One really interesting thing about the TAZ: Balance universe is that the skills you possess are very much linked to how you acquired those skills and especially the person who taught you them. We see this first when Merle loses his battle-axe proficiency, and along with that loses his memories of training with the battle-axe. And it’s presumably why, in losing their Starblaster memories, Magnus, Merle, and Taako go from incredibly proficient to level 1, even though normal logic would dictate that they should only lose the memories of how they learned their magic/fighting/clerical skills, not those skills themselves.

I think this plays really nicely into the theme of bonds being incredibly powerful forces, so much that losing these bonds means losing actual physical abilities that you learned from them. So much that Taako learning a cooking skill (how to make tacos) from somebody else literally helps save the world. Characters in the TAZ: Balance universe aren’t just sheets of paper with their abilities on them; they’re made up of the relationships they have with other people. 

In The Stolen Century, the narrator says “Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives” — but it’s not just the capacity for love. It’s literally our ability to do anything that increases the more that we form bonds with peoople. 

And oh jeez, that’s pretty sweet.