No Respassing Allowed

Ok ok ok, I’ve been trying to just use this as an art blog but I’ve been thinking about this forever and wanna put it into words. If you don’t care about worldbuilding or the web series RWBY go ahead and skip this buddy.

Ok, so if you care about worldbuilding but don’t know what RWBY is, the general plot is that these kids go to a special school to become hunters and fight these monsters called Grimm. They do this using very goofy weapons and powers called semblances. While every semblance is unique and seemingly have no limits to what they can be, most every character knows of them from the start and no efforts are made to hide it from the general public (the opposite actually, there’s an internationally broadcasted tournament where semblances are used, explained to the in-universe audience by the commentators and are understood so thoroughly that they can measure someone’s remaining magic via a digital health bar).

So in Volume 5 of the series the protagonists are explaining the concept of semblances to a new character, and Nora-one of the secondary characters-refers to them as “like having your very own superpower”. While that may seem like a complete throw away line, it immediately took me out of the show. Sure, if I were describing the show to someone who’s never heard of it, I’d probably use the term superpower when explaining semblances, but Nora is a character in the show.

It’s such a minor thing to focus on and I’m probably the only guy focusing on it, but I think a big thing about worldbuilding and writing characters within these worlds is being able to hone in on how things look from their perspective. In superhero comics you’ll often see a hero’s abilities referred to as a superpower, since they’re often outside the norm of what people in that universe are capable of. In a lot of Shonen anime (a genre which RWBY draws heavily from) it’s common to see a lot of worlds where people can do [blank], [blank] being basically superpowers but how the characters have come to know them as. Naruto has jutsu, BNHA has quirks, you get it. You could sub in the word superpowers and it’d still make sense, but to the characters all they’ve ever known these powers as are “that jutsu” or “his quirk”. To the characters of RWBY superpowers are semblances, and while not everyone has them most everyone knows about them.

It just kinda takes away from the immersion to have characters describe regular parts of their world with terms we use for the impossible. You wouldn’t see someone sprinting and think “wow he’s got his own superpower!” Because you could sprint too if you didn’t spend all your time writing breakdowns of one line in a web cartoon, it’s something we know as achievable in our reality.

The crazy thing is I know the RWBY writers get me on this cause in the same volume the whole cast freaks when they learn magic is real. Nobody bats an eye when a semblance turns you into rose petals, but to know somebody can turn into a bird through magic rocks their whole goddamn world. Sure, to most viewers that scene was ridiculously overblown, but in the context of the story they were shocked because that isn’t achievable in their reality. THAT’S what they should consider a superpower, because when you say someone has a superpower it draws to mind the idea that what they can do is beyond the possible as we know it.

Nora calls a semblance a superpower in that one instance because whoever wrote that line could only think of how they would describe a semblance to somebody else. The worldbuilding lesson here I guess is to take some time to think of how people in your universe approach their version of the mundane.

This is a lot of words about a very small detail of a web series, I can only imagine this is the same kind of thing those guys on YouTube talk about when they spend 2 whole human hours talking about one episode.