his boring friend Molly who the show had stopped featuring.
• Survived the night against an undead evil ghost being.
• Survived his show literally running out of budget on a meta level and reducing him to nothing more than a stick figure drawing on a postit note.
• Survived the satellite broadcasting his cartoon suffering all sorts of issues and causing him and his town to glitch out like crazy.
• Survived the Evil Turtle apocalypse.
• Survived being stuck on the school roof for a week with no food or water.

Summary

Advantages

• Multi Continent+ Level DC/Durability
• MFTL+ Speeds
• High Intelligence
• Star Level Reality Warping
• Very High Stamina
• Low Godly Regeneration
• Flight
• Teleportation
• Elasticity
• Logia
• Shapeshifting
• Size Manipulation
• Gravity Manipulation 
• Universal Animacy
• Matter Manipulation/Resistance
• Anti-Logia/Anti-Intangibility
• Energy Manipulation
• Mind Control
• Mind Reading
• Mental Plane Interaction
• Thought Constructs
• Power Ignore
• Possession Resistance
• Spatial Hax
• Time Travel
• Time Dilation
• Time Reversal
• Time Stop
• Duplication (Via Time Manipulation)
• Aging Hax/Aging Hax Resistance
• Claws
• Thousands of Kilometers Range
• Viral/Poison Immunity
• Extreme Genetic Manipulation
• Montage
• Immersion
• Metafictional Manipulation

Disadvantages

• Lazy
• Cowardly
• Egotistical

Recommended Opponent:

Chowder:

Chowder would be a perfect choice to fight Gumball as his series is one of the few cartoons that manage to be Just as Meta as Gumball’s own, and they also have a similar vibe of being mostly pure and innocent characters, who still manage to get into all sorts of trouble through their tomfoolery. Stats wise Chowder is a bit Stronger, While Gumball is a bit Faster, but that doesn’t super matter as both of these two have some pretty crazy hax abilities up to the Metafictional level, so a fight between them would be as imaginative as it is cartoony.

Next Time: