Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-294840-20170115115407/@comment-4010415-20170219063659

69.138.248.186 wrote: I'm guessing it's because Ren was in a more stressful situation. His parents were dead, the thing that killed them was killing others and slowly coming towards him. Everything he knew was gone. For the most part Jaune has always had someone around that had his back.

"We keep each other safe."

He's never had a dire situation like Ren. I've seen it argued that his trigger with Cardin wasn't the fact he was being beaten up but the idea that Cardin would go after his friends. It makes me wonder if the aura colors have a deeper meaning or have different triggers. That, and Ren had to find the resolve to do what his father told him to: Take action.

He saw that Nora was in danger, but he was terrified and thought there was nothing that he, a lone child, could do. But his father told him that doing nothing is the worst action to take.

In a literary sense, there's a reason the episode showed that scene with Nora being bullied and Ren being too afraid of the bullies to help her. It acted as a parallel to the later situation with Nora hiding from Grimm. In both situations, Nora was alone and being threatened, but Ren was too scared to do anything about it.