Talk:Semblance/@comment-95.176.187.106-20150808112907/@comment-4010415-20150808143543

You're talking metaphorical breaking of a soul. We don't know if the laws of Harry Potter apply to RWBY, and we have no reason to assume so.

Blake's speech about how she's always running away doesn't give us 100% evidence on how Semblance manifests, unfortunately. It could easily be that her Semblance has nothing to do with the fact that she runs away a lot, and she just brought up her Semblance because it reminds her of how she's always running away.

Ruby's Semblance is speed, but she isn't always running away. In fact, she has a habit of wanting to stand firm, fight, and protect those who can't protect themselves. It was said in the directors commentary of Volume 1 that Ruby has natural talent in the field.

When somene has low self-esteem, they can end up linking unrelated things to some aspect about themselves that they feel badly about simply because those things remind them of that aspect. For example, if they feel like they're just an idiot who can never do anything right. If something goes wrong, through little to no fault of their own, they'll still blame themselves and say "I can't even do this right! I can't do anything right!" Blake was having that kind of rant.

She knows that her Semblance has more uses than just running away, considering she has used it for more than running away. We've seen her use it to confuse Torchwick (Black and White), we've seen her use it to charge toward the giant Nevermore and move through the air (Players and Pieces), we've seen her use it to quickly propel herself past an enemy in order to dodge its attack while simultaneously attacking it (the very first thing she does to the robots in the Black Trailer), we've seen her continually use it in the Black Trailer to move toward enemies and strike them.

She was just too caught up in feeling like a coward to think about her Semblance as anything other than a symbol of what she hates about herself.