User blog comment:Wrath022/Chapter 517: Wendy Belserion, Review/@comment-24039234-20170116172626/@comment-24039234-20170117180935

The pathway thing occured to me as well, that would've been another good one. :)

As for the rest, I think that the properties of "magic" in FT are not that well defined that we could decide something like this. Mashima only very rarely states any rules, and even when he does, later he forgets or changes them on a whim, as his vision of the story dictates. For example: there was such a thing in the beginning as a distinction between holder and caster type mages. Remember those? Or even better, in one of the first episodes it is stated that mages specialize in magic, thus their bodies are mostly frail. A rule that was considered as common knowledge, yet nine out of ten of mages break it.

In this specific case, it would be important to know how much of magic is learned, and how much depends on the capabilities of body. It's evidently a mix of the two, as physical skills are in real life, but how much? We know that magic can be learned, but we know, that ability is a limiting factor. We know that most individuals are specialist who have a predisposition for certain kind of magics, yet we see, mostly from older, high level people that there is some science like element in it as well with formulas and such (Amaterasu, was it?), which definitely can be learned as well (btw this is why August is supposed to fearsome, because he knows shit - when will we see that...?). Most of these were hinted at, but only as much as to create a sense of intuition in the viewer, but never was anything really explained.

So, how much of the two enchanter's knowledge would be valid in their old body? Especially since the situation is complicated by dragon slaying magic which is more physical than the average? Honestly, I don't we have any logical ground for any argument. My intuition leans toward accepting what happened, but I can certainly understand any different oppinion, since I think it depends on our intuition more than our thinking.

That's my two cents, at least. :)