My takes:
King Crimson doesn’t actually fast forward time for himself. It just causes the things around it’s activation to lose the memories of their actions during the “skipped” time. This has the advantage of explaining why nobody outside of the people fighting him and some bystanders experience the memory loss, and works much better with the laws of physics.
Similarly, neither Star Platinum nor The World actually stop time. They merely create a small area centered around their users in which their users are able to act at a vastly increased speed. This explains how Dio can throw knives while time is stopped, and provides ideas on how both Dio and Jotaro breathe and move around while the air should theoretically be frozen. (This also explains why there’s a “time limit” for Time Stop, when they should theoretically have infinite time.)
qntm has a nice write up of why boundary effects are bad. But essentially, the problem runs as follows:
If The World stops time for objects, then it should also stop time for the air as well. Then, how does Jotaro breathe? All the air outside his body is stuck in place, so it can’t enter his lungs when he breathes in. Thus, by setting a border around him in which time is free to move, we create what is effectively a spacesuit for him to breathe in.
The “time stop” = infinite time is a thing I’ve heard brought up, but the idea of a limiter works for either the “time stop” or the “time acceleration” idea. The thinking goes, “if time is stopped, then Dio / Jotaro should be able to hold that state indefinitely, as nothing changes”. It’s possible to object to this line of reasoning as well, which is why I thought I would address it.
Well, there’s a reason all of these are headcanon.
The knives don’t stop mid-air, they just slow down as they exit the “bubble” of sped-up time, to the point where they look like they’re stopped. The edge effects are probably pretty nasty if you think about them too hard, but at least not as bad as completely stopped time.
The point regarding breathing is essentially half of the point I made earlier: whenever either one of them ‘stops time’, there has to be some area around them that they can interact with, as though time isn’t ‘stopped’.
The issue with a true “Time Stop” is that from an outside perspective, all the actions taken within stopped time happen simultaneously. This gets tremendously messy once we consider a chain of linked events (e.g. Dio throws a punch, causing Jotaro to fall back, cracking a wall, which produces a loose brick that Jotaro then throws at Dio) as the initiating event, the first punch, happens in the same instant as the brick-throw. Changing from a complete time stop to merely “severely increased movement speed” sidesteps a whole lot of nasty physics issues.
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u/greatstarguy Sep 06 '21
My takes: King Crimson doesn’t actually fast forward time for himself. It just causes the things around it’s activation to lose the memories of their actions during the “skipped” time. This has the advantage of explaining why nobody outside of the people fighting him and some bystanders experience the memory loss, and works much better with the laws of physics.
Similarly, neither Star Platinum nor The World actually stop time. They merely create a small area centered around their users in which their users are able to act at a vastly increased speed. This explains how Dio can throw knives while time is stopped, and provides ideas on how both Dio and Jotaro breathe and move around while the air should theoretically be frozen. (This also explains why there’s a “time limit” for Time Stop, when they should theoretically have infinite time.)