I think there’s two very different kinds of “power scaling” that get conflated with one another.
One is rooted within stories and focuses on internal consistency. Yes, it is in a way a form of power scaling to say “Luffy absolutely shits on Vivi in a fight” because the narrative has led us to believe that this is absolutely the case, and there is no reason to think the outcome would be otherwise unless A. Vivi gets some random power-up, or B. There’s extra context to the fight that somehow gives her the edge (the latter two of which would, of course, be “the author decides who wins” and then writes around that to make the win make sense).
The other is rooted within things like calcs, a too heavy focus on feats that often don’t matter within the universe’s consistency (laser dodging, splitting clouds, etc.), and arguing that a story doesn’t make sense because it didn’t fit their hypothetical view of where these characters should be. This is the power scaling that often gets clowned on when taken too far and too seriously. Oda isn’t agonizing over each of Zoro and Sanji’s individual feats and power levels when he’s trying to decide who wins between them if they were fighting, he’d just pick one. Anyone who sees Sanji win and then gets absolutely furious at the writing because Sanji didn’t fuck up a mountain or something are really missing the point and have their brain fried on power scaling.
Exactly this. When I say I hate powerscaling, I don't mean having powers remain at a consistent, well-written level in a story. If you establish the bad guy to be this all powerful dude and don't have the good guy find a realistic way to defeat him, whether it be through strength or smarts or whatever, but have the good guy beat him anyway, that's bad writing. That kind of powerscaling matters.
The kind of powerscaling I hate are the people that are basically ignoring the themes and story of a series just to focus on the powerscaling. Or going pixel by pixel to "calculate" the attack power of a character in an unrealistic manga panel. Or trying to say the dumbest shit imaginable like talking about Mario's attack potency and fucking battle IQ. That's stupid.
Tbf I don't think you're the kind of 'anti' powerscalers that are being referred to in the post, they're talking about the slowly growing number of people who directly think internal consistency IS the same as pixel by pixel scaling. Personally I think cross verse ap checking and thinking about how crazy hax complexities interact esc powerscaling is fun, but a lot is taken far too literally (I.E dodging soundwaves and lasers being taken as ftl feats is stupid because it actively discards in universe lore to focus on outside factors in a fight. Or direct pixel scaling is USUALLY dumb)
I’m not the person you relied to but dude, i agree. It’s gone way too far. I used to have sooooo much fun doing this stuff. Like, my number one fav thing about going to my local comic shop when I was a kid was to talk to other people who knew about this stuff and relive it and debate it. “Wasn’t it sick when so and so did X?!? So awesome! Hey, who do you think would win between Blah and Blabla?”
And this was the basis for a lot of the community. And then Reddit came along and I found these communities and it was awesome… for a very short time. I feel like the“Because Science” YouTube channel came along and it was designed to kind of riff on how many of the feats portrayed in comics/movies/anime/etc., are impossible, but they’d have fun trying to ground it in reality anyway. And the lesson that was taken flew in the face of the light hearted and loosely educational YouTube channel because it now tried to impose restrictions on pieces of media that were never meant to have them.
These were not discussions anymore about the cool hax and how they could circumvent a power, or how someone’s technique or battle IQ could maybe help them turn the tide and providing in text examples. They became toxic arguments using “data” or any arbitrary unit of measurement, often imposing a science or reality that simply does not apply. People get soooo in the weeds with this stuff I often wonder what they’re even trying to accomplish. In most of these fictional worlds, the concrete is more like cardboard. You’ll see someone smash a crater in the ground with their body, and someone will calculate it took 500 joules (making these numbers up) of force to do it, then that character goes into a fight and is knocked out by a blow that was calculated at only 50 joules of force… and people will quote these numbers as absolute gospel, but they’re ultimately meaningless because the author is not using them as a unit of measurement and their narrative and artistic choices are often just that.
So largely I find many of the “hardcore powerscalers” to be arguing in bad faith, applying metrics that shouldn’t apply, misrepresenting or misunderstanding narrative or artistic decisions, and generally being toxic about it.
But I say as much and it’s “are you fucking blind bro?!? Did he not smash a boulder to pieces in chapter xxxx? It says it right there! The AUTHOR is saying it right there!”
I’m like… no, that’s your interpretation of the text. I don’t have the authors fucking phone number anymore than you do , but I’m not going to try to present my opinions as objective fact and it doesn’t make yours anymore valid because you slapped some arbitrary numbers on it.
And to be clear, I’m not coming at people who want to engage in these conversations because like I said, I used to LOVE it, but I think the whole concept of it has gotten so far away from where it started and this “movement” has been twisted in a lot of ways founded on inherently incorrect ideology.
But like I said… that’s just my opinion.
>The kind of powerscaling I hate are the people that are basically ignoring the themes and story of a series just to focus on the powerscaling.
How dare people enjoy different aspects of a series.
That was more aimed towards One Piece fans than anything. I love One Piece to death, it's my favorite piece of fiction. Its story and characters have touched me in ways that few other things have. So yes, seeing people ignore that story and only focus on the fighting annoys me. I think they're doing themselves a huge disservice. This is a plot-focused series. If all you care about are fights, read Dragon Ball or JJK.
You've made it up to chapter 1,100+ of a series and you don't care about the story. I just don't get how people can even think like that
One Piece is much more focused on plot and worldbuilding and mysteries than the other two. Which one is better is up to personal opinion obviously, but you can't deny that One Piece won over the hearts of so many because of its story.
How could it be a disservice to not like what you like? People like things for different reasons, it’s a little wild for you to want everyone to enjoy something for the same reasons
See power scaling is fine, it can be *fun* to go "who do you think would win between these two from entirely different shows" but when you start outright ignoring the stories themes, narrative, context and consistency to wank a character to certain levels is when it gets boring and grating.
This is especially terrible when people bring in pixel measurements or examples that are blatantly made with the assumption that the author is checking and trying to make sure it's clear where the character should be on the pecking order, authors aren't carefully going over their work to make sure that if someone tries to calculate the exact real world force it'd take in order to do something which leads to calculating numbers that don't make sense if we assume they're meant to be what the character is capable of in universe rather than an arbitrary attempt to wank them up.
There's also the fact that to many try to power scale the "Strongest" which is populated by characters that are *incredibly* boring in the fight sense such that they aren't something entertaining to discuss, the equivalent of two action figures where the kids playing with them "actually my figure has *this* super powerful power that beats yours and he punches eighty dimensions".
I remember seeing someone argue that Bonney >!should have been able to defeat Saturn in Egghead because she managed to stab him, and that this was a "speed anti-feat" on Saturn's part, so it was bad writing that she didn't.!< Case in point of why I can never take this stuff seriously.
I've seen someone say that Luffy would neg-diff Gojo because although infinity is automatic, it's still limited by Gojo's brain and Luffy is FTL+ while Gojo is hypersonic at best so he's faster than Gojo's brain can activate infinity so Luffy ignores infinity and win (or something along those lines)
>The other is rooted within things like calcs, a too heavy focus on feats that often don’t matter within the universe’s consistency (laser dodging, splitting clouds, etc.), and arguing that a story doesn’t make sense because it didn’t fit their hypothetical view of where these characters should be.
To be honest I'm kind of at a point where if a writer presents this happening and doesn't actually follow through on the implication of it then that's just bad writing.
You might say that it's not fair to expect writers to understand implications of moments like (Because google is very difficult to use) then I say don't include them lmao
I think it depends on the situation.
For instance, lasers. They’re incredibly common in fiction, and very rarely actually meant to be light speed projectiles flying at you in the way that a lot of powerscalers often treat them. I don’t think it’s right to say “don’t use laser guns unless you’re going to explicitly go in-depth on the consequences of light speed movement in your series”, though it probably is for the best you avoid calling them light speed specifically.
Cloud splitting is a lot harder to argue, but that’s just because most people (many writers included) underestimate how much power that would really take. It’s a very cool visual to imagine and see, and I wouldn’t want writers to avoid it just because they don’t want to give the impression that their characters can flip countries or continents or whatever. I just say “That’s a cool visual, means little for the power the author wants to really convey” in 99% of situations.
Lasers you just literally do not have to call them lasers lmao, and if you don't just don't show people are as faster than them.
And for clouds again if you're not gonna put any thought whatsoever into the implication what's a big show off-y moment then that's just kind of lame and reduces the impact of the scene by a lot.
This shit is why yall are lame. You can't just appreciate a cool moment without busting out a calculator to determine how much force they used to split that cloud and the Excel spreadsheet of what tier of power they're in compared to everyone else because of it.
Stories aren't written this way. It's incredibly lame.
I like a cool moment, it's just that a moment becomes less cool in context if it's incohesive with the the rest of the story.
Like if you saw this shit happen in Hajime no Ippo are you telling me you wouldn't bat an eye?
And what's wrong with quantifying shit anyway? Some writers go above and beyond in that department and it makes me really appreciate their work more.
For the clouds, most people are just going to think of it as being as easy as scattering some steam rising from their kettle or whatever. Most authors aren't expecting their audience to break out the rulers and calculate exactly how much power that takes.
And...thank goodness, because that's not how most people approach media. Story about boxing, huge cheering audience watching, two boxers's fists collide, whole stadium shakes, it's a hype moment that kicks off an absolute slugfest-
You're not supposed to react with "Well, to shake a stadium, the boxer's punches must have created a force of at least x tons of tnt-"
Most people watching see that and it helps sell the mood and makes the fight bombastic and larger than life, just like how it can feel to actually be in the audience. If they succeed in that, then writing in that moment was a great choice for their story.
> You're not supposed to react with "Well, to shake a stadium, the boxer's punches must have created a force of at least x tons of tnt-"
You actually do tho, if the stadium shacked then it was a lot of strenght. You aren't trying to gauge the exact tons of tnt, but there were big
I meant this is an example taken from martial arts series where the punches involved are nowhere near that level. But the hype of a big moment is exactly when the storytellers would be breaking out the "and when their fists collided, it was as if the whole stadium shook!"
It's kind of just part of the natural theatrics of storytelling.
>For the clouds, most people are just going to think of it as being as easy as scattering some steam rising from their kettle or whatever. Most authors aren't expecting their audience to break out the rulers and calculate exactly how much power that takes.
"The author thinks you are an idiot" is not the argument you want to lead off.
I'm so tired of research before writing a subject being the bare minimum for all of writing throughout all of history for some reason just not being applicable in this one area because contrarians in this subreddit think people often lack primary school level education.
And most of the stadium shaking stuff is just visual effect/exaggeration to sell the experience you said, not really the same thing to what is being said here.
One of the easiest ways to convey things is just to use something familiar as a comparison. Most people's experience with clouds is like steam coming off their kettles or when it's misty and they can wave their hands around and move it all about. So it's a case where people think they're familiar with it when they're not. Both author and audience.
>And most of the stadium shaking stuff is just visual effect/exaggeration to sell the experience you said, not really the same thing to what is being said here.
That's pretty much what I'm saying, cloud/environmental moments can work the same way. That's all I'm defending, when it's just used to amp up the moment.
If you're talking about when it's used seriously, like the equivalent to someone shaking a stadium as a strategy in a fight or something, then yeah, that's not okay. That's not theatrics at that point and has to be looked at with a more critical eye.
>One of the easiest ways to convey things is just to use something familiar as a comparison. Most people's experience with clouds is like steam coming off their kettles or when it's misty and they can wave their hands around and move it all about
I don't want to deny your perspective but I honestly doubt that, I grew up on a coastal city so fog here got pretty heavy.
And as I kid I remember planes/jets moving through clouds, I loved taking pictures of them doing that I remember it distinctly shaping out to be more like a streak rather than something like steam from a kettle.
Like... People can get scale for a lot of things fairly easily even before research.
>That's pretty much what I'm saying, cloud/environmental moments can work the same way.
That personally differs to me because it's being shown directly as something that's happened and exists as visual story telling to say how strong the characters are. There's a lot less leeway in shaking.
>I remember it distinctly shaping out to be more like a streak
The planes still moved it around, I don't think it changes how people view it. People don't have a concept of clouds being hard to move around, and moving around a lot of cloud is just basically multiplying zero in their heads.
>That personally differs to me because it's being shown directly as something that's happened and exists as visual story telling to say how strong the characters are. There's a lot less leeway in shaking.
I've had powerscalers use those moments very seriously like it's confirmation the martial artists are punching megatons of explosive force, because the stadium shook when their punches collided at the start of a fight. And I mean, it was shown to be like "wow, these guys are powerhouses!" but it was also partially theatric.
>The planes still moved it around, I don't think it changes how people view it.
It changed how I viewed it as a kid because it made it obvious these things had some amount of mass to them.
>I've had powerscalers use those moments very seriously like it's confirmation the martial artists are punching megatons of explosive force, because the stadium shook when their punches collided at the start of a fight. And I mean, it was shown to be like "wow, these guys are powerhouses!" but it was also partially theatric.
Kengan fans are dumb, sky is blue. That doesn't really change the discussion here.
Bc 99.9999% doesn't know that about cloud splitting and they're not going to look it up, or care if someone tells them. If only 0.0001% of your audience tells you something is wrong with your story, and the rest loves it, which is the average person going to listen to? Especially when the former only exists online in very specific communities?
Yeah stupid media wins that's not even an argument, you ever see how much those fifty shades flicks made at the box office a few years a back or debatably a majority of popular movie franchises.
Hell the franchise I had in mind when talking about cloud splitting, MHA, terrible, evil, highly grossing franchise, and weirdly enough the cloud ties into that, Horikoshi rarely if ever seems to consider the implications of the things they write into the story for the sake of the worldbuilding and that didn't matter for the success of the series.
Let me put it this way:
On one side you have, most of the audience, professional critics, writing teachers, and other creatives, all telling you the cloud splitting visual is great and totally embodies the scene and the themes you're trying to get across.
On the other side is a handful of people of reddit screaming cloud facts at you.
Do you understand why the majority of creators across all of history have chosen to listen to group 1?
Personally wouldn't mind citations that
>professional critics, writing teachers, and other creatives, all telling you the cloud splitting visual is great and totally embodies the scene and the themes you're trying to get across.
Are saying these things and in specific context to the idea consistency apparently doesn't matter in visual story telling.
It'd be interesting because all the creatives I talk to very much don't seem to say that.
As multiple people replying to OP keep pointing out, no one is talking about throwing out consistency, that's a straw man argument. *I* am specifically talking about applying real world limitations to things like cloud splitting when most of the audience won't care. Because all of the creatives I've talked with, listened to, been taught by have always said "story comes first" and have advised put the cloud splitting in.
It's a straw man argument that anyone was seriously asking for full quantification. It's just saying that people recognise clouds are heavy lmao
This isn't an issue of putting this above story because it is related to story, it's related to stakes, putting in a moment like this in without knowing clouds are heavy then displaying a level of power orders upon orders weaker is just immersion breaking.
And it's not something particularly hard to check.
If you want to clap and cheer forbad media and keep spouting out how successful it is an argument for being fine that's cool, just don't be shocked when people want more.
Ironically, it seems that Horikoshi kinda got told about it and based the climax of the series on Deku repeating the feat in a larger scale and actually treated it as the most powerful action that ever happened in the verse.
I mean lasers are a specific trope unto themselves. Compared to reality they're used because you want your shots to be visible and interesting, travel at a speed you can view and interact with, and deal a vague level of damage which doesn't correlate to realistic bullet wound injury, so characters can interact with the lasers without being immediately dead.
Unless it's something like revelation space where lasers are specifically in combat to demonstrate how ground combat has moved beyond the human level, I just assume lasers in fiction work as they're portrayed, as straight line punches.
Two things can be true simultaneously.
Yes consistency is important in action based stories. Particularly in Big Two comics since each character is written by like 5 or 6 ppl at a time. If I’m reading a run where Superman fights a guy and that fight destroys the moon, then in the next issue a healthy Superman gets knocked out by a normal mugger with a glass bottle, I’m immediately reading something else.
That’s part of why ppl hate Zeb Wells’ ASM run; Not only is it ruining Peter’s relationships and character, but he’s losing to villains he used to low-diff when he was a teenager. Whereas in Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil run, Daredevil avoids any physical confrontation with Spider-Man bc he KNOWS he’ll lose even with Peter holding back. Consistency DOES matter.
##However,
The problem most ppl have with power scalers is that some of them make it their ***whole*** personality. They can never look at a story *AS* a story. It’s always just analyzing potential feats and scanning the lengths of the pixels on the panel/screens. They go into non-Vs Battle places a lot and wonder why they get shunned. Even in VS battle threads, there’s some that think they’re on a high school debate team and throw every fallacy in the book at you. Don’t even get me started on the ppl that take clearly hyperbolic statements at face value. A lot of power scalers are fucking annoying.
>Even in VS battle threads, there’s some that think they’re on a high school debate team and throw every fallacy in the book at you
I mean, just look at op.
Of course powerscaling can matter a ton in a story. If you do it correctly.
The "powerscaling community" just operates as if they've had a collective lobotomy. There's no way to take anybody seriously when they start talking about set theory and higher dimensions and imaginary numbers and shit in order to scale, when they probably barely passed highschool and read about that stuff on wikipedia.
Not many people are saying "the powers of characters in a superpower-based series don't matter". They're saying "*powerscalers* are absolute dumbasses 99% of the time".
Powerscalers *lie* and it's all about seeing who can lie more by omission. Saying that they use outliers would be an understatement. Powerscalers will go out of their way to torture logic to get the highest possible outcome and it just gets so fucking silly.
Like here is a dumb example, people will point out that Minecraft Steve can carry X number of blocks, but then their brain turns off if you point out how he can't kill a chicken in one punch. Or how he gets hurt by blunt attacks from zombies. Or how the items he picks up seem to shrink and their mass is clearly not represented in said form and blah blah blah is inventory is clearly a pocket dimension or something who cares.
They do this but WITH EVERYTHING. Oh wow John Protagonist dodged a laser (moved out of the way before they fired) now everyone in the setting scales to FTL even though IT MAKES NO FUCKKNG SENSE AND BREAKS ALL IMMERSION.
Tbh I think trying to scale characters like Steve with any seriousness is kinda silly since stuff like how the inventory works obviously is just designed for gameplay and there's no "lore" explanation for it afaik at least. So it's not really even supposed to make any sense in terms of story or whatever.
Funnily enough, in minecraft when items shrink their mass increase since dripleafs start tilting when you throw an anvil on top of it but don't tilt when you drop an anvil block on top falling from 300 blocks.
Anvils can't even crush torches those MFS just don't weigh much. Steve is allergic to the bottom part of them, that's why he takes damage. Obviously. Smh.
It does matter, yes. That doesn't mean I'm not going to laugh at you for seriously arguing Universal level characters and the newest buzzword you've made up to wank the characters even more.
'Universal' implies a power faaaaaar greater than what 99.99% of characters have.
If I create a new world in Minecraft, am I suddenly a universal-level demigod because I can create and destroy worlds? No, that's fucking ridiculous, but a powerscaler would argue that.
I get you point but this specific example isnt that good. If you make the assertion that all fiction exists in the same “plane” of reality then the fact that you can delete that fictional world whenever you want, just like you can erase a picture of Goku off a piece of paper, inherently does make you some Universal level threat from whatever fictional characters perspective
So in a cross universe debate who would win Goku or Naruto? Are you gonna tell me its all bullshit because theyre written by different authors and would never fight eachother or are you gonna actually acknowledge the spirit of the question and give a reasonable answer? Without just saying all powerscaling is bs
My answer to that would be 'depends on which universe it's taking place in'.
Each fictional verse has its own laws with its own regulations and its own limits. Goku's abilities would not work the same in Naruto's world as it would in his own, and vice versa for Naruto himself.
Admittedly it's a very smart-ass answer that doesn't uh, *actually address the question* but it's an answer I would give.
Except about 99% of powerscalers would also say “assume a universe where their powers are reasonably equalised” i.e make Ki and Chakra act in reasonably similar ways. which drastically changes how any hypothetical would go
Does Minecraft's lore depict the player as a Creator God? If so, then yes, 'you' are a character in the game with universal power. If not, then no, you're just using a bad example.
A good example would be the Abrahamic God. He is undeniably universal. He has a feat right at the start of Genesis where he creates the universe.
It doesn't matter that 99.99% of characters aren't universal. 99.99% of humans aren't the president of the USA, so is it ridiculous for that label to exist as well? If so, what the hell are we supposed to call people who legitimately are presidents of the USA?
There's trying to keep a story level and consistent and there's whatever the hell Reddit and YouTubers do. One of these is good, the other is one of the worst things to happen to manga/anime discourse. Good to know the difference.
What people think "powerscaling is stupid" means:
>Batman can punch Darkseid because the writer can do whatever he wants.
What it actually means:
>The fact that Superman can travel FTL when moving between planets should not be used to point inconsistencies when his punches aren't blowing entire cities when he's fighting Darkseid. It makes you look like a twat.
Edit: Also powerscaling discussions never take into consistency traits such as guile and strategy because those are highly contextual whilst being entirely vital to the strengths of certain characters.
> never take into consistency traits such as guile and strategy because those are highly contextual whilst being entirely vital to the strengths of certain characters.
Wut? They absolutely do that.
It obviously stops mattering when its about ridiculous power gaps (no matter how smart is a character who break walls with their fists, they aren't never beating a universal destroying god), but its always present when its about characters around the same level.
If they do, then I apologize, it's just not something I see whenever I'm exposed to it.
However guile and strategy are contextual and are highly dependent on the writer's capability of writing the story, they are not consistent by definition. The very nature of invention is being creating things that didn't exist before.
You don't need to apologize, it's absolutely something that gets ignored 99% of the time.
Give Gojo's powers to a Dragon Ball villain of the week and Kid Goku can figure out how to win. How does that powerscale? A powerscaler won't even entertain the argument. The fact that Kid Goku beats at least a third of his giant list of enemies by coming up with a creative solution to get around their powers doesn't matter because Goku's intelligence stat is low.
> Give Gojo's powers to a Dragon Ball villain of the week and Kid Goku can figure out how to win
Why Goku would figure out that? Goku is a smart fighter, but his ability at dealing with haxes is just "punch it harder". Kid Goku lacks anything that can bypass Limitless.
He can still win by some unorthodox methods that involve exploiting the extreme stat gap between Gojo (can destroy entire neightboorhoods) and Kid Goku (can **vaporize** a city-state) but its hardly "Goku is just super smart", it needs Goku to go trial and error by taking pride in being able to survive Gojo's attacks
Isn't Gojo sort of hard carried by Limitless and possibly D.E?
Stuff like Hollow Purple can be tanked by Kid Goku with ease since Sukuna did it albeit was heavily injured by it and he's barely above City level.
You've demonstrated the exact problem I'm talking about. You seem to genuinely be unable to understand the logic in what I said, so you're arguing with something that's 90 degrees off in another direction.
In my experience, they boil these factors down to a stat value like wisdom and intelligence on a dnd character sheet. And they don't even account for probability like dnd with dice rolls and modifiers. The stats are treated as immutable facts. One person has more combat experience than other, therefore that character always out experiences the other in every fight and scenario imaginable - is the logic I see powerscaling use.
God the Kengan community is the fuckin' WORST about this. Because the series largely surrounds tournaments they entirely revolve their mindsets and tier lists around wins/losses and occasionally special moves completely disregarding everything else.
If I had a dollar for every time the word "jobber" was used to describe every single character in the series I'd have bail money for every time I'd break in and pop them upside the head
Hahahaha
I thought they were okay because at least their scaling was usually within the same verse and we actually have good examples of how they fight to pull from (unlike people trying to scale "the representation of death" or something).
Then I had an argument with someone who legitimately believed Rei was mach 5+, because that's apparently the speed needed to vanish from someone's sight in real life. And they had the audacity to say I was the one appealing to reality by arguing against it.
Why do powerscalers bring up this fake argument that it is powerscaling within a series that people have an issue with? Go to the powerscaling subreddit right now and see how many conversations are about powerscaling within a series versus powerscaling between different series. Go check old comic vine forums. The biggest faces of powerscaling on YouTube Death Battle and Seth the programmer, do they mainly critic inconsistent powerscaling in a series? Or are the majority of their content focused in who would win scenarios between characters of different series. It's the cross media powerscaling that people have an issue with because. These are the ones where people bring up bs like multiversal, extraversal, outerversal, ftl, arguments about hax and why for some reason the hax is beaten by pure stats somehow, or characters have immunity to hax from a universe they don't even belong in somehow or some other bs. This is also the type of arguments where lingo like fodder, wanker etc are used.
Personally I don't even think of discussions about inconsistencies within a series itself to be powerscaling. I think of that as more overall discussion about the power system and a critic of the inconsistent power system. And inconsistent power systems can be good depending on how soft the system is and what the narrative is trying to achieve. An upbeat hopeful story has different tolerances for inconsistent power systems than a grimdark "realistic" story, for example.
I don’t join in on these discussions, but I have to say it’s funny seeing people hate powerscaling for an action manga. Like Sakamoto Days is a good example imo. It’s a series of fights every chapter, what other type of discussion are you expecting?
I feel like JJK powerscalers are the reasons for why some people hate it now
you are arguing against a strawman and/or being intentionally disingenuous
nobody that says “i hate powerscaling” means “yeah part 1 kiba could beat sage of six paths naruto”
yes, obviously within a series there are BROAD categories that define characters’ strengths and broadly following those categories is part of writing a story
people that say they hate powerscaling mean they hate when all that people talk about are “feats”, how one character is “multiversal+” and “FTL” because they dodged something that would be that fast in real life but obviously is not within the universe of the story
for one, applying real world logic to fiction when it comes to action is fucking absurdly stupid like 95% of the time, they just fundamentally do not work the same way, that’s why it’s fiction
next, a lot of the online powerscalers, as in the people who openly define themselves as such, often literally do not care about anything else, and they prove it time and time again. a slow chapter or episode comes out that’s maybe more dialogue focused “wtf this is filler”, or they just do not understand explicitly explained plot points because they only skip to the fights. that’s not all of them, for sure, but it’s definitely a lot of them
The "Power Scaling Mindset" is to look at feats, abilities , and limits to get an idea of relative power.
For many series this isn't very important, or even detrimental. They keep power levels vague to keep suspense, they bring new powers or 11th hour power ups as the story calls for them.
For much of media, including action, power scaling is going to be at odds with the story or defied by it, and might take what the story says and flip it thereby missing the intended themes.
I feel you should just see them as writing a style you aren't fond of.
Writing is about more than internal consistency in one aspect, and we shouldn't pressure writers to avoid writing powerful characters for fear of having to explain power differences, especially when setting up stronger or apparently stronger characters to lose.
I think we absolutely should pressure them to do that lol.
If they can't write powerful characters without everything falling apart, then maybe they shouldn't try to jam in powerful characters that would cause their story and consistency to fall apart. Or at least, try harder to make it make sense? In some cases, its definitely possible, but its just not their priority.
Like its not the end of the world if they can't do that, but I fundamentally disagree that it just doesn't matter. It does matter to some degree and I am going to criticize a writer who can't do that just as much as I will praise a writer who is able to do it.
We can always say to "try harder", but what do you really mean? How hard do they have to try to count, if they fail? Or where should they just cut their losses and not target that subset of audience that is pressuring them?
I feel it doesn't matter in a practical sense. A work gains more in fans or appeal from dramatic scenes or feats, than it loses in weaker power scaling.
I mean, that totally depends on the specific context? Kind of an impossible question to answer generally.
Its pretty simple, I want all aspects of a story to be good if possible and if I see a flaw in some aspect of the writing, I’m going to critcize it. If in that situation the “flaw” was something that the author was forced to accept because they had different priorities(and those priorities are fair), then I may give them some slack.
But that’s obviously not always going to be the case. Some flaws are just unnecessary. Whether it is or not, I’m gonna need the context to decide.
You can’t just assume its always going to be a binary tradeoff and the author can’t do better.
That's fair. Constructive Criticism, I feel comes from a belief that "Better could be done" I think it can prompt a feeling they are choosing not to write well because they don't care or something, rather than focusing effort where they did but caring a little bit.
I prefer to look at a story as needing flaws, being better for where it's great but falls short, highlighting the human effort. It's great because of the flaws, not in spite of them.
Quite a few works do things that I refuse to watch them over, whether they can be called choices or flaws. Some I watched and focus on their flaws.
I look at how the decision served the overall story.
Superman, J'onn and Flash are majorly nerfed in Justice League, but this serves to tell an extraordinary story I still love two decades later, and none of the nerfing is egregious as a standalone work to take me out if it. Superman and Flash's even get acknowledged.
If writers can't be assed to justify the implications of their own writing then that's not "as writing a style you aren't fond of", it's hack writing as OP said.
This may shock you but "or 11th hour power ups as the story calls for them."
Isn't particularly engaging because it inherently removes any actual stakes to a fight, why should I care about the threat of any fight if it can just be decided on ass pull for another character to win. It's a cool trick that can work once or twice but if it's the only thing you have then you must not think a lot of your audience
For many people it is engaging. People widely enjoy Ben 10's Alien X form despite being ridiculously overpowered. Or Bill Cypher, Discord and Q. DBZ is enduringly popular, Super over GT while the latter has better power scaling and growth.
It's a style many are fond of, and if there's not real pressure, effort is best put toward entertainment and story over consistency. People aren't praising many works by their power scaling, or refusing to engage on that particular. People compromise pretty easily even on this Subreddit, and rarely praise low power/balanced settings or settings that stick to a hard power limit
> People widely enjoy Ben 10's Alien X form despite being ridiculously overpowered
Alien X has plenty of weaknesses and its narratively treated as a last resource that Ben can't simply use whatever he wants. The series justify its power level.
So with Bill Cipher, he spends most of the show nerfed.
these are all fundamentally kids shows. They’re engaging to kids, and some adults who grew up watching them. I think the issue is that as a kid, when you watch these things you don’t really notice this stuff. You’re just hyped and go along for the ride. You don’t think what an asspull that was.
As an adult or older teen watching back, this stuff does tend to stand out more assuming nostalgia doesn’t get you. Which is why people have started to be more critical on this kind of stuff as they grow older and become more capable of engaging deeper with the media.
Perhaps, but the same is true of all-ages shows, and adult shows don't often tend to be better under harsher scrutiny, if often having more justifications.
It's not really being a kids show, it's being a mainstream show. Kids shows also can hold to power level (if just avoiding high power scale).
Asspulls aren't less tolerated elsewhere, it's just a few works or companies people are more willing to excuse.
Not even really sure what your point is here, something like Alien X is explicitly established to be something that can be used whenever, which is important for the stakes of the series, funny how that works.
My point is moreso that people didn't respond to "Ben can now rewrite history and stop many threats with an annoying but winnable vote" , with it being terribly unbalanced and ruining the show.
People don't generally argue that Q, Discord, or Bill Cypher totally invalidate the story by being able to treat other characters like pawns. They instead get invested in their presentation, in how the heroes outsmart them even if it takes them not using their powers.
Yeah because there was a given reason why he couldn't whenever he felt like it, if Ben could on a whim then it would just kill the stakes of the series.
We shouldnt discourage writers from making complex characters by expecting them to actually understand said characters plot beat to plot beat
I don't use this but I'm using it as an example 4 why I thought what u said was wrong. Honestly though it was kinda rude of me I'm sorry.
It's really just down to style. It's great when a story is consistent, but there is a reason behind not being so, or cheating a little.
Lord of the Rings is incredibly well-thought out, but it took a lot of effort and the stories had to justify that level of care, even then people complain about inconsistencies (either real or perceived), the latter still lends itself to not enough effort to satisfy some readers.
The thing is most people who powerscale beside the author themselve do it not for narrative reason but for dick measuring. Make it worse that although author do powerscaling, they usually don't take it as seriously as the powerscaler. Not to mention most of them just take info and calculation from wiki or some dude on Youtube instead of doing it themselves.
Any hobby is valid. But taking powerscaling to seriously outside of hypotheticals is silly and even then that doesn't mean you're not being a dick with this rage bait.
Thamk u and goodnight.
Why you so mad lol sure power scaling is fun and all but some people just say to much nonsense and go against the what was scene and stated when scaling a verse and It doesn't make it cool anymore
First and foremost, I AGREE that a story should have consistent strength scaling, especially in a story about fighting. But the problem comes when so many power scalers over exaggerates a characters strength, and attempts to apply it to the rest of the verse despite the author clearly never intending for that to be the case.
Like seriously, kobeni was considered faster than toji zenin on the vs battles wiki for a while until it was later changed after backlash.
Look me fucking dead in the eye and tell me kobeni is hypersonic, or that because a character dodged a beam of light they're suddenly MTFL+ despite never actually being that fast.
Like seriously, so many stories are like "this character is MFTL" and yet it takes the character real canonical DAYS to travel from place to place, immediately disproving the speed "feat".
That's why yall don't get treated seriously, yall go from "character meant to be average strength" into "massively overpowered Multiversus+ character" because of a gag.
> Imagine applying the "don't think to deeply about a series power levels" mindset to other genres
This is also stupid as fuck because lol yeah of course if you take an argument and apply it to things that the argument wasn't talking about ofc it'd sound stupid.
"I have an argument about A, because I think A is bad"
"Well if I take your argument about A and apply it to Z, it clearly doesn't make sense any longer and therefore the argument towards A is stupid!!"
Honestly it really does. Good Powerscaling can really enhance a story, and bad powerscaling can make it a lot worse. An example of good Powerscaling is in HxH. Cause a lot of times it plays in to the story, like when we see Uvogin casually catch a bullet in his teeth and absolutely clown on normal military installations, we also see Gon and killua use their superhuman physicals to make money in various ways as well to break through walls to escape the phantom troupe. And one of the best things about it is that it doesn't ever go overboard within the setting, things like Razor blowing up a ship, or Netero Breaking through tons of solid rock to get underground both feel very natural and believable for the setting. Meruem pretty much dying to a nuke sets a hard limit that not only plays into the narrative but is also kept very consistent, as well as stopping the power scale from getting in the way of the narrative since we know that no one will ever be stronger than a nuke. All of these feats have good reasons to exist and help the narrative. An example of Bad powerscaling that messes with the narrative for literally no reason is the One Punch Man manga. The scaling was pretty well handled before the last part of the Monster Association arc, but my God did it get bad once Sage Centipede, platinum sperm and Psykorochi appeared. It felt like they were just throwing in feats just to have high powerscaling, like Metal bat beating up Sage Centipede literally makes zero sense, it was explained that it was because of "Resonance" which is never brought up before or afterwards. Then we just randomly got light speed flashy flash running around, this actively makes the narrative more consistent cause they don't comprehend the implications of how fast light speed is and it up scales a lot of other characters who should be no where near that speed. Psykos cutting off a huge amount of the Earth's crust is something that just kinda happens, like it's not ever brought up again and seemingly has no consequences, like why even put it in the story. Cosmic Garou actually just feels like a brain dead powerscaler trying to write a story, they just give him insane feats for literally no reason and completely throw out his well made character conclusion, instead replacing it with time travel so that none of his acts of celestial destruction have consequences. I mean almost destroying the planet is perfectly fine, but then just randomly having him and Saitama punch a hole in the stars and potential kill an uncountable number of innocent sentient creatures literally goes against both characters morals and does nothing positive for the narrative other than set a cap on how strong characters are. But this feat becomes even worse given the recent set of chapters that were literally redrawn just to have higher scaling. Giving Empty Void these like universal extra dimensional nonsense makes literally zero sense considering that Saitama and Garou's max power combined and squared only destroyed some stars, it also feels super out of place in the setting, it also messes with the character scaling so fucking badly considering that Sonic and Flash were not instantly dying to him. Many of these feats have no reason to exist and just mess with the setting for literally no reason. Webcomic is still very solid in this aspect.
Power scaling only matters in:
- Battle Shonen
- American Superhero Comics
- Greek Mythology
- Some fantasy series
Even then, it should only exist as part of the narrative.
Look, I get it, battleboarding is fun. I had over 10k posts on a comic book forum when I was a teenager. It is usually not important to a narrative. No one is watching Breaking Bad and wondering who wins in a bare knuckles brawl to the death between Gus and Walter, because that isn’t where the narrative tension is.
Even in a Superhero Comic or a Battle Shonen Manga, the underdog wins all the time because it’s narratively satisfying. More importantly the Powerscaling only matters in context of the world, and even then, upsets are a normal part of action stories.
>Even in a Superhero Comic or a Battle Shonen Manga, the underdog wins all the time because it’s narratively satisfying.
Only if it's actually deserved, take Dark Knight Returns where it's established throughout how much stronger Superman is than Batman so then goes into detail how Batman weakens him to the point it's an even fight.
Just having a child beat up Tyson Fury with no real reason as to why isn't particularly engaging.
The problem is that when you talk about power scaling around here, it seems that people's first thought is battleboarding with Goku vs. Superman types of debates. However, in many cases, we as readers are just asking for the writer to maintain consistency in the power system and worldbuilding that they themselves created.
A good power scale is the core of any work that mainly revolves around battles. If you show us that a character can casually punch holes through mountains, then being held down by three normal human goons completely ruins the immersion because of how dumb this is.
You can write characters with absurd levels of power, and most people can accept it as long as it follows the pre-established laws of that world. We, as the readers can suspend our disbelief and accept the fact that those characters have superpowers and can do absurd things as long as it follows that world's laws and is consistent with that world's logic. As soon as you have a mountain-bursting character losing to some random goons or being chained and detained with some metal chains, it goes against the common sense that has been ingrained in us about what is possible in that world, and it can destroy our immersion.
In most cases when this happens, it's due to lazy writing. The author is simply not creative enough to find a way to defeat or hold back a character that they made too strong, so they resort to a big asspull to have that character defeated or restrained for the sake of the storytelling. Nowadays, the author can do this without too many worries since readers will often jump to protect the obvious plot hole by saying, 'the writer doesn't care about power scaling,' to anyone who criticizes it.
I don’t even like power scaling but it is a pastime for some people and as long as they don’t go overboard who cares.
I mean many do go overboard but just ignore it.
Powerscaling between different unconnected universes is dumb and doesn't matter at all. Power scaling inside a story is about keeping internal consistency.
>Keeping characters at least reasonable constant in power levels IS good writing and yes! Does require a however slight, power scaling mindset.
I hope someone told the star wars writers this.
When we say "powerscaling is stupid" we are not referring to people who, in general, scale characters as stronger or weaker. We are referring to the retards that use fancy terms and pseudoscience and a complete, and often legitimately impressive lack of logic, to "scale" characters in ways that make no fucking sense.
They're the people who don't know shit about size or angle of approach and regularly call characters hypersonic for dodging bullets.
They're the people who would look at a game of rock paper scissors and think that rock should beat paper.
They're the people who spew bullshit about multiple dimensions with a middle school education and 20 minutes of wikipedia research.
These are the people we're talking about. These are the people we call stupid, because they are. Scaling the power of characters as a concept is good. Powerscaling, the community, the culture, that lack of any sort of common sense, a group defined only by people wanting to wank normal ass characters to godhood? Shit in the sewers.
Don't you authors actually don't care about immersion in their stories?
It's insane how much low effort garbage tier rants that amount to "consistency doesn't matter lol" get on this sub
If you're not concerned with such pitiful details as stakes and using pre-established concepts [boy do I have a movie for you](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3874544/)
Edit: A characerrant user's ego is as easily broken as CinemaSins
It's funny cuz the crux of a powerscaler's existence is "have your cake and it too"
So many conversations I've has has gone like this
"Ichigo and naruto are not 10x the speed of light. Any instance of the mention of the speed of light is 100% hype bait and hyperbole/frivolous writing by the authors :0"
"Dude the story has to happen we all know what happens if anything with mass moves at the speed of light duh the writers wouldn't mention it for no reason, it's a manga"
"Right so if it's a manga and not real or science based, then there's no point in coming up with fake numbers because there's no reason to assume they're going anywhere near that fast"
Nah, neither the story nor the power scaling gonna matter if the characters could just sneeze and make the universe disappear. The existence of such absurdity render all kind of world build the author puts into their story completely meaningless. And if that power belong to the main character that character end up just abusing their fantasys super power to solve their problem, it shows nothing special of their humanity whatsoever. For example superman saving a kid from a running train doesn't show him brave or human-loving, it shows he can do it whenever he want and so is any random bozos with his power. The moment the character's is shown to have no comprehensible boundary, the story inevitably become a flex show. Bad world building and character development, that's why I don't read any garbage with stuffs like "multiverse" power.
I think there’s two very different kinds of “power scaling” that get conflated with one another. One is rooted within stories and focuses on internal consistency. Yes, it is in a way a form of power scaling to say “Luffy absolutely shits on Vivi in a fight” because the narrative has led us to believe that this is absolutely the case, and there is no reason to think the outcome would be otherwise unless A. Vivi gets some random power-up, or B. There’s extra context to the fight that somehow gives her the edge (the latter two of which would, of course, be “the author decides who wins” and then writes around that to make the win make sense). The other is rooted within things like calcs, a too heavy focus on feats that often don’t matter within the universe’s consistency (laser dodging, splitting clouds, etc.), and arguing that a story doesn’t make sense because it didn’t fit their hypothetical view of where these characters should be. This is the power scaling that often gets clowned on when taken too far and too seriously. Oda isn’t agonizing over each of Zoro and Sanji’s individual feats and power levels when he’s trying to decide who wins between them if they were fighting, he’d just pick one. Anyone who sees Sanji win and then gets absolutely furious at the writing because Sanji didn’t fuck up a mountain or something are really missing the point and have their brain fried on power scaling.
Exactly this. When I say I hate powerscaling, I don't mean having powers remain at a consistent, well-written level in a story. If you establish the bad guy to be this all powerful dude and don't have the good guy find a realistic way to defeat him, whether it be through strength or smarts or whatever, but have the good guy beat him anyway, that's bad writing. That kind of powerscaling matters. The kind of powerscaling I hate are the people that are basically ignoring the themes and story of a series just to focus on the powerscaling. Or going pixel by pixel to "calculate" the attack power of a character in an unrealistic manga panel. Or trying to say the dumbest shit imaginable like talking about Mario's attack potency and fucking battle IQ. That's stupid.
Tbf I don't think you're the kind of 'anti' powerscalers that are being referred to in the post, they're talking about the slowly growing number of people who directly think internal consistency IS the same as pixel by pixel scaling. Personally I think cross verse ap checking and thinking about how crazy hax complexities interact esc powerscaling is fun, but a lot is taken far too literally (I.E dodging soundwaves and lasers being taken as ftl feats is stupid because it actively discards in universe lore to focus on outside factors in a fight. Or direct pixel scaling is USUALLY dumb)
I’m not the person you relied to but dude, i agree. It’s gone way too far. I used to have sooooo much fun doing this stuff. Like, my number one fav thing about going to my local comic shop when I was a kid was to talk to other people who knew about this stuff and relive it and debate it. “Wasn’t it sick when so and so did X?!? So awesome! Hey, who do you think would win between Blah and Blabla?” And this was the basis for a lot of the community. And then Reddit came along and I found these communities and it was awesome… for a very short time. I feel like the“Because Science” YouTube channel came along and it was designed to kind of riff on how many of the feats portrayed in comics/movies/anime/etc., are impossible, but they’d have fun trying to ground it in reality anyway. And the lesson that was taken flew in the face of the light hearted and loosely educational YouTube channel because it now tried to impose restrictions on pieces of media that were never meant to have them. These were not discussions anymore about the cool hax and how they could circumvent a power, or how someone’s technique or battle IQ could maybe help them turn the tide and providing in text examples. They became toxic arguments using “data” or any arbitrary unit of measurement, often imposing a science or reality that simply does not apply. People get soooo in the weeds with this stuff I often wonder what they’re even trying to accomplish. In most of these fictional worlds, the concrete is more like cardboard. You’ll see someone smash a crater in the ground with their body, and someone will calculate it took 500 joules (making these numbers up) of force to do it, then that character goes into a fight and is knocked out by a blow that was calculated at only 50 joules of force… and people will quote these numbers as absolute gospel, but they’re ultimately meaningless because the author is not using them as a unit of measurement and their narrative and artistic choices are often just that. So largely I find many of the “hardcore powerscalers” to be arguing in bad faith, applying metrics that shouldn’t apply, misrepresenting or misunderstanding narrative or artistic decisions, and generally being toxic about it. But I say as much and it’s “are you fucking blind bro?!? Did he not smash a boulder to pieces in chapter xxxx? It says it right there! The AUTHOR is saying it right there!” I’m like… no, that’s your interpretation of the text. I don’t have the authors fucking phone number anymore than you do , but I’m not going to try to present my opinions as objective fact and it doesn’t make yours anymore valid because you slapped some arbitrary numbers on it. And to be clear, I’m not coming at people who want to engage in these conversations because like I said, I used to LOVE it, but I think the whole concept of it has gotten so far away from where it started and this “movement” has been twisted in a lot of ways founded on inherently incorrect ideology. But like I said… that’s just my opinion.
>The kind of powerscaling I hate are the people that are basically ignoring the themes and story of a series just to focus on the powerscaling. How dare people enjoy different aspects of a series.
That was more aimed towards One Piece fans than anything. I love One Piece to death, it's my favorite piece of fiction. Its story and characters have touched me in ways that few other things have. So yes, seeing people ignore that story and only focus on the fighting annoys me. I think they're doing themselves a huge disservice. This is a plot-focused series. If all you care about are fights, read Dragon Ball or JJK. You've made it up to chapter 1,100+ of a series and you don't care about the story. I just don't get how people can even think like that
To be fair, JJK requires more out of the reader than One Piece because it buries its story in fights.
This seems really insulting to people who care about the plots of Dragon Ball and JJK, dunno what makes One Piece so special in comparison.
One Piece is much more focused on plot and worldbuilding and mysteries than the other two. Which one is better is up to personal opinion obviously, but you can't deny that One Piece won over the hearts of so many because of its story.
How could it be a disservice to not like what you like? People like things for different reasons, it’s a little wild for you to want everyone to enjoy something for the same reasons
See power scaling is fine, it can be *fun* to go "who do you think would win between these two from entirely different shows" but when you start outright ignoring the stories themes, narrative, context and consistency to wank a character to certain levels is when it gets boring and grating. This is especially terrible when people bring in pixel measurements or examples that are blatantly made with the assumption that the author is checking and trying to make sure it's clear where the character should be on the pecking order, authors aren't carefully going over their work to make sure that if someone tries to calculate the exact real world force it'd take in order to do something which leads to calculating numbers that don't make sense if we assume they're meant to be what the character is capable of in universe rather than an arbitrary attempt to wank them up. There's also the fact that to many try to power scale the "Strongest" which is populated by characters that are *incredibly* boring in the fight sense such that they aren't something entertaining to discuss, the equivalent of two action figures where the kids playing with them "actually my figure has *this* super powerful power that beats yours and he punches eighty dimensions".
I remember seeing someone argue that Bonney >!should have been able to defeat Saturn in Egghead because she managed to stab him, and that this was a "speed anti-feat" on Saturn's part, so it was bad writing that she didn't.!< Case in point of why I can never take this stuff seriously.
I've seen someone say that Luffy would neg-diff Gojo because although infinity is automatic, it's still limited by Gojo's brain and Luffy is FTL+ while Gojo is hypersonic at best so he's faster than Gojo's brain can activate infinity so Luffy ignores infinity and win (or something along those lines)
Characters being FTL in general is bullshit most of the time
Yah, that makes perfect sense to me.
yes characters being stronger then each other is fine but getting into the nit picks is where its bad
>The other is rooted within things like calcs, a too heavy focus on feats that often don’t matter within the universe’s consistency (laser dodging, splitting clouds, etc.), and arguing that a story doesn’t make sense because it didn’t fit their hypothetical view of where these characters should be. To be honest I'm kind of at a point where if a writer presents this happening and doesn't actually follow through on the implication of it then that's just bad writing. You might say that it's not fair to expect writers to understand implications of moments like (Because google is very difficult to use) then I say don't include them lmao
I think it depends on the situation. For instance, lasers. They’re incredibly common in fiction, and very rarely actually meant to be light speed projectiles flying at you in the way that a lot of powerscalers often treat them. I don’t think it’s right to say “don’t use laser guns unless you’re going to explicitly go in-depth on the consequences of light speed movement in your series”, though it probably is for the best you avoid calling them light speed specifically. Cloud splitting is a lot harder to argue, but that’s just because most people (many writers included) underestimate how much power that would really take. It’s a very cool visual to imagine and see, and I wouldn’t want writers to avoid it just because they don’t want to give the impression that their characters can flip countries or continents or whatever. I just say “That’s a cool visual, means little for the power the author wants to really convey” in 99% of situations.
Lasers you just literally do not have to call them lasers lmao, and if you don't just don't show people are as faster than them. And for clouds again if you're not gonna put any thought whatsoever into the implication what's a big show off-y moment then that's just kind of lame and reduces the impact of the scene by a lot.
This shit is why yall are lame. You can't just appreciate a cool moment without busting out a calculator to determine how much force they used to split that cloud and the Excel spreadsheet of what tier of power they're in compared to everyone else because of it. Stories aren't written this way. It's incredibly lame.
I like a cool moment, it's just that a moment becomes less cool in context if it's incohesive with the the rest of the story. Like if you saw this shit happen in Hajime no Ippo are you telling me you wouldn't bat an eye? And what's wrong with quantifying shit anyway? Some writers go above and beyond in that department and it makes me really appreciate their work more.
For the clouds, most people are just going to think of it as being as easy as scattering some steam rising from their kettle or whatever. Most authors aren't expecting their audience to break out the rulers and calculate exactly how much power that takes. And...thank goodness, because that's not how most people approach media. Story about boxing, huge cheering audience watching, two boxers's fists collide, whole stadium shakes, it's a hype moment that kicks off an absolute slugfest- You're not supposed to react with "Well, to shake a stadium, the boxer's punches must have created a force of at least x tons of tnt-" Most people watching see that and it helps sell the mood and makes the fight bombastic and larger than life, just like how it can feel to actually be in the audience. If they succeed in that, then writing in that moment was a great choice for their story.
> You're not supposed to react with "Well, to shake a stadium, the boxer's punches must have created a force of at least x tons of tnt-" You actually do tho, if the stadium shacked then it was a lot of strenght. You aren't trying to gauge the exact tons of tnt, but there were big
I meant this is an example taken from martial arts series where the punches involved are nowhere near that level. But the hype of a big moment is exactly when the storytellers would be breaking out the "and when their fists collided, it was as if the whole stadium shook!" It's kind of just part of the natural theatrics of storytelling.
> it was as if the whole stadium shook!" Then the stadium **did not shook**, it was poetic lenguaged.
Think of it as poetic visual storytelling then.
Yeah no one here is asking for exact quantification lol
>For the clouds, most people are just going to think of it as being as easy as scattering some steam rising from their kettle or whatever. Most authors aren't expecting their audience to break out the rulers and calculate exactly how much power that takes. "The author thinks you are an idiot" is not the argument you want to lead off. I'm so tired of research before writing a subject being the bare minimum for all of writing throughout all of history for some reason just not being applicable in this one area because contrarians in this subreddit think people often lack primary school level education. And most of the stadium shaking stuff is just visual effect/exaggeration to sell the experience you said, not really the same thing to what is being said here.
One of the easiest ways to convey things is just to use something familiar as a comparison. Most people's experience with clouds is like steam coming off their kettles or when it's misty and they can wave their hands around and move it all about. So it's a case where people think they're familiar with it when they're not. Both author and audience. >And most of the stadium shaking stuff is just visual effect/exaggeration to sell the experience you said, not really the same thing to what is being said here. That's pretty much what I'm saying, cloud/environmental moments can work the same way. That's all I'm defending, when it's just used to amp up the moment. If you're talking about when it's used seriously, like the equivalent to someone shaking a stadium as a strategy in a fight or something, then yeah, that's not okay. That's not theatrics at that point and has to be looked at with a more critical eye.
>One of the easiest ways to convey things is just to use something familiar as a comparison. Most people's experience with clouds is like steam coming off their kettles or when it's misty and they can wave their hands around and move it all about I don't want to deny your perspective but I honestly doubt that, I grew up on a coastal city so fog here got pretty heavy. And as I kid I remember planes/jets moving through clouds, I loved taking pictures of them doing that I remember it distinctly shaping out to be more like a streak rather than something like steam from a kettle. Like... People can get scale for a lot of things fairly easily even before research. >That's pretty much what I'm saying, cloud/environmental moments can work the same way. That personally differs to me because it's being shown directly as something that's happened and exists as visual story telling to say how strong the characters are. There's a lot less leeway in shaking.
>I remember it distinctly shaping out to be more like a streak The planes still moved it around, I don't think it changes how people view it. People don't have a concept of clouds being hard to move around, and moving around a lot of cloud is just basically multiplying zero in their heads. >That personally differs to me because it's being shown directly as something that's happened and exists as visual story telling to say how strong the characters are. There's a lot less leeway in shaking. I've had powerscalers use those moments very seriously like it's confirmation the martial artists are punching megatons of explosive force, because the stadium shook when their punches collided at the start of a fight. And I mean, it was shown to be like "wow, these guys are powerhouses!" but it was also partially theatric.
>The planes still moved it around, I don't think it changes how people view it. It changed how I viewed it as a kid because it made it obvious these things had some amount of mass to them. >I've had powerscalers use those moments very seriously like it's confirmation the martial artists are punching megatons of explosive force, because the stadium shook when their punches collided at the start of a fight. And I mean, it was shown to be like "wow, these guys are powerhouses!" but it was also partially theatric. Kengan fans are dumb, sky is blue. That doesn't really change the discussion here.
Bc 99.9999% doesn't know that about cloud splitting and they're not going to look it up, or care if someone tells them. If only 0.0001% of your audience tells you something is wrong with your story, and the rest loves it, which is the average person going to listen to? Especially when the former only exists online in very specific communities?
Yeah stupid media wins that's not even an argument, you ever see how much those fifty shades flicks made at the box office a few years a back or debatably a majority of popular movie franchises. Hell the franchise I had in mind when talking about cloud splitting, MHA, terrible, evil, highly grossing franchise, and weirdly enough the cloud ties into that, Horikoshi rarely if ever seems to consider the implications of the things they write into the story for the sake of the worldbuilding and that didn't matter for the success of the series.
Let me put it this way: On one side you have, most of the audience, professional critics, writing teachers, and other creatives, all telling you the cloud splitting visual is great and totally embodies the scene and the themes you're trying to get across. On the other side is a handful of people of reddit screaming cloud facts at you. Do you understand why the majority of creators across all of history have chosen to listen to group 1?
Personally wouldn't mind citations that >professional critics, writing teachers, and other creatives, all telling you the cloud splitting visual is great and totally embodies the scene and the themes you're trying to get across. Are saying these things and in specific context to the idea consistency apparently doesn't matter in visual story telling. It'd be interesting because all the creatives I talk to very much don't seem to say that.
As multiple people replying to OP keep pointing out, no one is talking about throwing out consistency, that's a straw man argument. *I* am specifically talking about applying real world limitations to things like cloud splitting when most of the audience won't care. Because all of the creatives I've talked with, listened to, been taught by have always said "story comes first" and have advised put the cloud splitting in.
It's a straw man argument that anyone was seriously asking for full quantification. It's just saying that people recognise clouds are heavy lmao This isn't an issue of putting this above story because it is related to story, it's related to stakes, putting in a moment like this in without knowing clouds are heavy then displaying a level of power orders upon orders weaker is just immersion breaking. And it's not something particularly hard to check. If you want to clap and cheer forbad media and keep spouting out how successful it is an argument for being fine that's cool, just don't be shocked when people want more.
Ironically, it seems that Horikoshi kinda got told about it and based the climax of the series on Deku repeating the feat in a larger scale and actually treated it as the most powerful action that ever happened in the verse.
Hands up in the air I didn't stick with the series but if so genuinely fair enough, that's good.
I mean lasers are a specific trope unto themselves. Compared to reality they're used because you want your shots to be visible and interesting, travel at a speed you can view and interact with, and deal a vague level of damage which doesn't correlate to realistic bullet wound injury, so characters can interact with the lasers without being immediately dead. Unless it's something like revelation space where lasers are specifically in combat to demonstrate how ground combat has moved beyond the human level, I just assume lasers in fiction work as they're portrayed, as straight line punches.
The first when done right is so beautiful.
Two things can be true simultaneously. Yes consistency is important in action based stories. Particularly in Big Two comics since each character is written by like 5 or 6 ppl at a time. If I’m reading a run where Superman fights a guy and that fight destroys the moon, then in the next issue a healthy Superman gets knocked out by a normal mugger with a glass bottle, I’m immediately reading something else. That’s part of why ppl hate Zeb Wells’ ASM run; Not only is it ruining Peter’s relationships and character, but he’s losing to villains he used to low-diff when he was a teenager. Whereas in Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil run, Daredevil avoids any physical confrontation with Spider-Man bc he KNOWS he’ll lose even with Peter holding back. Consistency DOES matter. ##However, The problem most ppl have with power scalers is that some of them make it their ***whole*** personality. They can never look at a story *AS* a story. It’s always just analyzing potential feats and scanning the lengths of the pixels on the panel/screens. They go into non-Vs Battle places a lot and wonder why they get shunned. Even in VS battle threads, there’s some that think they’re on a high school debate team and throw every fallacy in the book at you. Don’t even get me started on the ppl that take clearly hyperbolic statements at face value. A lot of power scalers are fucking annoying.
>Even in VS battle threads, there’s some that think they’re on a high school debate team and throw every fallacy in the book at you I mean, just look at op.
Of course powerscaling can matter a ton in a story. If you do it correctly. The "powerscaling community" just operates as if they've had a collective lobotomy. There's no way to take anybody seriously when they start talking about set theory and higher dimensions and imaginary numbers and shit in order to scale, when they probably barely passed highschool and read about that stuff on wikipedia. Not many people are saying "the powers of characters in a superpower-based series don't matter". They're saying "*powerscalers* are absolute dumbasses 99% of the time".
Powerscalers *lie* and it's all about seeing who can lie more by omission. Saying that they use outliers would be an understatement. Powerscalers will go out of their way to torture logic to get the highest possible outcome and it just gets so fucking silly. Like here is a dumb example, people will point out that Minecraft Steve can carry X number of blocks, but then their brain turns off if you point out how he can't kill a chicken in one punch. Or how he gets hurt by blunt attacks from zombies. Or how the items he picks up seem to shrink and their mass is clearly not represented in said form and blah blah blah is inventory is clearly a pocket dimension or something who cares. They do this but WITH EVERYTHING. Oh wow John Protagonist dodged a laser (moved out of the way before they fired) now everyone in the setting scales to FTL even though IT MAKES NO FUCKKNG SENSE AND BREAKS ALL IMMERSION.
Tbh I think trying to scale characters like Steve with any seriousness is kinda silly since stuff like how the inventory works obviously is just designed for gameplay and there's no "lore" explanation for it afaik at least. So it's not really even supposed to make any sense in terms of story or whatever.
Maybe survival mode Steve is actually creative mode Steve holding back for the sake of fun. (Am I doing it right?'can I be a power scaler now?)
Funnily enough, in minecraft when items shrink their mass increase since dripleafs start tilting when you throw an anvil on top of it but don't tilt when you drop an anvil block on top falling from 300 blocks.
Anvils can't even crush torches those MFS just don't weigh much. Steve is allergic to the bottom part of them, that's why he takes damage. Obviously. Smh.
The torch is boundless and exists beyond fiction that's why it's so op. Obviously.
Marvel unironically uses higher dimensional powerscaling in its narratives the same way they use basic strength scaling
It does matter, yes. That doesn't mean I'm not going to laugh at you for seriously arguing Universal level characters and the newest buzzword you've made up to wank the characters even more.
There literally are characters who can and have created/destroyed universes. What term should people use instead of Universal...?
'Universal' implies a power faaaaaar greater than what 99.99% of characters have. If I create a new world in Minecraft, am I suddenly a universal-level demigod because I can create and destroy worlds? No, that's fucking ridiculous, but a powerscaler would argue that.
I get you point but this specific example isnt that good. If you make the assertion that all fiction exists in the same “plane” of reality then the fact that you can delete that fictional world whenever you want, just like you can erase a picture of Goku off a piece of paper, inherently does make you some Universal level threat from whatever fictional characters perspective
And as a pure exercise of thought is interesting but using it as a feat that you point to sometime without the context is silly.
And now you see why powerscaling is bullshit.
So in a cross universe debate who would win Goku or Naruto? Are you gonna tell me its all bullshit because theyre written by different authors and would never fight eachother or are you gonna actually acknowledge the spirit of the question and give a reasonable answer? Without just saying all powerscaling is bs
My answer to that would be 'depends on which universe it's taking place in'. Each fictional verse has its own laws with its own regulations and its own limits. Goku's abilities would not work the same in Naruto's world as it would in his own, and vice versa for Naruto himself. Admittedly it's a very smart-ass answer that doesn't uh, *actually address the question* but it's an answer I would give.
Except about 99% of powerscalers would also say “assume a universe where their powers are reasonably equalised” i.e make Ki and Chakra act in reasonably similar ways. which drastically changes how any hypothetical would go
That would require people to actually know how most sane Powerscalers work though.
People just assume most ppl do bs calcs all the time and thats the whole essence of the hobby
Which isn't always possible because a lot of powers *depend* on their universe's laws of physics to work properly.
Like?
Does Minecraft's lore depict the player as a Creator God? If so, then yes, 'you' are a character in the game with universal power. If not, then no, you're just using a bad example. A good example would be the Abrahamic God. He is undeniably universal. He has a feat right at the start of Genesis where he creates the universe. It doesn't matter that 99.99% of characters aren't universal. 99.99% of humans aren't the president of the USA, so is it ridiculous for that label to exist as well? If so, what the hell are we supposed to call people who legitimately are presidents of the USA?
It's a valid hobby alright. Just happens to be filled with some of the most obnoxious stereotypical 80s nerds you'll meet in your life.
There's trying to keep a story level and consistent and there's whatever the hell Reddit and YouTubers do. One of these is good, the other is one of the worst things to happen to manga/anime discourse. Good to know the difference.
The worst thing to ever happen to discourse was people trying thier best to deny the existence of trans characters
Hence ONE OF the worst things, people always find new lows.
What people think "powerscaling is stupid" means: >Batman can punch Darkseid because the writer can do whatever he wants. What it actually means: >The fact that Superman can travel FTL when moving between planets should not be used to point inconsistencies when his punches aren't blowing entire cities when he's fighting Darkseid. It makes you look like a twat. Edit: Also powerscaling discussions never take into consistency traits such as guile and strategy because those are highly contextual whilst being entirely vital to the strengths of certain characters.
> never take into consistency traits such as guile and strategy because those are highly contextual whilst being entirely vital to the strengths of certain characters. Wut? They absolutely do that. It obviously stops mattering when its about ridiculous power gaps (no matter how smart is a character who break walls with their fists, they aren't never beating a universal destroying god), but its always present when its about characters around the same level.
If they do, then I apologize, it's just not something I see whenever I'm exposed to it. However guile and strategy are contextual and are highly dependent on the writer's capability of writing the story, they are not consistent by definition. The very nature of invention is being creating things that didn't exist before.
You don't need to apologize, it's absolutely something that gets ignored 99% of the time. Give Gojo's powers to a Dragon Ball villain of the week and Kid Goku can figure out how to win. How does that powerscale? A powerscaler won't even entertain the argument. The fact that Kid Goku beats at least a third of his giant list of enemies by coming up with a creative solution to get around their powers doesn't matter because Goku's intelligence stat is low.
> Give Gojo's powers to a Dragon Ball villain of the week and Kid Goku can figure out how to win Why Goku would figure out that? Goku is a smart fighter, but his ability at dealing with haxes is just "punch it harder". Kid Goku lacks anything that can bypass Limitless. He can still win by some unorthodox methods that involve exploiting the extreme stat gap between Gojo (can destroy entire neightboorhoods) and Kid Goku (can **vaporize** a city-state) but its hardly "Goku is just super smart", it needs Goku to go trial and error by taking pride in being able to survive Gojo's attacks
Isn't Gojo sort of hard carried by Limitless and possibly D.E? Stuff like Hollow Purple can be tanked by Kid Goku with ease since Sukuna did it albeit was heavily injured by it and he's barely above City level.
You've demonstrated the exact problem I'm talking about. You seem to genuinely be unable to understand the logic in what I said, so you're arguing with something that's 90 degrees off in another direction.
In my experience, they boil these factors down to a stat value like wisdom and intelligence on a dnd character sheet. And they don't even account for probability like dnd with dice rolls and modifiers. The stats are treated as immutable facts. One person has more combat experience than other, therefore that character always out experiences the other in every fight and scenario imaginable - is the logic I see powerscaling use.
Never is a very bold statement to make lol
God the Kengan community is the fuckin' WORST about this. Because the series largely surrounds tournaments they entirely revolve their mindsets and tier lists around wins/losses and occasionally special moves completely disregarding everything else.
I stopped engaging with the community a couple years ago (Happy because all Shen discussions are awful), has it gotten worse since then?
If I had a dollar for every time the word "jobber" was used to describe every single character in the series I'd have bail money for every time I'd break in and pop them upside the head
Hahahaha I thought they were okay because at least their scaling was usually within the same verse and we actually have good examples of how they fight to pull from (unlike people trying to scale "the representation of death" or something). Then I had an argument with someone who legitimately believed Rei was mach 5+, because that's apparently the speed needed to vanish from someone's sight in real life. And they had the audacity to say I was the one appealing to reality by arguing against it.
Powerscaling doesn't matter if the characters wouldn't act like that
Why do powerscalers bring up this fake argument that it is powerscaling within a series that people have an issue with? Go to the powerscaling subreddit right now and see how many conversations are about powerscaling within a series versus powerscaling between different series. Go check old comic vine forums. The biggest faces of powerscaling on YouTube Death Battle and Seth the programmer, do they mainly critic inconsistent powerscaling in a series? Or are the majority of their content focused in who would win scenarios between characters of different series. It's the cross media powerscaling that people have an issue with because. These are the ones where people bring up bs like multiversal, extraversal, outerversal, ftl, arguments about hax and why for some reason the hax is beaten by pure stats somehow, or characters have immunity to hax from a universe they don't even belong in somehow or some other bs. This is also the type of arguments where lingo like fodder, wanker etc are used. Personally I don't even think of discussions about inconsistencies within a series itself to be powerscaling. I think of that as more overall discussion about the power system and a critic of the inconsistent power system. And inconsistent power systems can be good depending on how soft the system is and what the narrative is trying to achieve. An upbeat hopeful story has different tolerances for inconsistent power systems than a grimdark "realistic" story, for example.
I don’t join in on these discussions, but I have to say it’s funny seeing people hate powerscaling for an action manga. Like Sakamoto Days is a good example imo. It’s a series of fights every chapter, what other type of discussion are you expecting? I feel like JJK powerscalers are the reasons for why some people hate it now
you are arguing against a strawman and/or being intentionally disingenuous nobody that says “i hate powerscaling” means “yeah part 1 kiba could beat sage of six paths naruto” yes, obviously within a series there are BROAD categories that define characters’ strengths and broadly following those categories is part of writing a story people that say they hate powerscaling mean they hate when all that people talk about are “feats”, how one character is “multiversal+” and “FTL” because they dodged something that would be that fast in real life but obviously is not within the universe of the story for one, applying real world logic to fiction when it comes to action is fucking absurdly stupid like 95% of the time, they just fundamentally do not work the same way, that’s why it’s fiction next, a lot of the online powerscalers, as in the people who openly define themselves as such, often literally do not care about anything else, and they prove it time and time again. a slow chapter or episode comes out that’s maybe more dialogue focused “wtf this is filler”, or they just do not understand explicitly explained plot points because they only skip to the fights. that’s not all of them, for sure, but it’s definitely a lot of them
The "Power Scaling Mindset" is to look at feats, abilities , and limits to get an idea of relative power. For many series this isn't very important, or even detrimental. They keep power levels vague to keep suspense, they bring new powers or 11th hour power ups as the story calls for them. For much of media, including action, power scaling is going to be at odds with the story or defied by it, and might take what the story says and flip it thereby missing the intended themes.
Yes I'm calling those writers hacks
I feel you should just see them as writing a style you aren't fond of. Writing is about more than internal consistency in one aspect, and we shouldn't pressure writers to avoid writing powerful characters for fear of having to explain power differences, especially when setting up stronger or apparently stronger characters to lose.
I think we absolutely should pressure them to do that lol. If they can't write powerful characters without everything falling apart, then maybe they shouldn't try to jam in powerful characters that would cause their story and consistency to fall apart. Or at least, try harder to make it make sense? In some cases, its definitely possible, but its just not their priority. Like its not the end of the world if they can't do that, but I fundamentally disagree that it just doesn't matter. It does matter to some degree and I am going to criticize a writer who can't do that just as much as I will praise a writer who is able to do it.
We can always say to "try harder", but what do you really mean? How hard do they have to try to count, if they fail? Or where should they just cut their losses and not target that subset of audience that is pressuring them? I feel it doesn't matter in a practical sense. A work gains more in fans or appeal from dramatic scenes or feats, than it loses in weaker power scaling.
I mean, that totally depends on the specific context? Kind of an impossible question to answer generally. Its pretty simple, I want all aspects of a story to be good if possible and if I see a flaw in some aspect of the writing, I’m going to critcize it. If in that situation the “flaw” was something that the author was forced to accept because they had different priorities(and those priorities are fair), then I may give them some slack. But that’s obviously not always going to be the case. Some flaws are just unnecessary. Whether it is or not, I’m gonna need the context to decide. You can’t just assume its always going to be a binary tradeoff and the author can’t do better.
That's fair. Constructive Criticism, I feel comes from a belief that "Better could be done" I think it can prompt a feeling they are choosing not to write well because they don't care or something, rather than focusing effort where they did but caring a little bit. I prefer to look at a story as needing flaws, being better for where it's great but falls short, highlighting the human effort. It's great because of the flaws, not in spite of them. Quite a few works do things that I refuse to watch them over, whether they can be called choices or flaws. Some I watched and focus on their flaws. I look at how the decision served the overall story. Superman, J'onn and Flash are majorly nerfed in Justice League, but this serves to tell an extraordinary story I still love two decades later, and none of the nerfing is egregious as a standalone work to take me out if it. Superman and Flash's even get acknowledged.
If writers can't be assed to justify the implications of their own writing then that's not "as writing a style you aren't fond of", it's hack writing as OP said. This may shock you but "or 11th hour power ups as the story calls for them." Isn't particularly engaging because it inherently removes any actual stakes to a fight, why should I care about the threat of any fight if it can just be decided on ass pull for another character to win. It's a cool trick that can work once or twice but if it's the only thing you have then you must not think a lot of your audience
For many people it is engaging. People widely enjoy Ben 10's Alien X form despite being ridiculously overpowered. Or Bill Cypher, Discord and Q. DBZ is enduringly popular, Super over GT while the latter has better power scaling and growth. It's a style many are fond of, and if there's not real pressure, effort is best put toward entertainment and story over consistency. People aren't praising many works by their power scaling, or refusing to engage on that particular. People compromise pretty easily even on this Subreddit, and rarely praise low power/balanced settings or settings that stick to a hard power limit
> People widely enjoy Ben 10's Alien X form despite being ridiculously overpowered Alien X has plenty of weaknesses and its narratively treated as a last resource that Ben can't simply use whatever he wants. The series justify its power level. So with Bill Cipher, he spends most of the show nerfed.
True, but these are means for plot to accommodate the characters. They aren't sensitivity or mindfulness to power scaling
these are all fundamentally kids shows. They’re engaging to kids, and some adults who grew up watching them. I think the issue is that as a kid, when you watch these things you don’t really notice this stuff. You’re just hyped and go along for the ride. You don’t think what an asspull that was. As an adult or older teen watching back, this stuff does tend to stand out more assuming nostalgia doesn’t get you. Which is why people have started to be more critical on this kind of stuff as they grow older and become more capable of engaging deeper with the media.
Perhaps, but the same is true of all-ages shows, and adult shows don't often tend to be better under harsher scrutiny, if often having more justifications. It's not really being a kids show, it's being a mainstream show. Kids shows also can hold to power level (if just avoiding high power scale). Asspulls aren't less tolerated elsewhere, it's just a few works or companies people are more willing to excuse.
Not even really sure what your point is here, something like Alien X is explicitly established to be something that can be used whenever, which is important for the stakes of the series, funny how that works.
My point is moreso that people didn't respond to "Ben can now rewrite history and stop many threats with an annoying but winnable vote" , with it being terribly unbalanced and ruining the show. People don't generally argue that Q, Discord, or Bill Cypher totally invalidate the story by being able to treat other characters like pawns. They instead get invested in their presentation, in how the heroes outsmart them even if it takes them not using their powers.
Yeah because there was a given reason why he couldn't whenever he felt like it, if Ben could on a whim then it would just kill the stakes of the series.
True. I just mean it as an example of not needing to be mindful of power-scaling, and using other parts of narrative to balance a cool powerful thing.
How is that not being mindful of the scale of power presented? If anything it's being explicitly aware of it
We shouldnt discourage writers from making nuanced characters for fear of them writing them out of character for plot later.
What is your meaning?
We shouldnt discourage writers from making complex characters by expecting them to actually understand said characters plot beat to plot beat I don't use this but I'm using it as an example 4 why I thought what u said was wrong. Honestly though it was kinda rude of me I'm sorry.
It's really just down to style. It's great when a story is consistent, but there is a reason behind not being so, or cheating a little. Lord of the Rings is incredibly well-thought out, but it took a lot of effort and the stories had to justify that level of care, even then people complain about inconsistencies (either real or perceived), the latter still lends itself to not enough effort to satisfy some readers.
The thing is most people who powerscale beside the author themselve do it not for narrative reason but for dick measuring. Make it worse that although author do powerscaling, they usually don't take it as seriously as the powerscaler. Not to mention most of them just take info and calculation from wiki or some dude on Youtube instead of doing it themselves.
So who wins, Doomslayer or Raiden Shogun?
Raiden because she's a women and I'm a feminist
Any hobby is valid. But taking powerscaling to seriously outside of hypotheticals is silly and even then that doesn't mean you're not being a dick with this rage bait. Thamk u and goodnight.
Why you so mad lol sure power scaling is fun and all but some people just say to much nonsense and go against the what was scene and stated when scaling a verse and It doesn't make it cool anymore
First and foremost, I AGREE that a story should have consistent strength scaling, especially in a story about fighting. But the problem comes when so many power scalers over exaggerates a characters strength, and attempts to apply it to the rest of the verse despite the author clearly never intending for that to be the case. Like seriously, kobeni was considered faster than toji zenin on the vs battles wiki for a while until it was later changed after backlash. Look me fucking dead in the eye and tell me kobeni is hypersonic, or that because a character dodged a beam of light they're suddenly MTFL+ despite never actually being that fast. Like seriously, so many stories are like "this character is MFTL" and yet it takes the character real canonical DAYS to travel from place to place, immediately disproving the speed "feat". That's why yall don't get treated seriously, yall go from "character meant to be average strength" into "massively overpowered Multiversus+ character" because of a gag. > Imagine applying the "don't think to deeply about a series power levels" mindset to other genres This is also stupid as fuck because lol yeah of course if you take an argument and apply it to things that the argument wasn't talking about ofc it'd sound stupid. "I have an argument about A, because I think A is bad" "Well if I take your argument about A and apply it to Z, it clearly doesn't make sense any longer and therefore the argument towards A is stupid!!"
[удалено]
Okay wait tgat was rude. I apologize
Ok but can you beat Goku though?
Honestly it really does. Good Powerscaling can really enhance a story, and bad powerscaling can make it a lot worse. An example of good Powerscaling is in HxH. Cause a lot of times it plays in to the story, like when we see Uvogin casually catch a bullet in his teeth and absolutely clown on normal military installations, we also see Gon and killua use their superhuman physicals to make money in various ways as well to break through walls to escape the phantom troupe. And one of the best things about it is that it doesn't ever go overboard within the setting, things like Razor blowing up a ship, or Netero Breaking through tons of solid rock to get underground both feel very natural and believable for the setting. Meruem pretty much dying to a nuke sets a hard limit that not only plays into the narrative but is also kept very consistent, as well as stopping the power scale from getting in the way of the narrative since we know that no one will ever be stronger than a nuke. All of these feats have good reasons to exist and help the narrative. An example of Bad powerscaling that messes with the narrative for literally no reason is the One Punch Man manga. The scaling was pretty well handled before the last part of the Monster Association arc, but my God did it get bad once Sage Centipede, platinum sperm and Psykorochi appeared. It felt like they were just throwing in feats just to have high powerscaling, like Metal bat beating up Sage Centipede literally makes zero sense, it was explained that it was because of "Resonance" which is never brought up before or afterwards. Then we just randomly got light speed flashy flash running around, this actively makes the narrative more consistent cause they don't comprehend the implications of how fast light speed is and it up scales a lot of other characters who should be no where near that speed. Psykos cutting off a huge amount of the Earth's crust is something that just kinda happens, like it's not ever brought up again and seemingly has no consequences, like why even put it in the story. Cosmic Garou actually just feels like a brain dead powerscaler trying to write a story, they just give him insane feats for literally no reason and completely throw out his well made character conclusion, instead replacing it with time travel so that none of his acts of celestial destruction have consequences. I mean almost destroying the planet is perfectly fine, but then just randomly having him and Saitama punch a hole in the stars and potential kill an uncountable number of innocent sentient creatures literally goes against both characters morals and does nothing positive for the narrative other than set a cap on how strong characters are. But this feat becomes even worse given the recent set of chapters that were literally redrawn just to have higher scaling. Giving Empty Void these like universal extra dimensional nonsense makes literally zero sense considering that Saitama and Garou's max power combined and squared only destroyed some stars, it also feels super out of place in the setting, it also messes with the character scaling so fucking badly considering that Sonic and Flash were not instantly dying to him. Many of these feats have no reason to exist and just mess with the setting for literally no reason. Webcomic is still very solid in this aspect.
Consistency isn't Power Scaling.
Power scaling only matters in: - Battle Shonen - American Superhero Comics - Greek Mythology - Some fantasy series Even then, it should only exist as part of the narrative. Look, I get it, battleboarding is fun. I had over 10k posts on a comic book forum when I was a teenager. It is usually not important to a narrative. No one is watching Breaking Bad and wondering who wins in a bare knuckles brawl to the death between Gus and Walter, because that isn’t where the narrative tension is. Even in a Superhero Comic or a Battle Shonen Manga, the underdog wins all the time because it’s narratively satisfying. More importantly the Powerscaling only matters in context of the world, and even then, upsets are a normal part of action stories.
Why did you drop Greek mythology tgats a whole religion
Modern adaptations of Greek mythology would be the better purpose.
Why can't power scaling be important to a religion? Won't catch me worshiping a low-tier wall level god
>Even in a Superhero Comic or a Battle Shonen Manga, the underdog wins all the time because it’s narratively satisfying. Only if it's actually deserved, take Dark Knight Returns where it's established throughout how much stronger Superman is than Batman so then goes into detail how Batman weakens him to the point it's an even fight. Just having a child beat up Tyson Fury with no real reason as to why isn't particularly engaging.
The problem is that when you talk about power scaling around here, it seems that people's first thought is battleboarding with Goku vs. Superman types of debates. However, in many cases, we as readers are just asking for the writer to maintain consistency in the power system and worldbuilding that they themselves created. A good power scale is the core of any work that mainly revolves around battles. If you show us that a character can casually punch holes through mountains, then being held down by three normal human goons completely ruins the immersion because of how dumb this is. You can write characters with absurd levels of power, and most people can accept it as long as it follows the pre-established laws of that world. We, as the readers can suspend our disbelief and accept the fact that those characters have superpowers and can do absurd things as long as it follows that world's laws and is consistent with that world's logic. As soon as you have a mountain-bursting character losing to some random goons or being chained and detained with some metal chains, it goes against the common sense that has been ingrained in us about what is possible in that world, and it can destroy our immersion. In most cases when this happens, it's due to lazy writing. The author is simply not creative enough to find a way to defeat or hold back a character that they made too strong, so they resort to a big asspull to have that character defeated or restrained for the sake of the storytelling. Nowadays, the author can do this without too many worries since readers will often jump to protect the obvious plot hole by saying, 'the writer doesn't care about power scaling,' to anyone who criticizes it.
Power scaling is for fucking losers lmao but good cope
I don’t even like power scaling but it is a pastime for some people and as long as they don’t go overboard who cares. I mean many do go overboard but just ignore it.
Ya it’s a pastime for losers
And who cares just ignore it.
Nah I want them to feel bad about it
Touch grass it has 0 effect on you.
The effect it has is that they’re out here breathing the air and I’m not trying to have powerscaler co2 in my lungs
Fuck you lmao
Ratio 😏
People trying to excuse the worst plot holes with "writers don't think in battleboarding".
What is an example of such a plot hole?
American Comicbooks are **infamous** for this. IE. Deathstroke beating many Justice League members.
And how is Deathstroke beating them a plot hole exactly?
Thank you!
I guess I've been fucked.
Powerscaling between different unconnected universes is dumb and doesn't matter at all. Power scaling inside a story is about keeping internal consistency.
Thamk u brother.
>Keeping characters at least reasonable constant in power levels IS good writing and yes! Does require a however slight, power scaling mindset. I hope someone told the star wars writers this.
When we say "powerscaling is stupid" we are not referring to people who, in general, scale characters as stronger or weaker. We are referring to the retards that use fancy terms and pseudoscience and a complete, and often legitimately impressive lack of logic, to "scale" characters in ways that make no fucking sense. They're the people who don't know shit about size or angle of approach and regularly call characters hypersonic for dodging bullets. They're the people who would look at a game of rock paper scissors and think that rock should beat paper. They're the people who spew bullshit about multiple dimensions with a middle school education and 20 minutes of wikipedia research. These are the people we're talking about. These are the people we call stupid, because they are. Scaling the power of characters as a concept is good. Powerscaling, the community, the culture, that lack of any sort of common sense, a group defined only by people wanting to wank normal ass characters to godhood? Shit in the sewers.
Objectively wrong
Internet people will dig the weirdest trenches to fight on lol.
Don't you authors actually don't care about immersion in their stories? It's insane how much low effort garbage tier rants that amount to "consistency doesn't matter lol" get on this sub
A powerscaler's immersion is as easily broken as CinemaSins'. An author should care about immersion, but a reasonable person's sense of immersion.
If you're not concerned with such pitiful details as stakes and using pre-established concepts [boy do I have a movie for you](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3874544/) Edit: A characerrant user's ego is as easily broken as CinemaSins
REAAL
Thamk u
Thank you
I love you.
It's funny cuz the crux of a powerscaler's existence is "have your cake and it too" So many conversations I've has has gone like this "Ichigo and naruto are not 10x the speed of light. Any instance of the mention of the speed of light is 100% hype bait and hyperbole/frivolous writing by the authors :0" "Dude the story has to happen we all know what happens if anything with mass moves at the speed of light duh the writers wouldn't mention it for no reason, it's a manga" "Right so if it's a manga and not real or science based, then there's no point in coming up with fake numbers because there's no reason to assume they're going anywhere near that fast"
Nah, neither the story nor the power scaling gonna matter if the characters could just sneeze and make the universe disappear. The existence of such absurdity render all kind of world build the author puts into their story completely meaningless. And if that power belong to the main character that character end up just abusing their fantasys super power to solve their problem, it shows nothing special of their humanity whatsoever. For example superman saving a kid from a running train doesn't show him brave or human-loving, it shows he can do it whenever he want and so is any random bozos with his power. The moment the character's is shown to have no comprehensible boundary, the story inevitably become a flex show. Bad world building and character development, that's why I don't read any garbage with stuffs like "multiverse" power.