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Forms of Soul Manipulation, Potency, Resistance and Durability

Firephoenixearl

Firephoenixearl

20,509
1,590
Soul Manipulation potency by our current standards is scaled by the numbers of souls collected. I personally have a problem with that, but i will explain why below. First i want to mention our different types of soul manipulation.

So in this wiki there are 2 main types of Soul Manip:

  • The usual Soul Manip as we know it. The ability to just push someone's soul out of one's body. This can mean push it away making it a wandering soul, suck it, seal it etc many other applications.
  • The AP based Soul Manipulation. The best example i can give here is Bleach (the most well known, but not the only). There are verses where the strengths of souls are within the individual. Someone can literally crush souls by using a form of spiritual power that applies actual AP onto them. And with this rule, most often than not stronger people have stronger souls (but that's in verse and not important here). The problem here is, that they are not using actual hax to destroy the souls here and the medium is not "amount" but almost quite literally "Durability of the soul".
    • So the first thing is that we need to divide these 2 types in both resistances and applications. Maybe divide them into "Type 1" and "Type 2".
    • The second thing is resistances. People who have resistances to type 2, would not get resistance to type 1, because logically speaking, their soul is not getting crushed with AP, but rather separated from the body.
    • The third thing as I mentioned above is. Why is number of souls a factor?
I feel like this just came as a result of mind hax potency, however that makes sense because you're overpowering X number of minds constantly for it to be a thing. So in other words you're controlling thousands of thoughts constantly and forcing your will into their bodies making them comming whatever you want. So in this case, the number matters, because there is resistance on every mind, so more minds more resistance.

In this case however you're just pushing the soul or sucking the soul from someone. And as most fiction depict, there is no real resistance going on. You're not overpowering anything, you're not constantly withholding something (in most fiction a soul that has been pushed out stays out, and in some cases even flies off). So if there is no resistance going on, why does the number matter?

So I would like to hear what people have to say about this.
 
I actually think we should need 3 types, as some characters have the ability to control the souls while not having any combat applicable use. For example, Akuto Sai can control the soul of ghosts, which allows him to summon them wherever he is and talk with them, but he can't attack souls, suck souls or destroy souls.
 
Soul manipulation comes in way more forms than these. It's not something that can be split into distinct forms.
 
I rather avoid dividing these kind of powers into types, it is really unnecessary. Although, I would argue why do we consider aoe of the hax = potency of the hax, like, when that turned into a rule? Its kinda arbitrary if you ark me.
 
What's with the need to put everything into types? Just explain how it works.

As for the resistances, pretty sure that's how they're already treated, and you don't need types for that. Just put a note/add a new sentence or something.
 
Hmm, what about Character A that has soulhaxed 100 characters but all those 100 characters have the soul potency of 3 people for example? Would it make the character A potency 300 or just 100?

This is a problem that I have found for a long time. While the soulhax/mindhax potency is scaled by numbers what about those souls that are stronger. An example would be Character X has a potency of 1000 but can't soulhax Character Y because of Y's soul stronger but Y didn't have such a big number of souls affected.
 
There's no standard meaning of "soul/mind potency", the "potency" of the hax is measured if the power has surpassed the resistances of another character, so a hax its considered to have superior potency if it affected someone that its supossed to be resistent.
 
"Soul potency of 3 people" doesn't mean anything in context. If that gives him resistance, then fine he will resist type 1. I believe type 1 Soul hax needs to be treated in a way similar to Power Null and the like. So: "How many layers of resistance can this bypass with potency alone?".

"Stronger souls" would give resistance to type 2, but needs more context.

@Ogb

I disagree with that statements, just cus a few people in the wiki treat it like that doesn't mean "everyone" does. I have heard plenty of cases where type 1 and type 2 get confused. And my resistance point on type 1? Your opinion on it?

As for the types, well it just makes them clearly different and explains that "resistance to the one doesn't mean resistance to the other" and just generalizing that these 2 important applications being the most common shouldn't be confused.
 
Ionliosite said:
I actually think we should need 3 types, as some characters have the ability to control the souls while not having any combat applicable use. For example, Akuto Sai can control the soul of ghosts, which allows him to summon them wherever he is and talk with them, but he can't attack souls, suck souls or destroy souls.
Click to expand...
Then that's just summoning. We should restrict soul manip to the ones that actually affect a soul directly in one of these 2 types.

@Prom

Well yes, but these are the 2 main ones. Others can either be applications of these or just listed as different powers.
 
this will make things far more complicated tho .

what will happen when somenone soul haxed an entire planet face against someone that soul haxxed a 5-B being ?( both with matching resistances)

how to determine wich have the stronger ? i see none . that will create endless debate in vs matches .

either go for potency or numbers , going for both will create more problem that it will solve imo .
 
Yeah, ehm, people is once again associating AP with hax...

And yes, the main "issue" with hax is that there's no way to measure how powerful it is (although its way easier to to it in tabletop games and few rpg, as they tell you how "powerful" its the ability with reference to something else).
 
I think that Promestein and Antoniofer seem to make sense.
 
Antoniofer said:
Yeah, ehm, people is once again associating AP with hax...
And yes, the main "issue" with hax is that there's no way to measure how powerful it is (although its way easier to to it in tabletop games and few rpg, as they tell you how "powerful" its the ability with reference to something else).
Click to expand...
yeah , the way to quantify hax isn't based on AP. Resistance is a good way to judge an hax 's strengh when possible tho .
 
You just said the soul of a 5b. And in that case both would 1 shot.

The dude who didn't have his soul crushed by a 5b soul attack has no resistance to getting his soul sucked. Similarly the dude who soul haxed the planet has no resistance to soul crush.
 
Firephoenixearl said:
You just said the soul of a 5b. And in that case both would 1 shot.
The dude who didn't have his soul crushed by a 5b soul attack has no resistance to getting his soul sucked. Similarly the dude who soul haxed the planet has no resistance to soul crush.
Click to expand...
where did i mentionned soul crush and soul sucked ?

i just mentionned soul hax .

and i personally disagree with the OP , soul manipulation already take into account everything it need and i have no problem with it's potency being based on numbers affected as i believe AP shouldn't have anything to do with hax .
 
Yeah I invoke the sites case by case ruling :p

In the end I understand wanting to get hax more easily definable but things like soul hax are so complicated your never going to nail down all the different forms it takes nor the potency or resistances.

In the end its better to look at how the soul hax/resistance functions and make judgment calls based on that rather then creating a hundred categories for an ability that takes so many forms across all of fiction.

Ie I disagree with the op for the moment.
 
@Naeblis

A 5-B being doesn't have a 5-B soul was my point. You completely missunderstood the point. No matter what tier your AP, the Soul Potency stays the same unless he starts resisting Soul Hax, that's what was wrong about your case.

And i read your case wrong. Both of the cases you mentioned are baseline soul hax potency. Soul haxing a 5-B being is no better than soul haxing a human. And soul haxing 10k people is no better than soul haxing one.

You may have no problem, but it is logically flawed. There is no reason why "Numbers = potency" as numbers don't mean potency unless the case is Mind hax which as i said "Every mind has resistance", souls don't have such a resistance in base.

@Pen

Not really, i meant these 2 alone. And by that i mean dividing soul hax into "Type 1: Soul hax that doesn't apply AP on the soul" and "Type 2: Soul hax that seemingly applies AP on the soul (like in bleach)". Not divide them into "soul sucking" "soul sealing" "soul BFR" "soul pushing" etc. But just as an example all of these examples i mentioned would fall into type 1 because they do not apply any form of presure/AP (do not damage the soul, instead, focusing on just separating the soul from the body would be a good way to put it), where as the ones that focus on using things that damage the soul fall under type 2. So a summary:

Type 1: All types whose main focus is just separating the body from the soul.

Type 2: All types whose main focus is damaging the soul without necessarily separating it from the body.
 
Firephoenixearl said:
@Naeblis
Click to expand...
i did say that both have resistance that scale to their own level of soul hax , see the "(both with matching resistances)" in my post .

are you advocating that haxxing a single soul without resistance is the same as haxxing 10 quadrillion soul without resistance ? if that is indeed your argument, i will have to disagree completely then . the latter is clearly more powerfull as it can manipulate much more at once wich indicate more "power" behind it .

how do you propose scaling resistance to soul hax then , if number of souls haxxed isn't a factor ? every one that ever resisted any kind of soul hax on a 3-D scale is considered immune to soul hax then ?

example: a characther( let's call him billy) resisted his soul being ripped from his body by a single target soul ripping technique , is that considered immunity to 3-d soul rip then ? after all , AP have nothing to do with soul rip and with your system , the numbers of souls pulled also don't count .

what soul rip feat would be necessary to hax "billy" with your system ?
 
Im gonna skip this first point cus you understand it in the 2nd paragraph. But neither has matching resistances and im gonna say the thing you didn't mention below again. Haxing a 5-B is no better than haxing a normal human. All souls are the same with no resistance unless shown.

Ok i understand where you're coming from but your argument lacks a logical reasoning as to why it would be more powerful. If it takes you 0 effort to knock down a wall with 0 mass, then whether there is just 1 wall or 15 quadrillion, the result would still be the same, 0 effort would still be required. It "sounding" more powerful, doesn't mean it is more powerful, it's just more range. Souls are trapped within the bodies in most depictions and when they leave the body they have no resistance and do not come back instead they wander as lone souls. It's not the same as mind hax.

No, not immune. I explained above how it should be scaled (you probs missed it, so imma quote it):

I believe type 1 Soul hax needs to be treated in a way similar to Power Null and the like. So: "How many layers of resistance can this bypass with potency alone?".

What this means is that. Billy will resist any soul hax which is "basic" (no layers of resistance). If a soul hax has shown to affect these people even past resistances then it will affect billy even if the soul hax is on a 3D scale. This is how we treat all other hax which do not rely on potency (power null, conceptual manip, causality manip etc). Soul hax should be the same, the only different power would be Mind Hax which has a logical reasoning for why "more" is "more powerful".
 
To break the "link" between a soul and a body should obviously take some effort, no matter how small. The soul is connected to the body in some way since it doesn't fly out for no reason. Removing a million souls is obviously better than removing just one.
 
Not really break the link. You're just pushing the soul out. This is mostly depicted as an effortless action in most fiction.
 
InfiniteSped said:
To break the "link" between a soul and a body should obviously take some effort, no matter how small. The soul is connected to the body in some way since it doesn't fly out for no reason. Removing a million souls is obviously better than removing just one.
Click to expand...
i agree , even if it is made in very casual fashion , removing soul still have to require something out of the hax user .

@fire , no, range would be to be able to use my single target soul rip to target anyone on the planet , it is very different that targeting everyone on the planet at once .

one can only bear the burden of one soul , the other can bear billions at once .Even if it isn't showned , to manipulate something will require something out of you . just because i can lift a small rock quite casually and without effort , doesn't mean i can lift quadrillions of rocks at the same time.
 
Didn't know that was the standard even though it doesn't say that on the page unlike mind manipulation. Anyways this is tricky, in 7DS Meliodas momentarily resists it while Escanor who was stronger at that time lost his soul easily. The number of people = potency, doesn't really work because essentially it comes to range as well as the mechanics of the ability, whether you pick up 1 souls or a 100 doesn't matter if everyone doesn't feel it, this is as long as you aren't swearing buckets from all the effort, a sign that that verse has superglue on every soul attached to a body. So as long as it's effortless it shouldn't make sense that number of people it affects = potency, but a limitation on the ability sort of liek time-stop.

Problem is that (mentioned above) the potency of it if is harder to gauge if that verse has souls manipulation as well as certain people having higher resistance equal to a certain number of weaker people, I think he was pointing towards nascent soul or something...
 
iirc , meliodas is a demon ,wich just mean that demons , or meliodas alone , have soul resistance independant of their power level .
 
Naeblis495 said:
i agree , even if it is made in very casual fashion , removing soul still have to require something out of the hax user .

@fire , no, range would be to be able to use my single target soul rip to target anyone on the planet , it is very different that targeting everyone on the planet at once .

one can only bear the burden of one soul , the other can bear billions at once .Even if it isn't showned , to manipulate something will require something out of you . just because i can lift a small rock quite casually and without effort , doesn't mean i can lift quadrillions of rocks at the same time.
Click to expand...
Not really. You're applying AP logic to hax. And even if you do, you're pushing a weightless thing outside of someone's body. A weightless thing. It requires no effort.

Yep, it's range.

Not really. "bear the burden of one soul" is not a thing that happens in fiction. And in those that do it only applies to "absorbing the soul" but that is just an in verse weakness due to "a person cannot hold more souls than 1" kind of thing. It is again, not the same as manpulating the mind. Because with minds you're overpowering other minds. While here you're not overpowering the soul in any way. It's like saying.

If we drop Little Boy into a dessert with only one person and a little boy in a very crowded place, the 2nd Little Boy will be stronger because it killed WAY more people

Nothing changed, except for the amount of people that got affected by it, the ability is the same. No matter how many people you put in the range of the bomb, all will be evaporated. Be that a single person, 7 billion, several decillion or infinity.
 
in most verses that use soul hax , the soul is generally said to have "power" or carry some kind of energy even if it is very little. In bleach for example , hollows consumes souls to sustain themselves , wich mean that the souls they consumes , even from mere humans , carry a little bit of energy with them . Same for 7DS , the ten commandments consumes souls to restore their magic.

wich mean , that even by simply ripping souls , they have to manipulate that very small ammount of energy to do so .

so in those cases , manipulating more souls at once will mean that the hax is superior to a hax manipulating a single one. only in verses were the soul is said to be completly void of any "energy" "will" ect will haxxing more can argued as no better as haxxing a single one and even then i will my doubts .
 
I don't have much to say but that Singapore name drop brought me here.
 
@Naeblis

Energy and power of the soul doesn't mean "they have trouble affecting the soul". It just means they feed on souls. Not the same thing. For this argument you need the majority of verses to have trouble or exert themselves significantly to absorb more souls rather than a single one.
 
Firephoenixearl said:
@Naeblis
Energy and power of the soul doesn't mean "they have trouble affecting the soul". It just means they feed on souls. Not the same thing. For this argument you need the majority of verses to have trouble or exert themselves significantly to absorb more souls rather than a single one.
Click to expand...
still mean they have to manipulate and overpower that spiritual energy anyway just like mind manip require them to overpower the innate "will" of the target . If it didn't require efforts then the feat is treated as casual that's all .

anyway , no need for me to state my point again and again , i disagree with you and i believe the current system is fine as it is . no need to complicate things by splitting soul hax into many different forms and scaling , it will only make things even more complicated for nothing .
 
No, they do not need to do that. They're not taking control over the body (possessing it), that would be overpowering the will or soul. They're just removing the soul from the body. Them feeding on souls is just mechanics. If i eat a soul that won't fuel, me, in verse some people may feed on it though. I mean we have people in fiction who literally feed on bad dreams, despair or other things like that, are we just gonna give energy to all of them? Whereas for the mind you're constantly overpowering the mind, your case would be "if you just slap the brain out of the head".

And dividing it into 2 types is necessary. People who can use actual potency on soul hax cannot compare to people who do not use this. No matter how you take it, it falls into logical fallacies. Someone resisting a planetary crush on his soul doesn't mean he can't get his soul ripped out by someone else. Completely different things. Even currently different types of soul manip have no way to compare.
 
I skimmed through this, but this had my attention among what you said @Earl :


  • The second thing is resistances. People who have resistances to type 2, would not get resistance to type 1, because logically speaking, their soul is not getting crushed with AP, but rather separated from the body.


In your OP, I...think you actually maybe should add "Type 3" which has both resistances in it (or we can always go Type 1 and 2), because I know of verses which have both those in. They can push someone's soul from his body, eat it, seal it, but their souls also are as "strong" and "durable" as their "real self", so you also have souls throwing Low 2-C AP around....on other dude's who's souls also resist said AP and haxes.Both Hax and AP, regarding soul. Anyway just here to tell you verse when you have both types and resistances exist.

PS : Isn't the Type 1 basically Astral Projection? Edit : nevermind it's also what's written in the Soul Manip page..
 
@Nepuko

I assume you agree with everything else on the OP?

And about that, type 3 is not needed, it's just "type 1 + type 2" not actually "type 3". It's not a different form of power, but rather just characters who can use both types. So in your verse's case it would be "Soul Manipulation (Type 1 and 2 ......)" (assuming they have both types).

About the Astral Projection, nah. Astral Projection is "your own soul", type 1 is "the souls of others".
 
Oh I see, I misunderstand that part as "A character can only have 1 Type at once". Alright then.

And about agreeing, I honestly don't know. The OP seems reasonable, but Soul Manip from what I saw comes in so many forms that separating it in 2 types won't really work in my opinion. Maybe it'll be best that this ability stays like it is.

Basically I'm Neutral for now about this, and I'd like if possible to hear more staff input first if possible :).
 
Can we stop with the typing? Not everything needs to be broken down further into specific categorizes. If a mechanic slightly deviates from the norm, we explain it either on the character profile, or the verse page.

Seriously, I share Prom's sentiment we are taking this typing stuff way too far.
 
It doesn't need to be in the profiles. Just a word on the soul manip page should do. This is mostly for clarification.
 
No I mean like we don't need types for powers and abilities of this nature.

Again, if a specific power or ability works outside of the norm, it is the duty of the verse supporter to detail how exactly that power or ability works.
 
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