nope.

sailor; she/her; 33yo /// art blog of sailorboo.tumblr.com /// currently obsessed with: RWBY//be warned: i post more wips then actual art /// asks are always welcome ✌️obvi — tc*st; proshipping; etc DNI 🚫

[sailorb00]

Hey there! My name’s Cara/Sailor and I draw as a hobby (mix of fan and oc work). If you like what you see, please consider giving it a like and/or reblog (❁´◡`❁)

If you really like what you see, please consider giving me a follow.

You can also find me on my trash blog or on ; my twitter 💕

Also!! Asks are always welcome—so long as you don’t mind the impending info dump fsdf 💕

[skyrim-forever]

The worst characters are the ones were you only get like three pieces of lore about them but the lore is so fascinating and hits your brain at just the right angle to have you behaving like a feral dog in front of your conspiracy theory cork board

[neptunevasilias]

If you subscribe to Starr being the summer maiden (which I recommend), it makes you take a second look at some things about Sun. Specifically, the fact that he left.

[sailorb00]

Hi, I just wanted to say how much I adore how you draw ROTTMNT Salamandrians!

After doing some research myself about Salamander life cycles, I find your designs (as well as Sophie Campbell's design of Mona in the IDW comic run) truly a breath of fresh air!

Oh wow! That's so sweet of you to say! 🥰✨❤️

Wowee... It's been a while since I drew anything TMNT/ROTMNT — I remember just really liking the idea of Salamandrians starting off as fully aquatic tadpole-like creatures, who morph into a partial aquatic/amphibian axolotl-like state like mid-pubescence and then full amphibian salamanders as adults, and just kinda ran with it lol

(I also so very much adore IDW Mona 🥰✨❤️ I tried to incorporate all 3 Mona designs into my version of ROTMNT Mona fsdf)

[sailorb00]

knowing they're in the writing stage f9r v10 got me pondering about her again and so i had to redraw my starr sanzang fandesign fsdf

[sailorb00]

✨️💖🕶🏴‍☠️💖✨️

[kaen-ace-of-diamonds]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Written for @sailorboo for @rwbygotcha4gaza!

Word Count: 1,831 (oneshot)

Pairing: Qrow Branwen/Theodore

Characters: Qrow Branwen, Theodore (STR_ are hanging around offscreen)

Genre: Fluff/Hurt/Comfort

Summary: The first and last time Qrow and Theodore met.

~0~

“Good game, huh?!”

He recognizes the booming voice from the other side of the arena: this is the guy from Team TWSR who was giving Tai such a hard time in the shifting sand. (He’d left Qrow here early to find someplace quieter, complaining his ears were still ringing.)

“I didn't exactly mean to go out in the first round, but I guess it’s not so bad if it’s to guys like you. Where are you from, anyway? You don’t really fight like a Valerian.”

Qrow narrows his eyes, scanning for any trace of mockery or insincerity in Twister’s broad grin and bright, dark eyes. He finds none, but still.

“Hey, tough guy, fight’s over,” he growls. “Back up.”

Twister just laughs, as if that was a joke. “I kind of wish I’d been fighting you instead of your buddy with the ponytail! Like, boxers versus boxers can get boring. What’s it like to try and dodge a scythe like yours? It’s quite the weapon, you should be proud of it! Those extenders that transform it from the sword mode, they move out pretty fast, don’t they?”

In spite of himself, the corner of Qrow’s mouth twitches up. So Harbinger Version 3.0 (and counting) is his pride and joy and weakness all at once. Bite him.

[AO3]

[sailorb00]

❤️🌹

[sailorb00]

super belated raffle prize for @cometko_ on twitter (sorry!!!!!)

[bestworstcase]

i do think it’s thematically important that the maidens are inherited in this specific way, it’s not an accident that when the narrative sets down the rules the potential violence is not just remarked upon but given emphasis and used explicitly as justification for the aura transfer machines. nearly everything ozpin does is rooted in keeping the maidens within his control—selecting candidates in anticipation of their deaths, giving the branwens bird forms to identify maidens when the line of inheritance jumps the tracks, chaining the maidens to these vaults, etc—and his greatest adversary in this endeavor is the maidens themselves, because the magic preferentially selecting maiden-killers is, in effect, the magic fighting against this control.

why does the magic transfer itself like this? it will not be controlled. throughout the years ozma and his allies have devoted enormous effort to dictating the Final Thoughts of anyone who receives this power in order to maintain control over it (& their abject failure in this regard leads to the invention of the aura transfer machines); meanwhile the magic binds itself to "random" heirs if the candidate its host has in mind is unsuitable, and prefers to go to ozma’s enemies when it can.

(and do mark that. the person in the maiden’s Final Thoughts is explicitly only a suggestion, one the magic can and will disregard if he or she is unsuitable. ozpin et al believe that these candidates are only rejected if they are 1. male or 2. too old, but none of them can read minds; and as ozpin says, maidens choose themselves. it’s just as likely that there are additional disqualifying criteria, such as the candidate being coerced or just not being spiritually compatible. there’s no reason to think that KILLING A MAIDEN couldn’t be a disqualifying act if the magic were unwilling.)

of note in this regard is that cinder breaks amber’s aura (orange) before using the beetle to draw out the magic (golden):

which matters because the magic is attached to aura and separates at the moment of death; as i said in the last post, the grimm beetle is successful because it respects the magic’s own rules. cinder breaks the outward projection of amber’s soul and then shoots her in the back (symbolically, killing her) and then claims the magic as she begins to die. had she walked up and slit amber’s throat here instead, she would have almost certainly inherited all of the magic too. the grimm beetle thumbs the scales a bit but in the context of the magic’s rules, it’s playing ball.

whereas:

when cinder uses her arm to drain raven’s/penny’s auras, she doesn’t gain any portion of the spring/winter maiden’s magic, nor do either of them suffer lasting harm in the vein of amber (coma) or pietro (holes burned through his aura).

so there’s nothing special about grimm that allows them to violate the magical rules. all evidence suggests that the ATMs don’t work for this purpose either: as soon as amber dies, the magic rips free, and cinder’s grimm arm can harvest aura but not magic. it follows that in the event of a complete aura transfer, the magic would detach from the donor aura as soon as the donor died, leaving the recipient with two souls and no magic. there is a degree of wiggle room (under particular circumstances you can convince the magic to begin separating before the previous maiden is fully dead) but you can’t outright cheat.

which is the whole point. you can’t take a maiden’s magic without killing her and you can’t circumvent the maiden’s agency by stealing the soul of its host. the maidens are unbound by death. and i think there’s a literal causal relationship between how ozma treats the maidens and how they choose their hosts—he can’t use them as weapons without losing them, or outright delivering this magic into salem’s hands. nor can he hoard them or hide them away forever because he can’t dictate their final thoughts.

[cryptidblues]

I find the idea that the two Grimm syphons (beetle & arm) that Salem gives to Cinder, for the express purpose to aid in Cinder’s pursuit of the maiden power, having the implicit potential to be a nonlethal mode of transfer absolutely fascinating.

And Cinder kills because she chooses to kill.

Your words @bestworstcase: “the grimm arm is interesting because it theoretically enables cinder to take the maidens without killing (by siphoning aura)”.

I would posit that maybe the Grimm beetle could’ve been nonlethal too, had events not unfolded as they did. But I’d also say that the Grimm syphons mean to circumvent the will or intention of the host maiden by overriding those “last thoughts”. That is a crucial part of their function, like the aura machines. It’s meant to eliminate uncertainty of risk for the transfer of power But it’s not a guarantee. The magic goes where it WILLS ultimately.

Man I’m chomping at the bit to know how the power does choose and how it disqualifies. Whats the nuance? What are we missing? Sometimes a thing is meant to be unknowable in its nature and that’s the purpose it serves in the story but that’s not gonna stop me sitting here n thinking about it (put me head in me hands, just like silver eyes).

From the moment Oz divested his magic, the alienation of its hosts and the strict regulation and pursuit of the maiden powers was inevitable. Given the world these powers exist in. (Given who Ozma was/is. (And the fact that carving out most of his magic didn’t obliterate him like he was probably hoping it would)).

It has something to say about the whole story. You put it quintessentially. Control. Freedom. And Violence. All comes back to the Grimm doesn’t it?

[bestworstcase]

my reading of the maidens generally is that they are—at least with respect to the transference of magic at death—separate entities with their own will that can be influenced by the dying host’s final thoughts but won’t necessarily abide by her wishes. i also think the maidens similarly consider the will of the recipient, in that they’ll prefer a new host who truly wants them.

(we’ve never seen someone unwilling receive a maiden: fall chose cinder over pyrrha, the transfer from fria to penny doesn’t complete until penny decides to take her hand, the transfer from penny to winter likewise begins when winter decides to accept the magic as a gift. the one potential spanner in the works is raven, but if nothing else she’s gotten very good at using the magic which suggests that she embraced it and trained hard once she had it.)

i do think the beetle would have definitely been fatal had qrow not severed the connection; being shot in the back with an arrow wouldn’t… leave someone comatose for months, especially not in a setting where aura has such a remarkable healing factor (weiss and hazel both get impaled through the midriff at haven and fully heal within like 10-15 minutes, with weiss needing jaune to stabilize her + hazel relying on his semblance to negate the pain. getting shot with an arrow is a very survivable injury even in the real world, as long as it doesn’t pierce anything extremely vital like a major artery).

so it’s the beetle that put her into a months-long coma. & in other contexts (pietro) we see that injuries to the soul have a deleterious effect on health (he’s ill, he looks much older than ironwood and watts, there are holes burned through his aura when he projects it). i don’t think it’s possible to fully extract a maiden from someone’s soul without killing them in the process.

similarly, like i said, cinder doesn’t gain any magic from siphoning raven’s/penny’s aura and i’m not convinced that’s what she’s trying to do in those scenes—she has to kill them to get at the magic, she can’t kill them without breaking their defenses first, her use of the grimm arm to rip at their aura is meant to wear them down enough for her to punch through. both times she DOES go for the magic, with vernal and penny, she rams them through the chest. (in penny’s case there’s still aura to dig through because penny’s aura wasn’t broken, she was just distracted)

so i do think it’s necessary for a host to die, or at least be dying, before the maiden will cleave away. the use of the grimm arm to capture a maiden is theoretical (and hinges on the same reasoning that the ATMs do); i won’t be surprised if this was a theory that salem at least considered, but the evidence to me suggests that this is not actually possible—with grimm or with technology.

imo the circumvention of the host’s final thoughts are of lesser importance because the maidens themselves also disregard those final thoughts quite regularly, if the person in the maiden’s final thoughts is unsuitable in some way. the host can’t force the maiden to go to whomever she chooses. and of course it’s a mistake to conflate "final thoughts" with the dying host choosing her heir, because that is often not the case; no one wants to bequeath magic to the person who murdered them for it, but maiden-killers often receive the maidens.

i suspect that ozpin’s understanding of how the powers are passed along is both overly simplified and fatalistic: he believes it’s "whoever is in the maiden’s final thoughts, unless that person is male or too old, then it’s random (fate decides)." my theory is that it’s more like: "the maiden will respect the dying host’s wishes if she has an eligible and truly willing candidate in mind; if the dying host is killed by an eligible candidate for the specific purpose of acquiring the magic, the maiden will choose her; otherwise, the maiden will seek out someone both eligible and willing in accordance with its own nature."

with "eligibility" being determined by more specific criteria than gender and youth; i think the candidate also needs to resonate in some way with the character of the original maiden, i.e. the variations on the maidens "lessons"/characters that all the maiden characters embody is not just thematically relevant, it’s also mechanically the criteria that makes someone eligible to become a specific maiden. (<- like-minded souls. it’s following the pattern of ozma’s curse after having been unbound by death through separation from him.)

which, returning to the grimm beetle, is also interesting because—unlike the arm, which is part of cinder—the beetle was part of salem (her sigil on the glove, it crawls out through a portal in cinder’s hand, the glove evaporates when the beetle is smashed) and i think that Probably Matters because salem (if i’m right about pattern theory) would have the necessary gravitational pull to alter the way maiden-death-reincarnation works. she’s died twice and the second time, in the grimm pool, freed her from the brothers’ control (remade her, gave rise to the faunus).

so she gives cinder this part of herself—a grimm woven from her own magic—to use to kill a maiden in such a way that the maiden is first divided and then recombined. in between, cinder remarks that the severed connection / separated magic is "an emptiness" which "burns, like hunger" and that she likes it.

looks into the camera like i’m on the office

the primordial force of pure destruction in this world is hunger. the brothers were given destruction, dark ate the weeds. salem is destruction incarnate and immortal and her miserable rotting depression shack had a kitchen. hunger is destruction. fire is also destruction (and hope, in salem’s view, is a fire, and so is anger).

this is the point where i start mentally pacing and muttering to myself but Something Important Happened Here, and specifically the beetle (salem’s magic) and the maiden’s separation between amber (alive-but-dead, dead-but-alive) and cinder (so dehumanized she feels a kinship with the grimm, desperate for freedom) is analogous to salem remaking herself in the pool of grimm; i think there is something deeper at work here than merely using grimm to circumvent the dying host’s final thoughts in order to minimize risk.

cinder’s the pool of grimm here. hunger, fire, destruction. when salem jumped into the pool of grimm, she recombined the two halves of humanity itself—light and dark, creation and destruction—into one being, which released her from her isolation and set her outside of the brother’s control. similarly, the maiden rips free of the aura transfer machine to recombine within cinder, who then Immediately melts ozpin into the floor and becomes the maiden he can’t control and the one he pointedly calls by name, cinder, instead of by title, the fall maiden.

what i’m getting at here is i wonder if salem didn’t figure out that the maidens have this pseudo-reincarnation because they follow the pattern of ozma’s reincarnation, because they were made from his magic, and then go: what happens if i give them a little of mine?

worst case scenario, it changes nothing. but destroying and remaking herself in the pool of grimm changed her and changed the world in significant ways; if she likewise destroys and remakes the maidens with her own magic, through cinder, then…? well she might not be able to predict what will happen but it’ll probably make it harder, maybe impossible for ozma to control them. and in the short term she gets her skeleton key too.

[bestworstcase]

something smth

"what is perhaps even more unsettling is the basis of their attraction; the creatures of grimm are lured toward negative emotion"

salem illustrates that like ->

not fear, not panic. violence. anger. hatred.

her narration in this episode relays the modern scientific view of grimm held by humankind; she says that it’s "panic" that brings in more grimm after an initial wave is repelled. but she also says "negative emotion" and illustrates that as one man killing another with a rock. look at the imagery

the strongest emotional attractant is violence; we see this again and again. the ursa is interested in cardin (fearful) but seems more curious/investigatory than anything but immediate extreme aggression when jaune (angry) attacks. the gryphon swerves out of its flock to eat torchwick because he’s furiously beating ruby. grimm literally follow the branwen tribe around to scavenge behind them. the leviathan is drawn to argus by cordovin’s little power trip and all the atlesian soldiers cheering her on.

(this is also—aside from salem like, existing—the main reason faunus ended up culturally associated with grimm in the first place: humans hunted them, and grimm flocked to that violence and attacked the humans [anger, violent hatred] rather than faunus [fear]. to the humans doing the killing this looked like grimm turning up to protect the faunus)

which is not New. we knew this. but i am. once again. putting my head in my hands and muttering derangedly abt the Grimm Lady’s name meaning. peace.

[bestworstcase]

the only problem with salem being ozma’s happy ending is that she’s so tall now. he’s gonna need a stool

when he ascends or whatever and comes back looking exactly like himself (ship of theseus style) he’s going to be this height again because ozma isn’t a coward

[bestworstcase]

One has to wonder how giant sandworm Grimm survive in Vacuo, given it doesn't exactly seem like Vacuo's the most abundant place for food, and I don't think lost humans in the desert are a good diet for something that big.

what grimm actually seem to need from their prey is aura—in 'before the dawn,' there's a scene where gillian recalls a time when she tried transferring aura to a grimm to see what would happen, and the grimm latched on to the connection and kept drinking aura until she severed the connection.

gill's semblance seems to be touch-based, in that she needs to touch a person to drain aura (although she is able to maintain these links at a distance once they're formed). so she must have gotten close enough to this grimm to touch it at least briefly, and in the passage there's no mention at all of it being aggressive or attacking her. which... would actually make a lot of sense, if from the grimm's perspective this human walked up to it and began to feed it. they're smart. why bite the hand that feeds?

we also see that with e.g. the beetle and the grimm arm that at least some types of grimm can suck aura out of living things without killing them. and humans/faunus aren't the only beings with aura—it's a life force running through all living creatures on remnant, including animals (and presumably plants and fungi and other lifeforms, although this isn't confirmed). everything except grimm.

what makes humans/faunus unique is their ability to amplify and project aura outward. if grimm have a physiological need for aura and no ability to produce it themselves, then humans/faunus are their most efficient food source by several orders of magnitude but not remotely the only one.

if the ability to drain aura from living beings is a general trait that all grimm have, then i'd imagine grimm just do that passively all the time, drawing a little bit of aura out of everything they touch as they roam the world. they obviously can't sustain themselves this way (because they hunt humans, who are both their most efficient available source of aura and also the most dangerous, so they must have high enough energy needs for that trade-off to be worth it) but it would surely lessen the burden. similarly, just because grimm have never been observed hunting or eating wildlife doesn't mean that they don't ever do that.

another thing we've seen is that grimm have a 'dormant' state where they kind of just... turn off. this is probably some form of power-saving mode. if the wyvern wasn't petrified under that mountain, it had probably been in a dormant state for a very long time, and that could suggest that extremely large grimm might hibernate for years or even centuries at a time. so that's one possibility: perhaps giants like the blind worms are very energy-efficient and spend most of their time dormant or sort of dozing, to conserve energy, so they don't need to hunt very often, and when they do they're big enough to catch many humans at one time, which can last them for a while.

a second possibility is that blind worms and other giants might be more akin to, say, filter-feeding whales in that they're built to feed on millions of tiny organisms all the time and only resort to hunting larger / more energy-rich prey like humans in lean years when there isn't enough, waves hands, sand krill or whatever to sustain them.

but my favorite possibility is that. well. in after the fall, coco gets swallowed by a blind worm and she's like... fine:

It was pitch-black inside the Blind Worm. Coco took her glasses off, but that didn’t help at all. Maybe that’s why they called it a Blind Worm, because if it swallowed you, you couldn’t see inside its stomach, or whatever this was. Or maybe it was called a Blind Worm because you never saw it coming. Only she had seen it coming, and she’d ended up inside the damn thing, anyway. She had pulled Velvet out of the way, only to take her friend’s place. Coco figured sacrificing your life for your teammate was one way to be remembered as a good leader, but maybe that was just cheating. The air was warm and wet and foul smelling. And the darkness was even more disorienting because the worm was moving—fast. She was inside a living, runaway train with no idea how to get out.

while she's stuck inside it, this thing thrashes around, spins, plunges in and out of the sand, etc etc. and coco isn't harmed at all because she's "cushioned by the spongy lining on the walls." there doesn't seem to be anything in the way of digestive juices or... well, anything in there, just some ichor near the tail leaking from where her bullets injured it.

so blind worms can swallow people whole and alive, and keep them alive in there for at least a few days before they die of thirst. maybe a lot longer if aura can compensate for thirst. remember that point about grimm passively siphoning aura from living beings? 😶 depleted aura regenerates... if all a blind worm needs to survive is aura then jonahing a couple nomads every once in a while and then spitting them up again when there's no aura left is . probably a pretty good hunting strategy.

fuckin terrible way to go for the people, though.

[bestworstcase]

leans out a window. it is not salem’s fault that oz uses child soldiers to guard his fortresses. it’s not her fault that he made a deliberate strategic choice to recruit children into a war they didn’t even know they’re fighting. (and it certainly isn’t her fault that he’s been getting kids killed in training for decades before she made her first move!)

he has been trying to destroy her for thousands of years while salem lived in exile, not fighting back, until one of those grown-up child soldiers found out the truth and gave her something to fight for. if your defenders are all children because you set up your fortresses to masquerade as schools, if you for decades continually made the choice to use children as unwitting human shields then you don’t get to blame the enemy when children die on the front lines. YOU PUT THEM THERE.

[sruthi9018]

I wanted to have these tags here because I feel like they deserve to be since they're right. Also Cinder was "trained" as a child soldier from 10 years old by A HUNTSMAN (notably NOT Salem or anyone connected to her) while she was being abused and treated as a slave for who knows how long before Rhodes started teaching her. She killed her abusers and Rhodes at about 15-17, the age-ranges that RWBY joined beacon in too, we don't even know when she met Salem at all except that she's definitely in her twenties trying to blend in 17 to 20 year olds when she was infiltrating Beacon.

So like.. even if we grant that Salem recruited Cinder at the youngest possible age it would still be at least as old as Ruby when she got recruited and bumped up to study at beacon at 14-15.. Oz still recruites children way more than Salem ever does even hypothetically so of course he's the one who gets the darn criticism for doing it!! Salem having one potential hypothetical member of her group joining at 15 maybe(a severely abused person who killed their abusers at that) while the rest are very clearly adults does not make her a hypocrite when Oz regularly has 14 year olds and 15 year olds and 17 year olds fighting for him and using the students at the academies as shields against attack. (Seriously are we forgetting that we learn how Oz pays "special attention" to certain teams every year? STRQ was one, CFVY was the one just before RWBY too like.. The implications are that if the fall hadn't happened then CFVY would likely have been initiated into the Oz circle in a similar vein to STRQ and then RWBY would follow too after that. If that isn't hand picking and training special teams of students to fight for you and your cause then what is?)

[bestworstcase]

mmmhm. and cinder is in her early-to-mid twenties during the beacon arc as per word of god—around adam’s or winter’s or neo’s age, anywhere from 4-8 years older than a first year student at beacon (making her 21-25). she’s old enough to look at huntsmen academy students and see children.

which means that even if salem did somehow find cinder literally right after the glass unicorn incident, when cinder was 14/15 (the same age ruby was when oz admitted her to beacon), salem then waited almost a decade before she put into motion any plans involving cinder on the battlefield. there is a very real possibility that yang and ruby are on the front lines at all because salem decided cinder was too young, and waited until she was old enough to fully understand what she was signing up for.

it’s also entirely within the realm of possibility that cinder’s the same age that summer was when she cracked under pressure and went after salem; if yang was an ‘oops’ during or right after team STRQ graduated from beacon, and she’s five years old in the v9 flashback, then raven and summer couldn’t have been older than 25/26. and by then they’d been working for ozpin, minimum, four or five years, longer if he recruited them while they were still in school.

so it’s like… either salem found a 15-17 year old profoundly traumatized child who would have been laughably easy to mold into a living weapon and chose instead to hold off for anywhere between 5-10 years before sending her into battle, with the result that cinder in the present is more than willing to question salem’s decisions or argue with her or outright defy her if salem doesn’t treat her well, or salem found and recruited a young woman in her early twenties.

no matter which way you slice it, salem absolutely has the moral high ground as far as “don’t use children to fight your war” goes. not that that’s an especially high bar to clear, lmfao.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

That relies on the assumption that Salem really was just living in exile for thousands of years and this is the first time she’s gone on the offensive. Oz didn’t start the Great War, he tried to stay out of it, so I doubt Salem was just sitting that one out.

And as for training kids to fight and “using them as human shields”, the Grimm don’t discriminate, so you might as well to give them a chance at survival. If she was so worried about innocent bystanders, she could just not invade countries with hordes of demons.

[tumblingxelian]

So, I am not as much of an advocate for Salem as Bestworstcase, though I do love their meta and insights. But as to these points:

The Great War seems to have been something that happened entirely on its own, the political issues, the tensions the escalations, none of these things require Salem's involvement. So if the only evidence we have of it is Ozpin thinking she's involved its entirely possible she was just mooching about her castle and never heard about this. Especially given we know what Salem wants with her efforts, IE the Relics, which doesn't align with the Great War at all.

I mean Ozpin is literally using them as human shields, as in quite literally the stated purpose of the academies is to have the students unwittingly defend the Relics. Regardless no one's hands are clean in war and Salem's agents don't show much compunction about intentionally endangering or killing, or targeting civilians in their goals. So even at best, as their CO, she's responsible for that in a way I don't think can be quite done with Grimm. As she seems to only have loose command over them when not in their immediate presence and none at all outside a certain range.

So yeah she's certainly got no shortage of blood on her hands, still I can kind of see the point of "Why do you keep sending teenagers to fight and die stopping what you think are my plans rather than adults? That's fucked up." Doesn't make what she does OK, but as an observation I can get it.

[bestworstcase]

+ the lady just wiped two kingdoms off the map in the space of, like, maybe a month?, with the second being a few weeks at most after oscar and ozma atomized her vast fleet of zillions of grimm. in atlas she ripped open the continent to draw up a literal river of grimm from the core of the planet without any apparent effort at all, and spent hours spawning hundreds of grimm per second again without any apparent effort.

ozma has successfully kept this woman's existence a secret for thousands of years.

i, uh, do not believe he could have accomplished that if salem was exerting even a FRACTION of the effort she is now to fuck with him, as opposed to letting him self-destruct over and over again out of paranoia and dishonesty. y'know, "and when it turns out to be yet another routine patrol, it'll be 'i always preferred discretion!'" & all.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

I figured it was easy to keep her a secret because the kingdoms kept falling and losing their history with them. If Atlas hadn't had a functioning CCT (which Salem personally singled out for destruction at Beacon and had no idea existed on Amity Arena) and Team RWBY hadn't Relic teleported the population elsewhere, her secret would have died with them. Why would she have trouble keeping herself a secret when she can just kill all the witnesses?

As for 'the kingdoms keep falling because Ozpin keeps self-destructing out of paranoia and dishonesty and he's the one whose been attacking her all this time", it's a theory, but it's not one I subscribe to. We know she destroyed the Circle, we know she was systematically exterminating Silver Eyed Warriors, we know Ozpin flat out doesn't have a plan to defeat her and has been preparing for an attack rather than readying one, and she's already destroyed two kingdoms herself unprovoked. Occam's Razor: search for explanations involving the smallest amount of elements first and then add on when the simplest explanations fail. The simplest explanation here (Salem attacks, Ozpin defends) holds, while the previous one would require a lot of headcanons to scaffold it into place. Again, it's interesting speculation, but it's still speculation and not something I agree with.

[bestworstcase]

the thing is, though, i don't get the sense that kingdoms have been collapsing on the regular throughout recorded history. small settlements and nomadic groups are said to disappear frequently, but the youngest of the four human kingdoms is atlas/mantle—which is at least between one and two hundred years old. mistral was a vast empire with overseas territories before the great war; vacuo had a thriving monarchy centuries ago before it was conquered by its neighbors and persisted as a colonial territory under foreign rule. the WOR episode about vacuo implicates both mistral and vale in this conquest, so vale has to be quite old too.

the circle—assuming that 'the infinite man' is a story about a specific historical event, and not an allegorical amalgam of many, many times ozma tried and failed to fulfill his task—was a single town ruled by warriors openly seeking to "make ready for the final judgment." it wasn't a kingdom; it was an eschatological religious movement.

we also don't know that salem destroyed it. we know that ozpin believes that salem sent the attackers who destroyed it (or that she sent every group of people who've attacked every similar movement, if 'the infinite man' isn't about any one specific event), because in the story the infinite man questions the leader of the attacking army about if someone sent her to kill him. and we know that in the story, she answers in the negative: that no, his "mere existence makes [him] a target." which, considering the whole "make ready for the final judgment" thing... salem or no salem, a movement like that will make enemies of literally anyone who thinks THE FINAL JUDGMENT sounds like, perhaps, not something we want to happen.

occam's razor: ozma is one person, with an inherently disturbing creed ("humankind as it is now does not deserve to exist and must redeem itself before the gods, lest they condemn us to annihilation" is not what you'd call a hopeful ideology, and there's only so many ways you can dilute it to sound less horrifying without just flat out lying about the stakes). he also doesn't seem to especially enjoy leadership, and in 'the infinite man' even tries to avoid it. we know that he's spent some of his lives doing things like living alone in the woods as a miserable hermit. and we know he's as likely to reincarnate into the mind of a fourteen-year-old farmboy as he is a king, and given that there are a lot more farmboys in the world than kings, ozma probably began most of his lives as an Irrelevant Nobody.

i don't think ozma has ever been an especially powerful or notable person, before he lucked out and ended up a king at a pivotal moment in history and then took the opportunity fate handed him to establish a system where he could be reasonably assured of regaining his previous position in his next life. if we presume 'the infinite man' is about one specific historical movement, it's said to be HIS BIGGEST success, and it's... one town. not a kingdom, not a country, a single village that grows into a well-known town.

i think the idea that all of human history since the ozlem kingdom fell has been secretly orchestrated behind the scenes by Just Some Guy and his immortal ex-wife as if the world is a chess board and everyone else who's ever lived has amounted to nothing more but little playing pieces for These Two to maneuver around is... well, a hell of a lot more likely to be ozma's deep paranoia and lack of faith in humanity talking than the truth! and i think the longevity of vale / vacuo / mistral combined with the complete absence of any "lost kingdoms" in the lore, aside from the ozlem kingdom, is best explained by salem not having made a regular habit of razing kingdoms to the ground.

bc in re, "why would she have trouble keeping herself a secret when she can just kill all the witnesses?"—you can't just wipe a whole kingdom off the map without people wondering where it went, and she would have to have achieved an absolute 100% success rate killing absolutely every single person and completely eradicating any and all records that may have been left behind, every single time she wiped out a kingdom. and i don't believe that's possible, not even for her. ren and nora survived kuroyuri, a refugee ship made it out of vale and glynda escaped to go seek help elsewhere, people remember mountain glenn and oniyuri and what happened to those places. before ozma reunited with her in his first reincarnation, he traveled all over for years hearing rumors about her wherever he went.

like, all it takes is one person surviving one time and making it to another settlement to tell the story. it's way simpler for the answer to "why didn't anyone else in the world except her and ozpin's handful of agents have the faintest idea she existed, not even as a legend?" to be "salem has been living in distant exile far away from human civilization for thousands of years, ignoring ozma and sometimes having silver-eyed warriors assassinated, while he assumed that every major grimm attack and every war and every time his latest stab at an eschatological cult collapsed was secretly all her fault, because he is paranoid."

[sailorb00]

So badly coping with RWBY hiatus already that I doodled my dream RWBY Beyond episode about a cheeky monkey faunus and his tired older cousin as they make the journey across the desert to Vacuo ✨️👉👈🥺✨️

[bestworstcase]

Thanks for your response ala Ruby & Yang, great stuff!

Idle aside, but do you have any thoughts on Yang's role as the sort of black sheep of the family by dint of Raven associations?

Cos like, Tai overtly favors Ruby, projects Raven onto Yang, resents Raven being rough up and is bad enough about reminders of her Yang feels she has to apologize for his negative reactions. Let alone his... Everything else.

Then there's Qrow who doesn't seem to interact with Yang over much at all and one of if not their most major interaction. Involves him straight up saying he thinks she's either a liar hurting people for fun or "crazy".

I recall someone I was chatting with wondering: Imagine doing everything you can to keep your family from breaking apart & being compared to the woman who left you when you were a baby?

Cos I do wonder how Yang feels about all that given she seems to downplay and or try to work around her family's issues when she can. Let alone what it says about the adults in the room.

smth i think about a lot is the way yang’s narrative about her childhood shifts between v2 to v5

’cause in v2 it’s: “it was tough. ruby was really torn up, my dad kind of shut down. it wasn’t long before i learned why…” all to provide context for this anecdote about putting ruby in a wagon and running away to find her mother. and then her conclusion is “my stubbornness should have gotten us killed that night.”

and while there is a degree here of yang framing the story to emphasize the point she wants blake to understand, it’s also very obvious in her delivery that the emotional reality of this memory for yang is “the time my stupidity and stubbornness almost got me and ruby eaten by grimm”—when she was [checks notes] like five, six years old, and regularly left at home unsupervised.

but in v5, it’s: “my mom left me. ruby’s mom left too. tai was always busy with school, and ruby couldn’t even talk yet; i had to pick up the pieces. i had to pick up the pieces. alone.”

aside from the telling slip (tai, not dad)—yang centers her own feelings and the harm this situation did to her this time. which is something she’s always felt but i don’t think she could have brought herself to say it out loud to anyone during the beacon arc, because it was pressed down under the guilt on display in burning the candle, the feeling of having been inadequate and too stubborn and too selfish and and and–

coughs quietly. “my stubbornness should have gotten us killed that night.” / “you were predictable. and… stubborn. and maybe a little boneheaded.” yang’s narrative about the wagon incident—which happened when she was five or six!—pinning the blame on the thing tai imagines to be her fatal flaw is…probably not coincidental. yang in v4 after a year of being loved by her team and supported by mentors like glynda / oobleck / port has the perspective to know that tai doesn’t know what he’s talking about; but as a small child who’d just had a terrifying near-death experience with her baby sister… 😶

it definitely had a big impact on the way yang sees herself

BUT i do read qrow's talk with yang in 3.8 pretty differently ->

because the context is: yang saw mercury attack her and struck back in self defense, then had like a dozen synthetic soldiers point guns in her face, then looked up and saw the replay footage of herself walking over to shoot a boy who was just kneeling on the ground. and some of the most powerful authority figures in the world are pushing this narrative that stress and adrenaline "clouded her judgment."

like this would make anyone doubt their sanity. bc holy shit.

yang, though...a couple weeks ago, yang after being knocked unconscious woke up and blearily saw someone she thought was her mother walk away from her and disappear in a flash of red light. she hasn't mentioned it to anyone, because it's just so bizarre—yang doesn't know about raven's semblance yet—she must have just been seeing things. right?

aside from raven (who isn't here) and yang (who believes she hallucinated), the only other person who knows that yang saw her mom on the train is qrow, because raven told him about it. he also knows that:

tai insisted on not telling yang ANYTHING about her mother, and qrow respected that up until now; so yang doesn't know about raven's semblance and can't make sense of what she saw.

salem's infiltrators are the same people who attacked amber, and qrow didn't get a good look at them because they seemingly vanished into thin air—pretty damn good chance that one of them has a semblance that manipulates what you see.

ozpin wants #2 kept secret, so yang has some very powerful people actively trying to convince her that she's crazy. ironwood is straight up gaslighting her.

qrow also—based on the first thing he says, which is "why'd you do it?"—seems to consider it a possibility that it is what it looked like but yang did have a good reason, and i actually do not think that is an outrageous thing for qrow specifically to think. because qrow was emotionally abused as a child, and he knows yang, and in the event that yang really did suddenly turn around and punch a guy who was kneeling on the ground, why would she do it?

glances at shay d. mann. well. maybe this kid has been harassing her? maybe he said something horrible or threatening to her and in the heat of the moment she just snapped? maybe "he attacked me, i saw him attack me" isn't really a lie per se, she's just scared that "he's been picking on me ever since he got here and he made a disgusting remark and i just couldn't take it anymore" won't be taken seriously? as in, he did attack her—verbally/emotionally.

it's probably worth asking, at least!

so, qrow leads with "why'd you do it?" in case there is some invisible reason justifying the apparent action. yang says "you know why." qrow goes okay, well, i only know what i saw, so you're either lying (i.e., yang had a reason she now isn't telling) or crazy (i.e., yang saw something different from reality that was very real to her).

she says "i'm not lying." qrow believes her: "crazy, got it."

at this point, he knows the most probable explanation is that one of salem's infiltrators fucked with her head. the inner circle's gaslighting doesn't sit right with him; he's not going to buck ozpin by telling her the truth outright, but he wants to make sure yang knows she isn't losing her mind. he also has all the info needed to guess that yang is actually really really scared that she might be crazy.

which is why he kicks off the wall and begins to pace around. the language he uses sounds dismissive, but his tone is mild and his body language implies "let's talk about it, let's figure this out."

leading to:

YANG: Who knows? Maybe I am. QROW: And here I thought your dark-haired friend was the emo one. YANG: I saw my mom. …I- I was in a lot of trouble, took a pretty hard hit. But when I came to, the person attacking me was gone, and I thought I saw… her. Her sword. Like the one in you and dad’s old picture. QROW: You’re not crazy, Yang. That was your mom, alright. Let me guess—she didn’t say a word, did she? YANG: How did you know that? QROW: I don't see my sister very often, but she does try to keep in touch... whenever it suits her. YANG: Wait—you mean you talk to her? That was real!? QROW: Yeah, she found me. Had a tip from my most recent assignment and wanted me to give you a message.

it's really telling that yang responds to him this way. 'cause we've seen how yang acts when she feels dismissed or belittled:

TAI: Well, "normal" is what you make of it. YANG: What is that supposed to mean? Do you want me to just pretend like nothing happened? I lost a part of me. A piece of me is gone. And it's never coming back. TAI: You're right. It's not coming back. But that doesn't have to stop you from becoming who you wanna be. You're Yang Xiao Long, my sunny little dragon. You can do whatever you put your mind to. So whenever you're ready to stop moping, and get back out there? I'll be there for you. YANG: I– I...

she freezes and shuts down! her teachers have to come to her rescue!—but when qrow goes "crazy, got it" and suggests she's being "emo," yang blurts out her big secret. i saw my mom. to me that suggests a level of trust and understanding that isn't there with tai: qrow says stuff like "okay, so you're crazy" and "here i thought your friend was the emo one" but what he means is "hey, i know something's really bugging you, tell me about it," and yang picks up what he's putting down.

it's akin to how ruby goes "did you miss me? DID YOU MISS ME??" and qrow's like "nope" and they both laugh. or the back-and-forth ribbing between him and the girls in 3.4. there's this layer of mild ironic meanness in the way qrow converses with his nieces that all of them are fluent in, and in this scene he's using that mode to signal that "crazy" is not off-limits, that it's okay to talk about openly.

crucially, there's a code-switch in the middle of the conversation: as soon as yang gets real and says "i saw my mom," qrow reflects that seriousness back to her. you're not crazy, that was your mom, she found me afterward and told me about it. it was real. you're okay. qrow's ability to do that—to shift into a more serious mode when irony isn't appropriate—is why yang can have this rapport with him that she doesn't have with tai, because tai isn't... being ironic when he says mean or dismissive things to her.

anyway, qrow passes on raven's terrible message and then kind of annotates it: "raven's got an interesting way of looking at the world that i don't particularly agree with, and she's dangerous." (which is a very diplomatic way of saying he thinks raven is full of shit. lol.) but then he connects this whole conversation about raven back to what happened after the match: "you're a tough egg, kiddo. don't let this tournament thing getcha down. you had a slip-up; sometimes bad things just happen."

implicitly: yang isn't crazy. what she saw on the train was real, a product of raven's personality and her semblance. sometimes bad things just happen. qrow believes that yang had the experience she says she did when she punched mercury. he doesn't know why she had that experience—yang doesn't either!—but he knows she isn't just "crazy." sometimes things that seem crazy are actually real.

remember what he tells the girls in 3.4? "you may be acting like huntresses, but you're not thinking like one." same thing here. he's telling yang, hey, you're not crazy, you know what you saw, but you don't know what or who caused you to see it. "you cut off the head of the king taijitu, but now the second head's calling the shots."

hint, hint.

it's subtler than the hints qrow drops for ruby in 3.12, but very much in the same vein, and yang is plenty smart enough to figure it out. she might... not have? in the couple of hours between this conversation and everything going to straight to hell, but if they'd had literally just one more day, just long enough for the wheels turning in yang's head to click together with what ruby heard from velvet about coco hallucinating during her and yatsu's 2v2 against emerald and mercury, she would've had it.

more... generally, i've never gotten the sense that qrow projects raven's flaws onto yang in the way that tai does; qrow is definitely a lot closer with ruby than yang, but i think that has less to do with favoritism on qrow's part than it does ruby thinking he's like the COOLEST uncle ever and wanting to use a scythe like he does.

'cause like, qrow isn't their parent, he doesn't live with them, he's not responsible for raising these kids like their dad is, so while he obviously did contribute to fucking them both up because: alcoholic, ultimately there just isn't the same degree of betrayal or emotional abandonment; he's not their dad. both times yang talks in detail about her childhood, it's "my mom left, ruby's mom left, tai wasn't really around, ruby couldn't even talk, i was alone"—she doesn't mention qrow. there isn't that deep hurt, that feeling that qrow is someone who left.

when he isn't drunk, yang seems to feel pretty okay around him, and qrow likewise treats her... honestly a lot better than tai does:

he stops by their dorm in v3 to hang out with both his nieces; yang is fully in sister mode—cheers for ruby to beat him until ruby loses, immediately shoves her out of the way like "my turn!! >:D"—and qrow ribs them both, takes ribbing from both of them in good humor, tells both of them "you two are gonna go far."

qrow nicknames to show affection; ruby is "pipsqueak," yang gets "firecracker."

we only see qrow's goodbye to ruby, but in 5.4 yang indicates that qrow came to talk to her before he left, too. she also has complete trust that he's keeping the promise he made to look after ruby.

yang, as noted, opens up to him about seeing her mom; she's also shocked that he's still in contact with raven and indignant that he didn't tell her sooner, but—unlike with tai—she doesn't seem surprised that qrow is willing to talk about raven in general.

which tracks with what tai says in 4.11: "despite asking him numerous times not to, i know qrow told you where you're mother's been at these days"—meaning, this was a point of contention between him and qrow. behind the scenes, while tai refused to discuss raven at all, qrow was going okay well, let me tell her then, she deserves to know. and then ultimately he just bit the bullet and told her behind tai's back. i wouldn't be surprised if it turned out qrow had been straight with yang that her dad wanted to be the one to tell her the important stuff, and he wanted to be respectful of that, but raven wasn't an off-limits topic.

general contrast between yang-tai and yang-qrow dynamics; for example both of them say almost verbatim "you've got a long way to go before you're ready for the real world" (3.4/4.4). from tai it's belittling, he's insulting her; from qrow, it's meant to encourage, it's "remember you're still new to this, you'll make mistakes, just keep learning, keep trying." (rwby does stuff like this all the time, refracting an idea in different directions to highlight contrasts between characters; ozpin's advice to ruby vs port's advice to weiss is another example.)

a lot of qrow's resentment toward raven is centered on her abandonment of yang: "did you know yang lost her arm? [...] rhetorical question, i know you know. it's just obnoxious that you'd bring up family and then carry on like your own daughter doesn't exist. [raven: "i saved her."] once. because that was your rule, right? real mom of the year material, sis." like he is PISSED on yang's behalf that raven won't even try.

my impression is that qrow—although a) often away on long missions in far away places and b) an alcoholic who sometimes got blind drunk and became a burden yang and ruby needed to take care of—when he did manage to be there, made a serious effort to connect with both of them. he ended up being closer to ruby bc she wanted to learn scythe-wielding, but i do think qrow would've trained yang too (or instead) if the girls had different combat interests.

and while his relationship with ruby has a mentorish aspect, i don't get the sense either of the girls see him as a parental figure: he wasn't part of their household, he traveled a lot, his alcoholism in combination with tai's neglect eroded the adult-child boundaries because they had to be responsible for him as often as the reverse. he's a friend who also happens to be related to them. and that's especially true for yang, because he wasn't her teacher.

(i know it's a... pretty common headcanon / fanon that qrow lived with them, but i really don't think that's supported by the text? whenever ruby or yang look back on their childhoods, the family unit is always them + tai, and qrow isolates himself out of fear that his semblance will injure those he cares about. plus ozpin sending him all over the place as the one member of team strq still active. it makes way more sense to think he lived alone, and visited when he had the chance. which is the main reason i'm WAY softer on him than on tai, 'cause qrow wasn't in a caretaker/parent role; at most he was an occasional babysitter. so while his incidents of turning up drunk on the doorstep contributed to the harm... it's like, it would absolutely have been better for them if qrow were sober, but that wouldn't have changed anything about their home life. they'd just have somewhat easier relationships with qrow.)

TO WRAP THIS BACK AROUND TO THE QUESTION, tai is unfairly judgmental and harsh with yang bc he projects his idea of her mom onto her; yang also has a better relationship with her mom's brother than she does with her dad. how do these two dynamics interact? how does yang feel about hearing from tai that she's too branwen, so to speak, while also getting along better with the branwen side of her family? how might that fuel her desire to find raven?

if her uncle treats her better than tai does, then... maybe her mom would too, if only yang could reach her?—obviously it's not rational, but like. i don't think five year old yang put her baby sister in a wagon and ran away to find her mom because she thought she would ask "why did you leave me?" and then get her answer and go home. as yang grew older and developed a more realistic perspective it shifted to "i just need to know why she left" and she projects that backward onto herself as a child, but at the time what she wanted, what she was looking for, was someone who would take care of them.

[bestworstcase]

mutters. also summer rose is to rhodes as salem is to the madame. trust

[bestworstcase]

oh and there is something about the decor of the glass unicorn being decked out red and gold and brown, cinder’s red-and-gold feminity-as-power-fantasy femme fatale thing, brief stint in earthy colors for a disguise, and then this

to kick off her liberation arc

[bestworstcase]

#oooooooooh#would love to see elaboration on the summer-rhodes connection at some point#but that grimm arm post was really long I understand you're prolly tired (via @blakistan)

FORTUNATELY this one is less of an episode close read and more of a conspiracy guy dot gif squinting at etymology and setup sitch

rhodes has two etymologies, one from greek ῥόδον (rhódon) meaning “rose,” the other from old english rōd meaning, variously, a cross or crucifix, a rod, or a clearing in a forested area. in the first sense rōd was used idiomatically to suggest a great burden or torment in the same vein as “a cross to bear.”

sidelong glance at summer rose. ok

we don’t know very much about rhodes but his establishing character moments is this:

followed by this:

which tells us a few things about him:

he pays enough attention to notice that something is not right here, but chooses not to intervene.

as a huntsman he has social clout that he is aware of and enjoys; these people might be friends or just admirers but either way man whipped out a sword in a hotel lobby to show it off.

he’s popular and a huntsman and has money (because this place is swank and he’s a patron), so his reason for #1 is Probably Not that he can’t.

we don’t know a whole lot about summer rose but what we do know is that 1. she was up on the literal mother of all pedestals and the blacksmith all-but-confirms this is what broke her, and 2. she is the kind of person who Does Something when she sees a problem. she Does Somethings so hard she joined salem…

points at rhodes. popular huntsman who enjoys and stokes the admiration and attention but Does Nothing when he sees a problem.

points at summer. perfect idolized huntress (the best of us!!) who burned every bridgeto escape that expectation and is defined by her dedication to the principle of Do Something.

hmm. gestures at the likelihood that summer rose trained cinder. hmmmmm

when cinder meets rhodes, her impression of what huntsmen are is “you can do whatever you want. go wherever you want.” rhodes told her she shouldn’t kill the madame because it wouldn’t make her life any better. he taught her to fight. not what we’d call a guy who cared a lot about the philosophy

fast forward like, ten years and cinder’s view is now, “huntsmen and huntresses should carry themselves with honor and mercy, yet i have witnessed neither.” who taught her that. who put it to her in those terms, that huntsmen are called to uphold a moral ideal. not rhodes, that’s for sure! but the best most perfect huntress who learnt the truth about what ozpin really stood for and decided she could not remain complicit and gave salem a reason to fight back? uhm. hm

black eyes / silver eyes. inverted mirrors…

the madame -> salem. first a cruel "mother" who deems cinder worthless and viciously exploits and abuses her, tangibly reveling in her power over cinder right up until the instant she loses control. then a cold, exacting, profoundly fucked up mother-figure who thinks the world of cinder but is also a labyrinth of trauma and isolation that twists her caring into abusive and dysfunctional patterns; cinder is reminded of the madame but salem is trying—however badly—to protect cinder from herself.

rhodes -> summer rose. first a "mentor" who trained cinder to sacrifice herself and accept abuse for seven years until she earned her freedom, and condemned her without a second thought when she defended herself from her primary abusers. then…?

possibly also: the reason salem isn’t and can’t be like the madame is that she knows exactly what it is like to be cinder. the girl in the tower, the witch in the woods, doomed because her creator despises her.

glances at the adam burning rose / wilt and blush / moonslice / lunar eclipse / ENSLAVED EXPLOITED BRANDED ACROSS HIS EYE?! / what-is-he-foreshadowing-about-miss-silver-eyed-turncoat-over-there questions about summer’s child soldierhood. hmm