I know RWBY's nonsensical/nonexistent timeliness has been talked to death already, but usually it's talk about post-Beacon. I want to talk about the Beacon school year, because I was trying to figure out how much time is between V2 ending and V3 beginning, and I kinda spiraled, oops.
So like I said, I wanted to find out how much time was in between the V2 finale and the V3 premire. Going off only what I remember off the top of my head (I haven't dug through transcripts (yet)), Weiss says in V2 that the tournament is held at the end of the year, and we see that the tournament takes place in the fall. This confused me for a moment, as I'd assumed they'd be following the typical American school year format, or if not then the Japanese format, but the end of the school year being in fall doesn't line up with that. In my defense, I was wondering about this half-asleep at 1am, so it took me too long to think "Oh, they're going by a typical American university schedule, with the first semester being the spring semester." Okay, that works, spring semester with a summer break (probably like a month), and then a fall semester with a month or two winter break before starting again in late winter/early spring. V1 Beacon doesn't exactly look like spring or winter, but seasons are weird in Vale anyway with the seasonal forests, so whatever.
...
But then I remembered Ciel, and her comment about Ruby being 15.
If this is the end of the fall semester, aka November, then Ruby should be 16. If Ciel is correct, then this would mean it has to be October at the very latest, which makes no sense as a month to end the year on and would mean Ruby hung around Patch for months before leaving, or that Ruby is actually 14 through most of Beacon, which just seems wrong. It would also throw off this idea I've had about how Remnant age of majority works, being either 17 (when you can enter an academy) or 21 (how old you should be when finishing 4 years at an academy). Ruby has also been said by CRWBY to be 16 in Haven, so that would throw the entire time (even more) out of balance.
So I went googling, and found a dedicated fan timeline that said CRWBY had said somewhere that Ciel was in fact wrong with the 15 comment. I'd link it, but I'm on mobile at work, and it should be the first thing you see when you Google rwby timeline. This made me both pissed and pleased, as of course the only actual in show age we're given would be wrong, but pleased because if the creators specifically said the age is wrong, then the tournament most likely is meant to be in November and CRWBY realized that their Halloween birthday for Ruby made that complicated.
So.
What I'm going to be working with is Beacon starts its year in January or February, has a month or so summer break, and then ends in November, with the tournament at the end of the school year after classes have been wrapped up and a month or two of a winter break in between years - which would make a lot of sense, wanting students to be home with their families for the gloomy winter months to try and stave off some additional negativity and/or combat the Grimm the negativity of the winter months might bring. I really think Vale absolutely doesn't look like it's February in V1, but whatever, I'll deal with it, this is the time line that makes the most sense to me.
