Deltarune: Removing Magic Scaling

[GodlyCharmander]

Think the Pippins deal more than 1 damage yo

TV World Pippins are chapter 3 characters and were created by a Level 3 Lightner.

 

[Edutyn]

They should downscale from the higher feats, probably High 8-C since Ch 1 chars can still deal 1 damage to Chapter 3 Kris

Wasn't this discussed in the thread that changed everything in Deltarune? If I remember correctly, the regular enemies (chapters 1 and 2) were scaled 3x below enemys form ch3 & 4. I could be wrong too.

Plus Tenna's calc is 7-C

 

[GodlyCharmander]

Plus Tenna's calc is 7-C

That's getting axed

 

[Eden_Warlock99]

TV World Pippins are chapter 3 characters and were created by a Level 3 Lightner.

I think La Rory Nite is a fair bit stronger than both LV3 Kris and LV4 Susie, yet the Card Castle/Cyber World Darkners obviously aren't stronger than the TV World ones.
Just use Roulx's lamp from the Lanino and Elnina rematch or smth

 

[Axorandom0]

They should downscale from the higher feats, probably High 8-C since Ch 1 chars can still deal 1 damage to Chapter 3 Kris

Sorry if you already put this elsewhere, but what High 8-C calc are you using for their values?

 

[GodlyCharmander]

Sorry if you already put this elsewhere, but what High 8-C calc are you using for their values?

When a character heavily downscales from a stronger one, but can still cause some insignificant damage, we usually downscale them to the lowest value of the tier, or the highest value of the previous tier.

Apparently they're already x3 lower than the highest value, so there's that. I don't recall the logic behind that, was it because of Spamton?

 

[Axorandom0]

When a character heavily downscales from a stronger one, but can still cause some insignificant damage, we usually downscale them to the lowest value of the tier, or the highest value of the previous tier.

Apparently they're already x3 lower than the highest value, so there's that. I don't recall the logic behind that, was it because of Spamton?

Spamton NEO is stated to be 3x stronger than base Spamton, who we can use as a ruler for fodder compared to bosses.

(These are kinda minor so you can kinda ignore them) Also, 1. Downscales can only happen if the gap is close (I think less than 1.5x iirc), and 2. It can only downscale to baseline or [tier]+, so you can’t quite do “highest value of previous tier”.

 

[Eden_Warlock99]

When a character heavily downscales from a stronger one, but can still cause some insignificant damage, we usually downscale them to the lowest value of the tier, or the highest value of the previous tier.

We don't do that anymore, just slap an "At most" on it if anything.

 

[Axorandom0]

We don't do that anymore, just slap an "At most" on it if anything.

So would fodder be “At most [3x weaker than bosses]” when downscaling a c4 boss?

 

[IDK3465]

When a character heavily downscales from a stronger one, but can still cause some insignificant damage, we usually downscale them to the lowest value of the tier, or the highest value of the previous tier.

Apparently they're already x3 lower than the highest value, so there's that. I don't recall the logic behind that, was it because of Spamton?

I don't think we're allowed to downscale entire tiers unless it's within at most 1.5x the baseline, so we might be able to set pre-chapter 4 bosses at baseline 8-A, but we can't do so if the 7-C end gets used

So I guess it'd be like:
Bosses: 100 Tons of TNT or at most 18.376 Kilotons
Fodder: 33.3 Tons of TNT or at most 6.125 Kilotons

 

[Eden_Warlock99]

So would fodder be “At most [3x weaker than bosses]” when downscaling a c4 boss?

Feel like Spamton NEO has enough "This guy is REALLY strong" hype + The Lightner's Dream stuff to put him over a regular Darkner Ralsei could destroy in 3 hits.

 

[Axorandom0]

Feel like Spamton NEO has enough "This guy is REALLY strong" hype + The Lightner's Dream stuff to put him over a regular Darkner Ralsei could destroy in 3 hits.

Ok, so no “at most”. Makes sense.

 

[Jepilstiltskin]

"Ralsei only describes Darkners as 'not real' from a Lightner perspective"​

This is honestly a funny argument to make, because your interpretation fundamentally relies on Ralsei being some detached physicist coldly explaining cosmology, when that is very obviously not how Ralsei is portrayed at all. Ralsei may be highly informed about the world, sure, but he consistently frames things emotionally and existentially. Especially in Chapter 3 and onward, where the entire discussion heavily revolves around his personal issues which is loneliness, insecurity, self-purpose, being “made for” others, and most importantly, his lack of self-worth. THAT context matters in FICTION (see this bro I capped the text). Even reliable characters in fiction can have their judgment clouded by emotion.

So when someone says “I’m not real” during what is very obviously an existential crisis, you do not interpret that as a literal cosmological theorem. You interpret it psychologically. Because that is literally what the chapter is about, diving deeper into the psychological state of the characters. I mean, thank God you're not the writer of Deltarune.

And the ironic part is (since you keep claiming I'm doing this) that your counter-argument itself is basically a non-sequitur. A world being derivative, created, or dependent on willpower does not automatically make it ontologically fake or nonexistent. This is literally the case with almost every fiction on the history. Ralsei should logically understand this better than anyone, but because he is emotionally unstable and constantly viewing himself through the perspective of LIGHTNERS, his statements end up reflecting insecurity rather than objective truth. Take something like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a comparison (my first whataboutsim, but I don't care). Wonderland is constantly framed as a dream, yet the narrative heavily leans toward it possessing genuine ontological reality due to the sheer complexity and independence of its existence. Deltarune treats the Dark World in a very similar way, existentially real within its own ontological layer, especially through the prophecy.

And this is where your position starts contradicting itself. You insist that Ralsei is reliable, yet at the same time you dismiss his statements about balance, coexistence, and the prophecy as “not real” or merely symbolic...? So what exactly are we doing here? I mean, we could talk about the irony of our arguments, but the feather would heavily leans onto you to be practically honest. Because the overwhelming amount of evidence (including the prophecy and Ralsei's own retelling) points toward the Dark World possessing genuine ontological significance. What Ralsei says in Chapter 3 is very obviously framed as emotional venting tied to his psychological state.

And really, your interpretation ends up undermining the themes of the story itself. If DARKNERS are literally fake or ontologically nonexistent, then Ralsei's insecurities become objectively correct, Spamton'a existential terror becomes objectively correct, emotional attachment toward DARKNERS becomes philosophically meaningless, and the game's entire moral emphasis on empathy basically collapses.

Remember the whole “try being good” bit? Yeah no, that's USELESS now, congrats. Though the thing is, the story clearly does not frame these fears as factual confirmations. It frames them as tragic existential anxieties. The point is that DARKNERS feel disposable or unreal from certain perspectives, not that they literally are. That distinction is absolutely crucial.

"Ralsei moved between Dark Worlds, so Darkners must be genuinely alive"​

This is not really an argument, assuming there even is one here. You keep circling back to “Ralsei is a unique case” and “Darkness is just substrate” and so on, but you are not addressing the actual implication behind it. Ralsei is still technically an object from the perspective of the Light World. So if we are assuming that Ralsei somehow moved or “teleported” between different Dark Worlds, that would still imply movement occurring on the Light World side as well, because the corresponding object itself is changing position.

And if the object can move independently like that, then it is clearly alive in some meaningful sense. The object form is simply how the Light World perceives DARKNERS, not proof that they are ontologically fake or nonexistent. This is so self-explanatory, you genuinely can't mess this implication up bro WTF.

"King knew Queen, Tenna knew Spamton, therefore Darkners are real"​

The case with Noelle and Kris playing make-believe with Queen and King is clearly presented as a one-time thing. You do not genuinely think that alone fully explains the intimate relationship and history those two are implied to have, right? Brother.

And this still does not explain how Tenna is aware of Spamton and somehow shares a connection with him. You really cannot make proper sense of that through purely “mundane in-universe logic”, because the two are categorically disconnected in the Light World. Tenna is an analog tv with no awareness of the internet, while Spamton is directly associated with the internet itself. Yet somehow these two know each other and have interacted. Explain how that works, and I will concede this part of the argument.

And honestly, it is funny that you ask why this is relevant when the relevance is extremely obvious if you actually read my argument. The entire point is that these beings appear to have genuine lives and histories prior to Darkness physically manifesting them. The reason why the flashback involving Tenna is shown as an object is because it's from the perspective of the Light World itself, since LIGHTNERD are visibly involved in the scene. It would be stupid and uninteresting if we see it in DARKNERS perspective, because we couldn't see the LIGHTNERD present anywhere. And even if you try arguing that it was merely a “memory” generated by Darkness at the moment of creation, that still does not really work, because Tenna speaks about the flashback as though he personally experienced and remembers it.

At that point, the implication becomes pretty clear, he is genuinely alive in some meaningful sense, not merely an imaginary construct spontaneously invented by Darkness the way you are implying. Do I need to remind you that Spamton has a clear goal and implicated a genuine activity BEFORE we even play the game? Ads is sentient, wow.

"Chapter 3's theme is about loneliness, not the Dark World being fake"​

Themes are not mutually exclusive. A chapter can be about loneliness and contain explicit cosmological exposition. These are not competing interpretations where one invalidates the other. Ralsei's extended mechanical explanation of how Dark Worlds are created, what negative photons do, how willpower shapes the fantasy, is not a metaphor for loneliness. It is a literal in-universe explanation of how the world works, delivered by the character whose narrative role is specifically to deliver exactly that kind of information.

You are essentially arguing that because a chapter has an emotional theme, its explicit worldbuilding dialogue should be reinterpreted to fit that theme rather than taken at face value.

Now you are just putting words into my mouth because I genuinely never argued that lmao. My actual argument is that the chapter's themes are centered around the characters loneliness, insecurity, and search for purpose. Because of that, the statement in question becomes unreliable (there's truth in it, but since it's a venting heavy statement, there would be bias in it) as an objective cosmological claim, since it is delivered in an emotionally and psychologically heavy context while most of the surrounding evidence disputes that interpretation anyway.

The reason I even brought up the theme of loneliness in the first place is because you started saying some nonsense about the “theme” being cosmological expansion or some bullshit like “Ralsei explaining the cosmology is theme”, when that is not remotely close to being the actual narrative theme of the chapter (it isn't even a real theme in storytelling!). That is like saying “Death Battle and powerscaling are the themes of the story”, bro what? Yes, themes can be mutually exclusive, obviously. But what you are describing is not the thematic focus of the chapter at all.

Son.

You have not explained why music notes outspeed bullets in the same battle, why shockwaves travel at different speeds through the same medium, or why characters who dodge alleged SoL attacks get tagged by sound in the same chapter.

On what part of this sentence: “Because I specifically disagree with the Dark World being fake stuff?” you didn't understand? Is it the “because” or the “?” or the what exactly? Smh.

 

[Jepilstiltskin]

The counter-argument doesn't really make sense because it completely ignores the core point I was making and then shifts the discussion into something else entirely and then labeling it as “refutation”. It basically comes off as: “it isn't because this! because boom! because that!” while never actually addressing the idea behind the argument itself. The irony in this is that, you keep saying that I'm moving the goal-post, when literally you're the one doing it.

Anyway, this discussion is obviously going on in circle, and I genuinely uninteresed now. I'm just going to leave this to @StrymULTRA because the guy is gonna show up anytime soon.

 

[GodlyCharmander]

because your interpretation fundamentally relies on Ralsei being some detached physicist coldly

It doesn't.

I'm not entertaining your response any longer. Character has knowledge, character gives knowledge, character has emotions because of said knowledge.

Where in the hell does that require Ralsei to be cold?

YOUR interpretation relies on Ralsei being an a-hole and calling himself and every one of his friends and dark world denizens to be fake, just from some "existential crisis".

Ralsei is still technically an object from the perspective of the Light World. So if we are assuming that Ralsei somehow moved or “teleported” between different Dark Worlds, that would still imply movement occurring on the Light World side as well, because the corresponding object itself is changing position.

Don't care about your headcanon. Prove it's through the Light World or leave.

The case with Noelle and Kris playing make-believe with Queen and King is clearly presented as a one-time thing

It's not. You can't make a claim on implications because there isn't one. If you're just gonna lie, leave the discussion like you said you would.

The "fond memory" that stuck with ramb for years is a one-time thing because you can't interpret dialogue. Also, doesn't matter, this proves experiences are through the Light World and there is a precedent of cards and the computers interacting.

chapter's themes are centered around the characters loneliness, insecurity, and search for purpose. Because of that, the statement in question becomes unreliable

Non-Sequitur. The statement is the root cause of the insecurity, not the other way around, I've proven it.

On what part of this sentence: “Because I specifically disagree with the Dark World being fake stuff?” you didn't understand? Is it the “because” or the “?” or the what exactly? Smh.

That's one of the several points used to argue that.

this discussion is obviously going on in circle, and I genuinely uninteresed now

Great, genuinely stop pretending you're making a point after being refuted on an objective scale, you're literally using personal headcanons as an argument, I don't want to deal with you again.

 

[Anonymous_Learner]

ftl and stat downgrades i agree with, everything else i do not (especially fake world)

 

[Anonymous_Learner]

The fake worlds aren't literally fake, they are support for Dark Worlds being fantasy and unrealistic, thus, support for stat and FTL downgrade.

"FTL should be downgraded because Dark Worlds operate under the power of imagination"
"I disagree with the power of imagination being a thing"

?????? The fake world interpretation doesn't even provide any changes beyond the downgrade you're agreeing with.

if it's just support for the downgrades, i don't need to believe in it to believe in the downgrades.
i given my answer, count my vote and leave me be. I'm in no mood to respond to text walls today

 

[Anonymous_Learner]

i gave a vote and get attitude. brotha calm down

 

[ExcelsisBerny]

Well written CRT. I have read the discussion so far, and I lean toward GodlyCharmander’s arguments.

 

[StrymULTRA]

I literally don't care, regular member vote is basically decoration anyway.

This kind of comment is literally uncalled for, one can easily call anything you said decorative by this logic. It's not like we're all commoners while you're a noble, knock that shit off.

Regardless I am finally home and in a better shape, give me 2 hours tops and I'll reply to everything.

 

[DaReaperMan]

This kind of comment is literally uncalled for, one can easily call anything you said decorative by this logic. It's not like we're all commoners while you're a noble, knock that shit off.

This. It's fine to be frustrated or a bit heated in a debate, but the moment you kick up a stink with unrelated parties is the moment it enters no-go territory.

@Armorchompy can you please monitor this thread to keep things above board?

 

[TheOrangeGuy09]

Like you could.
You literally don't understand what's even being argued. Fine, I literally don't care, regular member vote is basically decoration anyway.

Why are you belittling Anonymous out of nowhere lmao, any user has a right to disagree with your thread and doesn’t owe ANY explanation to you, questioning their ability to comprehend the thread or debate is just straight up rude and disrespectful.

 

[StrymULTRA]

NATURE OF DARK WORLDS AND DARKNER MAGIC​

The way dark words work was elaborated by Ralsei in the third chapter of the series.

To give context, Ralsei has always been a character whose entire concept and purpose in the story was to give us blatant exposition of the story in all given moments, with evidence that he has deliberate awareness of the 4th Wall of the game, which is a part of his character. It is literally his entire purpose as a Darkner to know the entire prophecy, and literally all the rules about the world since the moment he began existing without choice.

Ralsei knows the ending of the prophecy by heart, and knew it would hurt Susie and Kris to know about it, a prediction that was ultimately true as Susie utterly rejected the ending by smashing the glass that showed it to her. Thanks to Ralsei's boundless knowledge of the Dark World, his information of how the Titans would emerge and appear from Berdly creating a new Dark Fountain inside the Dark World they were in was ultimately be proven true in Chapter 4 when the Knight did exactly that.

Needless to say: Ralsei's information is as reliable as a narrator in the story, as that's one of his roles. This doesn't stop him from lying to protect Susie and Kris from information, but unless it's proven, we should believe the information about the mechanics of the world as he has proven to be reliable on that front several times. And critically, his statements about the nature of Dark Worlds are not the kind of information he would have any motivation to lie about. He lies to protect emotional wellbeing. He has no reason to fabricate a cosmological explanation for how darkness and willpower interact to create pocket dimensions. That explanation serves no protective function. It is simply the truth of how the world works, delivered by the character whose entire existence is oriented around knowing and communicating exactly that.

With that being said, let's dive into how Dark Worlds work, and how the Darkners are made.

Dark Worlds are created when a lightner, aka a person from the real world, concentrated their will into a sharp object, like a pin, or a knife and while pouring their determination, stab the earth creating a darkness that fills the room they are in with a dakrness smoke, creating a fountain of darkness that gives the entire land, its citizens and objects form. This process is explicitly volitional and conceptual rather than energetic. The mechanism is willpower meeting a physical anchor, and the output is a space shaped by intent rather than by the conservation of energy or matter. This is not analogous to how any physical processes.

What that means is that these worlds are not a definitive creation from some sort of alternate physics, it's directly created by "willpower", and "determination" by the lightner, its contents and size are directly related to the will of the user, as the Knight and Susie create two alternate worlds despite being in the same place, and despite her will trying to replicate the exact same place. So darkness isn't exactly trying to replicate accurate size scalings or physics inside the dark worlds, it's just trying to replicate one's will. As a Dark World created in the confinements of a library (and it is a limitation), which is small, can create an entire city because of the themes of the world. This alone should terminate any attempt to treat Dark World spatial dimensions as physically meaningful.

While a Dark World created in an entire church, which is comparatively massive, only creates a sancturay, which is small in total. Because a sanctuary is a theme, and that's the only reason. The inverse relationship between the physical size of the source space and the thematic scope of the resulting Dark World in these two examples is a direct demonstration that spatial correspondence between the light world container and the dark world content is nonexistent. The church is larger than the library but produces a smaller dark world, because the theme of sanctuary is more contained than the theme of a city

For a more direct approach, let me paint this with numbers.

• Say the library is about 10 meters long, and 10 meters thick, thus an area of 100m² of Darkness. A very small city has an area of 10000m², a gap of 100x in surface area alone, and even more if you account for volume, cities are tall as hell.
• Say the church is 20x15 meters, that's 300m² of darkness. The biggest sanctuary in the world is the Sanctuary in Las Lajas, which is around 4,500m². Yet the Church Dark World is nowhere near that scale. Best case scenario, 15x gap. And a MUCH lower volume conversion.

Why? Because the Dark Fountain is not performing a 1:1 volumetric conversion of matter into space. It is manifesting concepts, themes, and intent. If Dark Worlds were obeying strict spatial conservation, the Cyber World should have been impossible using all other 3 Dark Worlds as a basis. The Cyber World's existence alone, created under conditions that physical spatial logic would make impossible, is a self-contained refutation of the idea that Dark World physics obeys any conservation law we could use for energy or size calculations.

What that means is that, first, darkness and magic derived from said darkness are not UES, they're not proportional to the hax feats they perform in any way, as all spaces created by Darkness are non-euclidean, meaning they don't take a proportional amount of "darkness" or "energy" to be created, yet they use immeasurable concepts like willpower and determination to fabricate their worlds. Non-Euclidean geometry by definition violates the spatial assumptions underlying any size-based energy calculation. You cannot use the apparent dimensions of a non-Euclidean space to derive a physically meaningful energy value, because the relationship between apparent dimension and physical volume that makes such calculations possible does not exist in a space where geometry is determined by will rather than physics.
TL;DR: Dark Worlds are made from willpower, not energy. They're not UES, and they're non-euclidean.

FAKE WORLD

That's when we finally arrive in Chapter 3.

In Chapter 3, Ralsei begins explaining the mechanics of the Dark World and why darkness create them, that while Susie and Kris live in the "light world" where "everything is what one sees", that is only possible as long as there is light. When the lights come out and the absence of light becomes absolute, you see nothing. However, when darkness itself becomes a property and the room that was completely dark gets yet darker, taking away light that isn't there, negative photons allows us to see things again, allows us to feel things again, allows us to hear things again.

Ralsei say that the act of taking light away and seeing things through the lens of shadow, IS THE DARK WORLD. Ralsei outright says that the Dark World, and by extension all the darkners there, are an illusion. Also outright stating that all the Dark Fountains do, is turning everything into a fantasy

Let me repeat that for you: The Dark World where all magic is present, is a fantasy created by willpower whose Darkners reflect the will. Also, notice how Ralsei, a reliable narrator, puts "world" in quotation marks. It's not an actual world. The quotation marks are doing real work here. Explicitly signaling that the word "world" is being used loosely, that what is being described does not meet the actual ontological criteria for a world

Ralsei outright says that the world isn't real, including the locations and the citizens. Susie outright confirms that the world is "kinda like a dream"

Ralsei makes a point about, when things become dark, everything is indistinct, citing how vision and your own mind starts disassociating objects, despite the fact you know what they are originally. A chair looks like monster, a poster looks like its moving, and how your eyes can't see the truth anymore. Appealing directly to the imagination of believing things that aren't true because of the darkness, making a direct point that the darker a place gets, the further from the truth you are in terms of visual guidance, so you rely way more on your imagination to make things up. This is the game explicitly connecting Dark World experience to the psychology of darkness-induced apophenia, the tendency of the human mind to impose patterns and identities onto ambiguous stimuli. What you see in the Dark World is your mind filling in blanks, scaled up to the level of an entire pocket dimension.

He even makes a point about your mind not being able to make something out of nothing when the lights go out. That means every indistinct nature of a chair becoming a monster came straight to your mind, and when it gets darker, it's an extrapolation of that concept incarnate. The dark worlds made by these negative photons is an illusion made by your mind, a fantasy that reflects your personal will poured into the blade you used. This means that every property of a Dark World, its size, its inhabitants, its magic, its physical laws, is a mental construct made material by the mechanics of darkness. And mental constructs do not have objectively measurable energetic values independent of the minds that produced them.

Every property inside the dark worlds is fanciful, unreal and bizarre, with no regards for realism whatsoever. That's why magic is possible, and why despite not knowing anything about the world she was in, Noelle knew how to cast ice magic like second nature, as she was just mimicking the RPG she played in real life with her dad, which uses the same magic, even verbatim, as her dark world self is a reflection of her own will. Noelle's magic literacy is one of the clearest demonstrations that Dark World capabilities are expressions of psychological content rather than physical properties. It's why fits don't change regardless of the world, only colors in case of Susie likely because she's colorblind, and she's the outlier. Her colorblindness changes how she perceives, and that changed perception is reflected in her Dark World form.

Other aspects also prove that the world and any of its effects are fake beyond Ralsei's outright words, like the fact that when you eat, you might taste the food but you won't get satiated, Susie would be hungry if she ate the DW food, something Susie noticed since Chapter 1. Even if you're frozen solid in the Dark World, when you return to the real world, your body temperature will APPEAR to YOUR IMAGINATION to be low and you won't have frostbite. Taste is a perception. Satiation is a physical state. The Dark World can produce perceptions. It cannot produce physical states.

^ Berdly is not even ACTUALLY COLD, it's Kris' IMAGINATION! This is definitive evidence. The game tells you explicitly that Berdly's experienced coldness is a product of Kris's imagination.

If you get your arm toasted, fried, you won't have burns when you return to the light world, you just won't be able to move your arm. Berdly only sees his arm burning in a DREAM. This is the physical damage analogue of the cold example. Berdly has no physical evidence in the real world. Dark World damage leaves no such evidence, because it never involved real physical processes to begin with. The arm doesn't work because the mind experienced something traumatic enough to produce a functional disruption. The doctors never told him he has any tissue damage.

It seems like most effects in the Dark World are an outright placebo, where you can taste, something that relies on your mind, but you can't get nutrients. You can feel cold, your mind controls your body temperature, but you can't get into a big block of ice. Dark World magic is a cosmological placebo. The fire feels real. The ice feels real. The lightning feels real. But none of them are operating through the physical mechanisms that real fire, ice, and lightning require.[/SPOILER]

Replying to both of these in one go, because both can be refuted in the same way.

This entire idea of "Dark Worlds are fake because they're illusions so physics does not apply to them" is just... silly.

For first, Dark Worlds just cannot be truly fake, because of these factors:

• Creating too many Dark Fountains would generate an unbalance between Light and Darkess, which would cause a catastrophe in the Light World due to the Titans rising and destroying everything. This cannot happen if the whole of Darkness is completely imaginary and fake.
• Light and Darkness are described as if they're in some kind of balance from the prophecy, which describes their yin-yang relationship, this cannot happen if the darkness in question is completely irrelevant and fictional.
• I am sorry, but the idea of "everything that happens in the Dark World is actually just placebo" is just stupid. The entire point about Berdly is bunk by using how Tenna is fully destroyed in the Dark World and then appears completely destroyed in the Light World too if he's not healed. Inanimated objects cannot have placebo effects because they do not have a conscious on their own.

The next is that you're arguing that "Dark Worlds do not follow physics because they're non-euclidean due to their size not matching the building they're based on", which is... not true?

There is literally no evidence for this besides "they're shaped based on the creator's willpower", but that does not mean they do not follow physics, as things like gravity, speed or causality all happen like one would expect to, there is no statement of physics being warped in the Dark World. Do we invalidate feats for worlds created by Subjective Reality or still created by an entity just because they're made from some power instead of a big bang? Obviously not, we'd have to make franchises that are fictional in-universe unusable under physics due to their mechanics and physics being shaped by the will of the creator being.

Currently, we have no reason to assume the magic of the Dark World behaves like the real life counterparts. The Darkners are made from the real objects, sure, but they are "fantastic" versions of that object with feelings and magic that defy the laws of physics, and their magic behave in ways that tell us that they're not realistic in any way. A cartoon drawing of a bullet doesn't travel at the velocity of a real bullet. A Darkner shaped like a speaker doesn't produce sound that propagates at 343 meters per second. The appearance of a thing and the physics of a thing are not the same information, and conflating them is the foundational error behind every speed scaling claim this thread is contesting.

Chapter 2:

• The Tasque's "sound waves" get thicker as they travel, the ball of wool which falls by gravity moves in tandem with the sound waves.
• Tasque's "sound waves" move in tandem with Werewire's electric beam. They are electric element.

Chapter 3:

• The music notes, which are supposedly sound, blitz the Fun Gang, and move in a specific path.
• Somehow, in the same battle, bullets are slower than the sound attack
• Yeah, the bullets and the sound can happen in the same attack, it's completely non-sense for bullets to be basically in slow-motion compared to sound.
• Zapper's alleged speed-of-light laser can have its size increased by Sound Manipulation. Also the "lasers" have a tail.

Chapter 4:

• Sound notes fall down gracefully towards Kris
• Music notes fly and sway
• Each one of Wicabel's "shockwaves" move at different speeds despite travelling through the same medium.
• Somehow, someway, music notes speedblitz shockwaves in the same fight

These are not isolated anomalies from obscure corners of the game that could be dismissed as outliers, btw. They're the VAST majority of demonstrations. These are behaviors exhibited by the same categories of magic attack, repeatedly, across multiple chapters, against the same party of protagonists whose speed ratings are derived from dodging them. The inconsistency is systemic.

Literally, why can't our speed ratings accurately predict how the Fun Gang and magic will interact? Because according to our speed ratings, sound attacks should be stopped in time.

The answer is simple, they're wrong. We're removing them.

The only reason we consider them to be realistic is because they look like the real counterparts in their bullet forms. And because files has names that describe them as what they look. And we pretend this is a canonical description of their realistic property. You don't need me to say that this is not how things work. File names are developer labels for asset organization. They are not in-universe canonical descriptions of physical properties. A developer naming a sound wave asset "soundwave.png" is telling the engine what sprite to render.

But, now that I've proven above that all these magic abilities are an illusion and a fantasy that only reflects the will of the Lightner, I believe we should remove all the speed feats derived from dodging a magic bullet shaped like a property, dodging music notes, electricity, lasers, shouldn't scale to the real counterparts. And this conclusion is unavoidable. we now have positive narrative evidence from the game's most reliable source that these attacks are imagined phenomena. Imagined lightning does not travel at the speed of real lightning. Imagined sound does not propagate at the speed of real sound. The ontological status of the attacks as fantasy constructs directly precludes treating their apparent speed as physically meaningful.

They're also inconsistent, while the Lightners dodge an alleged SoL magic bullet in a chapter, and in the next chapter, despite being stronger, they are tagged by sound again. This is evidence of the precise thing being argued here: that the speeds of these attacks are not fixed physical quantities that scale predictably with character power levels. We're literally dealing with variable fantasy properties that can be anything the narrative or the encounter design requires them to be in a given moment. You cannot derive a consistent speed tier for the characters from attacks whose speeds are inconsistent by design.

What happened exactly? Did they slow down for their enemies to give them a chance?
Is the sound in Chapter 4 unrealistic and thus just scales to FTL anyway?
If magic can have any given speed, why did we grant SoL to the laser then?

The framework produces contradictions the framework cannot explain. A framework that produces irresolvable contradictions against its own source material is not a framework worth preserving at the cost of those contradictions.

It's a magic fantasy inspired by lasers, of course it's gonna have similarities. The similarity is the point of the fantasy. A Dark World constructed from a person's imagination of what a laser looks like will produce something that looks like a laser, because that's what was imagined.

No one presented a single argument that supports or proves that magic speed is realistic.

"It's called a laser" is not proof it's lightspeed
"It moves in a straight line" is not proof it's lightspeed
"It bounces off the wall that's not even a reflective material" is not proof it's lightspeed

The fact it basically moves in slow motion in the same chapter where Kris is near-speedblitzed by sound after the encounter with the alleged lightspeed Darkner should've been your hint that these magic are just fantasy bullshit that don't scale with realistic speed. They literally dodge Zapper and still get blitzed by Shadowman in the same chapter. And the sequencing matters here. This isn't two separate chapters with enough narrative distance to allow for power scaling explanations. This is the same chapter, with the same characters, at effectively the same point in their power progression, being blitzed by attacks that the current framework would rate as dramatically different speeds.

Magic is either realistic or not, you don't get to cherrypick which magic has realistic speed or not. And given what I've presented, it's impossible for you to claim it's consistent and realistic. If you grant that some Dark World magic has realistic physical properties, you've committed to a framework that then has to explain why other Dark World magic, demonstrably from the same ontological source, operating under the same narrative rules, produced by the same type of willpower-darkness mechanism, doesn't. And there is no principled answer to that question that doesn't ultimately amount to "because it's convenient for the ratings"

This is really ironic because prior in the Undertale speed downgrade CRT you've argued that the sound attacks in Undertale are not "realistic" because of them not being omni-directional waves, and yet, you argue that the sound attacks in Deltarune are actually sound-speed despite them not being that and moving as note-shaped bullets in a specific, unrealistic pattern like Shyren's attacks do, try to be consistent here little bro.

And before you say "but Undertale is not Deltarune", remember that both games are made from the same person, the battles follow mostly the same gameplay, and overall the mechanics are near identical, so I am indeed allowed to call you out on this.

Meaning that I can indeed say that all of these sound anti feats you've mentioned are invalid. You cannot keep a cake (calling the sound-based attacks unrealistic because of them not behaving like that) and then eating it too (using said sound-based attacks as anti feats against anything higher).

The "contradictions" against the Zapper's feat are nonsense as well:

• Why is them being increased by sound manipulation a problem? Not only your scan does not even use sound, but it's a pun for "volume" meaning both the physical size in 3 dimensions and the intensity of the sound. It's clear that sound is not literally involved here, why is it assumed besides a pun of "well he's a tv remote that increases the volume, but here it means how big the attacks are, not the sound in actuality!"
• Why is it having a tail relevant?

I think that the thing is indeed intented to be light here, we have two statements inting that the thing uses infrared rays, which are, you know, light. There is also the fact that there are no real contradictions to the thing behaving realistically, as it goes in a straight way, it bounces off walls like the real ones do, and comes from a remoter. It being magic means nothing here.

Also for the point of Kris being tagged from sound waves, why can't I also go in the opposite direction and say that's an outlier compared to anything else? Susie was already fast enough to block literal soundwaves in Chapter 1, and the characters are stated that they become faster the more the story goes on. We have also the SoJ feat that you mentioned in the CRT as a way to say that they blitz sound, why is Wicabel's stuff a relevant anti feat?

The Titan's are losing their 7-B rating.

It's only natural. If Darkness is a non-euclidean property, that is not a UES, and the sizes are not based on energy, but based in thematic relevance, it's only natural that the Titan made out of the "magic bullshit darkness" doesn't scale to the size of the pocket dimension. The size of the Titan is a narrative and thematic expression of its significance within the Dark World's conceptual architecture.

First off, there is no way to prove with a shadow of a doubt that the darkness the Titan yields is 7-B in internal size. What if the Knight is Rudy, and the theme of the Titan is a hospital? Or literally anything below a city? The fact sizes are not proportional to the amount of darkness already refutes the certainty that the darkness the Titan has is 7-B in size. We cannot know the "true" energy-equivalent size of the Titan's darkness because that concept is incoherent within the rules the game has established for how darkness works. The question "how much energy is in the Titan's darkness" is like asking the color of a sound. It's not that we don't have the answer. It's that the question doesn't apply, lmao.

Secondly, if the entirety of the Titan's entire existence is 7-B, a humanoid with a height of 1.3 kilometers, there is absolutely no reason to assume the attacks it makes that use a miniscule fraction of its total darkness scale to their entire existence.

Does a punch of a human scale to the full energy to evaporate itself? Of course not. The same applies here.

When the Titan attacks, it uses a fraction of whatever darkness constitutes its being. The attack doesn't scale to the Titan's full darkness budget, any more than a human punch scales to a human's total caloric energy.

• Volume of a human: 0.070m3
• Height of a human: 1.7m
• Height of the Titan: 1342.98548m
• Volume of the Titan: (1342.98/1.7)^3x0.07 = 34511188.1m3

This is the total volume of darkness of the Titan.

• The amount of darkness in the attack has a diameter close to Susie's height, which is 2.05m
• Volume of a Sphere: 4.29350996m^3
• Ratio: 34511188.1/4.29350996 = 8037989.53x
• Attack: 6300000 tons of TNT / 8037989.53 = 0.783778081 Tons of TNT or Building level (8-C)

Of course, this is a 'mock-up', and I'm not trying to claim the Fun Gang is necessarily 8-C, the volume of the Titan is probably much thinner than a human, and it would likely push it closer to High 8-C to 8-B (which is consistent btw).

But none of this matters, Darkness is Non-Euclidean anyway. The point is, being made out of a 7-B size doesn't make your individual attacks that don't use your whole body 7-B, Humans don't scale to their full KE. The Non-Euclidean nature of the space makes the calculation ultimately moot, but the scaling logic alone, independently of the Non-Euclidean consideration, already defeats the 7-B rating for the attacks

70kg human, 12.4m/s, KE would be 5381.6 Joules or Street level.

Furthermore, let us circle back to Ralsei's wording in Chapter 3. He states that, if it gets darker yet darker again, that the darkness would allow us to see things again, to feel them, to hear them. That to me implies directly that the creation of the dark world is nothing but a change in perspective of reality based solely on the user's mind, willpower and imagination, essentially a illusion as he described. Meaning creating a dark world has literally nothing to do with energy. He says the dark world is just an alternate view of reality.
How can we justify Titans scaling to the size of something that was, technically, already there? The space the Dark World occupies is the same space the Light World occupies, perceived differently. The Titan is not occupying new space that was created by the expenditure of energy.

The Titan would have to go back to the nearest rating of 8-B from the Gerson statue swinging a hammer.

This entire thing is stupid, too. I'd like to mention that the existence of a UES is irrelevant because of this conversation I had with @Ultima_Reality on the topic:

This is because of two reasons:

1. Titans being fountains is not the sole reason why they're 7-B. Te reason why they're 7-B is also due to them sustaining and keeping these fountains in existence by existing, while also shaping them. Them being the Dark Worlds is not the main evidence, the main evidence is them being the Dark Fountains that give forms to these fountains and make them instantly disappear the moment they're sealed.
   1. It's a living Dark Fountain, which can create the Dark Worlds, give them forms, and instantly make them disappear the moment they're sealed, as creating it requires the creation of a Dark Fountain, with Ralsei saying that the Fountain is the Titan itself, and later on saying that a Titan is born when the Dark Fountains become too strong and the flow of darkness becomes wild and that both a Titan and a Fountain could be sealed the same way due to them being supposedly the same thing, with him being then proven right when Kris sealed a Titan in the same way they do so with a Dark Fountain.
2. UES is irrelevant for a Sustenance Feat, the page does not mention it as a requirement, it only mentions that it's their power what's supposed to sustain it. And isn't the fact that it's made of Darkness itself be a relevant factor on why it physically scales? They're not just some byproducts of Darkness like Darkners are, they're the very source that sustains the existence of these Dark Worlds in the first place.

The light from the SOUL is not real light (aka, massless photons travelling through space)

The term "light" in the Dark World has ALWAYS, and CONSISTENTLY being used to refer to reality, to real life, to the world we live in. It's not a literal lantern that just shines photons to a particular vector. It has never been. The semantic content of "light" in Deltarune's thematic vocabulary is not the semantic content of "light" in a physics textbook.

This is why we're called "Lightners", why we live in the "Light" World, a world verbatim stated to be "reality". It works as a direct contrast to darkness, which is a fantasy, and an illusion (check scans above).

It's the reason why Spamton wants to see past the dark, why he says it's all so dark, and stare into "heaven". Spamton states that what he needs to "see past the dark", fantasy, is Kris' SOUL, which is literally stated to be their light. And remember, "when the lights come back on, the fantasy ends". So light is just an analogy for reality:

Light = Reality
Dark = Fantasy

The game literally starts by stating we're "heroes of light", because we come from the real world. The prophecy states that the balance of Light and Dark is what keeps things the way they are, light being reality, dark being the Dark World, once more proving that the analogy is sort of obvious.

Let's analyze the lyrics of the credits song of Chapter 1.

It literally says that, as the shadows start to grow (Dark Worlds), the places that you know seem like fantasy, again proving that Ralsei was telling the truth and that darkness and DWs are fantasy. The light inside your SOUL holds the truth

And what did Ralsei say before?

"WHEN IT GETS DARK, YOUR EYES CAN'T SEE THE TRUTH ANYMORE" (Truth = Light World)

The "truth" is reality. The "light inside your soul" is REALITY

Light is JUST the SOUL'S connection to reality.

The song even says that said light is the solution to the growing shadows.

This is why light from the soul is so effective against Titan Spawns, literal puddles of darkness, because when the light, reality, comes on, the darkness isn't real anymore, as we just stated. The mechanism by which SOUL light damages Titan Spawns is ontological. Light, meaning reality, is the antithesis of Darkness, meaning fantasy. When reality asserts itself in the space where fantasy holds sway, the fantasy is undermined. The light of a SOUL, the light of a real person's reality, is antithetical to their existence at the level of what they are, not at the level of how much energy is hitting them.

Also, "the light inside your soul with the truth" is also the reason why Kris is able to seal Dark Fountains, in fact, only Kris is able to seal the fountain according to Ralsei, the thing that gives the entire fantasy form, that turns everything INTO the fantasy.

Why only Kris? Easy, they have the literal entity that is ontologically superior to even the Light World, the SOUL. We already accept that as canon in the wiki.

Basically, unless you argue that the Light World entire composition is just photons, and that lightners are made out of light, the use of 'light' for the SOUL's lanterns is not literal light.

Plus, also the light we have is magic and behaves in unrealistic ways.

Currently, we use this animation of the light shooting beams all over the place at a slow pace for our FTL ratings.

Needless to say, that's not how light works. If a source of light is already omnidirectional, light will not shoot beams around like that, it's magic.

Also, the speed varies, and that cannot happen. Lightspeed cannot vary. In the same fight, the light source takes:

• 10 frames for the circle to reach its full radius
• 4 frames for the "light cannons" to reach the edge of the battle box
• 1 frame for Jackenstein' light to cover the entire screen

Mind you, the last one was in an actual cutscene, animated deliberately, not just some battle animation. And it's the one that's instantaneous.

You can argue that "it's just how the animation works", but that's exactly why you shouldn't use it for scaling in the first place.

Absolutely, utterly ******* not.

Yes, Light and Darkness are used as allegories for reality and fiction, but you're basically saying that Light is not really like, and Darkness is not really Darkness, when Ralsei literally says that the Dark Worlds are just the version on steroids of what happens if your mind starts to make up stuff when there's not enough light to make a clear view on the surroundings. So what stops me from saying that Light and Darkness can be both literally light and darkness and also an allegory to that at the same time? You did not give an answer to this, you just said that light in Deltarune is not really light, despite you also saying in the CRT that Kris also gets Light Manipulation despite you saying that they don't produce real light!

Plus the Jackenstein stuff is not relevant at all here, it can be attributed to just the light expanding in intensity, similairly to how lighters work. Plus you're lying, the "beams" shot from our SOUL expand at the same speed as the "main light" during the battle.

The Jackenstein fight in itself is nothing but a big shitpost, Toby Fox's homage to the old era of Youtube Poops. Nothing about this gag fight is supposed to be taken literally.

He makes several references to YTP during the fight, like rearranging Jackenstein's phrases which is a reference to YTP's sentence mixing, Jackenstein stretching which is a reference to YTP's visual jokes, Jackenstein outright references a common YTP source phrase word by word. The distorted voice voice pitch is also a YTP reference.

All in all, the entirety of the fight is a gag, shitposty YTP homage, and since it's behavior is not supposed to be taken seriously, and it contradicts later showings of canonical speed in the same chapter, we should not use it at ALL.

TOBY FOX MADE IT CLEAR THAT, IN SERIOUS SITUATIONS, THE CHARACTERS ARE SOUND-TIMERS

The reason I say this is, in the same chapter we fight Jackenstein, several story beats, we're thrown in a room where we must use the sound of our steps to visualize things through the sound waves. We run away from an attacker using the sound waves to see where they are.

What that means is that, these characters still rely on sound speed, not generated by magic btw, to run, dodge and move through the area. Which is a weird narrative decision if you truly intend for your characters to be beyond light speed, no? It's almost like the fight against Jackenstein is just a bit gag.

This is even more EGREGIOUS later in the chapter, during the confrontation against Sound of Justice. As Susie confronts the statue, mistaking it for Gerson, the statue suddenly attacks, and in a cutscene in slow motion, we see the statue moving relative to sound waves. In fact, Toby Fox literally makes a sound wave PLAY after the attack just to show how the statue is relative to the speed of sound.

The JUMP happens at Supersonic speeds at BEST. The SWING and attack speed happens at Hypersonic+ speeds, again, at best.

To put salt on the wound, this is a fully animated cutscene. Well, animated to Toby and the team's best ability without breaking the artistic integrity. But the point is, each frame of animation, each movement, each consequence, is being CAREFULLY CONSIDERED and DELIBERATELY MADE by the big man himself. He was the one, with the team, who decided to make the sound waves slow down during his attack intending to show speed.

Do you realize how strong of an argument this is?

This is the ONLY time, the only CANONICAL TIME, Toby, in Deltarune, ever intended to show how fast a character is against a particular speed, against sound in this case.

Unlike the Jackenstein feat, where the light is just an animation that is not correlated to anything else in the story.
Unlike the magic bullets that have no intent of being realistic.
Unlike literally EVERYTHING THE GAME HAS EVER PRESENTED.

This feat of Sound of Justice moving at Hypersonic speeds is the ONLY TIME we can fully conclude that Toby wanted to show a character's speed, it's the ONLY cutscene that aligns with the author's INTENT.

FTL Deltarune literally breaks this intent, it's not accurate at all.

This is also just dogshit.

The fight being a reference to YTPs debunks what, exactly? We all know that the lore of Undertale and Deltarune for more than half the time are basically what happens if you mix Final Fantasy with Captain Underpants, some feats are indeed bound to be gag or humorous. Is there a standard saying that gag feats are automatically discarded? No, they do only if they're one-time events that are not repeated anywhere else in more serious instances, unless we're in comical verses like most of the Toons where every feat they have is a gag, does it mean that, for example, all of the feats in Looney Tunes are invalid because their whole verse is a shitpost?

Plus, the "intent" inherently doesn't mean jack here. To cite a popular example, Butch Hartman, when watching a Death Battle episode involving Danny Phantom, one of the series he wrote, was surprised at Danny vaporizing a golf area being almost 560 Tons of TNT in power. It was clear that it was not the intent of a feat vaporizing a chunk of soil being comparable to the power to blow up multiple city blocks, but it is if we actually take in physics and the actual implications of the feat.

Toby Fox is not a powerscaler either, and he definitely does not think of feats and stuff like that when coding his games, he's only a guy who is a massive Nintendo nerd who makes a love tribute to his childhood. You cannot expect him to be a overfixated nerd over physics to make everything coherent, that's just insane.

The feat you show is not an indicator of the characters being sound timers either (especially when you said before that they get blized by "sound attacks" multiple times, contradictions huh?), just that they're much faster than sound, and being FTL is enought to achieve that.

By this logic, every series featuring anything that should be FTE to humans would genuinely use instances of common humans following fights as an anti feat for whatever FTE and above speed rating because "they're not meant to blitz humans 1 trillion times per second", no author intends for that, we only use what the series offers with feats, because if we otherwise start to use author intent then we use some kind of authority that you cannot prove it exists in the first place.

So, if you wanna know why I gave "short answers" to things, is because to me:

• You said a whole bunch of nothing almost all the time that can be debunked with little things.
• You just started to make standards on your own (seriously the "light beam having a tail" just sends me)
• You misunderstood our stabilization standard.
• You basically made up a false dilemma on the whole light and darkness stuff
• You made a bunch of assumptions on authorial intent

I won't reply to further replies unless I find them relevant enough to my case. Gonna wait for staff now.

 

[LittleGuy99]

Introduction​

This thread aims to completely remove any calculations and scaling derived from magic attacks made by enemies in Deltarune, in all chapters, with no exceptions to that rule. I will present the nature of the magic in the Deltarune universe, and explain why exactly it shouldn't be used for speed scaling, and that it even contradicts some moments of the narrative, and how inconsistent it is.

DISCLAIMERS: Any attempt to use whataboutism from other verses on the wiki is being met with an immediate WARNING for derailment, no exceptions. You will not use the "but they approved it HERE" argumentation in this thread, it will not be tolerated. If you wish, search through the verses that have similar situations, and quote their argumetnation, not just the fact it was approved, or rejected. Because the latter is not a valid form of argumentation, I don't care about the decision staff made about a verse I don't care about.
The reason this rule exists is because "another verse got away with it" is not a logical defense of a methodology. It just appeals to precedent that bypasses the actual question of whether the methodology is correct. Correctness is not determined by how many times something has been accepted elsewhere. It is determined by whether the reasoning holds up against the specific material being evaluated. And in this case, the material is unambiguous.


This CRT also does not aim to remove calculations that use mass from actual objects created from magic, namely feats like Noelle's Snowgrave, and GIGA Queen's gigantic tennis ball are exempt from the thread. Others like speed feats derived from assumed realistic propagation are more likely to be removed altogether.


With that out of the way, let's start.

Spoiler: NATURE OF DARK WORLDS/NON-UES

NATURE OF DARK WORLDS AND DARKNER MAGIC​

The way dark words work was elaborated by Ralsei in the third chapter of the series.

To give context, Ralsei has always been a character whose entire concept and purpose in the story was to give us blatant exposition of the story in all given moments, with evidence that he has deliberate awareness of the 4th Wall of the game, which is a part of his character. It is literally his entire purpose as a Darkner to know the entire prophecy, and literally all the rules about the world since the moment he began existing without choice.

Ralsei knows the ending of the prophecy by heart, and knew it would hurt Susie and Kris to know about it, a prediction that was ultimately true as Susie utterly rejected the ending by smashing the glass that showed it to her. Thanks to Ralsei's boundless knowledge of the Dark World, his information of how the Titans would emerge and appear from Berdly creating a new Dark Fountain inside the Dark World they were in was ultimately be proven true in Chapter 4 when the Knight did exactly that.

Needless to say: Ralsei's information is as reliable as a narrator in the story, as that's one of his roles. This doesn't stop him from lying to protect Susie and Kris from information, but unless it's proven, we should believe the information about the mechanics of the world as he has proven to be reliable on that front several times. And critically, his statements about the nature of Dark Worlds are not the kind of information he would have any motivation to lie about. He lies to protect emotional wellbeing. He has no reason to fabricate a cosmological explanation for how darkness and willpower interact to create pocket dimensions. That explanation serves no protective function. It is simply the truth of how the world works, delivered by the character whose entire existence is oriented around knowing and communicating exactly that.

With that being said, let's dive into how Dark Worlds work, and how the Darkners are made.

Dark Worlds are created when a lightner, aka a person from the real world, concentrated their will into a sharp object, like a pin, or a knife and while pouring their determination, stab the earth creating a darkness that fills the room they are in with a dakrness smoke, creating a fountain of darkness that gives the entire land, its citizens and objects form. This process is explicitly volitional and conceptual rather than energetic. The mechanism is willpower meeting a physical anchor, and the output is a space shaped by intent rather than by the conservation of energy or matter. This is not analogous to how any physical processes.

What that means is that these worlds are not a definitive creation from some sort of alternate physics, it's directly created by "willpower", and "determination" by the lightner, its contents and size are directly related to the will of the user, as the Knight and Susie create two alternate worlds despite being in the same place, and despite her will trying to replicate the exact same place. So darkness isn't exactly trying to replicate accurate size scalings or physics inside the dark worlds, it's just trying to replicate one's will. As a Dark World created in the confinements of a library (and it is a limitation), which is small, can create an entire city because of the themes of the world. This alone should terminate any attempt to treat Dark World spatial dimensions as physically meaningful.

While a Dark World created in an entire church, which is comparatively massive, only creates a sancturay, which is small in total. Because a sanctuary is a theme, and that's the only reason. The inverse relationship between the physical size of the source space and the thematic scope of the resulting Dark World in these two examples is a direct demonstration that spatial correspondence between the light world container and the dark world content is nonexistent. The church is larger than the library but produces a smaller dark world, because the theme of sanctuary is more contained than the theme of a city

For a more direct approach, let me paint this with numbers.

• Say the library is about 10 meters long, and 10 meters thick, thus an area of 100m² of Darkness. A very small city has an area of 10000m², a gap of 100x in surface area alone, and even more if you account for volume, cities are tall as hell.
• Say the church is 20x15 meters, that's 300m² of darkness. The biggest sanctuary in the world is the Sanctuary in Las Lajas, which is around 4,500m². Yet the Church Dark World is nowhere near that scale. Best case scenario, 15x gap. And a MUCH lower volume conversion.

Why? Because the Dark Fountain is not performing a 1:1 volumetric conversion of matter into space. It is manifesting concepts, themes, and intent. If Dark Worlds were obeying strict spatial conservation, the Cyber World should have been impossible using all other 3 Dark Worlds as a basis. The Cyber World's existence alone, created under conditions that physical spatial logic would make impossible, is a self-contained refutation of the idea that Dark World physics obeys any conservation law we could use for energy or size calculations.

What that means is that, first, darkness and magic derived from said darkness are not UES, they're not proportional to the hax feats they perform in any way, as all spaces created by Darkness are non-euclidean, meaning they don't take a proportional amount of "darkness" or "energy" to be created, yet they use immeasurable concepts like willpower and determination to fabricate their worlds. Non-Euclidean geometry by definition violates the spatial assumptions underlying any size-based energy calculation. You cannot use the apparent dimensions of a non-Euclidean space to derive a physically meaningful energy value, because the relationship between apparent dimension and physical volume that makes such calculations possible does not exist in a space where geometry is determined by will rather than physics.

TL;DR: Dark Worlds are made from willpower, not energy. They're not UES, and they're non-euclidean.

---

Spoiler: FAKE WORLD

That's when we finally arrive in Chapter 3.

In Chapter 3, Ralsei begins explaining the mechanics of the Dark World and why darkness create them, that while Susie and Kris live in the "light world" where "everything is what one sees", that is only possible as long as there is light. When the lights come out and the absence of light becomes absolute, you see nothing. However, when darkness itself becomes a property and the room that was completely dark gets yet darker, taking away light that isn't there, negative photons allows us to see things again, allows us to feel things again, allows us to hear things again.

Ralsei say that the act of taking light away and seeing things through the lens of shadow, IS THE DARK WORLD. Ralsei outright says that the Dark World, and by extension all the darkners there, are an illusion. Also outright stating that all the Dark Fountains do, is turning everything into a fantasy

Let me repeat that for you: The Dark World where all magic is present, is a fantasy created by willpower whose Darkners reflect the will. Also, notice how Ralsei, a reliable narrator, puts "world" in quotation marks. It's not an actual world. The quotation marks are doing real work here. Explicitly signaling that the word "world" is being used loosely, that what is being described does not meet the actual ontological criteria for a world

Ralsei outright says that the world isn't real, including the locations and the citizens. Susie outright confirms that the world is "kinda like a dream"

Ralsei makes a point about, when things become dark, everything is indistinct, citing how vision and your own mind starts disassociating objects, despite the fact you know what they are originally. A chair looks like monster, a poster looks like its moving, and how your eyes can't see the truth anymore. Appealing directly to the imagination of believing things that aren't true because of the darkness, making a direct point that the darker a place gets, the further from the truth you are in terms of visual guidance, so you rely way more on your imagination to make things up. This is the game explicitly connecting Dark World experience to the psychology of darkness-induced apophenia, the tendency of the human mind to impose patterns and identities onto ambiguous stimuli. What you see in the Dark World is your mind filling in blanks, scaled up to the level of an entire pocket dimension.

He even makes a point about your mind not being able to make something out of nothing when the lights go out. That means every indistinct nature of a chair becoming a monster came straight to your mind, and when it gets darker, it's an extrapolation of that concept incarnate. The dark worlds made by these negative photons is an illusion made by your mind, a fantasy that reflects your personal will poured into the blade you used. This means that every property of a Dark World, its size, its inhabitants, its magic, its physical laws, is a mental construct made material by the mechanics of darkness. And mental constructs do not have objectively measurable energetic values independent of the minds that produced them.

Every property inside the dark worlds is fanciful, unreal and bizarre, with no regards for realism whatsoever. That's why magic is possible, and why despite not knowing anything about the world she was in, Noelle knew how to cast ice magic like second nature, as she was just mimicking the RPG she played in real life with her dad, which uses the same magic, even verbatim, as her dark world self is a reflection of her own will. Noelle's magic literacy is one of the clearest demonstrations that Dark World capabilities are expressions of psychological content rather than physical properties. It's why fits don't change regardless of the world, only colors in case of Susie likely because she's colorblind, and she's the outlier. Her colorblindness changes how she perceives, and that changed perception is reflected in her Dark World form.

Other aspects also prove that the world and any of its effects are fake beyond Ralsei's outright words, like the fact that when you eat, you might taste the food but you won't get satiated, Susie would be hungry if she ate the DW food, something Susie noticed since Chapter 1. Even if you're frozen solid in the Dark World, when you return to the real world, your body temperature will APPEAR to YOUR IMAGINATION to be low and you won't have frostbite. Taste is a perception. Satiation is a physical state. The Dark World can produce perceptions. It cannot produce physical states.

^ Berdly is not even ACTUALLY COLD, it's Kris' IMAGINATION! This is definitive evidence. The game tells you explicitly that Berdly's experienced coldness is a product of Kris's imagination.

If you get your arm toasted, fried, you won't have burns when you return to the light world, you just won't be able to move your arm. Berdly only sees his arm burning in a DREAM. This is the physical damage analogue of the cold example. Berdly has no physical evidence in the real world. Dark World damage leaves no such evidence, because it never involved real physical processes to begin with. The arm doesn't work because the mind experienced something traumatic enough to produce a functional disruption. The doctors never told him he has any tissue damage.

It seems like most effects in the Dark World are an outright placebo, where you can taste, something that relies on your mind, but you can't get nutrients. You can feel cold, your mind controls your body temperature, but you can't get into a big block of ice. Dark World magic is a cosmological placebo. The fire feels real. The ice feels real. The lightning feels real. But none of them are operating through the physical mechanisms that real fire, ice, and lightning require.

TL;DR: Dark Worlds are fantasy and everything in them is not supposed to mimick reality.

---

Spoiler: THE SPEED SCALING GOT TO GO

Currently, we have no reason to assume the magic of the Dark World behaves like the real life counterparts. The Darkners are made from the real objects, sure, but they are "fantastic" versions of that object with feelings and magic that defy the laws of physics, and their magic behave in ways that tell us that they're not realistic in any way. A cartoon drawing of a bullet doesn't travel at the velocity of a real bullet. A Darkner shaped like a speaker doesn't produce sound that propagates at 343 meters per second. The appearance of a thing and the physics of a thing are not the same information, and conflating them is the foundational error behind every speed scaling claim this thread is contesting.

Chapter 2:

• The Tasque's "sound waves" get thicker as they travel, the ball of wool which falls by gravity moves in tandem with the sound waves.
• Tasque's "sound waves" move in tandem with Werewire's electric beam. They are electric element.

Chapter 3:

• The music notes, which are supposedly sound, blitz the Fun Gang, and move in a specific path.
• Somehow, in the same battle, bullets are slower than the sound attack
• Yeah, the bullets and the sound can happen in the same attack, it's completely non-sense for bullets to be basically in slow-motion compared to sound.
• Zapper's alleged speed-of-light laser can have its size increased by Sound Manipulation. Also the "lasers" have a tail.

Chapter 4:

• Sound notes fall down gracefully towards Kris
• Music notes fly and sway
• Each one of Wicabel's "shockwaves" move at different speeds despite travelling through the same medium.
• Somehow, someway, music notes speedblitz shockwaves in the same fight

These are not isolated anomalies from obscure corners of the game that could be dismissed as outliers, btw. They're the VAST majority of demonstrations. These are behaviors exhibited by the same categories of magic attack, repeatedly, across multiple chapters, against the same party of protagonists whose speed ratings are derived from dodging them. The inconsistency is systemic.

Literally, why can't our speed ratings accurately predict how the Fun Gang and magic will interact? Because according to our speed ratings, sound attacks should be stopped in time.

The answer is simple, they're wrong. We're removing them.

The only reason we consider them to be realistic is because they look like the real counterparts in their bullet forms. And because files has names that describe them as what they look. And we pretend this is a canonical description of their realistic property. You don't need me to say that this is not how things work. File names are developer labels for asset organization. They are not in-universe canonical descriptions of physical properties. A developer naming a sound wave asset "soundwave.png" is telling the engine what sprite to render.

But, now that I've proven above that all these magic abilities are an illusion and a fantasy that only reflects the will of the Lightner, I believe we should remove all the speed feats derived from dodging a magic bullet shaped like a property, dodging music notes, electricity, lasers, shouldn't scale to the real counterparts. And this conclusion is unavoidable. we now have positive narrative evidence from the game's most reliable source that these attacks are imagined phenomena. Imagined lightning does not travel at the speed of real lightning. Imagined sound does not propagate at the speed of real sound. The ontological status of the attacks as fantasy constructs directly precludes treating their apparent speed as physically meaningful.

They're also inconsistent, while the Lightners dodge an alleged SoL magic bullet in a chapter, and in the next chapter, despite being stronger, they are tagged by sound again. This is evidence of the precise thing being argued here: that the speeds of these attacks are not fixed physical quantities that scale predictably with character power levels. We're literally dealing with variable fantasy properties that can be anything the narrative or the encounter design requires them to be in a given moment. You cannot derive a consistent speed tier for the characters from attacks whose speeds are inconsistent by design.

What happened exactly? Did they slow down for their enemies to give them a chance?
Is the sound in Chapter 4 unrealistic and thus just scales to FTL anyway?
If magic can have any given speed, why did we grant SoL to the laser then?

The framework produces contradictions the framework cannot explain. A framework that produces irresolvable contradictions against its own source material is not a framework worth preserving at the cost of those contradictions.

It's a magic fantasy inspired by lasers, of course it's gonna have similarities. The similarity is the point of the fantasy. A Dark World constructed from a person's imagination of what a laser looks like will produce something that looks like a laser, because that's what was imagined.

No one presented a single argument that supports or proves that magic speed is realistic.

"It's called a laser" is not proof it's lightspeed
"It moves in a straight line" is not proof it's lightspeed
"It bounces off the wall that's not even a reflective material" is not proof it's lightspeed

The fact it basically moves in slow motion in the same chapter where Kris is near-speedblitzed by sound after the encounter with the alleged lightspeed Darkner should've been your hint that these magic are just fantasy bullshit that don't scale with realistic speed. They literally dodge Zapper and still get blitzed by Shadowman in the same chapter. And the sequencing matters here. This isn't two separate chapters with enough narrative distance to allow for power scaling explanations. This is the same chapter, with the same characters, at effectively the same point in their power progression, being blitzed by attacks that the current framework would rate as dramatically different speeds.

Magic is either realistic or not, you don't get to cherrypick which magic has realistic speed or not. And given what I've presented, it's impossible for you to claim it's consistent and realistic. If you grant that some Dark World magic has realistic physical properties, you've committed to a framework that then has to explain why other Dark World magic, demonstrably from the same ontological source, operating under the same narrative rules, produced by the same type of willpower-darkness mechanism, doesn't. And there is no principled answer to that question that doesn't ultimately amount to "because it's convenient for the ratings"

TL;DR: Magic Bullets that look like sound in a fantasy world where everything is an illusion, are in fact, not realistic.

---

Spoiler: TITAN'S 8-B?

The Titan's are losing their 7-B rating.

It's only natural. If Darkness is a non-euclidean property, that is not a UES, and the sizes are not based on energy, but based in thematic relevance, it's only natural that the Titan made out of the "magic bullshit darkness" doesn't scale to the size of the pocket dimension. The size of the Titan is a narrative and thematic expression of its significance within the Dark World's conceptual architecture.

First off, there is no way to prove with a shadow of a doubt that the darkness the Titan yields is 7-B in internal size. What if the Knight is Rudy, and the theme of the Titan is a hospital? Or literally anything below a city? The fact sizes are not proportional to the amount of darkness already refutes the certainty that the darkness the Titan has is 7-B in size. We cannot know the "true" energy-equivalent size of the Titan's darkness because that concept is incoherent within the rules the game has established for how darkness works. The question "how much energy is in the Titan's darkness" is like asking the color of a sound. It's not that we don't have the answer. It's that the question doesn't apply, lmao.

Secondly, if the entirety of the Titan's entire existence is 7-B, a humanoid with a height of 1.3 kilometers, there is absolutely no reason to assume the attacks it makes that use a miniscule fraction of its total darkness scale to their entire existence.

Does a punch of a human scale to the full energy to evaporate itself? Of course not. The same applies here.

When the Titan attacks, it uses a fraction of whatever darkness constitutes its being. The attack doesn't scale to the Titan's full darkness budget, any more than a human punch scales to a human's total caloric energy.

• Volume of a human: 0.070m3
• Height of a human: 1.7m
• Height of the Titan: 1342.98548m
• Volume of the Titan: (1342.98/1.7)^3x0.07 = 34511188.1m3

This is the total volume of darkness of the Titan.

• The amount of darkness in the attack has a diameter close to Susie's height, which is 2.05m
• Volume of a Sphere: 4.29350996m^3
• Ratio: 34511188.1/4.29350996 = 8037989.53x
• Attack: 6300000 tons of TNT / 8037989.53 = 0.783778081 Tons of TNT or Building level (8-C)

Of course, this is a 'mock-up', and I'm not trying to claim the Fun Gang is necessarily 8-C, the volume of the Titan is probably much thinner than a human, and it would likely push it closer to High 8-C to 8-B (which is consistent btw).

But none of this matters, Darkness is Non-Euclidean anyway. The point is, being made out of a 7-B size doesn't make your individual attacks that don't use your whole body 7-B, Humans don't scale to their full KE. The Non-Euclidean nature of the space makes the calculation ultimately moot, but the scaling logic alone, independently of the Non-Euclidean consideration, already defeats the 7-B rating for the attacks

70kg human, 12.4m/s, KE would be 5381.6 Joules or Street level.

Furthermore, let us circle back to Ralsei's wording in Chapter 3. He states that, if it gets darker yet darker again, that the darkness would allow us to see things again, to feel them, to hear them. That to me implies directly that the creation of the dark world is nothing but a change in perspective of reality based solely on the user's mind, willpower and imagination, essentially a illusion as he described. Meaning creating a dark world has literally nothing to do with energy. He says the dark world is just an alternate view of reality.
How can we justify Titans scaling to the size of something that was, technically, already there? The space the Dark World occupies is the same space the Light World occupies, perceived differently. The Titan is not occupying new space that was created by the expenditure of energy.

The Titan would have to go back to the nearest rating of 8-B from the Gerson statue swinging a hammer.

TL;DR: Titans don't scale to 7-B. The Titan's pocket dimension can have literally any size. 5 meters³ of darkness shouldn't scale to millions of meters³ of their total volume.

---

Spoiler: SOUL "LIGHT" IS NOT LIGHT

The light from the SOUL is not real light (aka, massless photons travelling through space)

The term "light" in the Dark World has ALWAYS, and CONSISTENTLY being used to refer to reality, to real life, to the world we live in. It's not a literal lantern that just shines photons to a particular vector. It has never been. The semantic content of "light" in Deltarune's thematic vocabulary is not the semantic content of "light" in a physics textbook.

This is why we're called "Lightners", why we live in the "Light" World, a world verbatim stated to be "reality". It works as a direct contrast to darkness, which is a fantasy, and an illusion (check scans above).

It's the reason why Spamton wants to see past the dark, why he says it's all so dark, and stare into "heaven". Spamton states that what he needs to "see past the dark", fantasy, is Kris' SOUL, which is literally stated to be their light. And remember, "when the lights come back on, the fantasy ends". So light is just an analogy for reality:

Light = Reality
Dark = Fantasy

The game literally starts by stating we're "heroes of light", because we come from the real world. The prophecy states that the balance of Light and Dark is what keeps things the way they are, light being reality, dark being the Dark World, once more proving that the analogy is sort of obvious.

Let's analyze the lyrics of the credits song of Chapter 1.


It literally says that, as the shadows start to grow (Dark Worlds), the places that you know seem like fantasy, again proving that Ralsei was telling the truth and that darkness and DWs are fantasy. The light inside your SOUL holds the truth

And what did Ralsei say before?

"WHEN IT GETS DARK, YOUR EYES CAN'T SEE THE TRUTH ANYMORE" (Truth = Light World)

The "truth" is reality. The "light inside your soul" is REALITY

Light is JUST the SOUL'S connection to reality.

The song even says that said light is the solution to the growing shadows.

This is why light from the soul is so effective against Titan Spawns, literal puddles of darkness, because when the light, reality, comes on, the darkness isn't real anymore, as we just stated. The mechanism by which SOUL light damages Titan Spawns is ontological. Light, meaning reality, is the antithesis of Darkness, meaning fantasy. When reality asserts itself in the space where fantasy holds sway, the fantasy is undermined. The light of a SOUL, the light of a real person's reality, is antithetical to their existence at the level of what they are, not at the level of how much energy is hitting them.

Also, "the light inside your soul with the truth" is also the reason why Kris is able to seal Dark Fountains, in fact, only Kris is able to seal the fountain according to Ralsei, the thing that gives the entire fantasy form, that turns everything INTO the fantasy.

Why only Kris? Easy, they have the literal entity that is ontologically superior to even the Light World, the SOUL. We already accept that as canon in the wiki.

Basically, unless you argue that the Light World entire composition is just photons, and that lightners are made out of light, the use of 'light' for the SOUL's lanterns is not literal light.

Plus, also the light we have is magic and behaves in unrealistic ways.

Currently, we use this animation of the light shooting beams all over the place at a slow pace for our FTL ratings.

Needless to say, that's not how light works. If a source of light is already omnidirectional, light will not shoot beams around like that, it's magic.

Also, the speed varies, and that cannot happen. Lightspeed cannot vary. In the same fight, the light source takes:

• 10 frames for the circle to reach its full radius
• 4 frames for the "light cannons" to reach the edge of the battle box
• 1 frame for Jackenstein' light to cover the entire screen

Mind you, the last one was in an actual cutscene, animated deliberately, not just some battle animation. And it's the one that's instantaneous.

You can argue that "it's just how the animation works", but that's exactly why you shouldn't use it for scaling in the first place.

TL;DR: Light is just an analogy for reality. Light is magic and behaves in unrealistic ways. Light from the soul varies in speed and is outsped by other sources of light.

---

Spoiler: THE SOUND OF JUSTICE CONTRADICTION

We shouldn't use Jackenstein to scale in the first place, and FTL contradicts the narrative

With the Relativistic feats addressed, the only leg left to stand on for the FTL rating is the Jackenstein feat.

"B-But you addressed it before"

Yes, but even if the light was realistic, we literally shouldn't use this fight for ANY sort of scaling.


The Jackenstein fight in itself is nothing but a big shitpost, Toby Fox's homage to the old era of Youtube Poops. Nothing about this gag fight is supposed to be taken literally.

He makes several references to YTP during the fight, like rearranging Jackenstein's phrases which is a reference to YTP's sentence mixing, Jackenstein stretching which is a reference to YTP's visual jokes, Jackenstein outright references a common YTP source phrase word by word. The distorted voice voice pitch is also a YTP reference.

All in all, the entirety of the fight is a gag, shitposty YTP homage, and since it's behavior is not supposed to be taken seriously, and it contradicts later showings of canonical speed in the same chapter, we should not use it at ALL.

TOBY FOX MADE IT CLEAR THAT, IN SERIOUS SITUATIONS, THE CHARACTERS ARE SOUND-TIMERS

The reason I say this is, in the same chapter we fight Jackenstein, several story beats, we're thrown in a room where we must use the sound of our steps to visualize things through the sound waves. We run away from an attacker using the sound waves to see where they are.

What that means is that, these characters still rely on sound speed, not generated by magic btw, to run, dodge and move through the area. Which is a weird narrative decision if you truly intend for your characters to be beyond light speed, no? It's almost like the fight against Jackenstein is just a bit gag.

This is even more EGREGIOUS later in the chapter, during the confrontation against Sound of Justice. As Susie confronts the statue, mistaking it for Gerson, the statue suddenly attacks, and in a cutscene in slow motion, we see the statue moving relative to sound waves. In fact, Toby Fox literally makes a sound wave PLAY after the attack just to show how the statue is relative to the speed of sound.

The JUMP happens at Supersonic speeds at BEST. The SWING and attack speed happens at Hypersonic+ speeds, again, at best.

To put salt on the wound, this is a fully animated cutscene. Well, animated to Toby and the team's best ability without breaking the artistic integrity. But the point is, each frame of animation, each movement, each consequence, is being CAREFULLY CONSIDERED and DELIBERATELY MADE by the big man himself. He was the one, with the team, who decided to make the sound waves slow down during his attack intending to show speed.

Do you realize how strong of an argument this is?

This is the ONLY time, the only CANONICAL TIME, Toby, in Deltarune, ever intended to show how fast a character is against a particular speed, against sound in this case.

Unlike the Jackenstein feat, where the light is just an animation that is not correlated to anything else in the story.
Unlike the magic bullets that have no intent of being realistic.
Unlike literally EVERYTHING THE GAME HAS EVER PRESENTED.

This feat of Sound of Justice moving at Hypersonic speeds is the ONLY TIME we can fully conclude that Toby wanted to show a character's speed, it's the ONLY cutscene that aligns with the author's INTENT.

FTL Deltarune literally breaks this intent, it's not accurate at all.

TL;DR: Sound of Justice breaks FTL scaling. Jackenstein is a gag fight referencing YTPs, not a statement about speed. Animation of the light illuminating the SOUL is individual and doesn't interact (in terms of comparing speeds) with other speeds, because it's not meant to.

---

CONCLUSIONS​

• All speed scaling based on magical bullets, sound waves, electricity, lasers, music notes, or similar fantasy attacks should be removed.
• 7-B characters will scale to 8-A+ via the Titan's PE, High Hypersonic via upscaling off Sounds of Justice
• FTL scaling is axed.
• 7-B AP is getting axed.
• Dark Worlds/Darkness is not UES.
• All KE scaling based on bullet speeds should be removed. Shocker, Tenna is not jumping at MHS speeds.
• Soul light is not "true light". Can keep the light manip on the profile since it does illuminate shit.

Edit:

• Chapter 4: Top Tiers can be 8-A+ to 7-C, depending on the calc we use
• Chapter 3 to 1: Heavily downscale from these characters, either to 8-B/High 8-C+, or Low 7-C/8-A+

---

VOTE TALLY:

AGREE: @AyOgUyS, @CCandfriends, @OrangeFR, @DaReaperMan (on downgrading), @IDK3465, @Homie890, @Anonymous_Learner (7)

NEUTRAL: @ScoutManeater (on everything else), @DaReaperMan (on everything else) (2)

DISAGREE: @ScoutManeater (about Fake Dark World), @Jepilstiltskin (2)

I honestly disagree with everything

 

[Anonymous_Learner]

given strym's reasoning, i disagree fra

 

[TheOrangeGuy09]

I easily agree with Strym here.

 

[ScoutManeater]

With Styrms reasoning aswell I was pretty neutral on the speed scaling but now I feel like its definite until further notice I disagree with everything aswell

In addition the fact the remote guy legit has infrared statements ontop of the fact hes a remote that uses infrared lighting I think its pretty fair to say his attack is light speed

 

[CastoriceTheFifth]

This. It's fine to be frustrated or a bit heated in a debate, but the moment you kick up a stink with unrelated parties is the moment it enters no-go territory.

@Armorchompy can you please monitor this thread to keep things above board?

Can you ping more staffs so the first staff doesn't show up when the crt is 10 pages in or gets more heated pls

 

[SomebodyData]

NATURE OF DARK WORLDS AND DARKNER MAGIC​

I originally had something else written, but StrymUltra's response was a better version of what I was going to write. However, I will add that even if we were to take this at face value, all this would really do is grant the Lightners Physics Manipulation and Subjective Reality - there would still need to be additional proof for every feat you wish to discount. To your credit, you did do this.

Additionally, the Dark World being made of willpower is not, at all, relevant here. It's the non-euclidean arguments that are.

FAKE WORLD​

It seems that at least at this point in the story, we're a bit too reliant on speculation (both sides) to fully determine if the effects are fully placebo. Strym noting that Tenna is completely destroyed in the light world however, is a pretty powerful counterargument though.

I also note that everything I said above is still relevant here.

THE SPEED SCALING GOT TO GO​

I initially did agree that the FTL scaling was a bit lackluster (neutral on the anti-feats, but more so agreeing on the lack of support) but if it is noted to be an infrared laser, then I have no problem with the scaling staying.

SOUL "LIGHT" IS NOT LIGHT​

I'm pretty sure I misunderstood this argument, because from what I'm understanding, you were arguing that the Soul light doesn't count because its an analogy for reality?

While I agree that it is an analogy, I do not understand why we would stop treating it as a real light? Themes and such are not relevant in powerscaling.

THE SOUND OF JUSTICE CONTRADICTION​

Is it a non-canon gag feat with the character having zero relevance for the story? If so, I could agree with you here. Otherwise, I will have to agree with Strym here.

 

[LittleGuy99]

Is it a non-canon gag feat with the character having zero relevance for the story? If so, I could agree with you here. Otherwise, I will have to agree with Strym here.

The feat in the fight is simply the character moving fast while making funny sounds; there's nothing to suggest it's a non-canon gag feat
This character is relevant to the development of one of the protagonists, provides an important object to advance the plot, and helps at the end of the chapter. In other words, this isn't a joke character

 

[StrymULTRA]

Because soul and mind tend overlap with each other lmao

Darkners are soulless... Stop bringing random shit in, that's derailing again.

 

[Arceus0x]

Nah, DW are very much real on their own layer, there's clearly a life going on behind the events taking place. If you said FTL was an outlier I'd have agreed since it kinda is but since everything banks it on a rather direct interpretation of what is stated in game, I'll have to disagree with this.

 

[Uzil-IVrei]

Charmander is nuking this verse to the ground, lol

I'm not into the game or its scaling so I'm fine with this

 

[IDK3465]

Ok, so Styrm's arguments have actually changed my mind about some stuff, but I don't 100% agree with him on everything

Replying to both of these in one go, because both can be refuted in the same way.

This entire idea of "Dark Worlds are fake because they're illusions so physics does not apply to them" is just... silly.

For first, Dark Worlds just cannot be truly fake, because of these factors:

• Creating too many Dark Fountains would generate an unbalance between Light and Darkess, which would cause a catastrophe in the Light World due to the Titans rising and destroying everything. This cannot happen if the whole of Darkness is completely imaginary and fake.
• Light and Darkness are described as if they're in some kind of balance from the prophecy, which describes their yin-yang relationship, this cannot happen if the darkness in question is completely irrelevant and fictional.
• I am sorry, but the idea of "everything that happens in the Dark World is actually just placebo" is just stupid. The entire point about Berdly is bunk by using how Tenna is fully destroyed in the Dark World and then appears completely destroyed in the Light World too if he's not healed. Inanimated objects cannot have placebo effects because they do not have a conscious on their own.

The next is that you're arguing that "Dark Worlds do not follow physics because they're non-euclidean due to their size not matching the building they're based on", which is... not true?

There is literally no evidence for this besides "they're shaped based on the creator's willpower", but that does not mean they do not follow physics, as things like gravity, speed or causality all happen like one would expect to, there is no statement of physics being warped in the Dark World. Do we invalidate feats for worlds created by Subjective Reality or still created by an entity just because they're made from some power instead of a big bang? Obviously not, we'd have to make franchises that are fictional in-universe unusable under physics due to their mechanics and physics being shaped by the will of the creator being.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with this. Just because a world isn't naturally created and is instead formed by willpower doesn't mean we should disregard everything within it as disobeying the laws of physics, especially with how little info we currently have on what Dark Worlds actually are beyond Ralsei's (likely very biased) speech

HOWEVER, the Dark Worlds still seem to be highly variable in size, regardless of where they're placed, so that'll probably impact Titan scaling regardless

This is really ironic because prior in the Undertale speed downgrade CRT you've argued that the sound attacks in Undertale are not "realistic" because of them not being omni-directional waves, and yet, you argue that the sound attacks in Deltarune are actually sound-speed despite them not being that and moving as note-shaped bullets in a specific, unrealistic pattern like Shyren's attacks do, try to be consistent here little bro.

And before you say "but Undertale is not Deltarune", remember that both games are made from the same person, the battles follow mostly the same gameplay, and overall the mechanics are near identical, so I am indeed allowed to call you out on this.

Meaning that I can indeed say that all of these sound anti feats you've mentioned are invalid. You cannot keep a cake (calling the sound-based attacks unrealistic because of them not behaving like that) and then eating it too (using said sound-based attacks as anti feats against anything higher).

The "contradictions" against the Zapper's feat are nonsense as well:

• Why is them being increased by sound manipulation a problem? Not only your scan does not even use sound, but it's a pun for "volume" meaning both the physical size in 3 dimensions and the intensity of the sound. It's clear that sound is not literally involved here, why is it assumed besides a pun of "well he's a tv remote that increases the volume, but here it means how big the attacks are, not the sound in actuality!"
• Why is it having a tail relevant?

I think that the thing is indeed intented to be light here, we have two statements inting that the thing uses infrared rays, which are, you know, light. There is also the fact that there are no real contradictions to the thing behaving realistically, as it goes in a straight way, it bounces off walls like the real ones do, and comes from a remoter. It being magic means nothing here.

Also for the point of Kris being tagged from sound waves, why can't I also go in the opposite direction and say that's an outlier compared to anything else? Susie was already fast enough to block literal soundwaves in Chapter 1, and the characters are stated that they become faster the more the story goes on. We have also the SoJ feat that you mentioned in the CRT as a way to say that they blitz sound, why is Wicabel's stuff a relevant anti feat?

While I do agree that the Zapper's laser is real light, I'm still unsure about the FTL rating

In my eyes, we have only a single valid Rel+ feat (yes, I still believe the Soul's light is too abstract to be light speed), while we have several Supersonic to Hypersonic feats and several instances of characters needing to put in effort in order to pull said feats off. If you asked me which is the outlier, I'd say the Rel+ feat just for that reason alone.

That being said, I wouldn't be against a "possibly Relativistic+" rating, since the Zapper feat is legit, it's just quite a bit high compared to everything else we see the cast do

This entire thing is stupid, too. I'd like to mention that the existence of a UES is irrelevant because of this conversation I had with @Ultima_Reality on the topic:

This is because of two reasons:

1. Titans being fountains is not the sole reason why they're 7-B. Te reason why they're 7-B is also due to them sustaining and keeping these fountains in existence by existing, while also shaping them. Them being the Dark Worlds is not the main evidence, the main evidence is them being the Dark Fountains that give forms to these fountains and make them instantly disappear the moment they're sealed.
   1. It's a living Dark Fountain, which can create the Dark Worlds, give them forms, and instantly make them disappear the moment they're sealed, as creating it requires the creation of a Dark Fountain, with Ralsei saying that the Fountain is the Titan itself, and later on saying that a Titan is born when the Dark Fountains become too strong and the flow of darkness becomes wild and that both a Titan and a Fountain could be sealed the same way due to them being supposedly the same thing, with him being then proven right when Kris sealed a Titan in the same way they do so with a Dark Fountain.
2. UES is irrelevant for a Sustenance Feat, the page does not mention it as a requirement, it only mentions that it's their power what's supposed to sustain it. And isn't the fact that it's made of Darkness itself be a relevant factor on why it physically scales? They're not just some byproducts of Darkness like Darkners are, they're the very source that sustains the existence of these Dark Worlds in the first place.

Yeah, I agree with the Titans scaling to the Dark Worlds, the problem is that we just... don't know the size of the Ch. 4 Titan's Dark World, so I'm unsure about them being definitely 7-B. I'd be cool with a likely tho since all the Dark Worlds we've seen have been consistently huge

Absolutely, utterly ******* not.

Yes, Light and Darkness are used as allegories for reality and fiction, but you're basically saying that Light is not really like, and Darkness is not really Darkness, when Ralsei literally says that the Dark Worlds are just the version on steroids of what happens if your mind starts to make up stuff when there's not enough light to make a clear view on the surroundings. So what stops me from saying that Light and Darkness can be both literally light and darkness and also an allegory to that at the same time? You did not give an answer to this, you just said that light in Deltarune is not really light, despite you also saying in the CRT that Kris also gets Light Manipulation despite you saying that they don't produce real light!

Plus the Jackenstein stuff is not relevant at all here, it can be attributed to just the light expanding in intensity, similairly to how lighters work. Plus you're lying, the "beams" shot from our SOUL expand at the same speed as the "main light" during the battle.

I'm sorry Styrm, but I'm gonna need to side with Charmander on this one
Our light standards say that pretty much anything that isn't realistic for light to do pretty much disqualifies it from being SoL unless there's an ENORMOUS amount of evidence to the contrary, and yes, that includes sealing fountains of darkness or representing the concept of reality. I understand where you're getting at, but it seems like Deltarune's light in particular is more analogous to Kingdom Hearts' light than anything realistic. I'm sorry

This is also just dogshit.

The fight being a reference to YTPs debunks what, exactly? We all know that the lore of Undertale and Deltarune for more than half the time are basically what happens if you mix Final Fantasy with Captain Underpants, some feats are indeed bound to be gag or humorous. Is there a standard saying that gag feats are automatically discarded? No, they do only if they're one-time events that are not repeated anywhere else in more serious instances, unless we're in comical verses like most of the Toons where every feat they have is a gag, does it mean that, for example, all of the feats in Looney Tunes are invalid because their whole verse is a shitpost?

Plus, the "intent" inherently doesn't mean jack here. To cite a popular example, Butch Hartman, when watching a Death Battle episode involving Danny Phantom, one of the series he wrote, was surprised at Danny vaporizing a golf area being almost 560 Tons of TNT in power. It was clear that it was not the intent of a feat vaporizing a chunk of soil being comparable to the power to blow up multiple city blocks, but it is if we actually take in physics and the actual implications of the feat.

Toby Fox is not a powerscaler either, and he definitely does not think of feats and stuff like that when coding his games, he's only a guy who is a massive Nintendo nerd who makes a love tribute to his childhood. You cannot expect him to be a overfixated nerd over physics to make everything coherent, that's just insane.

The feat you show is not an indicator of the characters being sound timers either (especially when you said before that they get blized by "sound attacks" multiple times, contradictions huh?), just that they're much faster than sound, and being FTL is enought to achieve that.

By this logic, every series featuring anything that should be FTE to humans would genuinely use instances of common humans following fights as an anti feat for whatever FTE and above speed rating because "they're not meant to blitz humans 1 trillion times per second", no author intends for that, we only use what the series offers with feats, because if we otherwise start to use author intent then we use some kind of authority that you cannot prove it exists in the first place.

So, if you wanna know why I gave "short answers" to things, is because to me:

• You said a whole bunch of nothing almost all the time that can be debunked with little things.
• You just started to make standards on your own (seriously the "light beam having a tail" just sends me)
• You misunderstood our stabilization standard.
• You basically made up a false dilemma on the whole light and darkness stuff
• You made a bunch of assumptions on authorial intent

I won't reply to further replies unless I find them relevant enough to my case. Gonna wait for staff now.

I agree that a feat being a goofy reference doesn't disqualify it by any means, and we shouldn't let authorial intent get in the way of what the fiction actually shows us.
I still disagree with using the Jackenstein feat, just not for this reason

 

[StrymULTRA]

HOWEVER, the Dark Worlds still seem to be highly variable in size, regardless of where they're placed, so that'll probably impact Titan scaling regardless

There is literally no evidence for why the Dark Worlds should vary this much in size besides "huuuh what if they do!?". If anything, the 7-B is a downplay given that the rooms that the TV World and the Sactuary DWs are based on are bigger, so their DWs are definitely larger as well.

While I do agree that the Zapper's laser is real light, I'm still unsure about the FTL rating

In my eyes, we have only a single valid Rel+ feat (yes, I still believe the Soul's light is too abstract to be light speed), while we have several Supersonic to Hypersonic feats and several instances of characters needing to put in effort in order to pull said feats off. If you asked me which is the outlier, I'd say the Rel+ feat just for that reason alone.

That being said, I wouldn't be against a "possibly Relativistic+" rating, since the Zapper feat is legit, it's just quite a bit high compared to everything else we see the cast do

The issue is that there is not a real anti feat against Rela+ besides cherry picked evidence.

I'm sorry Styrm, but I'm gonna need to side with Charmander on this one
Our light standards say that pretty much anything that isn't realistic for light to do pretty much disqualifies it from being SoL unless there's an ENORMOUS amount of evidence to the contrary, and yes, that includes sealing fountains of darkness or representing the concept of reality. I understand where you're getting at, but it seems like Deltarune's light in particular is more analogous to Kingdom Hearts' light than anything realistic. I'm sorry

The **** are you even talking about? It being analogous to reality is NOT evidende of it being unrealistic, please quote me the standards where it says that it shaping reality is evidence for it not being SoL.

Like, this is the stuff against a beam being SoL:

Furthermore, there are a few criteria which show that a beam is not behaving like realistic light:

• The beam is shown to move at different speeds in the same material.
• The beam curves through the air or otherwise doesn't travel in straight lines (with the exception of realistic refraction or deflection).
• The beam primarily deals damage by means other than heating materials that absorb it.
  
  • A laser may cause explosions, but only if it rapidly vaporizes some matter, meaning that the target needs to be partially destroyed in the process.
• The beam is tangible and can be interacted with physically by normal humans, as if it was a solid, liquid or gas. It shouldn't disperse when being hit as a substance would, and should not be redirectable without using a mechanism like refraction.
  
  • While a laser can in theory push things, through radiation pressure or by causing explosions when vaporizing part of an object, those are niche circumstances and generally a laser should not primarily push things away like a physical projectile would.

NONE of this falls within what the SOUL light does, at all. You're making up standards on the fly just like Charmander does.

 

[Edutyn]

The issue is that there is not a real anti feat against Rela+ besides cherry picked evidence.

Shuttah also uses light (idk if it helps)

 

[StrymULTRA]

Shuttah also uses light (idk if it helps)

It does not because the light covers the whole box, so none "reacts" to it. It's the same as attempting to scale people to PSI Flash in EarthBound.

 

[IDK3465]

There is literally no evidence for why the Dark Worlds should vary this much in size besides "huuuh what if they do!?". If anything, the 7-B is a downplay given that the rooms that the TV World and the Sactuary DWs are based on are bigger, so their DWs are definitely larger as well.

The issue is that there is not a real anti feat against Rela+ besides cherry picked evidence.

The **** are you even talking about? It being analogous to reality is NOT evidende of it being unrealistic, please quote me the standards where it says that it shaping reality is evidence for it not being SoL.

Like, this is the stuff against a beam being SoL:
Furthermore, there are a few criteria which show that a beam is not behaving like realistic light:

• The beam is shown to move at different speeds in the same material.
• The beam curves through the air or otherwise doesn't travel in straight lines (with the exception of realistic refraction or deflection).
  • A laser may cause explosions, but only if it rapidly vaporizes some matter, meaning that the target needs to be partially destroyed in the process.

NONE of this falls within what the SOUL light does, at all. You're making up standards on the fly just like Charmander does.

ok, I could've done a better job at explaining myself back there, and tbh, I was also very wrong as you explained (also sleep-deprived), so I'm sorry for that
I still do feel weird about FTL, but I suppose I don't have a valid counterargument for it other than vibes, so yeah, I agree I guess

 

[StrymULTRA]

I was very wrong as you explained (also sleep-deprived), so I'm sorry for that

No probs lol, we all mess up while our brains are drunk.

 

[Qawsedf234]

What are the key posts to read for the pro and anti sides?