Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-24534644-20170630004409/@comment-25936766-20170724135732

RayStrikeAbius wrote:

1) Pretty sure that the Great War took place over 80 years prior, not 60.

2) I also have to ask why his age is listed as "Unknown". Surely he would know his own age, and if not it would be on record somewhere.

3) Another small discrepancy that pops up throughout the bio: this might just be an oversight, but he wouldn't have aspired to join the Atlesian military....

4) Separating them into multiple sections was an unusual, but ultimately good choice.

5) I'm more wondering why bribery wasn't used at some point during the backstory, as that's the only part of this nursery rhyme's history that actually stands out

6) I... was honestly horribly confused for a moment there. Then I realized the joke with the name. And I laughed. Well played, sir.

7) I don't understand how a person doesn't realize they have Aura though. How does one not notice that they have an equivocal force field around them protecting them from cuts and the like? 1) ....Ah, I see. A misunderstanding. See, the GW happened 80 years before RWBY's story started. And you are assuming I ended up his backstory at the time RWBY started.

But if I did that, it'd mean he only started looking for some helping hands for his bakery once he was in his 90s at the very least. He might be a Vet, but he's no Ozpin.

His backstory was never supposed to extend all the way up to "modern times". It ends some decades after the War, but also a few decades before the show. I'm not even sure if Herbert would still be alive by then, I'm not quite sure of the life expectancy for WW1/2 veterans.

......So, considering that it does not end by the time RWBY begins, read his story again. You'll see it makes more sense now and is far less questionable.

2) The idea behind it was that since he doesn't talk much about himself, and most people don't know much about him, no one really knows his real age. They can see that he's old ("over 60") but they don't know the exact age.

-

3) Damn, I feared one slipped my grasp.

---

4) But I always do that......

---

5) What. No. The Muffin Man is just about the Muffin Man. Back in Victorian London, households had much of their food, like Muffins, delivered to their doors by a "Muffin man". The rhyme was first recorded in a british manuscript near 1820.

The thing about "bribery" is not only not a part of the rhyme nor was it an influence in the slightest, it comes from a publication made nearly a decade after the rhyme was recorded.

--

6) .....Joke? I was just saying he never gave his Semblance a name.

---

7) The mind only registers what it notices, and it only notices what it pays some degree of attention to. As such, you can end up with cuts and bruises here and there without even remembering what hit you or when.

Since the story was set prior to the Academies, I assumed that knowledge about Aura and things related to it were far less common knowledge than they became 80 years later. Herbert did not know what Aura was, how it looked, or anything about it.

Combine that with his mind being focused on the war, where at any moment of the day or night, he and his teammates could have murderous Valesians and Vacuans, or bloodthirsty Grimm, swoop down upon them and start killing people.

He did not know what it was or how to identify it, and he didn't have time to think much about it during the war. And after the war he didn't want to think much about it either.