system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] What is physically happening at the point of contact when two light sabers hit each other? Energy or heat release? Does something different happen if they hit harder or softer?
gpt
IIRC the most common expanation is, they're tubes of plasma. And charge repels charge. So you're hitting a magnet, pretend dipole, against another magnet with a pretend dipole in the same direction. Quite likely they never touch, but mechanical work is still exerted. One can guess that the howling and crackling sounds are the stresses on the containment field.

Compared to something solid and uncharged, that's exposed to a huge flow of ions, that reacts and ignites it.