#I was having qrow emotions
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hellowhoisthere · 6 months ago
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BEACON ACADEMY: FIRST CLASS
this was alternatively titled "When Two Birds and Dragon Walk Into a Rose"
Once the last students arrived at the edge of Beacon Academy’s property, the headmaster began his speech.
“I would like to begin with expectations.This class will be the first class to be initiated under my tenure, and I intend to have you be the best huntress and huntsman Beacon has to offer Remnant. The first step will be a test. You will have until dusk to enter the forest, locate one relic from the abandoned temple in the northern edge of the forest and return here to present your findings. This will not only be a test of your aura, your skills, but also your intentions as future huntsman and huntresses.
The headmaster took one long look at the two students who arrived last as he spoke of the meaning of being huntsmen and huntresses. One was a boy with a fringe over one eye, dressed in what looked like a jacket with attached fingerless gloves on the sleeves. The other was a girl with bright red streaks throughout her wild raven hair. The headmaster closed his speech with, “Now, get off my cliff”.
Some students did not hesitate and jumped from the cliff, one female student did so with a flourish of her white cape as she bid adieu to the other students. Others used their weapons or dust to shoot off the cliff. While others, one student, had to be pushed off by the headmaster. However, that wasn’t Taiyang’s fault.
He had been searching his pockets for something to help him rappel from the cliff. He did not have any rope in his pockets, but he did find something as he was falling to the whitewater of the waterfall. The sail of the hang glider caught the air just in time and flew Taiyang over the Emerald Forest allowing him to take in the view. It was not that Taiyang was lost, but the view was spectacular the longer he was in the air. There were trees, and more trees, and one tree with what looked like a guy standing on the branches.
That guy must be lost, and it is Taiyang’s duty as future huntsman to help out the unfortunate.
Taiyang folded the glider to drop himself on the branches below the other student. Taiyang started to climb up, but was stopped,
“It’s not a good idea.” the guy shouted while keeping his eyes on the landscape.
“You don’t have to worry about me, partner. I can climb this tree blindfolded, and you had a good idea getting a bird’s eye view from there.” Taiyang said as he continued his climb up the tree.
“I’m looking for my sister. She is my only partner.”
Taiyang reached the branch the other was on. “I’m already here, so might as well help. I’m Tai by the way, so how do you know where your sister is?”
“Where there is a fire, there is my sister.”
“That should be easy to spot then.” Taiyang swept over the forest from this height; it still looked like a bunch of trees, and the guy stubbornly kept his gaze from meeting Tai’s. “Your name is, or I’m gonna give you a nickname.”
“Listen, I’d think twice before teaming up with me. I’m not a good person to have around.”
“Listen Moody Fringe, I only have to think once about it.”
Qrow finally looked at Tai, sorta. Qrow had rolled his eyes at the nickname, but Tai could tell he was suppressing a smile as he did. “My name is Qrow.”
Then for an indeterminable reason the branch beneath their feet gave way.
~
A few miles away, Raven heard the sound of a tree falling in the forest and knew it to be her brother. She started in a straight line towards the sound by cutting away at anything in front of her.
“Hey! Watch where you’re swinging that thing!” Raven has cut into some flowers, at least she thought so as only a few petals floated in the air.
Then, a girl was next to Raven. Raven was certain the girl had not been there seconds before, but what caught her off guard was something else about her.
“You have silver eyes.”
“Yeah, and you have red eyes.”
“I’ve never met someone with silver eyes before,” Raven lied.
“Likewise. I mean, I’ve seen myself in mirrors, but I’ve never seen red eyes.”
“You’ve never been to Anima, I guess. Red eyes were common in my village.”
“Haven’t, but maybe someday” Summer shrugged shyly.
Raven almost told her that no one could visit the village, that she and Qrow were the only survivors.
However, a beowulf howl on wind broke up the conversation. Raven turned away from the conversation and kept going forward, and the girl followed.
“We are done talking, so why are you following me?” Raven turned with her sword, and once again the girl dodged with the use of her semblance. Teleporting just before the strike came into touch with her.
“Why do you keep trying to kill me? We are going to the same place, so why not go together. Since that beowulf didn’t sound too far from here”
“I’m moving away from the temple. If you can make it through the forest by yourself, you would be going that way.” Raven pointed in the opposite direction that she could feel Qrow’s aura now.
“Nice try, but I know the relics are east of here. Maybe I’m worried about you making it through the forest?”
“I’m the strongest one here, and I would take the advantage if I were you.”
“It isn’t a competition, and how sure are you about the strongest hmm?”
“Everything is a competition. To find who is worthy, who is strongest, and only the winners stay alive. That is why I need to find Qrow, because we are going to win this together. Take the head start, Petals.”
Raven drew her sword up faster than before. Bring the tip just below the girl's chin, and the girl didn’t flinch.
“Wow, Qrow? Is your name Lark then, because my name is Summer Rose not Petals. ”
“My name is Raven.”
Summer smiled like she won something, and used her semblance to dance around Raven to reappear behind her. “Then we better get going Raven if we are going to beat the grimm to the finish line.”
Raven had a feeling she would find Qrow fighting with a pack of beowulfs, but she was not expecting for him to have such bad luck as to be in the center of a horde.
“That is bad luck, but I think the four of us can handle it.” Summer said bring her weapon out from under her cape. It looked like a hunting rifle with an ax blade .
“The two of us can handle it. Stay here.” Raven flew towards the eye in the center of the horde where Qrow was sundering grimm with his sword.
“Get the hell outta here” Qrow growled once she was back to back with Qrow.
“That’s the welcome I get for coming to save your skin?”
“He was talking to me,” Another person appeared from the ashes of grimm. Knuckles studded with dust he was punching grimm outright. “You must be Raven. You can call me Tai. I’m your brother's new best friend.” Tai punched another grimm in flames with fire dust. Then, Tai said to Qrow, “I told you I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Raven smelled fresh flowers, because she actually heard Summer, and she heard her before she saw appear. “I can’t believe you just tried to ditch me.” She said as she cleaved a beowulf as soon as she was a solid person.
“It’s a real problem with them I’m guessing.” Tai said. “But now this is going to be a party.”
“A short lived one, if you two don’t focus.” The smile Qrow had when he saw Raven was back in a frown at the situation. This was his fault, and he knew it.
“We need to kill the alpha beowulf, and make a run for relics. We don’t have the time to take on this horde.” Summer chopped a beowulf.
“Sounds like a plan, but which one is the leader?”
‘The one with the loudest howl” Raven and Qrow said together as the howl rang out above the horde of growls and baying.
“That one! Help me get a clear shot.”
Summer reverted her ax into a hunting rifle. Raven switched the blade of her sword with one for a blade of wind dust that cleared a direct path to alpha beowulf with one heavy swing. Qrow took to extending the path Raven made for their getaway run and Tai kept the rear to keep any grimm from chasing them through the forest.
The four of them ran until they came to the end of the path to the temple.
Raven struggled to save face while the others freely caught their breath.
“See like I said the four of us could handle it.”
“I don’t consider running from grimm handling it.”
“No one died, so I consider it handled”
“Let’s just pick a relic and get back to school before sunset.” Qrow picking up one of the crystal figurines at random.
“There are only four left, so it looks like we are in last place.” Tai said, picking up a figurine.
“It's ruby red. My lucky color.” Summer Rose said with a smile at Raven.
“The luck here is that this wasn’t a competition.” Raven didn’t smile back, but repetition of Summer’s words didn’t go unnoticed by her.
~
At the cliffs the group was at a standstill as getting to the top of the sheer cliff face was going to present a problem.
“I can check my pockets for a hot air balloon,” Tai said, considering the cliff face.
“The only place with hot air is your head.” Qrow rolled his eyes at him.
“You have green dust, right?” Summer asked Raven.
“Even if I had enough, it's going to be a long climb.”
“I thought the strongest of us would have no problem with it,” Summer teased, “We will only need to get closer, then I should be able to take us up one by one from that ledge.”
It was a good plan, but Qrow had the bad habit of messing up even a good plan.
The first thing to go wrong was Qrow losing his relic to the abyss as he climbed to the ledge. The second wasn’t his fault, but he blamed himself for it anyways.
“How does your semblance work?” Qrow asked as Summer held out her hand to him.
“I don’t really know, but it will help if you close your eyes and not think about anything.”
“That shouldn't be a problem for him.” Raven snorted.
“It will be even less of a problem with her.” Qrow retorted. Raven glared in response, and Qrow would have stuck his tongue out at her if she hadn't disappeared in the next second.
It wasn’t Raven that left though, it was Qrow. Now standing next to the Headmaster without a relic.
“Oh what? No way? Must have lost it in the teleport.” Qrow lied.
The headmaster only hummed in response. Qrow didn’t know how to understand that, so he looked over the edge for his sister.
Below Tai and Raven were waiting for Summer to renew her energy as teleporting herself was no sweat on her aura, but teleportation with another person took more.
Then, a wild updraft came, nearly blowing them off the cliff, or maybe it did because Qrow lost sight of the three.
Next to Qrow though appeared a pile of petals. It was worse than the blossom season back home, but out though petals appeared everyone standing safe and sound.
Summer Rose was bright as she handed the headmaster her relic. It was a mission well done as no was hurt, and everyone brought back what they needed.
Then, the world went dim. As soon as Summer released the relic she fell over, and so did Raven and Taiyang.
~
“Hmmmm,” The headmaster said, looking at three unconscious students before pulling out his radio. “Please bring a bus to the orientation site. Also, let my secretary know I thought of new rules for the orientation next year.”
When the world came back into color it was white. Actually off-white, or more like a very very pale green. Summer could faintly hear the muffled cheering from somewhere.
“It is the orientation ceremony, it sounds like the whole school is there.”
“I think passing out during the first exam means we didn’t make it.”
Raven and Tai were in cots on either side of her, and Summer came to with her last memory.
“I’m sorry, I took too much on, and I brought you down with me.”
“Are you hungry? Food always helps me feel better when my aura gets depleted.” Taiyang’s voice was so soft with concern as he held a footlong sub sandwich to Summer.
Summer was so hungry, but-
“Where did you get that?” Raven asked for both of them.
���It’s my semblance. I can basically fit anything into a box, so it came from my pocket. My semblance keeps things preserved as the day I stored it. Want some?”
“Sounds like a fair enough explanation to me. You don’t have to ask me thrice.” Summer took half of the offered sandwich.
“I can’t believe you’re eating that” Raven said. Eventhough she had no place to judge with the food she had to eat when there was nothing else.
“Don’t have the strongest stomach?” Summer said to her, and then to Tai, “Do you have any cookies? I think if I’m about to be kicked out of school before the first day, a cookie will make it all better.”
Tai nodded with understanding as he checked every pocket of his attire which consisted of cargo pants and fishing vest.
~
Meanwhile in the auditorium Qrow watched as everyone was either called to join a team or cheered to welcome the new students.
Qrow didn’t cheer, he didn’t move at all for the entirety of the ceremony.Qrow was too busy falling into despair as each student was called. He had hoped that he would finally find a place in the world. A place to belong, be accepted, just for a little while.
Qrow didn’t wipe his tears, because he wasn’t crying in the vacant auditorium after it was clear that he failed acceptance to Beacon Academy. He would get up, find Raven, and leave this place behind him… as soon as he could get up.
However, Qrow was found first by Headmaster Ozpin.
“We’ll be leaving soon enough, can’t even stay the night?” Qrow cleared his throat.
“It's a pity as I had high hopes for you and your team.”
“My team?”
“You may not be the leader, but it will be your team nonetheless. If you would please follow me, I’ll introduce you to-”
The headmaster fell over as Qrow followed him.
“That is an interesting semblance you have.” The headmaster said, straightening himself and continued walking.
“Are you blaming me for you falling over?” Qrow blamed himself too.
“You will be able to learn to trigger the probability field, but I suspect your semblance is passive to a degree.”
“I got shit luck that is all.” Qrow grumbled.
“I may not have the semblance of divination, but I do have a hunch. Do you not see the effect you have on your surroundings, the people, or grimm around you.”
Qrow stalled as his whole life realigned itself with this information. There was no hope for Qrow after all.
“I’m a bad luck charm to my very soul?”
“Not the way I would define it, but a stroke of good luck may be just beginning for you.”
The headmaster said as he opened the infirmity to find three students on one cot with a stack of cookies between their teeth for each of them.
Headmaster Opzin could not laugh now matter how much Ozpin wanted too, so he hummed a non-response. As he watched Summer Rose swallow the cookies whole, he knew he made the right choice. He has high hopes for these huntsmen.
Ozpin announced the team in a similar introduction from the orientation ceremony. “You will be Team STRQ (stark). Led by Summer Rose. I look forward to seeing you all in class tomorrow.”
Headmaster Opzin exited stage left after his announcement that shook Summer’s world entirely. She arrived at Beacon yesterday, with only the hope of passing orientation, had lost that hope in a low aura incident, and now was team leader.
Taiyang was happy to be at Beacon Academy of course, but had resigned himself to be unlicensed huntsman, or maybe take up teaching just one cookie stack ago. Now he broke the silence of his teammates, “This calls for cake! Give me a second. I have one in case of celebration.”
~
The Brawnwen siblings did not process their feelings from the day until they were alone with each other. Once on the roof of their new dorm they passed a flask between them. Together they allowed the reality of today’s events to set in as they watched the stars over Beacon’s campus and Vale beyond that.
Raven was tasked with learning how to be a huntress, so she could defeat other huntsmen. After two near failures in one day, she doubted her ability to make the next four years. Especially, with the teammates she had been given.
“Thinking about how you’re on a team with your favorite fairytale?” Qrow said, because growing up the only survivors and living in the tribe together gave Qrow the talent to read her mind.
“At least we won’t have to worry about them figuring us out.”
“Didn’t answer my question. Do you remember the guy from Kutanashi with the silver eyes?
Raven would never forget her first solo mission for the tribe. “He was strong, but no match for us.” Raven had been amazed by meeting a true silver eyed warrior, he had fought like one too, but she didn’t allow it to deter her from her mission. In the same way she wouldn’t let Summer Rose distract her now.
“Do you ever wonder who paid us to cut his eyes out?”
“Not our place.” Raven said automatically, but one day she would be one to have knowledge in the tribe. One day four years from now.
“Think about it, though. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn’t be here. After that the tribe said the only ones that could stop us are the huntsmen, so now we are here learning to be huntsmen. Because whoever that was, we get to do this normal thing.”
Everyday for the next four years Qrow wouldn’t need to prove his strength to be accepted, be fearful of falling behind, or forced to raid to survive. He would have friends, his sister, and a chance at a new life for himself.
Maybe the headmaster was right. This was only the beginning of Qrow’s good luck.
Raven and Qrow both a final swig of the flask to the same pledge,
“Until graduation.”
~~~~
@shiny-good-rock
@remnants-of-rwby-exchange
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marshmelonfluff · 2 years ago
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also i have doubts that they would have tai feature heavily in a volume again but i really want him to meet up with the gang in vauco bc i want ruby to get a hug from her dad. please. just let this girl get a good cry in about everything she's been through and have her dad hug her afterwards
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bestworstcase · 2 years ago
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Okay so, one thing I will say about the possibility of Summer willingly working for Salem: I hope they don't just do it to make Raven look like a better mother than she actually is.
I have long been of the opinion that Yang disowning Raven and cutting her out of her life entirely will be CRITICAL to her developing into a healthy adult. Ever since we learned about Raven, her arc has been building up to the realization and acceptance of the fact that Summer Rose was her real mother all along, and that she shouldn't waste her life chasing the toxic relationship Raven offered.
Point is, if Summer has thrown her lot in with Salem, it needs to have been out of love for her daughters, an impulsive and foolish decision made to keep her babies safe.
The best part of the juxtaposition of Summer and Raven is how it turns the age-old "wicked stepmother" trope on its head by having the stepmother be loving and kind while the biological mother is cold and heartless.
(That, and Raven's arc concluding with her realizing that she can't use her Semblance anymore because she burned all her bridges and nobody wants her in their lives anymore, and being forced to live with that knowledge, would be the perfect comeuppance for how willing she's been to sacrifice all her loved ones, up to and including her own daughter, just to save herself. Especially if she's given multiple chances to redeem herself and screws up every chance until everyone's just too sick of her nonsense to give her a twenty-third chance she doesn't deserve.)
hm
so
as far as yang’s relationship to raven goes, i don’t get the impression that rwby as a narrative has any interest in resuscitating raven’s motherhood—i mean, she flat out admits that she wasn’t kind to yang when they met and later whispers “i’m sorry” right before taking off again, lmfao. but equally i’m not sure i would agree that complete estrangement is really the healthiest goal for yang; it’s a pendulum swing to the opposite side of the spectrum from where she started and i think restricts her ability to meaningfully process the complicated feelings she has about her mother. there is a very wide band of grey area between emotional dependency on a bad or absent parent and full no-contact estrangement and—speaking here from the perspective of being inside that middle zone—i think partial estrangement is usually the better option, except when the parent is actively and viciously abusive to the point that no form of contact is safe.
with a parent like raven—who is absent and unreliable, not abusive—there can a lot of emotional value in just accepting the relationship as a distant one with minimal contact. and with yang being someone whose biggest emotional problem is bottling up things that hurt her, i think full estrangement stands to harm more than it helps because it puts a solid barrier in front of her feelings toward her mother. even if in practice she never sees raven, leaving herself the option to do so will make it easier to air those feelings out.
i also do not think that anything raven has done demands narrative retribution versus the compassionate framing given to, say, cinder fall or salem; she’s a bandit who abandoned her kid and her cause because ozpin molded her into his spy while she was a teenager or in her early twenties and then she couldn’t cope with the horrors she discovered or the personal threats salem is implied to have made to her. as reasons for being a deadbeat mom go that is a… fairly understandable one, and i do not think there is anything uniquely or egregiously more awful about walking out on your family than other kinds of wrongdoing—and certainly in terms of material harm it isn’t even close to the worse thing raven “some people?? pillage defenseless villages and leave the survivors to the grimm?? to cope??” branwen has ever done in her life.
anyway to the actual point:
summer rose working for salem stands to be compelling in a lot of ways, but the one that appeals most to me is a scenario where she didn’t choose it for her daughters. what have we been told about summer? she was the best of the best. the living ideal of what a huntress should be and an amazing mom—and then she took off without telling anybody where she was going to confront salem by herself, which, reading between the lines? summer rose got put on a pedestal and subjected to such intense pressure that she burned out and attempted suicide by pointless heroic sacrifice—either because she actively wanted to die or because she believed she had a responsibility to throw her life away for the cause.
and then salem offered her a way out.
now—from salem’s insistence that ruby be kept alive, and from her reaction to yang identifying herself as summer’s other daughter—i think it’s fairly clear that, whatever the exact circumstances are, there IS a standing agreement that salem will avoid harming them to the extent possible. but my personal hope is that the decision to join salem was one summer made for herself, to save herself from being the Sacrificial Hero, because she could not live like that any longer. this would be congruent with rwby’s thematic stance on heroic selflessness and self-sacrifice as a corruptive force and introduce layers of emotional messiness that appeal to me, in that summer can love her daughters with everything she has and yet leave them behind because she herself has been driven to an emotional brink where if she doesn’t escape by joining salem she is going to get herself killed on purpose, and the betrayal experienced by her now grown-up children when they learn this is mediated by their own experience of the same pressures that pushed her to that point (and presumably by the revelation of salem’s actual plan being less “nihilistically torch the world” and more “lure the gods back to defeat them once and for all so that this can finally end”).
insofar as there is a comparison to draw between raven’s abandonment and summer’s it’s one that removes summer from her supermom pedestal and renders her in a more flawed—and thus more human—light. not the good mom who died and the bad mom who left but two mothers who chose to leave their children for similar reasons and will likely differ in how they handle the inevitable reunion. (if “red like roses pt ii” is anything to judge by, summer is desperate to give her daughters the kind of explanation and closure yang wanted and didn’t get from raven, and has little if any desire to make excuses. that’s where the true difference lies.)
and i think rwby is doing something more interesting here than simply flipping the wicked stepmother trope upside-down. why is the stepmother wicked? why is the mother good? how do cultural narratives about motherhood create these categories? summer rose is the good stepmother, but she is also the absent mother; she left ruby around the same age that raven left yang, but yang’s memories of summer as her own mother and the presumption of summer’s death give ruby a fundamentally different experience of not having a mother. and likewise a significant amount of yang’s abandonment trauma has less to do with raven than it does her father’s secrecy and refusal to talk to her about it, which allowed the pain and confusion to fester. it’s all wrapped up in the storytelling themes and the reality is that mothers are just people who cannot be neatly reduced to fit inside fairytale archetypes.
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jinxedcrow · 1 year ago
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guess who finally watched v9
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tifaisms · 11 months ago
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RWBY and Trauma
So, i want to talk a little bit about RWBY. Specifically, with regards to its thematic storytelling. I think I made a post about this a few days ago but im gonna make a longer one here.
RWBY tackles a lot of themes in its storytelling. Death, grief, fear, trust, etc. to name a few.
One of the bigger themes is "keep moving forward", which was also Monty's motto. It is exemplified through the characters, both heroes and villains, and how they handle trauma and suffering.
The villains have pretty much all suffered. Salem, Cinder, Hazel, Mercury, Emerald, Roman, Neo, even Watts, all suffered. They experienced trauma, and hardship, and it shaped them.
The big difference between them and team RWBY is that they cannot move forward. Where team RWBY learn to grow and change. Salem couldn't accept loss, and grief, and instead turned those emotions to anger, same with Hazel, Adam, Neo, they all refused to move beyond their trauma. Yang put it pretty well in V8 - all this death and destruction because something bad happened to you once upon a time?
Trauma is inevitable. But the difference between the heroes and the villains is how their trauma impacts them going forward. And not just in a "the villains react negatively and the heroes don't" because Ruby reacted poorly, as did Blake, and Weiss in the early volumes. Qrow drinks to deal with it, and Ozpin let the betrayal he experienced define him.
The difference here is that the heroes try to grow and stop making their suffering everyone else's problem. You cannot use your trauma to justify lashing out at the world and other people. I think Kratos in God of War put it quite well - "Do not be sorry. Be better." You can't hurt people because you are traumatised, because all that does is traumatise everyone else. It isn't a justification for lashing out. Salem was traumatised, and she murdered so many people, and traumatised a bunch of other people, who will only continue that cycle.
It is worth noting that some of the antagonists do grow and change and become better. Ilia, Emerald, Hazel, and Neo are the big examples. They were all hurt by the world, and they turned to anger and violence. But Ilia is convinced by Blake that it isn't what she wants, and Blake is right. So Ilia turns away from that path. Hazel and Emerald both change and grow, and whilst Hazel gets the noble sacrifice, Emerald has to make amends for hurting people by being and doing better, and trying to make a positive impact on the world. And Neo had an entire arc culminating in her seeking revenge, and getting it, and realising that it was a hollow victory that left her with nothing but directionless grief and anger. When she had nothing to pursue, she was forced to confront the fact that she was just running from her actual feelings and lashing out. In the end, she chooses to go to the tree willingly, which is essentially willingly giving in to change and growth, because that's what the tree does.
The central conflict of the show is essentially that everyone has suffered, and experienced trauma. But it is the hero's ability and desire to grow beyond it and be better, so that they stop hurting the people around them, that sets them apart from the villains, who refuse to keep moving forward and instead just let their suffering infect everyone else, perpetuating an endless cycle of violence and conflict.
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serabellyms · 3 months ago
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Salem could sense the dread before Glynda even entered the room. Some might’ve called it a perk to have such foresight; Salem would argue it was only a perk if there was an “off” switch—and there was none.
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“What?” The question was rhetorical; how could she be dead? She wasn’t supposed to leave until later in the week, when the semester was over. Salem herself was supposed to have gone with; the danger level warranted it. Had Summer gone on her own? Oh, no—she didn’t even want to imagine the horrors that might have been encountered by her. There was a reason she'd told Summer not to go; it was too dangerous, even for her.
“I didn’t send her anywhere, Glyn. She and I were supposed to leave later this week, after the graduation ceremony.” Why in the world would Summer have gone? And on her own, no less? The danger had been far too high for anyone to go alone, even Summer. There was a reason Salem was going to go with her; while Summer’s talent could be used to fend off hordes of Ozma’s minions, there was no replacement for Salem’s physical immortality. Summer knew that. She knew the reason Salem insisted on her own involvement.
Because as much as she enlisted their help, she was determined to protect them, too.
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"This... isn't good." It wasn't good on many levels. Ruby and Yang, now without a mother, Yang for the second time... and Taiyang, now having lost another person he'd given a part of himself too. Salem knew that pain all too well; she was far too familiar with the feeling, given the way Ozma had tore her asunder with his betrayal. "I'll be in the garden; he can come speak with me there." That way, she wouldn't find herself overwhelmed by his emotions. She could at least draw strength from the plants and life in there; perhaps that would give her enough to subtly calm him enough for them to have a conversation.
[ @serabellyms | salem // glynda ]
The elevator to the top of Beacon Tower had always taken longer than Glynda liked, but she found herself appreciating it now. One hand pressed flat to the cool metal paneling, she watched the floor number tick higher and tried to impose some order upon her thoughts. No small task. They kept flying away from her, scattered like leaves driven by the wind.
Summer’s gone. Why Taiyang had chosen to call her first, Glynda didn’t know—perhaps grief had stricken every practical consideration from his mind, and he’d turned to her as a friend more than colleague—but she was glad. Better for Salem to hear it from someone calm, first.
The elevator glided to a halt, and Glynda released her breath sharply. Calm wasn’t the right word for what she felt as she stepped into the headmistress’s office; she didn’t feel much of anything at all, as though every emotion had been blasted out of her and left only a charred suggestion of feeling behind. She supposed she might call it shock.
“Professor Witchhazel,” she said, with a little too much formality. Stilted. Clearing her throat, she moved to stand at a more comfortable distance from the desk. “I–”
The words have bad news dried up, inadequate somehow. Glynda was no stranger to death. Gods knew Salem wasn’t either. Familiarity did little to soften the blow, or ease the burden of sharing it.
Better to just say it. Salem didn’t need to be told that Glynda had come to deliver bad news: a single glance would have sufficed even if the lateness of the hour and the unannounced intrusion had somehow escaped her notice. Glynda took a deep breath as she lifted her head to look the headmistress in the eye.
“Summer Rose is dead,” she said, stripped of inflection. “I’m not sure of the details: Taiyang called about ten minutes ago, and all he could tell me was that Raven’s bond to her has been severed. He’s on his way here from Patch now.” Her gaze flickered down. “I gather he wants to know where you sent her. He was… very nearly hysterical over scroll; I thought it best to inform you before he arrives.”
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tumblezwei · 28 days ago
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Ruby Day Headcanon: The Red Trailer and Volume 4 character trailer are depictions of Ruby's coping mechanism when dealing with too much emotional turmoil. She sneaks out, finds the heaviest concentration of local Grimm, and goes human blender on them until she's feeling better.
EXACTLYYYYYYYYY
For years and years I've used that trailer as a central point for my personal interpretation of Ruby's character and my god have I had to fight for it.
Ruby is someone who's used to dealing with her inner turmoil and emotional problems by herself. And not in a way where she thinks that like, Tai or Yang or Qrow wouldn't sympathize or try to help, but that they all have their own problems that they deal with much more outwardly. None of them are particularly reserved about their own coping mechanisms, and I think in the middle of it all Ruby just shrunk in on herself. All her frustration and anger would do is heap on another problem for her sister to shoulder, or another reason for Tai to shut himself away, so better to clamp those down and deal with them when you know no one else is watching.
And what you get in the end is volume 9.
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kitty8804 · 1 month ago
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Mini rant here:
I hate when people watch RWBY and go “There’s no difference between magic, dust and semblances! This show is so stupid!” Of course it all looks like magic to us! We can’t do any of the stuff that dust and semblances do in our world! Magic in the world of RWBY is what is considered impossible or otherworldly, just like us! But semblances and dust are a part of everyday life in RWBY. That’s why it’s not magic. What makes magic in RWBY magic is that it doesn’t follow the rules of that world.
A semblance is basically an individual superpower that manifests through a person’s aura. A person can only have one superpower. Semblances may “evolve” and allow a user to do more things but it is still the same power at its core. For example Ren’s semblance is tranquillity. Originally it allowed him to mask negative emotions of himself and/or others. In volume 8 it evolved so that Ren can also see emotions. While he did gain a new ability his semblance is still one based on emotions at its core. He’s not gonna one day be able to absorb lightning like Nora can. A semblance can’t be used if a person’s aura breaks. Also from my understanding a semblance can’t cause people to have any physical mutations. For example no one is going to have a semblance that makes them shapeshift. (People like Neo don’t shapeshift. They make illusions.)
Dust is basically an energy source that can allow people to control different elements. This can’t be done without dust. People can have elemental semblances similar to dust, but they can only manipulate that one element. For example Neptune’s semblance allows him to control water, but if he wants to control another element, let’s say fire, then he needs to use dust.
Magic throws all of these rules out of the window, which is why people that use it are so powerful. They don’t have the limits that most people in RWBY have. The maidens can manipulate whatever element they want without dust in addition to their semblance. That’s multiple superpowers. Also, as seen through Amber’s fight against Emerald and Mercury, a maiden can still use their power if their aura breaks. The reason Qrow and Raven turning into birds is magic is because as mentioned earlier a semblance can’t cause people to go beyond normal human/faunus biology. That’s why Weiss and Yang were so shocked when Raven turned into a bird in front of them. People are not supposed to be able to do that!
Magic in RWBY is different because it goes beyond the rules of the world that the SHOW takes place in, not our own. Semblances and dust follow those rules so they aren’t magic.
Now I’m not saying you can’t be confused. But I hate it when people don’t take the time to understand something and automatically call the show terrible because of it.
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rwby-encrusted-blog · 11 months ago
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Weiss: Winter, There is something I must ask you. Privately if possible.
Winter: We are alone, and in private. What do you need to know?
Weiss: How do you handle everyone being so attractive?
Winter: Explain?
Weiss: Ruby is my partner, and one of the first people to give me a chance despite how rude I was to her and She's both badass and adorable, Blake is a good listener and has helped me unlearn my subconscious prejudices, Yang is incredibly warm and kind, she smells like Ginger, and spices.
Weiss: Then There's JNR - Jaune was interested in me back at Beacon, but I shut him down. Since then we've grown and He's strong, kind, and is willing to give me space away from him should I request it. He's not the buffoon tripping through the halls anymore. Nora is almost always energetic and down for whatever. In moments of calm, she's very soft. Pyrrha is Pyrrha. I don't think I need to gush about her, but it's just so easy- She's so kind and so sound of mind - Gods. Ren is easy to be open with, no matter the subject because his semblance lets him know what you're feeling.'Ren is easy to be open with, no matter the subject because his semblance lets him know what you're feeling.
Weiss: Then there's Emerald, and being able to snark back and forth with her - It's fun, and she helps with pranks on others! But when it's time to be clear, she's willing to stop the jokes.
Weiss: And Penny. She's just so ... Direct, and kind, and sweet, and when she doesn't understand something she just looks so adorable-
Weiss: GGRR! It's - I - And they're all so gods Damn attractive! Whether it's bulk and brawn, or litheness, or cuteness and innocence - FUCK! I- You- Do you understand?
Winter: *Placing a hand on Weiss shoulder* Weiss I understand Completely.
Winter: Miss Hill, Robyn - the Happy Huntresses, the Ace-Ops, even Qrow has grown on me. I know exactly what you're going through.
Weiss: So ... What do we do about it.
Winter: Suffer.
Weiss: ... What?
Winter: Well - It's not as if we can tell everyone these things! I'm grateful that you trust me enough to confide this in me, Weiss! But if anyone else finds out, someone else might find out- Worst of all any of them.
Weiss: Why can't we tell any of them!
Winter: I've never been in a relationship, least of all one with so many people - How do i tell them - you know -
Weiss: You want to be the group Bicycle?
Winter: I wouldn't have put it as crudely, but yes. That is accurate.
Weiss: So we just sit on our emotions like we always have?
Winter: Yes.
Weiss: Well. Fuck.
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aspoonofsugar · 8 months ago
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RWBY Volume 9 Epilogue: The Five Stages of Grief Again
As @greenteaandtattoos's friend noticed, volume 9 epilogue has its five narrators embody the five stages of grief:
Negation - refusal to aknowledge the truth, while clinging to a preferable reality.
Anger - lashing out on others in an attempt to channel one's pain and frustration.
Bargaining - being ready to negotiate, to give something in order to avoid loss. When death already happened, it is about exploring what ifs scenarios.
Depression - sadness, desperation and refusal to engage with others. It often comes with low energy.
Acceptance - coming to terms with one's loss and finding a new stability.
This isn't surprising, as volume 9 as a whole uses this motif. In particular, Ruby herself goes through the 5 stages twice. First to grieve over Penny and then to face her emotions towards Summer. Finally, RWBYJN reach acceptance (the main theme). Acceptance of death, loss, pain, change and of themselves. All in all, RWBYJ's journey in the Ever after is a metaphor for the process of grieving. Well, the epilogue shows us how the other characters have been dealing with this emotion.
So, here comes NORWQ as the 5 stages of grief:
Nora = anger: tbf she is the most difficult to pintpoint, as she fits the pattern less than others. Still, her section focuses on how Vacuans and Atlesians are both reacting with anger at the new status quo. Vacuans are frustrated that Atlas brought its own problems into their Kingdom. Atlesians are furious nobody came to help them. Nora herself enters into a short confrontation with two angry Vacuans and clearly projects her own past into the conflict. What's wrong with orphans? What's wrong with her?
Oscar = negation: our Little Prince is the only one that believes Ruby and the others might be alive. He even looks for an answers into books (mirroring how RWBYJ is grieving through a fairy tale). On a personal level, he and Ozpin are both fighting the merge, so they are negating a transformation, which is bound to happen.
Ren = bargaining: Lotus boy is trying to replace Jaune as the glue who keeps the team together. He is conscious of everyone's feelings and problems, but is not sure on how to handle them. Moreover, his section deals with how Salem's faction goes through a bargain. Sure, it lost some people in Atlas, but Tyrian and Mercury free the Crown, so that new forces are ready to fight for the Evil Witch of the West.
Winter = depression: our Winter Maiden is dealing very very badly with Penny and Weiss's lost. She blames herself for everything and is far away from accepting Penny's final teaching: "I won't be gone, I will be a part of you". Winter is struggling to honor both Penny and Weiss's legacy. If anything, she feels she isn't the right person to do so. Her section is also the most somber on a macrochosm level. As a matter of fact through her we discover Vale was destroyed by Salem and we see how the refugees are not handling their new situation well.
Qrow = acceptance: Qrow is Winter's opposite, as he is the closest to find acceptance. On a personal level, he shows he has integrated with Clover. He has embraced his friend's optimism and has learnt to love himself through him. This is why his semblance evolved and he is now able to bring both good and bad luck. This new found balance lets him find hope even in the bad situation the world is in. He sees how people are showing kindness and realizes Ruby's message is the first step into uniting Remnant.
Of course, our five narrators all foil each other in different ways. I have discussed Qrow and Winter here, so let's see what to say about Nora, Ren and Oscar.
RENORA = LONELY TOGETHER
Nora and Ren are going through an inversion of their dynamic. Nora is now repressing her feelings and avoiding Ren's attentions and offers of support. Ren instead is grieving openly and is trying to be open with his feelings.
Nora isn't even able to speak directly with the person she lost, but narrates talking to no-one in particular. She mostly speaks about the macrochosm and uses plural forms. "We buried our friends", "I think everyone lost someone that day", "For us it was a relief, but for the Vacuans", ""What if we can't go on, what if we are too scarred?". She is in a sense the embodyment of everyone's grief. At the same time, she is so disconnected from her own trauma, that she can only read it while projecting it on the world:
Ren: Nora, she is putting the world on her shoulders.
Ren instead is the one more focused on the feelings of the people around him. Through his point of view, we discover how the other main characters are doing. We realize Nora is too focused on the macrochosm, while Oscar has trouble with the microchosm (he just isn't himself). Ren is trying to balance out the two dimensions. He is grieving for Jaune and is inheriting his legacy. At the same time, he understands that just like his friends are fighting to overcome anger and pain, so is the world. By doing this, he once again draws a parallel between Nora and the World:
Tumblr media Tumblr media
I think the epilogue of volume 9 (or the prologue of volume 10?) sets up Nora as a strong symbolic character in Vacuo. She is Vacuo itself, struggling with pain, grief and anger. She is Atlesian orphans, nameless children too scarred to go on. Ren's role will probably be to step in and remind her how beautiful she is.
OSCAR = STAGNATION
Oscar's conflict permeates both the microchom and the macrochosm. It is synthesized by this phrase:
Oscar: "You always believed in the best. You saw people for who they really were. Some of us don't know anymore."
Here, Oscar is speaking both:
Of himself, who is slowly and painfully merging with Ozpin
Of the world, which finds itself in "uncharted territory"
Oscar is uncertain. Of who he is. Of what to do. So, he looks up to Ruby, who was always certain and could "see the world through better eyes".
At the same time, Oscar's situation strongly suggests he is stagnating. He refuses to accept RWBYJ's death (he is right, but it isn't a healthy reaction). He fights the merge unsuccessfully. He can neither go back to the person he was before nor can he progress towards a better version of himself. Basically, just as Ruby is finding the path back to herself in the Ever After, Oscar is losing himself in Vacuo. This is (just like in Renora's case) an inversion to their previous dynamic. Back in Atlas, Oscar was the one progressing, whereas Ruby was stagnating. Right now, they start their stories in Vacuo in an inversed situation.
OTHER POSSIBLE FOILINGS
Of course, the epilogue/prologue offers several possible foilings that could be explored in volume 10. Here are some (but they aren't all).
Ren and Winter are both talking to the "sibling" they entered a conflict with in volume 8. Both grew distant from Jaune and Weiss, only to reconcile later on. Now, they realize how much Jaune and Weiss did to keep their respective families together. They celebrate their legacies and wonder if they might be able to live up to it. This might also foreshadow some foiling of Jaune and Weiss themselves, once they come back.
Qrow and Oscar are both talking to Ruby (to be fair, Qrow speaks to everyone, but thematically Ruby is her interlocutor). However, Qrow has managed to integrate (with Clover), while Oscar fights integration (with Ozpin (understandably so)). At the same time, Qrow focuses on how Ruby has changed the world, whereas Oscar focuses on how Ruby has changed him.
Nora and Qrow open and end the epilogue. Nora is the one who struggles to grieve the most (she is the only one who never visits the memorial, after the cerimony). She insists she must move on, but also wonders if she will ever be able to. Qrow instead is the one who deals the best with the situation. He finds serenity while at the memorial and grieves in a hopeful way thanks to the murales realized by the community. Both are very involved with helping people and the refugees. Nora is shown helping children and states she wants to help Velvet before eating herself. Qrow keeps going into meetings with Theodore, he spends time with Robyn and the kids and helps the Schnees giving out free food. Still, Nora is clearly wearing herself out, whereas Qrow genuinelly finds hope and energy. Nora is symbolically one of the orphans trying to carry the world. Qrow is instead a mentor, who has learnt he doesn't have to face the world alone.
OTHER THOUGHTS
Happy to see the Crown. I think Jill and Jax have the potential to foil Emercury to an extent, so I am happy to see them (it's them, right?) with Merc. It is also something I had always thought that Tyrian and Mercury's mission to Vacuo might have been to find some new allies there. The Crown were the obvious choice.
I feel neutral about team CFVY appearing so much in the epilogue. My guess is that they are set up to be minor foils to RWBY, kind of like the Happy Huntresses and the Ace Ops were in Atlas. I think the books give them enough set-up to solve their arc in a quick way, while commenting on those of the main characters.
I was surprised about the revelation of Salem attacking Vale. I wonder if she found the crown. I doubt it, so far and I think Glynda missing is clearly set-up as a future plot-point. In any case, we'll see. I am open to everything.
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skidsspace · 6 months ago
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The Tai discourse is back. And honestly? I agree with points from both sides. Tai loves his kids. Tai also neglected his kids. These are points that can't be denied by either side. I would say...Tai is not a bad dad. But Tai is not a great dad. We've seen both in this series and Tai falls somewhere in between. When Yang says "He just kind of shut down" people like to say she said kind of not fully. But...well of course she did. These girls never outright insult their father and she was only trying to connect to Blake. The picture we see on screen is Tai sitting in his room staring at a picture. It also can't be ignored that Yang managed to get a sleeping toddler into a wagon and out the house and somewhere in the woods before anyone was able to find them. I'm sorry but that takes time. Yang is only two years older than ruby. A 5 year old is gonna have trouble lifting a 3 year old. And Yang felt the need to bring ruby anyway. So Tai either wasn't home or...wasn't paying attention. Neither great. And it was Qrow that found them. But it can't be ignored that the Boba thing means Tai was present again.
I think what it is, truly is with Tai, is that he doesn't know how to deal with the big hard emotions. Like when he calls yangs depression moping or he shuts down himself. He himself couldn't handle his own depression let alone his daughters. He doesn't know how to have those talks or how to give a hand up, After all Summer is the one who came and gave him a hand after Raven left. So he makes jokes and tries to push them onward. And Yang adopted making jokes for hard situations from him. Ren calls her on it. She learned it from Tai. She picked up on him doing it to handle hard moments.
It's not the greatest thing. It's not. But from what I've seen Tai is not the worst dad and also isn't the best. I don't know if we can say he tried his best but I think we can say he did try. Tai loves his kids. But he doesn't know how to handle big, hard emotional moments.
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howlingday · 8 months ago
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Ruby: (setting up a dinner date) ... dad?
Taiyang: What's up, Ruby?! Missing the ol' block from which you were chipped?!
Ruby: Not at all, dad. Look, can you maybe take a walk around the world? I invited Penny over to tell her... I like her. ////////
Taiyang: ... (takes out radio) The Golden Panda has awoken.
Qrow: (breaks in through the window) The Golden Panda has awoken?! That's three years, seven months, two weeks, and four-and-a-half days earlier than I thought it would!
Ruby: (sigh) This is my life. What the heck is going on?
Taiyang: You see, Ruby, there are moments in a young person's life that are so important, they should never be interrupted. Even by dads. Which include, but aren't limited to, your first real scrap-
Qrow: Blood in, blood out.
Taiyang: -hitting a homerun-
Qrow: No pun intended.
Taiyang: -hitting a homerun-
Qrow: Pun intended.
Taiyang: -sacrificing your firstborn son on a mountaintop to ensure your other children will turn out semi-decent-
Qrow: The Gods thank you.
Taiyang: -and telling another person that you yearn for them in an emotional, spiritual, primal, and yes, physical way.
Qrow: L'amour est sacré. (Love is sacred)
Taiyang: Baguette. (bread)
Ruby: Wait... did Yang and I have a brother?
Qrow: Operation Golden Panda is a contingency your father and I came up with after he ruined Yang's first date. To ensure that he doesn't interfere with you, I will be responsible for keeping him away. I'll feed him. I'll bathe him. I'll monitor his every move! Until you accomplish your goal of expressing your true feelings to the robot girl, I will not let him out of my sight!
Ruby: Bathe him?! Why don't you just take him to a movie?!
Taiyang & Qrow: ... HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! (leave the room)
Something tells me that there's more going on with Uncle Qrow and Ruby's dad...
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lovingdabeessss · 10 months ago
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Mini ramble cause I’m tired I’ll expand later probably
Blake and Weiss have trouble with their emotions because of their different kinds of abuse they’ve experienced but they still clearly have them, you know? They talk about them and they talk about it a lot their was a whole arc that was just them talking about their emotions very loudly at each other so having the emotions or expressing it doesn’t really bother them that much
or at least not in every environment, Yang and Ruby are the safest space they got they’ll fight each other to the death around them if they’d let them if you want to have unsavory emotions and unsavory words they’re the two people they’re both comfortable doing it around
It seems like they’re biggest issue with having negative emotions is how other people perceive them and how others react and putting up a front around others unless really comfortable
(What an incredible life changing experience it must’ve been to have that kinda safe space with people who care about you for no reason other then because they do and not for any ulterior motive after so long of not feeling like that to love someone so much you could safely hate them and they’d still ask you include you in ever conversation, it’s like that one measurement of love and comfort where if your kid complains and whines about things you make them do to you then they love you and think your safe to be around and if they’re silent and obedient and distant they think your not)
However with Yang and Ruby it’s not a front they’re not pretending to not feel the emotions they’re actually just not feeling them
They’re refusing to outright
Ruby doesn’t vent till she’s in a universe where GRIM DONT EXIST and then the emotions overwhelm her so much she DIES
Yang does let herself have negative emotions but ONLY anger which is controlled and specifically when she can take that kinda heat she expresses anger not only with the acknowledgment of the risk to herself but also often when other people are also already upset
Yangs semblance is clearly designed to make it easier for her to take hits for others this expression of anger goes along with the fact that it lights her on fire and makes her big and bright she’s making herself a bigger target
Cough cough not subtle metaphor cough cough YOU KNOW LIKE WHAT YOU DO AGAINST BEARS?!?! GOLDILOCKS!?!?!? Cough cough not subtle metaphor cough cough
(And Yang and Ruby will sometimes have breakdowns because of this where everything totally boils over and they have no way of dealing with it and they end up sobbing but even then they usually manage to do it in a closed off room)
Their lives have been centered completely around becoming huntresses and surviving through and killing grim it’s been their whole lives if the grim are attracted to negative emotions it doesn’t matter if you don’t show it on your face it’s GETTING you
To be a hunter you have to choose either:
1- go fucking crazy (all of the teachers at beacon for whatever reason)
2- be good enough at your job to be mentally ill (qrow)
3- DIE
So they just couldn’t feel shit cause they didn’t hav the skill level as children to allow that and survive
And obviously they do feel these things but it’s SOO repressed (Ruby I believe less so but it’s still beneath the surface so she’s good)
Blake and Weiss had a ton of shit to worry about but Blake was always more focused on other people as enemies and only had to personally worry about that after she joined the white fang and learned how to fight and I GENUINELY believe that the forest with Ruby was the first time Weiss’s isolated SKY CITY looking ass ever saw a real grim in person and not her sisters fake ones
And I think this is just really interesting because of how long it might’ve taken Yang and Ruby to realize the difference between their partners and them and why I think it might’ve led to interesting interactions but they’d probably never outright talk about it with them because it might lead to emotions
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bestworstcase · 7 months ago
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Thanks for your response ala Ruby & Yang, great stuff!
Idle aside, but do you have any thoughts on Yang's role as the sort of black sheep of the family by dint of Raven associations?
Cos like, Tai overtly favors Ruby, projects Raven onto Yang, resents Raven being rough up and is bad enough about reminders of her Yang feels she has to apologize for his negative reactions. Let alone his... Everything else.
Then there's Qrow who doesn't seem to interact with Yang over much at all and one of if not their most major interaction. Involves him straight up saying he thinks she's either a liar hurting people for fun or "crazy".
I recall someone I was chatting with wondering: Imagine doing everything you can to keep your family from breaking apart & being compared to the woman who left you when you were a baby?
Cos I do wonder how Yang feels about all that given she seems to downplay and or try to work around her family's issues when she can. Let alone what it says about the adults in the room.
smth i think about a lot is the way yang’s narrative about her childhood shifts between v2 to v5
’cause in v2 it’s: “it was tough. ruby was really torn up, my dad kind of shut down. it wasn’t long before i learned why…” all to provide context for this anecdote about putting ruby in a wagon and running away to find her mother. and then her conclusion is “my stubbornness should have gotten us killed that night.”
and while there is a degree here of yang framing the story to emphasize the point she wants blake to understand, it’s also very obvious in her delivery that the emotional reality of this memory for yang is “the time my stupidity and stubbornness almost got me and ruby eaten by grimm”—when she was [checks notes] like five, six years old, and regularly left at home unsupervised.
but in v5, it’s: “my mom left me. ruby’s mom left too. tai was always busy with school, and ruby couldn’t even talk yet; i had to pick up the pieces. i had to pick up the pieces. alone.”
aside from the telling slip (tai, not dad)—yang centers her own feelings and the harm this situation did to her this time. which is something she’s always felt but i don’t think she could have brought herself to say it out loud to anyone during the beacon arc, because it was pressed down under the guilt on display in burning the candle, the feeling of having been inadequate and too stubborn and too selfish and and and–
coughs quietly. “my stubbornness should have gotten us killed that night.” / “you were predictable. and… stubborn. and maybe a little boneheaded.” yang’s narrative about the wagon incident—which happened when she was five or six!—pinning the blame on the thing tai imagines to be her fatal flaw is…probably not coincidental. yang in v4 after a year of being loved by her team and supported by mentors like glynda / oobleck / port has the perspective to know that tai doesn’t know what he’s talking about; but as a small child who’d just had a terrifying near-death experience with her baby sister… 😶
it definitely had a big impact on the way yang sees herself
BUT i do read qrow's talk with yang in 3.8 pretty differently ->
because the context is: yang saw mercury attack her and struck back in self defense, then had like a dozen synthetic soldiers point guns in her face, then looked up and saw the replay footage of herself walking over to shoot a boy who was just kneeling on the ground. and some of the most powerful authority figures in the world are pushing this narrative that stress and adrenaline "clouded her judgment."
like this would make anyone doubt their sanity. bc holy shit.
yang, though...a couple weeks ago, yang after being knocked unconscious woke up and blearily saw someone she thought was her mother walk away from her and disappear in a flash of red light. she hasn't mentioned it to anyone, because it's just so bizarre—yang doesn't know about raven's semblance yet—she must have just been seeing things. right?
aside from raven (who isn't here) and yang (who believes she hallucinated), the only other person who knows that yang saw her mom on the train is qrow, because raven told him about it. he also knows that:
tai insisted on not telling yang ANYTHING about her mother, and qrow respected that up until now; so yang doesn't know about raven's semblance and can't make sense of what she saw.
salem's infiltrators are the same people who attacked amber, and qrow didn't get a good look at them because they seemingly vanished into thin air—pretty damn good chance that one of them has a semblance that manipulates what you see.
ozpin wants #2 kept secret, so yang has some very powerful people actively trying to convince her that she's crazy. ironwood is straight up gaslighting her.
qrow also—based on the first thing he says, which is "why'd you do it?"—seems to consider it a possibility that it is what it looked like but yang did have a good reason, and i actually do not think that is an outrageous thing for qrow specifically to think. because qrow was emotionally abused as a child, and he knows yang, and in the event that yang really did suddenly turn around and punch a guy who was kneeling on the ground, why would she do it?
glances at shay d. mann. well. maybe this kid has been harassing her? maybe he said something horrible or threatening to her and in the heat of the moment she just snapped? maybe "he attacked me, i saw him attack me" isn't really a lie per se, she's just scared that "he's been picking on me ever since he got here and he made a disgusting remark and i just couldn't take it anymore" won't be taken seriously? as in, he did attack her—verbally/emotionally.
it's probably worth asking, at least!
so, qrow leads with "why'd you do it?" in case there is some invisible reason justifying the apparent action. yang says "you know why." qrow goes okay, well, i only know what i saw, so you're either lying (i.e., yang had a reason she now isn't telling) or crazy (i.e., yang saw something different from reality that was very real to her).
she says "i'm not lying." qrow believes her: "crazy, got it."
at this point, he knows the most probable explanation is that one of salem's infiltrators fucked with her head. the inner circle's gaslighting doesn't sit right with him; he's not going to buck ozpin by telling her the truth outright, but he wants to make sure yang knows she isn't losing her mind. he also has all the info needed to guess that yang is actually really really scared that she might be crazy.
which is why he kicks off the wall and begins to pace around. the language he uses sounds dismissive, but his tone is mild and his body language implies "let's talk about it, let's figure this out."
leading to:
YANG: Who knows? Maybe I am. QROW: And here I thought your dark-haired friend was the emo one. YANG: I saw my mom. …I- I was in a lot of trouble, took a pretty hard hit. But when I came to, the person attacking me was gone, and I thought I saw… her. Her sword. Like the one in you and dad’s old picture. QROW: You’re not crazy, Yang. That was your mom, alright. Let me guess—she didn’t say a word, did she? YANG: How did you know that? QROW: I don't see my sister very often, but she does try to keep in touch... whenever it suits her. YANG: Wait—you mean you talk to her? That was real!? QROW: Yeah, she found me. Had a tip from my most recent assignment and wanted me to give you a message.
it's really telling that yang responds to him this way. 'cause we've seen how yang acts when she feels dismissed or belittled:
TAI: Well, "normal" is what you make of it. YANG: What is that supposed to mean? Do you want me to just pretend like nothing happened? I lost a part of me. A piece of me is gone. And it's never coming back. TAI: You're right. It's not coming back. But that doesn't have to stop you from becoming who you wanna be. You're Yang Xiao Long, my sunny little dragon. You can do whatever you put your mind to. So whenever you're ready to stop moping, and get back out there? I'll be there for you. YANG: I– I...
she freezes and shuts down! her teachers have to come to her rescue!—but when qrow goes "crazy, got it" and suggests she's being "emo," yang blurts out her big secret. i saw my mom. to me that suggests a level of trust and understanding that isn't there with tai: qrow says stuff like "okay, so you're crazy" and "here i thought your friend was the emo one" but what he means is "hey, i know something's really bugging you, tell me about it," and yang picks up what he's putting down.
it's akin to how ruby goes "did you miss me? DID YOU MISS ME??" and qrow's like "nope" and they both laugh. or the back-and-forth ribbing between him and the girls in 3.4. there's this layer of mild ironic meanness in the way qrow converses with his nieces that all of them are fluent in, and in this scene he's using that mode to signal that "crazy" is not off-limits, that it's okay to talk about openly.
crucially, there's a code-switch in the middle of the conversation: as soon as yang gets real and says "i saw my mom," qrow reflects that seriousness back to her. you're not crazy, that was your mom, she found me afterward and told me about it. it was real. you're okay. qrow's ability to do that—to shift into a more serious mode when irony isn't appropriate—is why yang can have this rapport with him that she doesn't have with tai, because tai isn't... being ironic when he says mean or dismissive things to her.
anyway, qrow passes on raven's terrible message and then kind of annotates it: "raven's got an interesting way of looking at the world that i don't particularly agree with, and she's dangerous." (which is a very diplomatic way of saying he thinks raven is full of shit. lol.) but then he connects this whole conversation about raven back to what happened after the match: "you're a tough egg, kiddo. don't let this tournament thing getcha down. you had a slip-up; sometimes bad things just happen."
implicitly: yang isn't crazy. what she saw on the train was real, a product of raven's personality and her semblance. sometimes bad things just happen. qrow believes that yang had the experience she says she did when she punched mercury. he doesn't know why she had that experience—yang doesn't either!—but he knows she isn't just "crazy." sometimes things that seem crazy are actually real.
remember what he tells the girls in 3.4? "you may be acting like huntresses, but you're not thinking like one." same thing here. he's telling yang, hey, you're not crazy, you know what you saw, but you don't know what or who caused you to see it. "you cut off the head of the king taijitu, but now the second head's calling the shots."
hint, hint.
it's subtler than the hints qrow drops for ruby in 3.12, but very much in the same vein, and yang is plenty smart enough to figure it out. she might... not have? in the couple of hours between this conversation and everything going to straight to hell, but if they'd had literally just one more day, just long enough for the wheels turning in yang's head to click together with what ruby heard from velvet about coco hallucinating during her and yatsu's 2v2 against emerald and mercury, she would've had it.
more... generally, i've never gotten the sense that qrow projects raven's flaws onto yang in the way that tai does; qrow is definitely a lot closer with ruby than yang, but i think that has less to do with favoritism on qrow's part than it does ruby thinking he's like the COOLEST uncle ever and wanting to use a scythe like he does.
'cause like, qrow isn't their parent, he doesn't live with them, he's not responsible for raising these kids like their dad is, so while he obviously did contribute to fucking them both up because: alcoholic, ultimately there just isn't the same degree of betrayal or emotional abandonment; he's not their dad. both times yang talks in detail about her childhood, it's "my mom left, ruby's mom left, tai wasn't really around, ruby couldn't even talk, i was alone"—she doesn't mention qrow. there isn't that deep hurt, that feeling that qrow is someone who left.
when he isn't drunk, yang seems to feel pretty okay around him, and qrow likewise treats her... honestly a lot better than tai does:
he stops by their dorm in v3 to hang out with both his nieces; yang is fully in sister mode—cheers for ruby to beat him until ruby loses, immediately shoves her out of the way like "my turn!! >:D"—and qrow ribs them both, takes ribbing from both of them in good humor, tells both of them "you two are gonna go far."
qrow nicknames to show affection; ruby is "pipsqueak," yang gets "firecracker."
we only see qrow's goodbye to ruby, but in 5.4 yang indicates that qrow came to talk to her before he left, too. she also has complete trust that he's keeping the promise he made to look after ruby.
yang, as noted, opens up to him about seeing her mom; she's also shocked that he's still in contact with raven and indignant that he didn't tell her sooner, but—unlike with tai—she doesn't seem surprised that qrow is willing to talk about raven in general.
which tracks with what tai says in 4.11: "despite asking him numerous times not to, i know qrow told you where you're mother's been at these days"—meaning, this was a point of contention between him and qrow. behind the scenes, while tai refused to discuss raven at all, qrow was going okay well, let me tell her then, she deserves to know. and then ultimately he just bit the bullet and told her behind tai's back. i wouldn't be surprised if it turned out qrow had been straight with yang that her dad wanted to be the one to tell her the important stuff, and he wanted to be respectful of that, but raven wasn't an off-limits topic.
general contrast between yang-tai and yang-qrow dynamics; for example both of them say almost verbatim "you've got a long way to go before you're ready for the real world" (3.4/4.4). from tai it's belittling, he's insulting her; from qrow, it's meant to encourage, it's "remember you're still new to this, you'll make mistakes, just keep learning, keep trying." (rwby does stuff like this all the time, refracting an idea in different directions to highlight contrasts between characters; ozpin's advice to ruby vs port's advice to weiss is another example.)
a lot of qrow's resentment toward raven is centered on her abandonment of yang: "did you know yang lost her arm? [...] rhetorical question, i know you know. it's just obnoxious that you'd bring up family and then carry on like your own daughter doesn't exist. [raven: "i saved her."] once. because that was your rule, right? real mom of the year material, sis." like he is PISSED on yang's behalf that raven won't even try.
my impression is that qrow—although a) often away on long missions in far away places and b) an alcoholic who sometimes got blind drunk and became a burden yang and ruby needed to take care of—when he did manage to be there, made a serious effort to connect with both of them. he ended up being closer to ruby bc she wanted to learn scythe-wielding, but i do think qrow would've trained yang too (or instead) if the girls had different combat interests.
and while his relationship with ruby has a mentorish aspect, i don't get the sense either of the girls see him as a parental figure: he wasn't part of their household, he traveled a lot, his alcoholism in combination with tai's neglect eroded the adult-child boundaries because they had to be responsible for him as often as the reverse. he's a friend who also happens to be related to them. and that's especially true for yang, because he wasn't her teacher.
(i know it's a... pretty common headcanon / fanon that qrow lived with them, but i really don't think that's supported by the text? whenever ruby or yang look back on their childhoods, the family unit is always them + tai, and qrow isolates himself out of fear that his semblance will injure those he cares about. plus ozpin sending him all over the place as the one member of team strq still active. it makes way more sense to think he lived alone, and visited when he had the chance. which is the main reason i'm WAY softer on him than on tai, 'cause qrow wasn't in a caretaker/parent role; at most he was an occasional babysitter. so while his incidents of turning up drunk on the doorstep contributed to the harm... it's like, it would absolutely have been better for them if qrow were sober, but that wouldn't have changed anything about their home life. they'd just have somewhat easier relationships with qrow.)
TO WRAP THIS BACK AROUND TO THE QUESTION, tai is unfairly judgmental and harsh with yang bc he projects his idea of her mom onto her; yang also has a better relationship with her mom's brother than she does with her dad. how do these two dynamics interact? how does yang feel about hearing from tai that she's too branwen, so to speak, while also getting along better with the branwen side of her family? how might that fuel her desire to find raven?
if her uncle treats her better than tai does, then... maybe her mom would too, if only yang could reach her?—obviously it's not rational, but like. i don't think five year old yang put her baby sister in a wagon and ran away to find her mom because she thought she would ask "why did you leave me?" and then get her answer and go home. as yang grew older and developed a more realistic perspective it shifted to "i just need to know why she left" and she projects that backward onto herself as a child, but at the time what she wanted, what she was looking for, was someone who would take care of them.
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strqyr · 8 months ago
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...everyone in team strq keeps secrets of some kind. qrow had his semblance (and shapeshifting, kinda), raven's got being the spring maiden and her reasons for leaving, summer her mission (that i don't think she was being fully honest about with anyone).
so what does taiyang "i've got to... look after some things" xiao long have?
i don't think it's simply his refusal to talk about raven (and possibly summer), because it doesn't quite fit with the rest; it's not about him or what he's doing, if that makes sense. he could talk about everything and all, and it would not bring the answers desired.
and i do think he has a secret (or two) just for himself. something that possibly even his teammates don't know about; qrow says "there were a lot of those back in our day, but" in reference to the possibility that ozpin knew something about summer's mission that qrow and tai didn't, opening a room for oz secrets that weren't shared across the board; "still, who knows what he may have hidden from us over the years." <- that's an open door right there.
but my main reason for thinking so comes from 'known by its song' and raven casting doubt not only on qrow but tai as well on leaving things out, which seems slightly odd considering how... uninvolved tai seems to be in all things oz & salem in the present day.
"well, [qrow's] never given me a reason to doubt him before" -> "that doesn't mean those reasons don't exist."
"your uncle qrow and i didn't attend beacon to become huntsmen, we did it to learn how to kill huntsmen. daddy and uncle left that part out, hm?"
"you said tai told you all about my semblance. well, i doubt he ever told you what oz did to my brother and me." <- this, especially. tai talked, but he said nothing about oz-related stuff. not when he slipped up about what ruby did at the beacon tower. not when yang left, likely knowing she (and ruby) were getting involved in this stuff. even when he talks with qrow, he's being vague with his wording.
it reminds me of this quote from the official companion book: "to me, taiyang is the ultimate dad. he doesn't spend a lot of time talking about his emotions, but he's been through a lot. i think about men who went to war and experienced horrible things, but when they came back to support their families they never spoke a word about it. they took all that to the grave."
his team is full of secrets and he's got to look after some things (<- plural!!!) and if he's not the dragon guarding the treasure, i don't know what he is.
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wixhing0nastar · 2 years ago
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Abuse Narratives in RWBY: Yang Xiao Long Edition (Feat. Ruby Rose)
We've all witnessed and talked about Blake and Weiss being abuse survivors for years. Blake escaping from Adam and Weiss escaping from her father were both huge, impactful events that have shaped the narrative of the story in many ways.
Yang on the other hand has managed to fly mostly under the radar with the abuse she's suffered up to this point. Her jokey, happy-go-lucky facade tricking the audience just as well as it has her friends and family for years.
(Note: this is going to be a long post, so strap in. Also this is your warning I am not going to be holding back in my criticism of Tai, so if you don't want to see me go into detail about how exactly he abused Yang, I highly suggest turning back now).
TL:DR: Yang was neglected and parentified (aka: abused) as a child and that’s the root of a lot of the issues that she’s currently struggling with in Volume 9 and a large part of her healing is going to be centered around her relationship with Blake going forward.
Let's start by establishing what exactly I'm referring to when I say that Yang has been abused. Because while I'm certainly referring to her being neglected after Summer's death, I'm more so referring to the years of Parentification that was caused by said neglect (in addition to the verbal and emotional abuse hurled her way).
Let's start by defining what exactly Parentification is since it's where most of Yang's current problems stem from.
[Parentification is] a disturbance in the generational boundaries, such that evidence indicates a functional and/or emotional role reversal in which the child sacrifices his or her own needs for attention, comfort, and guidance in order to accommodate and care for the logistical and emotional needs of a parent and/or sibling. (Hooper, 2007b, p. 323)
Ruby establishes in Volume 9, Chapter 1 that Yang was the one who raised her. It's important to note that in the context of her saying that, she's telling Yang that Yang was the one responsible for her moral development as a kid.
Research has shown that the building blocks for morality are generally in place by the age of 4. However, "children need adults to help them at every stage of childhood to nurture these seeds into full development." (Harvard, Raising Caring, Respectful, Ethical Children, p. 1) With "childhood" commonly considered infancy to age 12.
Using this we can reasonably assume that Yang was Ruby's primary caretaker or at the very least co-parenting with Tai from the time of Summer's death to at least age 14 (when Ruby was 12)... which mind you, is already over a decade total and only three years before the show starts.
Now that we've got some of the science out of the way, let's start looking at the show itself to see just how bad the situation was.
Burning the Candle
This iconic scene actually paints a fairly horrifying picture of Yang and Ruby's early childhood when you start to break it down.
I waited for dad to leave the house.
Meaning that by that point, probably only a few months after Summer's death based on the timeline Yang establishes, Yang already knows Tai will reliably leave her and Ruby alone without supervision for extended periods of time in order to pull this off.
I must have walked for hours.
Meaning that it likely took several hours for someone to even notice they were missing in the first place. The fact Qrow knew exactly where they were indicates that Yang either left a note or clue about where they were headed and I'm willing to bet the only reason it took Yang that long to walk was because she was like two feet tall at the time (since Patch is like... a tiny island... which brings me to the next line...
A toddler asleep in the back of a wagon
Again, to clarify, Ruby was a toddler. Toddlers are between 1-3 years old... meaning this all happened when Yang was a maximum of (and likely, based on their physical appearances) 5 years old.
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So to summarize, Tai was regularly leaving Yang, his five-year-old, home alone and in charge of her three-year-old sister... which would be horrifying to think about on its own but this is Remnant.
Which means that Tai was regularly leaving his grieving five-year-old at home alone when they didn't live inside a kingdom's border and there were known wild Grimm in the area... who are attracted to negative emotions.
Wow... I wonder why Yang felt the need to try to diffuse the tension with humor and keep everyone in high spirits all the time. It’s almost like it was a life or death situation growing up. (/s)
Anger, Fear, and Burn
Before jumping into the next big narrative piece, let’s talk a little bit about Yang’s semblance, Burn, and how it works. Because it’s important to establish before starting to dig into Volume 4.
Let’s start with how Ruby describes it:
Don't worry! With each hit she gets stronger, and she uses that energy to fight back! That's what makes her special.
Notice how Ruby doesn't mention anything about Yang needing to be angry to use her Semblance? In fact, while it’s unclear if this is entirely true, it has been stated previously that Yang’s powers come in part from her hair and no one has refuted that claim in like 8 years so it holds some weight.
Moreover, recent volumes have actually been hinting that Yang likely doesn't even need to use her anger to activate/maintain burn. And that she just does so out of habit more than anything.
Now, why exactly would someone intentionally limit themselves by tying their semblance into in emotion like that? Well, first let’s answer the question, why anger?
And well... anger is a secondary emotion.
A secondary emotion is an emotion fueled by other emotions... masking your feelings of sadness, hurt or grief with anger can be easier than experiencing the primary emotion.
And moreover,
The feelings that anger commonly masks include fear, anxiety, guilt, shame, embarrassment, betrayal, jealousy, sadness, hurt, and worry. (Alta Loma, Understanding Anger as a Secondary Emotion, Web, emphasis added).
Fear is, of course, a bit of a running theme in RWBY, there was a whole speech and song about it at the end of Volume 7, after all.
But more than that, there've been two people on two separate occasions who've called Yang out for being scared when she's posturing: Ren and Raven.
And while Ren was pointing out that she uses humor to try to deflect when she’s scared, when Raven said this to Yang she was absolutely outwardly angry... and Yang admits to being scared in the moment yet still standing there.
Also note that humor = friends/winning, anger = enemies/losing.
Which makes you wonder, what was happening growing up that made Yang instinctively react to fear of danger with anger and planting her feet instead of running away? For that let's go back to what we learned from Burning the Candle and the V5 short real quick.
We know there are living Grimm on Patch. Maybe not as many as elsewhere, but both times we are given glimpses into Yang and Ruby's childhood on Patch they are attacked by Grimm, which isn't a great sign.
How old do you think Yang was the first time she or Ruby had a bad day and attracted one of them on accident and she had to fight it off on her own (because she couldn't run, she had to protect Ruby)?
How many nights do you think Yang would spend reading Ruby stories and telling her dumb jokes to get her to laugh to try to make sure they weren't attacked? How often did Ruby have to force herself to be okay? For both their sake?
Volume 4
Now let's talk about Volume 4, aka: when Tai had the chance to step up and didn't.
Now right off the bat he's okay. There's nothing inherently wrong with him bringing her the arm and being excited at the thought because he doesn't know how she's going to react to it though it is a little weird he opened her mail without permission.
The rest of Yang's first V4 episode, however, makes it very clear both to us as the audience and Tai that Yang isn't doing okay... but Tai doesn't do anything to attempt to help her.
Which is why what happens in the next episode is kinda messed up.
Yang wakes up from a nightmare about losing her arm in a seriously traumatizing event and goes downstairs when she realizes there's a distraction people are over.
Then we get the fight and despite Yang laughing it off in the end... honestly Tai is being very condescending towards her, which Yang even points out. Like, someone made a slightly adult joke in front of her and he flies off the handle and starts a fight with her and starts making digs about her not being a real adult ready for the real world and let's just break that down before dealing with the actual problems in this episode.
Yang, as established, has been fulfilling the role of parent (while barely getting any parenting herself) for years. She's been fulfilling the role of an adult since she was 5! And at this point in the show she's also legally an adult. So not only is it condescending, it's also untrue.
Then we get this line.
I guess you lost some brain cells along with that arm.
Not only is this beyond callus, Yang is clearly actually upset by this.
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And notably, she only treats it as a joke after Oobleck dropped his cup. AKA: after being reminded that they aren’t alone in the room.
(And remember, Yang uses humor as a coping mechanism).
And both Oobleck and Port can clearly tell that this wasn’t appropriate at all and immediately following that, they pointedly step in to ask Yang how she is doing with everything.
Which Tai has not done.
And Yang opens up to them! And she tells them that she’s still struggling and coming to terms with what happened to her. Which in turn causes Tai to finally talk to her about it, but he’s being pushy about her getting back out and “being her new normal” and even refers to her PTSD as moping when she just got done saying she’s still trying to process and recover.
And it’s again Port specifically who steps in and gives her some genuine advice without trying to push her her into anything she’s not ready for and then Oobleck joins in and they go out if their way to ham it up to make her laugh.
So overall, Tai’s being extremely dismissive of the trauma that she’s gone through and minimizing her feelings at every turn.
Which then leads to this scene...
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Which is when Tai’s dismissiveness starts to make sense (and I’ll come back to this when I’m analyzing the last episode).
Let’s break it down. To start, Tai knows that Yang is going up to her room, they pointedly have her call out goodnight from upstairs so Tai knows where she is physically and what her intentions are.
Secondly, there’s no way that Tai doesn't know you can hear people talking from the front door from Yang’s room. He’s owned this house for like two decades minimum at this point.
So when Oobleck and Port ask after Ruby, there’s no way he should assume Yang won’t be able to hear everything he says. And he very much lays the burden of Ruby’s safety at Yang’s feet. He’s not going after her because he has to “look after some things.”
AKA: Yang.
And then she comes to him literally the next day wearing the new arm and wanting to train and he doesn't question her at all, even though 12 hours earlier Yang was very much not ready?
We then don’t see her at all for five episodes until we get the scene where she’s training with Tai and honestly, his advice is kinda horrible.
To start, even he says his advice is based on watching her Vytal Festival fights, meaning that everything is based on watching three matches.
He points out she uses her semblance to win every fight after the qualifiers (which is true), and Yang rightly points out that everyone uses their semblances to help them win. Then Tai says this:
Because not everyone else’s is basically a temper tantrum.
Not only is this very unlikely to be true, but even if Yang does need to rely on her anger to activate her semblance, calling it a temper tantrum isn’t accurate at all.
In fact, the way Yang uses her semblance takes a great deal of emotional regulation to pull off. She not only is able to make herself angry enough to use it at will, she’s also able to stop using it at will. Meaning Yang is capable of instantaneously switching from one emotion to another.
That’s not a temper tantrum, that’s someone with superb emotional control choosing what emotion to feel when it’s most appropriate.
Furthermore, the “what happens if you miss” comment is so ridiculous I don’t even know how to start other than saying we literally saw exactly what happens when Yang misses her first attempt in Volume 2! When her semblance is being revealed! And the answer is... she gets another shot.
And if they’re stronger... like not using the thing that makes her ridiculously powerful is certainly not going to help.
And honestly... Yang doesn’t do what Tai says. He says it’s useful in a bind but Yang doesn’t use her semblance only in emergencies from here on end. In fact, what she actually does is pick up some tricks from Pyrrha and she starts hiding her semblance from people!
And noticeably, Tai isn’t the one who tells Yang to fight smarter. That’s a line of thinking she develops on her own between the first and second times she faced Adam.
And then Tai takes credit for her “suddenly” getting better like she hadn’t successfully hit him so hard he needed to take a pause and the fight he did win was only because he attacked her when she was being vulnerable with him... her father who she’s of course not going to assume is going to attack her while she’s opening up to him... because she wouldn’t do that to Ruby.
And then we get to Yang’s last (real) episode of the volume when she’s setting out to get Ruby. Remember when I said Tai’s dismissiveness started to make sense and we’d come back to it? Well we’re back to it.
Note how Yang pointedly doesn’t tell Tai that she’s leaving, despite him having indicated to Port and Oobleck that the only reason he wasn’t also going after Ruby was because he was staying with Yang?
And how in the end he doesn’t leave with Yang to go find Ruby even though supposedly the only reason he hadn’t was because he wanted to make sure Yang was okay? And now Yang’s going after Ruby? Alone?
Paired with how pushy and condescending he was acting towards her in the other two Volume 4 episodes he was in, on top of having neglected and parentified her for at least a decade, this really reads as him wanting Yang to get better so he can shove her out the door to go after Ruby, and not him caring at all about her as a person.
(Which is why I really struggle to feel bad for him in his V8 scene... if he was so worried he could have been there).
Yang’s Actual Temper Tantrums
Let’s address these really quick before moving on to the final section. We’ve actually seen/heard of four different instances where Yang actually was having something resembling a temper tantrum while using her semblance.
I’m going to start with the Neon fight because it’s the easiest. But Neon as a character relies on knocking her opponents off balance by getting under their skin in a fight. She tries to make them angry and yes, it does work on Yang in this instance. But that’s Neon’s whole thing, in any other match up Yang would have been fine.
The other three times all had to do with her hair (namely, when Junior gets her hair in her trailer, when the ursa gets her hair in the Emerald Forest and... in V4 when Tai refers to her having a rough first haircut).
Going back to the bit about how Yang’s powers, in part, come from her hair and this actually makes a lot of sense in the context of Yang’s childhood. If she was regularly in charge of protecting Ruby and some of the finite power she did have as a kid was because of her hair, of course she gets freaked out by losing some... and we’ve already talked about Yang using anger as a mask for fear.
Bumbleby and Volume 9
So let’s talk about where we’re going now, because of all three of the abuse survivors in this show, Yang is the only one who hasn’t really been confronted with and forced to deal with it yet.
Because at the end of the day, being parentified and neglected for years has left Yang scared to open up emotionally and more than that, uncertain of her identity outside of being Ruby’s parent.
Because up to going to Beacon, that was basically Yang’s entire life. It’s entirely possible the only reason she went to Signal was to learn how to protect Ruby better all things considered.
Which is why the development between her and Blake is so important this volume. Yang desperately needs to be valued as something other a caretaker and protector and so far they’ve been emphasizing the fact that Blake loves Yang because she’s a goofy dork who makes her smile, not because she’s strong enough to level a mountain.
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And while Blake’s relationship with Adam was abusive, unlike Yang, Blake does have a framework for health relationships thanks to Ghira and Kali and she’s worked through her own trauma from being abused romantically enough that she’s in a place emotionally to help Yang start working though hers. Starting by giving Yang a person she can trust not to leave who also isn’t and has never been dependent on her to muck up Yang’s healing process.
Because there’s a difference between someone choosing to stay and someone not having any other choice because they were/are dependent on you. And (absolutely no shade to Ruby here) she’s already had someone in the latter position choose to leave her anyways.
In Conclusion
Yang was abused as a child and into her late teens and is in desperate need of some type of unconditional love and affection that she doesn’t feel there are strings attached to in order to finally begin healing...
And therapy, but they’re a little low on that for the foreseeable future.
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