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In the Battle for Dream Island: Official Character Guide, it's stated that Clock can control his clock hands, but if he lets them move naturally, they are "infinitely powerful." The natural hand movement refers to when they're moving automatically in accordance with the passage of time. The controlled hand movement refers to when Clock freely moves them himself, and most likely also when he keeps them stationary.
Last time someone tried implementing this fact on the profiles, it was botched, but fortunately, the proposal having not been applied seems to mean they went back on it. This infinite power isn't meant to be taken at face value and doesn't have scaling potential. I'll go over why that is the case.
- The natural movement of Clock's hands specifically having infinite power also means that Clock's controlled hand movement lacks infinite power, and the latter of the two is what Clock normally does and is what other characters normally interact with. This is consistent with quality logic, because if the other characters scaled to Clock's infinite power, it would mean that Clock's controlled movement would also have infinite power, defeating the purpose of differentiating the power of his controlled movement and his natural movement, because they would be the same. Not to mention, the natural movement of Clock's hands having infinite power is considered as a special attribute of Clock specifically, allowing him to accurately tell time no matter what is in his way.
- As established in the past, scaling Clock's natural hand movement to the Announcer's budget cuts is baseless, because budget cuts are a non-physical force and there are no buzzwords correlating the two. The Announcer's budget cuts being universal in scale and the VS Battles Wiki calling infinite 3D power "High Universe level" isn't evidence officially from BFDI that Clock's "infinitely powerful" natural hand movement scales to the Announcer's universal capabilities. Even without the aforementioned, due to how budget cuts treat the show as a fictional work, having infinite power of a scope within that fictional work wouldn't indicate Clock scaling to them anyway. Additionally, budget cuts, when used for the purpose of threatening the entire series in a way that could only be prevented through interacting with the budget, were portrayed as genuinely all that, which would include destroying Clock's hands no matter what they were doing.
- If taken at face value with no analysis of the subtext, the statement is merely a hyperbole. However, I think the statement about Clock's natural hand movement has a bit of depth that makes it somewhat more valuable than that.
The word "power" can be used to refer to many other things than "attack potency" or "striking strength." A likely truth is, Clock's hands moving naturally in an "infinitely powerful" way means they have the highest physical priority in the setting, allowing Clock to accurately tell time with absolutely nothing able to physically prevent that from happening by doing something like blocking a hand from proceeding. This implies that Clock has a connection to time itself. A fantastic clock isn't inherently all that grand, but when its ability to tell time is considered as being "infinitely powerful," it gives me the impression that the clock might be magically linked to time.
Here's my proposal to implement the fact from the guide in a way that properly understands the subtext: The natural movement of Clock's hands likely have infinite lifting strength. Clock's "infinitely powerful" hands can use their priority to move anything in the universe out of their way, so they can accurately display time, due to them being implied to have as much authority as time itself in this specific regard.
Also, I establish in this thread that:
- There is supplementary evidence that can support this thread's revision proposal, but it's possibly incorrect. During BFDI:TPOT 5: Fishes and Dishes, Two's plates were rolling away, and this led to them being carried away by moving clouds, which Two reacted to by saying: "Not the clouds accelerating at a faster pace to keep up with the Earth's faster rotation due to a sudden daylight savings change!" Directly after this, Clock said: "My bad!" It is possible that this was just a joke and was an exaggerated reference to how Clock can tell time as a regular clock. It is possible that Clock was only aware of the daylight savings change due to keeping track of it, and apologized only for not pre-emptively alerting Two. However, another valid interpretation is that Clock had accidentally caused the clouds to move due to him having a connection to time's actual effects. This isn't a far-fetched interpretation, because during BFB 3: Why Would You Do This on a Swingset, when it was time for a daylight savings change, Clock's hands gained a huge burst of enhanced speed, and he was using his natural hand movement during the challenge.
- X having been able to catch a basket after Clock launched it to him using his natural hand movement during BFB 1: Getting Teardrop to Talk isn't evidence of X having infinite lifting strength. The point of Clock's natural hand movement having infinite lifting strength is for nothing to be able to block its movement, not that it launches everything with infinite force. If Clock had launched it with infinite force, it would have been striking strength, which is inconsistent based on what has already been explained in this thread.
- Clock's teammates having guided his hand moving naturally to tear open a big jawbreaker during BFB 2: Lick Your Way to Freedom isn't evidence for scaling. Guiding a teammate is not the same as overpowering an opponent. Arguing that Clock's friends scale to his exclusive infinite power for that reason would be as weird as claiming that a superpowerless regular civilian is as strong as a superhero who has super strength because the two can handshake without anything going wrong.
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