#power scaling

[raine-dance]

So I was discussing Kingdom Hearts characters with a friend and we decided to make a tier list to rate them by aura. I put Vor in S-Tier, and felt the need to justify the decision to my friend who had never played Dark Road before. As soon as I showed them the gif of Vor lifting and throwing the boulder, they agreed with her placement. This, however, was not the end of the conversation, because as we finished the tier list, I felt curious as to how much that boulder actually weighed. Here are my findings:

This is the promotional art for Dark Road. Using a general guesstimate for where the characters' feet are placed using the traditional artist's understanding that the pelvis is generally about halfway down the body, and the fact that Young Eraqus as per the KH3 journal is 5'7, and takes up 502 pixels, we can determine that Vor, who is about 386 pixels, is 4'4.

Here's the infamous scene in question where Vor lifts and throws this boulder. Vor is 189 pixels tall, whereas the boulder is 138, making it roughly 3'2 in height. For this exercise, we are going to assume its length and width are roughly the same. Using an average boulder weight of 150 lbs per cubic foot (as we do not know the type of boulder it is) we can assume that this boulder weighs 2.19 tonnes, or for those of us who don't use American measurements and have been pained just as much as I was by my use of them, 1987.96 kg.

This feat is about 13 times stronger than an intermediate deadlift. If this girl survived longer than she did I think she could have solo'd the Master of Masters with nothing but a boulder.

[thundamoo]

Look. I'll admit it. I like powerscaling arguments. In the right environments and doses I think they're fun. But I'm also an author, and that means I really get why they annoy people.

It doesn't matter what sort of magic or power system I happen to be writing. They will be there. Hiding in the comment section. Waiting. And then I will type "Borfoloofy had the power to summon tissue paper out of thin air" and they will POUNCE and rapidly start typing "USING BORFOLOOFY'S POWER TO CREATE INFINITE ARBITRARY MATTER, THEY SHOULD EASILY BE ABLE TO CREATE A COMBUSTION ENGINE TO BURN THE TISSUE PAPER AT HEATS HIGH ENOUGH TO—" at which point there may be more words or they may have spontaneously had a stroke and stopped typing, but I will never know, because whatever force caused them to assume a power source was limitless rather than remotely reasonable has infected me and caused my brain to entirely shut off, too.

[troythecatfish]

Think we can all agree Homelander’s just a big fish in a small pond

[prokopetz]

I approve of powerscaling discourse only in utterly senseless contexts. I don't give a shit about which shōnen protagonists could beat up which other shōnen protagonists, but I will 100% read your five thousand word essay exploring the subtle nuances of establishing a tiered ranking of the Smurfs.

[fallout-lou-begas]

[majubengel]

Power Scaling

comic based on a comment i got on tiktok

[fortunelowtier]

so a couple days ago someone on Twitter made this post:

and for the past 3 days it has caused a ripple effect leading to people trying to properly power scale Sportacus and discovering he is at the very least continent level in terms of raw strength but then he does some shit like hit an apple at 16% the speed of light and were all just like "what the fuck"

[im-not-buying-it-ether]

Freddy being a power nerd

Freddy: Could you outrun Wonder Woman in a footrace? Captain Marvel: Wai- What? Wonder Woman: We would tie, would we not? We both possess speed granted to us by Hermes Freddy: But if the power of Zeus works as a booster for our other powers on top of the magical lightning, then doesn't that mean you can outrun her? CM: I- huh, I guess so. Freddy: Could I outrun Wonder Woman? CM: Junior, you have a bad leg, you would have to have a flight race against her. Freddy: Hrm. No- wait wait, we split our strength when we're both transformed! I'm only half as fast as I could be! CM: Haha, yeah we— Freddy: Gimmie your powers! CM: Junior, I swear to Solomon, we aren’t power-scaling. Wonder Woman: I’m not opposed to a friendly race Freddy: See! I call power dibs! CM: I- you- ugh, I’m going home. You’ll have my half in about five minutes, okay? Freddy: HELL YEAH! JL: Are we just going to ignore that he is only half as strong as he normally is most the time?

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Have you ever gotten into power scaling? Do you have any thoughts about it and/or its culture?

I haven't engaged with it enough to have any deep knowledge of the culture of it so I won't comment on that. Like, I used to watch Death Battle, that's basically it.

For myself, I think power scaling is a fun intellectual and creative exercise, especially when you're trying to reconcile power sets from disparate properties that have vastly different thematic meanings and try and figure out some common metric by which they might be measured.

The part about power scaling I dislike is how easily it feeds an obsession with power as the primary metric or worth or value, and the ways in which it can lead to some really reductive and at worst anti-intellectual interpretations of media. Like, there's a subset of One Piece fans for example who insist that Nami - the navigator of the goddamn pirate ship - is "the most useless Straw Hat," entirely because she doesn't win a lot of big fights. Or there's a subset of Batman fans who very defensively insist that Batman could ALWAYS win ANY fight with ANY opponent so long as he has time to prepare, because their metric for whether or not he's a good hero is entirely measured by who he could take in a fight.

That sh*t is annoying, juvenile and often pretty reactionary, but like most such things it also comes from a very loud but very small minority of the fandom group, who probably shouldn't be held up as representative of the whole.

tl;dr power scaling is fun, people who make power scaling the center of their engagement with media are not fun

[theslackerjack]

could bugs bunny survive in 40k

[idk5969]

I LITERALLY TRIED TO DRAW AND IT LOOKS AWESOME!!! (at least to me 💔)

Sorry If it looks awful but I tried my best.

Reference:

My Art:

[shib4guette]

redraw of funny image

[danshive]

The actual answer to which fictional characters can beat Goku is all of them.

This is because they're fictional, and a writer can make up anything they want, up to and including Goku tripping on a peanut before the fight can begin.

[animentality]

[prokopetz]

The annoying thing about Batman is that he takes the option of short-circuiting dumb powerscaling arguments by pointing out that those two characters would logically never fight each other completely off the table when he's in play. "Batman wouldn't fight" yeah, he would. There's a non-zero chance he canonically did.

[jamie-mun]

Homelander Powerscalers suck

i don't know why everyone decided that he was the best person to powerscale against cause like of course the guy who can destroy Cities and take nukes to the face like its another Tuesday beats the guy who can fly and shoot lasers. Half the time the powerscalers will make videos and it's just saying "LOL he can't even beat half the cast" like why make the video then? It's a waste of everyone's time if you don't want to pit charecters who are equal strength against each other.

There isn't a good reason to put him in fights he won't win. Give me Onmi-Man if you want a Superman-Esq charecter. It just feels like people are bulling him cause they don't like him.

Thanks for reading my rant