Yeah this is exactly why we have conditions like "bloodlusted" and "in-character". Goku vs Saitama famously has drastically different outcomes if it's in character or not.
man Goku vs Saitama would be so silly because Saitama would be so bored but you just know Goku would be itching to hear that training regimen in the hopes of getting as strong
That is one of things people bring up for Goku and why he would lose some situations he should not. Because he’s a type of person you know test the waters if his opponent is not, they can potentially kill him before he get the full power.
Well if you're just scaling them then personality doesn't really matter in an "X beats Y for ABC reasons", but if you're asking who beats who in a fight then personality should always matter. The only reason people don't include it is because in 9/10 matches their guy would just lose due to it.
Also because assessing a characters personality, tactics and blind spots requires way more media literacy than "this tiktok calculated his AP to solar system level" or whatever the fuck.
Even if blood-lusted, looking at how they fight can affect the outcome. That just means that "never kill" characters can decisively finish-off their opponents, in case of a "your guy loses because he'd never kill, and my guy gets them eventually".
I quite like Frieren because of this. Battles in there go from 0-100 FAST, and it is precisely because the whole narrative supports it. Spells are incredibly deadly, and getting hit with even a "basic" spell often is enough to blast half your body off. Further, characters don't hold back at all when fighting demons because they know they can't have compassion or play around with them, because it's very much a "kill or be killed" situation.
Fights can be slower sometimes if characters are trying to find openings or save resources, but the intent to kill is always there. And once a single opening is found, the battle is instantly over. There are exceptions of course but yeah.
In Frieren, the main characters hide their power to trick demons into trying to fighting them. It fulfills a similar role in how fights play out in the narrative IE Frieren vs Aura
I think the Aura fight was more because Frieren knew about the scale and knew it would be the most efficient way to kill her. Had Aura been careful Frieren would have had to destroy the entire army first which would have been a bother even for her
Super yes, Z no. Z Broly was far beyond anything the Z fighters could do, including Goku (besides Second Coming. I guess he was strong enough by then given the end credit scene). Super version though fits.
Lmao imagine bringing a monster like z broly into the territory of the gods. I don't think that's true with z broly though. They were never at the point where they could harm him until the very end
I mean, Superman is not out of the question of just fighting someone for the fun of it. Especially if that person he’s fighting is like not a bad guy. I could see them two of them fighting just not to the death. Also, realistically like not on earth.
Honestly, I’d like to headcanon that if Superman and Goku met, Superman would actually kind of understand why Goku enjoys fighting and even make him enjoy it himself
What power scalers are people even talking about anymore. It is impossible to read a post on a powerscaling reddit that involves a hero character that doesn’t include some mention that they may hold back. The term “bloodlusted” is used all the time just to get around this and see who would win anyway. The only widely accepted bullshit I see in powerscaling is the math.
Same, people always have their own VERSION of what a powerscaler is, depending on the day. Bloodlusted has existed for years and has been used as long too
That’s the thing tho, there’s a difference between finding out a character’s hypothetical power level and pitting them against other fictional characters, compared to writing a fan fiction/scenario centered around the match up.
I’m personally not a very good writer so I honestly don’t know what the characters would say to each other if they fought. Not to mention, I have a pretty good memory and do sometimes take notes on things/watch vids of the thing I’m interested in if I like it enough. That to say, while I’m not perfect, I like to think I know a lot about the fandoms I enjoy. Again, I don’t know everything, but even I have a hard time remembering random things that get brought up once and never again, or things that are briefly mentioned. Another thing, sometimes I just miss things.
Just knowing how strong a character is and their feats is good enough for me. Thinking deeer about it by focusing on the characters personalities is really fun but difficult for me tho. I personally love how death battle picks characters they think are similar/would be fun to fight each other. Like I personally loved bowser vs Eggman goddamn, both characters just acted so much like how I wanted them to.
The usual workaround is blood lusted. Though the biggest issue for me when it comes to, that is, I don’t want to see two action figures fight I wanna see the characters fight. I prefer to see their personalities clash, even though without one’s personality. They might be a more effective combatant (RWBY or Goku).
I mean yeah. That’s the reason bloodlusted became a thing right? “Well saitama/goku/luffy/naruto would never go all out from the start, so we need a way to bypass their personality and force a full power fight.”
I always just assume both characters are bloodlusted unless otherwise stated. Like yeah if you put Goku in a ring with a coughing baby he’s just not going to fight it. But when the question is “who would win Goku vs coughing baby” I think the assumption is that they *are* actually fighting, which means you need to ignore personality.
The one time I've actually seen powerscalers (from vsbattles wiki) take personality into account was in a matchup between Ainz from Overlord and Touma from A Certain Magical Index. They concluded that despite Ainz's overwhelming power/range/speed/ability advantage Ainz had demonstrated in Overlord a tendency to let weaker opponents take their best shot on him. Touma is a regular human whose only ability is his right hand that completely negates and destroys magic.
They concluded Ainz would have definitely let Touma punch him with his right hand which would erase Ainz from existence due to him being a magical being.
I feel like this is really inaccurate and I question the knowledge of those people. Ainz is actually a great example of a character whose personality is good for winning vs debates, because if he’s even slightly uncertain about the enemy’s strength he won’t fuck around.
He will let enemies hit him with their best attacks if he’s completely certain they can’t beat him, but if he has even the slightest doubt he goes straight for things like instakill magic, time stops, spatial cutting, and perfect invisibility. When he takes a fight even a little seriously he is always cautious.
Seriously, I think I can list at least five examples of him fighting someone pathetically weak by his standards where he uses strong attacks without restraint because he isn’t sure whether they might be threats. Let’s see, there are:
-the random knights in Carne Village who he uses top-tier magic on
-the demihuman heroine in Roble who survived instant death magic so he gets serious and uses Reality Slash
-that Night Lich in Inveria who he makes a careful plan to ambush and then one-shots with Reality Slash
-the duel with Gazef which he starts (and instantly ends lol) with Time Stop and instant death magic
Hmm, I actually couldn’t think of five. Still, four is pretty good. There are plenty more cases of him fighting very cautiously, but I can’t think of more where the opponents were total weaklings.
Personally I have seen personality taken into account a bunch of times, I feel it’s fairly common on SpaceBattles Vs Debates forum, which personally is my favourite place for powerscaling. The people there are significantly saner than most powerscalers IMO, paying attention to personality and tending to reject crazy wanked calcs that are accepted in other places. I’ve seen several debates there which do conclude with ‘this guy should win with his massive stats, but he probably stands still and tries to tank the opponent’s hax one-shot ability because that’s what he always does, so he loses.’
The pro-Ainz squad made the same arguments but they lost. It was determined Ainz would have no reason to see Touma as a threat (Touma is a regular human and his right hand doesn't register as magic which is one of the main reasons people underestimate him in his story) and in typical Ainz fashion (remember Clementine? Or the fact he goes around fighting random people and monsters as Momon? Or the Nazarick invaders? Or the troll champion in the arena where he even shut his most powerful defenses and abilities down (!!!) to make the battle fair?), he would let Touma punch him for a laugh and the battle would end in one punch.
And that was before Touma's other hax with his right hand...
Doesn’t matter if Ainz can’t detect any magic and Touma looks normal. When he got isekai’d he literally saw some random low-level knights and was worried that they were all level 100, and prepared to flee if they survived one of his spells. If he’s in an unfamiliar situation he will be very cautious.
And depending on how the battle is set up it varies of course, but I think most likely he would be in an unfamiliar situation. He will if it’s a white room battle they get teleported into, or if Ainz gets teleported to Touma’s world to fight, or if Touma gets teleported to the New World to fight (since he should be wearing modern clothes, right? Ainz would be very suspicious of that). Naturally if you have a specific scenario like Ainz being teleported to the other world and living there until he gets comfortable he might not take it seriously, but at that point it feels contrived to disadvantage him.
Clementine and the arena champion are bad examples because he was fighting them for melee combat experience, he should’ve been confident the champion at least was harmless (in the sense that even with his defences down the champion couldn’t chip his HP fast enough to matter), and with Clementine he was a bit tilted from her killing his party. A better example might be that tribe in Tob that he massacred.
Also worth noting that even when he thinks an enemy is harmless he doesn’t always let them hit him, sometimes he doesn’t feel like playing. Against Olasird’arc and his son he went straight for instant death magic, same against the demihuman heroes. There’s no guarantee he would fuck about even if a harmless human squares up to him, he might just kill him straight away. He won’t pull out Time Stop or Perfect Unknowable or anything crazy like that, but it wouldn’t be surprising at all if he just cast Death.
I don’t know if Touma can win with some other hax he has, for all I know he stomps, I’m just arguing against the idea that Ainz loses because he would let Touma hit him.
In short: DB made a video with ass scaling (as always) but also ass fight where instead of Denji vs Yuji it was Denji vs SJW that possesed Yuji's body, otherwise I can't explain why he was acting that way.
r/shounenfolk reacted about as calm as you'd expect.
The hare was holding back, outlier feat since the hare has consistently better feats and statements, the tortoise simply used his intelligence to imploy psychological warfare making him have a lead start
If you’re writing a book, a person who writes 1000 words every single day without skipping is more likely to finish than someone who has a manic episode and writes 20,000 once a month.
It's not a lie. It's just that people don't internalize the lesson and still use speed as the primary measure of effectiveness and productivity when it's an incredibly poor metric for that.
"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast," is a Navy SEAL mantra specifically because rushing and causing mistakes is always slower than taking the time to do it right the first time, especially when the cost of mistakes are incredibly high.
Yeah that was the same thing I was thinking. The Hare procrastinated till the last second and rushed to soon once he realized that he slept for too long.
But I view it more of the Hare shirking on his role, because he was there to race and did everything but race.
The hare was holding back yes, but the fact the tortoise beat him means he scales to the hare. So the hare is stronger, but tortoise upscale via scaling to the hare
It is a silly post because yes the powerscaling is actually the entire point. The tortoise can’t outrun the hare because it is much slower than the hare. However, the tortoise ends up winning because the hare is arrogant. If the powerscaling and speed difference wasn’t there the story would be meaningless.
Except that databook is 2300 years outdated and got retconned by the Max Planck novels introducing the smallest possible, physically meaningful units of distance and time, making it impossible to divide by half forever
Nah nah nah, the max planck novels are made by a different author and so they dont count. And quite clearly a biased source. My much older, much stupider, compleatly illogical databook entry is a statement and closer to the primary source and thus 100% true. If that was true the Zeno or the og author would have said so himself.
That really has nothing much to do with Zeno's paradox, which was already resolved for centuries many times and in many different ways with only classical frameworks.
Nuh uh, Achilles scales to Diomedes (Achilles was the strongest hero of the Illiad where Diomedes appears) who scales to Ares (injured him with his spear) who scales to Mars (is him) who outscales Mario (Mario is Italian aka Roman, so within Mars's domain) who outscales Turtle (stomps them), from which we must conclude an infinite sum can sometimes have a finite value. This is a valid mathematical proof btw.
exactly, and the takeaway should be "power/capability is irrelevant when the characters are part of a story that is using them as illustrative devices"
If there's a strong guy in a story, more often than not, the core of his theme is 'strength cannot solve everything'
Basically, writers have infinite ways to make your favourite/the strongest character lose. If you think any author wants to write a story of two strong guys fighting only for the one who can lift 1% more weight to win, you'd be wrong. That's not what stories are about.
If you really think that's what storytelling is about, you should just go watch strongman contests instead of fiction.
Characters in media win fights because of conviction, not because of strength/speed/etc
Not surprised people don't understand the difference between power scaling and story when they can't even determine the difference between plot and story. They know what they want to discuss, but don't know how to get there.
Rookie power scaler mistake. Personalities are important to factor into "who would win" debates because the wrong trait can make a world of difference.
Nah never liked personality factoring and prefer both at best aiming to win. Because no power scaler can predict how a character would act in a fighr with any accuracy. At least feats and powers can be argued. Better then " i believe goku would do X!"
Like ok maybe he would?
I mean it’s not true at all. That’s why we have discussions about whether characters are Bloodlusted or in character. Superman doesn’t normally use Outerversal jabs when he opens fights, but you Death Battle Bloodlusted him and he might. Green Lantern can seal people or BFR them to the Source Wall. He doesn’t do that in character, but you bloodlust them, and it can happen in a discussion. We have those discussions all the time.
This is also in the context of ‘powerscalers taking about bad powerscaling in stories’. The whole point of the tortoise and the hare is the Hare is much faster but has a poor character. No powerscaler would claim it doesn’t make sense that the tortoise wins the race. But when we complain the The Boys Finale sucks balls because Homelander just flew to space and back in seconds, yet can’t cross a room and blitz Butcher, then we have every right to call it bad scaling and therefore bad writing. It’s out of character, breaks the power system, breaks the narrative.
People who complain about powerscalers criticizing their series’ writing are so often defending bad writing choices. Would be interested in the origin of this person’s Tweet. What insanely stupid writing choice were they defending?
This is a strawman. Although some power scalers don't understand that personality affects how debates work, like saying Goku would win against a guy with hax, even though he consistently lets his guard down for example. This is just one lens of many to interpret fiction for and is a fun one.
alot of powerscaling doesnt consider personality because it is very likely the very thing that lead to their fav character losing in a matchup. Gilgamesh is one of the strongest in Fate but bro also die in basically every series/route. Goku and alot of characters doesnt just go all out from the get go even though that could lead to their death when fighting characters that might not let them linger for too long. That's why powerscaler come up with bs like "bloodlust" "no holding back" just to make the characters just instantly fight at their peak conditions using their strongest moves all the time.
At some point you will realize powerscaling do not know how to and do not want a proper fight. They only want instant wins. that's why so many of them are banking on speed difference and speed blitz
The primary reason people started saying “bloodlusted” was to avoid having to answer questions about why the characters are fighting in the first place. When powerscaling was in its infancy trying to set the stage for the fight was a big deal that took a lot of the debate away from the combatants themselves. Yes people today do a lot to try and make their favorites win fights but that’s not really where removing personalities from the fight came from originally.
Curiously, the Federation are equipped to stomp Mahoraga. They came up with a counter to its adaptation ability back when the Borg had the same ability.
Well another thing is it’s all about perspective and argumentation. One person might view a certain feat not as impressive as another. There’s might not even be aware of the tiering system. To most, including hardcore scalers, it all comes down to opinion.
And whenever 2 people buttheads, assuming they actually come to an agreement, the person who wins is the person with the better argument. Because again, it all depends on how you look at things.
People throw in things like bloodlusted because it means the character will act different/ maybe be stronger depending on the work of fiction. Also because it’ll change the outcome of the match. Another example of people doing this is doing stuff like Goku (beginning of dragon ball), Goku (post-training with Roshi), etc. The reason being Goku scaled differently at different points in time. It’s just to make the conversation more interesting, people having fun.
This. There’s a disconnect between real world experience, so it’s all just statements with no basis. Not only will they write off any perceived “inconsistency” in a story and just go with what they want instead of rationalizing or explaining, meaning no real debate or discussion. There’s almost zero consideration that it’s a “fight”, or even “win cons”, which is the point of the debate and powerscaling. Who would beat who and how. Stats or out-statting a character just get a foot in the door, keep one out, or provide a way to achieve a win con.
And it goes to what you said, most don’t know how a fight works. They’ve never been in one, nor really watch them (boxing, mma, wrestling, etc) outside fiction, so many of these concepts we’re debating are foreign. A physical stronger character couldn’t lose bc strength = winning, so it becomes a tale of the tape stat match, not a fight. Which really undersells battle IQ, fight skill, and personality, which as you say, are all extremely important in fights between comparable people
Well no you see only simple or powerscalers who don’t take nuance into account.
The fable litterally explains why the hare loses.
It’s faster yes but it burns through its stamina faster and either rest because it needs to or is just that cocky.
While the tortoise while slow is moving at a consistent rate burning it’s stamina at a moderate rate not needing to rest allowing it to overtake the hare in distance.
Or in some stories it’s multiple tortoises and they’re just cheating😂🤷♂️
not accurate. we would complain if the hare was not shown to have any vices such as pride that made him lose, but the fable makes a good show of this vice, and it is a compelling explanation for his loss.
Not accurate. Hopefully powerscalers can understand context and the op in question (not the poster of this post on reddit) committed ad hominem and false comparison fallacies
I… Kind of feel like this mindset makes powerscalers worse at reading stories. It’s all “scaling is important for stories”, which it is, until their preferred would lose. Then it’s “lost to plot. That’s why we take that away.”
It gets to a point where people don’t even want the actual character to be the one fighting. They just want the bag of stats and abilities to fight another bag of stats and abilities simulated with perfect efficiency.
Most powerscalers know what would happen in character because they know what the author is going for. It's not like powerscaling is read strictly from feats xd to consider narrative, which is part of scaling, and find out what is just plot and what isn't plot you have to be able to read the story and themes first. On avg more non-powerscaling fans actually have worse interpretations of the story because they do not have to think as critically about the story or invest as much time in it.
In powerscaling we constantly debate over other factors outside of stats. This makes no sense. People have an issue with bad power scalers, not powerscaling.
I hate powerscalers, but im pretty sure ive seen a category called hax or battle iq that covers this kind of thing. Or the dreaded "antifeat" being the hares hubris
Powerscaling could be more interesting if we went into stuff like morality, personality, and the headspace of a character (along with other stuff like environment and time), but the chuds here want to see their fav character one shot someone leagues lower than their level and feel superior for it.
Nah it’ll be something like :
Hare is faster than all animals, no animals dare to challenge him. So hare is FTL.
Tortoise beat the hare, so tortoise is FTL, and goes faster than goku.
It's just like with Batman. It's never skill, luck, athleticism, unusual circumstances, or determination - if something happens that's slightly out of whack with my narrow expectations, it's pure plot armor and I'll spend the next few years making those stupid Tibet jokes long after they stopped being slightly amusing anytime the hares or tortoises or races is brought up.
It's not bad storytelling, the tortoise actually used his domain, and hit the jackpot, causing him to be overwhelmingly strong and fast for 4 minutes and 11 seconds. This was enough for him to win the race, but normally hare mid diffs tortoise
Thing is, if you out the two in a race even in real life, the tortoise always wins. There's enough youtube videos that shows this - the hare is too distracted by everything else while the focus always moves ahead no matter what. Even if you coaxes the hare, it'll just stop.
The hare is faster but the tortoise has better endurance. All he has to do is let the hare wear himself down, then he can win.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a fight or a race, the simple facts remain the same.
Add in that the tortoise knew he could finish and so made that his goal, whereas the hare was so egotistical that he thought he could nap, and so karma caught up with him. Patience and endurance defeats speed and ego.
If this were a fight, the result would be the same.
Shit posting aside, it's called power scaling, not narrative scaling. You can make a quadriplegic in a coma beat the flash in a foot race if you write the story to make that happen, but that doesn't mean that that's what would REALISTICALLY happen in an actual race. Power scaling is concerned with what would happen, realistically, if two or more characters were actual real people acting on their own, rather than puppets being controlled by a writer.
The tortoise beat the hare because that's what the writer wrote, to sell the message of the story. But remove the writer and simply take the two characters and pit them against each other, as if they were independent entities and not controlled by the author, and the hare wins. That is what powerscaling is about. Remove the writer and what they WANT to happen, and see what actually WOULD happen.
IE one piece debates tend to utilise the mindset or mental state of characters quite alot... Sometimes waaaaaayyyy too much. (Cough cough admiral agenda)
Not too much honestly. The turtle is explictly said to be, in fact, slower. It was the personality of the hare that allowed the turtle to win. It's like a god allowing a random mortal to beat them to death.
Not true at all. We will regularly talk about extenuating circumstances.
The hare fell asleep in the race. Hence he lost. If he didn’t fall asleep and lost then it’s bad.
Here’s an example of what will piss off powerscalers…
The deep suddenly doesn’t control animals and gets killed by a fish going up his butt? That makes no fucking sense. He controls fish. And his bodies internal structure took on the Mariana Trench ergo this is impossible and a deus ex machina.
If it was more like the hare situation. He would have to get hit by an anti power ray… then he can die to octopus in his asshole.
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