Powerscaling - Homestuck/MSPA

re:kevin this is also the other fundamental flaw with powerscaling as a concept. you really have to go into it assuming that every participating character is an AU version who is willing to use the utmost of their power to win a given fight. which just changes so much about 99% of characters LOL

@Jakemorph

I don't agree with the Jack Noir reasoning because of 2 points in the story being that the Green Sun is the sum total of the destruction of 2 universes, and the fact that when Roxy and Dirk are entering the Alpha Session, the Red Miles from Jack Noir's attack appear throughout the world, meaning he did actually attack every single timeline and destroy them all.

@Ashley

There's actually a good example of this in Homestuck proper. I remember one of Hussie's QnAs on Github where he talked about John and Jack Noir's fight and why he lost so easily the first time but put up a fight in the second.

John was mad at the moment, but he didn't have any purpose trying to kill Jack Noir in that moment because we already knew Jack was supposed to survive, but his death wasn't heroic because he wasn't prepared to fight and go out like a Hero. He was just an angry 13 year old. That's why when he gets his rematch he does so well. The song about the fight "You Killed My Father" comes to mind, because at that point he was able to reflect and hold a grudge against Jack. If there isn't any meaningful purpose to the fight outside of fighting, then whether or not John (or any God Tier to that extent) loses, they'll just come back because the fight didn't mean anything and therefore loses that stake.

Most Vs Fights take both character as blank slates in a barren field rather than actual characters in a situation. Homestuck characters need to have something to tie them to the fight. If they don't, then they'll just stalemate or win. There's no stakes.

this is all ive got to say on hs powerscaling tbh

RE:euchreYiik I don't understand your point? yes, Jack's red miles appear in every timeline and every part of the universe, but that's only because he's physically attacking the Genesis Frog from the outside, and the Genesis Frog of course CONTAINS all of those timelines and locations. nothing in the comic ever suggests that Jack is using some unique Green Sun reality-warping power here, that's just what happens when you blast a Frog from the outside.

Do we think if Equius locked in even just a little he coulda smoked Gamzee? Something about Gamzee's reaction to Caliborn's automatic gunfire later-- which is reasonable-- makes me think a real blue blood Zahhaymaker would have turned the clown into a stain on the wall. This also might be cope, though. Probably not fully killing Gamzee cuz of course it wouldn't but at least winning the scrimmage.

@JakeMorph I will say to be double fair that I don't think if HIC or Sollux used their laser beams on a frog that it would "work", but I still think Jack doing it from the "outside" is important.

Notably, when the Miles do appear in the post-Scratch timeline, there's a comment on how it took them billions of years (or eons? I forget) to reach this Earth through the vast stretch of the frog's gullet. Obviously from Jack's perspective this took like, 3 seconds though. I think the implication there is that the beefed-up Miles' infinite range allows him to destroy the universe, but that infinite range isn't infinite speed, and it would still take an interminably long period of time if Jack had tried doing this on Earth proper.

(Perhaps also of note is that Karkat saw the Miles in the frog as soon as it was made, possibly indicating that the Miles were tearing through the timeline(s) since the Big Bang/Croak, and just took 13.7 billion+413 years to reach Earth)

ancient Hussie lore from like 2010 says Equius could have broken free of Gamzee's bowstrings just by flexing his neck muscles lol so yeah I think Equius' freak strength trumps even Gamzee's highblood testosterone. that being said Equius' psychological complex about fighting a highblood totally has to be considered a real weakness in a deathbattle scenario

oops ninja'd haha. @Joshless I don't think gemini eyebeams would immediately incinerate a Genesis Frog, no, but like you say neither do the Red Miles; they're a wide-reaching attack that just takes time to spread. if a midboss-level character like the Black Queen can eventually destroy a universe from the outside, I really don't see why a similarly powerful weapon couldn't at the very least wound one, and if you can wound something you can eventually kill it.

I really feel that universes in Homestuck being essentially just big, vulnerable creatures in a grand ecosystem is part of the point of them being frogs. it's not that you need to be an especially grand and powerful godlike being to kill them, you really just need to be the kind of particularly nasty person that would want to kill a giant harmless frog.

IT IS NO MATTER

ALL SHALL FALL BEFORE MY JUDGEMENT

Pickle Inspector wipes the floor with Vriska and Lord English. EZPZ

vriska serket strongest human, jane crocker strongest troll. simple as

Remember the time Dave held off two Bec Noirs at the same time? I know he died but that's still insane to me

Reading through this has made me realize that nearly no one here actually understands what powerscaling is lol

No, Jack Noir being outside of the Genesis Frog when he destroyed it does not magically mean he isnt Multiversal+, nor does powerscaling break down conceptually at the alien concept of characterization. This is just a general pet peeve of mine, but there's just this... conception of what powerscaling is, that it's divorcing a character from who they are and just imagining their abilities that's just so blatantly false that I'm baffled the entire concept has lasted this long. If you want, I could explain all the questions and inconsistencies levied about Homestuck and how to powerscale it, or just generally what powerscaling actually is if you want!

I'll start with the Jack thing, I feel like saying the only reason the Red Miles destroyed the Genesis Frog was because of Jack being outside of the Genesis Frog and that attack spreading is somewhat disingenious and misinterprets the text. No, the Black Queen when 3x Prototyped DID NOT have the power to actually destroy a multiverse just because she has the red miles. The Red Miles as an attack actively gets STRONGER as the prototypings increase. We see this with Jack, actually.

In Act 6, DD uses the Red Miles with 0 prototypings on the ring, and it barely is enough to destroy part of Derse.

In [S] Descend, Jack Noir uses the Red Miles with 3x Prototyping twice, once to destroy a large part of the Battlefield (which is pretty much the size of a huge planet) and once to destroy a huge part of Prospit.

In [S] Cascade, Jack Noir uses the Red Miles AGAIN with 4x prototyping to destroy the Genesis Frog.

With the amount (and potency) of the prototyping, the power of the Red Miles increases to follow. This makes sense, as we see that the prototypings clearly affect how strong stuff like underlings and those who wear the ring/hold the scepter. Bec Noir is clearly far, FAR stronger than Jack Noir.

Any more questions? I can pretty confidently explain most qualms people have with powerscaling.

@Mocha I mean, I think regardless of where Jack was it's still relevant that it took the attack billions of years to destroy the Frog. Like I said, I think it's a function of it having "infinite range", rather than Jack being powerful enough to like, throw out a "blast" of "Red Miles-stuff" that carries the kinetic energy of a billion billion exploding suns.

@Joshless We literally see on screen the Red Miles spreading throughout the frog and destroying entire galaxies. I think the destruction of the Genesis Frog only took "millions of years" relative to the fact that Bec Noir did it from inside the Furthest Ring, wherein time and space are warped and hard to navigate. Also, he left behind an arm, which is probably where the Alpha Kids iteration of the universe was located until the Red Miles seeped into their reality.

Also, this is even more consistent given what the Green Sun (which is something we know for a fact is powering Bec Noir. Just. Obviously) is created from the destroyed matter of TWO entire Genesis Frogs, and even without that we know for a fact that it's just twice the mass of the universe. Bec Noir being Multiversal+ is NOT an outlier, nor are the Red Miles that we SEE on screen destroying the Genesis Frog.

@Joshless Actually wait, where are you getting the idea/metric that it took the Genesis Frog "billions/millions of years" to be destroyed from? That's contradicted a bunch in the comic itself. For example, the Tumor exploded within a few minutes of it being activated, and what we see on screen during the actual act of destruction is extremely quick. We even see the destruction around where Earth is starts at a relative point in both iterations of the universe (Around 400 years after Entry, when the Exiles and Dirk and Roxy are present.)

I think it's just because the attack was literally sent from outside of time AND it's meant to be affecting multiple timelines at once (since it's destroying a Genesis Frog which contains multiple timelines), that it FEELS like it takes longer than it does. Either way, Bec just scales to Multiversal+ even without that feat lol.

And actually, we KNOW the Red Miles as an attack don't typical have infinite range... We see it activated 4 other times by other weaker characters and those barely are able to spread across a planet like Derse/The Battlefield or the LOWAS (not even gonna get into the sizes of Homestuck's celestial bodies, those are somewhat inconsistent lol). It's only when amped by the fourth, most potent prototyping that Bec Noir has the power to create a version of the Red Miles that is able to destroy an entire Genesis Frog!

That and Jackspers (3x Prototyped Jack) wasn't able to kill Bro or Davesprite (even WITH the use of the Red Miles, on the LOWAS) until he gained that 4th prototyping! It's just super consistent...

When I first engaged with this thread it was with the acknowledgement that I can't claim to fully understand powerscaling, because I will admit I am one of the people who thinks of it as "divorcing a character from who they are and just imagining their abilities". So I'm genuinely interested to hear how your analysis here takes into account character motivations?

Like, surely Droog didn't WANT to destroy the entirety of Derse, or indeed anything beyond Derse, when he used the Ring of Void's Miles? Was he not specifically countering Dirk's rebellion? You assume that this is an indication of Droog's limited power AND range when it surely makes just as much sense - if not more - to presume Droog was deliberately limiting his own power and range. In a similar vein, how are we to assume that Jack didn't only use the 3-ring to destroy some of the Battlefield and Prospit because that's all he wanted to destroy? Your interpretation of the scaling Red Miles seems - to me at least - to rely on the assumption that every time someone uses the Miles they must necessarily be expressing the Miles' full power and range, which comes across to me as not only a limitation of powerscaling, but also dishonest to the way the Miles are actually used in the comic. Remember Jack spends several hours destroying each of the trolls' planets one by one (using the Green Miles, btw -- strongly implying he can choose to power up his Red Miles with Becquerel's power, but does not always do so!) before he finally decides to turn them on the Genesis Frog itself... Jack's motivations are those of a killer and are not always 100% clear, but he does seem to operate on his own logic of escalation, choosing to take out smaller targets before moving in for the really big kill, and this does not necessarily mean it is his powers which are getting stronger each time. (Your logic that he's not able to beat the Striders until his fourth form is sound, but I don't think it works as an explanation for the Miles specifically because it's not ultimately the Miles he uses to win the fight).

And most crucially to me, the point of the Red Miles is that it performs the function of a Queen's attack patterns in chess - that is to say that its key advantage is its reach and its precision. Hell, maybe it makes sense for a Queen's attacks to get physically stronger as she levels up, but the crucial strategic advantage of the Queen in chess is that she can reach anywhere on the board, but may make shorter moves if she chooses to do so.

I also fully understand your logic when you say we "see on screen the Red Miles spreading [...] and destroying entire galaxies", but I still think there are holes in your assertion that this somehow scales Bec Noir up to a multi-galaxy-destroying level on his own. Like, as I've discussed above, this still doesn't prove that a 3-prototyped Jack, or any other carapacian holder of the Black Queen's ring, couldn't have performed the same feat - as far as the reader is concerned, the only reason 3-Jack didn't destroy an entire universe is because there was no universe sitting there in front of him to destroy. And I think that treating a universe (or "multiverse", if that's what we're saying it is for the purposes of this discussion) in Homestuck as if it were the same as a universe in any other work of fiction does, by its very definition, strip away some of Homestuck's important thematic elements for the sake of powerscaling. Like, doesn't the fact that the "universe" he's killing is actually just a giant, passive organism still count for something? To count as a universe-killer, does he actually have to "destroy" the whole universe (which for the record he didn't do - on p. 4307 we can see not just a whole bunch of universal goo left over but a whole frog's hand still floating around the site of death), or does he just have to cease the universe's functions as a living life form? Using Cascade as our point of reference, these events also seem to suggest - if not outright confirm - that a universe can have a heart. Can you scale to universe-killer just by finding the universe's heart and putting a bullet through it? In which case doesn't Spades Slick, or whoever happens to be holding the cueball gun at a given time, also scale to killing universes? Both Jacks in Cascade did essentially the same thing: they found the living embodiment of a universe and happened to be holding the right weapon at the time to kill it.

I don't think that's a disingenuous misinterpretation of the text, I think that's pretty much the outright intention of the circumstances being depicted to us in that way!

I love powerscaling so much man, where else can you get arguments like ”Yeah, he’s destroyed a universe, but that universe was weird as hell!”

Not a jab at all, genuinely this is a big part of the appeal for absurdly powered characters in this kind of discussion to me.