Pizza wrote my judgement for me

Pizza judging:

Coco v Embrace

TLDR: Coco lost less, so he won

Let's begin by establishing that I'm here as a guest judge and I did this because I thought it would be fun. It was not fun. The arguments were terrible. Coco's weren't entirely his own fault, and I respect his improvement. On the flipside, I'm fairly new to reading Embrace's debating strategies, and she did not make a good first impression.

To summarize the debate, Embrace made a large number of well-rounded points, covering all aspects of the debate. She didn't ignore any sides of her characters or her opponents'. In structure alone, it was well-done. Unfortunately, her arguments themselves were filled with complete bullshit. Absurd scaling and feats of a sort I really wish I never have to judge again. Bad-faith "debunks" of Coco's characters that I know she knew were wrong. Countless moments of plain silly logic. It was Coco's debate to win.

Unfortunately, Coco didn't exactly bring his best showing. At first, it wasn't his fault, due to technical issues. But that only goes so far. While Embrace's points were exhaustive, Coco's were pathetically limited. Ignoring highly relevant sides to the debate, and consistently failing to go into the necessary level of detail on feat interpretations and comparisons. It doesn't matter if you don't want to deal with arguing against "pokemon scaling." You still have to do it, if you want to win. And that was far from the only thing he neglected. To his credit, his responses did get somewhat better as they went on.

I'm not going to list Embrace's ridiculous arguments. That was Coco's job, not mine. But despite Coco's pathetic attempts to just handwave them, I can't give Embrace credit on everything that went uncontested. Some things are simply too much to accept as soon as you actually look at the feat.

Claims of how good Pikachu's thunderbolt was were not sufficiently supported. Same with Electroweb. Same with Greninja's shurikens. Embrace's ranged-based arguments fail. Coco mentioned enough that I have to give it to him on that one. The major scaling for Pikachu's melee stats was a joke and based off of questionable feats in the first place. Same with Greninja. Luke feats were pretty fair, just not enough to save his weak team.

On the other hand, Luffy, Zoro, and Sasaki all had pretty reliable arguments for their feats made by Coco, and Embrace's debunks weren't very convincing. The problem is, there's just a certain level of ACTUALLY GOING INTO WHY YOU THINK YOUR FEATS ARE BETTER THAN YOUR OPPONENTS' that you need to do. Honestly, if Coco was against anyone who said fewer ridiculous things than Embrace, then he'd have lost for sure.

Ultimately, Coco said enough things that were technically right even if he didn't justify them enough, compared to Embrace's heavily justified hogwash, that I hand it to Coco.

But for real, nobody won this debate. Embrace lost it, then Coco lost it back, and then in the ensuing tumble Coco somehow ended up on top. I'm not proud of either of you. I don't want to see either of you fail — I want to see you do better. Coco, just actually fucking try. There's probably other problems in your strategies, but those didn't have time to manifest with how little you tried. Embrace, as much as gish-galloping has been the meta at some point or another, hoping your opponent doesn't call you on the shit you say just doesn't work. At the very least, please rein it in and focus on arguments that you can actually win with.