Talk:Carmine Esclados/@comment-25936766-20190701230014/@comment-35434444-20190818112354

 @Sentry 616

Does a can opener transform into a completely different utensil if you use it to open cans of pears one day and then cans of pineapple slices another day?

If differentiating powers were that easy Fatman wouldn't have been able to raise the criticism that semblances fail to be unique despite having been explicitly stated to be so in the first place.

Anyway, I was rather hoping that EmBELLEm would point out my conspicuous mistake of having forgotten that Weiss and Winter have the same semblance and Sun and Blake's semblances are identical but with only cosmetic differences, but it seems I have to do it myself. (Could he be developing some preflexes of his own?)

I don't actually think these count. The story is just bad at explaining their place within the setting, creating discontinuities in the lore that would enhancing the lore if they were sufficently elaborated upon.

Weiss' semblance being hereditary plays into the importance by emphasizing how much family connections and status have shaped her identity. This also implies that there is a genetic component to semblances which offers further opportunities to expand the lore by creating genetic classes of semblances. We also no longer have to ask why semblances are unique because there uniqueness would then be one in the same with biological diversity. (Although this has the implication that Weiss' family is heavily inbred, which not everyone will be comfortable with.) As an aside, this appears to be the solution given in My Hero Academia since it's possible to breed children with specific semblances and being quirkless is treated like a genetic defect with phenotypical markers.

Another way of going about it would be to make the hereditary nature of Weiss' glyphs a characteristic of the semblance itself; overriding the more general rule that semblances are unique with a more specific rule. My Hero Academia also does something like with One For All which originated as a semblance that had no properties other than being transferable. (I personally think this solution works to the strengths of the narrative better because it has a more mythological bent to it whereas the genetic raises questions as to whether or not semblances can be manipulated and moulded through technology and is more sci fi.)

Similarly, metatexual means could be used to give context to the similarity in Blake and Sun's semblances. The two contrast each other (or at least they would if anyone had remembered to give Blake a personality at all, but we at least still have her design to go on) with Sun being a sanguine and Blake melancholic. While I don't care about Blake herself enough to be bothered by who she hooks up with like so many other people, Black Sun would have made much more thematic sense than bumblebee and would have lended significance to their semblances if Blake's clones were meant to be the shadows cast in relation to Sun's light clones, so to speak.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">There are other examples of the double team horse being beaten to death, like that one guy who could make a trumpet quartet of himself, but these all at least have some half decent pretext to differentiate them and typically only serve as background characters anyway who can afford to be less fleshed out. -- Not great, but not worth as much crap as they get for it either.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">

<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">What I'm trying to say is that RT doesn't fail to make semblances unique and neither is Raymond's solution really a bad one, only the way in which he presents it because it leads us to think of it in all or nothing terms when a more fluid definition would clarify things much better and enrich the story.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Yes, minor cosmetic changes can be enough to create a unique semblance, but this should be an exception not a rule and the narrative should always work to provide a thematic framework for the exception wherever possible, and I think that's what Raymond was really getting at since he seems to draw influence from My Hero.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">I've given him trouble about this bother, so if this somehow gets to him, I'd like to offer him an apology and to tell that I understand his idea now. His work is commendable and I hope he succeeds in helping M&K to make better choices in future which may well have already happened because of how Camine's telekinesis seems to be an expression of her shady manipulative personality rather than the reassuring, whimsical --janitorial-- teach-me-politics-by-turning-me-into-an-ant-please-Merlin feel that Glynda gives off.