#mechanical aspects

Before we get started, let’s make sure everyone’s on the same page by quickly brushing up on our definitions. Aura is the physical manifestation of one’s soul, depicted as a colored emanation around the user. This effect is first visible when a person engages their Aura, and can be seen again when a person’s Aura is close to depletion. As Aura is drained through taking damage, staving off inclement weather, or using one’s Semblance, it begins to rapidly flicker. Upon depletion, it’s represented as either a full-body shimmering effect or a particle effect with “fragments” of Aura falling away from a person’s body, signifying that they’re susceptible to physical damage. Aura is vital not just for its inherent failsafe against injury, but for the other functions it offers, including: an innate healing factor, thermoregulation, conduction of Aura through inanimate objects, extrasensory perception, and unlocking dormant Auras within others. The only prerequisite for possessing Aura is having a soul, something which all life on Remnant (except for the Grimm) has.

You know, it’s amazing just how convenient Aura is. It almost makes you wonder why

EVERYBODY ON REMNANT HASN’T FUCKING UNLOCKED IT.

Seriously, why didn’t Pyrrha use her fame as a platform to raise public awareness on Aura? We know that trained Huntsmen can unlock them for people who have no prior training (looking at you, Jaune). Couldn’t her manager have found the time in-between signing deals with Pumpkin Pete’s to get a campaign going, so she could be sponsored to travel around the country doing exactly that? Why is 90% of Remnant’s population leaving themselves deliberately vulnerable to Grimm and bandits? Seriously, RWBY, what the fuck?

Sorry. Getting ahead of myself. Deep breaths.

Let’s set aside the histrionics for a moment. Aura as a combat mechanic is pretty ingenious when you think about it. It capitalizes on a pretty well-established trope already found in the genre. If you’ve familiarized yourself with the manga and anime scene in the last decade, chances are you know what Naruto is, even if you’ve never read or watched it. Having a magical soul-powered fuel source already gives you the license to justify all of the crazy acrobatics your cast is going to be doing, and given its parallels to chakra, it isn’t going to require too much explaining to a genre-savvy audience. In theory, anyway.

I think part of the problem is that RWBY’s writing relies a little too heavily on fans having at least a vague pre-established understanding of the concept behind Aura. It lets the show dodge having to answer problems that arise from under-developing its world. Aura’s utility as a combat accessory, coupled with all of the extra functions I mentioned earlier, creates the problem of: If this tool is so useful, why doesn’t everyone have it?

If you’ve never seen Hello Future Me’s video on magic systems, I highly recommend you check it out. Without even mentioning RWBY, he manages to pinpoint the flaw with Aura (and by extension, the common flaw with most fantasy magic systems): differentiating between limitations, weaknesses, and costs.

I’ll let him take over from here:

“The most common form of limitation is a vaguely-defined limit of strength, or training, or mental acumen of the practitioner. Avatar: The Last Airbender is kind of like this. There’s no explicit limit to how much fire a person can conjure, or how strong a wind they can muster, but we know it’s kind of limited by their training, willpower, strength, and talent. Think of it as the rule of: THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH AWESOME ONE HUMAN CAN HANDLE. If you’re really trying to differentiate your hard-magic system from this common trope, then think about not relying on this particular limitation, but maybe something else. Perhaps certain powers can be negated or are affected by certain things in the environment around them, like the moon, certain plants, or minerals. That way, your magician has to be aware of their surroundings at all times, or it can be used against them by their enemies.

Secondly: weaknesses. Weaknesses in magic systems can create interesting dynamics in a story where magic would usually make a character a lot more powerful than those around them. Maybe they can transform into a werewolf at will, but that makes them vulnerable to silver bullets, though, once again, making these limitations to your magic too simple can make them…uninteresting. […] If you have multiple different powers in your story, it could be interesting to have the use of one power making them more vulnerable to another, so your character has to be cautious about using their powers around someone who could take advantage of that. …I personally feel the best magic systems affect the way your characters think or act or change the way your fictional world operates.

Finally and thirdly, perhaps the most common way that people create rules for their magic system is through magic costing something. […] Perhaps the most common magical cost is that of bodily energy. In The Wheel of Time and The Inheritance Cycle, doing something with magic exhausts you, which is fine until you try and be too magically heroic, and you overdose on magical heroin and die.” [1]

Seriously, go watch this guy’s video. He’s great.

With all of that in mind, let’s take his thesis and apply it to Aura:

Does Aura have any limitations? Not really. We’re vaguely told by Kerry Shawcross that it’s possible to increase the amount of Aura a person has, but that it’s “impractical.” Most people try to get more efficient at using Aura instead of trying to get a “bigger gauge.” [2] Unfortunately, the show hasn’t provided any evidence of what “getting more efficient” looks like—whether that’s simply increasing your training, or undertaking a specific kind of training. Is Aura like a muscle that becomes stronger the more you exercise it? We don’t know. The show hasn’t given us a definitive metric for measuring training progress, so it’s up for debate.

Does Aura have any weaknesses? Sort of. You could argue that there’s a trade-off between using your Semblance versus simply relying on Aura to tank hits. A combatant’s innate defense system draws from the same energy source as a Semblance, which could create an interesting choice between offense and defense. Do I rely on my Semblance to win, or should I conserve Aura for other things, like activating Dust or staving off hypothermia? My issue with this being a credible weakness is that we don’t really see characters grapple with this dilemma on-screen. Taiyang tells Yang to decrease her dependency on her Semblance, but that has more to do with Yang’s Semblance enabling an aggressive attack style that gives her opponents more openings, than it does anything to do with conserving Aura for other things. [3]

Does Aura have any costs? That’s a resounding no. A Semblance costs Aura to use, but Aura itself doesn’t demand anything in exchange for activating it.

From every conceivable angle, Aura sounds like a pretty sweet deal. And that’s the problem: there’s no believable in-lore explanation for why the entire world doesn’t simply have a Huntsman unlock it for them.

So how do we rectify this?

What if having an unlocked Aura made a person more likely to attract Grimm? We already know that Grimm track people primarily through detecting negatively-valenced emotions and the presence of nearby souls. If we wanted to give Aura’s aesthetic appearance some more significance beyond simply being cool to look at, what if Grimm can sense that emanation? If a person with a locked Aura is akin to a matchstick, then what if a person with an unlocked Aura looked like a bonfire by comparison? The very tool used to fight Grimm has the drawback of also attracting Grimm, or worse, causing Grimm to prioritize you as a target.

Not only would this give us an answer for why the entire world doesn’t unlock their Auras, but it opens the floodgates for lore and worldbuilding ideas: If unlocked Auras can attract Grimm (even when not in use), do governments have an incentive to regulate how many of its citizens have unlocked Auras? Are only certain members of the population allowed to unlock their Auras, like Huntsmen or soldiers? What happens if you accidentally unlock your Aura? Would the government force you to pay a tax, or make you choose between conscription into either the military or a Huntsman Academy? There’s an entire afternoon’s worth of ethical debates right there.

But let’s say that unlocking your Aura doesn’t attract Grimm, in which case, maybe there’s some sort of societal stigma against it. What if you’re afraid of unlocking your Aura because that means, by extension, opening up the possibility of discovering your Semblance? What if you’re afraid of getting a passive Semblance that causes misfortune? What if you gain a pyrokinetic Semblance that’s hard to control, and without training you run the risk of hurting yourself or others?

We can even take this a step further if we consider how Aura and Semblances can be abused by others. What if at some point in history there was a monarch that would forcibly unlock their citizens’ Auras and force them to serve in their army? Skip forward several generations and picture a well-meaning Huntsman passing through a village. They stop to chat with the locals, and an inquisitive child comes up to them and asks about what it’s like being a Huntsman and having an unlocked Aura. The Huntsman, unaware of the history of the region, offers to unlock the child’s Aura for them. Cue the parents and nearby townsfolk panicking as their thoughts immediately go toward the tyrannical monarch from long ago, and the number of child soldiers forced to bleed for that king.

If we wanted to make Aura inconvenient, we could even introduce Aura- and Semblance-specific diseases transmitted via Grimm. Take a moment to imagine what it would be like if you lived in a world where you never had to worry about getting the flu, as long as you refrained from doing one specific thing. How’s that for an incentive? Now apply that to RWBY, and suddenly there’s a whole list of Grimm-based illnesses that you’re automatically immune to as long as you don’t unlock your Aura.

The possibilities are endless.

With a little creativity it wouldn’t be hard to give realistic, in-world answers for why unlocked Auras aren’t more prevalent: everything from mechanical drawbacks, limitations, weaknesses, risk factors, cultural taboos, stigmas, you name it.

I wanted to complain more about the vagueness of Aura’s healing factor and how it relates to Aura depletion—like how the hell Hazel stabbed himself with Dust crystals while his Aura was still active; wouldn’t the healing factor have caused them to just shoot out of his arms like magical splinters?—but this post is getting long, and I want to wrap things up. I think I’ve made my point.

Join me next time when I put another one of RWBY’s core concepts on the chopping block.

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[1] Hello Future Me. “On Writing: hard magic systems in fantasy [ Avatar l Fullmetal Alchemist l Mistborn ]” YouTube video.  February 07, 2018. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJQb5bGu_g&list=WL&index=351&t=0s]

[2] Shawcross, Kerry. “CRWBY AMA.” Reddit interview. February 12, 2018. [https://www.reddit.com/r/RWBY/comments/7x3w4s/crwby_ama_w_miles_luna_kerry_shawcross_and_paula/du5bpdm/?context=3]

Each of these mechanical aspects is important enough to merit its own topic, but I want to provide a brief rundown on what happens when a writer, to put it bluntly, screws the pooch. If mechanical aspects are a family recipe, then RWBY is what happens when you forget to add ingredients and don’t follow the directions.

Or put another way: RWBY’s explanations for how its world functions are frequently inconsistent, contradictory, and omitting crucial details. And I’m not the first person to notice a funny taste in their mouth when they take a bite from the pot. A quick Google search along the lines of “How are Semblances different from magic?” for example, will net you dozens of posts on Reddit, Tumblr, the RWBY Wiki discussion board, Amino, Wattpad, and Quora debating that answer. You can even find YouTube videos on the subject. At time of writing, it’s been eight years since the concept of a Semblance was first introduced, and the audience still doesn’t have a clear answer. And that’s bad. Not only is this poor storytelling, but it’s a fundamental flaw with the design of this world. If we don’t know what a Semblance is exactly, then we have no clear grasp of what they can or can’t do. Let’s use Weiss as an example.

So Weiss’ Semblance is glyph-based, meaning she can create a sigil to summon felled Grimm and have them engage enemies on her behalf? Okay, gotcha. She needs someone to fight her battles for her. I don’t know why she needs Grimm-thralls when her teammates have been doing that for her since Volume 1, but go off I guess. But then she can also infuse her glyphs with Dust to give them unrelated secondary abilities, like imbuing them with Lightning Dust to distort time? Okay… That seems like something that would be specific enough to warrant being its own Semblance, but I can sort of follow the logic. Wait, now you’re telling me that she can use her rapier to manipulate the Dust in the glyphs and cause little levitating flames to fly across the room in order to light candles? [1] Something she could have easily done with a fucking match.

See my point?

I was going to save my rant about Weiss’ Semblance for the actual topic post, but I wanted to use it here to illustrate the problem with Semblances. Never once does the show explicitly define the limitations of her Semblance, and as the series progresses, more and more abilities get thrown into the mix. This is the most egregious example of that, but other characters suffer from similar issues in later volumes. Now, this might not have been as big of an issue if the show took a moment to briefly explain how Weiss used Myrtenaster to manipulate the fire. But at this point, don’t hold your breath.

This nicely segues into the second problem with RWBY’s Semblance/magic system: if Semblances are capable of achieving so much, then what differentiates them from the primordial magic that existed during the age of the Brother Gods?

I’m reminded of that moment in Volume 5 when Ozpin reveals to our heroes that he gifted Qrow and Raven with magic—specifically, he gave them the power to shapeshift into birds. (How witty.) The group’s reaction to this news ranges from bewilderment, to grave concern, to Yang’s outburst of what the hell is wrong with you. It’s very clear that the show wants its audience to sympathize with the cast’s outrage. To give you an idea of how miserably this failed, I remember sitting on my bed with my sister, laughing my ass off. Seriously? You’re mad because your uncle sometimes has wings instead of hands? What, are you worried that he won’t be able to wield his scythe or tuck you into bed?

Somehow,

I don’t think that’ll be an issue.

Personally, if I were Yang or Ruby, I would be sitting in a dark corner scheming of all the ways I could abuse this newfound knowledge to hell and back. But that’s just me.

Beyond being hilariously awful, the inability of this scene to convey its intended impact shows us just what happens when you fail to establish hard rules for your world. Not only are Semblances indistinguishable from magic, but there aren’t any drawbacks, consequences, or limitations with using either. What should have been a gripping moment that made us doubt Ozpin’s trustworthiness, was instead regarded by the fandom as one of most idiotic scenes of Volume 5. Our heroes’ “righteous anger” is narratively unbelievable and dissonant with the reactions of the viewers.

Those are the consequences of a story that doesn’t explain its core mechanics. It gets turned into a regurgitated meme that the fans laugh about for years to come.

And as tragically funny as the “BIRDS?!” reveal was, it’s actually kind of sad. Believe it or not, I don’t want the show to fail. As I mentioned in the Preface, there are some really good ideas here. The problem is that a lack of foresight/consistent design during development left those ideas incoherent, underutilized, and disappointing. And as we get to the Deconstruction topics that focus on specific mechanics, you’ll quickly see that Dust, Aura, and Grimm didn’t make it away unscathed.

Well, the tank’s been refilled. Time to buckle up and hit the road; we’ve got a few more stops before this road-trip is over.

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