Why does catching someone or something falling in most cases negate or reduce the injury/damage applied to it? Shouldn’t it be almost just as damaging, just a few feet further up?
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Because when you catch something, your hands aren’t immovable concrete-hard slabs of meat made metal. Your flesh is soft and squishy and your arms have give. Concrete will extert all that force slowing you down with the space of millimeters, if that. When you catch something, you can slow it down over the span of a few feet. It decreases the maximum acceleartion the thing has to survive through.
Concrete: A whole lot of acceleration all at once. You stop really fast.
Caught in the swashbuckling arms of the hero: A smaller amount of acceleration over a span of time. You stop, but slower. There are limits though, even if he doesn’t drop you.
It’s how cushions and foam works. You start decelerating as soon as you hit the foam, and the foam squishes applying more and more resistance. You could hit something at relativistic speeds and with enough padding have a comfortable 1g of acceleration as you came to a stop.
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