You know that "Mundane super power" aspect you mentioned?
Another thing I like about crossing over RWBY characters with other settings is how easily their nature as basically coming from an apocalyptic hell-world can bleed through.
This is hard to articulate, but like.
The casual way in which towns disappear, that ruins dot the landscape, that people like Ruby & Yang grew up immersed in a culture that trended towards violence and early graves.
There's a nifty Naruto/Stargate crossover, (Its complicated) where Himawari kind of subtly disturbs the Stargate crew cos she knows exactly how best to behave in a dangerous situation, doesn't really seem bothered when enemies die and has been taught stuff like "Reading the battlefield."
I think RWBY characters would be similarly off-putting in their own way unless they were incredibly sheltered like Jaune or rich enough to have not ever encountered a Grimm until the the Beacon Test like Weiss. & even then, the lived experience, training and cultural awareness means they'd likely still come off as a little off-putting.
This also plays into how Ruby and Yang are seemingly quite... Not comfortable, but functional about the prospect of causing death or grievous bodily harm in a way most Shounen/action protags aren't.
Ruby, as far as she knew, sent Neo hurtling to her death in V3 and was at most momentarily shocked when Roman died & forgot all about it. Yang processed killing Adam in a very straightforward manner, she's not cavalier about it, but she'd made peace with it being a them or us situation right quick.
There's plenty of other examples but I think we've discussed it before.
But yeah, I just think its fun, even in series that can have similar degrees of destruction or death, their relative youth and manner with it would likely still make many locals be like (oO) & I think that's fun.
Oh yeah, this has always been a great idea for RWBY crossovers.
And one of my favorite/most interesting parts about is, as you touched on, how subtle Team RWBY’s whole vibe is and how it can potentially sneak up on others.
Like Team RWBY and really most of the show’s characters generally DON’T give off any real obvious ‘I come from a fucked-up deathworld’ vibes like being real dark, broody or even just looking anything the part. For anyone from a much more mundane setting/background, Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang generally come off as a friendly, likeable, good natured bunch without really anything all that offputting.
For about… eighty to ninety percent of the time.
But then you’ve got those 10-20% moments where the dark, serious ‘fantasy war-veteran’ sides of Team RWBY slip out. Like they might not even have been trying to hide it, it just comes out when things get serious.
Like maybe there is some big disaster or some other terrible event perhaps caused by the villains that leaves the more ‘normal’ characters/heroes frozen in shock and horror, meanwhile RWBY are just immediately jumping into the fray to fight or help however they can. With perhaps one or more doing the whole ‘slap the shock’ out of the other characters with a ‘We got work to do!’. And it’s just kind of… unsettling how Team RWBY takes these events in stride.
Or to build off your point on Ruby and Yang, as well as Blake and Weiss, being ‘functionally alright’ with hurting/killing people*, there’s a LOT of juicy potential there for when Team RWBY goes up against more mundane villains.
Like just picture a situation where a villain is threatening innocents in a classic ‘you’ll have to KILL ME to stop me!’ standoff that has the heroes freezing up… only for Ruby to almost immediately just shoot said villain.
She certainly looks like she didn’t enjoy or even want to do it, but both how quickly she did it and how easily she seems to role with it afterwards are just REALLY unsettling.
And then there’s what I’d call the FLIPSIDE to all this in how Team RWBY deals with being in a world that might NOT actually be filled with monsters who are an ever-present existential threat to humanity.
Like even for someone who grew up more sheltered like Weiss that is almost certainly going to be a MASSIVE culture-shock. Not to mention that the only people with a frame of reference that Team RWBY would be able to talk to about this would likely be each other.
Even in settings that might have some kind of monsters threatening humanity such as most magical girl shows, the appearance and threat that these monsters pose are almost always a very RECENT occurrence that most people might not even know about. Generally in these settings, the ‘normal, mundane world’ IS the norm, with the dangerous and supernatural merely popping up on and off in isolated places.
It could really create this interesting contrast where Team RWBY finds the mundane world that their new friends consider ‘normal’ to be just a bit uncanny and unsettling. And even finding it a bit comforting when monsters or some other supernatural threat to fight shows up because that feels more NORMAL to them.
This is actually something I tried/am still trying to explore in my Kingdom Hearts crossover fic. Like Ruby musing on how to explain her whole huntress background to Sora, Kairi and Riku when to them, monsters are things that have existed in storybooks, while for Ruby monsters have always been REAL. Or Ruby even noting a comforting ‘return to normal’ when she starts fighting the Heartless.
I’ve even got ideas for Ruby, as well as Weiss, Blake and Yang further on, idly musing on whether the Grimm or Heartless are the worse to fight, with some of their new friends being just a BIT weirded out.
And that’s not even getting into the potential of Team RWBY interacting with various Disney movie settings. Like I’ll admit that I kinda REALLY want to have Ruby boom-headshot at least one Disney villain XD
*I will say, I’ve had a theory for a while that Ruby, even more so than her teammates, has particular ideological reasons to generally avoid killing people, specifically when we consider how Ruby specifically DOESN’T use her ‘walking grimm-blender’ style of fighting against human opponents. Personally I imagine Ruby seeing it as ‘I hunt MONSTERS, not people.’ That being said, I don’t see Ruby as having some strict ‘no-killing’ ‘one rule’, but rather that she views taking a life as a last resort.
