It's really interesting because it seems kind-of clear to me that this is a holdover from how internet animators on places like Newgrounds would tend to do fight scenes, like characters would generally follow more arcade-y physics, you'd see people be knocked around with weapons all the time and they'd just have hit sparks fly off of them, right? So Aura was kind-of intended to justify that to give that type of feeling. But the problem is that when you try to apply that to an actual story, suddenly, why can Weiss tank a chainsaw but threatening Blake with a sword is meant to be a big deal? In most shonen stuff that has a power system to defend against weapons it's never a 100% sure thing, like people will get wounded and start bleeding or they'll get staggered or something. But by the time RWBY's creators realized the aura stuff wasn't great at selling when someone was in danger they already made friendly sparring a regular thing, so it'd be kind-of messed up if they had a school-sponsored tournament arc where people were constantly getting bloody or getting limbs broken or something. So aura just fizzles out now... which works on paper, but it also creates the problem that now you hard-know when you're not supposed to care and then the aura's back on, which means they can't get that hyper-speed arcade-y feel anyways! My favorite way around this whole issue is how World Trigger handles it, where characters actually swap their bodies out with fake bodies made of energy that look like them. Which means that now you can have characters lose limbs and get messed up and all this stuff and it's fine because there's no gore and it's a fake body. But at the same time, all your fighting abilities are tied to that form, so if it goes away it's actually a big deal because if you can't escape then that character is screwed... unlike RWBY, where your Aura can fizzle out and then you just run off and keep fighting without a second thought. Honestly, if characters just lost their ability to fight in RWBY when their aura was gone, then that'd fix so many issues here. But nope, people just keep on going on as strong as ever and nobody's even really concerned about it.
Aura, from Volume 3 onwards, are basically just the Spartan armor overshields from Halo. Thinking about it, that is actually nice callback to RoosterTeeth starting with just making Halo machinima, intentional or not.
Samantha Pribble that the problem, they keep changing and recon their scrip every volume. They have already heavily move away from Monty plan that v1 and v2 are pretty much non-canon to the current story line (as these videos have shown again and again).
I feel a full reboot would be counter productive. That would mean halting progress on the story now that it's finally started making progress just to go back and retell all the set up we just finished. It's why I often suggest in these videos for the writers/directors to sit down and formulate hard rules, rather than suggesting going back to "fix" the show. I'd rather the show continue to progress with an established world with consistent mechanics, instead of seeing the show back peddle to explain away inconsistencies. We don't know what Monty's plan was, so we can't know for sure if Miles and Kerry have been accurate to it or not. Volumes 1 and 2 are very much still canon (they still went to school, they fought Torchwick, they met Penny and Sun). Elements have become muddied, but the story is still continuing. Rebooting RWBY would stop all of that. Instead of retelling the beginning over and over again until they "get it right", I believe focusing themselves and continuing on from here with more defined rules and mechanics would ultimately be for the best.
Twiins iink well having volumes be release every other year instead of every year can help give them more time to make rules and prevent holes and recons from happening in my personal opinion.
The lifebars during the tournament indicate percentages, with the rule that if you go below 15% you're out. So the size of the lifebar doesn't indicate how much people have, if one percent have 15 out of a maximum of 100 it will show the same as someone who has 30 out of 200. Which doesn't really help make things less complicated.
It serves as a natural way to shrug and facilitate vagueness in areas that don't need to be clearly specified, which can prevent complications from arising in the first place. If you don't add enough additional complications.
It's even worse taking into account that people have different quantity of aura. The bar as measurement then make no sense. You can have someone with something of a 1000 units of aura fighting four people with a bunch of around a 100 units of aura. He could be eliminated by going under 15% and still have more aura left than any of his opponent.
@@maxentirunos It's actually not that bad. If you think about it, it teaches people to work within their own limits, something they'd have to be aware of in live combat. If your problem with that is a lack of fairness in a tournament setting, I'd say it's more than fair for you to be declared the loser when you've lost that much more aura than your opponent.
that's why they should have done something more visually striking like the aura shattering like glass to symbolize the protection being completely gone
@@twiinsiink funfact the glass shattering was based off and idea I had in my own work that was inspired by RWBY were when that worlds equivalent of Aura breaks it shatters something that represents the character such as chains for the main character. allowing for characters to wail on each other but still letting you know when the character is in danger more easily.
EnfuegoBeat Is the problem aura breaking looks not visually striking enough? From watching the video, I was under the impression Twiins iink complains there is too much aura breaking in the show.
@@schwarzerritter5724 I'm pretty sure she meant that the aura being damaged and Aura breaking looks to similiar at times so it makes it confusing when the character can still fight vs when they are in danger of actually taking real damage. like the Oscar clip his entire body had the aura flash but as we see later he still had enough to fight later on with Hazel. at least that's what I got out of it. that's why I recommended the visual distinction so that mix up wouldn't happen
Rwby is an amazing anomaly. It seems like the more support is behind the show, the more garbage the writing becomes. The inverse relationship of the fanbase and production team size to the quality of writing is incomparable to any other show ever. Where did the charm go?
RWBY only exists because of the fanatical devotion that RT's fans have toward the company. It's honestly cult-like. They hand wave away any criticism of the show and sit with open mouths, ready to accept whatever M&K shit out next.
@@stuartherrera The rwby subreddits are pure garbage since any criticism gets downvoted into oblivion and say all RWBY critics are part of an umbrella term known as the 'Hatedom' or some other stupid shit so they can immediately just dismiss criticism since they know it's true.
Well...... Monty died and stopped being the main animation director/showrunner, leaving things to the way rougher work of Miles and Kerry. If you watch season 1 and 2, all the really strong stuff is focused around the fights and everything else feels a bit inconsistent and worse written character-wise. So after that went down, Miles and Kerry had to hunker down with whatever plan they had left and it worked for a bit, but when they started running out of or leaving the existing planned material, stuff started falling apart hard again. Essentially, when things were hitting their prime, the people in charge changed hands and the guys making decisions now didn't know what to really do. And then after season 5, things changed hands a bit again because they hired on new writers to help improve the quality, but with that also came a lot more inconsistency because it dramatically changed the direction of the series again. So what we basically have is a situation where we had two seasons of people struggling to figure things out, then they had a season of things getting going but also being a bit out of touch with things, two seasons of "Well where do we even go now?" under new management, and now two more seasons of "Screw the old plan, this is the new direction".
@@dracocrusher That sounds very stressful. RT is hot company and from that chaos rwby was born. Not very enticing anymore, but it was entertaining. This is closure. Thank you sir
The retconning of Aura is one of the biggest betrayals of Monty’s show. He created Aura with the purpose of using it to explain his amazing fight choreography. M&K have retconned it in order to use it as a way of AVOIDING fight choreography. The contempt they have for the show’s MAIN SELLING POINT is disgusting.
Just look at Ren. He soloed a King Taijitu without weapons (basically without), because he could use a broken fang and Hyuga-worthy palm strikes to splode some heads. Now? He's relegated to the group's camo because they never use his fighting abilities.
yeah, it'd be nice if it had a limit, my idea would be to give specific semblance types a certain amount of aura like Blake's semblance is to avoid damage via shadow clones so she has a small amount of aura and thus it makes sense for her fighting style to incorperate a fuck ton of dodges and maneuverability. Where as say Yang's semblance is a burst of anger brought on by taking damage, thus she has a large aura reserve mostly dedicated to sponging up damage and allows her to take on a more hands on fighting style. Weiss's would be somewhere in between, her semblance being summoning defeated enemies which not only takes time but focus, perhaps taking a good chunk of her aura away depending on how big the summon, perhaps dust magic wears down on a hunters aura more so then a semblance so while it is a resource dust is more or less a secondary option, something about human bodies not being able to respond to a natural resource that managed to survive the last civilization or something, basically prior to the show in the old world dust was used for magic which the old civs bodies were intuned to and after their destruction the god of light purposefully made the new civs less compatible with dust so they couldn't attempt to attack them with magic again; the maidens are just the exception rather then the literal god given wielders of relics they simply are the only ones capable now... or something idk, i don't right fantasy, more of a Goblin Slayer kinda guy
Most of the time, when people blame Miles and Carrie for some problem in Volume 3 or later, I roll my eyes and point out that the problems being brought up are just extensions of trends I noticed going from Volumes 1 to 2 (because they affected things I cared about way more than most people did). But this seems to be 100% them, 0% Monty.
@@timothymclean well it's not every day Miles fails to define what a semblance is beyond a random cool yet convenient power for the character of his choosing, see it's not that Jaune has a healing semblance, mostly, (although it is really stupid broken considering the world and lore and monsters, much like Ren's semblance which should be god tier but isn't cause of bad really really bad writing) it's rather what hoops need to be jumped over the burning bridge that is the Ruby v Cinder fight, they had to actively write it so Cinder impaled Weiss not Ruby in spite of her own vengeance in spite of Salem's warnings and clear desire to have Ruby brought to her alive, some things just happen to push the plot or characters along, the writers abuse this and call it the character or story arc, the fans eat it up of course.
@@lordsurvivor5663 Don't get me wrong, RWBY has definitely gotten worse over time. But that started with Volume 2, not Volume 3, giving me the impression that most of the show's problems have as much to do with the foundation Monty created with his poor story-writing skills* as they do with what Miles built on top of them. *Monty Oum is awesome at fight animations and, if RvB is any indication, seems to be good at writing _scenes._ But a story isn't just a collection of scenes, which hinders character- and plot-driven series more than it does comedic ones.
Ok everyone falls for this mistake. Everyone thinks aura was recon from passive to active, but it was actually recton from active to passive then back to active. Back to Pyrrha explaining aura in V1, 3 times in the speech she talks about having to activate it. "Why didn't you activate your aura?" " by learning now to use our Aura, we can protect our self from Grimm." " with training, we can project our soul outward" ( not 100% on direct words but she does mention it 3 times) also when Jaune getting punch by Cardin he hurt, then he activate his aura to stop it, and Jaune is healed. V1 states, and shows that you have to activate and focus your Aura to protect. Then it was recton in the world of remeant to be a passive shield, then recton back.
@@rashan141 what I mean is that once his Aura is unlocked/activated, it should STAY passive. That's it. No more constant turning your Aura on and off in between fights.
I often write fanfictions about RWBY and one of my most prominent point of rewriting is aura. My solution about aura is clear, simple, logic and pretty much self-explanatory. Aura is an MP bar that began to refill the moment you stop using it. You can use it for three things : force-field, semblances and transfers.There is nothing beyond that. Both need active decision to use them, keep using them, and as such can't be used if the person loss consciousness. Both can be used at the same time for cost discussed below. The principle is that aura is common to everyone and thing like aura transfer and aura-injectors are a thing. If your aura hit 0, you loss conciousness Force-field : The force field doesn't consume aura at being activated and kept, it consume it when you take blow, proportionally for the damage needed to be defused. When your aura get too low, it's useless to keep the shield has there isn't enough aura to deflect damage anymore. The Force-Field have a penetration ratio that can be trained (AKA, some attack can pierce partially or completely the force-field without breaking it, like Adam Moon Slice or AP bullets). By using more aura for the force-field, and making the ratio of aura taken by damage augment, you can extend the force-field a little beyond your own body (Ren in V1) and cover objects to make them unbreakable (Like Vol2 food fight). Semblance : To make it simple, any kind of semblance use a set quantity of Aura. Ruby use hers to accelerate herself, Blake create shadow clones and Sun clones that consume aura at being created, not maintained. Yang in most of my fanfic, have a semblance that make her ratio force-field to damage double when used in exchange for multiplication of strength for each hit until semblance or force-field stopped (watch exponential by ceroblitz for ideas). Adam moonslice make aura being consumed at a continuous pace while he can absorb damage through his sword (or anything he is wielding), store it, and use it as wish... but the energy is lost the moment he stop the semblance or have not enough aura left to feed it. What is the point of all this, would you ask? I just prove I can make a logic magic system based around this in two paragraph and twenty sentences... And with just that I can make lots and lots of tactics and plot points around. How characters would have to train to augment their aura quantity, force-field ratio and piercing point, or aura quantity being used by semblance. Learning when they should keep their fore-field up or not. Could Ruby make a bullet faster by covering it with force-field and applying her semblance on it before shooting? Could a whole team have a hit-and-run tactic around very powerful semblance that consume massive quantities of aura? Can some hunter and huntress being actually more rich than talented and simply buying belts of aura-injectors between each missions? I have even rewritten Pyrrha in some of them as being talented because she have this very mad combat style of keeping deactivating her force-field between each hits in fights to maximize her aura recuperation. Something, in this story, that take years to even learn to do, and even some of the elder huntsmen doesn't manage it this good. She is the invincible girl because it would either take grueling minutes of constant damage or hours of fights to make her fall
I feel like there's really one big change you need to make for this to work somewhat well (RWBY, not your fanfictions) and that's that I don't think characters should be able to keep fighting when their Aura 'fizzles out'. I hate it when the show does this, right? Because that situation just makes me feel like everything up to that happening is inconsiquential because now the 'real' fight is actually happening. I started a fanfic and kept it going for a good bit, but the aura stuff was just so frustrating to work with that I couldn't even bother keeping it going because it makes fights feel very limiting when you can't really deal with the storytelling that can come from things like combat damage or having to protect vital areas, right?
Me: So what is aura? What does it do. If Yang reaches 0 aura can she still use her semblance or does it cap out at 1% aura left? If I fall and activate my aura while its low will that break it and if so then whats the minimum force required to actually damage aura? Writers: Well what do you think happens? Me: I don't know. Writers: Why don't you know? Me: Because!...You don't know either do you. Writers: Well would you look at the time, time to not be here.
the explanation death battle gives (screw attack working under RT's brand is the main if not only reason I'm thinking this is canon) is that your semblence is also powered by your aura, so if your Aura hits 0 then you can't use your semblence and they also confirmed it requires consciousness so being knocked out or unaware of aura's existence would be understandable, but it's very iffy
Keep in mind, too, that Aura heals you. So it's totally possible someone could theoretically be losing in a fight, turn the aura off for it to recover, get the crap kicked out of them, and then they just turn it back on to heal up their wounds and now they're at an advantage because they've had time to let things build back up. Which is a huge head-scratcher because it's super counter-intuative, but it could be cool as a risk-vs-reward mechanic if it's explored like that in-universe. Only big problem with that is that it's effing RWBY, so the creators don't care about having really cereberal, tense, Hunter x Hunter style moments of hard judgement because then it'd throw off the over the top high-speed anime choreography sync'd up to the awesome butt rock. "This grim hits hard, but I'm low on aura, so if I can fight defensively maybe I can risk taking some scrapes and-" ~~CREATURES OF THE NIGHT IN DISILUSION! HAPPINESS IS OVER, VIOLENCE THE SOLUTION!~~
tbh this is why I like Neo's fighting style more; dodge the attacks so you don't waste aura, and if you do block, use your weapon, and do careful strikes Also another thing that annoys me is that aura is shown to be used in battle as defense/offense in whenever it was introduced with Rea battling the Grimm, but the fighting part of the aura is never mentioned again in the series, and Jaune- who is said to have a 'strong aura'- never uses the combat fraction of it
Everything was done because the writers wanted to keep Jaune around and he really had no reason to stay in the series like bruh these girls were fighting giant machines 😂 Just look at how much character development Jaune has gotten since monty died. Fans aren’t being sold rwby. They are being sold the Jaune show
I agree alot witht he points shown here, but the "blocking" part isnt really unnecessary, you block not only to protect yourself from damage (which the Aura helps with) but you block so you don't lose your footing, losing your position and balance is a good way of allowing an opponent to lay you out with even more hits, thats why when people block they keep there legs wide apart to create more balance and stability in the body, also covering your face is a natural instinct for everyone, if your about to get hit by a robot arm or whatever, your first instinct is to protect your vital body parts.
Yeah except getting your opponent off balance is never a strategy used in the show, and otherwise all blocking does is depletes your Aura. By all accounts dodging seems like a significantly better option.
The minute you mentioned Ninjas, I realized something. Since this show has some similarities to Naruto (kekkai genkais= Semblances, no talent Jaune=no talent early Naruto), we'll eventually get people who can "sense aura" like the sensory types in Naruto. Which means stealth is going to be pointless by the time that rolls around.
@@dragensen2348 It didn't sense their Aura. Grimm can't do that. Grimm sense and are drawn to negative emotions. That is what Ren's semblance suppresses. Emotions. Not Aura.
In the recent Novel "After The Fall" It's been confirmed that Sensing Aura is a High-Level Aura Technique. Which means theres probably other High Level Techniques we haven't seen yet.
I will be the devil's lawyer, even if I realise how many mistakes RWBY has. This might be how Aura could be saved and keep all of the rules from now. What I have got from what the show told us is that aura takes concentration to turn on, but once is it turn on a few times it gets so easly one can turn it on almost without realising. /Almost/ is the key word, as turning aura on could be as taking a short breath, but in moments of high stress a fighter would not be able to use their aura, as they are focused on something else. Consider aura controling as breathing. Usually it is not a problem to turn it off and on, but once you become aware that you have to use it, it takes a little bit more effort and a few more seconds to turn it on. I realise that the visual queues (I am not sure if I pronounced that right) of aura being drained//broken is very inconsistent, and I can't say anything about that. But, as for the healing I assume that aura cannot regenerate while is it healing, so if a character is damaged during battle right after their aura was drained their aura wouldn't regenerate, as it it immediately consumed to heal, leaving them weaker (as we saw with Amber, if that was her name) while if their aura drains and they don't take damage they can keep going because they don't have to spend any energy on healing themselves by regenerating their aura (As we saw with Ruby, Qrow and Tyrian)
For the healing thing, I just assumed that it makes recovery easier. Like, if you get injured, instead of healing the normal way/time, it makes it so that you heal faster, that's why small cuts can heal quickly while stab wounds take a bit more time to recover. It's not just that you can hide for a minute or two until your stabs heal, just that compared to normal recovery, aura just I dunno, halves that time. That being said, after aura breaking, I just assumed that the person just regenerates their aura health bar first, before straight up going into healing (maybe up to 80-100% first, or just in the green). I would use Weiss' cut in the White trailer leaving a scar vs Jaune's in the Emerald forest/bruises in Forever Fall as an example but I dunno, if I can factor it as his having "a lot of aura" being the cause of his instant healing, or just his semblance.
I feel like Monty's vision of Auras was about the same as the shields in Halo. Players will do some off the wall shit while they're up, but when they get depleted, they start to fight more defensively, taking cover and acting less aggressive while waiting for them to recharge. Hell, he probably would've spiced the combat up at one point by giving one of the antagonists an "overshield" and attribute their defeat to a combination of teamwork and some (potentially) outlandish displays of power.
I've rewritten aura to be an ablative shield that powerful blows can get through(as aura breaks) and as it gets lower the required force gets lower. That's why the concept of your aura being 'in the red' is actually a thing. Essentially your aura is too low to ensure your safety so for sport fights, they call it there to reduce injuries on the field.
Here's Aura as I see it: The Soul is a physical entity unlike in our materialistic world. It is the literal core of a personality, and every defining trait of a person. It can be taken out and placed in another person, which will cause a merge and gradual absorption. The person's senses, attacks, defenses, and Semblance are all a part of your identity. By "bearing your Soul outward as a force" (basically willing your soft, abstract features to have a concrete influence), you can reinforce these attributes with a limited supply of energy. Do you not hit hard enough when you attack? Use your Aura to physically improve that striking force. Is your armor not enough to block an attack? Use your Aura to improve not only the armor, but your own body. Semblances take this to an extra level. Not only can you improve existing, apparent features, but you can manifest your personality and experiences as a special power that is not entirely unique, but manifests for you in a way that differs slightly from similar powers. It is not a Force Field. It is not a physical barrier that blocks energy or matter in a trajectory. What it does is improve what you've got, or give you something new. Jaune's excessive Aura lets him amp this up to a true defensive shield with his buffing Semblance, while Tock's Semblance directly channels her Aura into such a powerful defensive edge that she is completely immune to harm. To explain Jaune having a "lot" of Aura, I'd say it comes down to two things: how much energy output you can will up for things like a Semblance (or healing, remember that Hazel's Aura was also recovering quickly), and also the concentration that Ren was talking about. If you have "little Aura" then you need a lot more mental focus to maintain it, especially at first. If you have "a lot" then you more quickly learn to handle difficult situations without having to worry about your Aura just dropping (see Ghira and Oscar in V5). Yang had spent a day chatting in a bar, back in V2. She then directed all of her aggression and will into fighting Torchwick's Paladin. As a result, she could withstand extreme duress in short bursts and her Semblance was able to wreck the mech, shredding it with a final punch. Contrast this to the end of V3, where she had been fighting enemies constantly, alone, for an extended period, and then went up against Adam. His attack is confirmed by the writers to have done enough damage that it tore through what was left of her Aura and then her arm. One might be led to think that her number had just gotten low, but I think it has more to do with her physical and mental stamina. The fall of Beacon and less recent events had been tearing Yang down, and she hadn't fully bounced back yet. So when faced with his sudden, powerful attack, she gave up. Not consciously, but her Soul gave up the fight.
Didnt we see jaune's scratch get healed in V1 when pyrrha activated his aura? I think it wad obvious that aurs can heal wounds to some degree. Since pyrrha activated jaunes aura not his semblance. So the healing was done by aura. Also, I dont think the changed aura mechanism in that way. Pyrrha asked jaune why didnt he activate his aura not why he didnt unlock his aura. If aura was something that was always active after its been unlocked, then pyrrha wouldn't have asked why jaune didnt activate it. Also, if its always up, then it wouldn't be possible to deplete aura. IMO aura is like sleeping. We sleep everyday. Its not like if we sleep once we dont need to sleep ever again. Similarly, one needs to activate aura and while aura is activated, it slowly depletes. You know, how even if you dont do anything you will still get sleepy after hours. The energy starts to deplete. What I really dont understand is, how come electricity get past through aura? Is it that aura only stops physical attacks and not any elements?
If you want to understand aura, just look up an explanation of nen from hunterxhunter. Its what I can only assume RWBY's aura system was based on, and its very well explained. Better yet, just watch the Heavens Arena arc and get to see it explored bit by bit and understand the nuances of it. As for why I say it's the basis for RWBY's aura, nen's "resource" is aura, one of its four main applications is called Ten and is an invisible field that drastically reduces incoming damage, and another of its four main applications is called Hatsu and is a power almost always unique to that particular nen user. The only two of the four RWBY is missing are Zetsu which suppresses your aura for stealth purposes, and Ren which is a technique to increase the amount of aura generate to let you use your Hatsu. So really RWBY's aura is just half of Nen's mechanics brought into a series where the other half is irrelevant. Edit: actually Zetsu is also used to slightly accelerate the healing process so I guess 2 1/2 nen mechanics kinda made it in.
@@twiinsiink I definitely get that. If a series/its writers want to use a mechanic then it should be adequately explained in the series itself. It's just a shame that in trying to draw from a great power system they made a weak one.
@@gigabyteguru2452 It's kinda hard with nen tho. Almost 20 yrs since it was introduced and the writer of HxH has managed to make new additions, there are even religions based of certain aspects now.
I don't need to look at another franchise mechanic to know that the RWBY mechanic to be shit. At least in Nen they said that the MC are literally one in a Millenia Genius, cause each block happen in the Nanosecond, and each hit travel faster than a mach 1. How is RWBY based on Nen, Hunter X Hunter was not a popular anime when RWBY first came out, infact the reboot come out years after.
RWBY being taken over by people who don't even like action stories is one of the greatest tragedies I've ever seen. Has anyone else found it so boring that M&K seemed obsessed with using mundane violence to make dramatic points, in a series where everyone has a force field, super powers, implied super strength and automatic healing? "Jaques slapped Weiss! How horrible!" Weiss is a freaking super-human fencer with an enhanced force field. You can't have her jump on volcanic gushers, fall from hundreds of feet, and be slammed around a metal train by her hair... but then tell me to be upset when her civilian-ass father who probably couldn't stand up to a baby Ursa slaps her. M&K, I know you don't like anime, but just... lock yourself in a room with every freaking season of Dragonball and do not come out until you understand this. KRILLIN is the weakest member of the main cast, but is the strongest human, and bullets do not effect him. His chi is too substantial for that weaksauce. DBZ features a dozen visual gags of him being shot and shrugging it off like an itchy sweater. You are making RWBY SO boring by nerfing everyone's abilities to the point of even resenting that they have HP, just because you personally don't like fighting.
You do realize there's a difference between a warrior taking damage from an enemy and a daughter being abused by her father, right? Doesn't matter if she can take the pain, what matters is who inflicted it. Parents aren't supposed to hurt their kids. So, yeah, it is horrible. Don't minimalize abuse just because you're mad
If you haven’t noticed, that shift was to drag down the show to a level where Jaune could take the spot light e.g. dumbing down every thing so Jaune being an imcopentent fighter and sword upgrades could be seen as something awesome…. The writers precious self insert character.
@@SnoozinOnSaturday The whole scene was uncalled for bruh. We already know she was abused. But of course only way to make a female character interesting in pop media & feel sorry for is to see her be slapped. Like Weiss really needed to be more of a victim when it was already established? Thats tone deaf.
@@bryana.escaleralopez Oh the insert characters. And its like the want Jaune's incompetence to spread and grow. I've just now dipped my toe into a bit of My Hero Academia... A show that MUCH like RWBY, features most of the world's population having superpowers, therefore superheroes and supervillains are as common as police and organized crime. It just makes me even MORE furious about the direction RWBY's writing has taken, because it's absolutely inconceivable in the MHA world for someone to NOT understand how quirks work, how superhero/villains work, or how to keep themselves safe. But in RWBY, Jaune has to have a semblance explained to him?!?!
Nice video. The part about Weiss's injury was hilarious. I agree, Ghira and Oscar losing aura instantly in V5 was silly and completely confused me, because I wasn't used to seeing it at the start of a fight. It's clear the writers can't find an appropriate solution. Given that even large franchises like Star Wars struggle with this, maybe it's harder than we think. As you said, aura exists so that people can take damage to no consequence. However, people still need to be able to get injured at a moment's notice. My own headcanon / retcon mechanic views it as an activated fluid armor. -- Everyone has an aura tank. This aura needs to be activated to be used outside the body. -- As Jaune said, it's like a force field (piece of armor). Where, when, and how much -- they all require activation and practice by the user. In my model, the HP bar is not the most accurate way to think about it. -- The tournament meters are able to measure the total aura you currently have, regardless of your ability to show it. This means that you can still get injured at 100% if you're dumb. The 15% is a precaution because you have less to work with. -- Aura breaking is simply a shorthand way to say your tank depleted to 0%. Since your body is constantly obtaining aura, your aura technically will "break" again shortly after taking a another hit. That hit will consume that 0.1% aura and then deal physical damage. -- Aura's heaing effect exists in the plot only for Jaune, as you say. So we can say that the physical body passively draws aura from the tank very slowly and uses that to heal wounds. Any sort of healing that is noticeable on the spot would require extremely high throughput, which is Jaune's semblance. Basically, normal healing and a normal healing skill, but with aura inserted. -- Optionally, you can say that everyone, regardless of training, is slightly protected by a passive, easily broken, thin layer of aura. Thus it's both passive and active. Ugh, retcons. My retcon fixes the following: -- Adam could cut Yang because she wasn't able to gather enough aura to such a localized area and to do it quickly, especially given his amount of raw power. -- This also makes ninjas viable because the element of surprise means something, which Adam used against Sienna. -- Jaune has low aura in the syrup forest because he just got beat up (a lot) by Cardin and company. Red is just an indicator. It's as you say: it's low but not out. -- I didn't understand your complaints around 3:30+ because the other teams did lose their aura. In fact, that's how RWBY and JNPR won their matches. Besides, you can always hand-wave it away since technically we don't know how much aura they have. -- For my scenario, what you say around 8:00+ would be true. If you're really good at dodging, you turn it off and dodge. (Or, more accurately, you don't allocate aura there.) -- I think this works with Jaune. He has a large tank but has issues manifesting and manipulating it. -- As for Yang, it's interesting because I used to think what you said is true. Her aura would ideally be on the skin of her teeth. I think what makes more sense is that spending aura fuels a power tank, and her red-eyed form consumes energy from it quickly. -- My system has the problem of "Why does anyone block?" I guess it doesn't fix that one. =/ What do you think?
Sorry about that confusion. At 3:30+ I was trying to say that, even though the other teams lost their aura, we didn't see it break, making the mechanic inconsistent and confusing. Also, yes! Your idea is a thorough and efficient one!
Twiins: "Aura has been a confusing element in RWBY since it was first introduced." Me: "What? No it hasn't. It's just HP. I mean, I haven't watched since about a third of the way through Volume 3, but-" T: "Aura breaking, introduced maybe halfway through Volume 3, is where things start to get complicated." Me: "Well, never mind then."
They also never explain the extent that aura heals you. It can heal cuts, apparently, but not burns, or scars, or dismembered arms, or poison, or electricity shocks, etc.? Why would they establish that aura can heal you if they wanted characters to have permanent/long-lasting injuries anyway?
RWBY Logic: "Ow! I got a paper cut/ skinned knee/ splinter. Now all my aura is depleted" RWBY Battle Logic: * One punch that probably didn't hurt that much* K.O!!!
@@freecandy6408 I had assumed it'd been retconed out since we don't see Aura working that way afterward. Aura healing you seemed like a new element due to it's lack of prominence in previous volumes. Everyone makes mistakes, dude.
@twiinsiink3503 If I were to establish aura better the way I'd do it is to make it work similar to haki from one piece. Armorment aura Observation aura And Emperors aura
It makes more sense that the shimmer is the person's aura flaring up to protect them against a heavy hit that their normal passive field wouldn't be enough for. The full-body shimmer and shatter would then be their aura being pushed beyond its limit and failing on them.
A way to keep the aura being a passive constant shield while adding stakes is introducing a Grimm that cancels out aura. Have it show up during volume 4, it’ll make a shrieking noise at the protags disabling there aura temporarily. Have it explained that with Salem now having a maidens magic along with hers, she can augment the Grimm even more.
Seems like the biggest problem with RWBY is that the writers treat it with videogame rules and never thought how those things would work in the setting. The Yang thing is a very good example: Yes, from a videogame standpoint, her getting a damage buff from taking damage herself makes flawless sense. But now think about it without videogame rules: What does that even mean? Does she get the boost if she hurts herself? Is it a physical threshhold or a mental one? Every person feels pain in different amounts, after all. What if a person cannot feel pain? Do they still get a damage boost? Do you get tiny damage boost from bumping your elbow or hell, even just normal touch? It's the same sense after all, just not to the point where it overwhelms your nerves. Long story short: Aura was a terrible idea and Monty did the best with it that he could. They shouldn't have introduced it in the first place and just have all the characters be superhuman, but having an visual indicator of when it is broken really ruins any tension.
Here's my main problem with aura, semblances, They have absolutely no effect on the world building their potential is virtually limitless, a single semblance could be of immense help to an organization, someone with a power like Raven's would be insanely helpful as would someone with a healing power(which definitely exist as Nora thought that was what Jaun's was), and that's not even mentioning the tons of powers we haven't even seen yet (if time and probability manipulation are both possible then what reason do we have to think any power no matter how game breaking is out of reach?). Yet they are never used for anything other then peoples combat gimmicks, Their are absolutely no limits to what they can do, I mean we know they can accomplish time dilation, what about time travel? Was their no one amongst all of the hunters, huntress's and students who could heal amber? The characters can distinguish what is and isn't a semblance, this alone means theirs limits to what a semblance can be but their never explained.
Semblances are also just limited in the creativity department. The powers are all some sort of emitter effect, not once do we see a transformation or permanent mutation type of Semblance. That limits the amount of semblances you can play around with. There can never be a semblance that turns you into an animal or a semblance that makes you grow a third arm because all semblances have to be super speed or clone generation for some reason. The closest we got to a transformation semblance is Elm's stretchy-arms thing in Vol. 7.
simple solution, show amber have cuts across her body and have her notice those and panic as a way of showing that her aura is now shot and shes vulnerable, easy enough, keeps when aura breaks vague and leaves the tension intact for fights
In short, how aura and Health work in Vol 1-3 was the Halo 1 HP system except your shields don't recharge, post 3 it's effectively the Halo 2 and onward HP system more or less
Healing was there from day one... We see Jaune's cut heal over literally moments after being unlocked. Jaune's whole semblance healing thing works by boosting that aspect of aura
I can understand how aura breaking maybe confusing but In Vol 1 ep 6 it is shown that aura was originally active and could heal, I also I think it meant healing as in physical wounds. So without aura healing is not possible and your aura would need to regenerate but they haven’t really told us how long it takes for you to recover your aura after it is broken.
This video was made before volume 6 aired, so I wasn't able to use any info from it. Also, what part are you referring to where it's show that aura "was originally active and could heal"? I don't remember that part?
they said *volume* 1, episode 6 (i understand the misread though lol) It was just after Pyrrha had unlocked Jaune's aura. Before Pyrrha made the comment of him not activating his aura, Jaune received a cut. Once his aura was unlocked, the cut healed almost instantly.
I personally think aura is a excuse for the writers to dictate what attacks are lethal or not. Yang gets thrown through a pillar and doesn’t doesn’t even fluster and a hit by a sledge taken after being subject to less damage while the strike is cushioned by three meat-shields takes a dude out
I know it's 5 years old by now, but since I saw it I really want to add that Ruby should be second only to yang and maybe third if you count nora in terms of hand to hand combat and sheer power, in volume 1 she could literally throw people twice her size like they were a sack of potatoes, without her weapon, not to mention the sheer power she should have by just using that thing, I know that weight is relative in this show, sometimes it's as light as a feather, and other times it feels like freaking Mjolnir, but in any case, one punch from ruby should be the equivalent of a truck going 100 mph straight into your face, she also shouldn't be absolutely ass in hand to hand combat, like we see with oscar, I mean seriously, why is something so simple so inconsistent? It's literally in chapter 1
I feel the best way for aura to work would be a passive force field that prevents damage at the cost of aura, it also enhance physical traits of the user passively such as strength, speed, and regeneration, but when aura hits zero it 'breaks' signifying that the passive effects can no longer be used as well as the semblance
ok, while I agree that the series lore and mechanics need an overhaul to better accommodate how the series has change, as its now a bit bloated and incongruous, your first complaint is wrong. yes the aura shattering thing was introduced in season 3, but 1. its not incompatible with past instances of peoples aura being low and being in danger. there is a difference between having no shield and your shield being at 5%, but your still in danger and 2. it is arguably a good choice to introduce so that we don't need to have someone pull out their scroll to convey to the audience that someone is in danger. otherwise good video. its only when in season 4+ they start burning through aura and are so inconsistent with it that becomes a problem
If I had to rewrite aura, I would could it as a passively active ability (once unlocked it stays unlocked). It can take the brunt of physical attacks (kicks, punches things like that) and allows projectiles to bounce off a person's body like luffy from one piece, though high caliber rounds can be a problem and have to be physically dodged or blocked. Blades of any size must be dodged as well in order to avoid fatal wounds. Aura (seeing as it is described as the soul becoming an outward force field) will still have the shimmer effect, but it's introduced in volume one. The way aura breaks is when the body gives out, seeing as in actuality, a person's body would give out before their will would. Aura is also unlocked when either a person's semblance is discovered or a person uses their aura to unlock someone else's (i.e. Jaune and Pyrrha) Aura will only heal minor scrapes, bruises and cuts. Internal injuries and broken bones need hospitals and proper care. Also once a person's aura is broken, they can't use those semblance any longer (thank unicorn of war for that)
Why DOES it seem like Jaune is the only one with "Lots of Aura"? I've been explicitly told he has a lot but no one else and how does it have a lot of aura, is it genetic, we don't know.
And then Vol 7 has shimmers AND aura breaks, which I like the best but it was really confusing at first when someone shimmered and then later lost their aura.
YEAH! I kind of just let myself accept it as like "the aura break glowy-stuff doesn't mean full broken aura anymore" which is annoying because like, I just want it to be consistent for once. But also I think this new deal they have going on is better because it allows for more blows to be actually traded as apposed to simply dodged.
some of my thoughts on how aura works. Aura Bar (my headcanon): these are showing in percentages (%). let's imagine that the average aura "bank" is 100 Aura Points. Jaune has more aura than most, so he has about 150 aura points (I'm just throwing out numbers, I'm no scientist). the aura bar shows that Jaune has a full bar, so it's 100% full. this just means that Jaune's full aura is more than Ruby's full aura (once again, just example). Aura mechanics (my headcanon): aura is both active and passive. active in that people can concentrate it in limbs (so blocking is still kinda relevant) to minimize damage, or prevent aura penetration ( a la Adam). passive in that it still works against small damage (pistol fire?). stronger attacks may breakthrough and be fatal. if you get punched in the face with passive aura, you feel pain, might get a bloody nose, but it's like they punched you through a pillow, meaning it "softens" the blow. being punched in the face with active aura (depending on how much aura you concentrate in the face) is like being punched in the face, minus bodily damage. you still "flinch", cuz the force of the punch didn't just disappear. if Yang punched you in the face with passive aura, you'll probably get KO'd (or die, depends on how pissed she is, all while still having aura). with active aura, you get launched across the room, still feel pain, but you'll live. semblance's drain aura in their own unique rate (I'm not even gonna bother with this one). aura also recharges when not in use. I guess each aura has their own recharge rate (I'm sure I heard somewhere that Hazels Aura recharges faster than usual, that why ReNora had difficulty dealing with him, and in V7 training montage Jaune aura literally recharged in a matter of seconds) aura also heals the person using it. I'm sure that its possible to heal mid-battle, although it probably limits aura shielding. it's situational. (use a potion of Resistance, or potion of regeneration? your choice.) aura will not function when unconscious(?). since it is possible to KO someone without depleting aura (if hit in the correct spot hard enough), their aura won't protect them (ex. Neo KO'd Yang on the train. it's possible that when Neo Yote Yang into the ceiling, yang used passive aura cus she was (probably) confused because she was flailing around in the air, and the hit was strong enough to KO Yang. Yang was at the complete mercy of Neo.) Aura breaks and flickers (my headcanon): aura will flicker when being dealt big damage (angry Yang, Maginhild, etc.), or when aura is low (maybe 15%? your choice) aura will break when your aura is depleted (0% aura, 0 aura points) REGARDLESS if the hit is strong (angry Hazel) or weak (StormFlower's Machine Gun). 0% is still 0%. Reasons Jaune still sucks IMO, having "big" aura isn't a win condition. give a random nobody an LMG and a professional an old Bolt-Action rifle, and make it a death battle. "Wow! that random nobody has an LMG! there's NO WAY that professional with a Bolt-Action can win, RIGHT?" Sure, Jaune has "big aura", but it doesn't mean shite if he can't friggin use it. all it means (for now), is that he's a Paladin (LOW damage, high HP, support role due to semblance). or a Meat Shield, your choice. soooo, uuuuh, thanks for listening to my Rant! feel free to correct me in the comments. Peace.
Yeah that's how I see it. To me it's like ki from DragonBall or Ren from Hunter x Hunter. Ki for it being limited internal power, where sometimes when they block attacks they either block it or take it and be completely fine, or they block it using the last of their ki and either still have stamina or be completely exhausted. It's also passive and active like when someone weak punches a very strong person, they don't move at all, that's passive. When someone fires a ki blast and the other person actively puts up a strong ki barrier, then there's a big whole in the ground behind them where they themselves are unharmed. And for Hunter x Hunter, I say Ren is like being able to concentrate the energy in a certain place and the ability of specialization like for a semblance. I agree with your aura percentage too. Your tank ain't empty until it's empty.
I feel like if there is a reworking of aura, we mainly want to get rid of all of the stuff introduced after aura breaking, but leave some stuff in to make some semblances making sense. So here is a sample idea I think of. TLDR: Aura=Muscle (to an extent) Aura Is kind of like a force field but even more, a health bar (whatever ten did against the king taijitsu no longer happens). Aura is a passive force that protects the body from harm. It must first be unlocked, and then can be trained to become stronger in different ways, and there is a small natural difference between everyone’s aura amount (aka allowing Jaune to reasonably have his high aura). When you have your basic aura, you are a citizen who can take some attacks to protect themselves but your amount depletes faster, no matter your natural amount, and the lower your aura gets, you actually get fatigued (explaining how beginner jaune still felt odd even though he had a lot of aura). Trained huntsmen and huntresses however have stronger aura that works normally like in the show with people that aren’t jaune. The fatigue aspect is gone from low aura or zeroing out but semblances cannot be used at low aura levels, providing another effect that doesn’t stop action for miles and Kerry and gives some visual cue besides a health bar to the audience and keeps us on the edge of our seat when a character isn’t using their semblance. Also this is why weapons are important for people. Aura amount varies between all individuals and the training allows stuff like regenerating aura to occur quicker. Edit: Maiden powers would work without aura, to give more of a difference from semblances and make maidens like cinder big threats. It can be harder to control or reduced to just one element then (if we are keeping Maidens have all elements) but that isn’t necessary. Also jaune can still transfer his aura like normal it works the same, and semblances don’t consume aura, just also disappear when aura does
Aura Level (Aura)- This is the main thing that protects its user form damage but is also what they use to execute their special abilities known as semblances. If a user’s Aura is fully depleted they will be in a Aura Break status causing them to be stunned for some time and take extra damage from attacks. Based on most rules seen in every volume.
There is actually a very simple change a writer can apply to Aura in order to keep Yang's Semblance unchanged and working; to make Aura able to *prevent* the structural damage to the material body it is applied to by dropping of the same amount of energy that would have caused that damage to occur. This way the actual kinetic energy of the hit does apply to Yang's body charging her Semblance and her Aura will drop at the same time, without damage or contradictions. Absorbing the energy do prevent the damage therefore the two things seems to be a repetition of one another, but the following steps is how i imagine it to work; - step one: the energy is transferred to the body while the damage itself is still not applied - step two: the Semblance gets activated and charged *before* the actual damage gets applied - step three: the Aura gets activated and prevent the damage that would have been applied Basically Yang's Semblance works in synergy with her Aura to magically break the physics of the real world in order to have an instance of reality to act within.
If they ever reboot the show they could make aura work like Tekkai Kenpo from One Piece. So it would be always active in a fight. But we could have aura be manipulated in ways to penetrate others aura. For example, using aura to augment the effect of cutting and piercing weapons. So then it would explain flat out how Adam would cut through Yang effortlessly when she seemed good in aura. No semblance needed. Blunt attacks would be much more difficult to deal significant damage with unless the user was of equal or greater strength than the other. Remove the aura break animation and instead have characters be able to get cuts and bruises to indicate when they are getting too low in aura to keep up their passive defense. It would be gradual shift starting from just simple scuffs. Edit: Tried to elaborate more.
I think they never retconned the passive/active bit of Aura, they simply worded it terribly. You have to activate your aura, then it will protect/heal you until you run out or until you deactivate it.
the tournament life bar made it so that if you fall below 15% of your aura you were out- that gives the contestants 15% of their aura to not break. The breaking occurs when they bottom out. Mercury had 0% left by the time his aura breaks [ as Yang went to hard and fast for it to be called before then ] The visual doesn't happen for most of the other people- I think- because they lose before they hit 0. How they measure this shall remain a mystery.
I always simplified Aura as a mix of a (secondary) health bar and mana bar (or you know, kinda like how some NES era games had abilities cost health because a second resource bar was not common yet), semblances use up aura lightly to do their work, but it's the same resource that primarily does the self-preservation stuff, As soon as it's brought to low enough level, it barely prevents a papercut (and thus causes an aura break as well as any leftover damage from it) and you're left with not enough "mana" to use your semblance and you're just left as weak as the rest of us Ofc, for that to add up, you'd just have to do what anyone would do to fix all these inconsistencies, reboot and do it right from the beginning, same for the general writing thanks to the hindsight from what the show ended up as...
I love RWBY, but I agree with most of your points. Aura is definitely confusing. I'm pretty sure some of the changes and additions to aura and it's concept were due to the way in which the show began and Monty's death. I would describe Aura as special pseudo-mystical chi like life force that acts as a force field and increases ones physical capabilities. It can be activated and depleted in various ways and can also recharge after time and heal wounds. And yes, Yang is OP.
Think of arura like Persona, they have a somewhat similar healing technique, they would need to be activated, some people have a rare instance to have many, and when a person’s persona takes critical damage they will fade away leaving the person in a deathly state where they can almost die or die. Plus with a person with a resolve’s persona will undergo an evolution making it stronger.
I do prefer the idea that little blows could build up damage to the aura, but requires a large blow to break it, but that still causes massive problems, because if little blows never broke an aura, regardless of how many little blows rack up, then it become a question of aura regeneration, with the staple the you have limited aura and even little blows rack up against that limit, there has to be some level of aura regeneration to prevent little blows from causing aura breaks, which would make it seem like the aura would have to regenerate faster than little blows can possibly whittle it down, which would destroy all the tension in the show because we'd know that their aura just regenerates so fast that immediately after it's broken, they still have more to spend from it regenning so fast, and the health bar would also be broken because the health bar never shows aura regen, and if they said it requires focus or concentration to regenerate aura that quickly, then little blows would still whittle it down more than enough because unless they're gods of multitasking and focusing on aura regeneration mid battle, they won't get a break to meditate for regen, but if they said it required solid, stable breathing to regen that quickly, then it could potentially work, but then it'd literally just be hamon from jojo.
and this is why any writer worth their alt plans ahead and sets up basic rules for magic systems and basic rules for how the world works regardless before getting deep into the story, sort of like how grimm went from just dying to being video game enemies that have to disappear after dying, this fact alone is probably the source of most of the problems that pop up in rwby, which is kind of sad because thorough planning could have made this show really stand out consistently rather than the sad stumbling down the hill its been going through as the story just sort of goes on with no real sense to it
How about making it so that aura can reduce the damage you receive but not nullify it? Then characters that still have their aura up could still be severely hurt or even killed by a strong enough attack (Adam's semblance, for example), and it not being there doesn't mean the characters can't get hit in a fight anymore or they'll die, it just means they'll take full damage. Make it so that a full aura blocks more attack and the more it depletes, the less damage it blocks and voila - you got the tournament rule that being under red means you're out to avoid any heavy injuries or deaths, but it isn't strange for Ruby to get knocked out by a punch or Jaune to get bruises for being punched despite having his aura still on.
yup, that is exactly how I always thought aura works. And it also explains aura breaking, normal hits deal both damage to aura nad body (the more aura you have, less damage to body you get). But some attacks can straight up break the aura if they are hard enough. And as you say, some might be to fast, or just so unusual they bypass the aura. Like electricity.
I'll be honest half these clips of aura breaking in seasons 4-5 I thought where just a visual reminder that these character's have aura/ their aura is active and that's why they're able to withstand these blows unscathed, particularly Oscar tanking Lionheart's meatball, I didn't realise that was supposed to be a "oh no his aura's down, he can get hurt now!" moment when watching, I thought it was a "look, Oscar can harness his aura _this_ well now that he can take heavy blows like the others".
Honestly how I understood aura was kinda how I understood a shield in Bioshock: an invisible armor that can be broken after multiple or heavy, catastrophic damage. And once broken, you're going to have to deal with the actual constitution of the individual. Initially, I found it interesting that perhaps, this weakness could be bypassed by buffing up or something. Of course, you're vulnerable by then to getting your hand chopped off or die from a gunshot wound. Then I'm just confused as the later volumes go by.
Well imo: Aura is the strength of the soul, willpower is a great way to say it, since aura is (not really) determined by the person and their supposed semblance, aura is NOT used to attack, rather the semblance works itself, but the semblance needs aura to work. Basically semblance activates when you have aura, but doesn't consume any, if it doesn't affect the user and their surroundings (example Jaune, with his sembalnce) Tyrrian has a weird sembalnce that NEVER has been explained in the series, so it is easy to get lost during his fights when he makes direct hits (his semblance negates aura btw)
i do agree in some parts but i did not need to study a thing yet understood what was going on through out the series when the concept of aura was developing
Just a slight correction here, while it technically was Ren who mentioned verbally that Aura could heal, it was during Volume 1 when Pyrrha unlocked Jaune’s aura that the ability is first displayed, with Pyrrha stating ‘you have a lot of it’ after watching Jaune’s cut close near instantly, suggesting that it depends on how much Aura you have and how badly you’re hurt.
I usually pay attention to the power system in an action anime whenever its introduced and what I've noticed is that they usually have grounded information and its well developed. That isn't saying that there isn't a chance to evolve or add new applications to the power system, in fact I welcome advancements. The thing with RWBY is that they didn't go in depth and they treated the aura as something that's not important when it clearly is. When introducing a power system in a fighting anime its important that the introduction needs to be as detailed as possible before making advances so that the audience doesn't get confused.
I personally think aura’s rules should be that it is a passive forcefield, that upon being fully depleted visibly shimmers and shatters. This puts the user in winded a state. So that is pretty basic so far. As for the healing I believe it's necessary for your aura to not be broken to use it to heal, and since aura is passive the healing is also passive and is at fixed rate. It increases and decreases in speed depending on how much aura you have. Aura amount is based off of strength and natural birth so as you yourself grow stronger so does your aura and your aura’s natural size and potential is based on genetics similar to body type.
This series really should of took notes from Hunter X Hunter. Another series where the characters use arua, or Nen, and is explained and explored much better then here.
On a related note, for the questions about Pyrrha's aura unlock ritual or whatever you call it and as to why not a lot of common folk just unlock their aura (especially with the Oscar thing)....I just assumed: *1)* That the passage, however flowery it is, was either just a Nikos family thing, like a personal tradition or maybe something related to Minstral culture, explaining how Oscar didn't need to unlock it first that way (or maybe Oz just did it offscreen.) *2)* Maybe some people just didn't have a lot of aura to be worth unlocking (if the dialogue having "a lot of it", is to be believed then I guess aura is somehow quantifiable?) or *3)* Again, going by V1, Pyrrha said that she "used her aura to unlock Jaune's", so does that mean that non-huntsman families would need to have someone with an already unlocked aura to activate theirs, and that's why they didn't know/didn't bother? And on that note, who _did_ unlock everyone's aura first, if that was the case? -Wrote this on an empty stomach so I'm sorry if some of it was unclear.-
There are some points i would argue are actually consistend. Including Aura-breaking. The kids fight in the school until the Aura gets below 15. They could go further, but don't. That's why Jaune was in the red, but not out. His Aura was heavily depleted, but not out. That's why Mercurys Aura broke: it was at Zero. The shimmers don't show before, because they never occur
Easiest way they could have written it. Everyone has different quantities of aura, the HP bar is a percentage of that quantity, a shimmer or break is what happens when you drop to bellow a certain unit of aura (say 20 HP points as a standard. Like 3 good 9mm rounds away from bleeding.) not a percentage. So for someone like Ruby who has less aura than someone like Jaune, she is going to be shimmering more often if hit, because she is physically weaker than him. This reasonably makes it so an audience can go, "oh ok, she's weak, 15% for her is like 50% for Jaune." and can keep tension, while never having to divulge exact numbers. This would also explain why near everyone up until the mercury fight did not shimmer, they just never got to that point, then Yang got Yangry (hehe) and utterly destroyed his. You 100% FEEL everything hitting you, and it does't prevent internal moment of the body. Nut shot gag aside this is clear from however many times Jaune got his ass kicked in V one and two. This makes it so that characters still have to think about what they get into, because even though it won't injure them, getting shot will hurt like a bitch, and anyone who uses holds or grappling can break bones or dislocate limbs by moving the person inside their own aura. (Kicking in someones kneecap when a leg is extended, straining someones arm until their shoulder pops out of it's socket.) An aura as an extension of the body, is like a muscle, it must be flexed (active) for it to be useful. Like any muscle breaking it down makes it stronger, and once you train enough you can keep it "flexed' for near indefinite periods of time. (Endurance runners, strongmen competitions, shit like that.) This makes it so that people can be ambushed if they aren't in fight or flight mode like in V7 when the ace ops caught them, or if they have been fighting for 4 hours straight it means they are going to be tired even with it up. It can be penetrated with enough force concentrated to a single point. Adams semblance cut through Yang's aura because it was that strong as a thin line slicing and not a big hammer smack distributing the force. (Guns on remnant are weak because they use fire dust as a propellant and not smokeless high pressure powder, leading to bigger projectiles smacking hard for damage, and not fast projectiles puncturing through aura.) As far as healing is concerned, any wounds received from internal damage (Dislocations, compression bone breaks, Aura not being active at the time, or if penetrated,) will be healed by an ACTIVE aura, and aura will always regenerate itself. With rates depending on how much you have. Shit can still scar if it's deep enough because the body is using scar tissue to patch up the wounds at an accelerated rate. Weiss' scar, Blake's abdomen puncture, so on. To most hunters this will be a mute point as it's near always on when they are out on mission, but lore wise this makes seance. Healing is done on the cellular level, the body needs energy, (food) to heal. Hunters seem to eat a shit load, therefor energy is required to heal. This also wrangles in Yang's semblance logically without making her OP. She takes damage be it aura or physical, and then redirects it. Her aura regens and then she heals, her buff disperses, and she resets. That said, taking physical damage is never advisable because allowing yourself to bleed for a small boost could be life threatening, but it would be useful when responding to a sucker punch. In any other scenario Yang should be mastering a balance of her aura taking damage and then her dishing it out, instead of just flying in to fuck people up, she can be smart and overcharge herself to end fights quicker. Dropping to say 60% of her total HP points, (For math sake we say she has 100) to dole out the 40% of damage into 80% (80 points for math) on the return, but she should never play glass canon because even though taking 90% of her aura off to return 180% more damage would end near any fight with one good hit, any slip up and she could die. As a numbers game it gives her room to be smart, and can create tension through an equilibrium. "Do I let myself get hit by this?" "Can he tough through the damage I'm returning?" Tell me this isn't the most consistent way it should have been explained from the start.
It seems that aura breaks occur at 0 on the hp bar while your aura still protected you until then. My guess is that the school placed a safety restriction of stopping fights at 15% as to avoid anyone getting injured because they didn't calculate damage down to the exact %
Imagine if there was some sort of downside of having your aura broken, Yang could just let it go to about 1%, turn it off, get a stupid ass damage boost, keep fighting that way until the aura is fully healed up, turn it back on/taking actual damage and then turning it back on and repeating that cycle, she could fucking solo anyone ever
I'm gonna be honest, I feel Monty made aura so he won't have to do more work. Think of it like this, 2D animation is pretty difficult but if you want to change something, you simply draw the change: rips in clothing, cuts, bruises, blood, etc. But in 3D animation like RWBY, you essentially need to make a new model of what you want to change. Like if Ruby's hood were to suffer from battle damage, Monty would have had to make three or four models of her hood to show it getting more and more worn as the battle continued; and that's something as simple as a hood that's one color. Thus, Monty probably got the idea to make an ability everyone has to make his job easier, and aura is born. Monty's way of preventing question like, "Why is it that when the girls fight, they walk away without a scratch?"
They should have just made adam’s semblance to be able to put his aura into other objects so he can instantly cut through other auras that would have made a lot more sense for Adam as a whole
Most of the time I forget aura even exists in fights because it's rarely used or mentioned unless it's convenient to the plot. Like you said, it's broken almost immediately in a fight, so there's basically no point in it even being there. How many times has aura even been mentioned besides when teaching the viewers about it or when it relates to Jaune? The only indication of it existing when the plot doesn't need it is in the shimmer of it breaking and no longer being there - it only exists to stop existing. They could always use it as "it lets you survive the first hit in a fight", and could play around that to avoid a sucker punch or give people a reason not to use their strongest attack first. Or have them activate it as an actual forcefield like Ren with the snake and that way the characters have to be able to react to attacks to block them, meaning Ruby could get a hit in with her super speed without aura blocking it. Or make it so it passively blocks SOME damage but never runs out, which means they can take more than a normal human, without being invincible because of aura, but a strong enough attack or even just enough small attacks could still take them out, and that would allow for more epic fights with them surviving great feats, but still let them get injured in fights. It really just needs consistency and to have an effect in every fight instead of only when convenient.
When the characters aura is in red it's at a danger portion, it isn't broken. When aura reaches 0 from an attack that's when it the shimmering effect happens. Being in the red in v3 was just for tournament rules and isn't meant to be an indicator for it breaking. Mercury's aura was at 0 when it broke in v3 and he's the only one who's aura we know broke on screen during tournament.
Okay, I'm late but I just had a thought. What if Aura was used kind of like the MP bar in Kingdom Hearts? In KH, the MP bar is pretty much what limits you from spamming magic all the time. So what if Aura worked the same? You can use your Aura to protect yourself and when it runs out through overuse of semblance you're susceptible to real damage. You can either fully use Aura as your shield, project it in using your semblance, or do a smart combo of both. Of course, the show would have to establish a proper power scale but I feel like it'll kind of work and actually limit characters and make them be smart with strategies and stuff. I hope I explained that alright, I feel like it'd be better to show lol. Examples could be a mech breaking punch from Yang, summon from Weiss, or Ruby's petal form thing would take all their Aura while a strong punch, glyph, or simple speed would take less.
While I like the introduction of aura break, I also think it's not necessary for tention. Take Adam vs Yang during volume 3 as an example: Yang had her aura low enough for Adam to bypass it with a powerful attack. They could have done something like that for Weiss on volume 5.
Every weapon uses Dust. They all have "Dust Bullets". Not to mention there was a lot of Dust in volume 7 (most notably used to start fires in Mantle during the riots)
I never realized how much of this concept was built on knowledge of fantasy and game tropes. It seems to be pretty simple to me. Its a magick shield. It absorbs damage by reducing spirit energy (mana, magick, etc) Its the same idea as the shields in halo or the new way they do damage in Call of Duty series and a bunch of FPS games. While shield is up you get minor health regen. If the enemy does more dmg than your shield can take that damage applies to the body. Also, physics are kinda rough in this show. Force field or not, hitting the ground at high speeds should rupture internal organs. The active/passive debate is interesting. I think its somewhere in between. I’ve come across the idea of an aura when dealing with magic systems. Aura is an energy field around a person. It is recharged from the soul and protects the soul from magic. So the aura exists in everyone. Its like a muscle. Its always there but not always flexed. Not everyone trains their muscles. So while activating an aura would be a reflex for a fighter, a civilian would not know how to turn that energy into a protective shield. Therefore an unconscious person would be helpless as they would drop their aura shield. John, as a new and undisciplined fighter, shows this. He may have a “strong aura” or whatever, but getting hit still hurts and he lacks the discipline to Its active in the sense that it must be activated and requires some concentration or effort if you want to use it shield physical damage. (Which can become a trained response). But its passive in the sense that it provides minor healing benefits as a passive skill, and probably has internal benefits like stamina regen or just keeping the body functioning. When it “breaks” it can no longer provide active benefits but that might be different from being depleted. Aira depletion implies there is no energy to form a shield. An aura breaking means that the shield is no longer active. Theoretically it could just be the user losing concentration. But it could also be running out of energy. At least, thats how I see it. Maybe I’m too accepting of contradictions.
Jaune sort of demonstrates stuff Ren explained in Volume 5, but not in ways clearly visible. I'm not sure if it's because of the writers trying to explain things they realized they didn't explain properly through Jaune or if they were trying to explain the previous information poorly. They basically explain that rookies can't use Aura passively because that's something you need to train for. It adds up to the dialogue in Volume 1 claiming Jaune was having trouble keeping his aura up despite having "a lot of it", because his problem is that he isn't able to use it very effectively. There's still questions of how Jaune was different from Oscar at the time and how much training it takes to use Aura properly, but the idea of rookies not being able to use aura at it's full potential was at least shown and told, but just not clearly enough to avoid confusing most of the audience. We also saw Jaune's aura healing before, but we still don't know what the extent of their healing is. Does it only heal certain types of injuries, do they need consciously use aura for it, does it protect Qrow's liver from alcoholism, etc. Since we rarely see it intentionally used, we don't know what the possible ways of using it are. Despite it being hinted that Aura can do more in WOR, only see Aura used to block damage. I hope that they introduce exceptions to explain Aura further, and show us ways of using Aura that most people don't use.
Really, the aura breaking thing could've just been explained away as a maiden thing. The maiden, because they have so much magic power they are not ready for, their aura is weaker, so much weaker, their aura's break. A normal aura can't break but a Maiden Aura can. That would be my idea at least.
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I just realized that Aura is literally in-canon plot armor.
Holy smokes
It's really interesting because it seems kind-of clear to me that this is a holdover from how internet animators on places like Newgrounds would tend to do fight scenes, like characters would generally follow more arcade-y physics, you'd see people be knocked around with weapons all the time and they'd just have hit sparks fly off of them, right? So Aura was kind-of intended to justify that to give that type of feeling. But the problem is that when you try to apply that to an actual story, suddenly, why can Weiss tank a chainsaw but threatening Blake with a sword is meant to be a big deal?
In most shonen stuff that has a power system to defend against weapons it's never a 100% sure thing, like people will get wounded and start bleeding or they'll get staggered or something. But by the time RWBY's creators realized the aura stuff wasn't great at selling when someone was in danger they already made friendly sparring a regular thing, so it'd be kind-of messed up if they had a school-sponsored tournament arc where people were constantly getting bloody or getting limbs broken or something. So aura just fizzles out now... which works on paper, but it also creates the problem that now you hard-know when you're not supposed to care and then the aura's back on, which means they can't get that hyper-speed arcade-y feel anyways!
My favorite way around this whole issue is how World Trigger handles it, where characters actually swap their bodies out with fake bodies made of energy that look like them. Which means that now you can have characters lose limbs and get messed up and all this stuff and it's fine because there's no gore and it's a fake body. But at the same time, all your fighting abilities are tied to that form, so if it goes away it's actually a big deal because if you can't escape then that character is screwed... unlike RWBY, where your Aura can fizzle out and then you just run off and keep fighting without a second thought.
Honestly, if characters just lost their ability to fight in RWBY when their aura was gone, then that'd fix so many issues here. But nope, people just keep on going on as strong as ever and nobody's even really concerned about it.
I can just hear the microphone hitting the floor.
Most shown just have the characters be naturally that strong.
Aura, from Volume 3 onwards, are basically just the Spartan armor overshields from Halo. Thinking about it, that is actually nice callback to RoosterTeeth starting with just making Halo machinima, intentional or not.
The more videos I see of these the more I believe RWBY should be rebooted. Better world, better use of Aura, and no Maidens.
Samantha Pribble that the problem, they keep changing and recon their scrip every volume. They have already heavily move away from Monty plan that v1 and v2 are pretty much non-canon to the current story line (as these videos have shown again and again).
I feel a full reboot would be counter productive. That would mean halting progress on the story now that it's finally started making progress just to go back and retell all the set up we just finished. It's why I often suggest in these videos for the writers/directors to sit down and formulate hard rules, rather than suggesting going back to "fix" the show. I'd rather the show continue to progress with an established world with consistent mechanics, instead of seeing the show back peddle to explain away inconsistencies. We don't know what Monty's plan was, so we can't know for sure if Miles and Kerry have been accurate to it or not. Volumes 1 and 2 are very much still canon (they still went to school, they fought Torchwick, they met Penny and Sun). Elements have become muddied, but the story is still continuing. Rebooting RWBY would stop all of that.
Instead of retelling the beginning over and over again until they "get it right", I believe focusing themselves and continuing on from here with more defined rules and mechanics would ultimately be for the best.
Twiins iink well having volumes be release every other year instead of every year can help give them more time to make rules and prevent holes and recons from happening in my personal opinion.
Lightdragoon88 well that would be a long wait for fans
There's currently a new Shonen Jump Manga adaptation of the RWBY stories that's released monthly and actually pretty good.
The lifebars during the tournament indicate percentages, with the rule that if you go below 15% you're out. So the size of the lifebar doesn't indicate how much people have, if one percent have 15 out of a maximum of 100 it will show the same as someone who has 30 out of 200.
Which doesn't really help make things less complicated.
It serves as a natural way to shrug and facilitate vagueness in areas that don't need to be clearly specified, which can prevent complications from arising in the first place. If you don't add enough additional complications.
It's even worse taking into account that people have different quantity of aura. The bar as measurement then make no sense. You can have someone with something of a 1000 units of aura fighting four people with a bunch of around a 100 units of aura. He could be eliminated by going under 15% and still have more aura left than any of his opponent.
@@maxentirunos I literally hurt my head reading this, aura is really confusing.
I just realized that Aura is literally in-canon plot armor.
@@maxentirunos It's actually not that bad. If you think about it, it teaches people to work within their own limits, something they'd have to be aware of in live combat. If your problem with that is a lack of fairness in a tournament setting, I'd say it's more than fair for you to be declared the loser when you've lost that much more aura than your opponent.
that's why they should have done something more visually striking like the aura shattering like glass to symbolize the protection being completely gone
That would definitely help.
@@twiinsiink funfact the glass shattering was based off and idea I had in my own work that was inspired by RWBY were when that worlds equivalent of Aura breaks it shatters something that represents the character such as chains for the main character. allowing for characters to wail on each other but still letting you know when the character is in danger more easily.
EnfuegoBeat
Is the problem aura breaking looks not visually striking enough? From watching the video, I was under the impression Twiins iink complains there is too much aura breaking in the show.
@@schwarzerritter5724 I'm pretty sure she meant that the aura being damaged and Aura breaking looks to similiar at times so it makes it confusing when the character can still fight vs when they are in danger of actually taking real damage. like the Oscar clip his entire body had the aura flash but as we see later he still had enough to fight later on with Hazel. at least that's what I got out of it. that's why I recommended the visual distinction so that mix up wouldn't happen
@@twiinsiink A distinct sound effect that sticks out is absolutely necessary if going for that route too lol. Sound + Visuals _is_ the medium.
The way they explain Aura makes it sound like it's Halo's power armor. The shatter effect is just like Halo's power armor too lol.
That's amazing cuz I've never actually played Halo! :D
Halo was always an inspiration for Monty! XD
Makes sense because RT’s other internet show is Red vs Blue, based on Halo.
Monty literally got the idea of aura from just that right there.
And what is RT famous for? RvB?😂
Rwby is an amazing anomaly. It seems like the more support is behind the show, the more garbage the writing becomes. The inverse relationship of the fanbase and production team size to the quality of writing is incomparable to any other show ever. Where did the charm go?
with monty
RWBY only exists because of the fanatical devotion that RT's fans have toward the company. It's honestly cult-like.
They hand wave away any criticism of the show and sit with open mouths, ready to accept whatever M&K shit out next.
@@stuartherrera The rwby subreddits are pure garbage since any criticism gets downvoted into oblivion and say all RWBY critics are part of an umbrella term known as the 'Hatedom' or some other stupid shit so they can immediately just dismiss criticism since they know it's true.
Well...... Monty died and stopped being the main animation director/showrunner, leaving things to the way rougher work of Miles and Kerry. If you watch season 1 and 2, all the really strong stuff is focused around the fights and everything else feels a bit inconsistent and worse written character-wise. So after that went down, Miles and Kerry had to hunker down with whatever plan they had left and it worked for a bit, but when they started running out of or leaving the existing planned material, stuff started falling apart hard again. Essentially, when things were hitting their prime, the people in charge changed hands and the guys making decisions now didn't know what to really do. And then after season 5, things changed hands a bit again because they hired on new writers to help improve the quality, but with that also came a lot more inconsistency because it dramatically changed the direction of the series again.
So what we basically have is a situation where we had two seasons of people struggling to figure things out, then they had a season of things getting going but also being a bit out of touch with things, two seasons of "Well where do we even go now?" under new management, and now two more seasons of "Screw the old plan, this is the new direction".
@@dracocrusher That sounds very stressful. RT is hot company and from that chaos rwby was born. Not very enticing anymore, but it was entertaining. This is closure. Thank you sir
The retconning of Aura is one of the biggest betrayals of Monty’s show. He created Aura with the purpose of using it to explain his amazing fight choreography. M&K have retconned it in order to use it as a way of AVOIDING fight choreography. The contempt they have for the show’s MAIN SELLING POINT is disgusting.
Just look at Ren. He soloed a King Taijitu without weapons (basically without), because he could use a broken fang and Hyuga-worthy palm strikes to splode some heads. Now? He's relegated to the group's camo because they never use his fighting abilities.
yeah, it'd be nice if it had a limit, my idea would be to give specific semblance types a certain amount of aura like Blake's semblance is to avoid damage via shadow clones so she has a small amount of aura and thus it makes sense for her fighting style to incorperate a fuck ton of dodges and maneuverability. Where as say Yang's semblance is a burst of anger brought on by taking damage, thus she has a large aura reserve mostly dedicated to sponging up damage and allows her to take on a more hands on fighting style. Weiss's would be somewhere in between, her semblance being summoning defeated enemies which not only takes time but focus, perhaps taking a good chunk of her aura away depending on how big the summon, perhaps dust magic wears down on a hunters aura more so then a semblance so while it is a resource dust is more or less a secondary option, something about human bodies not being able to respond to a natural resource that managed to survive the last civilization or something, basically prior to the show in the old world dust was used for magic which the old civs bodies were intuned to and after their destruction the god of light purposefully made the new civs less compatible with dust so they couldn't attempt to attack them with magic again; the maidens are just the exception rather then the literal god given wielders of relics they simply are the only ones capable now... or something idk, i don't right fantasy, more of a Goblin Slayer kinda guy
Most of the time, when people blame Miles and Carrie for some problem in Volume 3 or later, I roll my eyes and point out that the problems being brought up are just extensions of trends I noticed going from Volumes 1 to 2 (because they affected things I cared about way more than most people did). But this seems to be 100% them, 0% Monty.
@@timothymclean well it's not every day Miles fails to define what a semblance is beyond a random cool yet convenient power for the character of his choosing, see it's not that Jaune has a healing semblance, mostly, (although it is really stupid broken considering the world and lore and monsters, much like Ren's semblance which should be god tier but isn't cause of bad really really bad writing) it's rather what hoops need to be jumped over the burning bridge that is the Ruby v Cinder fight, they had to actively write it so Cinder impaled Weiss not Ruby in spite of her own vengeance in spite of Salem's warnings and clear desire to have Ruby brought to her alive, some things just happen to push the plot or characters along, the writers abuse this and call it the character or story arc, the fans eat it up of course.
@@lordsurvivor5663 Don't get me wrong, RWBY has definitely gotten worse over time. But that started with Volume 2, not Volume 3, giving me the impression that most of the show's problems have as much to do with the foundation Monty created with his poor story-writing skills* as they do with what Miles built on top of them.
*Monty Oum is awesome at fight animations and, if RvB is any indication, seems to be good at writing _scenes._ But a story isn't just a collection of scenes, which hinders character- and plot-driven series more than it does comedic ones.
Ok everyone falls for this mistake. Everyone thinks aura was recon from passive to active, but it was actually recton from active to passive then back to active.
Back to Pyrrha explaining aura in V1, 3 times in the speech she talks about having to activate it. "Why didn't you activate your aura?" " by learning now to use our Aura, we can protect our self from Grimm." " with training, we can project our soul outward" ( not 100% on direct words but she does mention it 3 times) also when Jaune getting punch by Cardin he hurt, then he activate his aura to stop it, and Jaune is healed.
V1 states, and shows that you have to activate and focus your Aura to protect. Then it was recton in the world of remeant to be a passive shield, then recton back.
DOUBLE RETCON!!!
Khosef Tadros Double the headache!
We were led to believe that activating or unlocking your Aura was a one and done deal, not something you had to do in every fight.
@@TheIntratec9 Except PYRRHA asks Jaune why HE didn't activate it, implying that it's not passive
@@rashan141 what I mean is that once his Aura is unlocked/activated, it should STAY passive. That's it. No more constant turning your Aura on and off in between fights.
I often write fanfictions about RWBY and one of my most prominent point of rewriting is aura. My solution about aura is clear, simple, logic and pretty much self-explanatory.
Aura is an MP bar that began to refill the moment you stop using it. You can use it for three things : force-field, semblances and transfers.There is nothing beyond that. Both need active decision to use them, keep using them, and as such can't be used if the person loss consciousness. Both can be used at the same time for cost discussed below. The principle is that aura is common to everyone and thing like aura transfer and aura-injectors are a thing. If your aura hit 0, you loss conciousness
Force-field : The force field doesn't consume aura at being activated and kept, it consume it when you take blow, proportionally for the damage needed to be defused. When your aura get too low, it's useless to keep the shield has there isn't enough aura to deflect damage anymore. The Force-Field have a penetration ratio that can be trained (AKA, some attack can pierce partially or completely the force-field without breaking it, like Adam Moon Slice or AP bullets). By using more aura for the force-field, and making the ratio of aura taken by damage augment, you can extend the force-field a little beyond your own body (Ren in V1) and cover objects to make them unbreakable (Like Vol2 food fight).
Semblance : To make it simple, any kind of semblance use a set quantity of Aura. Ruby use hers to accelerate herself, Blake create shadow clones and Sun clones that consume aura at being created, not maintained. Yang in most of my fanfic, have a semblance that make her ratio force-field to damage double when used in exchange for multiplication of strength for each hit until semblance or force-field stopped (watch exponential by ceroblitz for ideas). Adam moonslice make aura being consumed at a continuous pace while he can absorb damage through his sword (or anything he is wielding), store it, and use it as wish... but the energy is lost the moment he stop the semblance or have not enough aura left to feed it.
What is the point of all this, would you ask? I just prove I can make a logic magic system based around this in two paragraph and twenty sentences... And with just that I can make lots and lots of tactics and plot points around. How characters would have to train to augment their aura quantity, force-field ratio and piercing point, or aura quantity being used by semblance. Learning when they should keep their fore-field up or not. Could Ruby make a bullet faster by covering it with force-field and applying her semblance on it before shooting? Could a whole team have a hit-and-run tactic around very powerful semblance that consume massive quantities of aura? Can some hunter and huntress being actually more rich than talented and simply buying belts of aura-injectors between each missions?
I have even rewritten Pyrrha in some of them as being talented because she have this very mad combat style of keeping deactivating her force-field between each hits in fights to maximize her aura recuperation. Something, in this story, that take years to even learn to do, and even some of the elder huntsmen doesn't manage it this good. She is the invincible girl because it would either take grueling minutes of constant damage or hours of fights to make her fall
Where could I find your fanfics?
Damn, that's some cool stuff.
Is it alright if I use some of your ideas in my own stories? And/or recommend them to someone else?
I feel like there's really one big change you need to make for this to work somewhat well (RWBY, not your fanfictions) and that's that I don't think characters should be able to keep fighting when their Aura 'fizzles out'. I hate it when the show does this, right? Because that situation just makes me feel like everything up to that happening is inconsiquential because now the 'real' fight is actually happening. I started a fanfic and kept it going for a good bit, but the aura stuff was just so frustrating to work with that I couldn't even bother keeping it going because it makes fights feel very limiting when you can't really deal with the storytelling that can come from things like combat damage or having to protect vital areas, right?
Where can I read your work ?
Me: So what is aura? What does it do. If Yang reaches 0 aura can she still use her semblance or does it cap out at 1% aura left? If I fall and activate my aura while its low will that break it and if so then whats the minimum force required to actually damage aura?
Writers: Well what do you think happens?
Me: I don't know.
Writers: Why don't you know?
Me: Because!...You don't know either do you.
Writers: Well would you look at the time, time to not be here.
the explanation death battle gives (screw attack working under RT's brand is the main if not only reason I'm thinking this is canon) is that your semblence is also powered by your aura,
so if your Aura hits 0 then you can't use your semblence and they also confirmed it requires consciousness so being knocked out or unaware of aura's existence would be understandable, but it's very iffy
Keep in mind, too, that Aura heals you. So it's totally possible someone could theoretically be losing in a fight, turn the aura off for it to recover, get the crap kicked out of them, and then they just turn it back on to heal up their wounds and now they're at an advantage because they've had time to let things build back up. Which is a huge head-scratcher because it's super counter-intuative, but it could be cool as a risk-vs-reward mechanic if it's explored like that in-universe.
Only big problem with that is that it's effing RWBY, so the creators don't care about having really cereberal, tense, Hunter x Hunter style moments of hard judgement because then it'd throw off the over the top high-speed anime choreography sync'd up to the awesome butt rock.
"This grim hits hard, but I'm low on aura, so if I can fight defensively maybe I can risk taking some scrapes and-"
~~CREATURES OF THE NIGHT IN DISILUSION! HAPPINESS IS OVER, VIOLENCE THE SOLUTION!~~
tbh this is why I like Neo's fighting style more; dodge the attacks so you don't waste aura, and if you do block, use your weapon, and do careful strikes
Also another thing that annoys me is that aura is shown to be used in battle as defense/offense in whenever it was introduced with Rea battling the Grimm, but the fighting part of the aura is never mentioned again in the series, and Jaune- who is said to have a 'strong aura'- never uses the combat fraction of it
After monty died every character went from strong to weak
I think you mean the whole show went from strong to weak after monty's passing
@@zekrom2359 I wouldn't say strong to weak, more pretty good to eh
If Monty was still here, I have a feeling he makes characters strong yet, vulnerable.
Like you are powerful, but your actions shows your true colors.
Everything was done because the writers wanted to keep Jaune around and he really had no reason to stay in the series like bruh these girls were fighting giant machines 😂
Just look at how much character development Jaune has gotten since monty died. Fans aren’t being sold rwby. They are being sold the Jaune show
I agree alot witht he points shown here, but the "blocking" part isnt really unnecessary, you block not only to protect yourself from damage (which the Aura helps with) but you block so you don't lose your footing, losing your position and balance is a good way of allowing an opponent to lay you out with even more hits, thats why when people block they keep there legs wide apart to create more balance and stability in the body, also covering your face is a natural instinct for everyone, if your about to get hit by a robot arm or whatever, your first instinct is to protect your vital body parts.
Yeah except getting your opponent off balance is never a strategy used in the show, and otherwise all blocking does is depletes your Aura. By all accounts dodging seems like a significantly better option.
The minute you mentioned Ninjas, I realized something.
Since this show has some similarities to Naruto (kekkai genkais= Semblances, no talent Jaune=no talent early Naruto), we'll eventually get people who can "sense aura" like the sensory types in Naruto. Which means stealth is going to be pointless by the time that rolls around.
@@dragensen2348yeah, but I'm talking about semblances that are specifically designed around sensing aura. Grimm are kind of mindless anyway.
@@dragensen2348 It didn't sense their Aura. Grimm can't do that. Grimm sense and are drawn to negative emotions. That is what Ren's semblance suppresses. Emotions. Not Aura.
In the recent Novel "After The Fall" It's been confirmed that Sensing Aura is a High-Level Aura Technique. Which means theres probably other High Level Techniques we haven't seen yet.
@@heyarnold7256 Aura training should have been something in RWBY's lore, honestly.
@@vynonyoutube1418 I'm guessing "Advanced Aura" training was a class at Beacon. But Team RWBY + JNR never got to it because they were first years.
I will be the devil's lawyer, even if I realise how many mistakes RWBY has. This might be how Aura could be saved and keep all of the rules from now.
What I have got from what the show told us is that aura takes concentration to turn on, but once is it turn on a few times it gets so easly one can turn it on almost without realising. /Almost/ is the key word, as turning aura on could be as taking a short breath, but in moments of high stress a fighter would not be able to use their aura, as they are focused on something else. Consider aura controling as breathing. Usually it is not a problem to turn it off and on, but once you become aware that you have to use it, it takes a little bit more effort and a few more seconds to turn it on.
I realise that the visual queues (I am not sure if I pronounced that right) of aura being drained//broken is very inconsistent, and I can't say anything about that.
But, as for the healing I assume that aura cannot regenerate while is it healing, so if a character is damaged during battle right after their aura was drained their aura wouldn't regenerate, as it it immediately consumed to heal, leaving them weaker (as we saw with Amber, if that was her name) while if their aura drains and they don't take damage they can keep going because they don't have to spend any energy on healing themselves by regenerating their aura (As we saw with Ruby, Qrow and Tyrian)
Well said!
Thank you!
@@TheTiredNaiad good theory, but let me say one word: hamon
For the healing thing, I just assumed that it makes recovery easier. Like, if you get injured, instead of healing the normal way/time, it makes it so that you heal faster, that's why small cuts can heal quickly while stab wounds take a bit more time to recover. It's not just that you can hide for a minute or two until your stabs heal, just that compared to normal recovery, aura just I dunno, halves that time. That being said, after aura breaking, I just assumed that the person just regenerates their aura health bar first, before straight up going into healing (maybe up to 80-100% first, or just in the green). I would use Weiss' cut in the White trailer leaving a scar vs Jaune's in the Emerald forest/bruises in Forever Fall as an example but I dunno, if I can factor it as his having "a lot of aura" being the cause of his instant healing, or just his semblance.
I feel like Monty's vision of Auras was about the same as the shields in Halo. Players will do some off the wall shit while they're up, but when they get depleted, they start to fight more defensively, taking cover and acting less aggressive while waiting for them to recharge. Hell, he probably would've spiced the combat up at one point by giving one of the antagonists an "overshield" and attribute their defeat to a combination of teamwork and some (potentially) outlandish displays of power.
I've rewritten aura to be an ablative shield that powerful blows can get through(as aura breaks) and as it gets lower the required force gets lower. That's why the concept of your aura being 'in the red' is actually a thing. Essentially your aura is too low to ensure your safety so for sport fights, they call it there to reduce injuries on the field.
Here's Aura as I see it:
The Soul is a physical entity unlike in our materialistic world. It is the literal core of a personality, and every defining trait of a person. It can be taken out and placed in another person, which will cause a merge and gradual absorption. The person's senses, attacks, defenses, and Semblance are all a part of your identity. By "bearing your Soul outward as a force" (basically willing your soft, abstract features to have a concrete influence), you can reinforce these attributes with a limited supply of energy. Do you not hit hard enough when you attack? Use your Aura to physically improve that striking force. Is your armor not enough to block an attack? Use your Aura to improve not only the armor, but your own body. Semblances take this to an extra level. Not only can you improve existing, apparent features, but you can manifest your personality and experiences as a special power that is not entirely unique, but manifests for you in a way that differs slightly from similar powers.
It is not a Force Field. It is not a physical barrier that blocks energy or matter in a trajectory. What it does is improve what you've got, or give you something new. Jaune's excessive Aura lets him amp this up to a true defensive shield with his buffing Semblance, while Tock's Semblance directly channels her Aura into such a powerful defensive edge that she is completely immune to harm. To explain Jaune having a "lot" of Aura, I'd say it comes down to two things: how much energy output you can will up for things like a Semblance (or healing, remember that Hazel's Aura was also recovering quickly), and also the concentration that Ren was talking about. If you have "little Aura" then you need a lot more mental focus to maintain it, especially at first. If you have "a lot" then you more quickly learn to handle difficult situations without having to worry about your Aura just dropping (see Ghira and Oscar in V5).
Yang had spent a day chatting in a bar, back in V2. She then directed all of her aggression and will into fighting Torchwick's Paladin. As a result, she could withstand extreme duress in short bursts and her Semblance was able to wreck the mech, shredding it with a final punch. Contrast this to the end of V3, where she had been fighting enemies constantly, alone, for an extended period, and then went up against Adam. His attack is confirmed by the writers to have done enough damage that it tore through what was left of her Aura and then her arm. One might be led to think that her number had just gotten low, but I think it has more to do with her physical and mental stamina. The fall of Beacon and less recent events had been tearing Yang down, and she hadn't fully bounced back yet. So when faced with his sudden, powerful attack, she gave up. Not consciously, but her Soul gave up the fight.
Didnt we see jaune's scratch get healed in V1 when pyrrha activated his aura? I think it wad obvious that aurs can heal wounds to some degree. Since pyrrha activated jaunes aura not his semblance. So the healing was done by aura.
Also, I dont think the changed aura mechanism in that way. Pyrrha asked jaune why didnt he activate his aura not why he didnt unlock his aura. If aura was something that was always active after its been unlocked, then pyrrha wouldn't have asked why jaune didnt activate it. Also, if its always up, then it wouldn't be possible to deplete aura. IMO aura is like sleeping. We sleep everyday. Its not like if we sleep once we dont need to sleep ever again. Similarly, one needs to activate aura and while aura is activated, it slowly depletes. You know, how even if you dont do anything you will still get sleepy after hours. The energy starts to deplete.
What I really dont understand is, how come electricity get past through aura? Is it that aura only stops physical attacks and not any elements?
If you want to understand aura, just look up an explanation of nen from hunterxhunter. Its what I can only assume RWBY's aura system was based on, and its very well explained. Better yet, just watch the Heavens Arena arc and get to see it explored bit by bit and understand the nuances of it. As for why I say it's the basis for RWBY's aura, nen's "resource" is aura, one of its four main applications is called Ten and is an invisible field that drastically reduces incoming damage, and another of its four main applications is called Hatsu and is a power almost always unique to that particular nen user. The only two of the four RWBY is missing are Zetsu which suppresses your aura for stealth purposes, and Ren which is a technique to increase the amount of aura generate to let you use your Hatsu. So really RWBY's aura is just half of Nen's mechanics brought into a series where the other half is irrelevant.
Edit: actually Zetsu is also used to slightly accelerate the healing process so I guess 2 1/2 nen mechanics kinda made it in.
Interesting, and well said! Though, I shouldn't have to watch a totally different anime just to vaguely understand a mechanic in this one, you know?
@@twiinsiink I definitely get that. If a series/its writers want to use a mechanic then it should be adequately explained in the series itself. It's just a shame that in trying to draw from a great power system they made a weak one.
@@gigabyteguru2452 It's kinda hard with nen tho. Almost 20 yrs since it was introduced and the writer of HxH has managed to make new additions, there are even religions based of certain aspects now.
Or just watch hxh instead lol
I don't need to look at another franchise mechanic to know that the RWBY mechanic to be shit. At least in Nen they said that the MC are literally one in a Millenia Genius, cause each block happen in the Nanosecond, and each hit travel faster than a mach 1.
How is RWBY based on Nen, Hunter X Hunter was not a popular anime when RWBY first came out, infact the reboot come out years after.
RWBY being taken over by people who don't even like action stories is one of the greatest tragedies I've ever seen. Has anyone else found it so boring that M&K seemed obsessed with using mundane violence to make dramatic points, in a series where everyone has a force field, super powers, implied super strength and automatic healing?
"Jaques slapped Weiss! How horrible!"
Weiss is a freaking super-human fencer with an enhanced force field. You can't have her jump on volcanic gushers, fall from hundreds of feet, and be slammed around a metal train by her hair... but then tell me to be upset when her civilian-ass father who probably couldn't stand up to a baby Ursa slaps her. M&K, I know you don't like anime, but just... lock yourself in a room with every freaking season of Dragonball and do not come out until you understand this. KRILLIN is the weakest member of the main cast, but is the strongest human, and bullets do not effect him. His chi is too substantial for that weaksauce. DBZ features a dozen visual gags of him being shot and shrugging it off like an itchy sweater. You are making RWBY SO boring by nerfing everyone's abilities to the point of even resenting that they have HP, just because you personally don't like fighting.
You do realize there's a difference between a warrior taking damage from an enemy and a daughter being abused by her father, right? Doesn't matter if she can take the pain, what matters is who inflicted it. Parents aren't supposed to hurt their kids. So, yeah, it is horrible. Don't minimalize abuse just because you're mad
If you haven’t noticed, that shift was to drag down the show to a level where Jaune could take the spot light e.g. dumbing down every thing so Jaune being an imcopentent fighter and sword upgrades could be seen as something awesome…. The writers precious self insert character.
@@SnoozinOnSaturday The whole scene was uncalled for bruh. We already know she was abused. But of course only way to make a female character interesting in pop media & feel sorry for is to see her be slapped. Like Weiss really needed to be more of a victim when it was already established? Thats tone deaf.
@@bryana.escaleralopez Oh the insert characters. And its like the want Jaune's incompetence to spread and grow. I've just now dipped my toe into a bit of My Hero Academia... A show that MUCH like RWBY, features most of the world's population having superpowers, therefore superheroes and supervillains are as common as police and organized crime. It just makes me even MORE furious about the direction RWBY's writing has taken, because it's absolutely inconceivable in the MHA world for someone to NOT understand how quirks work, how superhero/villains work, or how to keep themselves safe. But in RWBY, Jaune has to have a semblance explained to him?!?!
Nice video. The part about Weiss's injury was hilarious. I agree, Ghira and Oscar losing aura instantly in V5 was silly and completely confused me, because I wasn't used to seeing it at the start of a fight.
It's clear the writers can't find an appropriate solution. Given that even large franchises like Star Wars struggle with this, maybe it's harder than we think. As you said, aura exists so that people can take damage to no consequence. However, people still need to be able to get injured at a moment's notice. My own headcanon / retcon mechanic views it as an activated fluid armor.
-- Everyone has an aura tank. This aura needs to be activated to be used outside the body.
-- As Jaune said, it's like a force field (piece of armor). Where, when, and how much -- they all require activation and practice by the user. In my model, the HP bar is not the most accurate way to think about it.
-- The tournament meters are able to measure the total aura you currently have, regardless of your ability to show it. This means that you can still get injured at 100% if you're dumb. The 15% is a precaution because you have less to work with.
-- Aura breaking is simply a shorthand way to say your tank depleted to 0%. Since your body is constantly obtaining aura, your aura technically will "break" again shortly after taking a another hit. That hit will consume that 0.1% aura and then deal physical damage.
-- Aura's heaing effect exists in the plot only for Jaune, as you say. So we can say that the physical body passively draws aura from the tank very slowly and uses that to heal wounds. Any sort of healing that is noticeable on the spot would require extremely high throughput, which is Jaune's semblance. Basically, normal healing and a normal healing skill, but with aura inserted.
-- Optionally, you can say that everyone, regardless of training, is slightly protected by a passive, easily broken, thin layer of aura. Thus it's both passive and active. Ugh, retcons.
My retcon fixes the following:
-- Adam could cut Yang because she wasn't able to gather enough aura to such a localized area and to do it quickly, especially given his amount of raw power.
-- This also makes ninjas viable because the element of surprise means something, which Adam used against Sienna.
-- Jaune has low aura in the syrup forest because he just got beat up (a lot) by Cardin and company. Red is just an indicator. It's as you say: it's low but not out.
-- I didn't understand your complaints around 3:30+ because the other teams did lose their aura. In fact, that's how RWBY and JNPR won their matches. Besides, you can always hand-wave it away since technically we don't know how much aura they have.
-- For my scenario, what you say around 8:00+ would be true. If you're really good at dodging, you turn it off and dodge. (Or, more accurately, you don't allocate aura there.)
-- I think this works with Jaune. He has a large tank but has issues manifesting and manipulating it.
-- As for Yang, it's interesting because I used to think what you said is true. Her aura would ideally be on the skin of her teeth. I think what makes more sense is that spending aura fuels a power tank, and her red-eyed form consumes energy from it quickly.
-- My system has the problem of "Why does anyone block?" I guess it doesn't fix that one. =/
What do you think?
Sorry about that confusion. At 3:30+ I was trying to say that, even though the other teams lost their aura, we didn't see it break, making the mechanic inconsistent and confusing.
Also, yes! Your idea is a thorough and efficient one!
@@twiinsiink Oh right, definitely. They needed the break animation there.
Thanks!
Twiins: "Aura has been a confusing element in RWBY since it was first introduced."
Me: "What? No it hasn't. It's just HP. I mean, I haven't watched since about a third of the way through Volume 3, but-"
T: "Aura breaking, introduced maybe halfway through Volume 3, is where things start to get complicated."
Me: "Well, never mind then."
They also never explain the extent that aura heals you. It can heal cuts, apparently, but not burns, or scars, or dismembered arms, or poison, or electricity shocks, etc.? Why would they establish that aura can heal you if they wanted characters to have permanent/long-lasting injuries anyway?
RWBY Logic:
"Ow! I got a paper cut/ skinned knee/ splinter. Now all my aura is depleted"
RWBY Battle Logic:
* One punch that probably didn't hurt that much*
K.O!!!
You say that aura healing you is a retcon, but Jaune heals himself with aura the first time we see it.
Yeah but then we don't see it again until volume 5. So it's an easy thing to forget about, in my opinion.
@@twiinsiink You included the clip of him healing in the video
@@freecandy6408 I had assumed it'd been retconed out since we don't see Aura working that way afterward.
Aura healing you seemed like a new element due to it's lack of prominence in previous volumes. Everyone makes mistakes, dude.
@@twiinsiink You also included a clip of him healing a bruise after using his aura in 2:36
@twiinsiink3503 If I were to establish aura better the way I'd do it is to make it work similar to haki from one piece.
Armorment aura
Observation aura
And Emperors aura
It makes more sense that the shimmer is the person's aura flaring up to protect them against a heavy hit that their normal passive field wouldn't be enough for. The full-body shimmer and shatter would then be their aura being pushed beyond its limit and failing on them.
I thought the "breaking" of aura was really when they take an extreme blow, I've seen a pattern of that. But maybe that's just me.
A way to keep the aura being a passive constant shield while adding stakes is introducing a Grimm that cancels out aura.
Have it show up during volume 4, it’ll make a shrieking noise at the protags disabling there aura temporarily.
Have it explained that with Salem now having a maidens magic along with hers, she can augment the Grimm even more.
Seems like the biggest problem with RWBY is that the writers treat it with videogame rules and never thought how those things would work in the setting.
The Yang thing is a very good example: Yes, from a videogame standpoint, her getting a damage buff from taking damage herself makes flawless sense. But now think about it without videogame rules: What does that even mean? Does she get the boost if she hurts herself? Is it a physical threshhold or a mental one? Every person feels pain in different amounts, after all. What if a person cannot feel pain? Do they still get a damage boost? Do you get tiny damage boost from bumping your elbow or hell, even just normal touch? It's the same sense after all, just not to the point where it overwhelms your nerves.
Long story short: Aura was a terrible idea and Monty did the best with it that he could. They shouldn't have introduced it in the first place and just have all the characters be superhuman, but having an visual indicator of when it is broken really ruins any tension.
Here's my main problem with aura, semblances, They have absolutely no effect on the world building their potential is virtually limitless, a single semblance could be of immense help to an organization, someone with a power like Raven's would be insanely helpful as would someone with a healing power(which definitely exist as Nora thought that was what Jaun's was), and that's not even mentioning the tons of powers we haven't even seen yet (if time and probability manipulation are both possible then what reason do we have to think any power no matter how game breaking is out of reach?). Yet they are never used for anything other then peoples combat gimmicks, Their are absolutely no limits to what they can do, I mean we know they can accomplish time dilation, what about time travel? Was their no one amongst all of the hunters, huntress's and students who could heal amber? The characters can distinguish what is and isn't a semblance, this alone means theirs limits to what a semblance can be but their never explained.
Time is possible and Probability is also Possible (Fucking Weiss and Vic Magnonia)
Amber seemingly had half her soul ripped out. Simple healing wouldn't fix that.
Apart form that I agree.
Semblances are also just limited in the creativity department. The powers are all some sort of emitter effect, not once do we see a transformation or permanent mutation type of Semblance. That limits the amount of semblances you can play around with. There can never be a semblance that turns you into an animal or a semblance that makes you grow a third arm because all semblances have to be super speed or clone generation for some reason. The closest we got to a transformation semblance is Elm's stretchy-arms thing in Vol. 7.
I LOVE that you say what we are thinking!!!!!!! Please get in touch with Miles and Kerry and teach them how to write properly.
simple solution, show amber have cuts across her body and have her notice those and panic as a way of showing that her aura is now shot and shes vulnerable, easy enough, keeps when aura breaks vague and leaves the tension intact for fights
Or have you look at her health bar on her scroll. There are a lot of easier ways to handle this than what the show did.
*slowly looks at weiss*
Im GoNnA sTab Ya
Bruh 6:34 lmao, ive just started watching your videos. Incredibly informative and entertaining!
she forgot to mention "slowly walk past protagonist of show who you built a grudge with ever since Volume 3"
In short, how aura and Health work in Vol 1-3 was the Halo 1 HP system except your shields don't recharge, post 3 it's effectively the Halo 2 and onward HP system more or less
I never realized just how convoluted this all was.
Aura is a passive effect that can be toggled off like rain in minecraft
Healing was there from day one... We see Jaune's cut heal over literally moments after being unlocked. Jaune's whole semblance healing thing works by boosting that aspect of aura
when your aura breaks, it goes away, so you have to take a break and wait for your aura to replenish
also your aura heals you, if you activate it
I can understand how aura breaking maybe confusing but In Vol 1 ep 6 it is shown that aura was originally active and could heal, I also I think it meant healing as in physical wounds. So without aura healing is not possible and your aura would need to regenerate but they haven’t really told us how long it takes for you to recover your aura after it is broken.
This video was made before volume 6 aired, so I wasn't able to use any info from it.
Also, what part are you referring to where it's show that aura "was originally active and could heal"? I don't remember that part?
they said *volume* 1, episode 6 (i understand the misread though lol)
It was just after Pyrrha had unlocked Jaune's aura. Before Pyrrha made the comment of him not activating his aura, Jaune received a cut. Once his aura was unlocked, the cut healed almost instantly.
@@NightfallNyx. WHOOPS! Now it all makes more sense!
I personally think aura is a excuse for the writers to dictate what attacks are lethal or not. Yang gets thrown through a pillar and doesn’t doesn’t even fluster and a hit by a sledge taken after being subject to less damage while the strike is cushioned by three meat-shields takes a dude out
I know it's 5 years old by now, but since I saw it I really want to add that Ruby should be second only to yang and maybe third if you count nora in terms of hand to hand combat and sheer power, in volume 1 she could literally throw people twice her size like they were a sack of potatoes, without her weapon, not to mention the sheer power she should have by just using that thing, I know that weight is relative in this show, sometimes it's as light as a feather, and other times it feels like freaking Mjolnir, but in any case, one punch from ruby should be the equivalent of a truck going 100 mph straight into your face, she also shouldn't be absolutely ass in hand to hand combat, like we see with oscar, I mean seriously, why is something so simple so inconsistent? It's literally in chapter 1
I feel the best way for aura to work would be a passive force field that prevents damage at the cost of aura, it also enhance physical traits of the user passively such as strength, speed, and regeneration, but when aura hits zero it 'breaks' signifying that the passive effects can no longer be used as well as the semblance
ok, while I agree that the series lore and mechanics need an overhaul to better accommodate how the series has change, as its now a bit bloated and incongruous, your first complaint is wrong. yes the aura shattering thing was introduced in season 3, but 1. its not incompatible with past instances of peoples aura being low and being in danger. there is a difference between having no shield and your shield being at 5%, but your still in danger and 2. it is arguably a good choice to introduce so that we don't need to have someone pull out their scroll to convey to the audience that someone is in danger. otherwise good video. its only when in season 4+ they start burning through aura and are so inconsistent with it that becomes a problem
If I had to rewrite aura, I would could it as a passively active ability (once unlocked it stays unlocked). It can take the brunt of physical attacks (kicks, punches things like that) and allows projectiles to bounce off a person's body like luffy from one piece, though high caliber rounds can be a problem and have to be physically dodged or blocked. Blades of any size must be dodged as well in order to avoid fatal wounds.
Aura (seeing as it is described as the soul becoming an outward force field) will still have the shimmer effect, but it's introduced in volume one.
The way aura breaks is when the body gives out, seeing as in actuality, a person's body would give out before their will would.
Aura is also unlocked when either a person's semblance is discovered or a person uses their aura to unlock someone else's (i.e. Jaune and Pyrrha)
Aura will only heal minor scrapes, bruises and cuts. Internal injuries and broken bones need hospitals and proper care.
Also once a person's aura is broken, they can't use those semblance any longer (thank unicorn of war for that)
Why DOES it seem like Jaune is the only one with "Lots of Aura"? I've been explicitly told he has a lot but no one else and how does it have a lot of aura, is it genetic, we don't know.
And then Vol 7 has shimmers AND aura breaks, which I like the best but it was really confusing at first when someone shimmered and then later lost their aura.
YEAH! I kind of just let myself accept it as like "the aura break glowy-stuff doesn't mean full broken aura anymore" which is annoying because like, I just want it to be consistent for once. But also I think this new deal they have going on is better because it allows for more blows to be actually traded as apposed to simply dodged.
some of my thoughts on how aura works.
Aura Bar (my headcanon):
these are showing in percentages (%). let's imagine that the average aura "bank" is 100 Aura Points. Jaune has more aura than most, so he has about 150 aura points (I'm just throwing out numbers, I'm no scientist). the aura bar shows that Jaune has a full bar, so it's 100% full. this just means that Jaune's full aura is more than Ruby's full aura (once again, just example).
Aura mechanics (my headcanon):
aura is both active and passive. active in that people can concentrate it in limbs (so blocking is still kinda relevant) to minimize damage, or prevent aura penetration ( a la Adam).
passive in that it still works against small damage (pistol fire?). stronger attacks may breakthrough and be fatal.
if you get punched in the face with passive aura, you feel pain, might get a bloody nose, but it's like they punched you through a pillow, meaning it "softens" the blow. being punched in the face with active aura (depending on how much aura you concentrate in the face) is like being punched in the face, minus bodily damage. you still "flinch", cuz the force of the punch didn't just disappear. if Yang punched you in the face with passive aura, you'll probably get KO'd (or die, depends on how pissed she is, all while still having aura). with active aura, you get launched across the room, still feel pain, but you'll live.
semblance's drain aura in their own unique rate (I'm not even gonna bother with this one).
aura also recharges when not in use. I guess each aura has their own recharge rate (I'm sure I heard somewhere that Hazels Aura recharges faster than usual, that why ReNora had difficulty dealing with him, and in V7 training montage Jaune aura literally recharged in a matter of seconds)
aura also heals the person using it. I'm sure that its possible to heal mid-battle, although it probably limits aura shielding. it's situational. (use a potion of Resistance, or potion of regeneration? your choice.)
aura will not function when unconscious(?). since it is possible to KO someone without depleting aura (if hit in the correct spot hard enough), their aura won't protect them (ex. Neo KO'd Yang on the train. it's possible that when Neo Yote Yang into the ceiling, yang used passive aura cus she was (probably) confused because she was flailing around in the air, and the hit was strong enough to KO Yang. Yang was at the complete mercy of Neo.)
Aura breaks and flickers (my headcanon):
aura will flicker when being dealt big damage (angry Yang, Maginhild, etc.), or when aura is low (maybe 15%? your choice)
aura will break when your aura is depleted (0% aura, 0 aura points) REGARDLESS if the hit is strong (angry Hazel) or weak (StormFlower's Machine Gun). 0% is still 0%.
Reasons Jaune still sucks
IMO, having "big" aura isn't a win condition. give a random nobody an LMG and a professional an old Bolt-Action rifle, and make it a death battle.
"Wow! that random nobody has an LMG! there's NO WAY that professional with a Bolt-Action can win, RIGHT?"
Sure, Jaune has "big aura", but it doesn't mean shite if he can't friggin use it. all it means (for now), is that he's a Paladin (LOW damage, high HP, support role due to semblance). or a Meat Shield, your choice.
soooo, uuuuh, thanks for listening to my Rant! feel free to correct me in the comments. Peace.
Yeah that's how I see it. To me it's like ki from DragonBall or Ren from Hunter x Hunter. Ki for it being limited internal power, where sometimes when they block attacks they either block it or take it and be completely fine, or they block it using the last of their ki and either still have stamina or be completely exhausted. It's also passive and active like when someone weak punches a very strong person, they don't move at all, that's passive. When someone fires a ki blast and the other person actively puts up a strong ki barrier, then there's a big whole in the ground behind them where they themselves are unharmed. And for Hunter x Hunter, I say Ren is like being able to concentrate the energy in a certain place and the ability of specialization like for a semblance.
I agree with your aura percentage too. Your tank ain't empty until it's empty.
I feel like if there is a reworking of aura, we mainly want to get rid of all of the stuff introduced after aura breaking, but leave some stuff in to make some semblances making sense. So here is a sample idea I think of.
TLDR: Aura=Muscle (to an extent)
Aura Is kind of like a force field but even more, a health bar (whatever ten did against the king taijitsu no longer happens). Aura is a passive force that protects the body from harm. It must first be unlocked, and then can be trained to become stronger in different ways, and there is a small natural difference between everyone’s aura amount (aka allowing Jaune to reasonably have his high aura). When you have your basic aura, you are a citizen who can take some attacks to protect themselves but your amount depletes faster, no matter your natural amount, and the lower your aura gets, you actually get fatigued (explaining how beginner jaune still felt odd even though he had a lot of aura). Trained huntsmen and huntresses however have stronger aura that works normally like in the show with people that aren’t jaune. The fatigue aspect is gone from low aura or zeroing out but semblances cannot be used at low aura levels, providing another effect that doesn’t stop action for miles and Kerry and gives some visual cue besides a health bar to the audience and keeps us on the edge of our seat when a character isn’t using their semblance. Also this is why weapons are important for people. Aura amount varies between all individuals and the training allows stuff like regenerating aura to occur quicker.
Edit: Maiden powers would work without aura, to give more of a difference from semblances and make maidens like cinder big threats. It can be harder to control or reduced to just one element then (if we are keeping Maidens have all elements) but that isn’t necessary. Also jaune can still transfer his aura like normal it works the same, and semblances don’t consume aura, just also disappear when aura does
I literally forgot that this entire mechanic existed
Aura Level (Aura)- This is the main thing that protects its user form damage but is also what they use to execute their special abilities known as semblances. If a user’s Aura is fully depleted they will be in a Aura Break status causing them to be stunned for some time and take extra damage from attacks.
Based on most rules seen in every volume.
Season 7: Aura just becomes an AT field.
There is actually a very simple change a writer can apply to Aura in order to keep Yang's Semblance unchanged and working; to make Aura able to *prevent* the structural damage to the material body it is applied to by dropping of the same amount of energy that would have caused that damage to occur. This way the actual kinetic energy of the hit does apply to Yang's body charging her Semblance and her Aura will drop at the same time, without damage or contradictions.
Absorbing the energy do prevent the damage therefore the two things seems to be a repetition of one another, but the following steps is how i imagine it to work;
- step one: the energy is transferred to the body while the damage itself is still not applied
- step two: the Semblance gets activated and charged *before* the actual damage gets applied
- step three: the Aura gets activated and prevent the damage that would have been applied
Basically Yang's Semblance works in synergy with her Aura to magically break the physics of the real world in order to have an instance of reality to act within.
If its okay for you to become one of RWBY's writers, I'll vouch for yah👌😁
If they ever reboot the show they could make aura work like Tekkai Kenpo from One Piece. So it would be always active in a fight. But we could have aura be manipulated in ways to penetrate others aura. For example, using aura to augment the effect of cutting and piercing weapons. So then it would explain flat out how Adam would cut through Yang effortlessly when she seemed good in aura. No semblance needed. Blunt attacks would be much more difficult to deal significant damage with unless the user was of equal or greater strength than the other.
Remove the aura break animation and instead have characters be able to get cuts and bruises to indicate when they are getting too low in aura to keep up their passive defense. It would be gradual shift starting from just simple scuffs.
Edit: Tried to elaborate more.
Aura is not the only thing the RWBY writers have recon. Magic, plot and history seem to change every volume.
The Background music got me vibin'
The concept of Aura is so broad that I’m pretty sure Jaune still doesn’t have a semblance
jaune's semblance is aura amplification it focuses on aura so its probably gonna be easy to unlock
I think they never retconned the passive/active bit of Aura, they simply worded it terribly. You have to activate your aura, then it will protect/heal you until you run out or until you deactivate it.
the tournament life bar made it so that if you fall below 15% of your aura you were out- that gives the contestants 15% of their aura to not break. The breaking occurs when they bottom out. Mercury had 0% left by the time his aura breaks [ as Yang went to hard and fast for it to be called before then ] The visual doesn't happen for most of the other people- I think- because they lose before they hit 0.
How they measure this shall remain a mystery.
now I love Halo even more
I like your voice and your videos, I think I’m gonna subscribe
Thanks!
I always simplified Aura as a mix of a (secondary) health bar and mana bar (or you know, kinda like how some NES era games had abilities cost health because a second resource bar was not common yet), semblances use up aura lightly to do their work, but it's the same resource that primarily does the self-preservation stuff, As soon as it's brought to low enough level, it barely prevents a papercut (and thus causes an aura break as well as any leftover damage from it) and you're left with not enough "mana" to use your semblance and you're just left as weak as the rest of us
Ofc, for that to add up, you'd just have to do what anyone would do to fix all these inconsistencies, reboot and do it right from the beginning, same for the general writing thanks to the hindsight from what the show ended up as...
I love RWBY, but I agree with most of your points. Aura is definitely confusing. I'm pretty sure some of the changes and additions to aura and it's concept were due to the way in which the show began and Monty's death. I would describe Aura as special pseudo-mystical chi like life force that acts as a force field and increases ones physical capabilities. It can be activated and depleted in various ways and can also recharge after time and heal wounds.
And yes, Yang is OP.
Think of arura like Persona, they have a somewhat similar healing technique, they would need to be activated, some people have a rare instance to have many, and when a person’s persona takes critical damage they will fade away leaving the person in a deathly state where they can almost die or die. Plus with a person with a resolve’s persona will undergo an evolution making it stronger.
I do prefer the idea that little blows could build up damage to the aura, but requires a large blow to break it, but that still causes massive problems, because if little blows never broke an aura, regardless of how many little blows rack up, then it become a question of aura regeneration, with the staple the you have limited aura and even little blows rack up against that limit, there has to be some level of aura regeneration to prevent little blows from causing aura breaks, which would make it seem like the aura would have to regenerate faster than little blows can possibly whittle it down, which would destroy all the tension in the show because we'd know that their aura just regenerates so fast that immediately after it's broken, they still have more to spend from it regenning so fast, and the health bar would also be broken because the health bar never shows aura regen, and if they said it requires focus or concentration to regenerate aura that quickly, then little blows would still whittle it down more than enough because unless they're gods of multitasking and focusing on aura regeneration mid battle, they won't get a break to meditate for regen, but if they said it required solid, stable breathing to regen that quickly, then it could potentially work, but then it'd literally just be hamon from jojo.
and this is why any writer worth their alt plans ahead and sets up basic rules for magic systems and basic rules for how the world works regardless before getting deep into the story, sort of like how grimm went from just dying to being video game enemies that have to disappear after dying, this fact alone is probably the source of most of the problems that pop up in rwby, which is kind of sad because thorough planning could have made this show really stand out consistently rather than the sad stumbling down the hill its been going through as the story just sort of goes on with no real sense to it
How about making it so that aura can reduce the damage you receive but not nullify it? Then characters that still have their aura up could still be severely hurt or even killed by a strong enough attack (Adam's semblance, for example), and it not being there doesn't mean the characters can't get hit in a fight anymore or they'll die, it just means they'll take full damage. Make it so that a full aura blocks more attack and the more it depletes, the less damage it blocks and voila - you got the tournament rule that being under red means you're out to avoid any heavy injuries or deaths, but it isn't strange for Ruby to get knocked out by a punch or Jaune to get bruises for being punched despite having his aura still on.
Cool idea!
yup, that is exactly how I always thought aura works. And it also explains aura breaking, normal hits deal both damage to aura nad body (the more aura you have, less damage to body you get). But some attacks can straight up break the aura if they are hard enough. And as you say, some might be to fast, or just so unusual they bypass the aura. Like electricity.
I'll be honest half these clips of aura breaking in seasons 4-5 I thought where just a visual reminder that these character's have aura/ their aura is active and that's why they're able to withstand these blows unscathed, particularly Oscar tanking Lionheart's meatball, I didn't realise that was supposed to be a "oh no his aura's down, he can get hurt now!" moment when watching, I thought it was a "look, Oscar can harness his aura _this_ well now that he can take heavy blows like the others".
Honestly how I understood aura was kinda how I understood a shield in Bioshock: an invisible armor that can be broken after multiple or heavy, catastrophic damage. And once broken, you're going to have to deal with the actual constitution of the individual. Initially, I found it interesting that perhaps, this weakness could be bypassed by buffing up or something. Of course, you're vulnerable by then to getting your hand chopped off or die from a gunshot wound.
Then I'm just confused as the later volumes go by.
Best aura system is from HxH
Well imo:
Aura is the strength of the soul, willpower is a great way to say it, since aura is (not really) determined by the person and their supposed semblance, aura is NOT used to attack, rather the semblance works itself, but the semblance needs aura to work.
Basically semblance activates when you have aura, but doesn't consume any, if it doesn't affect the user and their surroundings (example Jaune, with his sembalnce)
Tyrrian has a weird sembalnce that NEVER has been explained in the series, so it is easy to get lost during his fights when he makes direct hits (his semblance negates aura btw)
i do agree in some parts but i did not need to study a thing yet understood what was going on through out the series when the concept of aura was developing
Aura is like the keyblade it does whatever the developer needs it to do
I've made a DnD RWBY Book, and this points out so many of the issues I had determining aura rules. I'm happy to see others annoyed by this, haha.
The Volume 1-3 problems you pointed out weren't something I thought were too big of problems, and Volume 4-5... Yeah. Now I see your point.
Just a slight correction here, while it technically was Ren who mentioned verbally that Aura could heal, it was during Volume 1 when Pyrrha unlocked Jaune’s aura that the ability is first displayed, with Pyrrha stating ‘you have a lot of it’ after watching Jaune’s cut close near instantly, suggesting that it depends on how much Aura you have and how badly you’re hurt.
I usually pay attention to the power system in an action anime whenever its introduced and what I've noticed is that they usually have grounded information and its well developed. That isn't saying that there isn't a chance to evolve or add new applications to the power system, in fact I welcome advancements. The thing with RWBY is that they didn't go in depth and they treated the aura as something that's not important when it clearly is. When introducing a power system in a fighting anime its important that the introduction needs to be as detailed as possible before making advances so that the audience doesn't get confused.
I personally think aura’s rules should be that it is a passive forcefield, that upon being fully depleted visibly shimmers and shatters. This puts the user in winded a state. So that is pretty basic so far. As for the healing I believe it's necessary for your aura to not be broken to use it to heal, and since aura is passive the healing is also passive and is at fixed rate. It increases and decreases in speed depending on how much aura you have. Aura amount is based off of strength and natural birth so as you yourself grow stronger so does your aura and your aura’s natural size and potential is based on genetics similar to body type.
This series really should of took notes from Hunter X Hunter. Another series where the characters use arua, or Nen, and is explained and explored much better then here.
On a related note, for the questions about Pyrrha's aura unlock ritual or whatever you call it and as to why not a lot of common folk just unlock their aura (especially with the Oscar thing)....I just assumed:
*1)* That the passage, however flowery it is, was either just a Nikos family thing, like a personal tradition or maybe something related to Minstral culture, explaining how Oscar didn't need to unlock it first that way (or maybe Oz just did it offscreen.)
*2)* Maybe some people just didn't have a lot of aura to be worth unlocking (if the dialogue having "a lot of it", is to be believed then I guess aura is somehow quantifiable?)
or *3)* Again, going by V1, Pyrrha said that she "used her aura to unlock Jaune's", so does that mean that non-huntsman families would need to have someone with an already unlocked aura to activate theirs, and that's why they didn't know/didn't bother? And on that note, who _did_ unlock everyone's aura first, if that was the case?
-Wrote this on an empty stomach so I'm sorry if some of it was unclear.-
There are some points i would argue are actually consistend. Including Aura-breaking.
The kids fight in the school until the Aura gets below 15. They could go further, but don't. That's why Jaune was in the red, but not out. His Aura was heavily depleted, but not out. That's why Mercurys Aura broke: it was at Zero.
The shimmers don't show before, because they never occur
Easiest way they could have written it. Everyone has different quantities of aura, the HP bar is a percentage of that quantity, a shimmer or break is what happens when you drop to bellow a certain unit of aura (say 20 HP points as a standard. Like 3 good 9mm rounds away from bleeding.) not a percentage. So for someone like Ruby who has less aura than someone like Jaune, she is going to be shimmering more often if hit, because she is physically weaker than him. This reasonably makes it so an audience can go, "oh ok, she's weak, 15% for her is like 50% for Jaune." and can keep tension, while never having to divulge exact numbers. This would also explain why near everyone up until the mercury fight did not shimmer, they just never got to that point, then Yang got Yangry (hehe) and utterly destroyed his.
You 100% FEEL everything hitting you, and it does't prevent internal moment of the body. Nut shot gag aside this is clear from however many times Jaune got his ass kicked in V one and two. This makes it so that characters still have to think about what they get into, because even though it won't injure them, getting shot will hurt like a bitch, and anyone who uses holds or grappling can break bones or dislocate limbs by moving the person inside their own aura. (Kicking in someones kneecap when a leg is extended, straining someones arm until their shoulder pops out of it's socket.)
An aura as an extension of the body, is like a muscle, it must be flexed (active) for it to be useful. Like any muscle breaking it down makes it stronger, and once you train enough you can keep it "flexed' for near indefinite periods of time. (Endurance runners, strongmen competitions, shit like that.) This makes it so that people can be ambushed if they aren't in fight or flight mode like in V7 when the ace ops caught them, or if they have been fighting for 4 hours straight it means they are going to be tired even with it up.
It can be penetrated with enough force concentrated to a single point. Adams semblance cut through Yang's aura because it was that strong as a thin line slicing and not a big hammer smack distributing the force. (Guns on remnant are weak because they use fire dust as a propellant and not smokeless high pressure powder, leading to bigger projectiles smacking hard for damage, and not fast projectiles puncturing through aura.)
As far as healing is concerned, any wounds received from internal damage (Dislocations, compression bone breaks, Aura not being active at the time, or if penetrated,) will be healed by an ACTIVE aura, and aura will always regenerate itself. With rates depending on how much you have. Shit can still scar if it's deep enough because the body is using scar tissue to patch up the wounds at an accelerated rate. Weiss' scar, Blake's abdomen puncture, so on. To most hunters this will be a mute point as it's near always on when they are out on mission, but lore wise this makes seance. Healing is done on the cellular level, the body needs energy, (food) to heal. Hunters seem to eat a shit load, therefor energy is required to heal. This also wrangles in Yang's semblance logically without making her OP. She takes damage be it aura or physical, and then redirects it. Her aura regens and then she heals, her buff disperses, and she resets. That said, taking physical damage is never advisable because allowing yourself to bleed for a small boost could be life threatening, but it would be useful when responding to a sucker punch. In any other scenario Yang should be mastering a balance of her aura taking damage and then her dishing it out, instead of just flying in to fuck people up, she can be smart and overcharge herself to end fights quicker. Dropping to say 60% of her total HP points, (For math sake we say she has 100) to dole out the 40% of damage into 80% (80 points for math) on the return, but she should never play glass canon because even though taking 90% of her aura off to return 180% more damage would end near any fight with one good hit, any slip up and she could die. As a numbers game it gives her room to be smart, and can create tension through an equilibrium. "Do I let myself get hit by this?" "Can he tough through the damage I'm returning?"
Tell me this isn't the most consistent way it should have been explained from the start.
It seems that aura breaks occur at 0 on the hp bar while your aura still protected you until then. My guess is that the school placed a safety restriction of stopping fights at 15% as to avoid anyone getting injured because they didn't calculate damage down to the exact %
They why did no one complain when Mercury aura broke?
8:56
Wasn't Aura healing the user one of the first things we see it do? How is it surprising? Jaune's Aura heals the cut that he got from that branch.
Imagine if there was some sort of downside of having your aura broken, Yang could just let it go to about 1%, turn it off, get a stupid ass damage boost, keep fighting that way until the aura is fully healed up, turn it back on/taking actual damage and then turning it back on and repeating that cycle, she could fucking solo anyone ever
I'm gonna be honest, I feel Monty made aura so he won't have to do more work. Think of it like this, 2D animation is pretty difficult but if you want to change something, you simply draw the change: rips in clothing, cuts, bruises, blood, etc. But in 3D animation like RWBY, you essentially need to make a new model of what you want to change. Like if Ruby's hood were to suffer from battle damage, Monty would have had to make three or four models of her hood to show it getting more and more worn as the battle continued; and that's something as simple as a hood that's one color. Thus, Monty probably got the idea to make an ability everyone has to make his job easier, and aura is born. Monty's way of preventing question like, "Why is it that when the girls fight, they walk away without a scratch?"
They should have just made adam’s semblance to be able to put his aura into other objects so he can instantly cut through other auras that would have made a lot more sense for Adam as a whole
Most of the time I forget aura even exists in fights because it's rarely used or mentioned unless it's convenient to the plot. Like you said, it's broken almost immediately in a fight, so there's basically no point in it even being there. How many times has aura even been mentioned besides when teaching the viewers about it or when it relates to Jaune? The only indication of it existing when the plot doesn't need it is in the shimmer of it breaking and no longer being there - it only exists to stop existing.
They could always use it as "it lets you survive the first hit in a fight", and could play around that to avoid a sucker punch or give people a reason not to use their strongest attack first. Or have them activate it as an actual forcefield like Ren with the snake and that way the characters have to be able to react to attacks to block them, meaning Ruby could get a hit in with her super speed without aura blocking it. Or make it so it passively blocks SOME damage but never runs out, which means they can take more than a normal human, without being invincible because of aura, but a strong enough attack or even just enough small attacks could still take them out, and that would allow for more epic fights with them surviving great feats, but still let them get injured in fights. It really just needs consistency and to have an effect in every fight instead of only when convenient.
When the characters aura is in red it's at a danger portion, it isn't broken. When aura reaches 0 from an attack that's when it the shimmering effect happens. Being in the red in v3 was just for tournament rules and isn't meant to be an indicator for it breaking. Mercury's aura was at 0 when it broke in v3 and he's the only one who's aura we know broke on screen during tournament.
I wish a characters colours became darker or muddier when they were low on aura/hp as a stylistic indicator
Okay, I'm late but I just had a thought. What if Aura was used kind of like the MP bar in Kingdom Hearts? In KH, the MP bar is pretty much what limits you from spamming magic all the time. So what if Aura worked the same? You can use your Aura to protect yourself and when it runs out through overuse of semblance you're susceptible to real damage. You can either fully use Aura as your shield, project it in using your semblance, or do a smart combo of both. Of course, the show would have to establish a proper power scale but I feel like it'll kind of work and actually limit characters and make them be smart with strategies and stuff. I hope I explained that alright, I feel like it'd be better to show lol.
Examples could be a mech breaking punch from Yang, summon from Weiss, or Ruby's petal form thing would take all their Aura while a strong punch, glyph, or simple speed would take less.
I always thought you had to be conscious for your aura to work
Yeah you do.
While I like the introduction of aura break, I also think it's not necessary for tention. Take Adam vs Yang during volume 3 as an example: Yang had her aura low enough for Adam to bypass it with a powerful attack. They could have done something like that for Weiss on volume 5.
Remember how important dust used to be? We really havent seen it in a couple years huh
Every weapon uses Dust. They all have "Dust Bullets". Not to mention there was a lot of Dust in volume 7 (most notably used to start fires in Mantle during the riots)
I never realized how much of this concept was built on knowledge of fantasy and game tropes.
It seems to be pretty simple to me.
Its a magick shield. It absorbs damage by reducing spirit energy (mana, magick, etc)
Its the same idea as the shields in halo or the new way they do damage in Call of Duty series and a bunch of FPS games. While shield is up you get minor health regen.
If the enemy does more dmg than your shield can take that damage applies to the body.
Also, physics are kinda rough in this show. Force field or not, hitting the ground at high speeds should rupture internal organs.
The active/passive debate is interesting. I think its somewhere in between. I’ve come across the idea of an aura when dealing with magic systems.
Aura is an energy field around a person. It is recharged from the soul and protects the soul from magic. So the aura exists in everyone. Its like a muscle. Its always there but not always flexed. Not everyone trains their muscles. So while activating an aura would be a reflex for a fighter, a civilian would not know how to turn that energy into a protective shield. Therefore an unconscious person would be helpless as they would drop their aura shield.
John, as a new and undisciplined fighter, shows this. He may have a “strong aura” or whatever, but getting hit still hurts and he lacks the discipline to
Its active in the sense that it must be activated and requires some concentration or effort if you want to use it shield physical damage. (Which can become a trained response).
But its passive in the sense that it provides minor healing benefits as a passive skill, and probably has internal benefits like stamina regen or just keeping the body functioning.
When it “breaks” it can no longer provide active benefits but that might be different from being depleted. Aira depletion implies there is no energy to form a shield. An aura breaking means that the shield is no longer active. Theoretically it could just be the user losing concentration. But it could also be running out of energy.
At least, thats how I see it. Maybe I’m too accepting of contradictions.
yes very well explained
Jaune sort of demonstrates stuff Ren explained in Volume 5, but not in ways clearly visible. I'm not sure if it's because of the writers trying to explain things they realized they didn't explain properly through Jaune or if they were trying to explain the previous information poorly.
They basically explain that rookies can't use Aura passively because that's something you need to train for. It adds up to the dialogue in Volume 1 claiming Jaune was having trouble keeping his aura up despite having "a lot of it", because his problem is that he isn't able to use it very effectively. There's still questions of how Jaune was different from Oscar at the time and how much training it takes to use Aura properly, but the idea of rookies not being able to use aura at it's full potential was at least shown and told, but just not clearly enough to avoid confusing most of the audience.
We also saw Jaune's aura healing before, but we still don't know what the extent of their healing is. Does it only heal certain types of injuries, do they need consciously use aura for it, does it protect Qrow's liver from alcoholism, etc. Since we rarely see it intentionally used, we don't know what the possible ways of using it are. Despite it being hinted that Aura can do more in WOR, only see Aura used to block damage. I hope that they introduce exceptions to explain Aura further, and show us ways of using Aura that most people don't use.
Really, the aura breaking thing could've just been explained away as a maiden thing. The maiden, because they have so much magic power they are not ready for, their aura is weaker, so much weaker, their aura's break.
A normal aura can't break but a Maiden Aura can. That would be my idea at least.