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Gotta love the movies where someone is falling only to be caught by a superhero who has accelerated to ludicrous speeds to catch the fallen and intercepts their trajectory at 90° just before hitting the ground. So the victims goes from 150mph down to some crazy speed at a 90° vector to their original path after being slammed into by superhero.
They’re so dead.
But the superhero Suspension of Disbelief Field extends to secondary characters in the story.
You're not wrong but there is one thing: hitting the ground is an instantaneous impact with a hard surface. Being swooped in some direction is a relatively slower process - the swooper is softer than concrete, and the change in velocity is spread over a longer period of time (even if it's still "instantaneous" to the casual observer, it can be an "instant" 100 times longer than ground impact).
It's like landing on a mattress vs a hard floor - from a high enough height both are deadly, but I'd still pick the mattress.
I also assumed the swooper still decelerates you a little even if not by much. If you're falling at 50m/s as you are trying to slow your fall by taking a skydiver pose, and a superhero caches you midair, you could decelerate over half a second and stop moving within 12 meters while still only experiencing 10g.
12m is pretty tall but not insane in a superhero style piece of fiction where people may be dropped out the sky or from tall buildings. If you want to increase that g-force to the maximum survivable limit of near 100g (in theory), you'd only need to go from terminal velocity to 0m/s in 1.5 meters. Being reasonable, being caught 5 meters above the ground would be enough for most people to survive without major reprocussions, and is always better than hitting the ground.
You ever ran into someone before?
Flesh is still a lot softer than concrete
Unless it's Superman.
Yeah, he's a man of steel
So is water but it'll still kill you if you're falling at terminal velocity.
Transformer movies were awful with this. Human falling hundreds of feet to the pavement. But wait! They'll hit a giant steel hand instead! Much better. Soft.
I guess technically this could work if the robot lowers the hand at the same speed they were falling and then decelerates gently, but I bet that's not what happens in these movies.
Isn't this the story of the original Gwen Stacy? Spiderman tries to save her, but does exactly this and the force on her body kills her anyway.
It's been a long, long time since I have read the comics but iirc, it was a defining point in the spiderman canon.
It wasn't originally. It was essentially the scene from the first Spider Man movie where Goblin makes Spidey swoop in to save her, but she was already dead.
They retconned it later to make it so Spidey killed her, which is a better story.
It's the other way around, actually.
The comic (#121) is ambiguous though. There is really no way for the reader to know whether she was dead before her neck was snapped, Green Goblin certainly seems to think so (but he is hardly a reliable source). But snapping her neck certainly would have killed her anyway.
He used his web to grab her from above. I think her neck snaps from the whiplash?
I just rewatched the scene on YT, and he's actually just a bit too late, and her head slams into the ground with full force.
I was thinking of the comic, but I guess it makes sense tocdo it that way in a movie meant for kids. A neck snapping might be a bit grim
And whipping a skull into concrete isn’t grim?
This is correct.
If we are talking emma stone, she is specifically shown hitting her head during the whiplash which is what kills her
I was referring to the original version in the comic. I haven't followed all the revisions and alternate universes to know the variations.
That's exactly what I thought when I was watching that scene with that superfast dude in X Men where he saves a bunch of people by carrying them away from an explosion. They must accelerate from 1 to 1000 km/h in a mere second.
The scene is still awesome, but I don't think anyone would be alive after that.
Edit: https://youtu.be/ZnZqB5Z75zI?si=41ohBuk03Xuy5RGl
He would have created his own explosions just getting there either from the friction of moving all that air out of his way so he didn't collide with the atoms, or from the nuclear forces involved in colliding his atoms with the air's (and still creating a lot of friction in the process).
It would be like that light speed baseball pitch question and answer that ends up killing everyone in the stadium with a nuclear blast.
And Xavier would have done one of those himself in X2 when he freezes time at the mall... Maybe, actually I'm not clear if his ability is a time stop or if he did a mind control on everyone and made them stand still. There's another one like that in Logan, though Logan is able to fight through it, which kinda makes it even less clear exactly what he's doing. Powers!
Yeah, Xavier can't stop time, he can just mind control people into standing still.
Relevant XKCD
The final paragraph is amazing.
Yeah, with the Flash, there's the "speedforce" excuse, but quicksilver has never had that kind of effect given as part of his power set.
I hate the flash as a superhero... The dude is literally unbeatable, but he just chooses to like, not really bother.
Have you never been so lazy you watch yourself get punched at a snails pace?
It's like one of the opening scenes from The Boys.
splat
Sorry Lois Lane, superman just made you into a bony pink mist.
Was thinking of the Airplane Rescue, as Homelander breaks down why everyone's fucked no matter what they do.
Isn't it well known that if you're near Superman you"get" some of his powers. So him coming in to save you like this would be ok because you'd have some of his invincibility.
You're saying if I have an unconscious superman, and I wear him as a backpack, I can rob banks?
Only one way to find out! Now, how do I knock Superman unconscious?
Kyrptonite and chloroform
Kryptoform
Canonically Superman s 6’3” tall and weighs 235 lbs, so if you’re able to wear able to wear that as a backpack, hats off to you bud.
I get some of his powers when he's close to me, so it'll be easier to carry him.
You don't need to be superman to rob a bank tho
True, but it would be much easier if you were.
The cleanest explanation was that he's Superman because his powers give a psychokinetic field around his body that can absorb kinetic and other energy. It's what makes him invulnerable except for kryptonite that can just bypass and negate that field. It can also extend over other people so they can lift along and it can absorb the energy from the fall.
Alright, that's enough nerding out.
The best part of the theory is it really does answer quite a lot of problems with his power set.
It's hand waving comic nonsense in the end still, but in a better way than "because Speed Force"
I believe there is the unified theory of Superman's powers where he actually has the ability to manipulate molecular structure of the object he touches.
He is shown picking up cruise ships and the ship doesn't split in two, that's because he's strengthening the structure and making it lighter as he lifts it.
He causes the air around him to thicken and squeeze him through the sky.
He causes the air touching his eye balls to turn into hot laser beams.
So when Supes catches a falling human, he instantly makes them invulnerable to the sudden stop
All this is done unconsciously on his part.
The most famous (and internally consistent) version is control over inertia, not molecular structure.
I don't agree with it because inertia alone can't explain everything, but I think it's the right track, in the form of some kind of general control over universal forces that manifests in a way he intuitively understands (unless we want to argue that all energy has inertia just as all mass does, in which case okay fair enough)
His varying power levels are both dependent on how much energy he has stored from the sun, because it is a specific EM wavelength that he can absorb and store, and how much control over the forces he can deliberately or intuitively exert.
This implies that his most powerful form is not the one that punches the hardest, but the one that realizes he doesn't need to punch at all.
I always thought it would be neat if his super strength also meant very fine control, so he could do stuff like decelerate a plane with his bare hands, even if that'd be equal to an ant catching a paper mache egg filled with lead. Maybe when he catches someone, he manually decelerates each piece of them bit by bit, controlling where the waves of force go until they all cancel out and have zero inertia.
Also why he not immediately naked when going to superspeed in the outfit. It's protected by the force bubble around him.
It is like the trope of the explosion behind the hero.