Rant

[UzumakiKurisu]

This is my opinion, so please take it with a grain of salt. Now I don't want to be that guy and ruin everyone's fun, but I find it kinda strange that a lot of people on here(and on other forums) try to use real life science to prove or disprove a feat displayed by a character from a work of fiction. Now using Naruto as an example. There are people who can magically spit fire from their mouth, summon gigantic talking toads to fight for them, and casually rip out eyes from other people's sockets and implant them into their own without the need for surgery. How do you explain this with science? Now I don't want to turn this into a "Naruto has light speed reactions argument" or "Gai is sub-relativistic because he bent space." I do however find it kinda contradictory to use science to say that Naruto doesn't have light speed reactions because Madara's light fang technique is "not a real beam of light" or Gai's isn't as fast because "everything distorts space to some extent" because there are literally dozens of other things in Naruto(and other works of fiction) that completely go against what science has taught us. Now it's all fine and dandy if we apply science to the real world, but Naruto is not the real world. The fact is, Naruto is Kishimoto's world. He stated in a book written by himself that Madara's attack is light speed. So yes, in Kishimoto's world Madara's attack is light speed and Naruto did in fact dodge it, because that is what Kishimoto wanted to depict. Anyways like I said I don't want to turn this into an argument about Naruto's reaction speed or how fast Gai is, because I know it won't get excepted anyways, and people are probably tired of hearing it. That is just my opinion, and an example to further prove my point. There's a lot of other things I want to say but I don't really want to drag this post out too much as it's already quite long. So yea I'm done ranting now, you guys are free to agree or disagree with me, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

 

[Azathoth_the_Abyssal_Idiot]

I will not respond to anything regarding the Naruto feat, as I am not well versed in the series, but I will talk about the fundamental structure of this rant.

There is a thing called "suspension of disbelief". It refers to when a writer is able to make the reader refrain from judging how implausible a narrative is, at least to a certain extent. There are many things about Naruto, as well as almost every other fictional verse, that we accept because the author shows us that's simply the way the universe works. We accept that ki allows Goku to shoot blasts of energy out of his hands. We accept that Superman has the ability to fly without anything propelling him. We accept these because they're established as parts of the universe, and something that simply is. Sasuke can breathe fire. Cool. This doesn't mean Naruto's earth is suddenly made of anti-matter and several trillion light years in diameter.

However, many of these fictional universes do share similarities to our own universe. We can use science to judge feats because of this. We don't just automatically assume every single thing in the fictional universe functions differently because it's fictional. Otherwise, we could make a literal countless number of baseless assumptions on how the physics of said fictional verses work without feeling any need to supply proof for them.

Calcs allow us a way to judge the power and potency of feats that we would otherwise just look at and go "Wow. That guy/girl/alien/whatever just punched/moved/flew/teleported really hard/fast/high/far!", and are very useful.

Regardless, most of this doesn't even relate to the main purpose of your rant, as what you seem to be referring to is an outlier. People have a hard to believing Naruto is lightspeed not because it's unscientific, but because it is at odds with many other things in the source material.

Lastly, I hope none of this sounded aggressive. It is hard to convey a fully peaceful tone through text, but this is merely meant to answer some of your questions posed in this rant.

 

[UzumakiKurisu]

@Azathoth the Abyssal Idiot

No worries, it didn't sound aggressive to me. And you're right, some aspects of fictional universes do resemble our own. I'll admit, I thought the whole applying science to fiction thing was kinda pointless, but I guess I never really look at it the way you explained. I was reading some arguments, and I suppose it sparked something in me to post this. So I also hope I didn't sound to aggressive in my rant as well. May you lock this thread so it doesn't cause any further problems or unnecessary arguments please. Thank you for shedding some light on me and taking the time to thoroughly explain by the way.

 

[Azathoth_the_Abyssal_Idiot]

I shall lock it, and I want to thank you for being so understanding and level-headed.