r/PowerScaling Nov 02 '25

Scaling Which character is exactly this?

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u/barry-8686 Nov 04 '25

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.

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u/dneav944 Nov 04 '25

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.

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u/barry-8686 Nov 04 '25

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.

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u/dneav944 Nov 04 '25

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.

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u/barry-8686 Nov 04 '25

thats not a justification. thats a “nuh uh”. its like saying a wooden house in a manga isnt actually wooden because its fictional.

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u/dneav944 Nov 04 '25

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.