#like magic users have a specific silhouette/aura | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bestworstcase · 5 months ago

Note

#wait wait WAIT#aura originates from the waters of light????#I was always under the assumption that aura was either the leftover bits after the gods took away elemental magic with them#or that it was always part of humanity and simply underdeveloped because it was competing with magic and people generally chose the latter#if Salem's dip in the waters of light is actually the origin point of aura as we know it then. hmm#see I was always more on the side of Salem rekindling humanity by combining the waters of light and dark as symbolic but.#yeah I need to rewatch the lost fable I think you've changed my mind on that (via @blakistan)

this isn’t something i would consider to be 100% certain, because the visual effect is slightly different, but:

based on the information we have right now, this is either 1. aura, 2. some kind of precursor which became aura once commingled with the pool of grimm, or 3. an undefined life-force that superficially resembles aura but isn’t, which seems unnecessary.

and it does track for it to be either 1 or 2:

the fountain gives salem infinite life; aura is a “life force”

it’s a “manifestation of the soul” and the mantra pyrrha recites when she unlocks jaune’s is about dying; “through this we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all, infinite in distance and unbound by death;” salem isn’t just cast into the fountain, she drowns in it – we see her breath leaving her, the gasping for air, her eyes rolling back as she passes out. it’s… like. pyrrha’s mantra is a ritual reenactment of how the brothers made salem immortal, basically.

aura’s healing factor is so powerful it can fully heal a thoracic impalement within 15-20 minutes (people always try to nitpick this when i mention this on the grounds of “that was with jaune boosting!” so: weiss runs hazel through the gut and he literally just shrugs it off. he doesn’t even bleed. being able to ignore pain allows him to heal with aura at a rate on par with salem.)

“[Aura] can protect a combatant from what would normally be a fatal blow. It does not, however, make the user invincible. As they receive more and more damage, their Aura reserve will deplete. If this happens, all the fighter will be left with is his resolve.” the stated reason aura doesn’t make people invincible is it’s finite.

so if you gave a person infinite aura…?

visually, aura is made to look like light refracting through water, which… hm.

afterans don’t have aura (despite inarguably having souls); this includes both the cat and jabber, who were created by the brothers just as humans were. given that, there is a certain logic in human soul + pure creation + death = new kind of magic.

the narrative also took the time to pointedly demonstrate that grimm flesh cannot be protected with aura, even if it’s attached to a human skilled in using aura. the lost fable also very carefully avoids showing salem getting hurt or healing on screen – only in silhouette – until after she’s grimm. which might be only a matter of taste, but, i mean

they put her exposed ribcage festooned in gore on screen. so it’s not like they’re shy.

it does mean that if she was healing herself with aura before the grimm pool, we don’t get to see any tell-tale visual cues.

the other thing is – i don’t think aura can be suppressed by magic. maidens don’t lose their ability to use aura, and what we see with cinder specifically (salem’s protégée, salem taught her how to wield magic) is that gaining magic supercharges and expands her semblance, rather than usurping it.

to a lesser extent we see this with penny and winter too: penny has complete mastery over the magic, but the ace-ops thrash her because she doesn’t integrate the magic into her existing skill set, whereas winter immediately starts using the magic as an extension of her semblance and matches cinder blow for blow despite literally having her aura shattered mere minutes before. (<- compare the end of v7. winter doesn’t regen her aura that fast. either the passing of the magic rejuvenated her or she was able to use magic to replenish her aura reserve.)

so i don’t think the theory that humans always had aura but magic overwhelmed it holds much water. and the recent theories that people just never bothered with Specialized Magic because Generic Elemental Powers were… easier? yeah sure some people would have been like “why would i want to do anything except spam fireballs” but like

humans aren’t lazy.

like. the advent of LMMs capable of spitting out cogent-sounding responses has in no way prevented the millions and millions of people around the world who want to write from writing, for example. there are no end of hobby communities oriented around ‘i accomplished this thing! how can i do it again, but harder?’ we are easily bored, competitive monkeys who routinely invent painfully difficult fake problems to solve FOR FUN. for fun! people play soulslikes for fun! people go to grad school for the joy of learning! we shot people to the moon in a metal tube because it was there. people will happily risk their lives for the sake of a challenge.

in a world where everybody had magic (easy mode) and aura/semblances (hard mode), anyone using magic in a professional capacity would be aura-trained (<- defense. healing. magic can’t do these things.) and, because semblances are manifestations of your true self (and therefore driven by personality and passions), semblances would be at least as widespread in that world as they are on remnant (<- quite possibly more, because while everybody on remnant has the potential only a tiny fraction of the population is actually trained to use aura at all). and someone like ozma – a “legendary hero” – would certainly be in the category of aura-trained magic-wielder with a semblance.

it just… it’s a generalist vs specialist distinction, where the ‘specialist’ magic is something that comes from the heart of who you are, so it’s not even a situation where semblances are necessarily a professional class thing in the vein of pursuing an advance degree; in a world where grimm aren’t a problem (because anyone can lob a fireball), anyone particularly passionate about a hobby or their career or their family or aspirations could manifest a semblance related to those passions. the only possible limiting factor would be if auras weren’t unlocked as a matter of course (as in remnant – civilians receive no aura training and this seems to be the main limiting factor). but even then, we have seen that even Tiny Children can spontaneously manifest a semblance in moments of intense emotion!

(<- not to go off but i’ve seen posts in this vein circulating quite a bit since v9 and i have been So Brave About it.)

that being said,

i also don’t think magic and aura are meaningfully separate – more different expressions of the same force, which is why we see this synergy between magic and semblances and why everyone who becomes a maiden instinctively knows how to use it.

(we don’t have a case study for someone who becomes a maiden without having trained aura, but my theory is that someone with zero aura/dust training would not be able to just Do Magic right out the gate. relatedly, cinder was telekinetically slinging glass darts around without using dust before she had any magic – the dust-embroidery she uses to make the darts stops glowing before she flings them – so salem either gave her some training wheels magic, or you can straight up do magic-magic with aura and it’s just hard. considering, uh…

what blake can do with aura, and my theory that salem lost her god-given magic when the gods fucked off, well.)

Took a look at the image organizer you linked the other day, and MY OH MY is there so much to unpack there. While I think I understand most of it, there's still some stuff I'm unclear about. What are those quotations from? What's Jaune doing here (and I think I remember you mentioning him as the Oz stand-in for the Ever After)? What about those scattered extra panels in the Jaune column, like Bumbleby-Adam and the maple leaf? What're the entire bottom three rows doing, what is the truth, and who is the "she" who knows it? I really need to do a rewatch...

By all means, go as overboard as you want to (or not), I just love hearing what you have to say.

the quotations are all heraclitus (there’s a link to the fragments at the bottom – the Bn tag on each quote is the fragment number) – heraclitus being a pre-socratic philosopher who had a significant influence on plato, and rwby being a story that draws heavily from plato (see also: atlas/atlantis). the philosophical ideas articulated in v9 regarding balance and creation/destruction get at concepts like flux (everything rests by changing; equilibrium is a state of constant motion and transformation, like a top which stays upright only while it spins) and strife (not conflict, but the push-and-pull between opposite forces, like the tension on a string which creates music).

i get very exited about this because it is the basis for rwby’s destruction-is-not-bad thesis; true equilibrium cannot be found without destruction because creation must have its counterweight. conflict is antithetical to balance specifically because it is a rejection of strife—it’s, to continue the metaphors, creation smashing the top because it doesn’t like that destruction causes it to spin instead of standing perfectly upright, or destruction cutting the string to free itself from destruction.

the OP specifically is about my thesis that rwby’s narrative is fractal—reflected aspects of the ozlem story repeating over and over again as this shattered fairytale strives to get it right this time. jaune (like cinder, like ruby) is a mirror held up to salem—the girl in the tower refracted in the “lovable idiot stuck in the tree”—but he’s a funhouse mirror. he’s a salem without her faith in humanity; a salem who is fundamentally cynical (he cheats his way into beacon, he wanted to be the hero to prove himself worthy to his family, he is ultimately corrupted by his rejection of change—which twists him into a reflection of ozpin instead) and thus repeatedly puts himself in the tower. and the point of him with respect to the fractal narrative is that being Good and Kind did not save him from his cynicism, and that the essential difference between salem and ozma is that she truly believes in her cause (that the gods are unjust and humanity must live free) whereas his commitment is hollow and borne of fear.

(likewise cinder is a salem whose tower is her faith, because what cinder believes in is the innate cruelty and injustice of the world and her destiny to be crushed beneath it, and she is in want of something true to believe instead; and ruby is… more or less literally who salem was when she was young)

jaune is also specifically paralleled with cinder in this regard – his time in the ever after mirrors her exile after haven, and both reflect salem’s isolation after the moonfall; he gives into despair and stagnates (like oz), cinder angrily drags herself out of the pit and keeps clawing her way forward (like salem).

(yang and blake killing adam are just there because i didn’t have a better place to note the echoed framing when cinder kills rhodes – different camera angle, but there is a striking visual comparison drawn here. the narrative does not smile on rhodes)

and then the last three rows are my unhinged mumbling about salem having met the blacksmith before in picture form. Ma’am Why Is Your Illustration Of The Human Soul A Blacksmith. What Do You Know.

like the thing is. heraclitus again: fire is arche. it is the beginning. the transformations of fire, first into sea, and of the sea half becomes earth, half whirlwind. from the outside, the tree is earth and air (the holes in the ground, the leaves on the wind) – on the inside, it’s an ethereal cosmic ‘river’ of souls flowing to their next life; and in the center, it is a forge. and this rhymes also with ‘for it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth, but water comes from earth, and from water, souls’ – like

???

before she’s drowned in the fountain, salem is engulfed in dark’s flame – the flame he once used to restore jabber to life. and then she drowns and returns, with aura, now immortal. salem leaps into the pool of grimm seeking change and is transformed – the faunus in the myth she quotes immerse themselves in magical waters and are transformed. and then we have this recurring motif of a character (or symbol thereof) engulfed by flame, trees, katabasis, drownings, spiritual or physical rebirth. and salem waving the blacksmith under our noses since 2014. maple leaf carved into the frame of her family portrait – maple leafs shed by the tree – the maple leaf guiding jaune to pyrrha’s statue. it’s very

it sure is pointing in a direction!

43 notes · View notes