Schnee Hereditary Semblance – Summoning
With training and effort, a Schnee learns how to use their glyphs to manifest familiar-type constructs. Each kind of familiar results in a unique form of summoning glyph, which could give away which beast a Schnee is about to call forth.
The familiar may have almost any form, but the Schnee is limited to the shapes of past enemies defeated only by pushing themselves to their limits, and thus far, Schnee have only displayed the ability to manifest the forms of fallen foes. The reasons why are not yet (and may never be) clear, and might be purely psychological. Weiss Schnee summons the form of the Arma Gigas she defeated rather than the Geist which possessed the armor.
No Schnee has yet been witnessed summoning a familiar based on a robot, natural beast, or other human being; only Grimm.
The Schnee is easily able to summon their familiars at much smaller-than-life sizes, even producing toy-sized manifestations of giant Grimm. Winter Schnee once weaponized a swarm of small Nevermores, which might have been an application of this ability together with a skill to summon many copies of the same beast.
No Schnee has been observed to conjure a familiar larger than the original foe, and summoning the shades of giant enemies at their full size takes much longer than summoning smaller or miniaturized servants. Presumably, larger familiars require more effort to summon and maintain than smaller ones.
The Schnee must maintain at least some level of effort to keep a familiar from fading away, and a sufficient shock can interrupt a summoning or dispel a manifested familiar. Winter needed to remain still and focused on nothing else to conjure her swarm of familiars, and being forced to dodge also forced her to stop summoning, as well as costing her the Nevermores already present. The farther Weiss sent her Lancer Queen from her position, the more she seemed to need to concentrate on keeping it extant under Ruby’s feet.
Further, the more a Schnee focuses on their familiar, the easier they find it to assist the familiar with the other applications of the Schnee Semblance. With almost no practice using a successful summon, Weiss not only provide glyphs for it to use as platforms and catapults, she could make her Arma Gigas simply teleport between glyphs, apparently using the same method of sympathetic transfer which allows a Schnee to channel the effects of Dust through one glyph and out another. Perhaps a Schnee could even use a familiar as a sympathetic medium for distant Dust casting.
It is unclear where Schnee familiars fall on the scale of dependence on or independence from their master’s control. At the Battle of Beacon, Weiss seemed surprised when her Arma Gigas’s glyph appeared, as if it was responding to her desires all on its own rather than answering a conscious summons, and she did not expect it to block the Paladin’s strike. At her father’s charity event, in response to her father’s manhandling, Weiss accidentally summoned a Boarbatusk that attempted to kill a woman Weiss found distasteful.
Winter’s Beowolf acts like a pet dog that seeks out her caress, and Weiss’s Arma Gigas displays mannerisms benefiting a fairy tale knight which are totally unlike the behaviors of a true Grimm. Clearly, even if Schnee familiars are completely independent of their master’s control, their natures are influenced by the desires of their summoners.
It is unclear whether a Schnee can see through a familiar’s eyes or read their minds, or whether a familiar can read its master’s mind or else operates on a limited understanding of what its master wanted when summoning it.
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onward to my sub-index on canonical Semblances
onward to my sub-index on familiar-type Semblances
onward to my Semblance super-index
onward to my sub-index on the Schnee Family










