User blog comment:IamJakuhoRaikoben/Chapter 473: Red Lightning, Review./@comment-1776824-20160216185112

Okay, so I got the raw.
 * 1) Magical Barrier Particles are literally magical barrier particles. Yes, I know. It's stupid, but it's the hand we were dealt. Doesn't change my opinion of the chapter, it just invalidates my argument that what Wahl did was impossible and made no sense. It makes complete sense now, but it's equally as retarded.
 * 2) The red lightning was, indeed, Yuri's, or perhaps an homage to some technique Yuri once possessed. The kanji is 雷汞・赩御雷 (it has katakana that says ライコウ・アカミカズチ), which translates the name to Mercury Fulminate: Red Lightning (roughly; I'll see what Crunchy says later). I took the individual bits of the name and did some digging, and here is what I found: if you take the character 御 and look it up, or if you actually just know Japanese, you'll find that it's an honorific used to indicate respect for the noun that follows; this respect can vary from basic, familial respect to god-like respect/extreme respect to some spiritual figure. Either way, one can see that Laxus created this technique with Yuri in mind, indicating that although Yuri did initially use regular lightning, it was entirely plausible that later on down the road (14 years passed from the day Yuri learned Lightning Magic to the day he died, after all), he learned how to create this exact kind of lighting. Perhaps the flashback was meant to indicate that Laxus learned more from Mavis about his great-grandfather than we saw, but still, it validates the red lightning to some degree. It's literally lightning that surpasses lightning; completely explosive like we thought.

Or something. =)