I've read through the posts made on the topic since my last evaluation.
My stance has ultimately not changed, though I am pleased that the open questions I expressed were thoroughly explained. I believe Agnaa's post here most clearly summarises the underlying issue I have with the arguments.
I understand the argument, it just doesn't meet our standards for evidence.
If there was a character who had 40 different feats of reality warping, operating on fairly wide scales (such as, having given everyone on the planet a sore stomach). And then, they had a feat where they said "Let's heat things up", before narration describes the nearby land lighting on fire and a nearby lake evaporating. We would not calculate this as them boiling all the world's oceans and coating the entire surface of the planet with fire. It wouldn't exactly be a huge leap for their reality warping to be able to do that, but the text itself doesn't concretely establish that happening. Going from showing me 5 of those different reality warping feats to 20 of them would change nothing about this.
Because of that, all the other reality warping feats in the series you keep listing are, at this point, completely and utterly inconsequential. Please stop wasting my time with them.
I don't think the interpretation of the feat offered by CurrySenpai is particularly unreasonable. I believe the
potential for such a feat as the one asserted has been firmly established, and within the constraints of the ambiguity of the statement, I could realistically imagine that the intention by the authors was to describe actually taking away every light element of Solus.
But I'm afraid we don't tend to index such tenuous cases. We don't need mountains of evidence that this interpretation of the feat wouldn't be completely out-of-line with the context of the setting and lore - what we need is direct evidence that this interpretation of the feat is the correct interpretation. Pointing to the influence of memories in the manifestation of a power and Kirito's memory of a 'starry sky', the legends surrounding Gigas Cedar and the role of imagination and beliefs in limits and potentials, the properties and elements that make up the world and the concept of luminosity and light elements, and so forth; these aptly establish that it's not totally unbelievable that a feat along the lines of "all the light elements that make up Solus were absorbed"
might be possible, and while there are worthwhile criticisms of some of the claims that have been made due to these pieces of information (most of which Agnaa has already sorted through well), I acknowledge that this interpretation of events isn't a huge leap.
But it is still a leap, because it never says "all the light elements that make up Solus were absorbed" or any unambiguous variation of such a phrase in the passage itself, nor can we deduce this to be the case through elimination. We are still taking something that can perfectly be explained as a particular subset of the light elements of Solus being absorbed, and extrapolating that they absorbed all the light elements of Solus without textual evidence that this is what occurred in the scene. We simply don't index feats like this.
At risk of inciting further discussion on a thread already reaching nearly 10 pages, I am open to further evidence on this matter. The fact is, CurrySenpai, that I think you're
probably not incorrect that absorbing all the light elements of Solus was how this feat was supposed to be understood by the authors. I don't say that definitively, I can't speak on their behalf, but I think it's well within the realm of possibility. But if there is any further evidence to be provided, it should be evidence from the scene or directly connected to the scene that elaborates on the nature of the event that occurs. You've given about as much context as could realistically be useful surrounding the rest of the verse, so if there is anything more to be said, it should be about the feat itself.
