#sorry.i went onto a something of a pointless ramble?? im pretty sure people smarter and more eloquent than me

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

I was rewatching rc9gn and revisited “Dawn of the Driscoll” and I gotta say, Randy’s art of healing is crazily overpowered.

He revived someone who was reduced to nothing but bones and had been dead for who knows how long. Not only that but it was later shown that he revived various animals who had dissected and most were nothing but eyes. Not to mention he did all that from just skimming through the instructions.

Imagine the full potential that he could unlock if he studied the art of healing fully and practiced enough times!

Oh BOI YEs. It's ridiculous how overpowered Randy can come across, because the show wanted to make a funny episode (and we love that of course but still xD).

Like, how strong of a potential this boy has, if he managed to execute what must be one of the hardest techniques in the Ninja arsenal? Just imagine all the implications of that ability??? To literally save someone from a brink of death/resuscitate them? No wonder some ninjas go power crazy! I would too, if i had ability to bring back the dead!

Though I do like to think that there are more nuance to all of that, than it was shown in the series. (A bit of a me yapping on beneath, feel free to ignore it.)

One of the things that actually bothers me about this ability - is that technically, for something called the Art of Healing, we never saw actual healing performed (because its a kid's show duh but still) BUT it has been used in the show more to 'restore' inanimate objects (the bike) and bring someone "back to life" (skeleton & dissected animals) - which IMO is not 'healing' but more of a necromancy ability.

After all, Randy didn't restore Driscoll to full life (gave a fully functioning body back) and the animals/body parts are also in their post-mortem states. So, what he essentially did is reanimate remains, by (perhaps) returning their souls and binding them to what was left of mortal bodies (which probably reflected very badly on their mental state = reason why Driscoll&animals were full of anger/insanity) or sharing some of his own life energy to restore minimal physical 'aliveness' (I mean a bunch of eyeballs in a jar could hardly be called alive, but they do perform their basic function of looking/blinking). Seems like classic nercomancy to me!

Of course one could argue that the reason it happened is because Randy didn't execute the technique correctly, because he 'skimmed' through instructions, and that potentially he could have restored their bodies too....but I like to think that the ability have its limitations - and returning long-dead bodies to full life back (basically rebuilding a whole creature from a body part/single cell scenario) is one of them.

Otherwise, in my opinion, while it is impressive that Randy 'revived' someone long dead, what he has done is technically one of the easiest (and thus more dangerous) variation of Art of Healing/basically Art of of Necromancy - reanimation through spiritual energy, but not actually returning someone to full life. Another variation of Art of Healing - is Restoration of Physical Body without any sort of Spiritual Energy - aka the freaking bike. I mean, is it really healing if one just restored the original form of the object without any actual prior life in it??? Bike is not the same as a human after all, its not alive in any sense, it doesn't have a soul/life energy.

So you see, in these two occasions Randy used Art of Healing, none of them actually healed anything. Because actual healing of live things is much harder! And further proof of my headcanons is in the plants.

The original reason Randy learned Art of Healing is to restore their Botanical project - and despite hitting at first full blast before Randy lost control of 'beams' - it never actually worked on it. I mean, we basically see the plant still dead even as an already alive Driscoll pops out behind them!

So obviously healing a recently dead plant requires a much more fine touch/precise control than just full-blasting healing energy at long dead remains. And further emphasize on it we have with The Skunk Pine. The pine cone is alive and in whole condition - but the application of healing energy gave it a boost that accelerated its growth to the point that Randy implied that in few days it would be a fully functioning tree.

It kind of aligns with my understanding of how magical healing works - the healer basically shares their energy with the target to kick start and accelerate their own healing rapidly and sort of suppliment their reserves with the healer's help. But again - the pine cone was not injured/dead/damaged so it would be much easier for Randy to 'heal' it in order for it to grow rapidly - but no actual healing took place.

So the point of all this rambling recollections - is that while Randy's raw potential made something like reanimating and restoring look too easy - the things he did were already the easiest parts of Art of Healing because either option essentially requires only one aspect of either soul/body to be restored. The true Art of Healing is much more complicated. Not only it requires concentration and precise control/application in restoration of both physical and spiritual aspects, it also most likely has power requirements and repercussions to the user if they tried to overcome those limitations.

All in all, thinking about application of fantasy healing is always fun when you look deeper into its simplified canon version. ;)