How Dancer skills actually work?

[Connor]

It’s a bit condensed, but basically I think that Dancers are channeling internal aether to manifest the effects of their dances.

We know that aetherial manipulation is generally influenced by the intent of the manipulator. It’s likely that when the Kriegenstanz was first made - or at least the dance moves - there wasn’t any intention to create a ‘magic dance’. But just as a Paladin’s magic is their fervent desire to protect their comrades made manifest, Dancers desire to bring healing and Succor to the land, and mend people’s hearts with their art. As such, I would guess that this desire resonates with their internal aether, causing the effects to manifest (i.e physically healing someone with a dance, or hurting an evil monster with a dance). Plus, we learn that a Dancer’s true goal is to stop the spread of the Totenkranz, and so the desire to halt the spread of this darkness is likely another reason why there’s a resonance between the Dancer and their aether

Manipulating ambient aether isn’t likely to be how Dancers do this. We know from White/Black magic’s history that attempting to use this kind of aether can be dangerous to both the caster and the land, and it tends to result in much larger scale ‘magics’. As such, I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that a group would inadvertently do, unless going out of their way to create world-shattering magics like in Amdapor / Mhach / That place Black Mages came from in Thanalan (Sil’dih?) during the War of the Magi (Nym were involved too but from the sounds of it they didn’t put up much of a fight before, you know, they got all stabby lol).

I don’t know how accurate it is but this has been my own assumptions on how the Dancers work with aether. Maybe it’s be more accurate to call it a ‘headcanon’ lol