Honestly call me radical, but at this point I think someone should just compile what has been proposed and have a vote off between the experts (NOT the members, NOT the general staff, just the people that are actually extensively talking about this stuff all thread long).
I mean this has been going on since October of last year, and if there's anything I've gotten from years and years of Tier Shit
talk is that most of it is arbitrary anyway. I'd rather get it over with already over dragging it out for another year and probably wearing the patience of people who care even more thin that it already is.
Idk, wouldn't that mean the opinion of those most interested in the topic wins?
Anyways, if this debate continues I may as well write some extra argument.
Let me write a bit more about Immeasurable just so we're clear why it is superior speed to infinite, which we can also take to the BDE case to see why I don't consider it superior speed. In the process, I will also address the passive thing RatherClueless wanted to talk about, even though I still maintain that it is irrelevant for the thread.
So we're looking at a few different kinds of speed on this wiki. I will address travel speed (flight speed is the same for this purpose), attack speed and reaction speed. Combat speed is the combination of the 3, so no need to address it separately. I will talk only about time in the following, to make it easy to follow.
Travel speed is easy. Having higher travel speed basically means as much as that you are winning a race against the other character. In other words, there is some distance that should be travelled, characters start "traveling" at t_1=0 and whoever reaches the end first wins.
An infinite-speed character reaches the goal at t_2 = 0. I.e. they reaches it at the same point in time as when they started running.
An immeasurable character could reach the goal at t_2 = -5s, for example. I.e. they reach it before they started. Before they started is earlier as the time when they started, so the immeasurable speed character is faster.
Attack speed is similar to travel speed, except that it is now the attack that travels. Fundamentally one can do the same race comparison for the attack, in which the infinite-speed attack reaches the target at the same moment in time and the immeasurable speed attack earlier in time.
One could also make a comparison as to whether or not the attack can be reacted to. Say a character with infinitely fast reactions is attacked. Such a character could potentially block an infinitely fast attack in time. Say an infinitely fast energy beam is fired. They see it is fired and raise their shield in the same moment, which is also the moment in which the attack hits them. They could have potentially blocked it. However, for an immeasurable speed energy beam, the moment the character sees the energy beam being fired they were already hit. Even if they raise their shield in that same instant it would be too late, as the attack hit them, for example, 5 seconds ago.
Those two are pretty easy, but the case of immeasurable reaction speed is more interesting. For reaction speed, we ask ourselves whether some character could react to an attack with the respective speed from a short distance away.
As established in the attack speed case, infinite reactions are not enough for immeasurable attacks.
So are immeasurable reactions enough for infinite speed attacks? Yes, of course. Immeasurable reactions mean to be able to react in a negative timespan i.e. backwards in time. They see the energy beam being fired and put up their shield 5 seconds ago. Early enough to block when the beam actually arrives 5 seconds after they raised their shields.
With that we come to the topic of Immeasurable vs. passives that RatherClueless brought up. First, it should be said that not all passives kill instantly (I dare say most in fact do not), but let's assume one that does.
At first one might think: Well, the character is already in the passive's range. At best they can do a revenge attack in the same instant in which the passive kills them, right?
However, consider the following: A character with Immeasurable reactions has to be able to react to an immeasurable attack so as to block it. So if a character fires an immeasurable energy beam that hits them 5 seconds ago, they have to be able to put up a shield 5 seconds ago or earlier. An attack that hit them 5 seconds ago should likewise already have made contact with them, just like the passive. In a sense, what the passive is doing, is to hit them '0 seconds ago'. It has already hit them in the same instant, while an immeasurable attack already hit them in a prior instant. If you can make a reaction to the latter, you can also make a reaction to the former.
Is that pretty hard to imagine? For sure. But that's what you get when you think about blocking immeasurable attacks.An easier way to imagine it might be to say that in the same instant they get erased (so by doing an infinite speed reaction) they rewrite the past to prevent it from ever happening.
Let me say that this point isn’t what this debate depends on, though.
With all of this said, how about we do the same test scenarios with the "BDE is superior to everything else" idea?
For travel speed we want to do the race again. But we immediately have problems. Can a character with BDE even start at the time t=0? Can they even cross the distance of the race? And if they do, since they are unbound by time they presumably do so at no point in time at all. Is reaching the goal at no point in time before or after they started? Is it before all times before they started even? In an extreme scenario an immeasurable character might reach the goal as early as the dawn of creation. Arceus might reach the goal as early as when he got out of that egg of his, before time and space even got created. But no point in time is "before" that in a sense that one can consider the BDE character to have won the race? I don't see why.
Next attack speed. If you think of it as travel speed of attacks, we have the same problem as above. The attack is fired and arrives at something that isn't a point in time or even stand in any causal relationship of order of events. So how would one compare that?
And if you think of it in terms of overcoming reactions... Well, a character with infinite speed sees the energy beam getting fired and their reaction happens at the same instant. Why does the energy beam hit before they put up their shield? If we take BDE seriously, the "time" when the beam arrives can't be compared to the time when the shield is put up. It can't be before nor after. So how can we guarantee that the beam hits when the character is in a state of "the shield isn't up"? I don't think we can, especially not for fiction in general.
And that gets just worse when you consider that, again, an immeasurable character might see the attack being fired and in response raise their shield at the dawn of creation before which not even concepts existed. That means as much as that they, retroactively, never had their shield down at any point throughout everything that exists in the verse. So how and why would the BDE attack hit them in a state where the shield is down?
Lastly, how does it stand with BDE reactions? Now, this is a little difficult in that in order to even be able to attack a BDE character we have to assume that the attacker is able to in some way interact with something with BDE. That's not easy after all. A true BDE character is immune to a lot of things.
So, for the sake of argument, let's say the attack in this scenario can just erase the concept of the BDE character without actually needing to hit the character itself and the BDE characters reaction is to use powernull before the concept erasure is completed.
In case of an infinite speed character the attack starts and ends in the same instant. So the BDE character needs to activate powernull in 0 seconds. Can they do that? I would say maybe, maybe not. Being beyond time they technically can't do anything in any span of time. On the other hand, we can't apply the idea of "before or after the attack is used" to them. So whether they can is once again indeterminate and would need to be clarified by actual showings in the verse.
And how is it with the immeasurable character case? Well, let's go into the most extreme case once again. The character activates their power which erases the opponent's concept before Arceus even gets out of the egg to establish time and space. So, retroactively, the concept of the character and the character themselves were never created. Here I again really don't see how a BDE character could use powernull before that. Or, more importantly, why we would assume they can do that just for being outside of spacetime.
So, in total, I maintain that BDE characters should not be ranked inherently higher than Immeasurable ones. They should be required to demonstrate feats on par with Immeasurable characters to get speed values on par with them.
Hence (to repeat for those who have read nothing before this) I still suggest to delete Irrelevant speed and just use Immeasurable for all feats that are baseline Immeasurable or higher. Although, I would be willing to agree to the 'compromise' of defining Irrelevant as a variable speed tier for characters with BDE that is not inherently higher or lower than other speed tiers.
