on Ruby and THE INTRICACIES OF BEING A HUNTRESS.
It’s no secret that Ruby started off with an incredibly naive idea in her head of being a Huntress. Her words exactly: “My parents always taught us to help others, so I thought ‘might as well make a career out of it’! I mean, the police are alright but Huntsmen and Huntresses are just so much more romantic and exciting, and really… Gosh. Y’know?” The keyword of this being romantic: she is quite literally romanticizing a very dangerous job. I think she always had an expectation of being a huntress and knew deep down that it could lead to harm, injury, or death – looking at you, Summer Rose, but to her it was one of those… “It happened to someone else but that doesn’t mean it’ll happen to me” type things. She had yet to see the intricacy of what being an active Huntress would entail. Do I think she would have stopped what she was doing if she found out beforehand? No. I think she’d still have that same mindset of ‘that was them, and this is me’. In situations like this it’s all theoretical until it’s not, and when it isn’t is when it really hits her. In a lot of ways, she still has this naivete. In other ways, this romanticism has faded away with time and experience.
I touched on this a bit earlier when talking about Ruby’s identity, but I would like to expand on this a bit, specifically in the realm of being a Huntress. Her mother does have quite a bit to do with most of these subcategories so it’s likely I’ll be bringing this up again: a lot of her issues stem from her mother somehow - either knowingly or unknowingly. Either way: because of Summer Rose’s death, Ruby feels a certain responsibility or duty to become a Huntress. It’s like she’s being passed down a torch she’s essentially made herself to believe was hers all along, but really is stemmed from wanting to be like her mother, or people’s memories of her. She has a lot of weight of expectation on her shoulders from someone she hardly remembers. Because of this: to her, there’s little to no room for error, and she’s yet to learn that making mistakes is an important part of growth. She’s so good at being a Huntress - or at the very least, training to be one - that she’s put pressure on herself to do more. A lot of this has to do with the fact that she’s younger than most of her peers - not considerably, but enough to feel a separation. She said it best at the very beginning of all of this: “I just want to be a normal girl”. Of course, the line was meant to be more like a joke but looking deeper, she just wanted a place to fit in. Ruby is confident in her skills and in her duty to protect others, but at a base level she just wants to be normal.
Stemming off of what I said previously, pressure to fight from unforeseen forces = failure hits harder. Because she is put on a higher pedestal due to skill ( and some due to forces out of her control IE her silver eyes ) the proverbial fall is further and prone to more injury. To her, there is little to no margin to fail. A lot of this is to do with Summer Rose and the expectations to live up to, but a very important chunk of this is her own expectations and the expectations of others for her to keep pushing through. Failure in her eyes is unacceptable, and she will be very mad at herself if she allows essentially anything to slip through the cracks. Very often this will result in some sort of anger within her that she will then repress. Because of the pressure of being a special case, with the pressure of being a leader despite this, and the anxiety of having to lead a team of people - in some cases, multiple - failure has a tendency to crush her. she holds herself to a bar higher than anyone else could dream, and beats down on herself when that extremely high expectation is not met. It isn’t necessarily her fault that she does this. Again, it all trails back to expectations of her.
Despite the previous want to be normal ( which, admittedly, I think she’s somewhat grown out of in a literal sense through some factors of this stay steady ), worse by far is underestimating her because of her size / experience / etc. To her, there are two sides of this coin: the side where people expect the most of her and put her high above others, and the side where people look at her from an outsider’s point of view and write her off as someone who is too small / incapable of things someone who is older and has more experience would be capable of. A lot of this is due to her size, which is regularly poked at by people like Robyn. It plays her advantage because not many people expect the little girl to be so good at what she does, but it also plays to a mental disadvantage because half of the people she knows are praising her and holding her to high expectations while the other half are belittling her and underestimating her despite not knowing what she can do. While maybe not as extreme as the example lends itself to be, it’s still prominent, and that’s important.
Those who oppose what Huntsman and Huntresses do and use it as a door to openly hate on those who are trying to keep others safe make Ruby incredibly angry. A lot of this stems from the previous points, specifically underestimation.
SPOILERS FOR THE RWBY DC COMIC.
Issue #6 specifically deals with this. A group of people openly hate on team RNGR for doing their jobs, and are scared of them and being harmed. Even though Ruby’s well aware that she doesn’t hurt people - only Grimm - Ren reminds her that before all of this, during the war, it was commonplace for war-like things to be happening: people killing people for the slaughter. After fighting Grimm and keeping them safe despite their opposition, Ruby says this:
“I don’t want a thank-you. I wouldn’t say ‘you’re welcome’. You want to listen to scare tactics instead of thinking for yourself, that’s your choice. You want to believe what some stranger tells you instead of what your eyes and ears show you, that’s your choice. But birds that don’t hatch just die in their eggs. So I hope you choose to break out. Open up. Trust people and help people grow. Even if it’s hard. But I can’t make you do it. And I can’t do it for you.”
This, specifically, is something imperative to get to know Ruby, and very important to see her bitterness to people who choose to go with what others say without thinking for themselves, especially in a job that she’s spent essentially her whole life dreaming about. A way to get her angry is to be ignorant. Ignorance is one of the things she has little to no a.) tolerance on and b.) time for. People who believe what other people say blindly without thinking for themselves makes Ruby very angry, and is one of the few ways see a quite nasty side of her. People who hate people because someone else said they should makes no sense to her, especially in something she’s grown up with a good opinion of, and something that she’s wanted so much to the point of romanticizing it. Because of this, she will always try to see the other side of things or at the very least be curious as to why they do what they do. This gets her in trouble sometimes, but the other percentage of time it works to her advantage. Seeing the other side for where they’re at or at least trying to do so is something that seems so simple to her. So, in times and examples of ignorance, she gets angry because to her, it’s easier than most.