If anything, powerscaling should be more vibes-based

A new Death Battle episode has released and created discourse, as seems to be tradition. But people seem a little more heated than usual this time, and I think the reason is ultimately simple: the matchup was between a character that obviously can destroy a planet against a character that obviously can't.

"But wait," a strawman powerscaler might say, "this calculation shows that Kratos's feats are easily more impressive than destroying a planet! If anything, planetary is lowballing him!" But that's not what the story is actually communicating. Though they're nominally attempting to quantify what's shown on screen, feat calcs are often far less reliable and informative then what a casual viewer will glean from simply watching the action. Because authors don't operate on calcs, they operate on vibes.

If I, the author, want to inform the audience a character is strong, then I will show them pick up and throw a car. If I want to say they are fast, I will show them outrun a bullet. From this the audience can infer that my character is strong enough to lift a car and fast enough to outrun bullets, and can conclude that they could probably lift other cars and outrun other bullets. But these objects are immediately obvious to the audience's frame of reference; they know cars are heavy and bullets are fast. What if I wanted to show that a character was really strong? A semi truck or a building. From this the audience knows that character 2 is stronger than character 1, or if character 1 was doing it that they were really pushing themselves. But when I wrote those things I didn't actually consider how heavy a semi truck or building are. Those feats give the audience a ballpark understanding of my character's strength, but neither they nor I am worried about actually quantifying them. What's important is the "feel" of how strong my characters are, something the audience intuitively understands as they experience the story.

How fast is Star Platinum? If you asked a casual Jojo fan, someone who's actually watched the show but never even heard of powerscaling, they'd tell you "oh SUPER fast, fast enough to catch bullets." And that's true! That's the information Araki wanted the audience to understand when he showed Star Platinum catch a bullet. To a casual fan, the notion that everyone is actually going faster than light would literally never occur to them. It's obviously not true. But Silver Chariot intercepted Hanged Man one time, and Star Platinum is about as fast, so obviously Ratt shoots lightspeed projectiles. By hyper focusing on their chosen feat, the powerscaler has actively absorbed less information about the story than the casual fan. Their tunnel vision has blinded them to the vibe, the baseline strength of the verse that the author was intentionally aiming for, and now they're looking at a fanfic reality of made up numbers and fictional quantum physics.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that a very large number of powerscalers have simply never engaged with the media they're discussing at all. If you actually played Devil May Cry, you'd know Dante was about a building-level bullet-timer. If you've only ever read Redditors talking about how Mundus blew up seven multiverses by flexing his bicep, you're so divorced from the mood of the source material that it's like Plato's allegory but the guys doing the shadow puppets are also trying to mess with you.

That was probably more yapping on a straightforward topic than necessary, but in summary, a work's actual audience intuitively understands how powerful its characters are because they've seen what the do firsthand and understand what the author was attempting to communicate. By attempting to use real-world physics and hard numbers a powerscaler distorts their vision to an extent that their interpretations are often less accurate than someone who just views the scene casually. A vibes-based assessment of how strong a character is will 9/10 times be closer to their actual depiction.