Surely you've trodden straight
To the very door!
Surely you took your fate
Faultlessly. Now 'tis too late
To say more.
It is evident you were right—
That man has a course to go,
A voyage to sail beyond the charted seas.
So you have passed from sight,
And our sighings blow
Bark from that straight horizon which ends all one sees.
Now, like a vessel in port,
You unlade your riches into death,
And glad are the watchful dead to receive you there.
Let the dead sort
Your cargo; breath from breath
Let them disencumber your bounty, let them all share.
I imagine dead hands are brighter,
Their fingers in sunset shine
With jewels of passion once broken through you as a prism.
Dead breasts are whiter
For your wrath; and yes, I opine
They anoint their brows with your blood, as a perfect
chrism.
It is evident you were right-
There are bounds to break,
Sumptuous passage from sight,
For you, and sighs down the white
Path of your wake.
Now to the dead you've given
Your last allegiance.
But woe unto us who are driven
After you, hostile to heaven
And its hateful legions.
About worldbuilding: how would you say Remnant societies would develop due to the presence of Grimm?
Like for example, would there be more holidays in an effort to increase positivity and morale? Would entertainers and therapists be highly valued careers? How would places like prisons and graveyards function, since they would also act as beacons of negativity?
As a vague, general answer to your initial question: I’d argue that the presence of an apex predator that hunts people—to the exclusion of all other species—would fundamentally define the culture of that society. That is, it would be nearly impossible for any aspect of life in this world to not be shaped by Grimm in some way. Therein lies your potential for worldbuilding RWBY: imagining all the ways people would initially adapt to survive Grimm, and later, how some cultural values could emerge as more nuanced, complex extensions of those survival mechanisms.
That being said, there are some important caveats that need to be acknowledged. Let’s start by individually addressing each of your questions, and dispelling some misconceptions while we’re at it:
Holidays, festivals, and other forms of celebration:
For the pedants in the room, holidays are designated periods of time that celebrate or commemorate something important. They predominantly emerge as religious customs, although there are plenty of exceptions, like holidays centered around historical events or people (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), or holidays that celebrate an identity or heritage (Pride Month, Indigenous People’s Day).
The important takeaway is that there’s a reason why these things are celebrated, and that’s because the beliefs, people, or events they commemorate have value to those that celebrate them. They exist as outgrowths of something that was already widely-recognized as having worth.
By contrast, a holiday that’s deliberately created as a conscious choice—as a countermeasure to negativity, and by extension, Grimm—wouldn’t have the same impact. Artificially making a holiday for the sake of would probably have the opposite effect.
Imagine, for a moment, that you work a minimum-wage job at a fast-food joint. Your building is understaffed because your corporate overlords would rather exploit their current workforce than shill out money to hire additional staff, which means that you’re often forced to carry the workload of two people. This exploitation is made worse by the fact that your contract only guarantees 29 hours per week, which means that they don’t have to offer you benefits or insurance, but they can (and frequently do) ask you to work beyond those hours. If someone calls out for any reason, you and your coworkers have to make up for that difference, and more often than not, end up being forced to stay later than necessary. That’s not even factoring in other issues, like a lack of resources necessary for performing your job, aggressive or entitled customers, and the repetitive, backbreaking monotony of your work.
Imagine how miserable you and all of your coworkers are.
Now, the managers aren’t oblivious to how unhappy their employees are. But rather than enact widespread policy changes that would improve the quality of their working conditions, they decide to hold a monthly staff party to “boost employee morale.”
Rather than distract them, it only serves to remind everyone of all the ways their managers could not give a shit about them, and how much their jobs suck.
In my mind, any holiday created for the sake of would be markedly similar. Instead of increasing the net positivity of your population, it would probably only heighten everyone’s awareness of the Grimm and foster feelings of anxiety. “Hey, everyone, remember that we have to be extra positive today! Don’t think about the fact that our government threw a dart at a calendar and decided to make today all about being happy, because the alternative is being sad and getting eaten alive by monsters. :)”
Putting in the effort to be positive for the sake of being positive, rather than genuinely celebrating something that has meaning, is like the monthly staff party. It’s just painting over the cracks.
So I can’t envision any realistic scenario in RWBY where a holiday is created with that purpose in mind. In theory, it has the trappings of legitimacy, but in practice it wouldn’t pan out.
That being said, there are still plenty of workarounds to this problem. We can easily come up with festivities that incorporate or acknowledge Grimm, which might have naturally evolved over time:
Example 1: A holiday that falls on the date that a famous warrior slew a King Taijitu that was threatening a town. What makes this defeat so noteworthy was that the warrior was disarmed during the fight, and so they cleverly tricked the heads into attacking each other in order to win. As a result, the townsfolk immortalized the warrior, and began to value cunning rather than brute strength. On this holiday, children are encouraged to play tricks on each other, as a way of symbolically recreating the warrior’s own trickery. Throughout the day, people go out of their way to spend time together—time that was given to them because of the warrior’s selflessness. The town holds an elaborate community feast in the evening, and to finish off the night, a group of actors puts on a small play that reenacts the battle. And there you have it—a holiday which began because a Grimm was killed, and over time, it evolved to not only commemorate the warrior, but by extension came to embody and honor the values of community, altruism, and cunning.
Example 2: A holiday that celebrates a minor deity responsible for warding off Grimm. This deity is associated with fire, divine protection, and strength of arms, so people who celebrate this day will often symbolically gift each other things like daggers, a quiver full of arrows, or armor. (Perhaps in future generations, these gifts change to fit the times. So instead of being given an arrow, the recipient might be given a necklace with an arrowhead pendant, or a batch of cookies baked to resemble swords instead of an actual sword.) Worshippers of this deity might spend the week leading up to the holiday building effigies that resemble Grimm, and during the actual celebration, burn the effigy as an offering to the deity. Perhaps this holiday incorporates a coming-of-age ceremony, where the priest/sage/religious authority takes those who turned [age] that year on a hunt to kill a Grimm, and afterward, they return to their community as adults/warriors. This example holiday manages to tie in Grimm with a local religion, and establishes believable liturgical traditions.
Ultimately, I think the big takeaway is that holidays will naturally evolve regardless, so it wouldn’t be necessary for societies to create holidays with the specific intention as anti-Grimm measures.
Hopefully that managed to answer your question regarding the Grimm’s influence on holidays. Now, as for your other two questions—occupations and negativity hotspots—I’m going to put them under a readmore, because this is starting to get rather long.
Occupations that center around art, entertainment, and mental health:
One of the things that makes RWBY’s inherent premise (a world where people are confined to heavily-fortified city-states because of monsters) so interesting is that it creates unique problems: How do you prevent waste and pollution buildup if your sedentary society can’t disperse across the globe? How are resources like food, medicine, and shelter allocated given their disproportionate scarcity to our world? Would these constraints push society toward a more socialist government where wealth distribution is fairer, in order to mitigate poverty, crime, and disease?
And, of course, if everyone’s basic needs were met, labor was automized through advanced technology, and people’s time was freed up to spend it on recreation, would a society like theirs inherently value art?
Hypothetically, that answer would be yes.
But, given that one of the Redux’s core themes is deconstructing capitalistic exploitation and its negative impacts, that sadly isn’t the case here.
Because, in an ideal version of the world that the Redux is set within, then there should logically be greater emphasis placed on careers based in the arts. Same goes for things like healthcare, public sanitation, and education, because all of these things aren’t just necessary for survival, but fundamental for enriching and improving one’s overall quality of life.
The way the kingdoms in the Redux are set up is very much a parallel for real-life countries, where arts are seen as a luxury often made inaccessible by paywalls. Similarly, socialized healthcare doesn’t exist, save for in a few outlying places that have semi-socialized or integrated healthcare (like Menagerie and a few cities in Vacuo). The blame can be partly attributed to a rise in klepto-plutocracy after the Great War ended, due to the intersection of racism, rapid technological acceleration post-Great War, capitalism, and the restructuring of the world’s governments.
The few exceptions made for healthcare are Huntsmen, council members, and the Atlesian military. Those are the three groups that have what basically counts as socialized healthcare, and it’s a direct and unforeseen consequence of the Great War.
All of this is to say that while people in this universe care about art, and understand the importance of good physical and mental health, those things aren’t always feasibly attainable. So, yes, therapists and artisans are hailed as pillars of society, but the reality is that their services and crafts aren’t available for everyone. That disparity in access both creates problems and exacerbates already-existing ones. And while sanitation workers are extremely important in this setting, the work itself is often seen as demeaning because of bourgeoisie propaganda. It also doesn’t help that those jobs are frequently given to Faunus, which results in sanitation workers being underpaid (it basically creates a positive feedback loop: sanitation work is menial > give those jobs to the Faunus > Faunus work those jobs, therefore sanitation work is menial).
The intersection of body disposal methods, and cultural values surrounding death:
Before I answer your question about graveyards theoretically being negativity hotspots, I first want to address two underlying assumptions here: that graveyards exist in this universe, and that death is perceived as something negative.
Now, seeing as I’m from the US, I’ll be using Western (as in, Judeo-Christian) cultural standards as my frame of reference, since that’s what’s most prevalent stateside (and what I grew up surrounded by, despite being a vocal atheist).
Life and death are traditionally regarded as a linear path—as in, you’re born, you exist, you die, and then your existence is allegedly transcended to an afterlife. It therefore makes sense for people to grieve and mourn, because from that perspective, anyone around you who dies is permanently gone, and whether or not you’re reunited is contingent on which part of the afterlife you’ve earned the right to reside in.
And, given the many tragic and painful ways a person can die—cancer, drowning, electrocution, starvation, hypothermia, gunshot, car crash, burns—it’s no wonder people view death as this terrible thing.
But—and I cannot stress this enough—when worldbuilding, you have to be careful to not default to your own cultural background and just slap it onto your story, without any alteration whatsoever. It’s perfectly fine to gravitate toward things that are familiar, but there are inherent pitfalls that need to be taken into consideration when doing so, and you have to be mindful of them.
Such is the case here, when talking about how a fictional society might perceive death, or how they might handle the disposal of human remains.
Remember how I said that RWBY’s cities are incredibly restricted in terms of dispersal and expansion, because of the pushback from the surrounding Grimm? That creates another dilemma in the form of land area usage. If there’s only so much space available for things like agriculture or housing, then a society has to choose what it’s willing to prioritize that space for. Cemeteries can and frequently do run into expansion problems because, over time, the bodies add up. It’s inevitable.
Now transpose that issue into RWBY’s setting, and you can see why a graveyard might not be the most viable option out there.
Of course, that’s operating under the assumption that a graveyard in their universe would look or function anything like the ones in ours. But what if they don’t? If burials are indeed a preferred form of body disposal, maybe it’s the norm for plots to be shared or reused. Maybe holes aren’t 6 feet deep, but rather consist of 20-foot-long vertical pits, and at every 5-foot interval, a body is added and then interred with soil (and then, 5 feet above them, someone else’s body is added). Or, once a body has decomposed, the bones are excavated and transferred to an ossuary. Maybe graveyards consist of selective burials, with only the skull being buried because it houses the brain (and is therefore the center of consciousness/personhood), while the rest of the body parts are trashed.
Maybe graveyards do exist, but they’re reserved for royalty or religious figures. Perhaps being buried is an honor granted only to a select few, based on merit or significant/noteworthy accomplishments.
Of course, who’s to say interring the dead necessarily has to be a good thing? Maybe the people of your fictional society see decay as a form of earthly damnation, and they therefore reserve the practice as a form of punishment for convicted and executed criminals. The rejection of burial could be entirely cultural rather than anything practical. In Ashley Cope’s Unsounded, the Ssaelit cremate the dead because decomposition is a humiliation created by the gods, and burning the bodies is the only way to circumvent it.
And that’s just ideas for burials. We haven’t even gotten into all of the methods of body disposal that are out there—cremation, immurement, cannibalism, sea burials, sky burials, composting, mummification.
In the Redux, for example, Menagerie’s population mainly practices burials at sea. The bodies of the deceased are affixed to an anchor, or a similarly-weighted object, and allowed to drop to the ocean floor from within either the neritic or the epipelagic zone (within a designated “drop site”). In the neritic zone, the bodies are meant to contribute to reefs by providing a substrate for coral attachment (the anchor), and food for marine organisms. Bodies dropped within the epipelagic zone are meant to emulate whalefalls, and provide nutrients for deep-dwelling organisms. From a pragmatic standpoint, sea burials were chosen because land in Menagerie is already scarce, making inhuming ill-advised. From a philosophical standpoint, sea burials are viewed as a way of nourishing the ocean and “returning the energy” to the ecosystem that sustains the people living there.
By contrast, Mistral regards sea burials (and noyades) as blasphemous, because their primary religion places creation with water. To allow the taint of rot to come into contact with water is to defile it. Therefore, their deceased are cremated, and their ashes traditionally scattered to the wind. As you can imagine, these cultural differences put the two countries at odds. In fact, there was a point in Mistrali history (within the last 60 years) where the council passed a law that made sea burials illegal under the guise of “environmental concerns.” Really, it was just a pretense for discriminating against any Faunus living in Mistral that adhered to the practice. The law was later repealed, but its existence was yet more fuel for the fire that eventually gave rise to some ugly international strife.
On the topic of negative emotions, it’s also worth pointing out that death (and any related funerary customs) might not always be culturally perceived as a somber thing. If, say, a culture believes in reincarnation, then death might not necessarily be seen as the end, but rather as a waypoint between their last life and the next. In which case, depending on the circumstances, the friends of the deceased might actually spend their time celebrating the life lived rather than mourning the life lost. It could be a tradition for those in attendance to place bets on where their departed friend might reincarnate in the world, or what they’ll reincarnate as. Perhaps there’s a cultural precedent not to openly grieve in public, because if they do, their tears might attract the attention of the spirit, and cause them to linger rather than move on to the next life.
Perhaps there’s a religion in which a god of death holds each soul in limbo for a brief period of time, so that they can purify the soul and strip them of all sin in preparation for their next life. In which case, it might be tradition for friends and family to participate in cleansing rituals, in which they pray to help their god expedite the purification process. The cleansing ritual might require a clear mind free of distraction, so it might be cultural stigma for anyone participating to show signs of distress or fear while doing so, in case they mess it up.
I hope you’ll forgive just how lengthy my reply’s been thus far, but I really wanted to stress all the ways that body disposal and perceptions of death could vary across cultures. In the Redux, graveyards are sort of nonexistent, so I needed to give some elaboration as to why they wouldn’t be negativity hotspots.
That being said, negativity hotspots do exist in the Redux, and they have very specific criteria for forming. Being a graveyard isn’t a prerequisite.
I’ve mentioned the term psychometric imprint in passing a few times (and its synonym, “locational memory”) but I haven’t gone fully in-depth on what they are, exactly, and how they emerge. A graveyard wouldn’t qualify because simply being a place culturally associated with death, or having human remains deposited there, isn’t enough to induce the phenomenon.
What creates a psychometric imprint is sudden, mass trauma experienced by the immediate living, which forms a metaphysical impression or “memory” upon the site where it occurred. A town swallowed up by an earthquake, a battlefield where many soldiers fell, a settlement consumed by the outbreak of disease, a village set to the torch by bandits, a community wiped out by Grimm in a single night—all of these scenarios can, and have, given rise to psychometric imprints. You’ve got places like Chamenos, Redsand Altar, Suicide Valley…
…and, of course, Mountain Glenn.
But that’s a post for another day.
(Forgot to mention prisons in this post! My bad. I still have to finish writing out the lore for them before I can give you a concrete answer. Sorry!)
