#and in theory (sighs heavily) crochi amour would explore and resolve that conflict

[bestworstcase]

Just found your post about gillian x jaune and I enjoyed it very much! Could you elaborate gillian being anti-theme ozma? Is it like, she’s committed not to GoL and his religion war but the people she loves and she acts in ozma’s manner on this issue? Thank you <3

when i say a character is anti-theme what i mean is they either don’t know or don’t believe the narrative themes. this is a broad / high-level way of thinking about character arcs in terms of a character’s relation to theme. for example, a lot of fantasy protagonists have character arcs about learning and embracing the story’s themes; think “hero discovers the true power of friendship” type of stories. 

one of the characteristics that makes rwby so interesting is that this theme/anti-theme paradigm is decoupled from narrative role, most notably in the case of salem and ozpin. 

salem understands the narrative themes. in fact, she articulates them at the beginning of the story with such precision that fans regularly describe what rwby is thematically about by quoting or paraphrasing her: “even the smallest spark of hope is enough to ignite change,”  “there will be no victory in strength,” and “your faith in mankind was not misplaced: when banded together, unified by a common enemy, they are a noticeable threat.” salem also describes mankind as “strong, wise, and resourceful” and praises humanity’s “passion, resourcefulness, and ingenuity.” these are ideas that salem truly believes. 

meanwhile ozpin professes to have faith in mankind, but in reality he is beholden to a god who explicitly views modern humans as inferior shadows of their predecessors and has commanded ozma to “redeem” them before the gods lest they be found unworthy of existence and destroyed. ozpin himself is also paranoid, deceitful, manipulative, and distrustful, because he has no real faith in people. 

and, if you listen to what salem actually says to and about him (including in ‘sacrifice’ and ‘divide’) it’s obvious that most of her fury is motivated by this: salem believes that humanity is worthy and that the divine mandate should be refused, and ozma’s dedication to his task of “redeeming” humanity enrages her. she’s angry both for herself and on humanity’s behalf.

her belief in the themes is also evident in her strategy and the scope of her war: she is very narrowly focused on the huntsmen academies and seems to be making an effort to minimize collateral damage, i.e. pulling grimm out of vale quickly while holding beacon, the surgical strike planned on haven, not attacking mantle (and having the hound send wild grimm out of the city), leaving menagerie in peace. salem is both desperate and ruthless, but her faith in remnant’s ability to survive and rebuild after she knocks the academies down is ironclad.

so, with that laid out, before discussing gillian i want to first elaborate on jaune being anti-theme salem. 

salem’s own story is defined by striving for freedom and justice: she escapes her tyrannical father’s tower; challenges the brothers, who are unjust; leads a rebellion; possibly brings humankind back and may have created the faunus through her transformation in the pool of grimm; rejects the divine mandate; and now she seeks to topple the huntsmen academies and create a ‘new world’ free from the divine threat of annihilation. 

connected to that, one of the central thematic conceits of her character is the power that storytellers wield over their audiences: ozpin explicitly uses fairytales as propaganda to control the narrative about her, framing her as an inhuman monster who cannot be trusted and desires only annihilation. fairytalesare not real, and the truth is hard to come by. salem is well aware of this and remarks upon it in her V1 soliloquy (“legends, stories scattered through time” that obscure “the forgotten past”). she does not, particularly, seem to like fairytales. 

as with hope and faith in mankind, this is another case of salem knowing the theme versus ozma believing the anti-theme. rwby values fairytales because they can express emotional truths, but the whole truth—the reality—is always more complex, and fairytales can also be weaponized as propaganda or tools of condemnation. it is important to understand that fairytales aren’t real, and treating real life like a fairytale only leads to pain. 

yes? okay.

jaune and pyrrha reflect salem and ozma; she’s the renowned celebrity athlete with a heart of gold, he’s the self-described “damsel in distress” and “lovable idiot stuck in the tree.” she helps him down from the tree and trains him to a level of competence, and like the original ozma, she dies tragically young. simple. 

but,

unlike salem, jaune is not motivated by a longing for freedom or anger at injustice. he comes from a line of soldiers and he wants to prove to his doubtful family that he’s good enough to uphold that legacy. he doesn’t want to be the damsel in distress; he wants to be the hero. he doesn’t want to be saved; he wants to be the one saving others. so he fraudulently enrolls in beacon academy and pretends to be something he isn’t. the tree is his tower—“i’m tired of being the lovable idiot stuck in the tree while his friends fight for their lives,” he says, pointing wildly at beacon tower—but the thing is, he put himself there. during his character arc in V1, jaune is trapped in a cage of his own making, one he built out of childish fantasies about being the fairytale hero. 

further, if we compare jaune’s reason for wanting to be a huntsman against the rest of the kids:

ruby wants to help people and feel closer to her mother by being like the heroes in the stories summer read to her when she was small

weiss wants to atone for what her father has done in her family’s name and make things right

blake wants to make a stand against corruption and inequality for her people, even though she’s not sure how to fix it

yang craves adventure and self-discovery, and she wants to pursue it in a manner that will make the world a better place

pyrrha believes it’s her destiny to be a huntress in order to protect the world

nora doesn’t have a clear idea of what she wants, but she’s an intensely compassionate person who, like blake, stands up to injustice and advocates for people in need. 

ren wants to become the huntsman his village needed, someone who could have saved his parents and his home, and he’s following his father’s final advice to take action

jaune wants to prove to his family that he is good enough to become a warrior like his forefathers. 

jaune is the odd one out. he’s fiercely loyal to and protective of his friends, but he’s the only one who came to beacon for purely self-centered reasons. his arc in V1 is about jaune learning not to be craven and self-serving, to shelve his pride, let go of his cowardice, and do the right thing. 

all of this is anti-theme—or at least, the absence of belief in the themes. 

and that comes to a head when he’s stranded in the ever after in V9. see, salem’s belief in the themes—in the power of hope, the worth of mankind, and the importance of truth—is not just an abstraction. these beliefs are what drives her. for salem, emotionally, hope and righteous anger are one and the same. when she loses her hope, she remembers her anger; anger motivates her to act, and so reignites her hope. she has never given up because she has taken every horrific hope-shattering experience as a reason to get back up and keep fighting. every cruelty the gods inflicted upon her strengthened her conviction that resistance to their design was worthwhile. 

so

what happens if salem lacks that conviction?

salem believes heart and soul that change is possible and that these humans—this world—are better off without the brothers. in the present, she is hopeless and wrathful, and her desperation drives her to catastrophic extremes, but she is not stagnating: she’s fighting to change the world, freeing herself from exile and everyone else from the threat of annihilation. 

in contrast, jaune does not really believe in anything. not in the way salem does—he believes in his friends and he believes in doing his job as a huntsmen, sure. but where is his faith? where, after he’s stranded in the ever after, is his reason to act? after the moonfall, salem curses the gods and wanders the face of remnant alone until she reaches the pool of grimm, then throws herself into the darkness with the hope that it will change something; rather than fall into despair, she holds onto her conviction and searches for a way to keep moving forward. 

jaune… sits on a beach for years, passively waiting for something to happen. when alyx and lewis find him, he tries to be the storybook hero and his obsession with making sure that the story happens as it’s “supposed” to freaks alyx out so much that she poisons him. then he lives with the paper pleasers for years, playing pretend as their hero while he runs in circles. he’s trapped. he has no real purpose or direction. the tree is, once again, his tower—that tree is death! it erases you!—and just as before, it’s a tower of his own making. 

tellingly, his stagnation in the ever after transforms him into a resemblance of ozpin: paranoid, distrustful, manipulative, controlling of the very people to whom he has appointed himself a guardian. he finds himself in a world completely unfamiliar to him, convinces himself that it’s cursed and bad because it isn’t like the world he remembers, and rots. 

so, he’s anti-theme salem: a fractal repetition of her unmoored from her unshakable belief in the themes, who stagnates and is corrupted like ozpin because of his lack of faith. 

the natural converse of anti-theme salem is an ozma who does believe in the themes, because that’s the reversal of ozma’s relation to the theme.

presuming that i am generally anticipating gillian’s presence and role in the vacuo arc correctly, there are a few solid reasons to think that her thematic ties to ozma will mirror jaune’s to salem.

first, as the summer maiden—the maiden of destruction—her “moral” (per the fairytale) is “don’t view the world at a distance; take an active part in it,” and destruction itself has been consistently portrayed as a catalyst and agent of change. ozpin fears destruction and views it as the enemy of life itself—anti-theme. being the summer maiden, gillian would embody the thematic refutation to that idea.

second, the crown repeats the ozlem kingdom: both authoritarian cults founded and led by a pair of leaders claiming divine right to rule (ozlem on the strength of their magic, the asturias twins through their claim of royal blood), and both collapse when ozma / gillian are forced to choose between love and their cause. but they choose in opposite directions; ozma sacrifices salem and their daughters for the sake of the divine mandate, but gillian turns against jax at the last minute to save  his life (and her own) once it’s clear that he intends to go down fighting. unlike ozma, when the chips were down, gillian sacrificed her cause to save her brother.

third, the whole backstory between gillian and jax—as i’ve pointed out before—revolves around gillian’s absolute rejection of the idea that her brother’s frailty made him inferior. everyone else, even jax himself, sees jax as a parasitic weakling, pitiable at best and repellant at worst, but gillian is glad to share her aura with him and not only treats him like her equal but comfortably follows his lead. 

gillian’s semblance makes her terrifically powerful, with or without the maiden powers, and she was raised in a culture that worships power and abhors “weakness”—and yet. she mainly uses her power to support her brother and at one point during the climactic battle she even reflects that the power she grants her forces also leads them to be overconfident and reckless, to their detriment. her attitude toward power is very reminiscent of salem’s—and quite unlike ozma, who seeks out the relics in the hope of using them to overpower salem and goes to extreme lengths to try to keep the maidens and their power under his control. 

so while she clearly repeats ozma, gillian does not put her faith in power and chooses to follow her heart rather than let herself and her brother die for a doomed cause, and she might be the maiden who embodies destruction as a force of active change. all of this puts her thematically opposite to ozma in much the same way that jaune is thematically opposite to salem. 

and,

if she and jaune do wind up being narratively intertwined (romantically or otherwise), there is a lot of compelling reverse-ozlem ore here. a heroic anti-theme salem in juxtaposition with a villainous ozma who knows (some of) the themes. when jaune is at his best, he’s a healer; gillian loves her medically fragile brother. there’s an obvious narrative opening to bring these characters into orbit with each other and helping jax is an obvious step to healing what’s rotten in the state of vacuo. in the broader thematic sense, gillian as an ozma repetition being motivated to complete a villain->hero arc because they’re helping her brother (and because she’s been given a reason to question whether there’s any real truth or value in her “royal bloodline”) would also elegantly precipitates ozma’s apostasy arc. and then you have the possible ozlem reversal of jaune finding something to believe in through gillian just as ozma found something to live for in salem. 

#theme vs anti-theme is rly central to #why ozlem imploded #and in theory (sighs heavily) crochi amour would explore and resolve that conflict #as a prelude to the ozlem reconciliation