Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-35784433-20180605013633

I'm sure people have talked about and argued about omnipotence to death, and everyone is completely sick of it, but I find it easiest for me to define omnipotence as less of a "super power" and more as the state of being the author of the story you're writing. To me it makes sense, because as the author, you're the only one that can truly be considered totally and completely almighty and "above" and "more powerful" than any character you could ever create. No matter how powerful you make your characters, they can never somehow become self-aware and kill you from inside your own imagination. We all agree on that. You can make a character and say they have omnipotence, and make them absolutey above all the rest of your characters for sure, but you can still take their powers away or retire them as a character entirely if you don't like them, which is something that obviously can't happen to an omnipotent being, according to its very definition. But no character can ever do the same to you.

Some (or most (or all)) of you might not count that, since obviously you as the author aren't a character and powers don't exist in real life, so of course no character is "more powerful" than you, but it's the most straightforward thing I can think of that truly fits the definition of omnipotence.

It also fits omnilock too, because the only place you can't will a character to go or affect is, well, real life. Anywhere else inside your imagination would just be somewhere that you choose to be unaffected by other powers, but that place is fictional and inside your head just as much as the rest of your characters and powers. Even if you never acknowledge that, which is fine as long as you don't bring in contradictions.

Now things like ultipotence and metapotence are things that you could have as a character however. You can just make a character and say they can do anything they want in your entire fictional sphere and it works out, but metapotence and ultipotence are just having the raw power to do anything and affect and create, destroy, redefine anything you want, whereas omnipotence goes beyond that in saying that it's the top. Omnipotence isn't just the power to do anything, metapotence and ultipotence and all those other ones have got that covered, omnipotence is also the state of being above absolutely everything and anything no matter what, forever. You could create a character, call them omnipotent, and have them create a character that killed them permanently and removed their powers. But that isn't possible according to the definition of omnipotence, so they clearly weren't omnipotent in the first place. Then who is? The author. The only being that truly can do anything, affect, access, create and destroy anything and everything in their fictional omnisphere with a thought.

An author avatar could count too, but that isn't really a character, that's just you making an image and labeling it as the embodiment of your creative process, but you're still free to manipulate that model as you please.

If you want to discredit this whole explanation as too obvious to be acceptable, that's fine, but it makes sense to me, and when I make sooper dooper meta characters and stuff I have to find some way to differentiate the different variations of omnipotence so I myself don't get confused. And I consider omnipotence, at least in terms of fictional characters, to be something only the author can have or their author avatar, and all the other powers are nothing to it not just because we say it is, but because it makes sense for it to be an author-only thing, not something you can just slap onto any character you want. If you give a character a power and then immediately contradict that power, then they didn't have the power at all in the first place, it must have been something different. But a character can't use their fourth wall breaking powers to become self-aware inside your head and kill you just because you said that they can, no matter how much power you give them, which seems to fit the idea of omnipotence being truly immutable to everything else.

For instance, I once made a character that had logic and causality manipulation, and developed them for a while, and they could do omnipotence-y things, but eventually I got tired of them and retired them. I remember them, but they don't exist or have any influence over any characters or story lines I've created since then. As far as I'm concerned they don't exist. Even though their powers would be capable of defying that, I removed their powers and existence as an official character entirely, completely "bypassing" their powers to illogically do and be anything. Only omnipotence could do that, and it's not like I had any trouble doing it. For another character that had logic manipulation, it might actually be a fight to kill each other, they could be compared and even posibly have different skill levels depending on who's writing, but they can't affect their author, the one totally truly unquestionable force in the realm they were created in. Everyone agrees on that.

But again, a lot of you might not accept the explanation of powers not affecting real life because it's too obvious, which is fine. This explanation just clears up some of the nonsense and illogic that comes with these omnipotence powers, but if you like all the nonsense and believe that's the way it should be, that's completely fine. That's just my opinion, and it doesn't really matter anyway since this is a wiki about superpowers that aren't relevant to the struggles and wonders of real life like depression, finances, college, family, and so on. I'll forget I even made this post in a few years probably. So if you disagree, state your opinion firmly, and not call me a moron for not understanding a super power that already has a ton of contradictions in the same way you do.

Enlighten me kindly on what you agree and disagree with in my post. I'm not asserting anything is true, just hoping to help someone else better understand this weird, highly disputed power in their own way through careful thought and analysis of someone else's perspective. Lol. 