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do you have theories about how the aura transfer machine is going to inevitably come into play

this is timely, because i’ve been chewing on it quite a lot lately.

let’s talk about the rule of threes!

the basic idea is that important things in stories often come in threes. narrative triads are a staple of fairytale/folklore in particular, which makes it very salient to the rwby narrative. often, you’ll see the rule of three described as a pattern where a thing happens a certain way twice, and then once more differently (aab); there are other configurations. abc/cba or abc/abc is pretty common in fairytales—think the “questing hero does a kindness to three entities and each repays with a favor later on” structure—and simple repetitions (aaa) or progressive triplets (a-A-A!) aren’t uncommon either.

the rule of threes gets cited a lot in discussions on the maidens and the ATMs in particular. this is a little thorny because maidens come in fours, not threes; i think rwby is taking advantage of this mathematical problem to develop multiple interlocking triads. we’ll call this the Fourth Maiden Exclusion Principle.

our first set of triads occur within each season. the seasonal triads, if you will. all of them—so far—follow this basic pattern:

fragile -> false -> freed

where the first maiden is introduced in a vulnerable state, the second maiden is either literally false (not really a maiden) or perceived as illegitimate, and the seasonal arc ends with third maiden removed from ozpin’s hierarchy and separated from her vault. thus:

amber -> pyrrha -> cinder

(spring) -> vernal -> raven

fria -> penny -> winter

the last spring maiden is unusual in that she’s a posthumous character, but she’s described as having been “a child” who ran away because the responsibility was “too much for her” and raven says she was “weak” and “scared.” we also know that raven mercy-killed her.

so the question to ask here is whether the summer maiden will repeat this pattern. if i’m correct about the Fourth Maiden Exclusion Principle, the answer is “no.” our triad is [fall-spring-winter] and our excluded fourth, in this case, is summer.

[SIDEBAR: the maiden arcs are following the gifts in reverse order (choice -> knowledge -> creation -> destruction). the seasons being “wrong” is a misdirection. thank u.]

our second set of triads interlace the maiden arcs. we’ll call them the perennial triads (laugh!). there are three Big Ones.

the first is the presumptive ATM triad, which might be drawn in two ways:

[amber-fria-(summer)] + (spring)

or

[pyrrha-winter-(summer)] + raven.

the former being three maidens fed to the machines, the latter recipients of machine transfers. the triad is [fall-winter-summer] and the excluded fourth is spring.

the second is the triad of maidens cinder tries to Get. i will discuss my reasoning for bracketing it like this in a bit, bear with me:

[amber-raven-penny] + (summer)

and finally, the third is the triad of maidens who got eaten by the fairytale, as it were:

[pyrrha-(spring)-penny] + (summer)

note that these last two match the seasonal triad-of-triads: [fall-spring-winter] + summer. This Is Important.

but before we get into the weeds of the Machine Question, we first need to sketch out why i don’t think cinder is going to go after the summer maiden. for the benefit of newcomers and in case this breaks containment, Mainly. it boils down to:

salem’s going to beacon next.

it is established in V4 that a) the crown is still in its vault, b) salem believes the vault is at beacon, c) the vault is Hidden, and d) salem has someone [summer rose] stationed at beacon to search for it. in V8, salem notes that The Situation Has Not Changed; she is preoccupied with gaining access to the lamp so that she can use it to discover the crown’s location. (<- the first thing she asks oscar is where ozma hid the crown; she asks for the password to the lamp only after confirming that oscar doesn’t know.) having been frustrated in her effort to wring the location out of oscar and with the lamp now out of questions, her obvious next move is to go to beacon.

she is also two for two on relics swiped after someone else—not cinder—opened the vault, and two for two on cinder Almost Fucking Dying at the hands of other maidens. she’s realizing that her opponents will open those vaults if she squeezes them hard enough, and the sword presents an obvious temptation for vacuo’s defenders; she also won’t be able to access the crown at all if cinder dies. the skeleton-key plan is a wash.

and, with the coalition in vacuo galvanized by the imminent existential threat of another massive attack, the strongest next move for salem is to do nothing: quietly go to beacon, search for the crown, and run out the clock while her opponents wait. the longer she can draw this out, the shakier that coalition is going to get as people get complacent or start to doubt that an attack is coming at all.

(it is also something of a toss-up whether salem plans to launch another assault; she hit beacon and atlas with overwhelming force to take ozpin off the board, but for haven she planned a covert infiltration.)

so salem has a lot of compelling reasons for going to beacon, and none for rushing to vacuo. further, the end of V9, the epilogue storyboard, and the second rwby x jl film collectively indicate that at a minimum, salem will not be in vacuo at the top of V10. a V7ish scenario where salem doesn’t arrive until the end of the volume is not out of the question (although i do think she’ll be in V10, just at beacon).

and she will, of course, want to keep cinder close, both for the purpose of opening the beacon vault and because she will need to manage cinder’s ongoing rebellion very carefully. cinder may not Like This, but a) she she swanned away from the winter maiden without a backwards glance because she Doesn’t Care About The Power That Much, she just wants to Win The Power Struggle With Salem, and b) the vault and the relic of choice and being The Only One Who Can Do This are going to appeal to her too, again for power struggle reasons.

and since the skeleton key plan is a wash, it’s likely that salem will try to ease cinder off the idea of Getting the summer maiden so as to avoid risking a repeat of what happened in atlas. that, plus the nascent villain->hero arc developments involved in returning to the choice arc, taper cinder off the maiden hunting such that i do not think she’s going to be a central player in the summer maiden arc. (or obsessed with winter, for that matter.)

the summer maiden arc, sans cinder

okay. here we go!

in order for the ATM triad to eventuate, as i believe it will, someone in vacuo is going to need a reason to pull that trigger. at beacon and in atlas, the reason was cinder. cinder is also the reason both of those transfers failed. because cinder is probably Not In Vacuo, the ATM triad is almost certainly the a-a-b pattern; the negated pair both failed because cinder deliberately provoked them for the purpose of gaining access to the maiden, so i think the likely reversal here is that a machine transfer initiated in a non-crisis situation will succeed.

this is a puzzle, because the ATMs are unequivocally Not Good. every single character in the story is on the same page about this; even ironwood regards it as a necessary evil. there is an asterisk here for pietro because the only person harmed by his use of the machines is himself and he made the choice freely. but in any other circumstance, using the ATM is wrong, because That’s Murder. so the decision to use an ATM in vacuo to transfer a maiden is not one that can be made lightly.

thus we have to consider what circumstances could lead to that decision, and to do that we need to zoom out a little.

let’s assume the CFVY novels are both canonical and relevant to the narrative of the show proper, as RH was to V9.

i submit that there are two (2) possible summer maidens hinted at in before the dawn. one of them is sun’s cousin, starr sanzang, who appears briefly at the end of the book and has an “uncanny sense” for the weather.

the other is gillian asturias.

she and her twin brother, jax, are the leaders of a virulently xenophobic nationalist movement called the crown; they believe themselves to be direct descendants of the defunct vacuan monarchy, all the way back to malik the sunderer, first king of vacuo. their “evidence” (such as it is) is a crown-shaped birthmark supposed to be had by every member of the royal lineage. gill’s, however, is actually a brand,implied to have been done to her by her father when she was an infant.

gill is the power behind the crown. her semblance siphons aura; in the novel, she uses captives as batteries to make herself virtually invincible. on the battlefield, she glows with a brilliant iridescent light—brighter than the moon.

their mother—luna asturias—developed some sort of sickness during pregnancy that caused her aura to rapidly deplete and gradually waste away; she died due to complications during an emergency c-section. jax was born with the same condition; gillian’s aura was “elevated” from birth. their father believes that her semblance manifested before she was even born and ate her mother’s and brother’s auras.

right before the climactic battle, there is a brief skirmish with gill and her lieutenant, carmine, in an abandoned dust mine, which ends with the kids deliberately triggering a cave-in by blowing up a vein of dust. this is the result:

“Did it work?” she asked Octavia. Octavia shook her head. “I think we got Carmine, but just before everything came down on our heads, Gill flew backward and out of the cave.” “Carmine’s telekinesis,” Velvet said. “She used it to save her friend at the last second.”

then, during the actual battle:

He heard gunfire and then Dust bullets exploded against Gill, amped by Coco’s Semblance. Gill stepped back, swatting at her face as though the explosive rounds were no more annoying than bugs.

if you wanted to hide a maiden in plain sight in a canonical ancillary novel, this is how you to do it.

gillian is extraordinarily powerful. flying, being surrounded by visibly glowing haloes, and banishing bullets with the flick of a hand are all Maiden Things—and also Gillian Things carefully given plausible deniability through the eyes of POV characters who don’t know about the maidens and interpret what they see as effects of a semblance.

gillian herself is stridently opposed to the use of dust for reasons; if she is a maiden, she has compelling political and ideological reasons not to use the dust-like elemental magic that comes with being a maiden. if she started lobbing fireballs, everyone would assume she was using dust to do it, and that would make her look like a raging hypocrite. but covertly using magic to augment what she can do with fifty people’s aura? sure.

and the summer maiden is the maiden of destruction. the asturias family identity revolves around descent from a man named malik the sunderer. her fanatic of a father BRANDED HER with the mark of this legacy as an infant. her dead mother who sickened and died in childbirth is named for the moon.

when ozma ended the great war, he did it in vacuo, the crown on his head and the sword in hand. jax asturias is the leader of the crown, the twin with the real birthmark, the mind of the operation. gill is the power—very literally the source of his strength, because she lends him some of her own aura, and metaphorically his shield and his sword.

and furthermore, the lesson taught by the summer maiden in the fairytale is “don’t view the world at a distance; take an active part in it and the events around you.” gill’s backstory very closely mirrors salem’s in one key way—their mothers die in childbirth, and their fathers see them as the cause—BUT. where salem’s father locked her in a tower about it, finn asturias chose differently:

“[Gill’s semblance] had caused us so much pain, but I couldn’t blame her, an unborn baby, doing what we all do: trying to survive. Over the years, I taught her to control her Semblance, and over time we unlocked her true ability—she doesn’t just sap Aura from others; she can transfer it, too. It turned out her power, which had seemed like such a curse, could be a force for good as well. She had a large reserve of Aura already, and so she shared some of it with her brother. And he began to thrive.”

throughout the novel there is also a recurring thread of other people (theodore, finn, rumpole) remarking on how much promise gill had and how she could have been a great huntress—if only she hadn’t stuck with her brother. once jax’s mind-control semblance is found out, everyone assumes that he’s using it to keep gill under his thumb… but he isn’t. his semblance straight up does not work on her, possibly because her aura powers it.

so gillian embodies the summer maiden’s lesson in two different ways; her father made a Huge Point of making sure she could take part in the world (instead of isolating her as salem’s father did), and gill bucked everyone’s assumptions about what she should do, actively following her own ambitions instead of passively accepting the expectation placed on her.

gill is alive and in custody at the end of the novel. (jax likewise, although his memory was at least temporarily wiped.) if she’s the summer maiden, that ticks the box for summer being the excluded fourth in the seasonal triad-of-triads; she is not, in any sense except moral, fragile.

and gill as the summer maiden throws an interesting curveball at the Machine Question: what to do with a maiden who can also absorb the auras of fifty people to turbo charge her abilities, when that maiden is a reactionary nationalist who led a violent insurgency a few weeks ago and the only thing keeping her in jail is that she loves her brother and he’ll die without her? what do you do with her when you expect salem to rock up with another legion of grimm any day now?

maybe you look at a machine meant for ripping aura out of a person to put in somebody else, and then look at her brother who has almost no aura of his own, and see a way for everyone to win? it isn’t like gillian asturias has any objection to transferring her own aura to her brother. she’s spent most of their lives doing exactly that, because she loves him.

the only difference is that the ATM can make that transfer permanent.

it won’t kill her: partial transfers are possible, and she’ll still have her ability to siphon aura.

it might strip her of the maiden power, and—because the magic will only cleave to a woman—there is at least a chance that something like what happened with amber, pyrrha, and cinder can be deliberately triggered with gillian’s willing cooperation. transfer half gill’s aura to jax while gill focuses on an eligible candidate (cough, starr, cough), and maybe you can convince the magic to separate from gillian’s aura, leave her and jax, and hop into the chosen heir instead, just as it would if gillian died.

the reasoning is sound. gill would probably agree to do it for her brother’s sake; she and jax already share her aura, a permanent split between them would give them both an average amount of aura, and the transfer being partial would keep their consciousnesses separate, thus avoiding the Ozma Problem. all the thorny ethical problems involved in using the machines are avoided, and the magic’s rules are bent (gill lives) but not broken (the machine triggers an ordinary transfer), which reduces the risk that the magic will resist or break free.

and if it does go wrong, the most probable outcome is that the magic ends up split between the asturias twins—which is not ideal, but you’ve also earned some goodwill from both of them by helping jax and you can maybe pitch them on an enemy-of-my-enemy alliance to defend vacuo from salem because they sure as fuck aren’t about to join her.

this is a) the only scenario where i can plausibly imagine RWBYJNOR et al deciding to use the ATM to transfer a maiden, and b) the only one i can imagine succeeding without having dire repercussions.

the other possibility—one i think is all but guaranteed if gill isn’t the summer maiden—is that a villain uses the ATM to steal the maiden power, with dire repercussions.

and in either case, as long as we’re prognosticating interminably on the summer maiden arc, we might as well think about what the shape of the V10 narrative arc might look like if salem isn’t in vacuo.

the first point to address here is how inadequate tyrian is for the job of leading the operation in vacuo. he is extremely good at indiscriminate killing and quite bad at everything else; watts was in charge in V7 because watts is a competent strategist. tyrian lacks focus and discipline. in the short term, he’ll start and spread fires; in the longer term, if salem intends to bide her time, she needs someone reliable.

summer rose has been holding beacon against vale’s huntsmen for the last year or so whilst searching for the vault. she’s been with salem fourteen years. there is no question that salem both trusts and relies on her. even if it weren’t a binary choice between her and cinder, she’s the obvious pick. once salem arrives at beacon, she can take over the operation there, send summer ahead to handle vacuo, and keep cinder safely away from any other maidens.

the strategic end of salem’s operation in vacuo is to retrieve the sword from the vault under shade academy. she is undoubtedly prepared to deliver a siege and capture shade by force, but as with haven it’s more likely that Plan A is to do things quietly.

summer also has an immediate personal interest in accomplishing this goal without an open assault (her daughters are leading the defending coalition) and, given the level of autonomy implied by salem handing off beacon to her for a year+, probably broad latitude to make the tactical decisions she deems best.

so summer’s priority is finding the summer maiden and getting her to open the vault. she herself is probably not an eligible maiden candidate—she’s in her forties—so maiden-killing is out. her options are to persuade the summer maiden, or capture her and steal the magic if she can get her hands on an ATM.

meanwhile, the crown is in shambles with the asturias twins in custody and the vacuo coalition holding strong in the face of the assumed-to-be-imminent threat, plus morale bolstered by team RWBY and jaune’s return. but the cracks still show. vacuans have always been hostile to outsiders, and the refugees are putting an enormous strain on the already-impoverished kingdom, even with aid pouring in from vale and mistral. the crown’s core supporters are people who believe that allowing refugees into vacuo will weaken its defenses, and the longer this drags on, the more they can capitalize on tensions to stoke dissent.

gill and jax are bound to escape or get broken out by their loyalists sooner or later. if gill is the summer maiden, and summer identifies her as such, then getting the vault open might be as simple as posing as a huntress disillusioned by the “weakness” of the powers that be and telling gillian about the sword.

the tricky part is getting the sword away from gillian, because a summer maiden who can drain aura and wields the sword of destruction is a walking nuke. summer might be able to pull it off if her semblance is along the same lines as ruby’s: have gill open the vault, rush the sword, cut her down before she can react. otherwise, cutting a deal—the sword in exchange for salem leaving vacuo alone—might work, because salem’s stated motive in the broadcast is to destroy the huntsman academies and that is also what gill wants, so summer could make a credible argument here that salem is a potential ally to the crown.

if gill is not the summer maiden, then the crown is still potentially useful—a nascent civil war will distract the coalition and if the crown rebels again and wins, they’re probably going to be easier to persuade or manipulate into opening the vault (and jax can control the summer maiden, if it comes to that). also, adding the imminent threat of a civil war to the imminent threat of salem attacking puts more pressure on the coalition to risk using the sword.

the other thing summer might do is eschew the cloak-and-dagger routine altogether and take a gamble on approaching her daughters to open negotiations; this is, to put it mildly, a risk. but a very high-reward risk.

IN SUMMARY.

gillian asturias -> starr sanzang. probably.

summer rose is here and she’s not going to, at any point, Be the summer maiden but she is going to Cause Problems On Purpose.

one of the ways the summer maiden arc will be Different is that summer rose has some things to unpack (what happened to the last spring maiden That Night)

the vacuo ATM is either for the asturias twins OR someone (summer or jax) is going to do a murder OR there is no ATM, there’s just gill and her ability to (temporarily) steal the maiden power via aura, in which case it’s starr -> gillian -> starr and we might see magic-thieving conflicts between gill and winter or raven also.

if the ATM gets used for any other purpose than making gill’s and jax’s aura-sharing deal permanent it is going to be Very Bad.

maybe the real crown was the reactionary insurgents we foiled along the way?