Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-28189972-20160414231859

I posted this on reddit, but I'm curious to see what the opinion on here is.

Cinder's semblance is basically a giant question mark. Back before the maiden reveal, a lot of people were saying she had Pyrokinesis. Which was a fair assumption. We also had that line from Ruby, where she stated that she didn't think Cinder's usage of glass was her semblance.

Well, in the sense that Cinder doesn't magically have the ability to pull glass out of thin air, yeah. But what if her semblance is just basic Heat Manipulation?

In the fight between CEM and Amber, we see Cinder kick up some earth (I know sand makes glass, but there might have been some in the ground. Otherwise Miles and Kerry logic) and form it into glass. We also see the dust on her arms glow while she's doing it.

We know there are limits to what semblances can do. Maybe she was using the dust on her sleeves in tandem with her semblance to heat the earth to a certain point, then cooling it by utilizing her semblance and the environment's own temperature, to create glass.

She still needed to use normal weapons because her semblance wasn't strong enough to create glass by itself, and especially not strong enough to attempt some sort of heat-strengthening on the glass she could make via help with dust. However, once she got even just half of the maiden powers, that could've changed. The powers could have amplified her semblance, bypassing the need for dust. Once this amplification happened, she could actually create obsidian via dust, meaning she didn't need normal weapons anymore. Her weapons could be sewed into her clothes.

If you watch the fight between her and Ruby in Volume 2, when she creates the glass shards, her clothes don't glow like she did before she got the maiden powers. Which makes sense. Why would they? She doesn't need dust for heat anymore. She only needs it to create obsidian out of.

Heat Manipulation fits on another level, as well. Cinder stated she wants to to be powerful. Can you imagine how it must feel to only have low-level heat manipulation compared to outright Pyrokinesis in a world of crazy semblances? That could be a reason in itself she would hunt down the maiden. 