User blog:Sorairo/Aura, Dust, and the RWBY Panel

Warning: A TON of words in this post.

Okay....so Aura pretty much blindsided me. Though in hindsight I suppose I should have seen this coming since RWBYworld seems to be filled with color......motifs (if that's the right word). People having auras of a certain color shouldn't have been too far off from something that Monty, Miles, and Kerry would come up with.

The RTX Panel
I was basically watching a section of the and right around 39:40, there is a guy that comes up and asks about Crimson and her lack of a weapon which could use Dust. They know all about Aura and Dust at this point and we (the audience) have no clue Aura exists.

The Responses
Kerry: So, Dust is a very big topic. We spent a lot of time on it. It is essentially our magic. We don't want to use the word magic. That was a very big deal. This is not magic, this is Dust.

Kerry: They use Dust in their weapons but they don't have to use a weapon to use Dust. There's going to be very different ways for people to use it, and that's going to kinda come into play later....

Miles: You can kinda pick up on some things in the Blake trailer as well, oh, I was going to say when you rewatch this episode but that will be in a little while. If you look closely you can see, um, you can kinda see where it's coming from. Anyways, but yeah, there are many applications of Dust.

Kerry: Things glow.

What Their Responses Might Mean
I'm pretty sure that the last comment that Kerry makes is a reference to Aura since we know now that it is what makes everyone glow in Episode 6. From there, I think I can go ahead and assume that what we saw in the Blake trailer with Adam and his powers was also an application of Aura in an offensive manner.

But something curious here is that Miles and Kerry seem to be talking about Dust and Aura almost interchangeably. Okay, maybe interchangeably isn't the right word, but up to this point before I saw episode 6, I had assumed that they were talking about the effects of Dust the whole time. But now that Aura's been introduced, and we know now that it is what makes people glow, I'm now thinking that they were referring to Aura (even though the person was specifically asking about Dust).

But what does this mean for Dust?

 * Dust could be something that needs Aura in order to activate. It could be some medium through which you can channel your Aura powers and create specific elemental effects.
 * Dust could be something like solidified Aura.
 * Either way there's some sort of CLOSE relationship between Aura and Dust.

And what does this mean for the powers we have seen displayed thus far?

 * In Ruby's Trailer, are we seeing Ruby put some kind of dark colored (black with a red tinge) Aura to use against the Beowolves?
 * I mean, all I see is her put in that special magazine and then instead of shooting out a blast of fire along with a high caliber bullet, we see some dark cloud form around the end of the barrel of Crescent Rose.
 * I don't think anything comes out of the barrel either (though I do know that she expels bullet casings). She never fires the sniper rifle at the wolves and only uses the force from the recoil from the explosion to tear them up.
 * Could it be that the special magazine is some method through which one's Aura (or maybe just Ruby's) can be focused and fired in order to propel the scythe?
 * For Weiss, I don't know if I can point to an instance where she relies solely on Aura.
 * The one thing that I can think of that would be some indication of Aura would be when she first activates her power and her fingers glow with some white light.
 * But her attacks so clearly rely on Dust that I don't know where Aura factors in.
 * For Adam, I think I can say now that his special Moonslice attack or Seeing Red power is pretty much Aura.
 * For Yang, I'm pretty sure that the fire we see surrounding her is from her aura.
 * As for the eye color change, I have no idea what that is. Any thoughts?
 * For Crimson, yeah I fully agree with the anon that said that she uses Aura to deflect Ruby's bullets.
 * Though whether or not she uses Aura to fire off bolts of fire at the others is still unknown.
 * For Glynda, she does glow purple so I imagine that's her personal Aura color.
 * And if Dust is something that can be activated by Aura or augmented by Aura in some way, then she's pretty much channeling her Aura into the Dust and causing those storm clouds and manipulating those building shards.