Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25266931-20170224140119/@comment-4010415-20170228015540

KNN005 wrote:

@Chi: 1) Did you see those slashes Adam was doing in the 4th intro? What's your opinion on that?

2) I mean absolutely no disrespect when I say this: I don't care what most people think when I write. I know lots of people that will shit all over ideas I come up with, then fanboy over the same ideas in their favorite manga. People are wishy-washy. If I want to make a character a master of swordplay from chapter 1 and have all the growth be mental, (and all of the struggle would come from coming up with tactics and using their brain to figure out what's going on) who's gonna pull out a rule book that says "you can't do that"? Not saying, that's what you're saying, just making a point that unless someone is willing to physically fight me, they can expect I'm gonna do whatever I want all the time. Period. That's what being an artist is. All artists can create whatever they want. For better or worse, once you make something, you stand by it. 1. Adam is at a higher level than Team RWBY currently is, due to him being older and more experienced. Blake herself called Adam her mentor in Mountain Glenn ("I had a partner named Adam... more of a mentor, actually."). Though, overall, his attacks throughout the majority of the Black Trailer were not much different or that much stronger than Blake's, aside from the fact that his sword's blade appears to be made of fire Dust, hence the fire trails some of his attacks made. It was his Semblance that really made a difference.

But we've been told that his Semblance is a bit similar to Yang's. He absorbed a very, very powerful attack from the giant robot, and he returned that power multiplied, which resulted in the robot getting disintegrated. However, we know that his Semblance isn't always that powerful. If it was, Yang would be dead. He hadn't absorbed enough power to do more than cut off her arm. In the Yellow Trailer, Yang basically did something similar to Adam. She had enough power saved up in her Semblance to explode the entire dance floor in the nightclub with the tantrum she threw over Junior pulling her hair out.

Both Yang and Adam are capable of pulling off a huge, devastating attack via their Semblance, if they can absorb and save up enough power to do it.

2. The thing is, your style actually isn't bad, per se. It's all about the execution, how you do it.

I know this is a terrible example, due to it being mainly a comedy anime with just a bunch of wacky goofy stories and not much serious fighting, but Gintama has a couple main characters who are really powerful from day one. One of them has superhuman strength, and the other, Gintoki, is an incredibly skilled swordsman. Though, in their universe's Japan, swords are banned by the aliens who run Japan, due to samurais having fought back against the aliens trying to take over. Only the special ops police are allowed to have swords. Gintoki gets away with carrying his sword because it's purely made of wood and no one takes it seriously. But, as he says, a samurai's true sword is in his soul. He was able to break a cop's sword blade with his wooden sword.

I didn't get super far into Gintama, but I recall there is an arc that was actually really serious and had a serious plot going on, and Gintoki and his friends had to fight some bad guys, and he kicked ass! But the way that it was executed had there still be struggle and danger and uncertainty over whether or not the good guys would succeed, despite Gintoki being an incredibly skilled swordsman.

So, yeah, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have characters start out super powerful from day one. What matters is how you actually execute that, and RWBY... did not execute things very well. The way that RWBY's story is set up doesn't really allow for the main characters to be super powerful and still have it make sense, due to them being just first-year students. You'd have to change the story.