Man it’s been a minute since I did a purely analysis blog on a Nick character, so I decided to go old school and cover my favorite character from the Aaahh!! Real Monsters series Oblina! Was actually really fun to do this, and I hope you have as much fun learning just what this little lady can do.
Background:
Ever since mankind first began, something ever present in our very minds and DNA was fear.
Fear of predators, darkness, the unknown, and Monsters. This fear of monsters, horrific, grotesque creatures beyond our understanding was SO powerful that it actually caused these nightmarish creatures to manifest in the real world.
Monsters are ancient and chaotic beings that have existed long before human society and come in an incomprehensible amount of shapes, sizes and makeup. Their bodies, souls and existence are tied to the fear humans have of them, and therefore they must seek out and Scare humans,
as Monsters will collectively be erased from existence should humans stop believing in them or start understanding them.
Monsters live in secret, in the places humanity forgets and fears, such as Garbage Dumps, Sewers, Swamps, Forests, Junkyards and Graveyards. They thrive on the gross and ugly, eating garbage and breathing pollution, while things like soap and perfume are harmful to them.
Which kinda makes them extremely good for the environment, all things considered. But onto today’s topic, Oblina.
Oblina was born in Europe in the year 1794 to an extremely aristocratic family. You see, in Monster society human toenails are currency.
And humans just so happened to construct a pedicurium directly above her family underground home, easily making them the richest family in the world.
Despite this, Oblina wasn’t happy with her ritzy pampered lifestyle, it had a tendency to make one lazy, boring and obsessed with material possessions.
What hammered this point home to her was her extremely overbearing mother, who wished her to abandon her emotions and dreams and become a proper Aires skilled in numerous difficult art forms.
Though eventually with the help of her supportive father, Oblina left home and moved to New York City to attend The Gromble’s Monster Scare Academy to achieve her dream of becoming a professional Scarrer.
There, Oblina met her best friends and roommates, Ickis and Krumm, and due to her hard work and intelligence became literally the top of her class.
Over their adventures together Oblina has scared some of the toughest humans, battled monster hunters, tracked down cryptids and even encountered ghosts, becoming one of the most prominent members of the scariest generation yet.
Personality:
Oblina is very prim and proper for a monster, she speaks with a thick British accent and is very responsible & supportive of her friends. She tends to be assertive, on rare occasions even vain and jealous and will often speak very directly. That said she is also extremely caring, even willing to swallow her pride and falsely tell Ickis that he's better at scaring than she is to boost his confidence and make him worry less.
She is most often sarcastic with a funny snark to her, when scarring she will often directly communicate with humans with a charming sadistic wit to make her scare more effective and artistic.
Intellect & Skills:
Oblina is arguably the single most intelligent character in the Aaahh!! Real Monsters series, being very experienced, intellectual and hard studied on monster philosophy, history and strategy. Unlike Humans, Monsters do not fear what they do not understand and it allows them to stay rational in intense situations.
Oblina is significantly more intelligent than her friend Ickis, and he was smart enough to construct a working satellite TV out of garbage in an afternoon. In fact, The Gromble himself declared her the best and brightest student in monster academy.
Because of this he chose Oblina to infiltrate human society in disguise to gather information, where she was able to rapidly learn human behaviors and blend in. On another occasion Oblina was able to go from a bookworm to the coolest kid at monster academy almost instantly after studying tropes associated with cool for a single day.
Oblina has stamina enough to operate for 10 straight days with no rest, and is skilled enough to beat up and restrain both Ickis and Krumm at the same time.
One of her best aspects however is her potent Stealth abilities. Oblina has repeatedly shown able to weave through crowded movie sets, cramped airplane hallways and even fully camera surveyed government buildings like space stations and nuclear power plants without being seen or heard.
Also after stealing and swallowing a watch from a hypnotist, Oblina immediately mastered that art and can now hypnotise people and monsters with it.
Powers:
As a monster from a strong old lineage, Oblina has an impressive arsenal of natural, supernatural abilities, such as;
Fear Aura:
Monsters in this universe are magically scary, surrounded by a supernatural aura that warps reality to terrify even inanimate objects and make them move and jump.
Even fodder monsters are able to literally Scare away their own shadow, and shatter mirrors with their appearance.
Humans who have been exposed to Oblina’s scares have gone insane, miraculously gained the ability to walk again, and performed superhuman feats like running on water and smashing through walls all out of sheer terror.
Elasticity:
Oblina’s most iconic powers are her malleable body. Oblina is able to stretch and extend her body to the height of buildings, and turn her limbs into lassos, restraints and coils.
She can turn herself inside out with no repercussions, to the point it has become her favorite method of scaring.
She can also extend herself to catch the air beneath her in order to glide and levitate.
Shapeshifting:
Oblina has impressive shapeshifting abilities, able to take on numerous different monstrous forms.
She is able to change the color, texture and light refraction of her skin, allowing her to flawlessly blend into backgrounds and disguise herself as others.
She can also use this to grow weaponry such as claws and teeth.
Body Hardness Manipulation:
Oblina can turn her body as hard as steel to be used as tools and increase the damage of her attacks and her own durability.
Or also expand her lips to be used as a giant air cushion or life raft.
Body Manipulation:
Probably most disturbingly, Every part of Oblina’s body is completely detachable and can be taken off and put back on at will with no negative effect. It's impossible to kill her with physical force without completely destroying her body as she will just reassemble.
She can survive even with her brain detached from her body, and can move each individual piece of her being while it's detached as easily as she could while it's on.
Poison Immunity:
As Per their diet, Monsters are immune to all conventional forms of poison, they can drink radioactive waste, eat venomous insects, and breathe poisonous gasses and not only be unaffected but it will actually be good for them. They do however avoid eating people and animals as who knows where they have been, things like soap and perfume are what is poison to them.
Cold Resistance:
Monsters have heavy resistance to the cold, Oblina was able to function normally and persist in the Antarctic, an environment SO cold it flash froze methane gas into a solid.
Methane Freezes at -295 degrees F, a temp similar to liquid nitrogen, and freezing it in a second as it did would be well below absolute zero.
Agelessness:
Monsters are centuries old creatures with extremely long lifespans, they age at a rate that is slowed to a near nonexistent state. Ickis, Oblina and Krumm are hundreds of years old yet still in high school.
Mind Manipulation:
A commonplace ability among monsters, by sticking her finger into someone's ear she can stretch it into their brain and give them horrific realistic nightmares and hallucinations that traumatize the victim.
These fear episodes cannot be awakened from until Oblina breaks contact, monsters less proficient at this than her have even fully entered into the mind of the victim and possessed them for as long as they wanted.
Oblina is also able to mental project herself and others INTO the dream state to directly talk to them.
Feats:
Strength:
Lifted a large newspaper truck.
She is more powerful than Ickis who, with just his voice, could shatter windows and break furniture, shake the whole underground structure of their room, casually smash through walls and Scare away bears.
While her and her friends were in a weakened state, they still grew to the size of an entire baseball stadium.
Oblina also is able to overcome the durability of Krumm.
This is the same Krumm that drank an entire Oil Spill, stated to be 20 miles in diameter, in 10 seconds. The Volume of such a spill would be in the ballpark of 130,000 cubic meters and weigh 126,247 Tons. Sucking this all in within 10 seconds would yield a Kinetic energy of 142 Kilotons of TNT.
Krumm on another occasion drank and coughed up enough water to flood an entire section of New York City.
Durability:
Tanked a massive head on car crash to a brick wall.
Scales to Ickis who can tank being in a Trash Compactor.
Withstood Krumm’s stench, which was enough to collapse a circus bigtop, clear a crowd, break glass and melt the paint off a house.
Scales past Krickis, who tanked being baked in an oven.
Tanked standing on the bottom of the ocean.
Tanked being Hit by an Airplane and standing on the wing for a very long period of time.
Also scales to Krumm who endured being sucked into the turbine of an Airplane without a scratch.
Tanked a small Avalanche.
Endured a Terminal Velocity Fall, being crushed by a giant metal astronaut chair falling at terminal velocity and being abused by all sorts of Astronaut equipment.
Endured being sucked into a Tornado the size of a large building.
Speed:
Was able to tunnel through the snow at a faster rate than dogs could run.
Monsters can scare people to run fast enough to run on water and keep up with them.
Kept up with a car, even climbed into the tire of a speeding car too fast to be seen.
With the help of only 6 other monsters, she managed to grab every Newspaper in New York before even a single human saw them.
Scales past Krickis, who could run fast enough to walk on the ceiling.
Could perceive being flung across the ocean.
Scales to Ickis and Krumm were fast enough to keep up and react to the Great Wave which moved with speeds fast enough to carry some other monster to the Arctic in only a few minutes. A speed feat of over Mach 40.
Fast enough to quickly travel from Antarctica back to New York on foot in a short timeframe.
General:
Endured being eaten by a sperm whale.
Caused a Russian submarine to retreat.
Was able to power through Super Freezing Temperatures.
Is the Best Student in her monster academy.
Canceled a Space Shuttle Launch with her scares.
Outsmarted and defeated 3 monster gangsters.
Defeated a teacher on par with The Gromble in a fight.
Endured being nuclearly divided into a dozen tiny Oblinas and fused back together.
Summary:
Advantages:
Town Level.
Hypersonic.
Highly Intelligent and Experienced.
Master Stealth Skills.
Very Impressive Stamina.
Fear Aura.
Elasticity.
Shapeshifting.
Body Manipulation.
Body Hardness Manipulation.
Poison Resistance.
Disease Resistance.
Radiation Resistance.
Cold Resistance.
Dream Manipulation
Hallucinations.
Possession.
Hypnosis.
Disadvantages:
Monsters Require pollution to breathe, they can fill sacks in their body with polluted air which allows them to persist in clean air for up to a week, but things like perfume and air freshener are poisonous.
Needs Humans to believe in monsters to maintain her existence.
This is Probably one of the most inconsistent weaknesses ever but Oblina ‘can’t swim’ only one quarter of the time that Oblina is tossed into water is this actually a problem, another quarter of the time she’ll mention and it will not actually be a problem for her, and Half the time this isn’t mentioned and she's shown swimming just fine, hell she even swam into a river and rescued Ickis from drowning at one point and a big deal wasn’t even made of this.
Recommended Opponent:
Double:
Double from Skullgirls would actually be a fairly interesting opponent for Oblina to face down with, both of which being terrifying shapeshifting monsters that thrive on the fears and insecurities of humans. Double is a bit stronger and Oblina is a bit faster but still in each others ballpark, and their powers line up in many interesting ways. For example, one would think Double’s ability to BFR her to Gehenna would be a one-shot, but as Gehenna is PART of Double, Oblina would be in the perfect position to mind screw her if that happened, and there's a lot more interesting interactions like that.
It HAS been a while since you did a pure death analysis for a nick character and this was an interesting one to get back with. I didn't expect the verse to have such a metaphysical origin for the monsters. I quite like when series create a grandiose sense for things, which I imagine this series didn't have to with it's more earthy aesthetic.
ReplyDeleteIn a similar fashion I was impressed by Oblina's sheer suite of mind hax. It's quite strong, especially for someone in her tier. Despite elasticity seeming to be her main ability, she has a comparably dangerous metaphysical range of abilities (similar to the show nature)
I was very impressed by your calc for Krumm's oil spill feat and the hypersonic speed feats. Definitely gives a very clear range of how strong and fast the verse is and Oblina by extension. Given the range of a lot of the feats, I get a sense of how impressive these feats are relatively for the verse. I although her general feats were pretty impressive even without context of seeing the series. Defeating a teacher on par with the Gromble certainly sounds impressive!
I have never seen the series but Oblina sounds like quite the interesting character. Despite them living in rather unhygenic areas, she is surpisingly posh, reflecting her aristocratic background. I almost want to say there's a parallel in her attempting to escape her family's restrictive ways and her power which is literally abound bending and contorting her body structure to escape rigidity, but maybe that's just me being pretentious :P Her more mundane skills like her very high stealth as well as her resistances were also useful things to add to her grabbag of tricks. Not her flashiest stuff but bread and butter abilities are more reliable too.
Nontheless I was impressed by how efficiently and effectively you expressed the series lore about what monsters represent, and why they are the way they are. They are expressions of primordial fear and thus exist because humanity believes in them. They live in places that are grimy and distasteful because those are the places the human mind, the human soul, recoils from in disgust.
I am excited for next time! I know one of the characters pretty well and am very excited to see your analysis for him! :)
It’s been so long since I watched this show and it’s nice to be reminded how awesome it was! Definitely one of the more creative concepts for Nickelodeon show in the 90s. The monsters being the physical embodiments of humanity’s fears is such a cool idea to explore. I can also appreciate how ecologically friendly the monsters are in a way :P
ReplyDeleteYou really did Oblina justice with your summary of her background, personality, and intelligence (even using Ickis’s satellite creating intelligence feat to scale her intelligence to). It’s an interesting contrast in her being quite high class despite being a gross monster, and I really enjoy her background of being a rich girl trying to escape her parents’ restrictions to follow her dreams. I thought Oblina, alongside Ickis and Krumm, made for a great trio in general in the show.
Once again, amazing job with the research. It’s always nice to see you exploring the abilities of characters from various television cartoons, because it seems like I rarely hear people talk about them. Honestly surprised how high her stats get. But that Oil Spill feat she scales to really is ridiculous. Oblina seems like a really hard opponent to put down with her resistances, elasticity, and body manipulation. Double seems like an awesome opponent for her as well from how you explain it; Skullgirls characters work oddly well against Nick/CN characters (as shown by your GIR vs Robo-Fortune blog as well).
The next time looks like a very strange yet very interesting concept for a matchup. Look forward to seeing what you do with it!
*created a satellite tv
DeleteRealized I read that wrong the first time. Still impressive, but definitely not as impressive as a satellite.
Aaahh!! Oblina! I'm so happy to see this blog, I've been hoping for you to cover this series for a while now. It was one of my favorite cartoons as a kid and reading through this, listening to the music (which came from a game I played way back on my old Sega Genesis) and seeing bits and pieces of the show in the gifs you included all added up to a divinely nostalgic experience. Thanks so much bro!
ReplyDeleteOblina sure is a scary girl! That's an understatement though. I knew she was smart and talented, but this blog really peeled back my eyelids to show me how truly impressive she is. Lots of nice scaling to Krumm, who she can definitely push around despite her stick-like appearance. The frozen methane cold resistance feat really blew my socks off. Past absolute zero? Crazy!
It was her mind manipulation powers that truly terrified me though. That's some OP stuff! Combined with her variety of excellent resistances and other defensive traits like being able to live without her brain attached (wtf) and you have a deadly fighter. Her incredible stealth skills would make her function best as an assassin imo. This package comes together to form a character I'd really like to see you use as a counter to some other verse in a strategy guide one day (forgive me if she's already been used and I forgot; I read a lot of these!).
From what I know of Double and what you've said here, I think she'd make a great opponent for Oblina. Who would outfox who? Would love to see either this fight or a SG blog on Double one day. Speaking fights though, your awesome trailer for your next blog got me rockin'! The countdown to Halloween continues with more spookiness; I'm hoping for a bone-chilling good time! Thanks for the blog and the hype injection for the next one.