That evening, I came home with a bit of a passenger. A small bit of plastic and metal in my pocket where I'd saved copies of the past few days' reports. I figured I could do some editing, and post my general findings on the fanfiction cliches, maybe with some notes on the sides. With any luck, it would help people make some higher-quality stuff.
Buuuuuuut I suppose I should have known better than that. I awoke to more than a few messages in response, all pretty much the same thing. "You just have no imagination", "You're stopping creativity", yada yada. That was pretty surprising, but mostly because I overestimated the internet. I didn't truly think that these communities could be so thoughtless, but in retrospect, I was getting these stupid ideas from them, and the communities obviously didn't see the flaws. Actually, I suppose it was that particular response that surprised me so much, not just that it was so negative.
I'm a scientist, I've dealt with mixed results. Sometimes experiments don't go as planned, but when it fails, I don't vapidly insist it's a success and say that anyone who contradicts me has no creativity or imagination. It's a failure, whether you see it as one or not, get over it. They're the ones that can't come up with better reasons for anything than "Because I said so", who can't make their ideas make sense, who apparently can't do anything interesting within boundaries or with any challenge, and I'm the one with no creativity because I told you about it?
Creativity requires challenge, it can't exist without it. It's about what can be done with what's available to you. It's about new, unique, and effective ways of doing things. Everything I'd talked about were tired, dime-a-dozen, ineffective ways of pretending to do things. If there was any creativity involved, they'd at least be new ways that didn't make sense. Creators would take a look at their collection of cookie cutters and at least think to expand it, if not avoid it. I don't think I've heard anything more foolish than how my expectations of creativity were anti-creativity.
I got the feeling that I was rapidly becoming a rather cynical critic. Guess I didn't really care, but I typed up my little mental rant, dressed it up a bit, and posted it up too along with my other ideas before heading off to work.
This time it was another typical day. The experiment coordinators had SEX with the chemists again, even though I wished they phrased it differently. They'd be going through the rest of their basic chemical tests on Peggy, checking for reactions that could help us determine the chemical makeup and structure of the creature. Applied Science was working on vases today, and… Actually there was a memo from management. I was surprised they knew how to write. Apparently they were not happy with our lack of progress this first week. If we couldn't even find something that hinted towards a promising avenue of research, they were threatening to restructure the lab's oversight and methods. "Restructure", an eleven-letter word! Perhaps I wasn't quite giving management enough credit. Maybe this was a good thing, in fact. I completely overlooked the possibility of their impatience, they could just shut the whole project down if it doesn't yield results fast enough for their liking. We just need to continue on, and things will be alright.
So! Next item on my agenda…. Semblances. God damn I really need to be more descriptive, even if I know what I meant. There were a lot of misconceptions about Aura and Semblance, it seemed. Attempts to manipulate or guide them weren't uncommon in our world's past. In ancient times, many families rose to power because of the semi-hereditary nature of Semblances. Occasionally warrior families would arrange marriages in the hopes of combining the two clans' Semblance aspects into something greater. The practice lasted a while, but didn't survive long after people realized that it wasn't doing any of them any good. The misconceptions that led to this era seemed to be repeating themselves in the word of fanfiction, and I certainly wanted no part in an attempted revival, so I had to set things straight.
Number one: Semblance stems from, and is fuelled by Aura. Occasionally, some can have negative side-effects, but they don't replace that basic cost. No Semblance can be infinite, or limitless, they're naturally bound by the user's Aura reserves. Flat-rate Semblances don't work for this same reason. I saw those a lot, "My OC can use his semblance for only 5 minutes", "Mine can only use his 5 times per day", come on. What sense does it make for the unique, tangible expression of your soul to say, "Oh, an arbitrary amount of time has passed? Can't work anymore", or, "You've used me twice, now you can't use me again until this other arbitrary 'reset' point", it just doesn't work. Sure, maybe you could use a Semblance for five minutes under certain conditions… But maybe for 10 if you only used it at half that potency, and two-and-a-half if you doubled it. A "Per-day" system makes no sense, because Aura regenerates constantly, your reserves don't just pop back up to full at midnight. Maybe when you're totally drained, it only takes a couple hours to charge back to full. Sure, it's an imperfect system; very generalized, but that's because it has to be, or are you going to try to tell me that you can quantify the manifestation of the soul? It's vague, but it makes sense, and it works.
Number two: Again, Semblances stem from Aura, which in turn stems from the Soul. This means that some ideas just don't work. Weaponized Semblances for example. What do you think it means if the manifestation if your soul can only be used to cause harm and destruction? Skill semblances are another one I saw, stuff like weapon wielding or even lock-picking, and they're the same thing. This isn't My Little Pony, the manifestation of your metaphysical being isn't a skill. Why would a Semblance even require specific other objects to manifest? What about the old standby of the Semblance to copy/negate other Semblances? Same deal. The expression of your soul is to rip off other peoples', or deny them? Real people just can't have souls like that.
Three: I'd be repeating myself again. So many Semblances are redundant and poorly considered, in the way they're used if not the way they function entirely. "My OC's semblance creates armor made from Aura to protect himself"... You mean like how Aura already does as one of its stock, non-Semblance functions? "My OC uses his pyrokinesis Semblance to burn his Human enemies alive"... Except that they also have their Aura to protect them, just as much as you're using yours in the Semblance to attack, and they have a significant home-team advantage as far as efficiency goes. You're always going to be on the losing side in that situation, short of an overwhelming advantage to begin with.
This is why Semblance breeding fell off, and only lasted as long as it did because of confirmation bias. People thought they could breed planet-cracking superhumans, ignorant of the fact that Semblance is fundamentally limited by Aura. The one thing that's been made abundantly clear from that history is that the Semblance does not make the person. Quite the opposite, in fact. It all depends on how effectively and creatively it can be used. No Semblance is or could be truly better than any other.
Like the Faunus one, this was a pretty simple report that I could write on my own without extra research. Luckily it still took up almost the entire day to track down the sources and records, with a few supplementary papers on the topic referenced for good measure.
I didn't bother to check on a single thing before I left. I hoped something would go wrong, so there would be even more reason to cancel the project outright, and I'd get a sweet severance package. With any luck, this was one of my very last days of work.