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bestworstcase · 6 days ago

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So, I decided to try and list reasons why I think Jinn is not an objective or necessarily accurate source of info, your thoughts?

Reason the first, CRWBY loooove unreliable narrators with a position of authority, IE the closest we've come to reliable narrators are the main characters. Basically every other narrator has been unreliable.

Reason the second, Jinn gets a very basic fact wrong, namely claiming Light is the elder brother despite them both being born at the same time.

Reason the third, This ties into a wider point that the Brothers are not shown to be omniscient so it is hard for me to believe one of them alone could create a being that is.

Reason the fourth, One of Jinn's claims in the Lost Fable is that Salem was corrupted or otherwise made evil/more evil by jumping in the pool, but here's the thing, lore wise, destruction is not ontologically evil, in fact its the basis for renewal and rebirth in the Ever After. & Salem herself spent millennia after her swim just living in a cabin, she even answers the door when people knock, that doesn't seem like an overwhelming urge to destroy.

Reason the fifth, Jinn was made by the God of Light specifically, that guy very much has a bias and could well have imparted that into his creation or otherwise left programming to always frame him in the best light possible that even Jinn is unaware of.

Reason the sixth, So far we have seen two relics in action, and both are more loosey goosy with their presumed rules than many realize. Jinn is fine giving Ruby a freebie cos she's clever & Ambro creatively fucks with the designs he's given if he's able to even if its unhelpful; or they outright have no control over giving people specifically what they ask for. So Jinn being 100% objective is questionable, especially because Ruby asked what Ozpin was specifically hiding, if Jinn is like her brother then she would show them what Ozpin believes to be the case not necessarily the specific facts, even if said facts are very close to reality, there could be elements that are incorrect. The fact she frames it as a fairy tale feels like it plays into that, this is a story not factual reconnaissance.

Reason the seventh, Jinn claimed: "Ozma began to learn the importance of living with the souls with which he had been paired." This is just factually untrue, Ozpin doesn't live with the souls he reincarnates into; he (Unwillingly) eats and absorbs them into himself, their identities subsumed by his own. Resisting this process causes both Ozpin & Oscar legitimate agony, while not resisting leads to Ozpin overwriting them entirely like he did with his first life and eventually does with all lives. Even if that is just using flowery language to say "he resisted eating them right away" that still shows Jinn has a clear and present bias in how things are framed.

I tried to leave out anything that might be read as speculative, but any other additions or perspectives on these examples would be welcome but no pressure!

i would prepend, first:

Its user can ask any question, and the Lamp will provide an answer. […] However, it's not without drawbacks. The Lamp cannot tell of events that have yet to happen, and it will only ever answer three questions every one hundred years.

the lamp will provide an answer, but oz does not say the lamp's answer will be comprehensive, objective, reliable truth. we know that jinn can provide strictly objective answers—when cinder asks "what do ruby and her friends have planned?" she simply allows cinder to see the planning for herself, without editorializing—but the rules governing the lamp do not require her to do so.

and to address your other ask here:

Also regarding Jinn getting things wrong, what are your thoughts ont the V6 commentary? "Figuring out how Jinn spoke was something that was very interesting to us. We always wanted her to be an outside observer[…] It was an interesting blend of her being an objective person that gives the facts and how the events played out and someone who considers themselves a storyteller" -Miles Luna

i would say that this, above all, is why jinn's story can't be taken as the whole truth. "i just don’t get how the story is both real... and not," ruby says in v9. this is one of the core narrative themes.

as ozpin writes in his commentary on the girl in the tower: "As a metafiction, this tale more than any other in this collection demonstrates the power of stories to create reality and shape our destinies, and the subtle influence storytellers have over their audiences. […] Her story did not include the whole truth, and how much of it might have been false? One must always be prepared to think about and question everything they read or hear, especially if they are told that it is absolute truth. […] It is the storyteller who decides where a tale begins and when it ends, and if you look far enough ahead, even a story with a happy ending may reveal itself as a tragedy, and heroes may turn out to be villains."

jinn is an outside observer who knows the objective truth and answers factually—in that she doesn't lie.the lost fable is a factual account of what happened, but jinn isn't an encyclopedia. she's an individual with her own personality and opinions—and, as you point out, she can exercise discretion in how she answers. the answer she provides to "what is ozpin hiding from us?" is an elaborate, detailed story; but when oz asked her "how can i destroy salem?" she just grinned and said you can't; ruby's cleverness impresses her, so she she did ruby a favor; cinder's question saddens her, but she nevertheless provided the most objective and comprehensive answer out of all the answers we've witnessed.

(think about that. why did she choose to answer cinder so thoroughly, in spite of her obvious unhappiness when she heard the question? we know jinn doesn't have to do that; merely saying "they plan to open the vault and use the staff to save everyone" would have been a sufficient answer—she didn't provide context or elaboration for oz when she answered him "you can't"—and it would have given cinder significantly less of an advantage than letting her see everything.

jinn likes ruby. that is, presumably, the reason "what have ruby and her teammates planned?" was not a question she liked answering—so why? why, if she's a "being created by the god of light to aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge," if she's truly innately biased in light's favor as is widely assumed, why did she choose to go above and beyond in giving cinder the most helpful possible answer?

why does she so palpably dislike oz? why is she wearing shackles? why is she overtly compared to a genie imprisoned in a lamp? when oz sought knowledge of how to destroy salem, she brushed him off with "you can't;" when cinder asked for information she needed to defeat salem's enemies, jinn felt sorry for them but gave cinder everything, in comprehensive detail, with full context. why? what does jinn herself want? whose side is she on, really? even if she is truly light's creation, that… doesn't necessarily mean she's loyal to him. salem is light's creation, too.)

jinn knows everything, but she's a storyteller and an individual with her own private agenda. the truth is that truth is hard to come by; even a purely objective answer with no editorialization is a revealing choice. when jinn puts her thumb on the scales, who benefits?

oz… or salem?

and, in the lost fable itself, which brother does jinn cast in a more sympathetic light? which one is, by her telling, lonely and surprised and hurt by salem's [alleged] manipulation? which one is given interiority and motivation in her story, and which does she leave unexplained?

rewatch the lost fable sometime without the presupposition that jinn must be "programmed" to always frame light in the most flattering way possible. (she and ambrosius are people, not computer programs.) does the story as jinn tells it actually flatter light… or did the fandom just uncritically take qrow's earlier framing of light as the Good One as fact and carry that bias into the lost fable because our cultural convention of "light good, dark bad" works in light's favor?

to your specific points!

CRWBY loooove unreliable narrators with a position of authority, IE the closest we've come to reliable narrators are the main characters. Basically every other narrator has been unreliable.

i'd argue it's less "unreliable narrators in a position of authority" and more that the writers are interested fundamentally in the truth being complex and multifaceted; the kids aren't any more reliable than the old guard, because their conclusions are only as good as the information they've been given, and 1) a lot of their information is bad quality, vague, fragmented, or outright false, 2) the kids largely do not exercise critical thinking about the information they receive, and 3) ruby in particular has a badhabit of making snap assumptions on minimal evidence and it took until she met the demiurge in v9 before anyone advised her to not do that.

this struggle with critical thinking is a major underpinning of v9—look at the difficulty these kids had just wrapping their heads around "the story being both real and not," how they all took it for granted that alyx must have been the book's author even after the girls learnt about lewis, how the cat makes it clear from the jump that alyx isn't the only human they've known ("you're not nearly as interesting as the others i've met") but none of them think to ask about that—v9 makes a huge point of highlightingthis weakness as their fatal flaw and the one they most need to overcome.

as always, i think it's a mistake to assess the reliability of any character's information in terms of that character's narrative role. the closest rwby gets to having a genuinely reliable narrator is raven,because her response to yang asking for the truth is to say that truth is hard to come by and yang needs to be both more skeptical and curious if she wants to learn what's true. but even raven divulges only a fraction of what she knows, and what she does tell is only what she believes to be true.

like, yes rwby is the unreliable narrators show but i think the stronger argument to make on this point re: jinn is how hard the story hammers this point. "a story of victory for one person is a story of defeat for someone else." "i just don't understand how the story can be both real, and not." "no one who wasn't there could know what really happened, and even then, they would have only a small part of the story." "truth is hard to come by." "truth itself is not an absolute." "stories create reality and shape our destinies." "one must always be prepared to think about and question everything they read or hear, especially if they are told it is absolute truth." "it is the storyteller who decides."

question everything. question everything. truth is complicated, storytellers hold great power, question everything. over and over and over again. and no one ever says that jinn must give the whole, absolute, objective factual truth when she answers a question; only that she must provide an answer.

Jinn gets a very basic fact wrong, namely claiming Light is the elder brother despite them both being born at the same time.

✅ correct! and the way she's wrong is suggestive; "light is the older brother" is how qrow tells the story. it follows that this is a cultural belief likely originating from ozma, brought forward from ancient times. either 1) jinn herself doesn't know the brothers are twins born in the same instant, which might imply that her knowledge is limited to what remnant's people know, or 2) she knows but her telling is restricted by the limits of what oz knows because of the way ruby asked her question: "what is ozpin hiding from us?" implicitly excludes any information that ozpin doesn't know.

either way, this tells us that jinn's answers are only as good as her sources allow her to be. she's not omniscient—or if she is, she may be required to answer the exact question posed to her and consequently limited in how much information she's allowed to share depending upon how the question is worded. (in which case cinder asking what "ruby and her teammates" have planned would have maximized what jinn was allowed to show her versus the narrow questions ruby and oz ask.)

This ties into a wider point that the Brothers are not shown to be omniscient so it is hard for me to believe one of them alone could create a being that is.

indeed, it's jinn who initially reveals that the brothers are fallible.

tangentially, i would also note that a being whose purpose is to "aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge" is not the same as a being whose purpose is to provide the truth. (see also: curious cat.) that is, pursuing knowledge doesn't inherently lead to genuine factual understanding; without robust critical thinking skills, one can just as easily pursue knowledge down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. what are your priors? what do you ask? how do you ask them? how do you evaluate the answers you receive? how can you know what you don't know?

what kind of answer might jinn provide to a leading question?

One of Jinn's claims in the Lost Fable is that Salem was corrupted or otherwise made evil/more evil by jumping in the pool, but here's the thing, lore wise, destruction is not ontologically evil, in fact its the basis for renewal and rebirth in the Ever After. & Salem herself spent millennia after her swim just living in a cabin, she even answers the door when people knock, that doesn't seem like an overwhelming urge to destroy.

she kind of implies that, but only if her audience already believes that destruction is innately evil. what jinn actually says is "this force of pure destruction could not destroy a being of infinite life, so it createda being of infinite life with a desire for pure destruction."

salem, she says, is a being created by pure destruction. earlier, darkness told his brother "you may bask in the powers of creation, but you do not own them."

this echoes what pyrrha said of the grimm and humanity back in v1: "they are the darkness and we are the light," but "understanding both light and darkness helps us manifest our aura; everyone has some of both."

the language jinn uses to describe salem's transformation evokes this dualistic relationship between destruction and creation, darkness and light. (this is another reason i'm skeptical of the premise that she's a mouthpiece of light in any meaningful sense; light does not see destruction and creation as halves of a whole.) her tone is ominous, but then she says "and in time, she would find her adversary" and transitions to light's reaction to what salem did.

what does "a desire for pure destruction" mean? purity is a state of being unadulterated, free of contamination, incorruptible. "first, the brothers were given the power to destroy, to clear the wilderness away." in the blacksmith's account, destruction isn't violent or evil.

it's hunger. it is the force which sustains life and drives change. destruction is renewal and revitalization. the act of creating anything begins, always, with destruction.

and that is the actual implication jinn makes regarding salem's metamorphosis, when she describes salem as a being created by destruction. this is lost on her audience because they've all inherited their idea of what destruction is from light's perversion of it: as maria puts it, "preservation is an extension of creation, or at least, an enemy of destruction." (in an episode unsubtly titled dead end, no less.) but "balance is not two forces locked in never-ending conflict." creation isn't the enemy of destruction.

what does salem want? once her hope is restored, the being of infinite life with a desire for pure destruction says "we could create the paradise the old gods could not." in the present, she says "in pursuit of a new world, no cost is too great."

destruction, to clear the wilderness away. creation, to imagine what will replace it.

jinn omitted the clarifying context here but prior to 9.10 airing her phrasing was the big arrow pointing in a clear, straight line toward the metaphysical lore and the narrative understanding of what creation and destruction are. she states this fact in a melodramatic tone that makes it sound terrifying—perhaps because she's reflecting ozpin's perspective—but the interpretation that salem was "corrupted" speaks to the biases of her audience more than jinn herself.

Jinn was made by the God of Light specifically, that guy very much has a bias and could well have imparted that into his creation or otherwise left programming to always frame him in the best light possible that even Jinn is unaware of.

…or so she claims.

this is the one thing jinn has said that i think might be an outright falsehood, partly because it's unclear whether oz believes it.

(he's candid about the relics having been left behind by the brothers; he says he doesn't know why grimm are attracted to the relics but thinks it has "something to do with their origin." obviously this must be taken with a grain of salt because oz deliberately makes it sound like the relics are inanimate objects, so he might be dissembling—but light also didn't tell him anything about the relics beyond what to do with them. if oz believed that grimm were drawn to the relics simply because light made them, why wouldn't he just say "i think it's because the relics were created by the god of light"? the kids were told that the relics are gifts from the gods, so this wouldn't be new information or an explanation they would think to question. his equivocation and uncertainty on the origins right before jinn comes out of the lamp and says she's a being created by the god of light is… hm.)

later, jinn implies that she seldom if ever gives information "freely." and when she makes an exception for ruby, the knowledge she offers is "i will not let you use me without a question again," so jinn defines "knowledge" very broadly. after her initial appearance, every time jinn is summoned properly (i.e. with intent to ask a question), all she says is "do you have a question for me?" and in 6.2 she seems to be relishing the opportunity to expose oz's lie about her questions.

it also looks pretty damning of oz for her to just announce her origins mere minutes after oz equivocated around that subject.

so if she's capable of lying, this is the one thing i would suspect of actually being an outright lie; because the more we see of her the more clear it becomes that introducing herself like that was atypical and because jinn had a motive in that she wanted to make oz look bad.

but even if she wasn't lying, that doesn't necessarily make it true. in v9 the curious cat refers to their "maker," singular, but the blacksmith implies both brothers made the cat. the brothers built their entire world on the foundation of a lie that death must be final or else. ascension entails losing the factual memories of one's previous life. darkness has been conspicuously absent since leaving remnant. and…

"they were new gods with shared memories and complementary abilities—and each thought that he was the original, and the other his copy."

"'i'm sorry i ever made you,' said both at the same time."

<- this myth is not true, but this idea came from somewhere. the spirits wear shackles; they're prisoners. the first act of creation is destruction, a force light dreads because he does not understand it. ozma's curse is a corrupted form of ascension. when jinn says she's a being created by the god of light, what does that mean?

every single time we've seen light create a being—not just heard about it in myth, but seen him creating on screen—it's with his brother helping him. darkness eats the weeds; darkness breathes fire over the wooden statues first. similarly, this force of pure destruction could not destroy, so it created…

light basks in the powers of creation but does not own them; the grimm were created by darkness alone. darkness understands, acknowledges, embraces his creative side.

light hates and fears destruction. if all creation begins with destruction, can light create anything without darkness?

it seems to me there are two possibilities: either the spirits were created by both brothers and light claimed all the credit (as he seems to have done with the curious cat), or light's concept of what creation means is as warped as his misunderstanding of destruction and he "created" these beings in the same general sense that, say, an abusive parent might hold "i gave you life" over a child (that is, he played some role in the spirits coming to be that wasn't creating them per se—a distortion in the vein of "neo created somewhat by killing little," whereby little's agency and freedom to choose what they become next is denied. this is precisely how the brothers saw their role in the ever after ["the brothers built homes for them and gave them roles to play"] and light, never having ascended himself, surely still thinks this way.)

either way, the cat apparently believes their "maker" is a singular entity. it's not implausible that jinn might have been misled in the same way by the same god.

(broadly speaking, i think this is the direction rwby is more likely to go versus jinn being "programmed" by the god of light who really did create her ex nihilo all by himself. there's a lot more setup and narrative precedent for a reveal that "light created the spirits" is at best a misleading half-truth than the spirit of knowledge turning out to be a brainwashed propaganda mouthpiece.)

So far we have seen two relics in action, and both are more loosey goosy with their presumed rules than many realize. Jinn is fine giving Ruby a freebie cos she's clever & Ambro creatively fucks with the designs he's given if he's able to even if its unhelpful; or they outright have no control over giving people specifically what they ask for. So Jinn being 100% objective is questionable, especially because Ruby asked what Ozpin was specifically hiding, if Jinn is like her brother then she would show them what Ozpin believes to be the case not necessarily the specific facts, even if said facts are very close to reality, there could be elements that are incorrect. The fact she frames it as a fairy tale feels like it plays into that, this is a story not factual reconnaissance.

yeah. there's several layers to this:

fact is separate from interpretation. jinn's story is probably accurate as far as the events did happen as shown, but she's also crafting a narrative about those events. it's a subjective interpretation of the facts.

"what is ozpin hiding from us?" and "what's the truth about salem?" are different questions, with the former being a request specifically for information ozpin knows and deliberately keeps secret. if you ask me "what do flat earthers believe?" and i answer "the world is flat," i haven't lied to you, i've just factually answered the question. likewise, if i said "the world is round," that's… factually true, but it isn't actually an answer to the question you asked and it's also a lie because flat earthers don't believe the world is round. true answers are contextual. asking for ozpin's secrets, then assuming that's the whole truth, is a reasonable mistake, but it is a mistake.

neither oz nor jinn say that the answers she provides are complete, objective truth. nora and ruby kind of pick up on this in v7: jinn told oz he can't destroy salem, but "maybe someone else could?"—they just haven't yet applied that skepticism to the answer ruby received.

there's a subtle distinction made between what the relics can do, what the rules require them to do, what they can't do, and what they're not allowed to do. bringing people back from the dead is "against the rules," for example, but ambrosius is capable of it: a soul removed from its body is dead by any reasonable definition, but he's able to circumvent the rule by separating penny's soul and then letting her borrow his power to recreate herself. jinn is required to answer up to three questions every century; she can come out of her lamp whenever someone calls her name, with or without a question, she can share information at her discretion, and she can choose to answer those obligatory questions in a minimally helpful, dickish way ("you can't >:)").

chains. shackles. imprisonment. the key takeaway from #4 is that jinn and ambrosius are not personifications of the relics but individuals bound to them, and when characters describe what the relics do, how they work, they're not talking about the powers of the spirits but rather the rules dictating what the spirits are and aren't allowed to do with their powers according to the god of light. this distinction is extremely important. the spirits are enslaved. ambrosius is vocally unhappy with his situation; jinn likes ruby's cleverness, but she does not appreciate being "used" and she very much seems to enjoy dismantling oz. every time they act outside of the explicit rules governing their relics is an act of rebellion against the power keeping them bound. they want to be free.

and the only tool jinn has in this situation is the way she answers questions on the very, very rare occasion she's given the chance. she's not allowed to answer questions about what will happen in the future, but she certainly knows enough to make accurate predictions about the outcome of her answers. looking at the consequences of what and how jinn tells people things from this perspective—well, she really seems to have it out for oz, but also?

there is an argument to be made that jinn purposefully orchestrated team rwby's fall into the ever after. there is also an argument to be made that she wanted salem to keep the lamp and get the staff. she gave cinder way more information than the rules required her to give, information cinder needed to prevail against daunting odds. why did jinn put her thumb on the scales for salem?

and how might jinn putting her thumb on the scales for salem in v8 recontextualize her storytelling the lost fable? even if she's restricted by the question to only share things ozpin knows or believes, she still has power as the storyteller. she makes the choices about how to frame these events. why does she tell it this way? there's an obvious reason jinn might want salem to succeed—the relics being torn out of oz's grip by the witch who loathes the brothers is probably jinn's only shot at freedom. and… if you look at it that way, consider what jinn achieves in the lost fable. she obliterates oz's standing with his inner circle and other allies, drives him into self-imposed exile for months, and brutally demoralizes salem's opponents by relentlessly painting salem as a remorseless monster and then closing, almost gloatingly, with "how can i destroy salem?" "you can't :)"

i'm just saying. this spirit of knowledge was enslaved by the god salem has been dead-set on destroying for millions of years, and her prison was in the hands people who fully intended to just lock her away again indefinitely. then they asked her "what is the man who locked you up and kept your very existence a secret hiding from us?" and jinn made him out to be a blind, easily-manipulated, deceitful fool who got in way over his head with an invincible monster and then lied about everything.

did she really have their best interest at heart?

Jinn claimed: "Ozma began to learn the importance of living with the souls with which he had been paired." This is just factually untrue, Ozpin doesn't live with the souls he reincarnates into; he (Unwillingly) eats and absorbs them into himself, their identities subsumed by his own. Resisting this process causes both Ozpin & Oscar legitimate agony, while not resisting leads to Ozpin overwriting them entirely like he did with his first life and eventually does with all lives. Even if that is just using flowery language to say "he resisted eating them right away" that still shows Jinn has a clear and present bias in how things are framed.

i'm not sure it is untrue, actually. light tells ozma he'll reincarnate in a manner that ensures he is "never alone" and even after what is quite possibly decades in his first life, he hallucinates his reflection asking "what are we doing?"—similarly, when jinn says he learnt to live with his hosts, we see oz experiencing the other-self as a presence in the room with him. later, in v7, ironwood says "eventually, you won't even know who's who anymore."

these might be nothing more than hallucinations brought on by the trauma of the merge itself, but i think it's more likely that oz never stops having two minds in his head; rather his curse forcibly changes him and his host until they're mirror images. oz and the reflection that watches his every move. we glimpse this panopticon with oscar in v4 and i think that is what it's like for oz all the time.

and i think oz would definitely rationalize this as "living with the souls with which he's been paired" because the alternative is just being haunted by a twisted facsimile of the soul he parasitized until he finally dies, over and over, forever. it isn't until he comes back that oz begins to display any real resistance to the curse; he's long since become numb and resigned to it. what jinn says lines up with how oz himself must talk about his curse, for ironwood to make that remark, so i think it's an accurate statement about what oz believes and how he sees his situation.

but that in itself is another point in favor of interpreting the lost fable as a narrative told from oz's point of view, so.

LASTLY,

i would add two more:

first, light says outright that darkness destroyed mankind. ("a tragedy has befallen your home at the hands of my brother.") but jinn makes an equivalence between ozma keeping his task and the relics a secret and salem "blaming the end of the world on the gods" in order to imply that salem deceived him… but blaming the end of the world on the gods is factually correct, and salem quite obviously did tell ozma her part in it because ozpin knows about her rebellion. (salem is washed in inexplicable red light here, so this moment is very conspicuously highlighted as important.)

and second: jinn's framing of salem is internally contradictory. "she cursed the gods, she cursed the universe, she cursed everything… everything but herself" implies salem is too arrogant to reflect on her own choices or take responsibility for anything; but "salem, fearing ozma would reject her, blamed the end of the world on the gods" implies that salem, deep down, blames herself. she wouldn't fear rejection unless she felt shame.

the part of the lost fable that is most suspect is jinn's narration of what's going on in salem's mind, what she thinks and feels and wants, why she did anything. that's where the most obvious holes are.

#god. this got long #i just think jinn is a really interesting character in her own right

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bestworstcase · 7 days ago

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worth noting: when ozma told salem about his return from death, the first time, he literally did not know this either. he was given a choice, he said yes, he woke up in a new body.

at the time when salem learnt how his reincarnation works, mechanically, that was the only information either of them had.

it's a safe bet they haven't spoken since that lifetime—at least not in any substantive way—and oz lies and obfuscates about his curse so much that any further information salem has gleaned third-hand is certainly vague, fragmented, and would have included oz's framing that he returns for the purpose of "stopping salem" and/or "protecting remnant."

how could she possibly know?

oscar sees ozma reincarnate for the first time and remarks "he didn't know." how could ozma have possibly foreseen what light's curse would do to him, after the first time when he chose to come back? and all salem really has to go on is what he knew in that lifetime.

it's not like they've been on speaking terms since then!!

I just started reading in the hall of the mountain and it’s good but I have a hard time believing the whole salem didn’t know how oz’s curse worked thing after all this time how could she possibly not know??

Salem literally says she doesn’t know, in so many words:

“WHY. DO. YOU. KEEP. COMING. BACK?”

#fog of war. divorce. same difference

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bestworstcase · 7 days ago

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I'm curious, what do you think is the purpose in attacking Vale like Salem did? I have a few thoughts, but some things don't really add up so I'm curious as to what you think tbh

-🌙

sooo while i didn't anticipate vale being destroyed prior to the v9 animatic release, i will say it wasn't a surprise because it aligned with what i thought salem would do next: bring cinder to beacon and dig in to wait. my read is that she's most urgently concerned with 1. finding the crown and 2. forcing the defenders to open the vaults so she can get the relics without risking cinder; salem's increasing reluctance to use cinder as a skeleton key underpins her character arc in v6-8 and i expect that to continue.

at the end of v8, salem learnt exactly what she needed to do to make the vacuo coalition open shade's vault and bring her the sword. because cinder told her.

"they used the staff to save thousands" -> "in pursuit of a new world, no cost is too great. you've done well, cinder."

salem's praising cinder for exercising restraint and caution there (the "cost" in this context is cinder letting the winter maiden go), but i think she's so pleased in part because she knows, now, that when the chips are down her opponents will choose to save thousands of lives over keeping the relics sealed.

they also rejected the terms of her siege, so she knows showing up in vacuo with another storm won't be sufficient. the stakes must be "people will die and the only chance we have to save them is to use this relic."

so the question for salem is: how does she create a situation wherein thousands of people will die unless the shade coalition risks using the sword of destruction, and—perhaps even more crucially—how can she maintain that indefinitely until the coalition actually makes its move? (that is, she can't predict how swiftly her opponents can or will react and it will be necessary to keep all the imperiled people alive, else she loses her leverage; which means salem needs to orchestrate a scenario where thousands of people are utterly at her mercy but won't die unless she pulls the trigger.)

what i'm getting at here is hostages.

mantle had the crater.

vale has mountain glenn.

i wrote this post shortly after the v9 animatic dropped and after having a year or so to keep chewing on the possibilities, i stand by it. i think salem razed vale specifically in order to corral everyone who didn't make it onto the one refugee ship she allowed to retreat into the caverns beneath mountain glenn because she wants to force the shade coalition's hand; she has almost all of vale's population trapped underground and surrounded on all sides by grimm. oobleck looks at the ruins of mountain glenn and sees lives that could have been saved; salem looks his students in the eye and says very well, how?

she's either planning to offer an exchange or she intends to push them into attacking her with the sword.

notice the thematic echoes of the mountain glenn arc in v9. what are you? no, no, that is what you do, i want to know why you do it. the narrative isn't just coming full circle; it's setting the stage.

years ago, vale sealed off the tunnels and left mountain glenn to die instead of trying to save the people. lives that could have been saved. history is important because those who fail to learn from it are destined to repeat it; what sets team rwby apart from the old guard is their determination to save everybody. no more sacrifices.

it just… works. it follows logically from salem's motivations, it gives her a clear strategic reason not to have just flattened vacuo too, it makes room for v10 to breathe with the crown as its primary antagonists without just benching salem, and it delivers on major setup from v1-2 that hasn't yet come home to roost ("history is important" vs oz's lies and erasure of history).

#in general rwby is the kind of story #where character action is very coherently motivated by internal goals #so when in doubt the best way to figure out why salem does anything #is to ask what outcome she's trying to achieve. what does she want? what are her priorities? what's her strategy?#because salem is a planner. shes always thinking ahead and she's.#honestly it isn't even a competition salem is the best strategist in the story by an embarrassing margin lmao

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bestworstcase · 7 days ago

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Regarding Salem calling Leo a coward as she executed him what leads you to: ough. yeah i only think about this daily

did she call leo a coward as she murdered him?

…or did she murder him, then study her own reflection in unmoving silence for a moment before glaring at herself and contemptuously muttering coward? is she referring to him or is she addressing herself?

who is the coward, in salem's mind, in this moment? we know what she's looking at when she says it, and it isn't leonardo. it's herself. her reflection in the glass, after she killed a man for the sake of convenience and then immediately ended the seer-call so she wouldn't have to look at the corpse.

and if she's talking to herself, what might it say about her that salem regards her own actions toward leo as cowardice? (what is it she fears? what is she hiding from? there's a reason the narrative heralds her arrival in atlas with oz soliloquizing on the topic of fear. there is an almost-unseen paradigm shift here, in this scene in leo's office; this is the moment salem gets scared. and like a cornered animal this makes her so much more dangerous.)

#the image of salem *looking herself in the eyes* with utter contempt is certainly. suggestive #of how she sees herself

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bestworstcase · 8 days ago

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#ough. yeah i only think about this daily

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bestworstcase · 8 days ago

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blacbone Mouth perfec t size to put ship in to float! inside very Soft and Comfort ship sail soundly put ship in Blackbone Mouth. Put Ship in Blackbone Mouth. no problems ever in blakcbon mouth because good Shape and Support for stern weak of big ship hull. Ablakbon Mouth yes a place for ship put ship in blackbone mouth can trust blackbone for giveing good safe voyage to ship. friend blackbone

#friend blackbone.

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bestworstcase · 8 days ago

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#hello secret histories players

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bestworstcase · 9 days ago

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So I really liked your breakdown on Salem not being a good manipulator, but in that regarding how do you take her handling of Hazel, Watts & Tyrian in V7, IE, how she frames their motivations VS the reality, vengeance/love, spite/justice, mania/reverence before reaffirming they can only get these through her?

BAM.

that post outlines what i think is happening in salem's head during that scene in 6.4 but more broadly: being a mediocre manipulator doesn't make her not manipulative, which she very much is. (indeed all of the beats the linked post touches on entail salem trying and mostly failing to get her way through performative showboating and blunt coercion instead of just saying outright what she wants; she's extremely manipulative, and part of what makes her kind of suck at it is that she lacks the requisite charisma and subtlety to be, well, subtle about it. manipulation is most effective when it isn't visible.)

the TL;DR of my read on that scene in 6.4 is: salem isn't really talking to WTHEM here so much as she uses them as props in the concluding remarks of an argument she's been having with herself about whether or not to rescue cinder.

(consider that at the top of the scene, everyone in the room except salem is under the impression that cinder is dead, and salem reveals that she isn't specifically by more or less going "i'm not going to help cinder no matter how much you want me to, EMERALD" apropos nothing, declares she's leaving cinder to "toil in her isolation until she redeems herself [by retrieving the lamp]," and then like a minute later gets cold-clocked by the revelation that oz has the lamp and IMMEDIATELY throws her plans out the window to drop everything and rush to atlas with overwhelming force. salem girl that is NOT leaving cinder to toil in isolation.)

so "it's important not to lose sight of what drives us: love, justice, reverence…" is, i think, an instance of salem describing her own motivations in a manner she knows will resonate with her agents enough that they'll think she's talking about them, first because it's a carrot ("see? i respect and value your desires") and second because it allows her to express what she's feeling without showing vulnerability, because no one realizes she's talking about herself. (hence: "what drives us.")

if you accept the premise that 1. salem's goal is to defeat the brothers once and for all, 2. she loves cinder (on this refer to the linked post), and 3. the things she says of humanity in her soliloquies are articulations of what she actually believes (thus: mankind is strong, wise, resourceful, passionate, ingenious, rose up from the ashes to defy fate and thrive in a harsh, unforgiving world, ozpin's hollow faith in mankind is his fatal weakness etc), then this statement reads intuitively as salem talking to herself because 6.4 is the point in her character arc when the tension between the things that drive her surfaces.

she wants justice (the brothers defeated, remnant freed from their judgment) but in pursuit of it she risks sacrificing cinder (whom she loves) and humanity (which she reveres); cinder's loss at haven and temporary exile/disgrace force salem to confront for the first time that her chosen course is self-destructive. she's reckoning with that through the end of v8 and will continue to do so in v10+ until she finds a way forward that resolves the internal conflict; "in pursuit of a new world, no cost is too great," but "it's important not to lose sight of what drives us."

her next statement, "but the moment you put your desires before my own, they will be lost to you; this isn't a threat. this is simply the truth. the path to your desires is only found through me. and so we must… press on," is imo:

salem talking to herself again (she has to stick to her own plan, too, no matter how much she wants to bring cinder home, because if she balks now she risks losing her only shot at getting all the relics and all of this will have been for nothing)

salem performing grandiosity to intimidate her agents and keep them focused on themselves (& thus blind to her feelings) while making the not unreasonable point that she expects them to stay on task instead of throwing plans out the window to chase immediate gratification (remember that salem is acting on the basis of what watts would've told her about the change in plans at haven, and he 1. genuinely believes cinder's reason for doing all that was to kill ruby against salem's direct orders and 2. made his intention to throw cinder under the bus if it went south absolutely clear; this is salem's commentary on that)

salem saying something ("the path to your desires is only found through me") that she does notbelieve (in v5, she tells cinder to be careful because "there is only so much i can do to aid you" and as her bearing in that scene is markedly less performative it's far more likely that this is the statement that cuts closer to the truth of how salem sees herself in relation to her agents) and upsetting herself in doing so (immediately, with her back turned to everyone else, she glances out the window and visibly sags before rallying to conclude "and so we must press on"); which i think is a clear tell that she does not enjoy the grandiose performance. it's an affectation she finds wearying.

so why does she do it? it's an effective way to intimidate and thus control people but i don't think that's why she does it, because it also makes her seem distant and untouchable and inhuman. which is to say it's camouflage. a defensive crouch. in 6.4 salem talks about her feelings but she wraps it in this obfuscating mask to protect herself from Being Vulnerable. the ozlem leitmotif plays faintly when she looks away and feels tired. she's terrified of being hurt like that again.

conveniently for her, i do think hazel would describe his motivation as love, and watts would say he's seeking justice (because that's what tearing atlas down is in his mind), and tyrian would certainly describe his devotion to salem as reverent. so this shell game lands with them to the extent that she needs it to in the moment.

one of the tells that salem is being performative in 6.4, incidentally, is what she says to hazel in 8.9 ("so, you've decided against vengeance for your sister, after all this time?"); she's clear-eyed about what actually drove him to work for her and understands that his betrayal means he's let go of vengeance as a goal altogether. like, salem isn't under any illusions about what kind of people she has working for her but she's demonstrably willing to validate and reinforce their rationalizations when it serves her purposes to do so. she's just not very subtle about it so it comes across as insincere, especially in 6.4 because she's primarily talking about and to herself while using them as a captive sounding board. as it were.

#oz lies to himself by projecting his internal struggles and feelings onto his enemies #salem can only tell the truth about what she feels by hiding behind mirrors in which her allies will see their own warped reflections #in this way they are opposites but also exactly the same #in conclusion: ozlem.

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bestworstcase · 19 days ago

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Hi! I’m the Ozma and forgiveness anon. My question was bc I seen people think that forgiveness towards Salem is bad bc she’s an abuser. I have seen people think that Ozma was forgiven too easily by the heroes but also that he wasn’t forgiven enough. You also see this mentality with Bee shippers thinking that Blake will hate Raven and overall not wanting Yang to forgive Raven. For me, I thought it would be a “we accept/forgive you but it doesn’t mean we like you” situation. You have to accept that people change and are trying to be decent people but not like want them in your life or even vicinity. It’s too black and white thinking for me you know. It’s different than wanting to hang out with them and being friends. Or would this be too harsh for RWBY’ Hopepunk themes.

ok 1. forgiving someone who has abused you is fine and having a story where a fictional character does that is also fine, and i think the fandom habit of slapping the "abuser" label on Every Fucking Villain is infantile and deeply annoying,

and 2. no she isn't.

or rather, to be more precise, salem abuses her associates. she's not an abuser in relation to the heroes; the word you're looking for here is enemy. salem abusing her associates has sweet fuck all to do with whether the heroic characters can or will forgive her war.

and--i've said it before and i'll say it again!--salem is not the one who's shown to act abusively in the lost fable. ozma is. lying and keeping his true intentions a secret from her for years to manipulate her into serving a tyrannical and genocidal god (who hates her personally) after she made her opposition to that god crystal clear was abusive. it's appalling that this even needs to be said.

what we see in the lost fable is salem giving ozma enthusiastic, unconditional support in what he told her he wanted until he dropped the bomb that he's secretly been working to bring back the gods who KILLED EVERYONE AND TORTURED HER FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS AND HE WANTS HER TO HELP HIM DO THIS whereupon salem, like, asks him to not do that. and then he just walks out. like! it is bonkers to read the lost fable as a story about salem abusing ozma.

but even if that weren't true, it would not?? be the heroes' place to forgive or not forgive her for that; it's between her and ozma, and ozma has [in songs] textually expressed a desire to make amends with her. it is, frankly, rude as fuck to make somebody else's reconciliation with a person who's hurt them in the past all about yourself. (relatedly, "blake will hate raven and not want yang to forgive her" is not going to happen lmao.)

and again. neo psychologically tortured ruby into attempting suicide, ruby chose to forgive her, and WBYJ followed her lead. without hesitation. would they have been warier if neo wanted to go back to remnant with them? yeah, probably. but on the other hand, these kids warmed up to emerald within like. literally an hour.

rwby declared its stance on forgiveness in completely unambiguous terms in v5

BLAKE: Let her come.

SABER: Huh!? You're just going to forgive her? After everything she did?!

BLAKE: I am.

SABER: [to Ghira] What does she think she's doing?

GHIRA: She's learned a lesson that evaded me until I was much older: that there is strength in forgiveness.

it's not subtle. whatsoever.

the thing is it's not so much "hopepunk" as it is pragmatism. ghira isn't just talking about inner strength, there, he's seeing that his daughter turned an enemy into a friend and in doing so inspired a whole lot of people to care about stopping adam. blake forgave ilia because she wanted to, but it was also strategically advantageous to do so. similarly, ren speaks up for emerald because he can see how scared she is, but oscar invites her to stick around because he knows what she's capable of and they need all the allies they can get.

it's enemy-of-my-enemy. as of v8, these kids have made a deliberate strategic choice to accept former enemies as allies.

that is why they're going to give salem a chance, fundamentally. because this story doesn't end with a ceasefire, it ends with taking down the brothers, and they've seen what salem can do--they know what she's capable of--and if they're going to beat the gods, they could really fucking use her help.

do they like her? do they trust her? are they particularly happy to have her around? no. but for remnant's sake, they'll grit their teeth and deal with it…

…and, like. once she becomes their ally, once she stops being this distant unknowable inhuman adversary and becomes a person they know who's working with them against a common enemy… like. look at how these kids react to her throughout the lost fable; they empathized with her. if they felt moved to sympathy in the lost fable i don't see why they wouldn't, in the event they joined forces with her to defeat the gods, warm up to her just as they did emerald.

this mindset:

You have to accept that people change and are trying to be decent people but not like want them in your life or even vicinity. It’s too black and white thinking for me you know. It’s different than wanting to hang out with them and being friends.

is directly at odds with the way rwby as a narrative handles forgiveness because you're thinking about it on a strictly individualistic level ("you hurt me so i don't want to be around you") whereas forgiveness in rwby arises from practical, strategic considerations as much if not more than personal feelings ("you hurt us before but you've stopped and you want to help us, things are so dire that we really could use your help, and every former enemy we can turn into our ally removes a piece from salem's side of the board. whatever personal anger or distress we feel about you being around can't get in the way of that").

#a protip here is to listen to the actual words the characters say and #pay attention to the way forgiveness is handled in the narrative #instead of projecting your personal feelings about forgiveness onto the characters or #listening to the freaks who think forgiveness is problematic lmao

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bestworstcase · 28 days ago

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Even after all this time I’m confused on the difference between Ozma and Ozpin. Can you clarify that bc you say there’s a difference but what is it exactly? It’s is psychological (DID, dissociation, denial, constructed identity, persona) or not?

unrelated.. do you think Ozma and Salem are going to be forgiven by the heroes or do they have to deal with everyone hating them for all time? Like Ozma was the architect in the fucked up world that is remnant and salem is obvious. Ruby is pretty kind and compassionate but I’m a not sure of the rest.

i mean. i don't think the distinction is particularly opaque in the text itself; as ozma himself puts it:

OZPIN: I'm… cursed. For thousands of years, I've walked the surface of Remnant, living, dying, and reincarnating in the body of a like-minded soul. The Professor Ozpin you all met was not my first form, and clearly wasn't my last. It's... an extraordinarily strenuous process on everyone involved.

JAUNE: So who… what are you?

OZPIN: I am the combination of countless men who've spent their lives trying to protect the people of Remnant. With every rebirth, my soul is eventually merged with another and I am changed, but my memories stay with me.

in his initial explanation, oz lays out that he's cursed with a form of immortality that entails reincarnating into the body of a like-minded soul, and makes a very clear distinction between himself and his hosts, including ozpin, whom he describes here as a temporary form he adopted, neither his first nor his last. ozpin, then, is the identity of the like-minded soul which ozma inhabited until he died and left ozpin behind.

then jaune begins to ask who oz really is, but catches himself and amends the question to WHAT are you, which oz answers by erasing the line he just drew and describing himself as merely an amalgamation of countless men. he backs off of describing himself as an individual separate from his hosts in response to jaune signaling disinterest in ozma's real identity. there may be a kernel of truth here in that ozma's sense of self has been so broken down by this ordeal that he feels like a stranger to himself, but he's also deliberately obfuscating.

and part of that is because ozma is the man who loves salem enough to damn the world for her and ozpin is, like every other like-minded soul who came before, her sworn enemy and dedicated to the protection of remnant above all (*defined here as obedience to light's mandate). ozpin is the mold to which light's curse forces ozma to conform.

to what extent ozma is conscious of being trapped in these molds is an open question--i think ozpin's behavior in v1-3 and especially unspoken things like the design of beacon tower and the fairytale anthology suggest some degree of self-awareness, even if repressed.

it's not like. complicated. the curse forces him to assume the identities of his hosts and suppress the parts of who he is that light disapproves (namely, loving salem). ozpin is the assumed identity, ozma the true self.

with regard to forgiveness: idk why ruby is the one of the main four you think of as being the most compassionate and likeliest to forgive (that would be. blake. forgiveness and compassion are a central theme in her character arc whereas ruby is kind but until her experience in the tree tended toward very black-and-white thinking. ruby's the one who would've cut emerald down without blinking if oscar hadn't stopped her. blake is the one who tried to get through to ilia after ilia sold her out to adam and while ilia actively participated in the attack on blake's family because blake knew ilia didn't feel good about these choices.) but the narrative is telegraphing forgiveness loud and clear lmao. like. ozma has already been forgiven. ruby (after her time in the tree gave her new perspective) forgave neo and the rest of her friends followed her lead. this is not a story that ends with ozma or salem Ostracized Forever lmao

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bestworstcase · 28 days ago

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any thoughts on Awake? I'm aware it wasn't written *for* RWBY, but it was still a specific choice to use That song for That moment, and Casey and Jeff have mentioned that they write lyrics separate to the show's writing, esp Casey mentioning in a recent video that some of the V9 lyrics were inspired by stuff like Deftones rather than 100% conscious symbolic choices, so imo with death of the author, Awake and the soundtrack proper are on equal ground in regards to potential interpretation

pushing pause real quick to say that "death of the author" doesn't mean what fandom thinks it means (it rejects a school of literary criticism wherein authorial intention and biography are applied as a textual lens with the goal of determining the true meaning of the text by finding the author within it, in favor of assessing the text alone.) i say this not because You Specifically are "doing it wrong" but because i want to note that your final clause isn't an "imo," that's just objectively factually what barthes argued in his essay. death of the author means that "word of god" is the text, and anything the author(s) have said about the text is irrelevant.

🫵 don't hedge when you're factually correct is what i'm saying

anyway!

(for what it is worth with regard to what jeff and casey have said about how the songs are written, i've said this before but i think the fandom interpretation of these remarks is probably off-base because the songs are so clearly grounded in character and theme that it beggars belief to think they're not taking the writing into account; i think it's a lot more likely that the songs are plugged into the intended subtext and narrative throughline than the literal written dialogue of any given scene and that (like any creative work) inspiration is being drawn from a broad range of other works because that is how. art-making works.

and i'm sure there's also a mutual exchange happening here between the songs and the text particularly with regard to imagery and symbolism; for example, is bmblb the way it is because it was deliberately foreshadowing a plan for yang and blake to have their first kiss in a garden of blooming flowers, or was the garden imagery something jeff chose to convey the romantic subtext which then guided the aesthetic and symbolic choices made in later volumes? the answer to that question doesn't particularly matter because either way, the end result is cohesive. This Is How Creative Collaboration Works.)

anyway.

awake is--i think--about unbearable conflict between outer form and inner self wherein maintaining the performance of the outer form is strangling the inner self and so one of them has to die; thence the sharp contrast and juxtaposition in "i'm ready to be set free/i'm sick as the dying/i feel alive/my self-portrait suicide/tonight is no time to die/now i'm awake." this is about killing the (false) self-portrait to awaken and liberate the (true) self.

waves hands. That Is What Midnight Is About. for cinder. specifically i will draw your attention to this part from the linked post:

in the glass unicorn, cinder has two parental figures—the madame and rhodes—who act in synchronicity to keep her in her place. shock collar, pat on the head. stick, carrot. she is tortured and made to refract this violence inwards, against herself, by turning the other cheek. within this narrative, the symbolic purpose of the grimm is to protect cinder and cinder herself is symbolically identified as grimm; just as black glass is her signature in in the present, the white glass of the hotel’s grimm figurines reflects cinder’s starkly white-and-grey uniform.

[...]

unicorns, classically, are said to be ferociously wild and dangerous beasts tamable only by the touch of a maiden. those who hunt unicorns, then, should solicit a maiden’s assistance. she goes out into the woods alone; the unicorn finds her and docilely, fearlessly lays its head upon her lap and goes to sleep; and thus the hunters take it. this manner of hunting unicorns is called entrapment, and among medieval and renaissance depictions of unicorns it is by far the most common motif.

[...]

the story of the glass unicorn is a story about a maiden-monster whom a huntsman instructs to tame herself lest she be hunted forever; an entrapment of the self; in the end she hears the baying of hunting dogs in the distance and awakens to the truth that she too will be killed, in spirit if not in body, if she obeys the huntsman. the unicorn is not to blame, and the maiden is right to protect it, and the unicorn is, has always been, grimm.

what's always interested me about 'awake' is the specific choice to use this verse to underscore cinder's fight with rhodes:

silence fuels the deadly cries ripped apart by knives in lovers' lies curse my innocence goodbye take my hand and take my life

with the lyrics coming in at the precise moment rhodes fires the first shot and the music cutting out after cinder runs him through such that it's utterly silent when his hand makes contact with her head. the placement is clearly very deliberate and i think the choice of these words is also very deliberate.

because rwby's narrative follows this recursive structure--the fractal repetitions of ozlem--and midnight is in many ways a recursion of the lost fable. i think This Specific part of awake plays here to draw that connection--in the context of rwby, the "silence" fueling these deadly conflicts in the present day is the silence between salem and ozma, who were ripped apart by the lies ozma told her. (and here, in midnight, that silence is echoed by the years of rhodes' choice to say nothing, enabling cinder's abuse rather than helping her, just as ozma chose silent complicity in light's genocidal design and ongoing torment of salem.)

and then there's "take my hand and take my life" which i think is an interesting lyric to be given such weight here because:

the acts of reaching out and taking or not taking someone's hand are the critical turning points in both the lost fable and midnight. (and if we take 'sacrifice' into account here then we have "take my hand and take my life" in juxtaposition with salem's "you can't have my life" addressed to ozma long after he refused to take her hand.) so this lyric carries a lot of weight.

if we interpret 'awake' as cinder's point of view then "take my life" is not about killing rhodes per se except insofar as it reflects the way cinder feels about touch--namely that it's coercive or an act of domination--and how this intersects with salem's implicit feeling, expressed in 'sacrifice,' of "you didn't take my hand so you can't have my life," and at the crossroads of these ideas we get salem offering her hand to cinder and cinder choosing to take it, which changes the balance in power between them in cinder's favor because what she's learnt from this experience is that salem is willing to answer defiance by changing how she treats cinder.

so what does "take my life" mean in this context? i think it speaks to cinder's capacity for intense loyalty--something we've not seen clearly yet (because cinder obfuscates her true motivation for going to atlas--she cares more about getting the lamp and the staff to redeem herself in salem's eyes than she does about ruby)--IF she feels it has been earned. salem loses that in v8 by receiving cinder so coldly and midnight is the first stroke of her attempt to win it back. she and cinder are very alike in this way: take my hand, treat me like an equal partner, and i'll give you my life. in salem we see this in the lost fable--she's ready to forgive the enormous betrayal of ozma's lies without hesitation if he'll take her hand and reject the divine mandate for her, and he won't do that, and that's what gets her to "you can't have my life/i'm not your sacrifice."

#it's juicy.#read together with sacrifice it lays some exciting groundwork for #''no cost is too great''#to come to a head with ''is salem willing to sacrifice cinder? (no)''

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