Oh man, okay. Specific direction for commentary is super valid, it's just also hard to pick a direction because I'm just sitting over here [taptaptap] enjoying everything... I guess characterization is usually the axis upon which my thoughts turn. Got any info you wanna share about what's going on with characters behind the scenes? And what's up with all these new folks? I'd love to hear about your creation process for them, and, like, the ways this all slots into canon. (Or maybe diverges, to give it time to Get to where it is in canon those years down the line.) 'course, you're free to stop wherever you'd like to keep from bumping into spoiler territory.
I wouldn't be opposed to getting those liner notes either, if those were something you wanted to share. :3c
I should have said this before, but: wow, I am so thrilled that you want to hear my commentary. Thank you so much for your interest. You have unlocked the floodgates; there is probably a lot more coming! I’m sorry this took so long.
So, characterisation.
There’s this framework I use for figuring out one piece of characterisation, which is basically about how people relate to their skills. Not what skills they’ve got, but how they approach the process of using them. One part of it boils down to dividing people into analytical vs intuitive. (Sort of. This gets more complicated because the same person can approach different skills/interests in different ways. Usually I apply at least two categories of the framework to each character. I can draw the basic concept of the thing up like a chart with two axes, but I can’t actually place anyone in a single neat box on it.)
‘Analytical’ means someone who thinks out their plans in advance, consciously plans out what tactics they’re using/ going to use, is paying conscious attention to a lot of little details and also (often) fitting them into a bigger picture. Their failure mode is overthinking and missing the simpler insight, or decision paralysis. ‘Intuitive’, by contrast, is about gut instinct. Improvisation, going with the flow. Generally goes with the willingness to break more rules to get where they need to go :p . An intuitive character will figure something out in one brilliant moment and not be able to explain how they got there; probably they’ll already be in motion dealing with it. Of course, that means their failure mode is rushing in too fast, jumping to conclusions, getting in over their head.
This can be really subjective/subject to headcanon-ing, it’s about internal perspective stuff, but it really helps me with writing from a character’s POV – basically, it means I’ve decided how much they think about/overthink what they’re doing!
[Sidenote: “One person is analytical and the other is intuitive” is a really common combo for ‘unlikely friendships/pairings’ setups in fiction of all sorts. For one thing it’s basically the foundation of every buddy cop story ever: “the straight-laced cop and the quirky specialist” (to quote Erin Ptah making a snarky comment about it). See also Weiss and Ruby, Blake and Yang, Ren and Nora… This framework with its names and categories is my own niche thing but it’s picking up on something real, or at least something that gets used in fiction a lot :p ]
And I think of “the ability to relate to people” as a skill, for this purpose. Social stuff in general.(Because I am socially awkward enough that I have to think of it as a skill I’m consciously deploying, nothing will go well with it if I try to do it from intuition haha.) Social skills is one whole axis of the framework. Someone who approaches social skills intuitively is a Heart. Someone who goes about it in a more detatched, analytical manner is a Diamond.
All of which brings me round to – so Clover, as a character, looks like the absolute stereotypical Heart. Cheery, outgoing person, effortlessly charming, everyone’s friend. It’s a pretty familiar character type, even if no one else calls it a Heart, haha.
… The thing about Soldier, Spy’s Clover is that it’s not actually that effortless. Saying the right thing all the time is nowhere near as easy to him as he pretends it is. He’s always thinking about what people need, and how best to give it to them with his responses. His front is, from the inside, sometimes very very artificial. So many manufactured smiles.
Fun fact: I didn’t realise that that was what I was doing with him until chapter 4. I was doing it, I look back and see signs of it even in chapter 1! But I guess I was doing it intuitively, haha. It wasn’t until I was writing chapter 4, which has him interacting with other Huntsmen and Huntresses from his own POV, that it solidified in my mind.
Related to that, there’s the thing where Clover spends a lot of time not thinking about stuff. Notice how he doesn’t let himself feel any of his own reaction, at the end of chapter 7, until the moment when he’s effectively alone and can’t help it.
“Qrow drank the water, and smiled half-seeing up at him, and went where he was led. Clover got his shoes off him, and his cape and rings, and guided him down onto his bed. Qrow was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
Then Clover let himself sink down onto the end of the bed himself. Now that he didn’t have taking care of Qrow to focus on, he was suddenly overwhelmingly tired. He scrubbed a hand across his face.
One more person in my life who only wants to use me for my semblance.”
This makes him really tricky to write sometimes. I don’t think I was very successful, in chapter 4, at getting across all the things he’s not happy with that he’s ignoring. … But that meant the end of chapter 7 hit people so much harder, as the moment when everyone realised things are Not Okay with Clover either, and I’m okay with that >: ] I laid the groundwork, and now people can notice it after the fact.
Some of this is rooted in backstory stuff that’s specific to this fic, which I can’t talk about (damnit! I need to finish this fic so that I can talk about all these cool ideas I had.) The other half is, uh… rooted in the way he turns on Qrow so quickly in the end in canon. No matter how he feels, it seems obvious that there’s a distance there in how he relates to his emotions. The walls can go up, any time he needs them to.
And then there’s Qrow (who is pure intuitive, obviously. No point making plans when everything might change on you at any moment.)
A lot of my idea of Qrow’s tactics as a spy comes from the story he tells Yang and Ruby in volume 3. https://roosterteeth.com/watch/rwby-season-3-volume-3-chapter-4-lessons-learned Not actually the story itself (although yeah, obviously “overhearing secrets/pumping people for information in a bar” is going to be one of his tactics), but the way he tells it. His nieces are demanding to know what he did on his mission, he can’t tell them because it’s secret (and also probably wasn’t pleasant); he doesn’t refuse, he starts telling them a story – and then he sidetracks them right into the joke about the bartender’s skirt length, and they forget all about it. He even uses that to also win the video game! And later on, when he makes a misstep (we all make mistakes :p) and speaks too familiarly about Ironwood, he immediately rescues it by shoving that photo of STRQ in Yang’s face and distracting her with the hope he might say something about her mother. He looks like the opposite of a people person, but “good at manipulating people” doesn’t always mean “charming extrovert”. He knows people underestimate him and he uses that. That’s how I’ve been writing his spy shenanigans here.
So in other words: Clover is a diamond using those skills to pretend to be a heart. Qrow is a heart using those skills to pretend to be unable to manipulate anyone. I had so much fun when I figured that one out in words.
Thanks so much for asking me about this! Sorry it took me so long to write out, I was eager to share all this stuff but it turned out to be complicated to explain. I’m hoping to stay motivated on the story by talking about bits of it, I’m definitely going to say something about my OCs in the next post I do for this :p I love OC creation, it’s such a neat way to explore parts of the story-space a given canon doesn’t let us see.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 11/?
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Characters: Qrow Branwen, Clover Ebi, James Ironwood, Vine Zeki, Harriet Bree, Elm Ederne, Marrow Amin, Jacques Schnee, Robyn Hill, Penny Polendina, Supporting Cast of OCs
Additional Tags: Slow Build, Pining, Hurt/Comfort, oblivious idiots, Spy Shenanigans, Action, Spy!Qrow, shady things going on in atlas, TRUST NO ONE, please do trust some people actually, qrow deserves all the good things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pre-Canon, by about three years, all the themes from vol 7 but in a different order with a different (better) ending, badass qrow, but i mean that's just canon
Summary:
Qrow Branwen is sent to Atlas as Ozpin’s spy, in search of a traitor high up in Atlas’ command structure – but Salem’s pawns may not be the only danger Atlas holds. Surrounded by military personnel of unknown and dangerous loyalties, how can he know who to trust?
Clover Ebi doesn’t think there’s anything missing from his life. He has his team, and his job; personal relationships have always come a distant second to his role as a protector. The newly-arrived Qrow Branwen shouldn’t mean more to him than any other allied Huntsman – but he’s about to be proved wrong.
This is interesting, thanks for describing your thought process and character insights! that's a really smart way to look at Qrow and Clover both. Side question: how do you fit the later parts of Qrow's canon arc into your framework?
Thank you so much! I’m glad you liked it.
And that’s an interesting question, because it basically doesn’t really apply here. This is something really deep-down about mindset, the way I see it: it almost never changes with character development (except very occasionally on times when character development means learning new skills). The thing is, I call this thing a characterisation aid, but it’s not really about personality, or even goals or drives. It’s about what tools the character reaches for first, in order to achieve their goals. There’s only four categories, after all! I usually file characters under two or three of them, but they each have one that is first, and even so, that’s not many options to distinguish things.
The absolute clearest demonstration I can give you of this: Clover is a diamond. So is Jacques Schnee.
[Sidenote: most diamonds that you see in fiction are villains, or at least made up of Mean Girl tropes like Weiss is. Heroes are either effortlessly good at being friends and leaders, or else analytically brilliant in logical/technical fields and basically incapable of social (in my framework, that’s a Spade). As someone who is teaching myself how to say helpful things to people in real-time, I’m kind of annoyed about this. These are morally neutral skills!]
This is a pretty core thing, I guess. It’s learned early on and doesn’t really change. Especially in Qrow’s case, where what he’s learned is how to react to sudden changes in his life. I guess most of his character development across the later seasons is his journey to relearning how to work/live with other people again. That’s happening on a different level to this card suits framework thing.
An analytical person can learn to stop overthinking things, and to analyse their own thought patterns to see where they’re missing things or getting stuck and fill in the gaps, but I don’t see that as becoming less analytical. And the equivalent for an intuitive person is more – developing better-calibrated instincts. They’re not consciously doing a risk assessment now, it’s still happening subconsciously, but that process is producing better results.
I’m not sure how much sense that makes, but I hope I’ve helped! Feel free to ask me anything else you want to know.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 10/?
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Characters: Qrow Branwen, Clover Ebi, James Ironwood, Vine Zeki, Harriet Bree, Elm Ederne, Marrow Amin, Jacques Schnee, Robyn Hill, Penny Polendina, Supporting Cast of OCs
Additional Tags: Slow Build, Pining, Hurt/Comfort, oblivious idiots, Spy Shenanigans, Action, Spy!Qrow, shady things going on in atlas, TRUST NO ONE, please do trust some people actually, qrow deserves all the good things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pre-Canon, by about three years, all the themes from vol 7 but in a different order with a different (better) ending, badass qrow, but i mean that's just canon
Summary:
Qrow Branwen is sent to Atlas as Ozpin’s spy, in search of a traitor high up in Atlas’ command structure – but Salem’s pawns may not be the only danger Atlas holds. Surrounded by military personnel of unknown and dangerous loyalties, how can he know who to trust?
Clover Ebi doesn’t think there’s anything missing from his life. He has his team, and his job; personal relationships have always come a distant second to his role as a protector. The newly-arrived Qrow Branwen shouldn’t mean more to him than any other allied Huntsman – but he’s about to be proved wrong.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 9/?
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Characters: Qrow Branwen, Clover Ebi, James Ironwood, Vine Zeki, Harriet Bree, Elm Ederne, Marrow Amin, Jacques Schnee, Robyn Hill, Penny Polendina, Supporting Cast of OCs
Additional Tags: Slow Build, Pining, Hurt/Comfort, oblivious idiots, Spy Shenanigans, Action, Spy!Qrow, shady things going on in atlas, TRUST NO ONE, please do trust some people actually, qrow deserves all the good things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pre-Canon, by about three years, all the themes from vol 7 but in a different order with a different (better) ending, badass qrow, but i mean that's just canon
Summary:
Qrow Branwen is sent to Atlas as Ozpin’s spy, in search of a traitor high up in Atlas’ command structure – but Salem’s pawns may not be the only danger Atlas holds. Surrounded by military personnel of unknown and dangerous loyalties, how can he know who to trust?
Clover Ebi doesn’t think there’s anything missing from his life. He has his team, and his job; personal relationships have always come a distant second to his role as a protector. The newly-arrived Qrow Branwen shouldn’t mean more to him than any other allied Huntsman – but he’s about to be proved wrong.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 8/?
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Characters: Qrow Branwen, Clover Ebi, James Ironwood, Vine Zeki, Harriet Bree, Elm Ederne, Marrow Amin, Jacques Schnee, Robyn Hill, Penny Polendina, Supporting Cast of OCs
Additional Tags: Slow Build, Pining, Hurt/Comfort, oblivious idiots, Spy Shenanigans, Action, Spy!Qrow, shady things going on in atlas, TRUST NO ONE, please do trust some people actually, qrow deserves all the good things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pre-Canon, by about three years, all the themes from vol 7 but in a different order with a different (better) ending, badass qrow, but i mean that's just canon
Summary:
Qrow Branwen is sent to Atlas as Ozpin’s spy, in search of a traitor high up in Atlas’ command structure – but Salem’s pawns may not be the only danger Atlas holds. Surrounded by military personnel of unknown and dangerous loyalties, how can he know who to trust?
Clover Ebi doesn’t think there’s anything missing from his life. He has his team, and his job; personal relationships have always come a distant second to his role as a protector. The newly-arrived Qrow Branwen shouldn’t mean more to him than any other allied Huntsman – but he’s about to be proved wrong.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 7/?
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Characters: Qrow Branwen, Clover Ebi, James Ironwood, Vine Zeki, Harriet Bree, Elm Ederne, Marrow Amin, Jacques Schnee, Robyn Hill, Penny Polendina, Supporting Cast of OCs
Additional Tags: Slow Build, Pining, Hurt/Comfort, oblivious idiots, Spy Shenanigans, Action, Spy!Qrow, shady things going on in atlas, TRUST NO ONE, please do trust some people actually, qrow deserves all the good things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pre-Canon, by about three years, all the themes from vol 7 but in a different order with a different (better) ending, badass qrow, but i mean that's just canon
Summary:
Qrow Branwen is sent to Atlas as Ozpin’s spy, in search of a traitor high up in Atlas’ command structure – but Salem’s pawns may not be the only danger Atlas holds. Surrounded by military personnel of unknown and dangerous loyalties, how can he know who to trust?
Clover Ebi doesn’t think there’s anything missing from his life. He has his team, and his job; personal relationships have always come a distant second to his role as a protector. The newly-arrived Qrow Branwen shouldn’t mean more to him than any other allied Huntsman – but he’s about to be proved wrong.
