After everything we've seen so far, why do people still think Gordon Freeman is worth anything at all? To me, Kirby was actually more impressive for just about tripling a fairly popular and notable Street Fighter character.
Seeing GLaDOS in action has me wondering how much of a decline Gordon has actually seen. No doubt Gordon's reputation has taken a hit with Half-Life 3 becoming the new Duke Nukem Forever, but I don't think we get to this much of a discrepancy without Bowser also taking an increase, especially since Gladdy didn't crash and burn to that extent with even the most pessimistic outlook on Mewtwo's strength
I guess you have a point, but GLaDOS took a pretty big hit from 2013 in her own right. You might forget that GLaDOS managed about the same percentage on Snake back in 2013 as she did on Mewtwo now. That puts GLaDOS at sub-2010 levels if you're like me and have a pessimistic view of Mewtwo's strength. I do think Bowser's strength has increased, though, but only by the standard margin we've seen from other well-established Nintendo characters so far.
Honestly, I expected GLaDOS to fade a decent amount more than Gordon. HL3 was already being memed into being another DNF a decent amount of time before DNF happened, and the confirmation regarding it may have helped people keep it on their minds, if anything. Just look at how Konami characters have been handling this contest, in light of their respective series being dead in the water (outside of the arcades in bastardised form...)*. No doubt about it to me, that Bowser performance is something pretty damn impressive as far as I'm concerned. Possibly something that won't last for long either, as I suspect a non-negligable amount of that strength only came from a far less long-lasting meme.
*sure, some of them have smash boosts and stuff, but smash boosts have also amounted to very little in other cases, and potentially even deboosted some
Anyway yeah my pick is actually to Kratos, for similarly exceeding expectations, and against someone who definitely can't be accused of being any weaker than usual. A shame he's up against a monster next. Maybe he has a chance if the tepid prerelease reception to Let's Go can play a part.
Now to go back to not pretending I know jack about jack in this contest.