The Ellimist
So one of the common class of arguments in these rounds is comparing how impressive combatants' feats are to one another. To be clear, here I am referring to feats that involve manipulation of the environment or some other recipient acting independent of power scaling - so not Yoda matching Sidious but maybe Sidious lifting X object that weighs Y tons.
If we follow a Wong/Saxton model of suspension of disbelief, this is the most "real" way of doing the analysis. But it runs into a lot of flaws that basically reduce its predictive power to zero. Firstly, I don't think that people typically arrive at their conclusions from these feats - they mainly powerscale and go from their gut, adding a feats war on top as a meaningless exercise. Secondly, and more fundamentally, the authors don't even try to make feats consistent with one another. Whether a character can do X or Y at a particular rate depends more on the personal idiosyncrasies of the writer and their sort of stylistic conception for the Force is. It isn't really explained why Yoda struggles to lift a pillar while canonically weaker characters do so much more, but authors were not sifting through Yoda's teachings to figure out that he can actually do this instead of that.
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here; I think feats can be useful to certain ends, particularly if they are a) well documented and replicated and b) if they establish an upper limit rather than a lower one.
If we follow a Wong/Saxton model of suspension of disbelief, this is the most "real" way of doing the analysis. But it runs into a lot of flaws that basically reduce its predictive power to zero. Firstly, I don't think that people typically arrive at their conclusions from these feats - they mainly powerscale and go from their gut, adding a feats war on top as a meaningless exercise. Secondly, and more fundamentally, the authors don't even try to make feats consistent with one another. Whether a character can do X or Y at a particular rate depends more on the personal idiosyncrasies of the writer and their sort of stylistic conception for the Force is. It isn't really explained why Yoda struggles to lift a pillar while canonically weaker characters do so much more, but authors were not sifting through Yoda's teachings to figure out that he can actually do this instead of that.
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here; I think feats can be useful to certain ends, particularly if they are a) well documented and replicated and b) if they establish an upper limit rather than a lower one.