User blog comment:WarrenWitch/Dust is not magic/@comment-23784953-20130721233859

I've been thinking on how Dust seems very similar to Spirit Stones from Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits. For those that don't know, Spirit Stones are used as an energy source, is mined, is used to perform magic and if I remember correctly, as a nuke.

Now that I got that out of my head, I wanna complement Dust =/= Magic further.

Once again, I'd like to point out that the definition of magic is still vague for us.

Firstly, I personally differentiate "magic" and "spells". Magic is a rare supernatural phenomenon that may or may not be caused by something or it occurs naturally. Spells are magical moves that are performed by someone or something.

It's thanks to JRPGs and anime that our normal definition of magic is warped into a hybrid of both: "something flashy and elemental that may or may not have magic cirles or runes". Thanks to that, the original term of magic tends to be lost, which is loosely "a miracle". But that only applies to Earth.

The RWBY world is not connected to Earth, so their definition of magic will probably be vastly different. The feats they perform will probably look magic to us, but to them, it's the equivalent of us using an assault rifle. This is emphasized further by the non-Dust users like Roman using a Red Dust crystal as a grenade that needs to be manually detonated. Both Glynda and Crimson don't perform magic with Dust, they're using Dust to create spells.

I can't get further comparisons to Dust since we still have no clear examples of it being used by a machine. Possibly, they're also used by Roman's ship and the Beacon Academy airship.

If that's the case, then Dust is like the fusion of oil, gunpowder and the hundreds of spell components witches and wizards on Earth use simplified into a single source to them.