GodlyCharmander
He/Him- 6,732
- 6,128
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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"
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.
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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, @Robo432343, @ExcelsisBerny, @AguilaR202, @Echidnacodefan2512, @Qawsedf234 (about AP and FTL being dropped), @ActuallySpaceMan42 (10;2)
NEUTRAL: @ScoutManeater (on everything else), @DaReaperMan (on everything else), @ScoutManeater (3)
DISAGREE: @ScoutManeater (about Fake Dark World), @Jepilstiltskin, @LittleGuy99, @Arceus0x, @Anonymous_Learner, @Maniaunavailable, @Qurbonboev, (fantasy world), @TheOrangeGuy09, @Psychomaster35, @StrymULTRA, @SomebodyData, @DarkDragonMedeus, @Maverick_Zero_X (10;3)
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