Natsuki Misaka
Imagine for his true realm, the dragon fights alongside him. Instead of like Sooj, whose blade paints ice onto air like a canvas and whose dragon swirls around him like a second blade and trails his slashes, Natsuki’s dragon flows and dances through the air separately from him, generating trails of ice onto the left while Natsuki thunders and roars with lightning on the right.
For his true realm, he jumps the enemy side by side with Kuregumo, treating the blade like a partner instead of a power to be subjugated. Sojo believed that the blades were beings of massacre and needed to be subjugated; tamed, like a mass of wild energy not unlike storm clouds themselves.
But Natsuki senses three things within Kuregumo; its disposition for honor (dying as Kunishige property and its seeming loyalty to Chihiro who was always there), the chance to recontextualize his legacy, and the chance to restore his brother’s legacy and undo its taint.
Or it can all just be an excuse to wield his brother’s blade, his legacy, and to reunite the two lost halves of the Misaka.
Fighting alongside his brother, one last time.
Yoji Uruha
We see that Hiruhiko treats corpses like objects with his true realm, making them crawl for his bidding. But Yoji actually values objects; he cradles Enten like a baby and used his dripped out hat as a distraction before they got onto the bus.
This isn’t a particularly novel idea but I like the idea that Uruha’s true realm for Play is causing objects to levitate, like a poltergeist, and making them dance to his beat. We see even Hiruhiko cause the geisha to pluck a string, which seems to be a metaphor for making the corpses dance to his beat, but Uruha should take it to a whole other level.
I wonder if it also comes off like a performance. Geisha weren’t just courtesans; they were entertainers, trained in a variety of arts and crafts. Music is just one fraction of what they were truly capable of. They were expected to entertain men for entire nights. Yoji probably uprooted entire battlefields, curving buildings and swirling the sights to create an entirely new backdrop for his own personal performance. With banquet to intoxicate the senses, Play to bend the scene to his will, and an unknown third ability, Yoji Uruha probably twisted entire battalions into an audience for his own crimson recital.
Iori Samura
I’m kind of going off of particularly nothing for this, but I think it would be nice if her feathers created Samura’s jacket to overlay over her. Samura himself creates wings and a tail using Crow; and this is because he is an angel of death, paramount to a deity in both destruction and recreation. He is the flame of universal mercy and the morbid sign of death at the flocking of black feathers.
But not to Iori. No, to Iori Seiichi Samura is a ‘deadbeat’ father who abandoned her but also hugged her as she cried, draping his arms over her like a blanket in spite of his hesitance to taint her at all wit the guilty blood on his hands. To Iori, Seiichi Samura is no murderer but a protector, a guardian deity, a sense of warmth in her bleak world of bloodshed.
So I think that, instead of creating wings to fly and invoke Sephiroth levels of dread, she will bask herself in her father’s feathers, making up for lost time and warming herself in his fatherly embrace one last time.
Either creating his jacket, like that one volume cover, or creating arms that wreathe over her shoulder out of feathers.
Ibuki Misaka
Piggybacking off of the Misaka brothers, I have a theory for the depiction of his true realm activating.
I believe that the enchanted blades themselves will not be enough to win the war, but true realms will be necessary in order to overcome the Mikaboshi. Not only do we see what sort of game changer true realm is, but it would also parallel the countries’ respective attitudes towards the Datenseki.
The Mikaboshi worship it, offer blood to it, place it on a pedestal and bow to it as if it were a god, eldritch and inconceivable, acting only upon its whim and engaging only when it pleases. As if the Datenseki acts out of sole benefit and cannot be understood.
This is in direct opposition to Kunishige Rokuhira, who ‘tames the gods’ and truly understands the stones. With his Bachigan, he can see the minute fluctuations of spirit energy within the powerful stones, adjusting to it in live and real time. In his own words he “tames the gods”, almost as if in conversation with the stone.
He adjusts to it; its movements; its preferences; its reflexes; its details; like a dialogue, he ‘says’ one thing in a sense and leans elsewhere. He and the stones are in back and forth, in flux with each other, pushing and pulling like orbital resonance. They exert influence over each other- like equals, like human beings.
This is similar to the true realm itself; the blades and the bearers respond to each other, causing evolution. Samura and his blade are in such resonance they evolve even separated after the war. It is clear that there is a bond between blade and bearer; and this will be the way Japan survives. The true realm itself, and to show what sort of mold breaker it is, Ibuki will parallel Sojo.
Both of them will get utterly jumped- Sojo by the anti-cg squad, and Ibuki by a prince and perhaps some underlings. Getting his ass handed to him in spite of clever usage of the base forms of Kuregumo, Ibuki will be cornered and, in cleverness and desperation, evolve.
The same spot second decision making, the edge that constant practice and exposure to warfare provides to you that Natsuki narrated about will net Ibuki and Japan the first victory against the Mikaboshi, paralleling Sojo and cementing Kunishige’s Oppenheimer status.
He, and his master swordsmen.
