Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27234079-20190901125053/@comment-4010415-20190901205905

EmBELLEm wrote: i see the amber one as more "dust activation". idk how to explain it. to me, yes, anyone can activate dust "point it in the direction and shoot" or like "make a sword burn" or "hold a lightning crystal at the enemy and shoot lightning"

while when i hear "Dust manipulation", i see it more as Dust crystals flying around, or like actually controlling the element after it gets discharged from the crystal.

I think "my version of dust manipulation" is Maria since the sickles floated around her on their own. I guess Dew, sure, it could also be "Dusr does what it wants after being let loose, what of nature and all". And Weiss... since... her glyphs can do whatever they want :P

...then again it's anime fanatsy logic and I know what I signed up when we started watching the show, haha Like I said, though, Weiss didn't use any glyphs that time. She channeled the fire Dust to the tip of Myrtensater, and then tiny little flames flew around the room and planted themselves directly on the wicks of all the candles, without a single glyph in sight. This means Weiss herself made them do this without her Semblance - in other words, directly manipulating the Dust with Aura alone.

And it still seems convenient, to me, for Dew's tornadoes to surround Sage, move in circles around him while closing in on him, and then combine into a single tornado and throw him out of the ring. I had assumed that Dew made them do that.

The easiest forms of raw Dust use with Aura are indeed things like "Aim my staff at them and 'turn on' the crystal with my Aura" and "Coat Myrtenaster's blade in fire Dust and then swing it", but at the very least, we have now seen very clear fine-tuned manipulation and control from Weiss and Maria as of Volume 6, with another possible example being Dew with her tornadoes in Volume 3.