Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1.40.59.59-20160717064827/@comment-86.148.177.208-20180107152712

SomeoneYouUsedToKnow wrote:

I'm saying that the Aura Sparkles, indicate that the hit received dealt so much damage that one's Aura was barely able to block it. There's so much it can handle in 1 hit and that hit reached that limit. That's what my idea is.

It means that the oponent would be a serious threat to the character, because their shield can barely handle the pressure. Whether their Aura would even be close to 0% is an irrelevant question to this Idea.

2) "No one being in danger", maybe. "Boring", not necesarily. We've had fights that didn't have a definitive sense of danger or threat yet still were entertaining.

Like in this video. You know the guy has no problem and there's no danger involved, but it's still fun to watch and exciting to see.

(this inability to hyperlink is getting on my nerves now) The way you’re putting it forward makes it seem like that is the only way to read it. Yet if you emphasise the threat level via a character’s defensive limit being matched multiple times, then where do you stop? You can only pull that trick maybe three times max and still expect the audience to be tortuously gripped in fear as to whether ‘this time his defense could break!!’ Actually now I’m looking at it, you make an arbitrary distinction between the damage one’s aura receives and how much it subsequently depletes, I mean Miles does say (//youtu.be/wdUMisVDijM?t=50m56s)... All we’ve seen from the show along these lines is how the more you brace for the hit, your body suffers less trauma (compare Emerald & Adam one-shotting Coco & Sienna, to Junior snagging Yang’s hair while she’s focusing on wailing on him, to Mercury straight up blocking Yatsu’s telegraphed attack). Although whether this means aura takes more of the damage onto itself (like sacrificial protection in bike helmets), or just works to deflect more of the force elsewhere (remember (//youtu.be/fAcfTfm5e9U?t=5m39s)?); we don’t know. What we do know is that if you take a critical hit that removes 95% of your health, you can’t afford to take that hit a second time. Unless I’ve missed smth the way you explain your theory doesn’t excuse how Ruby’s aura could’ve survived to do its little shimmer thing thrice in a row. I mean just passing a sheen over the character’s body with a distinct lowering whine is enough to convey that they’re now in deep water. There’s quite a difference in meaning between fights which are for fun and those which are for tension. We see vol2 open with a insouciant, all-out food fight and we were entertained and rapt the whole the way through. We see vol3 end with Ruby rushing towards the top of the tower, we see Cinder crush Pyrrha with brutal metal against unforgiving concrete and her aura drains in an instant; we are also glued to our screens. It’s in that instant that all the dread from Penny’s recent quartering and Yang’s dismemberment comes back to haunt us in the realisation Pyrrha is truly in danger. So like Chushio said, remove that by removing aura itself and voila, we've no longer got a clue what the stakes are meant to be.