Okay - my issue is sort of tied together with how we're approaching this feat, the scaling and the Area of Effect fallacy.
Now, Kizaru's "offensive power" with his Devil Fruit is scaled to 6-B. His lasers & explosions do harm people on his level and we make no mention on his profile of his attacks with his Devil Fruit scaling substantially below his physical striking strength / other statistics.
I want to address this first.
This is just a misconception on how we rate Kizaru's offensive power in the first place. Do we consider his AP as 6-B with his fruit? Not entirely, no.
You can look at
Kizaru's profile. We actually take his lasers and pure light abilities as Durability Negation through heat, piercing and tearing through bodies while ignoring conventional physical resistance. We do not impose any energy value to said lasers, and much less their explosions. This calculation, however, attempts to do just that. Put into perspective how much energy these lasers have behind them when they explode, which do not necessarily scale to Kizaru's 6-B AP, nor does it relate in any way to his durability negation through heat or other named attacks. The fact is, your own argumentation falls flat once you even say yourself that you think a Devil Fruit should not have a definitive power level.
So the proposition is to ignore what Kizaru's beams could scale to and calculate their energy by measuring the explosions they leave behind. Now there's a big variety in the sizes of the explosions they generate. We see it all the time from his biggest shown to be able to
engulf a Mangrove tree to the Pacifista's
spamming out smaller explosions all
the time.
The problem - and this is where it is tied into the AoE Fallacy - is that we
assume that all of Kizaru's / the Pacifista's attacks have a constant value of energy. In other words, that their offensive power is equal to one value / tier and that is it. Anything that goes against this assumption is ignored.
Getting to this, I understand where you're coming from. But how exactly does that make any sense in the narrative?
We
know the lasers are capable of generating 7-A levels of power. This much is undeniable, unless you have a problem with the calculation itself.
We also have official sources stating that the Pacifista's lasers are comparable to Kizaru's laser in offensive power. This is also true.
Thus, the Pacifista should scale to the 7-A value of energy. It is rather simple, and does not have any assumption in it.
"Well, it's an assumption to say they scale to THAT value in specific rather than 8-C sized explosions!"
That is just nitpicking, and you should really provide reasoning behind your doubts other than just "Well, it doesn't HAVE to be that".
Because our reasoning is pretty logical.
- Kizaru's casual "nameless" laser output is 7-A. Pacifista's scale to his offensive power (with the nameless laser specifically). Pacifista's should be 7-A;
Sorry Damage, but just saying "It doesn't have to be like that" isn't convincing.
Again, the explosion sizes fall under AoE fallacy
because their size are inconsistent with what they are capable of, which is damaging characters who are far into Tier 7 territory. And let me give you a little spoiler,
none of these explosions would go past Low-Tier 8. It wouldn't make sense to calculate them, their sizes are clearly not an indicator to how much energy they pack. This is why this proposition is not a solution to our scenario in any way, shape or form.
I get why we tend to do this; our profiles would be ridiculously overcomplicated if we looked at every single attack and rated them separately all the time - but I think that the proposal for the Pacifista's here is an unnecessary high-ball. When we have a range of attack potency for the explosion-generating lasers, the proposal is only concerned with the biggest and most destructive explosion shown by Kizaru. I get it; it's the flashiest showing and incinerates a large volume of wood so it is naturally rated the highest compared to the multitude of other explosions generated in the fights. It's also the simplest; find the biggest AP showing, scale the characters to it by default.
But it isn't necessarily the most accurate. I don't know what's going through Oda's head; if he wants us to think that Kizaru's display of destroying the Mangrove means that he wants us to believe that is the default level of power for Kizaru's explosions, regardless of the repeated showing of far smaller explosions afterwards. Or if his intention is that Kizaru getting "carried away" in overzealously destroying the Mangrove is a showing that Kizaru could be more powerful than he normally is but he doesn't whip out that level of power / destruction for every fight.
Either way; it doesn't seem right to me that we one-sidedly ignore the size / potency of the explosions when it suits us such as the Pacifista's repeatedly creating smaller explosions with their attacks, but we also rely on the size / potency of the explosion when it provides a convenient result such as Kizaru creating an incredibly massive explosion in his debut. If the amount of destruction caused by the explosion is supposed to to give us a more accurate value for the AP than his scaling, why apply it so inconsistently and not look at the other showings?
Either the amount of destruction / size of the explosion has nothing to do with the actual potency of Kizaru's attacks - in which case his initial feat shouldn't accurately be labelled as 7-A in the first place when it could actually just be a 6-B feat, or the varying size of the explosions means that the beam's strength isn't a single consistent value and we shouldn't automatically label every feat the Pacifista's lasers as 7-A when they could be lower than that.
I'm sorry to say that, but this last bit just screams "Death of the Author" so hard to me.
You need to understand two things. First, the size of the actual explosion used in the calculation is not a key component to our scaling. It's what the energy does to the mangrove that matters.
Second, we are not scaling the Pacifista's lasers to the
default level of Kizaru's lasers. We're considering them the
same. If Kizaru's lasers can generate 7-A energy, the Pacifista's can as well.
It does not matter if said value were to vary for a multitude of reason, the Pacifistas would still scale to the 7-A value as it was done with the nameless lasers which they scale to regardless.
Furthermore, as a cyborg programmed for optimal elimination, the Pacifista would not, a hundred percent, hold back in their power when dealing with the Straw Hats or any of the Worst Generation. Why would it? It wants to do its mission as effectively as it can. If it can shoot lasers with a zillion joules of energy to destroy it's target, it is going to do just that.
I am not planing on addressing size variation as an indicative of lower levels of power. That is a logical conclusion, but it's contradicted by what's demonstrated in their fight, sizes are not a representative of energy level. Thus, this conclusion just becomes an appeal to reality, in my opinion. I don't find these points particularly convincing, though.
