GodlyCharmander
He/Him- 6,732
- 6,130
Got permission from @Nierre
A response to this:
First of all, @Chariot190, let me start by doing something called sift gold. You see, I like simple, we love simple, and for some reason you love adding fluff to your arguments, straight up filler, repetitive stuff to reinterate the exact same argument, because breaking down what you're actually trying to argue for would make it more susceptible for proper debunks.
So, first, let me point out all the pointless fluff in your argument to better paint what I mean:
A non-exhaustive list:
So, this is the actual argument being made, without the fluff:
THAT'S what I'm going to reply to here:
This is just me reposting the argument from here, now I sleep.
A response to this:
Let's gooooo....
First of all, @Chariot190, let me start by doing something called sift gold. You see, I like simple, we love simple, and for some reason you love adding fluff to your arguments, straight up filler, repetitive stuff to reinterate the exact same argument, because breaking down what you're actually trying to argue for would make it more susceptible for proper debunks.
So, first, let me point out all the pointless fluff in your argument to better paint what I mean:
- “Later feats do not validate the chain”: about 6 times.
- “Unknown gaps don’t prove anything”: about 11 times.
- “Frieza/Cell are cherry-picked anchors”: about 9 times.
- “Conservative scaling is not validation”: about 16 times.
- “Chain overshoots/undershoots”: about 8 times.
- “Speed scaling lacks supporting feats”: about 5 times.
- “The chain is disconnected from actual feats/showings”: about 11 times.
A non-exhaustive list:
- "A later feat does NOT validate the multiplier chain leading up to it"
- "It only proves Frieza has that feat"
- "How does that prove Guldo, Jeice, Recoome..."
- "It doesn't prove a thing"
- "Neither of those prove every multiplier stack"
- "A high Frieza feat proves Frieza has a high feat. A high Cell statement proves Cell has a high statement."
- ...and so on.
So, this is the actual argument being made, without the fluff:
- A high feat from Frieza or Cell does not retroactively validate every multiplier step leading up to them.
- Unknown ">>>" gaps between characters are unknowns, not evidence the chain is conservative.
- The chain undershoots Frieza/Cell but overshoots everything after Cell, proving it isn't consistently grounded in anything.
- Speed feats especially never catch up to what the multiplier chain implies, making the speed scaling even less defensible.
- Therefore, multiplier stacking in DBZ is largely disconnected from actual material and shouldn't be treated as precise or validated scaling.
THAT'S what I'm going to reply to here:
Chariot, what you're doing here is essentially manufacturing an unreasonable evidentiary standard, one where the only series capable of having their ratings accurately depicted are ones that conveniently pump out a perfectly aligned feat every arc, for every character, at every tier.
That's a standard specifically designed to be impossible to meet, and conveniently, it only ever gets applied when someone wants to dismiss a scaling chain they personally dislike.
Think about what you're actually demanding for a second.
You're asking that a series written weekly over the course of decades, somehow produce a continuous unbroken stream of feats that neatly corroborate every step of a scaling chain. No series does that. Not Naruto, not Bleach, not One Piece, not anything on the wiki. The reason the wiki exists, the reason scaling methodology exists at all, is precisely because fiction doesn't hand you a perfectly calibrated stat sheet. If it did, you wouldn't need a scaling chain. You'd just read the number off the page.
The entire premise of your critique assumes the chain should function like a precise scientific instrument, and then faults it for not doing so, while ignoring that no tool built from the material available could ever meet that bar. You didn't establish a reasonable threshold and find the chain wanting. You established an impossible threshold and then declared victory for finding it unmet.
You don't generate plausible deniability in any meaningful capacity here, because the existence of feats that scale above the chain somehow isn't evidence for you.
"The unknown gaps that aren't accounted for" somehow don't explain the margin between the chain and the feat.
You're demanding a level of mechanical consistency that no narrative work of fiction, let alone a weekly manga written across decades by one man with an admittedly loose relationship to his own numbers, is ever going to produce. And more importantly, no scaling methodology on any major VS wiki actually demands that either. You've invented this requirement from whole cloth and are now using it as your primary metric of validity. That's a goalpost you personally installed.
And the really frustrating part is that this invented standard only flows in one direction. You use it to dismiss the chain when feats overshoot it, but the moment we'd try to use that same logic in reverse, applying the same skepticism to any individual feat that looks suspiciously high or suspiciously low, suddenly the feats are sacrosanct and beyond question. It's the shape of a motivated argument. You've constructed a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose framework where the chain is always suspect for not being 1:! with isolated feats, thus not reliable, and you've dressed it up in the language of rigor to make it look like principled methodology. It isn't. It's selective skepticism applied in exactly the direction needed to reach your preferred conclusion, and if you're going to hold the chain to this standard, you need to hold every individual feat calculation to the same standard, including all thirty-odd interpretations of the Planet Vegeta destruction, or the argument is just nakedly inconsistent.
The chain has never, at any point, been presented as a definitive, precision-mapped declaration of exact AP values.
It has always been a low-end approximation built from the canonical multipliers and power level gaps the story itself provides. I've literally proven it here.
The moment you start critiquing it for failing to be something it never claimed to be, the entire weight of your argument collapses, because you're not actually rebutting the chain on its own terms. You're rebutting a strawman version of it that exists only in the framing of your own post. This distinction matters enormously and I genuinely cannot stress it enough. A low-end, by definition, is expected to come in below the true value. That is the entire function of a low-end. When you construct one, you are consciously and deliberately building something that undershoots, because you are only accounting for what can be directly and conservatively established from the material, and you are leaving out everything that can't be nailed down with precision.
In fact, undershooting is not a problem. It just isn't. That just means the characters that have a canonical gap should be higher than what they're indexed, we've closed the actual threshold of their scaling, before it was "between Planet and Small Star" to "Between Dwarf Brown and Small Star".
So when you look at the output of a low-end and go "this is below the feat," you have identified the low-end functioning exactly as designed and labeled it a failure.
The chain is not trying to nail the exact value. It never was. Critiquing it for not doing so isn't a substantive rebuttal of the methodology. It's a demonstration that you've fundamentally misunderstood, or deliberately misrepresented, what the chain is actually for.
And look, if higher feats don't prove the chain is viable, and the complete absence of AP anti-feats doesn't make it more acceptable, then I genuinely need you to explain what you would accept as evidence. Be specific. Are you asking for a feat that aligns within some acceptable margin every ten chapters? Every twenty? What margin qualifies as close enough? Because you never actually tell us.
You just keep saying things don't line up without establishing what lining up would even look like for you, which means your standard is functionally unfalsifiable. There is no result the chain could produce that you couldn't dismiss under the framework you've built, because if it's "below the feat", the chain is wrong, and if it were somehow exactly at the feat, you'd argue it was cherry-picked to match. An argument with no possible counterexample isn't a rigorous position. And more to the point, if your answer to "what would you accept" is "the feat needs to land close to the chain's result," then you've already conceded the argument, because the chain is a deliberate low-end that doesn't account for arbitrary training gains, rage amplifications, the passive power growth that happens between stated benchmarks, mid-arc power spikes, the effects of zenkai boosts, or any of the numerous unquantified ">>>" gaps you keep citing as problems. Those aren't holes in the chain. Those are documented, narrative-supported reasons why the actual values are higher than the chain suggests.
Let me give you a concrete example of exactly this happening, since apparently it needs spelling out directly:
That increase is not accounted for in the standard chain. It's just noted as "stronger than before" and left unquantified. And this happens repeatedly, not once, not twice, but multiple times across multiple arcs, at multiple different points in the story's progression. Each one of those unaccounted growth instances pushes the real value further above the chain's conservative floor.
The chain is a FLOOR.
So when you look at the final result and go "wow, the chain undershoots Frieza," you are literally just observing the cumulative effect of all those unaccounted upward deviations stacking on top of each other. You're watching the low-end function correctly and calling it a contradiction.
Beyond just Piccolo and Goku at the Budokai, consider the growth that happens during the journey to Namek, the training in the spaceship, the zenkai boosts from near-death experiences that are narratively significant but never given hard multipliers, the power Goku demonstrates against the Ginyu Force that already exceeds what a strict chain reading would suggest.
Every single one of those moments is the story telling you, in plain terms, that the characters are above where a conservative chain would place them. That's the chain being appropriately humble about what it can prove, and the story filling in the gap above it exactly as you'd expect.
Also, the chain uses the feats. It uses its values and then starts using multipliers again.
Now, on the Cell point specifically, your argument weakens considerably and actually inverts when you look at it closely.
4-B is an extraordinarily large tier.
And this might be news, but THE CALCULATED VALUES ARE NOT CANON! They are not! That means all the scaling chain NEEDS to do is getting in a similar ball park, the actual gap isn't relevant because the author is literally not aware of them.
"He is far above Goku who chains scales as nearly Solar System level, it makes sense he'd produce a 1.053 KiloFoe SS feat."
The chain, using exclusively canonical multipliers and stated power gaps from the story itself, gets close enough to Cell's Solar Kamehameha scaling that the remaining margin is well within what the unaccounted gaps we've already established would cover.
You called the gap "over 1000x" and framed it as damning, as though 1000x is some insurmountable chasm that proves total disconnection. In the context of 4-B, where the tier itself spans values that make 1000x look trivial, it genuinely isn't the devastating indictment you're presenting it as.
And that's before we factor in all the unaccounted growth instances between the 23rd Budokai and the Cell Saga that we've already established aren't captured in the chain. Add those in and the gap closes further.
Beyond that, Gohan's physicals aren't 1000x below the Kamehameha. They're roughly 10x below it, a detail that significantly changes the picture you painted. The reason the Kamehameha scales where it does is a legitimate, canonical one rooted in the story's own stated power relationships. The characters who earn that scaling earn it through the story's own internal logic. That's the chain following the material to its natural conclusion and arriving in the right general neighborhood, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.
And then there's your claim about the chain after Cell overshooting by some incomprehensible degree, which you presented with dramatic rhetoric about millions and billions and total detachment from reality, but conspicuously, devastatingly, without a single actual number or a single actual anti-feat to anchor any of it.
You made this claim with enormous confidence and zero supporting data.
Let's actually run it, since you apparently declined to.
Super Saiyan 3 Goku sits at roughly 5.2650 MegaFoe by standard chain math. Cell is at roughly 1.0530 KiloFoe. That is a gap of approximately 5000x between Cell and SSJ3 Goku, the single most powerful form Goku uses in the entirety of Dragon Ball Z. Not millions. Not billions. Five thousand times. That's the gap you described as the chain shooting off into incoherence.
Now account for the fact that SSJ3's multiplier itself is one of the more conservatively established ones, that the fusion bonuses for Vegito aren't fully quantified in the chain, that Buu Saga power growth follows the same pattern of unaccounted spikes we've documented throughout the series, and suddenly even that 5,000x gap starts looking like exactly what you'd expect from a low-end that's working properly. For the gap to even begin approaching the millions you dramatically invoked, you'd need to push to Vegito at full power using his absolute strongest output under the most aggressive possible reading. And it makes sense for Vegito and him alone to be that much stronger than Cell.
That's the chain arriving at a defensible range that requires cherry-picking the most extreme possible reading of the most powerful character in the verse to even start challenging it meaningfully.
Your only offered anti-feat for the post-Cell era would be Kid Buu destroying a planet. Casually. A feat that is, by the narrative's own framing and context, nowhere near Kid Buu's upper limit, performed in a throwaway moment with zero effort, zero escalation, zero dramatic weight attached to it as a display of power. The arc frames Kid Buu as an existential threat to literally everything, a being so dangerous that the gods themselves were scrambling for solutions, a character explicitly stated to be beyond what even a fully powered Super Saiyan 2 could handle. And a casual, effortless, throwaway planetary destruction from this character doesn't represent his ceiling. One cannot use an effortless low-output moment from a character the story frames as cosmically threatening as a hard cap on that character's capability without simultaneously contradicting everything the narrative is telling you about that character's significance.
If you were to actually commit to that reading and scale everything post-Cell to Kid Buu's casual planet bust as a ceiling, you'd produce results so absurdly low that they'd contradict the story's own internal logic at every level, which is why nobody does that, including you. You don't actually believe that's Kid Buu's limit. No one does. So I ask again.
The chainscaling post-Cell saga is overshooting what, exactly?
You also said yourself, and I want to make absolutely sure this point doesn't get quietly buried, that there are approximately thirty different ways to calculate the Planet Vegeta destruction feat, yielding results that vary enormously across a wide range, some higher than the chain's anchor, some lower, some significantly lower depending on which methodology and which set of assumptions you apply.
You introduced this as a critique of the chain's reliability. But think through what that actually means for your own argument. If the feat itself doesn't produce a single clean authoritative number, if it's a distribution of possible values rather than a fixed point, then the chain isn't undershooting some objectively established value. The chain isn't undershooting anything canonical, it's undershooting ONE version of a feat that could easily be much closer.
It's sitting somewhere within or near the distribution of reasonable interpretations of that feat.
Some calculations of Planet Vegeta probably land much closer to the chain's anchor than the highest-end interpretation you've been implicitly using as your measuring stick. The moment you acknowledge that the feat has a range, you've undermined your own ability to declare definitively that the chain undershoots it, because "undershooting" only means something if there's a fixed target to shoot at. If the target is itself a range, and the chain sits at the lower end of that range or slightly below it. That's the chain being conservative, which is, again, the entire point. You cannot invoke the variability of the feat calculation as evidence of the chain's unreliability and simultaneously use the highest interpretation of that calculation as the benchmark against which the chain is judged. That's having it both ways, and it's one of the more glaring methodological inconsistencies in your entire post.
Your strawman about unknown gaps being used for "precise" determination is also genuinely puzzling, because nobody in this conversation argued that. At no point did anyone claim the gaps tell us exactly how large the jumps are or that they can be used to pin down a specific value.
The argument was always, and only, that the gaps exist, that they are directionally upward based on everything the narrative tells us about how power growth works in this series, and that they provide more than sufficient room to explain why the chain comes in below the feat without that constituting evidence the chain is wrong or disconnected.
The distinction between "this gap explains the margin" and "this gap tells us the precise value of the margin" is not a subtle one.
The chain doesn't need to account for those gaps precisely. It needs to account for them directionally, and it does. It doesn't have to match 1:1. It needs to land in the same ballpark, demonstrate that the floor is correctly placed below the true value, and leave room for the unaccounted growth above it. For AP, across every point we've examined in detail, it demonstrably does exactly that.
The speed discussion, honestly, deserves its own entirely separate treatment and should not be bundled into this conversation as a rhetorical weight to make the AP argument feel more broadly damning.
The bottom line is this, and it's genuinely not complicated once you strip away the volume and look at what's actually being claimed.
The chain is a low-end. It was built as a low-end, it functions as a low-end, and it produces results consistent with a low-end.
The feats being above it is not only expected under that framework, it is the predicted and intended outcome of building something conservative that doesn't account for unquantified upward deviations.
The unaccounted gaps push real values higher, not lower, and they do so repeatedly across the entire chain in ways that are narratively supported and directionally consistent.
The post-Cell inflation is nowhere near the catastrophic, galaxy-brained scale you described, and the actual numbers, when you bother to run them, tell a story dramatically less dramatic than your rhetoric implied.
You have no AP anti-feats.
And you've held the chain to a standard of precision that it was never designed to meet, that no legitimate scaling framework anywhere demands, and that you have never applied with equal rigor to the individual feat calculations you're using as your benchmarks. That's building a maze with no exit, placing the chain inside it, and declaring the methodology broken when it can't find a door that was never there.
And while we're here, let me ask you something that I think cuts straight to the heart of how unreasonable your evidentiary standard actually is in practice.
Why, exactly, do I need to produce a specific independent feat for Burter? For Jeice? For Guldo? What is the actual justification for that requirement?
Because here is what I do have: I have a established lower bound, grounded in a calculable feat, that places characters beneath them at a specific value.
I have an established upper bound, grounded in either a calculable feat or a statement with narrative weight, that places characters above them at a specific value.
And I have canonical, story-endorsed, textually supported multipliers and power gaps that the narrative itself provides to describe the relationships between those characters and the ones bookending them.
That is, by any reasonable definition, a complete and coherent scaling chain. The upper bound exists. The lower bound exists. The canonical gaps between them exist. Burter, Jeice, and Guldo sit somewhere inside that bracket, placed there not by arbitrary guesswork or vibes or wishful thinking, but by the actual stated power relationships the story gave us.
So what is missing? What is the gaping hole in that picture that demands I go find a Burter-specific feat before his placement is considered valid? You haven't answered that, because there is no good answer. The scaling isn't contradictory. It doesn't produce results that conflict with anything the narrative shows us.
It uses the story's own internal logic to arrive at a range that is, in practical terms, entirely defensible: somewhere well above Planet level and well below Small Star level, which is exactly the bracket those characters narratively belong in. That's not a precise number, and it was never meant to be. It's a range established by real bounds with real canonical support, and the burden of proof you're demanding to refine it further, to pin down Jeice specifically rather than acknowledge his bracket, is an extraordinary requirement that you have never, at any point in this conversation, justified. You don't get to demand individual feat verification for every link in a chain that has a valid upper bound, a valid lower bound, and canonical connective tissue between them, and call that a principled methodological objection. That's just asking for more work than the question requires, dressed up as rigor.
That's a standard specifically designed to be impossible to meet, and conveniently, it only ever gets applied when someone wants to dismiss a scaling chain they personally dislike.
Think about what you're actually demanding for a second.
You're asking that a series written weekly over the course of decades, somehow produce a continuous unbroken stream of feats that neatly corroborate every step of a scaling chain. No series does that. Not Naruto, not Bleach, not One Piece, not anything on the wiki. The reason the wiki exists, the reason scaling methodology exists at all, is precisely because fiction doesn't hand you a perfectly calibrated stat sheet. If it did, you wouldn't need a scaling chain. You'd just read the number off the page.
The entire premise of your critique assumes the chain should function like a precise scientific instrument, and then faults it for not doing so, while ignoring that no tool built from the material available could ever meet that bar. You didn't establish a reasonable threshold and find the chain wanting. You established an impossible threshold and then declared victory for finding it unmet.
You don't generate plausible deniability in any meaningful capacity here, because the existence of feats that scale above the chain somehow isn't evidence for you.
"The unknown gaps that aren't accounted for" somehow don't explain the margin between the chain and the feat.
You're demanding a level of mechanical consistency that no narrative work of fiction, let alone a weekly manga written across decades by one man with an admittedly loose relationship to his own numbers, is ever going to produce. And more importantly, no scaling methodology on any major VS wiki actually demands that either. You've invented this requirement from whole cloth and are now using it as your primary metric of validity. That's a goalpost you personally installed.
And the really frustrating part is that this invented standard only flows in one direction. You use it to dismiss the chain when feats overshoot it, but the moment we'd try to use that same logic in reverse, applying the same skepticism to any individual feat that looks suspiciously high or suspiciously low, suddenly the feats are sacrosanct and beyond question. It's the shape of a motivated argument. You've constructed a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose framework where the chain is always suspect for not being 1:! with isolated feats, thus not reliable, and you've dressed it up in the language of rigor to make it look like principled methodology. It isn't. It's selective skepticism applied in exactly the direction needed to reach your preferred conclusion, and if you're going to hold the chain to this standard, you need to hold every individual feat calculation to the same standard, including all thirty-odd interpretations of the Planet Vegeta destruction, or the argument is just nakedly inconsistent.
The chain has never, at any point, been presented as a definitive, precision-mapped declaration of exact AP values.
It has always been a low-end approximation built from the canonical multipliers and power level gaps the story itself provides. I've literally proven it here.
The moment you start critiquing it for failing to be something it never claimed to be, the entire weight of your argument collapses, because you're not actually rebutting the chain on its own terms. You're rebutting a strawman version of it that exists only in the framing of your own post. This distinction matters enormously and I genuinely cannot stress it enough. A low-end, by definition, is expected to come in below the true value. That is the entire function of a low-end. When you construct one, you are consciously and deliberately building something that undershoots, because you are only accounting for what can be directly and conservatively established from the material, and you are leaving out everything that can't be nailed down with precision.
In fact, undershooting is not a problem. It just isn't. That just means the characters that have a canonical gap should be higher than what they're indexed, we've closed the actual threshold of their scaling, before it was "between Planet and Small Star" to "Between Dwarf Brown and Small Star".
So when you look at the output of a low-end and go "this is below the feat," you have identified the low-end functioning exactly as designed and labeled it a failure.
The chain is not trying to nail the exact value. It never was. Critiquing it for not doing so isn't a substantive rebuttal of the methodology. It's a demonstration that you've fundamentally misunderstood, or deliberately misrepresented, what the chain is actually for.
And look, if higher feats don't prove the chain is viable, and the complete absence of AP anti-feats doesn't make it more acceptable, then I genuinely need you to explain what you would accept as evidence. Be specific. Are you asking for a feat that aligns within some acceptable margin every ten chapters? Every twenty? What margin qualifies as close enough? Because you never actually tell us.
You just keep saying things don't line up without establishing what lining up would even look like for you, which means your standard is functionally unfalsifiable. There is no result the chain could produce that you couldn't dismiss under the framework you've built, because if it's "below the feat", the chain is wrong, and if it were somehow exactly at the feat, you'd argue it was cherry-picked to match. An argument with no possible counterexample isn't a rigorous position. And more to the point, if your answer to "what would you accept" is "the feat needs to land close to the chain's result," then you've already conceded the argument, because the chain is a deliberate low-end that doesn't account for arbitrary training gains, rage amplifications, the passive power growth that happens between stated benchmarks, mid-arc power spikes, the effects of zenkai boosts, or any of the numerous unquantified ">>>" gaps you keep citing as problems. Those aren't holes in the chain. Those are documented, narrative-supported reasons why the actual values are higher than the chain suggests.
Let me give you a concrete example of exactly this happening, since apparently it needs spelling out directly:
- Piccolo Jr. (unweighted) is [several times stronger]() than Piccolo Daimao, Goku (unweighted) is equal to him. "Several times" meaning at low-ball 3x: >9.00938205546 Yottatons (Large Planet level)
- Goku and Piccolo grow stronger than their 23rd Budokai selves, and are comporable to one another: >9.00938205546 Yottatons (Large Planet level)
That increase is not accounted for in the standard chain. It's just noted as "stronger than before" and left unquantified. And this happens repeatedly, not once, not twice, but multiple times across multiple arcs, at multiple different points in the story's progression. Each one of those unaccounted growth instances pushes the real value further above the chain's conservative floor.
The chain is a FLOOR.
So when you look at the final result and go "wow, the chain undershoots Frieza," you are literally just observing the cumulative effect of all those unaccounted upward deviations stacking on top of each other. You're watching the low-end function correctly and calling it a contradiction.
Beyond just Piccolo and Goku at the Budokai, consider the growth that happens during the journey to Namek, the training in the spaceship, the zenkai boosts from near-death experiences that are narratively significant but never given hard multipliers, the power Goku demonstrates against the Ginyu Force that already exceeds what a strict chain reading would suggest.
Every single one of those moments is the story telling you, in plain terms, that the characters are above where a conservative chain would place them. That's the chain being appropriately humble about what it can prove, and the story filling in the gap above it exactly as you'd expect.
Also, the chain uses the feats. It uses its values and then starts using multipliers again.
Now, on the Cell point specifically, your argument weakens considerably and actually inverts when you look at it closely.
4-B is an extraordinarily large tier.
And this might be news, but THE CALCULATED VALUES ARE NOT CANON! They are not! That means all the scaling chain NEEDS to do is getting in a similar ball park, the actual gap isn't relevant because the author is literally not aware of them.
"He is far above Goku who chains scales as nearly Solar System level, it makes sense he'd produce a 1.053 KiloFoe SS feat."
The chain, using exclusively canonical multipliers and stated power gaps from the story itself, gets close enough to Cell's Solar Kamehameha scaling that the remaining margin is well within what the unaccounted gaps we've already established would cover.
You called the gap "over 1000x" and framed it as damning, as though 1000x is some insurmountable chasm that proves total disconnection. In the context of 4-B, where the tier itself spans values that make 1000x look trivial, it genuinely isn't the devastating indictment you're presenting it as.
And that's before we factor in all the unaccounted growth instances between the 23rd Budokai and the Cell Saga that we've already established aren't captured in the chain. Add those in and the gap closes further.
Beyond that, Gohan's physicals aren't 1000x below the Kamehameha. They're roughly 10x below it, a detail that significantly changes the picture you painted. The reason the Kamehameha scales where it does is a legitimate, canonical one rooted in the story's own stated power relationships. The characters who earn that scaling earn it through the story's own internal logic. That's the chain following the material to its natural conclusion and arriving in the right general neighborhood, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.
And then there's your claim about the chain after Cell overshooting by some incomprehensible degree, which you presented with dramatic rhetoric about millions and billions and total detachment from reality, but conspicuously, devastatingly, without a single actual number or a single actual anti-feat to anchor any of it.
You made this claim with enormous confidence and zero supporting data.
Let's actually run it, since you apparently declined to.
Super Saiyan 3 Goku sits at roughly 5.2650 MegaFoe by standard chain math. Cell is at roughly 1.0530 KiloFoe. That is a gap of approximately 5000x between Cell and SSJ3 Goku, the single most powerful form Goku uses in the entirety of Dragon Ball Z. Not millions. Not billions. Five thousand times. That's the gap you described as the chain shooting off into incoherence.
Now account for the fact that SSJ3's multiplier itself is one of the more conservatively established ones, that the fusion bonuses for Vegito aren't fully quantified in the chain, that Buu Saga power growth follows the same pattern of unaccounted spikes we've documented throughout the series, and suddenly even that 5,000x gap starts looking like exactly what you'd expect from a low-end that's working properly. For the gap to even begin approaching the millions you dramatically invoked, you'd need to push to Vegito at full power using his absolute strongest output under the most aggressive possible reading. And it makes sense for Vegito and him alone to be that much stronger than Cell.
That's the chain arriving at a defensible range that requires cherry-picking the most extreme possible reading of the most powerful character in the verse to even start challenging it meaningfully.
Your only offered anti-feat for the post-Cell era would be Kid Buu destroying a planet. Casually. A feat that is, by the narrative's own framing and context, nowhere near Kid Buu's upper limit, performed in a throwaway moment with zero effort, zero escalation, zero dramatic weight attached to it as a display of power. The arc frames Kid Buu as an existential threat to literally everything, a being so dangerous that the gods themselves were scrambling for solutions, a character explicitly stated to be beyond what even a fully powered Super Saiyan 2 could handle. And a casual, effortless, throwaway planetary destruction from this character doesn't represent his ceiling. One cannot use an effortless low-output moment from a character the story frames as cosmically threatening as a hard cap on that character's capability without simultaneously contradicting everything the narrative is telling you about that character's significance.
If you were to actually commit to that reading and scale everything post-Cell to Kid Buu's casual planet bust as a ceiling, you'd produce results so absurdly low that they'd contradict the story's own internal logic at every level, which is why nobody does that, including you. You don't actually believe that's Kid Buu's limit. No one does. So I ask again.
The chainscaling post-Cell saga is overshooting what, exactly?
You also said yourself, and I want to make absolutely sure this point doesn't get quietly buried, that there are approximately thirty different ways to calculate the Planet Vegeta destruction feat, yielding results that vary enormously across a wide range, some higher than the chain's anchor, some lower, some significantly lower depending on which methodology and which set of assumptions you apply.
You introduced this as a critique of the chain's reliability. But think through what that actually means for your own argument. If the feat itself doesn't produce a single clean authoritative number, if it's a distribution of possible values rather than a fixed point, then the chain isn't undershooting some objectively established value. The chain isn't undershooting anything canonical, it's undershooting ONE version of a feat that could easily be much closer.
It's sitting somewhere within or near the distribution of reasonable interpretations of that feat.
Some calculations of Planet Vegeta probably land much closer to the chain's anchor than the highest-end interpretation you've been implicitly using as your measuring stick. The moment you acknowledge that the feat has a range, you've undermined your own ability to declare definitively that the chain undershoots it, because "undershooting" only means something if there's a fixed target to shoot at. If the target is itself a range, and the chain sits at the lower end of that range or slightly below it. That's the chain being conservative, which is, again, the entire point. You cannot invoke the variability of the feat calculation as evidence of the chain's unreliability and simultaneously use the highest interpretation of that calculation as the benchmark against which the chain is judged. That's having it both ways, and it's one of the more glaring methodological inconsistencies in your entire post.
Your strawman about unknown gaps being used for "precise" determination is also genuinely puzzling, because nobody in this conversation argued that. At no point did anyone claim the gaps tell us exactly how large the jumps are or that they can be used to pin down a specific value.
The argument was always, and only, that the gaps exist, that they are directionally upward based on everything the narrative tells us about how power growth works in this series, and that they provide more than sufficient room to explain why the chain comes in below the feat without that constituting evidence the chain is wrong or disconnected.
The distinction between "this gap explains the margin" and "this gap tells us the precise value of the margin" is not a subtle one.
The chain doesn't need to account for those gaps precisely. It needs to account for them directionally, and it does. It doesn't have to match 1:1. It needs to land in the same ballpark, demonstrate that the floor is correctly placed below the true value, and leave room for the unaccounted growth above it. For AP, across every point we've examined in detail, it demonstrably does exactly that.
The speed discussion, honestly, deserves its own entirely separate treatment and should not be bundled into this conversation as a rhetorical weight to make the AP argument feel more broadly damning.
The bottom line is this, and it's genuinely not complicated once you strip away the volume and look at what's actually being claimed.
The chain is a low-end. It was built as a low-end, it functions as a low-end, and it produces results consistent with a low-end.
The feats being above it is not only expected under that framework, it is the predicted and intended outcome of building something conservative that doesn't account for unquantified upward deviations.
The unaccounted gaps push real values higher, not lower, and they do so repeatedly across the entire chain in ways that are narratively supported and directionally consistent.
The post-Cell inflation is nowhere near the catastrophic, galaxy-brained scale you described, and the actual numbers, when you bother to run them, tell a story dramatically less dramatic than your rhetoric implied.
You have no AP anti-feats.
And you've held the chain to a standard of precision that it was never designed to meet, that no legitimate scaling framework anywhere demands, and that you have never applied with equal rigor to the individual feat calculations you're using as your benchmarks. That's building a maze with no exit, placing the chain inside it, and declaring the methodology broken when it can't find a door that was never there.
And while we're here, let me ask you something that I think cuts straight to the heart of how unreasonable your evidentiary standard actually is in practice.
Why, exactly, do I need to produce a specific independent feat for Burter? For Jeice? For Guldo? What is the actual justification for that requirement?
Because here is what I do have: I have a established lower bound, grounded in a calculable feat, that places characters beneath them at a specific value.
I have an established upper bound, grounded in either a calculable feat or a statement with narrative weight, that places characters above them at a specific value.
And I have canonical, story-endorsed, textually supported multipliers and power gaps that the narrative itself provides to describe the relationships between those characters and the ones bookending them.
That is, by any reasonable definition, a complete and coherent scaling chain. The upper bound exists. The lower bound exists. The canonical gaps between them exist. Burter, Jeice, and Guldo sit somewhere inside that bracket, placed there not by arbitrary guesswork or vibes or wishful thinking, but by the actual stated power relationships the story gave us.
So what is missing? What is the gaping hole in that picture that demands I go find a Burter-specific feat before his placement is considered valid? You haven't answered that, because there is no good answer. The scaling isn't contradictory. It doesn't produce results that conflict with anything the narrative shows us.
It uses the story's own internal logic to arrive at a range that is, in practical terms, entirely defensible: somewhere well above Planet level and well below Small Star level, which is exactly the bracket those characters narratively belong in. That's not a precise number, and it was never meant to be. It's a range established by real bounds with real canonical support, and the burden of proof you're demanding to refine it further, to pin down Jeice specifically rather than acknowledge his bracket, is an extraordinary requirement that you have never, at any point in this conversation, justified. You don't get to demand individual feat verification for every link in a chain that has a valid upper bound, a valid lower bound, and canonical connective tissue between them, and call that a principled methodological objection. That's just asking for more work than the question requires, dressed up as rigor.
This is just me reposting the argument from here, now I sleep.
