Skullgirls is my favorite game…. heck, series ever, and one of its main characters, Peacock, is my character in all of fiction. I love her personality, inspirations and her story. But said story, ended in a Cliffhanger, with her about to face off with the Medici mob's top enforcer, Black Dahlia, with the results of the fight left to the imagination. So today I wanted to take a look at all the information we have on Black Dahlia throughout her appearances in Skullgirls and information from Lore, and compare her to Peacock both from an out of universe And in universe perspective. Despite my great love for Peacock, I will be completely objective and determine to the best of my knowledge who should logically win this battle!
So in Peacock’s story mode, after Peacock defeats the Skullgirl, Marie Korbel, she vows to finish Marie’s original goal of destroying the Medici Mafia once and for all. After killing every single member of the organization in a one woman crusade over the course of one night, she finally makes it into the office of the head Crime Boss, Lorenzo Medici.
Terrified, Lorenzo summons Dahlia to defend him, and both girls exchange dialogue that makes them both sound incredibly confident of victory. Dahlia basically saying Peacock is a pathetic unworthy child and she's going to kill her, and Peacock essentially blowing her off as a non threat, saying she's already beaten larger threats that night, and is more concerned about missing her shows and staying out too late.
Now I can say Peacock not being worried about having to fight Dahlia is not particularly notable to this discussion. Peacock as far as I can tell, wouldn’t/shouldn’t/doesn’t know who Dahlia is or what her capabilities are. The only way she could would be if someone at Lab 8 told her about her at some point, or if they’d met before, which we don’t have evidence to support. Other than that, Peacock is extremely confident and brash, and would literally never show fear, so even if she did consider Dahlia a massive threat, she still would have reacted with this same level of bravado.
Dahlia not considering Peacock to be a big threat on the other hand is more noteworthy. While Dahlia is confident herself, she seems to be more cold, calculating and warrior-like in personality, meaning she likely would be more cautious than Peaks. Dahlia also is aware in this scene that Peacock single handedly killed all the other Medici forces, meaning that she had this in mind when making those confident claims, so evidently it didn't impress her.
That’s it for their actual interaction, so let's pull in some info from the rest of the series to get the greater context. Black Dahlia was once a woman who was critically injured in a Skullgirl attack several decades ago, who was put back together by an ASG Scientist named Geiger using mechanical parts, becoming the first ASG Agent, predating even Brain Drain and Big Band, and essentially being the Prototype for all those that came after her. While her time at ASG saved her life, it also drove her Mad, she became deranged and violent, and soon defected and joined up with the Medici Mob as an Assassin.
Despite her being very high ranking in the Mob, this is sheerly due to how powerful she is. Dahlia has no actual loyalty to the Medici’s, only sticking with them cause she gets to hurt people and be paid for it, as seen in Cerebella’s origin where she made no effort to protect Vitale from Beatrix’s stray attack.
So let’s go over her VS info from what we can gather. The earliest point in the Skullgirls Timeline that we see Dahlia is 14 years ago, when she and some of her goons, slaughtered the entire Contiello family, where she shot Sienna in the head, and gunned down her father, Roberto, who it is important to note had Levithan as a parasite at the time.
Afterward, Selene used The Skull Heart to wish her family back and turned into the Skullgirl. This used to be Dahlia’s most impressive feat, as we know that Selene was defeated, and the Medici made a big show of how they silenced the Contiellos, Heavily Implying that Dahlia fought Selene, a powerful Skullgirl, one on one and defeated her.
However it was later shown that Dahlia and her forces quickly fled once Selene turned Skullgirl. And that Selene was actually defeated by Squigly, with the help of Big Band, Annie, Panzerfaust and D. Violet. Additionally, While we don’t know the full fighting capabilities of Roberto with Leviathan, he was clearly much weaker than Squigly, due to him not being able to fight against Dahila’s forces very effectively, while Squigly defeated what they had run from, and even defeated Roberto after The Skull Heart gave him a power boost. Roberto also seemed to basically sacrifice himself for Squigly rather than die by the villain's hands anyway, so trying to scale Dahlia to Squigly from this is pretty sketchy.
With that, Dahlia’s actual best feat comes from the Skullgirls Mobile Main Story, where the newest Skullgirl, Marie, Storms into the Medici tower intent on killing Lorenzo, and Dahlia manages to drive Marie off by shooting her in her heart, injuring the Skullgirl. Marie is very powerful, but there are some important things to note, One being that Skullgirls rise in power the more they give themselves to the Heart, starting pretty strong, and eventually growing strong enough to threaten countries or more. And this event took place before the main Skullgirls game started, meaning Marie was weaker than she was in that game to an unknown degree.
Dahlia also trains all the female assassins who work for the Cirque des Cartes, teaching them many of her great assassin skills. When she was asked to judge the competition between Cerebella, Beatrix and Feng she was not particularly impressed with any of their power or skill, heavily suggesting that she is superior to all of them as a fighter. Cerebella is a powerful fighter, who has many times proven herself superior to Ms. Fortune, and this is pretty consistent for Dahlia, who is also likely responsible for killing Nadia and her entire Fishbone gang and dumping them in the ocean. This also means that she would scale above Nadia and Cerebella being able to defeat Valentine, who was able to deal significant damage to an early Marie.
However I should mention that a great deal of the feats attributed to Dahlia are based on statements she herself made. In Eliza’s story mode, Dahlia makes threats to Eliza’s life with the utmost confidence she can and would totally kill her in a fight. And the ending made it EXTREMELY Clear that Eliza is basically untouchable to the entire Mob and can wipe them out with barely more than a thought. While the Medici did not know the full extent of her power, they did know that she was extremely powerful to the point they hired her to single handedly take down a Skullgirl, something Dahlia is established to not be able to do in the past. Marie may not be as strong as Selene, but the Mob didn’t actually know that. So based on this, it's clear that likely from either her mental instability, or arrogance, that Dahlia has a tendency to overestimate her abilities. Meaning that statements like her being super confident she will kill Peacock in a fight, have to be taken with a grain of salt, as she said the same thing about goddamn Eliza!
So going into Peacock in terms of how relevant a threat she is. Peacock has an extremely good win/loss record throughout Skullgirls, and is described as being The Greatest Threat to Skullgirls in the World. This is stated throughout the game, multiple times, including by villains in other characters' story modes without her even being there. And this does line up, as Peacock is the only character in the game to kill Marie more than once, once single handedly in her own timeline, and another time where after losing to Marie, she still is fine enough to get up and help Big Band defeat her. She has directly defeated Double and Valentine at the same time, and in her own story mode, after she slaughtered the Entirety of the Medici Mob, we can actually see she is carrying a ripped piece of Cerebella's hat and Ottomon's severed head, meaning she also beat the entire Cirque Des Cartes band of assassin's all at once. Including Cerebella, and Ottomon in particular, Ottomon by the way once nearly killed both Filia and Samson in a single hit. This is Consistent as Peacock has actually only lost 2 fights against other Skullgirls characters throughout ALL the story modes, and even those barely count.
The first of those losses was against Big Band, when they had a dispute over what to do after Lab 8 was attacked. Big Band wins the fight, BUT after the fight Peacock immediately gets up, Knocks Big Band OUT in one hit, and proceeds to do her plan anyway. Her second loss was against Annie, however that match was suppose to be more of a sparring session between star and fan, and Peacock still held her own despite Annie getting serious.
Based on that, it's actually quite difficult to argue Peaks ISN’T one of the top tiers, and would be very difficult for most people in this game to defeat. But let's go into the actual Powers these characters possess.
Dahlia is the Prototype model of an ASG Agent essentially. I pointed out in my Big Band blog that he is an older ASG Model, and thus lacks access to the extremely potent Synthetic Parasites that newer Models have, and his abilities are lacking by comparison because of it. Well Dahlia is even older than him, and it shows in her story, she actually has a dude named Tom that works for the mob that maintains her Mechanics, and it's said that his engineering knowledge is vital to this because her parts are so dated. By Comparison, Peacock is the 2nd Newest ASG Agent, with only Painwheel being more recent, and has not one, but 2 Synthetic Parasites, she is very modern and state of the art, and this is reflected in their aresnels. While we don’t know the Full extent of Black Dahlia’s abilities, all we have ever seen her do, and all she is ever described to have is Grenades, Guns and Blades that come from various parts of her body, even her official Playstyle description only sites this, and the most complex thing it mentions is she can use her doilies to hide and conceal herself.
By comparison, Peacock has Omnidirectional Vision and hearing that lets her detect everything that goes on, from every angle, across the entirety of New Meridian, so it's not like that Dollie trick will be effective here. And in other powers, Peacock can fly, teleport, open portals to other dimensions, stop time, manipulate space, create matter and living beings from thought, hit on the metafictional plane, paint herself into and out of existence, shoot lasers, and has all the abilities we know Dahlia has, just to name a few.
SO...if you are paying attention it is VERY Clear Peacock should logically kick her ass if we do this purely from a VS Perspective. BUT that's partly the problem of looking at one of a series’ playable main characters, vs a minor npc villain you never fully see in action. For all We know, Dahlia could be monstrously more powerful and just hasn’t shown it in canon yet, but then you consider it from an in-universe perspective. Dahlia is essentially an older, failed experiment by the ASG labs, while Peacock is their proud, newest accomplishment, the magnum opus for her creator Dr. Avian. For Dahlia to BEAT Peacock, would essentially be saying that ASG have not made any significant improvement in their technology in literal decades, and that these advanced Synthetic Parasites they have made are basically worthless. Now you could argue that Dahlia was just SO skilled compared to Peacock that she could beat her in spite of Peacock logically having better stats, hax, and power variety….But that really opens up a lot of plot holes. If Dahlia was that godly skilled, why didn’t she just charge in and 1v1 Skullgirl Selene to Death? Selene wasn’t exactly a fighter, was literally an idol singer. Why in all the decades she's worked for the Medici has she not just gone and killed the Royal family to let the Mob take over the kingdom? If she's THAT skilled she certainly can do that, yet she hasn’t. And Peacock is extremely skilled in her own right. She was trained by Big Band for a year straight, and that guy was skilled enough to physically beat up an entire Mafia crime ring, while he was still a normal human police officer. And later, Peacock beat up Valentine while she had backup, and Val has superhuman skill feats as well. Really All the particularly skilled Skullgirls characters, have explanations for Being so skilled. Parasoul and Valentine have both trained almost since birth, Big Band was a Police Officer, Beowulf was a world champion wrestler, etc. As far as we can tell, Dahlia was only a normal, noncombatant person who worked for ASG before becoming a cyborg, making this argument unfounded.
So overall, I have to give this win to Peacock, I do hope you found these arguments logical and informative, and that any form of bias didn’t shine through. If you have any thoughts on the matter that differ from mine, please leave them below, I’ll be happy to read ‘em, cause I am ALWAYS happy to discuss Skullgirls...That’s all FORKS!
