Recently, I’ve been having more and more people ask about how we plan to handle creation feats, specifically how (or if) they relate to a character’s destructive abilities. I’ve been putting the issue off for a while, but finally decided to bite the bullet and try to explain our stance.
Creation feats in general are confusing and greatly vary in how they are presented in media. While this article is meant to address things as generally as possible, there will be exceptions when some piece of media treats a feat very differently than most others. That said, the position in this article will still be applicable to the large majority of creation feats.
I’m going to try and explain this stance in three different levels of complexity, because I find myself unable to come up with a single concise explanation that hits on all the points that I want to touch on. Hopefully when combined, these explanations will give you a clear idea of where Smash Bracket stands.
Explanation zero: We haven’t seen it happen
This isn’t “explanation one” because it’s really too simple to be a proper description. But Smash Bracket’s entire philosophy is based around measuring things that we can actually see happen. When we don’t see destruction on the same level of creation, we don’t assume a character can destroy at that level. It’s really that simple.
Explanation one: Magic is Freaking Weird
This is what I would describe as the simplest, surface level view of creation feats. In our universe, we don’t see examples of pure creation the way that we do in fiction. We can try our best to find examples of something being “created,” like stars forming out of space dust or trees growing from seeds. But these often span very long timeframes and seldom resemble fiction enough to be meaningful comparisons. What we’re left with, therefore, is a feat that can only be described as magic. Regardless of the systems accomplishing creation in the fictional universe, it is so far removed from our common understanding of physics that there is no useful way to describe it.
What that means is that if we want to calculate how impressive a creation feat is in terms of energy, our only option is to pick a number at random. Obviously, most people are going to use some kind of intuition to help guide the number that they pick so that it feels “right,” and I don’t think anyone ascribing a value to creation is doing so in bad faith. But there is exactly as much basis in saying that creating a building requires a billion joules (because that’s what it requires to destroy a building) as there is in saying it requires 12,000 joules (because that’s the number of animals in the San Diego Zoo). It might feel more correct to base the energy of creation off the energy required for destruction, but there is absolutely nothing based in reality to indicate one method is better than another.
Under this view, we need to keep in mind that whatever energy level we choose is completely random and disconnected from any actual physical processes. Aside from making the actual measurements of creation feats dubious, this is important because it lets us understand the connection that creation feats have with destruction feats. Namely, there is no connection. We can anchor our understanding of destruction in the real world because things can actually be destroyed here, but creation isn’t afforded that same luxury, and therefore we have no idea how creation energy would relate to destructive energy.
Even more importantly, because we don’t even have the foggiest idea what physical processes creation would use, we have no idea whether it even makes sense for a character to be able to access the energy used in creation in other contexts. When we look at the energy required to destroy a statue with a punch, we can also understand what other physical processes are able to take advantage of that energy (though, as always, it’s important to be aware that energy isn’t some vague mystical thing that can be freely distributed to any tasks you wish, so we can’t completely transfer that energy into other processes). When we look at creation, the only thing we are sure the energy involved can do is create. It doesn’t make “more sense” to be able to use the same amount of energy in other contexts because it doesn’t make sense even in the original context, and (once again) we don’t even know how impressive that original context is.
So why don’t we think that creation capability is inherently equal to destructive capability? Because when we have to make up random numbers and invent descriptions of abilities that don’t exist, we don’t use those inventions to create new feats for characters.
Explanation two: We actually know exactly how much energy it takes, and it’s too much
Remember how I called that last explanation simplistic and surface level? That’s because it falls apart under close examination. I wrote it to address the most common view of creation feats that I’ve seen brought up, which is basically “physics can’t describe creation, so we just label it with intuitive tiers.” While I don’t have anything against debaters who hold that view, it is demonstrably incorrect.
While we might not know exactly how creation would look, we do know exactly how much energy it would take. In fact, I would bet almost any random person on the street could tell you exactly how to tell how much energy it takes to create something, even if they don’t know the significance of their knowledge. If I asked a random person “what is the most famous equation in science?” I would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t respond with “E=MC².” Now, hardly anyone actually understands what that means, but the formula itself is everywhere. And that formula is spelling out the answer to our question as plain as day: energy and mass are the exact same thing. Therefore, creating some mass (as you do with creation feats) is the exact same as creating energy. Which means that we can use that formula to know exactly how much energy it takes to create something.
The problem, though, is that the amount of energy stored in matter is deceptively massive: the amount of energy inside a paperclip is the same as the amount of energy released in the Little Boy atomic bomb that was dropped in World War 2. If you saw a character in fiction who could create paperclips out of thin air, would you feel comfortable describing them as clearly having the power to destroy towns? Because that’s the problem that we run into when using creation feats to gauge destruction. It puts characters way, way, way above what they would have otherwise demonstrated.
If you want to argue that a character should have access to all that energy for any purpose they desire, then sure, have fun with your paperclip-creating nuke machine. But not only does this put every creation feat firmly into outlier status for almost every character, it gives a very dishonest picture of them. If a character can create something, that is practically guaranteed to be their best feat by a very significant margin. And now you’re stuck talking about this theoretical character who’s only feat is creating paperclips as if they can go around erasing cities from existence with a bit of work.
If you want to massively inflate every character far beyond anything they’ve ever shown, go for it. But in my opinion, when there’s a feat where one interpretation puts it significant orders of magnitude beyond anything else, it’s usually better to consider a different interpretation or throw the feat out than to discuss some theoretical version of the character who feels nothing like the character we can read about or play as.
Oh, and we still have the same problem as before: we have no indication of how the process unfolds, so there’s no reason to assume the energy required could even be used in other contexts.
(By the way, I said that the conventional approach is wrong without really detailing why. While I don’t want to get too deep into this conversation because it involves a lot of complicated physics, the misunderstanding is based on the assumption that energy and matter can’t be created or destroyed. That is wrong. The conservation of energy is a very common and mostly-universal principle, but it stops applying in the case of general relativity. Admittedly, this is a hard thing to research because the misconception is exceptionally wide-spread, but the basic idea is that when spacetime itself is changing — as it would be when creating new matter — conservation of energy doesn’t apply. Or rather, it works differently enough that the conventional understanding of the conservation of energy doesn’t apply. The universe creates and destroys energy all the time, in fact. So with an accurate understanding of conservation of energy, we can see that mass-energy equivalence actually works to describe the situation pretty well.)
What’s the Alternative?
We treat creation as a bounded ability. We can measure how much stuff is able to be created and use that as a limit for creation, but we wouldn’t go on to invent some new destructive ability that taps into the same pool of mass/energy. This is almost always more inline with how characters and creation are presented and it allows us to keep feats that would otherwise need to be deemed outliers. That’s a win-win in my book.
