I am very much not trying to troll here, I'm actually trying to wrap my head around concepts and am trying to make sure I understand things.

So, first premise of my thought experiment is there is no change of the frame of reference here. No Lorentz transformations at all. We are staying with the single frame of reference of the initial observer.

Two objects at opposite vectors are moving at more than half the speed of lights away from the initial observer.

From the frame of the initial observer, not from the frame of either object, do these objects appear to be moving at a distance over time with a velocity higher than C? I understand that as soon as we change frame of reference to either object their relative velocity is a fraction of C, but if we stay in the initial frame of reference what does their movement over time look like?

I've been trying to chew on this from a conceptual understanding, rather than a mathematical understanding, for over twenty years as something I low key keep coming back to.

Or is this one of those things that it's almost impossible to get a conceptual understanding of?