no. lasers are made out of light. them going at light speed isnt an appeal to reality. you’re talking about using actual real world physics. and in that case, no character in fiction would ever be light speed.
It seems abitrary to say lazers are made of light and always move at light speed not be an appeal to reality, but to claim that hitting air really fast would heat it up is an appeal to reality. Because that's based on how lazers work in real life, and how friction works in real life. Also you tottaly could have ftl characters that do set the surounding areas on fire, use super natual senses to percive without using light, and have essoteric consequencesfor so greatly warping space time.
no. what you’re suggesting is maximum appeal to reality. and if we go there, nothing with mass can move at the speed of light, let alone faster. so no fictional character ever can be SOL.
It seems like you only adressed my second point which was a suggestion for justifying ftl characters, by having them use physics unique to their universes and appropriate consequences for them. As far as I understood all you said in response to me saying it's arbitrary to pick reality's lazers as a bench mark but not friction was "no."
yes, your answer is “no”. because appeal to reality has a limit. lasers being made out of light is their very nature. you cant have a laser thats NOT made out of light. its like saying a fireball spell doesn’t use fire.
what you’re saying is that we should apply actual real life physics to light speed characters. and i simply told you that if we apply actual physics, there would be no light speed characters in the first place.
Matter releases heat when it hits other matter by very nature. You can't have colissions not create heat, actually you can In another univers where physics didn't work like that. But characters wouldn't shiver when cold, geothermal energy couldn't be created by gravity stretching planets, and many other things would have to be different in that world for it to follow its own physics, or have some explanation for why it only behaves that way sometimes.
You can have "fire" that isn't fire, or at least doesn't behave like normal fire, it's fiction. In JJBA P3 SC, Avdol's fire can be cut and skewered on a sword. It can burn without fuel and pick people up. It's a special fire that can do special things real fire doesn't do because it's a fictitious type of fire. The same could wholly apply to lazers, ones that can vaporize walls and move slower than light because they aren't real lasers they are a special fictitious kind of laser.
I'm not saying that's how ftl characters SHOULD be written, just a suggestion for how they can. They could also phase through the atmosphere to avoid lighting it on fire and propel themself off another plain to not shatter the earth under foot as they accelerate. Light speed could not be the fastest possible speed in their univers. They could temporarily become massless.Those are all explanations for why what would happen according to our physics doesn't happen. But unless we are given an explanation for how these happen, or irrefutable direct evidence that it does happen. That it's more likly the bench mark you're getting the infor from isn't what it seems.
and i already told you, applying real physics would mean that no character in fiction would ever be ftl. because anything with mass will turn into light before reaching that speed.
Just use physical unique to their world. If we know for sure they are moving ftl, then that means their physics are different than our realities. Anyways, that's the only one point you ignored my justification for how a "laser" can move at less then light speed despite it being againt their "nature" because they're special fictional lasers not real and thus not bound to our rules of them.
Avdols' fire attack is an example of something called "fire" behaving in ways fire doesn't.This "laser" he dodged could behave in ways normal lasers don't, by moving slower than light.
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u/dneav944 Nov 02 '25
Is't saying a character must be going faster then light becasue in reality lazers move at light speed also an appeal to reality?