Talk:Santana/@comment-219.92.112.206-20150709073801/@comment-187.122.125.9-20150710223935

I think that the transformation in stone was a spontaneous reaction of the body in a tentative to avoid death, gaining resistance to sunlight (and hamon) at the cost of have to halt all bodily functions (remember that Caesar says that he can't use Hamon on them while they were in the stone state). Remember when Santana fought Joseph, after feeling hamon for the first time, he quickly developed that skin to disperse hamon and Joseph only directly injured him after he almost let it himself be absorbed, and Esidisi is impressed when he sees that Joseph hamon is strong enough to injure him, which leads me to believe that all pillar men are able to create that dispersal skin in contact with Hamon (Wammu only got hurt by the Cracker Boomerang, and the hits that Joseph made before that hardly hurt him, the same with Caesar bubbles only slightest hurt his finger and he recover almost instantly), the same way they are able to turn into stone to avoid death in contact with direct sunlight, imo they should not have much control over the transformation of stone and it must spend an enormous amount of energy to maintain this state and probably they lose consciousness during this period, and must absorb something (probably by instinct) to gain energy to wake up (Santana absorbed that snake even in that UV cell and Wammu used the power he absorbed from the nazis to awaken his masters) and this is likely how the hamon clan must have "defeated" them in the first place, perhaps fighting sufficient to force them to be exposed to direct sunlight by a extended period of time, and then hide them to avoid them to absorve other things to awaken prematurely (much like Santana), all the pillar men became stone if exposed to direct sunlight, the Kars' group desintegrated because they all are exposed to a powerfull and concentrated hamon that hurt them internally to a point that them cannot recover.

As why Santana did not have a mode, I believe it is because he never had the need for it (using the stone mask or not), Esidisi and Kars primarly developed their modes to kill the other pillar men (although not as powerful as they are, the other pillar men were also powerfull beings) and then them fought several hamon warriors and developed their fighting techniques properly, as Santana left behind only having to face humans or regular vampires.

The other pillar men don't have modes because is the stone mask that awakens the body manipulation power to do so, at cost to absorve various living things to maintain such power, what makes me belive that the pillar men are born with a less powerfull version of the undead powers that the stone mask awakens (maybe because them had a different more developed brain or something) what gives a extendend life span absorving other life forms but not body manipulation (or in a lesser form) and immortality (as seen that some pillar men had signals of aging, like the elderly woman of the same hierarchy as Kars) and as stated in the Kars' flashback, the other pillar men feared that the mask could lead to extinction of all other life forms (and them eventually) if more of them used the stone mask and rushed to execute Kars and Esidisi.