Hi Plat Terra,
First off, slight confession, I never really thought too much about how tides work until recently (since joining this forum). The problem is the common quick answer is that the moon and sun pull water towards them. This is kind of true, but doesn’t really explain it properly.
I’ll try to explain how it works to best of my understanding in a series of steps, mostly conceptual. You may object to some concepts, but these are (I think) all regular “round earth” physics.
1. Newton’s law of universal gravity is
F=(G x m1 x m2)/r2
So the closer two objects are, the stronger the gravitational force. Forget Einstein’s theories, it gives the same results in this case, but it’s waaaay harder to visualise.
2. An example of extreme tidal forces you’ve probably heard is the hypothetical case of an astronaut falling feet first towards into a black hole. The feet experience much greater gravity than the head and the astronaut turns into spaghetti. No need to discuss this anymore, except to remember that tidal forces are due to differences in gravity at different points on an object.
3. Imagine an Earth sized blob of liquid water (somehow) floating in space far away from any gravitational fields. Under its own gravity it’s pulled into a perfect sphere. Think we can probably all agree to that assuming that gravity is a thing, right?
4. Put the blob of water in orbit around a sun. It’s still held together under it’s own gravity into a mostly spherical shape, but it’s slightly elongated by tidal forces, as the side nearest the sun experiences a bit more of the sun’s gravity than the far side.
5. Now replace most of the water with a rocky planet that’s (mostly) able to resist tidal forces. Say its completely submerged with no land masses. The planet is in the center of a slightly elongated sphere of water. That creates 2 tidal bulges in the ocean, one towards the sun and one away from the sun.
It’s not that the water is “pulled up” towards the sun, it’s just free to flow to the shape with lowest gravitational potential energy. ie. “Water finds it’s own level” (TM).
6. Next add land masses. The water cannot flow as freely around the planet, it has to work its way around the land. So it redistributes easily across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, but is restricted and channeled through places like the straight of Gibraltar.
Lakes are affected by the same tidal forces as the oceans, but they are far smaller bodies of water and there’s nowhere for them to go, so we see little or no actual movement.
So that basically describes solar tides as I understand them.
7. Finally add the moon, which basically does the same thing as solar tides. Except despite being much smaller, it’s way closer, so the tidal forces of the Moon on the Earth are stronger.
The conceptual problem people can have is thinking of the Moon just orbiting the Earth and the Earth just orbiting the Sun. But really they are all being pulled towards each other (along with all the other planets and moons in the solar system).