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bestworstcase · 1 day
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Hello! Are there any songs outside of the RWBY soundtrack that remind you of Salem?
the ozlem song ever
obligatory within temptation
son lux this time
delain vengeance
obligatory grace mclean
the staves tongue behind my teeth
will wood dr sunshine is dead
bravely limiting myself to only one song from a musical
mirah goat shepherd (also the zhan tiri song of all time)
the cat empire daggers drawn
instrumental!
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bestworstcase · 2 days
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Are you open to dms? Or just prefer asks? Are reblogs with additions cool? Want to engage with you how you prefer
pretty bad at keeping up with DMs, asks and rbs are both cool! i uh, only answer probably about half the asks i get thanks to a combination of “don’t have brain for this rn, i’ll get to it later” + swiss cheese memory but i do like getting and answering them. rbs with additions likewise.
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bestworstcase · 3 days
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penny was the winter maiden for two days.
ozma has been reincarnating for centuries, if not thousands of years.
assuming that the maiden cycle depends on the exact same metaphysical process (which is in itself textually uncertain, given that the maidens are non-conscious entities said to separate from the host’s aura at death and cleave to another whereas ozma’s reincarnation works by combination of his aura with another—as described, these are explicitly different mechanisms, and because the different outcome of the two cycles (one overwrites the host, one doesn’t) are explained by this difference in mechanism, i see no real reason to question the overtly-stated differences in what is happening when a maiden finds a new host vs when ozma is bound to one), the notion that penny could have—in two days—achieved some mastery over the reincarnation process that has eluded ozma for, again, thousands of years, is… nonsense?
it’s the most grasping-at-straws out of a lot of very straw-grasping penny 3.0 theories and the premise is, more or less, “ozma has been needlessly murdering his hosts for thousands of years because he’s too stupid to realize that he doesn’t have to do that.”
when like. ok. listen to me.
in the lost fable, ozma takes control within seconds of landing in the new guy’s head. he’s not able to answer the question “what’s your name,” because he doesn’t know. jinn talks about ozma traveling for years before seeking out salem. he’s with her for years; they found a kingdom and have children. through all of this time, there is nothing to suggest that ozma has another presence in his head—until his reflection speaks to him, and he physically recoils in pure shock.
i think, when this began, there was no “merge.” ozma just landed in someone’s head and erased them, almost completely, right away.
in v8, oscar says he doesn’t like using magic because it makes the “merge” happen faster, and oz answers “i don’t blame you.”
many lifetimes ago, ozma either divided his magic or carved the divine blessings out of his soul and gave them to four young women who had helped him. the maidens persist as non-conscious entities who confer magical powers upon their host without, in any way, corrupting or taking over the host consciousness. meanwhile oscar is still holding on—by his fingernails, perhaps, but he’s still alive and himself—and he feels that using magic erodes him faster.
do the math.
at some point, ozma worked out that the divine magic he carried was killing his hosts, leaving behind just a reflection that monitored him to keep him in line. so he tried to get rid of it, by giving portions of that magic away, and it worked, even if not to the extent he might have hoped. the maidens are ozma’s best effort at sparing the lives of his hosts.
(reading between the lines of how oz phrases it to the kids—“i reincarnate, but my memories stay with me”—in combination with his obvious projection of his own suicidality onto salem? i’d bet that ozma was hoping to destroy his own consciousness when he did this, too, so that his future hosts would receive his remaining powers and inherit the task but not him.)
it’s a mistake to look at the resigned acceptance ozpin has now and assume that it’s representative of how ozma has always felt about his curse; the whole point of him as a character is that he’s been ground down and slowly corrupted in the gristmill of this curse over thousands of years.
and it’s also, frankly, a mistake to take penny clocking blake as a faunus because she saw blake’s ears through the bow in infrared or penny figuring out that ruby can carry people with her semblance after 1. ruby flew with penny in volume two and 2. several months of ruby demonstrating abilities in training that she’s been doing since v4 without consciously registering that she’s doing them, like splitting to go around obstacles, to mean that penny is uniquely insightful or good at “figuring things out” in general. she has superhuman sensory capabilities (infrared vision, aura-scanning) that give her an advantage in perception of certain situations, and she’s fairly book-smart.
that doesn’t make her capable of solving ozma’s Divine Curse after sitting with the maiden powers for Two Days in a war zone. lmfao
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bestworstcase · 4 days
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how do you feel about the idea that the dark veins on Salem's body are a result of Summer using her eyes on her? and if you don't think that's what caused it, what's your theory on what happened between TLF and current times to make it happen?
i think it begs the question.
if the veins are scarring left by the silver glare—and there’s no clear textual reason to think that they are, because cinder didn’t end up with anything like that and she’s the closest data point, and because salem’s indestructibility is otherwise inviolate—the presumption that summer specifically is the one responsible seems improbable given the timeline involved. it’s been perhaps thousands of years since the ozlem kingdom fell; salem met summer twelve years prior to v1; somewhere around half a century ago, she put a bounty on maria’s head because of her silver eyes, which—if the veins are scars—would suggest that salem knew the silver glare could harm her decades before meeting summer.
how likely is it that salem would know that without first experiencing it?—and if she had experienced before, it makes… no sense… to conclude that it didn’t leave scars until summer tried it. at this point you have to either accept as a prerequisite that summer was just special somehow, or invent convoluted explanations to prop up the theory when the much simpler answer would be that it happened a long time ago and the details aren’t narratively important.
that said, i don’t believe that the veins are scars at all. i think they’re connected to her exile from human civilization after the ozlem kingdom fell and consequent embrace of the grimm; there is nothing in the lost fable to suggest that salem didn’t crawl out of the grimm pool and proceed to try to live as much of a Normal Human Life as she could manage. meaning, staying far away from the grimm and living close enough to a settlement (and in regular enough contact) that she had a paved footpath leading right to her door.
take that away from her. banish her from civilization and leave her with nothing but the grimm to turn to for companionship. what happens?
it doesn’t make sense to me to assume that salem just, like, instinctively knew how to form grimm out of the pools or use geist-sigils or communicate with grimm. i think she probably had to figure all of it out through trial and error after she was cut off completely from human civilization. my theory is that the veins are something she developed through this learning and growing closer to the grimm.
(something similar happens to cinder when she uses the grimm beetle to take a portion of the fall maiden: either the magic or the grimm marks her. so there’s some precedent to suggest that this kind of thing is possible.)
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bestworstcase · 5 days
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@cryptidblues tumblr Ate this ask for some reason so copying text from the email notif
See I’ve always thought that the mechanism through which cinder stole the maiden powers (bug) from Amber made her a Grimm hybrid. And THATS why Ruby’s silver eyes worked on her at the top of beacon tower; regardless of the presence of the wvyern. Because underneath her skin she was Grimm (and still fully human). “Your newfound strength brings with it a crippling weakness”/“You said the light only reacts to Grimm but…it reacted to Cinder”/“perhaps there was something that you just weren’t seeing?” Leading from that the implicit threat of “Oz can’t defeat [Salem]”/“but maybe someone else can?” to Salem is not that Salem could be eradicated by silver eyes (go poof like other Grimm) but rather be put back in The Tower by silver eyes. By being turned to stone. Still immortal but frozen. Trapped. Her Freedom completely sundered. “You thought there was no greater punishment we could bestow upon you?”/“Your light comes from his brother”/“The god of light…his eyes”. There’s an assumption that Salem is invulnerable, no personal skin in the game, “she’ll come back”, nothing effects her, nothing sticks; but her running this risk of being petrified by silver eyes gives depth and high stakes to any interaction she has with Ruby face to face (and her possible complex relationship to a hypothetical favorite silver eyed lieutenant). ᓚᘏᗢ
the reason i Don’t believe the grimm beetle made cinder vulnerable to the glare atop beacon tower is that ruby hits her with a second full-blown glare in atlas towards the end of v7 and—even though cinder by that point has a whole grimm arm—cinder flies away from that one unscathed. either:
a) the implication salem makes in v5 that cinder can learn to resist the glare is true,
b) there is an additional, unknown but more important factor besides “grimm” involved here, or
c) both.
i think the answer is probably both, although more b than a. (maria sees the flash coming from the god of light’s eyes and concludes this power came from him; but she couldn’t see that ruby’s eyes were silver until she saw their light go off, and she missed those two silver-eyed children of ozma’s. “maybe there’s something you’re not seeing” is true of her, too)
(the silver light evokes the pure white of the void between realms, where the dead travel from life to death and the souls of the living and the dead can meet in between. ozma passes through this liminal space every time he dies and reincarnates, and his children with a mortal woman have silver eyes. after ruby witnesses pyrrha’s death and her light erupts, the hand cinder used to kill pyrrha is destroyed and ruby spends months hearing echoes of pyrrha’s final words—which she wasn’t there to see—haunting her dreams. there are butterflies, classic symbols of reincarnation and in certain cultures historically identified as psychopomps, all over the scene where maria discusses her theory. maria is also philosophically wrong in her conception of creation/life as “enemies” of destruction; destruction feedslife and exists in balance with creation, and the glare itself is definitionally destructive. silver eyes have something to do with death.)
the kids at least, per nora and “maybe someone else can [destroy salem]?” do seem to be thinking in terms of ruby’s eyes being the silver bullet that can stop salem if not destroy her outright, and ruby has the wyvern example to look to to be thinking about trapping salem in stone forever. but then the leviathan is there to raise the possibility that petrification is not necessarily forever, and salem herself seems unconcerned when ruby’s eyes start to flash in ironwood’s office. plus again the implication salem makes that the glare can be resisted: if that is something she taught cinder to do, it’s something salem must be able to do too.
i do think the glare is probably capable of hurting her somehow—i have my own specific headcanons as to how for Fic Purposes but in terms of textual speculation, what happens if you take a grimm woman who can’t die and blast her with the grimm-killing light from the threshold between life and death? it sounds painful, if nothing else.
but if the leviathan could break free after being petrified, and salem is both immortal and human and thus able to, like cinder in v7, resist the glare in some way, i think being turned to stone or encased in stone is not likely to slow her down for very long. although i can’t imagine she would enjoy the experience.
the other factor to consider is that—well, quite a lot of the fandom assumes the point of silver eyes is to “purify” the grimm out of people, for example saving cinder from her grimm arm, and on the basis of maria’s theory that is an easy extrapolation to make; which is to say, after the experience in the ever after, i wouldn’t be surprised if the idea of “purge the grimm out of salem to make her herself again?” was broached on the heroes side. the reality though is that being grimm is not what’s wrong with salem and becoming grimm is something she chose, or at least accepted as a possible consequence of what she attempted to do when she jumped into the pool of grimm, and using silver eyes to try to Force Her to go backwards is probably not a good idea and not something that will work. she is change incarnate—that’s what destruction means.
so there is a thematic challenge here that might be explored; seen through the lens of maria’s theory, silver eyes are anti-change (preservation) and therefore anti-theme (destruction is part of life, not the enemy of life) so her theory is incomplete and the most obvious way to fill in the gaps and arrive at the whole truth is to test the glare against salem herself, because she is change. 
and because rwby is so thematically driven i’d anticipate this happening concurrently with salem turning in a new direction, which intersects in very interesting ways with what is being set up vis-a-vis needing cinder to open the vaults vs wanting cinder to be alive, safe, and free. (i think the momentum there is toward salem being forced to choose between getting the crown and protecting cinder, and she’ll sacrifice the crown for cinder’s sake; the… possibility of silver eyes being involved in that scenario is obvious.)
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bestworstcase · 6 days
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I was having trouble finding the Rwby beyond stuff that contained storybook style animation for beyond volume 9.
Were you able to find and/or download those?
sure let me just jump in my time machine /j
it hasn’t dropped yet, is why you can’t find it. i do plan to add everything that releases during the wind-down period as it becomes available.
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bestworstcase · 7 days
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Okay- Salem throwing in during the Great War especially with Grimm would belatedly justify that card game from Volume 2 because of how it was over control of Remnant besides as an in show ad. Especially with the whole bit of the Nevermore card.
Salem as supporter of revolutionaries fighting for their freedom... One that fits extremely well. Two it puts additional layers to Cinder approaching the White Fang and also just ... Cinder being taken in.
I also would find such a reveal in show to likely be extremely hilarious as the implications hit the audience and cast.
my god i wrote that entire fucking post without remembering the great war Board Game existed
you’re right though, it would be a sly piece of foreshadowing if that’s the intention, esp bc the nevermore bit is between ruby (playing atlas) and yang (playing mistral) and a dice roll which of their forces it attacks.
in terms of the worldbuilding that game has always kind of interested me for what it says about how grimm are viewed in military contexts by the general public; qrow in WOR suggests that grimm on the battlefield was an automatic ceasefire until they were driven off again, but also that “grimm came in droves” while ozma laid waste to his enemies with the sword. and then there’s this grimm card in a war game where the mechanic is “flip a coin to see whose soldiers get mauled”—implying that opportunistic “let the grimm attack your enemies” tactics are not unheard of.
and… then. there’s arrowfell. the grimm lures the antagonists use were developed by the atlesian military, and… the only practical use case for a device that summons swarms of grimm is to weaponize grimm against human targets, ideally a safe distance away from your own forces. like, they’re grimm bombs. and these were developed post-war! in a time of peace! the great powers during the tense period before the great war must have been thinking about how to point the grimm at their enemies, too.
but unless you’re salem, or have salem on your side, weaponizing the grimm will always be a double-edged sword—as yang says, that’s just a risk you have to be willing to take.
anyway yeah if i’m right, the reveal would be so punchy. and i do for sure think were due for some sort of revelation about the great war—it’s been set up and referenced over and over, and they made a deliberate choice to convey this information through a heavily biased perspective, and the great war ended in vacuo, and everything the narrative is building up to the last stand in vacuo. something about history coming due, and the truth coming out.
it’s also be a neat counterpoint to the Team Oz narrative, which is very black-and-white (mantle and mistral were the bad guys, vale and vacuo were the good guys, don’t ask too many questions about valean expansion into the likeliest origin point for those desperate crazy founders of mantle or vale’s involvement in the complete destruction of its next-door neighbor centuries ago or the part where ozma magic nuked everyone so hard that allies and enemies alike bent the knee.) whereas the truth seems to be more complicated with vale also having imperial ambitions prior to ozma assuming the throne, and then at best prioritizing the status quo.
an interesting possibility that i think about sometimes is that ozma may have been the one to withdraw vale from vacuo; less out of anti-imperialist principle than because the vacuan people were increasingly unhappy with valean rule and he recognized that the only way to avoid a war for independence in the long term would be to give vacuo independence first. and then mistral swooped in like a vulture because ozma neglected to do anything but formally recognize vacuan sovereignty, rather than make reparations and provide support needed to allow vacuo to emerge from centuries of valean occupation as a functional country—the same conflict-avoidant, shortsighted approach on display in his choice to “share the land” with mistrali colonists in eastern vale.
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bestworstcase · 7 days
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my feeling is less that the CFVY novels are intended to set up An Arc about coco and velvet getting together in vacuo, and more that “coco and velvet start dating in vacuo” is a planned Background Happenstance, possibly something to be thrown in during the catching-up to perhaps lighten the mood (think “xyz really bad things happened” [pained, worried silence] “but oh hey, coco and velvet are dating now,” a kind of it’s-not-important-in-the-grand-scheme-but-there-are-still-stars-in-the-darkness moment), AND the writing team is invested enough in the pairing to want to tell a real, in-depth story about it—so they used the ancillary/optional side novels to do that.
’cause coco and velvet are just side characters, way less important narratively than renora or arkos—like, they only appear in a handful of episodes during the beacon arc—so it’s not really an issue narratively to have them start fall in love and start dating off screen; the average casual viewer is not going to be like “huh??” about that. but then for the subset of fans who are really invested in the characters or the pairing or just really want more rwbyverse stories, here’s a bonus side story focused on them to fill in that gap.
(& i mean, i’ve done this sort of thing myself, gotten WAY MORE INVESTED in an irrelevant pairing between side characters than is warranted by the story i’m writing, and developed a whole other story featuring them in my head because of it. it happens xD)
anyway, fair point about the lack of a specific Salem-Related Subplot; i do get the sense that there was one of those happening behind the scenes (theodore fretting about being prepared for “the big one”) that just wasn’t visible to the audience because team cfvy was kept in the dark (and also you don’t want to put too much important main-plot stuff in an ancillary novel only a fraction of the show’s audience is going to read) and i do so enjoy corkboarding little crumbs, but yeah the book does absolutely end in a very open-ended way in terms of The Gaps between its ending and the end of v8 and the end of v9
in an ideal world i would love to get, like, a short story focused on team cfvy that began with ruby’s broadcast and ended with the arrival of thousands of refugees the next day, ’cause that would be a neat way to explore whatever theodore was up to in secret during the events of BTD.
Rwby beyond March 30th, any theories? What are you hoping gets explored? Please let me see team OREN, 🅱️lease
given how directly salient RH was to neo’s arc in v9, i expect the same to hold true for the CFVY novels in regard to the vacuo arc, and i think making that backstory more accessible to general/casual audiences is one of the core purposes of rwby beyond—giving cliff notes in a brief animated short is a lot less of a barrier than asking viewers to read two entire novels, even if the novels in question are quite short. a succinct recap of what went down with the crown’s insurgency prior to the broadcast and arrival of refugees from atlas + character-focused shorts giving some sense of what’s been going on with the vacuo coalition in the aftermath so that v10 can hit the ground running seems the most likely. a sort of after-credits “where are they now” for v8 but with the intention of setting the stage for v10 as opposed to tying off loose ends.
i anticipate it’ll be in a similar vein to the epilogue animatic—like a more narrative-driven world of remnant-esque series where it’s in-character exposition over a sort of slide show. (what i would ideally really like is if we got the same basic story told in a different ways by different characters, rashomon style, as a way of elaborating on the story’s themes about storytelling and the nature of truth.)
i am not holding my breath for anything to do with salem or cinder or summer, but i would be over the moon to get even the tiniest crumb of what’s happening over there given that they are Clearly Not in vacuo.
given the description of “untold stories happening in remnant during v9 and even beyond” i am wondering if the series will like, end around where the storyboard epilogue does—ie with the reunion after rwbyj return—again for the purpose of easing the narrative burden at the top of v9. i could even see it going as far as settling rwbyj into the New Normal in vacuo (as in, establishing up to the equivalent of where they’re at in rwby x jl pt 2), although that depends on how important the Explanations are narratively (the more important they are, the less likely they’ll be in rwby beyond bc you want to reserve critical scenes for the show proper)
the other possibility is that “and even beyond” means in the past, in which case we might get some “missing scene”-esque shorts set during previous volumes. which i think would be pretty neat.
i would love it if we got a spot or two focused on civilians rather than the main cast—for many reasons, vacuo is the ideal point in the narrative to start breaking down the hard boundaries between huntsmen and civilians and the CFVY novels focus quite a lot on non-huntsmen experiences, so i’m pretty optimistic that this will happen generally but i’d be stoked to directly get a glimpse through the eyes of an ordinary vacuan citizen or mantelian refugee with no connection to the plot whatsoever, and the relative low-stakes of an ancillary “untold (short) stories” series is the perfect place for that. fingers crossed.
in addition to the CFVY novels recap, i’m placing my bets on a short centered on qrow, oscar+ozma, ren, nora, emerald, winter and/or the schnees, robyn and the other happy huntresses, pietro+maria and whoever else is involved with converting amity into a battleship, arrival of aid from vale and mistral, glynda, (possibly) mercury+tyrian, and raven. plus tai if he’s left his cabin. that’s assuming like WOR-length shorts; if they’re longer then these can and probably will be combined more efficiently. but broadly speaking those are the important narrative gaps to fill in.
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bestworstcase · 7 days
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tin hats on. let’s talk about the great war.
first, a general point about the relevant world of remnant spots: qrow narrates all of them. i think this is important to keep in mind when assessing the information provided, because he editorializes constantly, and i do not believe that we are meant to take qrow’s obvious biases at face value. rather, this is a narrative choice to introduce us to this history through a very distorted lens; qrow is ozpin’s man, loyal to the bone before to the revelation of ozpin’s lies, and it is also very likely that he had no formal education prior to his enrollment at beacon academy.
#1: the pre-war kingdoms.
vale sits on the northwestern coast of sanus, sandwiched between “steep mountains” and “waters too shallow for any real monsters to pop out of.” throughout the kingdom’s history, every attempt to expand the kingdom’s borders past the mountain range has ended in “colossal failures”—the most recent of which is mountain glenn, in the post-war period.
however, vale was also engaged in a different expansionist effort in the century preceding the great war: the kingdom was building settlements on “the small islands and peninsulas” of the northeastern coast.
to the north of vale lay the kingdom of mantle. qrow does not give a lot of detail regarding the settlement of solitas, just that “at some point, a group of settlers were crazy enough to venture out into the northernmost continent,” but i submit that the founders of mantle came from northern sanus. why?
mantle’s location at the southwestern tip of solitas is geographically closest to the island of vytal, just off the north coast of sanus; had the settlers come from northern anima, they would have more likely landed on the eastern side of the continent.
qrow says this: “the harsh weather conditions proved to be just as useful as the mountain ranges when it came to keeping the creatures of grimm at bay,” and while anima does have mountain ranges, they’re not remarked upon in WOR: mistral. it is vale that depends upon “steep mountains” to bulwark its eastern flank against the grimm, and vale that has made repeated, unsuccessful attempts throughout its history to expand its borders beyond those mountains.
it is unclear how long mantle existed as an independent state prior to the great war, but we know that it’s not very old; qrow also states that the century preceding the great was “filled with so much tension” that it might as well be “lumped together” with the great war. meaning almost certainly that there were smaller-scale conflicts throughout the whole period. sometime during that century, vale began to build settlements in northeastern sanus. mantle was settled “at some point” by “a crazy group of settlers”—and “i guess when you’re that desperate,” qrow opines, “a frozen hunk of rock doesn’t seem like such a bad place to call home.” mantle is geographically closest to northeastern sanus. there are—there have always been—people living outside the kingdoms, who do not want to be part of the kingdoms.
you do the math. or i will: mantle was founded by people displaced from northeastern sanus by valean expansion, probably in the neighborhood of a hundred years prior to the great war.
meanwhile, mistral was conquering anima. notably—because qrow doesn’t like mistral, particularly—there is less ambiguity on this point than on vale’s settlement of northeast sanus: this expansion was an imperial project. a conquest. mistral was (and based on the language used in the present, still is) an empire, meaning its “territories” are all conquered people or polities from whom the imperial core extracts resources, which—both historically and in the text of this story—includes slaves.
so, argus. during the century preceding the great war, mistral’s attention turned to northern anima. according to jaune and ren in 6.7, mistral’s expansion into the region was stymied by the cold until forming an alliance with mantle; qrow describes mantle as an “unlikely friend” to the empire. the goliath in the room that none of these characters acknowledge (and may not know, given their upbringings—bandit, orphaned young, & very sheltered) is that the region was probably not uninhabited at the time.
empire. conquest. controlled territories. you cannot have these things without also having conquered people. what stymied mistral’s expansion into the region was likely not the cold per se but the logistical burden the cold imposed upon military action here; invading a cold region with an army in the wintertime is famously not a good idea. and, if mantle was founded by people displaced by valean imperialism… well, that explains both qrow’s view of it as an “unlikely friend” and why mantle would make such an overture of alliance to mistral in the first place; vale and mistral were the great world powers, and for mantle—a small, vulnerable, dust-rich but otherwise resource-poor state with every reason to fear its closer southern neighbor—cozying up to mistral would have been just rational politics; hug one great power to insure against invasion by the other.
and then there’s vacuo.
WOR: vacuo is easily the least factually trustworthy episode in the series to the point that i think it is probably all but worthless in terms of the historical narrative given; it’s worldbuilding the modern day cultural narratives about the conquest of vacuo, not the actual history.
(the CFVY novels, i believe, support this reading: in the present, many city vacuans believe the narrative qrow offers here that the old kingdom of vacuo was a “paradise,” but “comfort breeds weakness” and its people were complacent, soft, helpless to defend themselves from invaders from more hardened kingdoms… but the first king of vacuo was a man called malik the sunderer, shade’s history teacher states that it’s been centuries since vacuo was conquered and the real history has been so obscured and distorted by myth that it’s impossible to know what it was truly like, and desert vacuans—the nomadic peoples who don’t live in the kingdom—have a starkly different cultural outlook on hardship that is much more in line with the story’s themes and also reality, valuing community, hospitality, and resilience over “strength.”)
but there is one kernel of very interesting information in this episode: “after the great war, a formal government was finally established.” meaning there wasn’t a formal vacuan government before the great war.
vacuo was not a state before the great war.
of vacuo’s entry into the great war, qrow says this:
Up to this point, Vacuo had done its best to stay out of the fight. Mantle and Mistral, having both already established a small presence in Vacuo territory years before promised to leave them alone, provided they didn't interfere. Soon, those talks evolved. It went from "Don't side with them" to "Side with us and you'll be safe". Vacuo did not much care for that, and they came to the conclusion that if Vale were to fall, there'd be no one left to stop Mistral and Mantle from conquering them next. So they did what they considered to be the logical thing. They drove Mantle and Mistral out of Vacuo and told Vale they had their backs.
at this point in history, vacuo did not have a government. at this point in history, vacuo was not a state. the kingdom of vacuo had been conquered centuries ago (by “more developed kingdoms,” qrow says—by whom?), and according to rumpole (<- an actual authoritative source, given she teaches history at shade!), “few documented accounts or records remain from that far back.”
the conquest of vacuo predated the conflicts of the prewar century (and probably predate the existence of mantle). this illustration in WOR: vacuo implicates all three of the other kingdoms—blue for mistral, white for mantle, green for vale:
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so there is no question that vale participated in the butchering of vacuo; it did. but this illustration is also impressionistic, ahistorical, not a literal representation of how vacuo was conquered.
by the time of the great war, vacuo was a territory occupied by mantle and mistral, but vale does not seem to have had a significant presence there. in the present, vacuans harbor a lot of resentment for mistral and atlas, less for vale. vale is also, by virtue of being located on the same continent, the kingdom best positioned to invade vacuo if it so chose.
(qrow asserts that vacuo was conquered by “more developed” kingdoms, but it was also dust-rich—the CFVY novels confirm this—and there is a clear correlation between technological innovation and access to an abundant source of dust. it’s possible that a scarcity of, say, iron inhibited ancient vacuo’s technological development and put it at a military disadvantage, but generally i think it’s more likely that qrow is regurgitating historical propaganda there.)
the point being: vale conquered the kingdom of vacuo and then either withdrew or lost a war with mistral for control over the territory at some point prior to the great war.
regardless of the finer details, the historicity of qrow’s account regarding vacuo’s entrance into the war seems… pretty suspect given that vacuo did not have a government. what sort of “talks” do you suppose the mantle-mistrali bloc was having with the non-state actors of vacuo? what kind of “presence” did mistral, the empire that conquered all of anima, actually have in the vacuan territory?
hmm. i wonder.
vacuo “drove mistral and mantle out” and threw in their lot with vale; meaning, the vacuan side of this war was really a war of independence. vacuo wasn’t “doing its best to stay out of the fight” so much as it was under mistrali control until the vacuan people rebelled, then sided with mistral’s enemy.
#2: salem?? ?
ozpin—and qrow by extension—believes that salem ignited the war with a false-flag op in northeastern sanus (“to this day, no one knows who shot first” + “salem’s smart. she works in the shadows, using others to get what she wants, so that when it comes time to place the blame, we can only point at each other”). much of the fandom not only takes this at face value but also assumes without… really any basis at all that salem was responsible for the “incident” in mantle that the mantelian government used to justify a raft of draconian censorship laws.
but… authoritarian regimes can and will use any pretext to justify repressive new laws whose real purpose is to punish dissenters and strengthen control over the populace; banning art and all forms of self-expression is not a move that anyone would think with any seriousness would protect people from the grimm. qrow is either being disingenuous in purpose or (more likely) just doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about because four years at the monster-hunting college is the sum total of his education: “the people of mantle had come to believe that they would be much safer from the grimm if they could only keep the emotions of the masses in check” is the kind of bullshit nonsense you would expect if the guy doesn’t know how government works, either the modern-day democratic councils or whatever system prewar mantle had; what is the distinction between “the people” and “the masses?”
in. the. unreliable. narrators. show.
mantle’s autocratic government found a pretext to crack down on subversive speech and pumped out a massive body of propaganda to the tune of “we’re just doing what we must for the good of the people :)”—that’s what happened. that’s why mistral imposed the same laws on its territories but not in the imperial core, and why mantle didn’t have a problem with that “selective” enforcement.
maybe salem sent some grimm to attack mantle, maybe she didn’t. maybe there was a public protest that got angry enough to attract grimm. maybe there was a protest that got too rowdy, and who’s going to openly question the government officials claiming that officers on the scene opened fire into the crowd because a grimm jumped out of the sewers? grimm evaporate when they die. kind of a hard thing to fact check.
and in a similar vein… vale’s king rolled out a welcome mat for mistrali colonists who came to colonize valean settlements. it is beyond nonsensical to think that there was no violence involved. colonization is an inescapably and inherently violent process. and remember, the rioting began shortly after mistral imposed draconian censorship laws on its occupied territories, which absolutely would have included parts of eastern vale.
it was inevitable and completely predictable that this situation would explode. might salem have sent someone to fire the first shot? sure? but why would she bother, when the fuse was burning down all on its own?
(and that’s assuming she even had an interest in provoking a massive war at all, which seems rather unlikely given her apparent disinclination to engage in wanton destruction; see also her consistent choices to limit civilian casualties by pulling out of vale quickly / planning a surgical strike on haven academy / not attacking mantle / not sending grimm into the subways of atlas.)
but. but–
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they did put her in the thumbnail. the point of this is presumably to imply that she did, in fact, do something to influence these events.
specifically.
they put her in the thumbnail superimposed over the leader of the vacuan rebellion, who:
led what must have been a pretty desperate fight against steep odds to drive an industrialized global power out of vacuo,
kept that coalition together after they won and formed an alliance with vale, and
was a faunus.
ozpin is superimposed over the king of vale because he was the king of vale. so: is the choice to position salem in this way similarly non-arbitrary?
looks into the camera like i’m on the office.
salem is a faunus. she identifies herself as such (“your grace” is the mode of address for menagerie’s chieftain) and she has been socially understood as a faunus for thousands of years (in a time when faunus were hunted and caged like animals, the stories about the witch who lived in the woods among “beasts and monsters” were, uh, probably not referring to wild animals; “beasts” was a euphemism for the people the ones telling those stories hunted and caged.)
to this day, ozpin associates the faunus with salem. he suspects blake of being her spy; he similarly singles out velvet after the massacre of lower cairn (and we don’t get to see what he actually says, only that velvet is in tears by the end). at haven, leo more or less says “the council overruled me and my hands are tied,” and ozpin immediately decides to freeze him out and insinuates to the kids that he suspects leo might be a traitor; meanwhile james “two votes” ironwood is closing atlas’ borders, cutting off the global supply of dust, recalling his troops from an allied state, and behaving so erratically that mistral is evidently anticipating a fucking invasion, and ozpin instructs qrow to take the lamp to atlas anyway. lionheart is a faunus; ironwood is human. the tea set ozpin gifted to lionheart is a replica of salem’s tea set. math.
so the fact that salem is superimposed over the faunus leader here does not seem coincidental; the narrative is very consistent in linking salem to the faunus because she is herself a faunus.
in WOR: faunus, qrow describes the appalling treatment of faunus by humans throughout history (first ostracized and hunted down, later enslaved and exploited) before to the great war and states that, after the great war, “the world was desperate to find compromises that would ensure they'd never see the likes of it again; the faunus were awarded equal rights as citizens of remnant, and as an apology, they were given an entire continent of their own to do with as they pleased. there were some that saw this as fair and just, but many saw it for what it really was: a slap in the face from a nation of sore losers. and so menagerie was born.”
and from the great war:
But whatever the reasoning, everyone bowed to the King of Vale by the time it was over. The Great War had ended. The world was ready to live under the rule of Vale. But the King refused. The leaders of the four Kingdoms met on the island of Vytal, and it was there that they worked together to form a treaty and establish the future of Remnant. Territories were redistributed, slavery was abolished, governments were restructured, and the Warrior King, the last king Vale would ever have, founded the Huntsman Academies and placed his most trusted followers in command of each Kingdom's school.
a few things to unpack here.
first: ozma as the king of vale would have had quite a lot of power to drive the vytal negotiations in the direction he wanted them to go; the other three leaders were given at least a notional say, but these were people who had just seen ozma unleash the horrifying powers of the sword of destruction upon their armies and bowed to him in abject terror—and that’s before getting into the possibility that ozma may have used the crown of choice to compel agreement.
second: “territories were redistributed” mostly appears to mean that mistral was forced to relinquish control over conquered territories that did not want to be part of mistral; vacuan sovereignty was formally restored (…on paper) (shade academy is the de facto government and has been since the war ended, which is worth raising an eyebrow at), parts of western anima were liberated, and… menagerie was given to the faunus.
(menagerie had to have been a mistrali colony before the great war ended, otherwise the framing of “a slap in the face from a nation of sore losers” is nonsensical.)
third: note the implication that awarding the faunus equal rights and giving them an island was a desperate compromise to insure against the perceived threat of a second war. it’s of a piece with ozma’s attempt to appease mistral and avoid war by “sharing” eastern vale with mistrali colonists.
the vacuan leader—his ally in the war—was a faunus, but it sounds very much as though ozma saw her kind as adversaries, at least in potentia, whom he made it a point to appease in the hope of avoiding a war. which is irrational on its face but does make sense in conjunction with ozpin’s clear inclination to imagine connections between salem and faunus, however baseless that suspicion might be.
and on that note, qrow also says this: “a lot of settlements were lost during those years, and most were never reclaimed. rations on food and dust were put into effect, development of technology accelerated, humans and faunus who fought alongside one another became closer and every day, mankind grew more and more efficient at destroying itself.”
pay attention to that rhetorical structure.
many settlements were wiped out
food and dust were strictly rationed
technological (military) development boomed
humans and faunus grew closer
mankind grew ever more efficient at destroying itself
one of these is not like the others.
qrow’s framing of these events likely comes from ozpin, whether directly (things ozpin told him) or indirectly (ozpin’s influence as headmaster over beacon’s curriculum). so the inclusion of “humans and faunus who fought side by side grew closer” into what is otherwise a list of ways mankind “destroyed itself” is perhaps telling of ozma’s mindset at the time; which in turn supports the implication that ozma perceived the faunus as a potential threat to appease after the war.
now!
the question is, how was salem involved—and why?
well. we know that salem is inclined to revolution; she rallied people to rebellion against the brothers millions of years ago, and in her war against the academies in the present, she aligns herself with groups like the white fang. she refers to the global order ozma established through the vytal accords derisively as “your so-called ‘free’ world.”
and we know that salem herself is a faunus, and thousands of years ago she was present enough in faunus culture that their creation myth is just a refraction of her story—transformation into something new by a choice to leap into magical waters.
we know that the faunus did not have rights in any of the four kingdoms before the great war, and mistral in particular is noted for its reliance on (presumably, mainly faunus) slave labor. reading between the lines of qrow’s slanted narration, vacuo was a mistrali territory back then, and in the CFVY novels it’s mentioned that vacuan faunus were regularly enslaved in mistrali-operated mines within that territory.
and we can guess, based on their leader being a faunus, that the vacuan rebels who drove mistral and mantle out of vacuo were predominantly faunus, plus humans willing to follow and fight for the faunus.
in the present, salem preferred sienna khan over adam and dropped adam like a hot potato after he assassinated sienna; she also clearly has no intention to attack menagerie, where the grimm notably do not seem to be a serious problem. salem also implicitly identifies herself as a faunus (“your grace”). so there are grounds for thinking that she does consider the faunus to be her people.
vacuo’s part in the great war was a war for independence. salem is both pragmatic and ruthless; she understands that nothing forces people to cooperate quite like the threat of a common enemy; she has the means to turn the tide of any war by the simple expedient of directing her grimm against the side she wants to lose. if she was in communication with the vacuan rebels—or just had spies—she could have coordinated grimm raids to sever supply lines or winnow defending forces in advance of attacks planned by the rebels, tipping the odds in their favor.
she knows ozma. if she was paying attention to the war, she would have known it began with his futile effort to appease mistral by giving away parts of vale; she has to know he sees her in the shadow of every faunus. the vacuan rebels—most of them faunus, led by a faunus—saved his bacon by joining the war he very much seems to have been losing (the frontlines were in vacuo by the end of the war; all of eastern vale was destroyed, and the king of vale and his army made their final stand in vacuo; vale itself was… probably under mistrali occupation at the time).
i am sure salem did not want, particularly, to throw ozma a lifeline. but she does care about freedom in the abstract—“your so-called ‘free’ world”—and she may think of the faunus as her people. once the war began, once it became clear that vale was losing… well, either vale would fall and mistral would rule the world, which would be undeniably worse for the faunus, or she could grit her teeth and accept helping ozma as a fair price for a shot at liberating the faunus.
and the only thing she would have to do to influence the war’s outcome is use her grimm to disrupt mantelian/mistrali supply lines and specifically target their forces on the battlefield. such attacks wouldn’t stand out against the backdrop of regular grimm activity—there are a lot of grimm in the world beyond her control—but a sustained, deliberate campaign of grimm attacks focused on one side would absolutely add up over time to a significant advantage for the other. especially given that the logistical burden of waging war on a foreign continent is already so much higher than defending your home.
if salem could also keep wild grimm off the backs of vacuo’s and vale’s armies to some extent, a la the apparent absence of a grimm problem in menagerie, that advantage would be even sharper.
…although she probably did not anticipate that ozma would use the sword of destruction to crush everyone who opposed him, or the crown of choice to do… whatever it is he did with it. you win some, you lose some.
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bestworstcase · 8 days
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Did you ever watch the Hbomberguy RWBY video?
i dont watch youtube video essays in general, or spend much time on youtube, not really my cup of tea
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bestworstcase · 8 days
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What was the thing that made you go "Oh, RWBY is very smartly written"? Because it seems like a lot of the online space just keeps insisting that it's a badly written mess that deserves to be rebooted, despite that not being the case.
i remember very distinctly hitting players and pieces and thinking “oh yeah this is going places” because that episode is where things like characterization and tempo start to really click into place. and then in volume two—
okay this is a really specific analogy, but. the first discworld book i ever read was thud!, which if you’re not familiar is quite late in the series and very much not a book that makes much sense if you haven’t read any previous books in that line. i had a fucking blast but also spent the whole book in a state of bewildered disorientation trying to piece together the MASSIVE AMOUNTS of missing context undergirding the story.
watching volume two for the first time felt a lot like that, except because it’s happening at the start of the story all of the question marks are, uh, surprise tools that will help us later.
this is a risky thing for a story to do. a lot of people—i would even tentatively hazard most people—would not enjoy the experience of reading thud! as their first discworld novel. deliberately seeding information this way, as a scattering of tips-of-icebergs incongruously floating around in what appear to be the tropics, risks irritating your audience by asking them to pay close attention to small details that don’t make any sense yet, before you’ve earned their trust that there will be a worthwhile payoff for investing that effort.
rwby, uh, delivers. in spades. the rewatch value of the first three volumes but especially volume two is off the charts just on the strength of the foreshadowing alone. that’s not an easy thing to accomplish! foreshadowing is difficult!
the third thing is the momentum and escalation as the dominoes fall in volume three. speaking as someone who’s written a story paced in a similar way—the slow build to sudden out-of-control explosive catastrophe—it’s really hard to get right. you have to set up the pieces in such a way that it’s believable for things to go so, so badly wrong once you flick down the first domino. and rwby pulls it off fucking flawlessly. and then does it again with the fall of atlas.
that’s not even getting into how much the story rewards digging your teeth into it.
the story just fits together really well at every level, broad strokes down to the tiny details. which is not something that happens by accident; intricate narratives takes a lot of planning and care.
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bestworstcase · 8 days
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as the resident salem crank i gotta say i like that she’s straight up not involved with anything that happens in the CFVY novels (unless we’re counting the very interesting things bertilak has to say about ozpin as an implication of some history with the inner circle, which is juicy; if anyone in those books is spying for salem, it’s him).
the fandom kinda takes at face value the idea that salem is (or must be) the secret mastermind behind All The Bad Things Ever, but that is… boring, and also presumes that salem is nigh on omniscient and omnipotent, which… she isn’t. ozpin’s paranoia isn’t fact.
so the CFVY novels are a neat opportunity to, for lack of a better phrasing, take the ozpin-vision goggles off. he thinks salem pulls every string to make the whole world dance to her tune, and he passes that perception down to everyone who gets looped in to the conspiracy. is he right? is this accurate? well, no. theodore is so preoccupied with the distant threat of salem that he straight up ignores the crown until the eleventh hour; it’s got nothing to do with her, therefore it’s not a real threat as far as he’s concerned, and that way of thinking lets the asturias twins swan their army right to the walls of shade academy completely uncontested.
which realizes an important thematic idea that rwby has been building for several volumes now: salem is just a person. one person. she is not the source of all evil in the hearts of men. the world is more complicated than that, and you can’t fix anything by pretending otherwise. at best you’ll just be letting problems smolder until they blow up in your face; at worst, you end up like ironwood.
and if the CFVY novels are any indication, vacuo is when that theme comes due. the coalition is obviously expecting her to roll in with another massive army to attack vacuo like she did atlas, and salem is almost definitely not going to do that. ’cause she’s ripping beacon apart in search of the crown. what happens if the great evil takes a rain check on humanity’s last stand? how do you handle all these very complicated problems in the absence of a simple answer? etc.
i’d actually be interested to hear your thinking here in regard to the treatment of coco/velvet in the novels, if you’d care to share. mainly because i came away from the books with the opposite impression. is it just that they aren’t portrayed as already dating, contra chibi?
’cause like, chibi isn’t canon, it’s a “and nothing bad happens ever” fluff au meant for Silly Goofs, but the goofs are all done with foreknowledge of where the real story is headed. coco and velvet are side characters; going “yup, these two are gonna date” well in advance of that actually happening in canon is not a huge deal.
and… when your story’s flagship romantic pairing is a slow-burn between two of the female leads spanning nine volumes over the course of a decade? a super low-stakes spoiler confirming that a couple of side characters are also sapphic is a way to offer some reassurance that the sapphic narratives aren’t just bait—here’s a fluffy “what if these two started dating at beacon and nothing bad ever happened?” au in the Silly Goofs spinoff.
(a cfvyshop au, if you will.)
whereas the sense i get from the CFVY novels is that coco and velvet are slated to fall in love in vacuo, with a core purpose of the books being to flesh them out both as individual characters and eventual romantic partners—a way to give this fairly inconsequential side pairing the same serious, emotionally-compelling and thematically-motivated narrative treatment given to the romantic arcs involving the core cast.
rambling under the cut ->
the CFVY novels make it expressly clear that coco is a lesbian—she thinks glynda is hot, velvet recalls her “breaking performance records and breaking girls’ hearts” at pharos academy, coco briefly considers partnering with another girl because she’s “cute.” velvet’s sexuality is not confirmed, but, uh:
If she had had a choice—which she apparently didn’t—she would have chosen Coco Adel. They’d both come to Beacon from Pharos Combat School, so Velvet knew her … sort of. Coco probably had no idea who Velvet was, but Velvet knew all about her. Coco had been popular at their school, breaking performance records—and breaking girls’ hearts. Even from twenty feet away, Velvet could see Coco was falling with style. It wasn’t only because of the shades, but because of her whole form. She wasn’t slowly tumbling in the air like most of their classmates—she had her feet pointed toward the ground, as if she expected to just land like a cat. As far as Velvet knew, Coco wasn’t hiding cat ears under that beret, though. One hand was keeping the hat on her head, the other was at her waist holding on to her purse. And Coco was smiling. Anyone who could look completely confident and happy while plummeting to the ground at thirty-two feet per second was someone you wanted on your side.
girl.
so like right out of the gate, we learn:
coco likes girls and is supremely confident in her sexuality, and
velvet may or may not be aware that she likes girls, but when the headmaster yeets her off a cliff she sees coco and is like “omg it’s the hot popular lesbian from my high school! i wish we could be partners. she probably doesn’t even know who i am, though. wow look at her go, she’s so stylish and confident, i wonder if she’s a faunus like me–” GIRL. THE GROUND??
from here, the book establishes that while coco is outwardly flirtatious and charming, that’s… sort of a front. she struggles to form deeper, more meaningful bonds with people because showing any vulnerability makes her intensely uncomfortable. she doesn’t feel secure in her position as team leader, so she tries to compensate by adopting a my-way-or-the-highway attitude that just fosters resentment and feeds her growing lack of confidence in her own leadership.
meanwhile velvet is a vibrating ball of social anxiety with no self esteem. she’s brilliant and powerful but the nature of her semblance and what she’s chosen to do with it makes her look like the team’s weak link, and in after the fall, she spends quite a lot of time feeling that way and desperately trying to prove to her teammates that she doesn’t need to be carried. (and coco is overly protective of velvet—fox even thinks in one scene that he can’t tell coco that velvet is out in the desert, or else coco will drop everything and rush to cover her instead of staying put to defend a vulnerable settlement from grimm.)
so while coco’s foibles irritate fox and tries yatsu’s patience too, velvet takes it a lot harder and the central emotional conflict of the book is about coco and velvet figuring out how to resolve what seems like an irreconcilable difference.
(which… is very much how rwby Does Romance. every canonical pairing in this story faces a serious, nigh-insurmountable emotional obstacle that they have to clear together before they can be together. the bees have got blake running away vs yang’s abandonment issues, for example.)
the way this central emotional conflict gets resolved is: in a tense moment, velvet finally outright tells coco that she never wanted to come to vacuo at all but felt like she had no choice but to go along because her team brushed off her concerns. and coco listens to her, and answers with the humility and emotional honesty velvet really needs from her (that coco did what was best for herself, not the team, because she was scared she’d get them all killed if they stayed)… and then the blind worm that’s been hunting them resurfaces, and coco grabs velvet and throws her to safety—sacrificing her life to keep velvet safe—whereupon velvet chops the grimm IN HALF to save coco. like,
Then the worm flooded with a bluish light as a glowing line sliced through the worm, only two inches away from Coco’s face. As it passed, she realized it was a replica of Brawnz Ni’s claw weapons. She stumbled backward as the weapon faded. A beam of sunlight appeared on the ceiling and spread quickly down the curved walls and along the floor, widening as the tough skin and flesh and sinew separated—as Velvet pulled them apart. She had hacked and slashed all around the creature and then let it pull itself apart as it tried to dive under the ground. The front portion of the worm disappeared into the sand in front of Coco, spewing ichor that turned the sand black.
this thing is described as being the length of six goliaths lined up end-to-end and the width of a nevermore’s wingspan. it’s on par with the fucking leviathan or the wyvern AND VELVET RIPS IT APART PRACTICALLY BARE-HANDED? BECAUSE COCO’S IN THERE?
(coco literally falls into her arms afterwards.)
the book closes with coco taking charge (“first let’s get these people to their new home”) and velvet confidently backing her up (“and then we can go home”)—they’ve surmounted the insurmountable obstacle, they just back-to-back saved each other’s lives, they’re fully on the same page now. and that’s ultimately what after the fall is about, coco and velvet finding that balance.
before the dawn doesn’t revolve around them in the same way—the interpersonal conflict between them is over—but again, when team cfvy is forcibly disbanded, the emotional focus is on how distraught velvet and coco are in particular. (yatsu and fox aren’t happy about the situation either, but they end up with people they can work with alright; whereas both velvet and coco get stuck in teams that are awful for them and spend that whole section of the book pining.)
plus details like coco now being able to pick up with a glance when velvet isn’t on board with a decision she’s making (velvet told her a month ago that it hurt her feelings when coco brushed off her concerns, and coco made it an immediate priority to learn how to read velvet well enough that velvet will never feel overlooked or dismissed again). or velvet having spent over a year designing and building a pair of tricked out sunglasses with night-vision capabilities because coco admitted one time that she’s scared of the dark. or coco sending velvet after gillian on the grounds that “you’re a one-person army” and how thrilled velvet is to be shown that level of trust.
what it all adds up to is like… this is how they did the bees. this is how they’re doing renora. with ozlem it’s blown up to cosmic scale but they’re doing this with ozlem too. romance in rwby is about overcoming.
so while, on its face, “coco and velvet are girlfriends in chibi but not in the canon novels” sounds like backpedaling, taken into context with a) all the characterization in chibi being rule-of-funny caricature, and b) the novels developing the relationship between the two from “superficial attraction but their respective baggage makes them kind of awful for each other” to “but they care and they listen and they try until they grow together into their best selves” with a side of [gestures at the blind worm incident] THAT… well.
to me, that looks like either chibi crosshares was just for fun and then the writers started thinking about it and got invested to the point of “whoops, we’ve got two novels worth of story about how these two fall in love For Real,” or the novels’ story (+ coco and velvet getting together in vacuo in the show proper) was already sketched out before chibi and because chibi is for sillies and crosshares is a side pairing anyway, why not indulge in a little established relationship fluff?—or somewhere in between.
Rwby beyond March 30th, any theories? What are you hoping gets explored? Please let me see team OREN, 🅱️lease
given how directly salient RH was to neo’s arc in v9, i expect the same to hold true for the CFVY novels in regard to the vacuo arc, and i think making that backstory more accessible to general/casual audiences is one of the core purposes of rwby beyond—giving cliff notes in a brief animated short is a lot less of a barrier than asking viewers to read two entire novels, even if the novels in question are quite short. a succinct recap of what went down with the crown’s insurgency prior to the broadcast and arrival of refugees from atlas + character-focused shorts giving some sense of what’s been going on with the vacuo coalition in the aftermath so that v10 can hit the ground running seems the most likely. a sort of after-credits “where are they now” for v8 but with the intention of setting the stage for v10 as opposed to tying off loose ends.
i anticipate it’ll be in a similar vein to the epilogue animatic—like a more narrative-driven world of remnant-esque series where it’s in-character exposition over a sort of slide show. (what i would ideally really like is if we got the same basic story told in a different ways by different characters, rashomon style, as a way of elaborating on the story’s themes about storytelling and the nature of truth.)
i am not holding my breath for anything to do with salem or cinder or summer, but i would be over the moon to get even the tiniest crumb of what’s happening over there given that they are Clearly Not in vacuo.
given the description of “untold stories happening in remnant during v9 and even beyond” i am wondering if the series will like, end around where the storyboard epilogue does—ie with the reunion after rwbyj return—again for the purpose of easing the narrative burden at the top of v9. i could even see it going as far as settling rwbyj into the New Normal in vacuo (as in, establishing up to the equivalent of where they’re at in rwby x jl pt 2), although that depends on how important the Explanations are narratively (the more important they are, the less likely they’ll be in rwby beyond bc you want to reserve critical scenes for the show proper)
the other possibility is that “and even beyond” means in the past, in which case we might get some “missing scene”-esque shorts set during previous volumes. which i think would be pretty neat.
i would love it if we got a spot or two focused on civilians rather than the main cast—for many reasons, vacuo is the ideal point in the narrative to start breaking down the hard boundaries between huntsmen and civilians and the CFVY novels focus quite a lot on non-huntsmen experiences, so i’m pretty optimistic that this will happen generally but i’d be stoked to directly get a glimpse through the eyes of an ordinary vacuan citizen or mantelian refugee with no connection to the plot whatsoever, and the relative low-stakes of an ancillary “untold (short) stories” series is the perfect place for that. fingers crossed.
in addition to the CFVY novels recap, i’m placing my bets on a short centered on qrow, oscar+ozma, ren, nora, emerald, winter and/or the schnees, robyn and the other happy huntresses, pietro+maria and whoever else is involved with converting amity into a battleship, arrival of aid from vale and mistral, glynda, (possibly) mercury+tyrian, and raven. plus tai if he’s left his cabin. that’s assuming like WOR-length shorts; if they’re longer then these can and probably will be combined more efficiently. but broadly speaking those are the important narrative gaps to fill in.
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bestworstcase · 9 days
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Rwby beyond March 30th, any theories? What are you hoping gets explored? Please let me see team OREN, 🅱️lease
given how directly salient RH was to neo’s arc in v9, i expect the same to hold true for the CFVY novels in regard to the vacuo arc, and i think making that backstory more accessible to general/casual audiences is one of the core purposes of rwby beyond—giving cliff notes in a brief animated short is a lot less of a barrier than asking viewers to read two entire novels, even if the novels in question are quite short. a succinct recap of what went down with the crown’s insurgency prior to the broadcast and arrival of refugees from atlas + character-focused shorts giving some sense of what’s been going on with the vacuo coalition in the aftermath so that v10 can hit the ground running seems the most likely. a sort of after-credits “where are they now” for v8 but with the intention of setting the stage for v10 as opposed to tying off loose ends.
i anticipate it’ll be in a similar vein to the epilogue animatic—like a more narrative-driven world of remnant-esque series where it’s in-character exposition over a sort of slide show. (what i would ideally really like is if we got the same basic story told in a different ways by different characters, rashomon style, as a way of elaborating on the story’s themes about storytelling and the nature of truth.)
i am not holding my breath for anything to do with salem or cinder or summer, but i would be over the moon to get even the tiniest crumb of what’s happening over there given that they are Clearly Not in vacuo.
given the description of “untold stories happening in remnant during v9 and even beyond” i am wondering if the series will like, end around where the storyboard epilogue does—ie with the reunion after rwbyj return—again for the purpose of easing the narrative burden at the top of v9. i could even see it going as far as settling rwbyj into the New Normal in vacuo (as in, establishing up to the equivalent of where they’re at in rwby x jl pt 2), although that depends on how important the Explanations are narratively (the more important they are, the less likely they’ll be in rwby beyond bc you want to reserve critical scenes for the show proper)
the other possibility is that “and even beyond” means in the past, in which case we might get some “missing scene”-esque shorts set during previous volumes. which i think would be pretty neat.
i would love it if we got a spot or two focused on civilians rather than the main cast—for many reasons, vacuo is the ideal point in the narrative to start breaking down the hard boundaries between huntsmen and civilians and the CFVY novels focus quite a lot on non-huntsmen experiences, so i’m pretty optimistic that this will happen generally but i’d be stoked to directly get a glimpse through the eyes of an ordinary vacuan citizen or mantelian refugee with no connection to the plot whatsoever, and the relative low-stakes of an ancillary “untold (short) stories” series is the perfect place for that. fingers crossed.
in addition to the CFVY novels recap, i’m placing my bets on a short centered on qrow, oscar+ozma, ren, nora, emerald, winter and/or the schnees, robyn and the other happy huntresses, pietro+maria and whoever else is involved with converting amity into a battleship, arrival of aid from vale and mistral, glynda, (possibly) mercury+tyrian, and raven. plus tai if he’s left his cabin. that’s assuming like WOR-length shorts; if they’re longer then these can and probably will be combined more efficiently. but broadly speaking those are the important narrative gaps to fill in.
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bestworstcase · 9 days
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leans out a window. hi. also,
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immediately after doing this and then leaving oscar to be hazel’s punching bag, salem finds cinder waiting for her in the corridor and stonewalls her in the harshest possible way, which incites cinder’s open defiance, leading directly to, uh, this. the harm salem inflicts on oscar is symbolically revisited on cinder tenfold; cinder is even caught in this blast at all because she tried to deceive someone who could not be deceived (through em’s illusions).
which, considering the reason salem shuffled her plans around to rush to atlas rather than actually leaving cinder to “toil in her isolation until she redeems herself”—
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—is about narratively confronting salem with the same choice she faced before; does she keep lashing out and escalating the fight with ozma and risk losing this daughter in the crossfires too? and her answer is… no. she won’t. gestures at salem surrendering the power struggle with cinder, gestures at her letting the kids go in witch.
@tumblingxelian tag from here
#OK I'd legit love to hear your take on her interactions with Oscar
oh i think about the interrogation scene a normal amount
something i want to underline before diving in is the conspicuous discrepancy between the eloquence and spoken delivery of salem's soliloquies in V1/V3 (internal monologue) versus her dialogue (verbal speech). it's especially noticeable in juxtaposition with ozma's V7 soliloquy versus ozpin's dialogue, where no such discrepancy exists; oz talks the way he thinks, he's an excellent orator and even in casual conversation he's well-spoken and charismatic.
whereas salem... thinks eloquently and often poetically ("nature's wrath in hand, man lit their way through the darkness..." or "it's true that a simple spark can ignite hope, breathe fire into the hearts of the weary..."), but speaks with minimal rhetorical flair. her speech is also sometimes a little stilted or just very, very deliberate in a way that does not sound natural; and there's times—her conversation with cinder in V5 is a particularly noticeable example—where what she says circles around what she means.
"working with bandits? keeping ruby alive? what's the point? we're strong enough to take what we want by force!" / "never underestimate the usefulness of others; take leonardo. he was one of ozpin's most trusted, but now... hm. you will have the power i promised you when the time is right, but remember that it comes with a cost. if ruby rose has learned to harness her gift, you must take care to protect yours. there's only so much i can do to aid you."
<- its like. instead of just saying it, salem says examples supporting the idea she's trying to articulate. if a conversation were a math problem, salem shows all of her work but doesn't give the answer. and she does this A LOT.
none of the other characters in the story are like this—which means it isn't, like, a problem with the writers failing to write cogent dialogue. it's a deliberate character choice for salem specifically.
anyway, prior to the interrogation scene, salem only appears in contexts where she is either addressing her subordinates or—in V7—giving ironwood the terms of her siege. on two of these occasions, she get interrupted with unexpected new information (ozpin is back, ruby rose used the lamp) and in both cases, salem abruptly ends the conversation and either kicks everyone else out (V6) or leaves (V7).
and i think that's worth noting in relation to this scene, because the interrogation veers off script very fast and we get to see salem, um, Trying Her Best.
so!
as far as salem knows, oscar is gone. she expects—prepares for—a hostile and painful confrontation with ozma. when oscar wakes up, she's huddled against a pillar in a shadowy corner with an arm curled around herself and her head low, staring fixedly at conjured shadows of her dead children. she is Not Okay.
but when she speaks, her tone is conversational. almost cordial, once she's past the withering sarcasm in "my long lost ozma... found at last." it's affected! it's not real! she's reciting words she planned and probably rehearsed beforehand—which i think is likely the case for most of her little speeches. she's a poor speaker.
except... it's oscar. salem twigs that he isn't ozma the instant he talks, stares at him for a couple seconds without no visible reaction except that her mocking little smile fades, and:
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snarls and grabs his face and yanks him down to get a better look at him—the mask just shatters. there's lots of ways to interpret this, but i'm inclined to take it as salem recognizing that this isn't ozma and then second-guessing that instinct and grabbing him because she needs to be absolutely sure.
"you can pretend, boy... but you're not fully him. not yet, at least." her tone shifts on every clause, from almost a growl to relieved to just sort of resigned. and then she drops him, exhales, steps back:
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and just... stands there gazing into the middle distance for a couple seconds. like—oscar being here was not a possibility she even considered until it happened and upon finding herself in this situation her reaction is basically, "...um."
and then she's like
well... :)
perhaps you and i can have a better working reLaTiOnShiP.
...
...
oscar, >:[
was it? :\
laying aside the dire understatement of referring to what happened between her and ozma as a bad "working relationship," you can like. hear. the crash box crashing in her head as she says this. her tone swings from sweet and gentle to sardonic to coldly indifferent—and then she follows this by swerving right back into cordial neutrality. hrgkhsj her affect just goes haywire
and i think that happens because this is just so far out of expected bounds that she can't figure out how to say what she needs to say to get herself back on track. her speech smooths out again as soon as she segues into her questions, because she knows what she planned to ask ozma and she can tailor that to oscar instead.
but getting there? dial-up noises.
the hysterical part though is that it's really obvious this awkward verbal jumble isn't indicative of internal confusion or uncertainty, in that salem knows what she's going to do—her chosen tactics are clear and entirely coherent. she:
calms herself down and backs off.
states her intention to play nice if he cooperates.
both implicitly and explicitly differentiates him from ozma to indicate she understands he's his own person and can and will set her rage and bitterness with ozma aside to treat oscar fairly.
which is precisely what i meant in the OP, about salem having the necessary grasp of human nature to be—in theory—a formidable manipulator but lacking the social dexterity and charisma required to put it into effective practice. like, tactically this line of attack is very shrewd, but her awkward, erratic delivery cuts the legs out from under it because she sounds utterly insincere.
⭐️ she tried.
continuing on—salem first explains the context regarding what she needs to know about "the beacon relic" (sidebar, does... salem even know what it is? this is the only one she refers to this way. the lamp, the staff, the sword, and "the beacon relic"), all in a fairly amicable tone except for:
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"if i know my ozma" <- she's implicitly positioning herself and oscar on the same 'side' against ozma. this follows from her deliberate rhetorical separation of oscar from ozma and also the basis of her strategy in coaxing this information out of oscar. the reason she's taking the time for this little prologue is not to help oscar understand why she captured him necessarily. she's (trying to) set out the rules of the game she is playing. trying to, because she's doing her showing-her-work-but-not-giving-the-answer thing again.
here's what she means:
"perhaps you and i can have a better working relationship. oscar, was it?" -> i can work with you because i know you're not him. "if i know my ozma, he has used some means of deception to hide [the relic's] location differently from the others." -> ozma lies. i despise him for lying to me. i expect you to prove to me that you're not like him in this specific way. "i need to know where it is." -> i want an honest answer.
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salem knows he isn't going to tell her where ozma hid the relic, if oscar even knows that information; she doesn't expect or even want him to tell her that yet, necessarily. rather, this is a test. she wants to see if oscar will try to deceive her.
"that's not something i know about." he passes.
immediately, salem rewards him for being honest. "of course." she removes her hand from the hound's shoulder and moves away.
"he would keep that one guarded as long as possible." she also takes the opportunity to reinforce that she sees oscar as a separate individual and insinuates that ozma is actively keeping secrets from both of them.
and again, this is a cunning approach because:
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oscar is scared and uncomfortable. he quite clearly anticipates that salem is going to get angry and hurt him as he says he doesn't know the answer. so when she accepts "i don't know" without hesitation and physically moves out of his personal space, it creates these feelings of surprise and relief.
that emotional reaction is the key to salem's strategy here. first she tells oscar that she will be reasonable if he cooperates, then she clarifies her expectations ("don't lie.") she asks a question knowing full well that he either can't or won't answer it. he says "i don't know" and braces for retaliation, but instead salem goes "okay" and turns down the heat. she's demonstrating through her actions that she's going to play fair.
"how about something easier, then? the password for the lamp."
she doesn't expect him to tell her this one either. not yet. it's another test that builds from the first. she's established that "i don't know" is a safe answer (as long as it's true). what salem's fishing for him to say now is "i'm not going to tell you that."
why? when she walked away, she left oscar hanging from the hound's jaws. salem lowered the heat—she didn't turn it all the way off. the point of all this is to teach oscar how to play her game, and the last rule he needs to know is that "i won't say" is also a safe answer. had he given her that answer, the hound would have set him down and withdrawn to lay down in the entryway.
only then would the game truly begin. the idea is to draw oscar into something like a real conversation and gradually get him comfortable saying things like "i don't know" and "i won't answer that question" by cultivating trust. once that rapport exists, it becomes really easy to turn the discussion around by asking oscar why? why not take the risk of trusting her with this or that information? after all, she's been nothing but polite and reasonable. does he truly still believe she's the evil monster ozma made her out to be? she gave him the benefit of the doubt... can't he do the same for her?
salem wins by convincing him she's a person he can negotiate with. that pulling this off would be the ultimate fuck-you to ozma only makes it more satisfying.
of course, that's not what actually happens. (partly because salem talked a circle about the "don't lie" rule and oscar—who hasn't spent the last four volumes seeing that his woman yells and flips tables when she's lied to—didn't pick up the hint.) instead, he tries to deceive her again and salem lashes out.
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<- the physical violence gets all the attention from the fandom, and i do understand why, it's nasty and protracted and made to be viscerally unpleasant to watch, but. it's only a placeholder, something salem does while she considers what she's going to do—and say—to hurt him in a way that will never heal.
ok.
salem gets that oscar isn't ozma, didn't ask to become him, and feels desperate to retain his own identity distinct and separate from for as long as possible. she knows how ozma's reincarnation works, what this curse does to his hosts. it's not hard to figure out that it is a horrifying, traumatizing ordeal for the souls he's "paired" with. this is why she makes such a particular point of differentiating between oscar and ozma.
"the lies come out of you so easily." ("if i know my ozma, he has used some means of deception...")
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why does she caress his face like this? to make him remember her like ozma does. "like-minded souls, indeed." you can pretend, boy, but so much of you is him that you remember even this.
the torture is just the preshow. this is the cruelest, most devastating thing she could possibly do to him, and salem knows it. she gave him a pass on pretending to be ozma, and he threw the second chance back in her face by lying to her again; she's furious and upset and she wants to HURT him.
this is how porous the boundaries between you and him have become. this is how close you are to being him. this is how little of you there is left to lose. like-minded souls, indeed.
like.
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she does this to fuck with his head and it horrifies him so much that oscar spends the remainder of this arc actively choosing to endure being hazel's literal punching bag rather than let ozma take over or try to escape using ozma's magic. in 8.6:
OZMA: I’d like to express again that this is my burden to bear, not yours. His grudge is with me. OSCAR: No, it’ll be even worse. He’s holding back with me, I can tell. OZMA: I understand. I do. But you’ve done so much already. The least I can do is give you a break and try to get us out of here. OSCAR: We can’t leave yet.
they go back and forth, oscar proposes trying to flip hazel, ozma agrees it's worth a try. when hazel comes in, ozpin goes "oscar, please"—and because oscar doesn't respond, it's ambiguous whether he gives ozma control or if ozma shunts him aside again as he did at haven academy.
either way, the next we see of oscar after the interrogation scene is ozma entreating oscar to let him take over and oscar going no no no, that'll make it worse, no i don't need a break, i've got a plan, no no we have to stay here. and while his reasoning is cogent... this is a fifteen year old boy who's spent the whole day getting beaten up by a guy three times his size, and he actively wants to stay and be tortured more rather than let ozma front for a while.
and then in 8.9:
OZMA: I think this plan to divide may have run its course. It’s time we start thinking about a way out; not having our cane certainly limits our options, so… OSCAR: No! I don’t like what happens when we use magic. Every time we use it, I can feel us merging faster. I'm not ready for that.
the deeper truth gets spoken aloud.
this is not a new thing with oscar—his emotional core has always been existential dread—but framing it in this way, set against hours and hours of brutal torture that oscar insists is the less bad option, represents a massive spike in the intensity of his horror.
because salem Did That.
anyway the interrogation scene is great. 10/10.
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bestworstcase · 10 days
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what ruby says: are we supposed to be mourning jaune’s make-believe friends?
what she means: jaune labeled all the paper pleasers with the names of his friends and then abused them for years, ignoring everything they told him about what they wanted because he decided they needed to be protected from themselves because they were too stupid and crazy to really mean what they said. (<- ruby knows exactly how that feels.) the paper pleasers were not his friends, he didn’t care about them—they were props to make him feel better. they were real people whom jaune treated like toys to play pretend about saving his real friends. the make-believe hero. and ruby’s supposed to feel sorry for him now? because his little toys finally broke free?
what wby+j probably hear: ruby thinks it’s stupid to care about the paper pleasers because afterans aren’t real people.
what salem says: none of that matters anymore! why spend our lives trying to redeem these humans when we could replace them with what they could never be?
what she means: the brothers never had the right to massacre humankind, and now that they have abandoned remnant, abdicated their responsibility as its creators, and sworn not to return until they’re summoned, nothing they say matters at all. these humans did nothing wrong and the gods gave them nothing and deserve nothing in return; trying to ‘redeem’ these humans is a waste of time because there is nothing to redeem. the only person alive who needs redemption before the gods is salem herself, and she doesn’t want it—because to redeem herself is to justify what the brothers did, to say that the slaughter of the whole planet and the millions of years she spent in solitude were good and just and fair, and she knows that isn’t true. the gods want humans to grovel for forgiveness? the gods can burn.
what ozma probably hears: salem wants to kill everybody because she doesn’t think these humans are real people.
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bestworstcase · 11 days
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You have certainly made a post about how ruby adopts salem’s strategy against the gods in her fight against cordovin but I can’t find it :( And if you have any other thoughts on the final fight against the gods please share them thank uuuuu❤️
this is one of those pre-v9 posts that i snicker about now. volume nine said this mountain is not enough i need a whole goddamned range
post-v9, this is the loose sketch of how i think things will go down with the god of light (and why the brothers are important narratively)—the short version is that the cordovin and furious cat fights are foreshadowing the showdown against the god of light: cordovin’s giant mech is defeated when her own attack is turned against her, and then the person inside reflects on her mistakes and chooses to turn in a new direction; the furious cat is defeated and the true self emerges from within the monstrous form, and then the narrative gently rebukes team rwby and jaune for turning their backs on the cat. the set up is toward sending the god of light home so he can ascend.
(and i say god of light specifically because i think darkness already ascended and—like the primordial dragon in the mythical tale of the two brothers—divided himself into new beings. four of them. whom the god of light then chained up in those relics because he still thinks he can force things to go back to the way they used to be if he achieves perfect control over his brother and all of their creations.)
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bestworstcase · 12 days
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This is a haha funny joke but I’m also being completely serious: Salem’s hair is spider. Like that’s a thorax and legs we all see it right? Now she’s either got a spider growing out of her head or it’s like her bug ring and she’s just got a grim spider hanging out as her hairdo. What’s the 9 layers deep symbolism going on here? Her hair so big because it’s full of secrets, insect-arachnid secrets
hm
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hmmmm
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