Forum - Dream World and Data Standards

While I was working on Madotsuki I saw how her range is Standard Melee, likely Higher for her dream world key, while her dream world key is Low 10-C due to her theoretically extremely tiny and small size.

Now instead of just reconciling this by putting some low range level, my neurons activated and started having me laugh uncontrollably as I started to brainstorm. I haven't slept in 8 days.

Through brainstorming I think I found a perfect middle ground to cases like Yume Nikki, Sword Art Online, etcetera.

So initially in my head I was wondering for dream world characters, while Low 10-C is technically the most accurate because it's literally just a subsection of your conscious, this is one of the rare cases where that's a little too scientific and fiction is rarely ever considering that and treats things as more abstract. Also there's just some cases where it makes the profile looking confusing, so using Freddy Kreuger as an example, his entire gimmick is in the dream world he's all powerful but when he's in the real world you can overpower him, now with how we currently tier dream worlds he would be 9-C or whatever in the real world and Low 10-C in the dream world. Now technically this is accurate but looking from the pure in-universe perspective, this frankly makes no sense and just looks confusing on paper.

The same applies for things like data worlds, a whole thing with Sword Art Online is meant to be the VR World and Real World are not that different despite it being a literal digital world. So giving it just a "Low 10-C" seems kind of like fully undermining a core part of the series (regardless of how I feel about the series in question, the point of these profiles ARE to give the best indexing experience and make them for fans of the series).

So one of my first thoughts in my head was maybe just giving all dream world characters a "Dream World Tier" to denote how they don't follow physics and can be whatever they want, but not only did this feel as unsatisfying as the Low 10-C solution, it also felt very lazy, the point of a tiering system, even if not perfect, is to rank characters in a set in comparison to others, and a "Dream World Tier" would be so broad that it may as well just be shifted to an Unknown tier. Though Unknown falls into the same situation to me that it's a little too lazy of an answer and doesn't feel as satisfying, at the end of the day for these series that have a huge emphasis on these abstract or digital planes and I want to include everything in my indexing profiles, taking a complete literal part of Madotsuki would just be her real world key which would be a very barren profile. Oh also this would make no sense for Digital World profiles.

So I kept brainstorming until I came up with an idea that'd work a method for pseudo-tiering, to explain essentially, there'd be separate tabbers, using Madotsuki as an example, she has her real world key which she's obviously 10-B and then her dream world tabber, which would firstly have an explanation in the beginning explaining all of the feats and abilities listed in this key are only applicable to HER dream world, it cannot be used outside of it and it cannot be replicated in other fashions, with either a note on the page saying while you can pit her versus threads against real world characters, she cannot go on any of the Strongest Characters Lists or any list for that matter (also if we somehow return versus threads then she wouldn't get anything added as they would be considered Fun and Game threads due to how Psuedo-Tiering works), or on the page that'd deal with Pseudo-Tiering. Within Pseudo-Tiering you'd tier the dream world, digital world, etcetera as equal to main reality. Essentially this is what I think reality equalization should have been. A case where you can equalize it to reality through a pseudo-lens that pays tribute to the importance of that world in the series while also noting that these stats literally cannot be replicated outside of that world in the piece of fiction.

For cases where not even this can be applied:

• Series where dreams are not a major emphasis
• If they directly say stuff like they're "coding" in a universe.
• Series where they literally go out of their way to get across the idea that they're lesser then you

Examples:

• IMSCARED - A Pixelated Nightmare: Completely aware they're a video game and they're just jumbles of code and the way you defeat them is by deleting their file in the computer.
• Doki Doki Literature Club: Same thing as IMSCARED, to defeat Monika in the Just Monika setting you need to outright delete her file.

Obviously stuff that qualifies as legit dreams/data worlds that are equal to physical reality don't apply here since they have basis for being tiered legitimately.

Oh yeah also an extra thing for levels of control in a dream:

• If someone has complete control of their dream and can do whatever they want

they'd just get Varies in the psuedo-tiering. As they can be as strong or weak as they want to be for the sake of the dream Freddy would be an example of that for characters where it seems they have clear limits even in their dreams. Like Mado needs to go out of her way to get different effects to use abilities, and is limited by obstacles that she can't just simply erase, manipulate, or destroy without equipment, along with the fact that she doesn't just create things out of thin air like just spawning effects in front of her.