#also summer rose is general jinjur

[etruatcaelum]

On Semblances.

As this post mentions, neither Salem nor Ozma have ‘true’ ancient magic anymore: her immense power derives from the pools of light and darkness, and when Ozma created the maidens, they sacrificed their divine gifts but awakened their aura. Both now wield powers functionally identical to the aura and dust-based magic of modern humans; the sole difference between them and ordinary humans is vastly greater experience and, in Salem’s case, the interaction between her infinite aura and her grimmness.

(That is the subject for another post, but in essence grimm flesh and atrum ‘burn’ aura and this reaction can be controlled and channeled just like dust; Salem, who is grimm, uses this to her advantage to mimic ‘true’ magic.)

And, because their ‘magic’ is really just aura trained to a level beyond what any mortal could achieve in a single lifetime, both of them do have semblances.

Salem’s semblance is less an outward projection of her self than an inward one. It developed through the slow reconstruction of her mind and soul after a long period during which she had no sense of identity and was just kind of mindlessly dreaming all the time; her semblance sparked from the need to become whole and to know herself again. What it does, in essence, is immanentize her thinking.

Think method of loci, but crystallized from the imaginary construct into a real, tangible place—in a sense, the interior of her soul, her semblance, is a realm. Not one anything like as vast or complicated as Remnant or the Ever After, but quite a bit larger and more intricate than the vaults, and accessible only through doors she chooses to open.

It’s how she keeps herself sane and also why her sense of identity and conviction are so unshakable in the present: Salem knows herself extremely well and nearly everything that defines who and what she is, she made a deliberate choice to include as a fundamental part of herself. She is capable of change—and in fact capable of changing herself very rapidly and easily, once she decides to do so—but she cannot be forced or coerced or compelled or worn down or manipulated into it. Because the only way she can change is for her to literally disassemble and reassemble parts of herself and her semblance will not let her do that if she doesn’t truly want it to.

Ozma doesn’t know that they even have a semblance, because their semblance fluctuates from one life to the next; they believe the permutations of their own semblance have all been semblances taken from the lives they steal. What’s actually going on is that their very fragile sense of self gave them a semblance that lacks clear definition because it has yet to be fully-realized. It warps and bends and molds itself into the hollowed-out masks of every host, then loses that shape once those masks crumble again to expose Ozma.

There are, however, some constants:

The base essence of their semblance is remembrance and accretion of time. It’s the grasping for another chance and the tearing pain of almost and the venom of what if and maybe then and it wasn’t supposed to happen this way all rolled into one. It’s the aching possibility on the trailing edge of a mistake. Often, it takes the form of small-scale temporal manipulation: with Ozpin, it became an ability to ‘skip’ a second or two here and an idle moment there and ‘save up’ that time to spend all at once, squeezing several minutes worth of action into a single fraction of a second. (<- Ozma still has this ability and Oscar can tap into it for a while, but after the events of V8 it fades as their self-identification as Ozpin disintegrates.)

As themself—once freed from their curse and restored to live as their own person—their semblance is effectively only half-formed: not quite latent, but not truly manifested either. They will need to find themself and know themself before they’re able to fully bring it out. In its true, unalloyed form, Ozma’s semblance is unbinding: the breaking of chains, the opening of doors, the snipped thread of fate to unleash boundless possibility.

In less poetic terms, they will be able to reach back and bring forward the moments when what is now became inescapable. Nothing can be undone, nothing erased: the past cannot be unwritten, but what they can do is create a second chance to rewrite the future, whether by literally making a new possibility that didn’t exist before or by cutting through whatever beliefs or rationalizations a person clings to to pretend that they have no other choice.

Their fully-realized semblance will turn inward and confront them whether they like it or not; toward other people it is entirely under their control. (<- It is also quite likely the one thing capable of reaching into Salem’s head and shaking the foundations of her self, by drawing out her line of reasoning for committing to those choices and asking her to walk those paths anew, decide again.)

Oscar does not have a semblance and will not have a semblance until he’s separated from Ozma. If the integration were completed he would eventually produce a new permutation of Ozma’s, but it wouldn’t in any meaningful sense belong to Oscar, because Oscar as an individual would, for all intents and purposes, be dead.

But once he’s separated from Ozma, and once he sorts out who he is and who he wants to be outside of the looming existential dread of becoming Ozma, he’ll be able to discover his semblance.

(<- Also his aura, when not subsumed by Ozma’s, will turn out to actually be orange. Like a pumpkin. Because his Ozian allusion isn’t Tip OR Dorothy, it’s Jack Pumpkinhead)

Oscar’s semblance is… essentially, a hyper-specialized form of empathy: he can take the words people say and unfold them to reveal the things they mean, the feelings they’re trying to express but can’t communicate clearly, and then find the words to articulate those things back. He’s an interpreter, not of language but of emotions. He’s able to very quickly talk through to the heart of a problem, and he’s preternaturally good at listening in a way that makes people feel seen and heard. It also has the side effect of making him almost impossible to lie to.

Even with Ozma in his head, there are traces of this latent ability eking through to the surface—his determination to connect with Ironwood throughout V7, his intuitive sense for what to say to Hazel and Emerald to earn their trust, and even earlier, his realization that Ozpin is lying and his ability to break through long enough to spill Jinn’s name: these are all inklings of what could be, if not smothered by Ozma’s curse.

That sort of rising-to-the-surface is very rare among Ozma’s hosts. With Oscar, it’s happening partly because he’s fighting so hard to hold on for as long as he can, partly because his upbringing gave him a pretty strong sense of identity to begin with, and partly because the nature of his semblance itself resists falsehood and obfuscation. Latent though it is, it still gives him a firm place to stand when he pushes back and asserts himself against Ozma’s resignation. This struggle also has the effect of deepening the potential of his semblance—in effect, training it before it even properly manifests—so that once he’s free and it emerges fully he gets in tune with it fast.

[bestworstcase]

i am revising my estimation on what rwby beyond will entail perhaps out of wishful thinking but: since they let the cat out of the bag on salem razed vale with the animatic that means salem razing vale is conceivably something that beyond might touch on. maybe not if her motives for doing so constitute a major spoiler (which is possible but seems unlikely), but that is a big “holy fuck” moment to drop in the Forbidden Eleventh Hour Episode Animatic and. hm. hmmm

i would really like to get a glimpse of the context. salem left atlas with herself and cinder; she can spawn hundreds of grimm per second but came to atlas with a giant whale and millions of grimm, which seems to have taken her several weeks if not a few months to put together. if the civilian retreat traveled very quickly southward to vacuo it’s conceivable that they arrive within hours of the destruction, which does leave salem time to have whipped up another storm.

but retreating so hastily would have necessarily meant leaving a lot of people to die (or be captured—depends what “there’s nothing left” means, really) and the longer it took the civilian retreat to get to vale, the less likely it is that salem stormed vale with a massive fleet of grimm a la atlas.

the other possibilities i can think of are:

salem and cinder flattened an entire city, which has horrifying implications as to how much salem has been holding back up to this point;

she cracked the wyvern out of gay baby jail and let it do the heavy lifting;

“there’s nothing left” means that salem encored her trick of ripping open the continental crust to make a grimm river, but under vale this time, cratering the entire city into a lake of grimm (which also has horrifying implications as to how much she’s been holding back before);

salem didn’t attack vale so much as she was seen approaching beacon tower and mass hysteria ensued, leading to the city being swamped by the local grimm again.

ponders.

or vale was a casualty of an extremely destructive attempt to brute force break through the extra protections ozpin arranged for the beacon vault. what that might look like practically is an open question, but… i mean, i’ve been thinking for a while on the possibility of ozpin weaving traps into those protections.

there is also the more interesting question of why. beacon fell -> grimm pulled out of vale within days -> surgical strike on haven -> held her forces back from attacking mantle -> no grimm in atlesian subway tunnels -> (ironwood forced the fall of atlas while salem was taking a dirt nap) -> razing vale to the ground apparently. what changed?

“people saw salem and panicked” seems like both a copout and also the explanation that tracks with what we’ve seen from her before and what we know of the situation. “something happened that made salem decide it was necessary to delete vale” is the more narratively punchy option and the one i hope they’re going for. in pursuit of a new world, no cost is too great, and all.

sighs. when glinda lays siege to the emerald city, the witch mombi magically disguises herself in the form of a rose, and general jinjur aligns herself with mombi in a bid to remain in power. salem has put a lot of trust in summer to hold beacon for her, never doubting her loyalty after a year or more without progress. if that trust were betrayed…

(<- NERVOUS.)

the other obvious possibilities is brutal overreaction to a perceived threat to cinder (“if anyone even looks at cinder wrong i will break this wyvern out of its shell” WAS A JOKE I WAS JOKING–). or she’s removing vale from the equation specifically to broaden the search radius for the crown, and/or now suspects that the vault is in vale. that glynda “emblem is a crown” goodwitch is being kept offscreen still is interesting in that regard, obviously.

i don’t think it’s a matter of salem feeling emboldened by possession of two relics, if only because she wasn’t emboldened by having the lamp in atlas, and also her character arc in v8 was firmly oriented around cinder and the beacon relic, in that order. that was the basis for my thinking that she would make a beeline for vale next, which is exactly what she did. my assumption was that she planned to dig in and wait for a counteroffensive to become necessary to hold the vacuo coalition together, which i did not guess would include razing vale—because i thought she might take a gamble on pitching her side to vale, to remove a pillar of support from the vacuo coalition; razing vale is a different tactical approach to the same end.

so it’s possible that salem simply made the calculation that razing vale was the most effective way to achieve her longer term strategic goal (eliminate vale as an ally to the vacuo coalition and prohibit a siege while she digs in at beacon). it comes at the cost of hardening the vacuan coalition by demonstrating that she’s capable of flattening two kingdoms in a span of weeks and giving mistral more reason to be nervous, but it also tells the world in no uncertain terms exactly where she is, which removes an obstacle to the counteroffensive she is probably counting on to deliver the sword to her.

narratively i think it’s a really exciting choice. the pressure it puts on the salem-summer-cinder dynamic stands to be very interesting and i would like to see it.

[etruatcaelum]

On Silver Bloodlines.

As noted here, every argent in history is descended from one of the eight children Ozma has borne or sired with partners other than Salem. Some of these lineages are considerably older than others.

Lurline and Marvel Henkle.

Born in the mid-Third Era to Ozma’s fourth life, Ostwin Henkle, and his wife Pastora. The marriage predated Ozma’s reincarnation by a little more than a year; to say it was always fraught thereafter would be an understatement.

Ostwin raised the children as warriors. From a young age, they knew the tale of the God of Light, his relics, and the malevolent witch Salem; but they never learned of their father’s reincarnations, nor of their past with Salem. Lurline discovered the power of their eyes first, but both she and her sibling became equally formidable in time.

Her semblance gave her the ability to speak with animals, and as an adult she became a ranger, roaming far and wide and never staying in one place for too long. She had several children throughout her life—all of whom she left behind with their fathers.

Marvel, however, as a young person saved the life of a local lord, who then welcomed them as a vassal. They entered into this lord’s service as a knight and remained loyally at his side their whole life long. After half a decade of faithful service, they also fell in love with—and eventually married—his weaponsmith, with whom they had five children.

The cultural legacy of the silver-eyed warriors—aloof, noble vagabonds and faithful guardians of humanity—has flowed down generation to generation from these two.

Terebinth.

First and only heir of Emperor Zartosht, Ozma’s eighth life. Zartosht ruled the Perigean Emperor during the twilight of the pre-collapse Third Era. He was a troubled and enigmatic man, intensely religious, paranoid: some folklorists believe he may have been the original inspiration for ‘The Indecisive King.’ His daughter was only four years old when he died, leaving her a child queen and her mother, Chione, her regent.

Terebinth was in her late forties when Perigee’s sacred mountain—the one now known as Mount Atrox—abruptly and violently erupted for the first time in history. The empire’s crown jewel, its capital city, nestled at the foot of the mountain, was buried in lava and atrum and boiling ash.

All but Terebinth perished. Her light had never awoken—she had inherited her father’s fretful, dour disposition—and so, when the searing heat of the new volcano’s pyroclastic flow engulfed her and turned her insides to twisted glass, the light erupted back. She did not die; the gates of death opened to her and her light opened to the gate.

So Terebinth is not quite alive, and neither is she dead. The only thing that can be said for certain is that she is not human anymore: what remains is a wraithlike creature of black glass and silver mist who haunts the wilderness. From a distance, she is easily taken for a grimm, but she is as dangerous to them as she is to people—and, to people, she is far more dangerous than a grimm.

Ozma believes she’s something Salem made; much of Salem’s interest in silver-eyed warriors is motivated by a sort of repulsed fascination with her. Terebinth is also one of the cracks in the gate out of which silver bleeds through into auras and dust.

Polly Diggs-Crombé.

Born to Estelle Diggs, Ozma’s twenty-seventh life, early in the Sixth Era, a little more than a thousand years ago. Estelle was one of what Ozma thinks of as their “smaller” lives: she never had great ambitions, preferring to focus on safeguarding the farming community into which she had been born in the Valende Republic. Her wife, Rain Crombé, was a childhood sweetheart; Polly was the youngest of four, although terrible misfortune—in the form of famine and illness—meant that she was the only child to survive into adulthood.

Having grown up indelibly marked by the tragedy of her elder siblings’ deaths, Polly did not become a warrior: she devoted herself to healing. As an adult, she left home first to study medicine in the capital, and then to travel the world, aiding the sick and wounded wherever she found them. In the modern day, she is immortalized in myth as both Saint Polla, a patron of midwives and undertakers, and Kalé, a minor god of health and purity.

Elagia and Dirge of Pinemoor.

Twins born to Ozma’s thirty-third life, Azaria of Pinemoor. Much like Lurline and Marvel before them, they were raised by their mother as warriors with knowledge of Salem’s existence and the war for humanity’s salvation.

In adulthood, Elagia took up leadership of the Knights of Iliaster after Azaria’s death, while Dirge followed his wanderlust to the far corners of the world.

Jericho and Sharon Vermeil.

The last of Ozma’s offspring, the (illegitimate) children of King Osiander and his closest ally, Dame Hyemalis Vermeil. Their affair was a subject of swirling rumor but never proven; the children had not only silver eyes but also—as their mother was the winter maiden, and their father the one from whom that power had long ago been given—a touch of creation.

Jericho, the elder, had a semblance that could knit even grievous wounds closed in the blink of an eye, leaving the flesh painless and whole as if it had never been injured in the first place. Sharon, three years his junior, could connect her soul with another person and, even at incredible distance, see through their eyes, hear through their ears, and position herself perfectly in relation to them, as she pleased. He served as a battlefield medic throughout the Great War, restoring countless soldiers and civilians alike from the threshold of death; she became Vale’s spymaster.

The Valean monarchy ended with Osiander—partly for the sake of avoiding a succession crisis, as the king had no legitimate heirs. After the war, Jericho and Sharon settled into civilian life. He died childless, never having been interested in romance or parenthood. Sharon bore one son: a quiet, hard-working boy she called Eglantine, who married a woman named Ginger Rose—Summer’s parents.

Eglantine Vermeil and Ginger Rose were indeed miners, for the Vermeil family had always taken an ambivalent view towards Hyemalis’s bastard children (allegedly sired by the old king or no), and Sharon, wanting nothing to do with them, had raised her son without any trappings of aristocracy.

However, although he never bothered to acquire a license, Eglantine received training equivalent to that of a huntsman from his mother and had his eyes to boot. He and Ginger were drawn to Visage partly by his fear for the fledgling settlement, and fear of the dark force his mother had warned him lurked in the heart of that continent.

[bestworstcase]

So, Taiyangs arc will end with him acknowledging that he was not the best father and husband/partner. Then, to and reestablish a healthy relationship with all parties involved in as much as he can.

Im just wondering how Taiyang will get there. We haven't seen his reaction to the news that Yang and Ruby "died" yet. So that could be his turning point.

But if it isn't, I don't know what could be a bigger wake-up call than your kids died and you weren't there to help. Yang and Ruby's wagon trip to find their mother part two, perhaps?

(Could everything that Yang and Ruby have done so far be considered wagon trip part two?)

if he’s been trying to like power of love coax summer back to the Good Side this whole time then summer um

not wavering after salem razes vale

would certainly be a wake-up call, i think. of the "oh. laughs nervously. i’m in danger" kind—not that i think summer particularly wants to hurt him and salem is obviously disinclined to kill summer’s friends/family (<- "you disappoint me" after tyrian claims to have killed qrow, "he might be on our list of people we’d very much like dead" says watts but salem conspicuously hasn’t lifted a finger to try making that happen even when she assassinated qrow’s. entire mistrali spy network. etc) but Tai Won’t Know That. and of course cinder is both a wild card and the limit of salem’s tolerance in that if it came to a choice between cinder and ruby or yang i think salem would pancake summer’s girls without blinking.

even before that he’d also—given that global comms are down—be learning about ruby and yangs apparent deaths from salem, whether directly or indirectly through summer. and that’s fun.

in general i think as soon as salem Turns Up at beacon with cinder and two relics in hand then whatever wishful thinking situation is going on with tai and summer is probably gonna crumble real fucking fast. bc like… it’s one thing to tell himself summer is just brainwashed or misguided or too afraid to leave while salem is a distant abstract monster somewhere Out There, quite another to do it while salem is Here and summer’s like looking back and forth between salem and cinder and going oh you want to raze vale to force the sword into play? sure ok i’ll get my axe about it.

i won’t entirely Rule Out the possibility that summer might betray salem at this juncture strictly on the basis of the ozian allusion (glinda and jinjur are opposed in the book, mombi’s illusory rose, etc) BUT i don’t think it’s very likely given rwby’s narrative setup and the truth-is-hard-to-come-by storyteller themes 🤔 this is a version of the story where glinda is not Universally Beloved and jinjur is her general; if we read the god of light as mombi, then summer’s silver eyes—incorrectly supposed to be a gift from light—are intuitively the illusory rose and i think it makes more sense to anticipate the deception/illusion to be this idea everyone has of the Heroic Martyred Paragon. glinda’s the one who sees through the illusion and reveals the truth. etc.

it’s also—laughs helplessly—congruent with the wonderland (musical) stuff they did in v9 with ruby as the child-looking-for-her-lost-mother mirror image. perfect writer/perfect mother/perfect wife -> perfect huntress/perfect mother/perfect wife. it um. well im rotating it in my mind all the time. the lost mother is the hatter. get it?

(<- "get it?" i say about smth that will basically only make sense to me bfrgscbk sorry you’ll just have to trust me on this one)

[bestworstcase]

hi it's me again this might be too much of an ask but do you think it would be possible to do a list of all the allusions that Salem is/has? not her own personal ones (rapunzel etc.) but the role she has in other people's stories (I ask because I made a joke to someone about hansel and gretel and went "hazel and gretchen" -> "salem is the witch to hazel's hansel in a world where neither hansel nor gretel survives" which also factors into the "gretchen is the spring maiden and died during Summer's Mission" theory in which case raven would be her witch) not just all the ones where she's The Witch (archetype) but also other antagonists or roles like the wolf to ruby and summer (wherein summer is both the grandmother and the woodcutter) or the fairy godmother to cinder if that's too much to ask of you I understand in which case I'll have to make a chart with my own red string and thumbtacks

um so basically:

<- this is how the story goes.

to break it down:

CORE ALLUSIONS.

in approximate order of importance, these are: maiden-in-the-tower tales, the marvelous land of oz, cinderella, and the little prince. structurally it isn't as complex as the above diagram makes it appear because the petrosinella -> persinette -> rapunzel -> petrosinella circle and the ozian narrative are the same narrative through different eyes. cinder and oscar are the proverbial twins and summer rose is important connective tissue gluing everything together.

maiden-in-the-tower: - salem is always the maiden - ozma is always the prince - the god of light is always the captor

petrosinella: - the og divine rebellion - failed bc dark sided with light

persinette: - the ozlem kingdom - ozma Left Her to escape the curse

rapunzel: - war for the relics - ozma is the blinded prince + the pilot - both are stranded in the desert - truth will rise etc etc leading to:

petrosinella, again: - the broken fairytale to be mended - the hound is the dog - cinder is the lion - summer is the wolf - "you saved yourself" <- the girl in the tower comes due

the marvelous land of oz: - ozma is ozma - ozpin is the wizard + tippetarius --> meaning he "chose" his curse - the god of light is mombi (cursed ozma) - salem is glinda (searching for ozma) - oscar is jack pumpkinhead (tip's "son" + existential dread) - summer rose is general jinjur (holding the emerald city) - qrow is the scarecrow (ruling in the wizard's absence) --> the scarecrow and jinjur fight over the crown - ironwood is nick chopper (emperor of winkie country) - lionheart is the soldier with green whiskers (coward, traitor) - raven is the woggle bug (=maiden of knowledge) --> mutters in silver wishing pill only the bug can use - mutters about silver eyes and mombi's rose - glinda forces mombi to tell the truth, free ozma, and then relinquish her magical power. hello

cinderella: - salem is the grave of her mother / the fairy godmother - summer is the stepmother (probably) - ruby and yang are the stepsisters - the crown...?

the little prince: - ozma is the pilot, see prev re: blind in the desert - oscar is the little prince - (ruby in V9 is also the little prince) - (summer is her rose; salem is the sheep)

MINOR / CHARACTER ALLUSIONS

hansel and gretel: - hazel is hansel, gretchen is gretel - salem is the witch - ozpin is the evil mother - gretchen dies in the woods under mysterious circumstances - hansel pushes the witch into the oven because it's what gretel would have done. laugh!

sherlock holmes: - watts is dr. watson (but evil) - salem is holmes (but evil) - mumbles. cinder is adler (outmaneuvers them both)

the scorpion and the...: - tyrian is the scorpion - "f. pickerel" is a frog - qrow is also a frog - salem is the turtle

little red riding hood: - ruby is little red - the Idea Of Summer Rose is the mother - the Real Summer is the big bad wolf + the huntsman - salem is the grandmother - witches can be right giants can be good etc - the key here is that the grandmother is the goal; ruby is trying to beat salem. the wolf is the obstacle; summer joined salem. the huntsman is the resolution; summer joined salem for a good reason.

book of job conspiracy theory: - salem is job - ozma + rwbyjnor is eliphaz et al - the god of light is the satan - the god of darkness is the deity

yeah

[bestworstcase]

cinder is the red queen, summer is the white queen. one runs hard to stay in place, the other lives backwards. if cinder maps to an oz character that remains to be seen, but summer is general jinjur (which perhaps foreshadows a rupture between her and salem, although salem being directly involved in beacon’s fall suggests otherwise). cinder is cinderella, summer is both the rose and the one who scatters the rose (and there’s interesting synchronicity there with summer being the rose to ruby’s prince and also the white queen, who is a sheep.) (also mombi disguises herself as a rose so like. Squints.) cinder Might be jellia (if only because jellia is unaccounted for and also, points at cinder’s turn as symbolic incarnation of light’s judgment, points at jellia in the guise of mombi) which would track as far as her relation to summer. summer is the burning rose, cinder is the flame. what i’m getting at here is. who is summer rose in the context of the cinderella layer. if salem is the (wicked) fairy then is summer perhaps the (good) stepmother, possibly due for a direct reversal of rhodes (the ‘fallen’ huntress who reaches out not to condemn but to help?) um. cinder “killed” summer’s kids. so the rhodes foundation is there in theory. the white queen remembers what happens next

[bestworstcase]

do you think there's any merit to a little prince-and-the-rose metaphor in which Spring is the rose and Ozpin is the prince? and including the poem, Raven is the one who "scatters the petals of the rose" (mercy kills the rose that couldn't protect itself)

the one killing the rose would be the sheep in any case (<- that sound you hear is me bodily wrestling the unhinged SHEEP SUMMER ROSE WHITE QUEEN tangent away from myself. some other time)

but no i’m not convinced there’s any configuration in which it’s sensible to interpret ozpin (or ozma) as the prince to anyone’s rose, if only for the obvious problem of him being jaded and symbolically blind. he is, of course, the stranded pilot to oscar’s prince (<- the prince’s childlike love and wonder clear the eyes of the weary man’s heart, reawakening him to the magic of the world; he’s the blind man lost and searching for his love in the wasteland twice over) and insofar as ozma could be retrofitted to the little prince given his alienness to remnant, the immediate problem that emerges is that salem would in that case have to be his rose and there is no plausible way to argue that because it’s nonsense. 

with ozpin and any maiden the core issue is that he… doesn’t love the maidens and certainly at no point does he seem to have taken care of them (indeed in the fairytale he made of the first four it is they who took care of him); they are, ultimately, quasi-replacement-daughters whom he weaponizes in his war with salem—deeply deeply cynical way to (not) handle his grief. he is retreading the final duel over and over again at global scale.

(if “dancing and fighting aren’t so different; two partners interlocked…” delivered in the gooiest tone ozpin has ever used doesn’t make you SCREAM LAUGH every time you hear it…)

summer is likewise thorny (snrk) in that there is no evidence to suggest ozpin was ever especially close to her or had any kind of parental bond with her (and the distrust evinced by her secret shenanigans with raven would suggest that she didn’t feel especially close to him, as would her decision to jump ship to salem’s cause—see also general jinjur).

generally my thinking as of now on the basis of what we glimpsed in V9 and the temporal dovetailing of spring running away / gretchen rainart dying as a student / raven having some unknown involvement in spring’s death for which she clearly feels guilty is that A) spring was in fact gretchen rainart and B) all of this is about her, and her death, and whatever the fuck happened when she and summer and raven and salem all collided that night. 

it is vaguely interesting to mark that there were four and all of them have significant associations with knowledge (salem: the only character who knows her secrets + hatred of deception + keen interest in the lamp; summer: silver eyes [truth will rise/revealed by mirrored eyes] + the mystery of her disappearance; raven: alludes to the woggle-bug + spy + became maiden of knowledge; gretchen: died as a student + probable spring maiden + symbol of ozpin’s deceit). so on the one hand, it seems… obvious that SOMETHING BIG came out that night; obvious, specifically, that salem decided to talk. the question is to whom and what her audience did with that information. it is also at least notionally possible, if the fourth person was spring, that they used the lamp’s first question (<- i do not think it likely however because ozpin kept her name a secret and habitually swore that the lamp had no questions left.)

on the other rwby doesn’t often pile up singular qualities like that; in the narrative sense it seems inevitable that this ended in calamity because… knowledge/knowledge/knowledge/knowledge is not a balanced configuration. but you know what is? salem offering knowledge, summer making a choice, and gretchen’s death making raven the new maiden: knowledge/choice/destruction/creation. 

everything adds up so strongly to summer joining salem that the missing piece does really feel like it’s actually… what happened to number four. gretchen or whoever else the spring maiden might have been. is it that raven mercy-killed the proverbial first rose of spring? the only things we know FOR SURE are that raven was involved enough to feel like the killer and that she was the one the spring maiden thought of; circumstantially, salem and/or summer were probably there too. tenuously, there is the possible parallelism with jaune and penny (in which case summer probably struck the killing blow, as the proto-cinder).

in… all of this ozpin is fairly irrelevant except insofar as he presumes summer to be dead and spring to be alive (but missing) and is wrong on both counts; which if put into the little prince framing would again make him the pilot, forever wondering and guessing. the prince seeks out the rose, one way or another; for summer that tracks with ruby as the prince, and if the last spring maiden is anyone’s rose—well, gretchen, hazel. obv. though i think that’s tentative at best and the presumptive broadening of allusion is generally not very speculatively sound (<- unless you’re me in V9 hitting 9.8 and going insane but THAT came down to rwby being unusually direct.)

and with the rainart twins there is the much more straightforward allusion to hansel and gretel; gretel outwits the witch, gretchen presumably did not (and in that case bequeathed the maiden of knowledge to a different twin who does outwit the witch—jot that down as another point in favor of summer being the proto-cinder who cut gretchen/spring down.)

rubs head

this is the problem with rwby really it’s too fucking well put together

[bestworstcase]

& since i’m on the subject of allusions tonight:

let’s talk about rwby’s actual oz allusions

so, generally speaking, the fandom—understandably perplexed by how tangential or even superficial rwby’s reference to the wizard of oz appears to be—takes the oz allusions in one of two ways: either, 1. the core ozian characters are deconstructions of the correlating oz character [the scarecrow drinks, the tin man throws his heart away, etc.] or 2. the oz allusions are a deliberate red herring intended to misdirect attention from the deeper or truer allusion to whatever, whence the g.u.n. theory or the bastardized norse myth madlibbing and so forth; or on occasion both at once.

the first camp has a lot of interesting things to say that i would probably find persuasive were it not for the fact that they also keep wrestling unsatisfyingly with the persistent questions of:

1. who is dorothy?

2. what about raven and summer and tai? (oh my)

3. how do the ozma/wizard/tip and ozma/ozpin/oscar trifectas fit together?

and the answers to all of these questions are in fact pretty straightforward...

...the trick is just that rwby isn’t alluding to the wizard of oz.

for the uninitiated there are a lot of oz books. there are-- there are so many oz books. fortunately for my sanity however rwby appears to be focusing primarily on one, the marvelous land of oz, which occurs not too very long after the wizard’s departure from oz at the end of the wonderful wizard of oz.

now, i will say up front that you are going to look at this list and immediately go “wait. what?” but just... trust me, ok? here we go.

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? god of light → mombi* ozma → ozma/tippetarius ozpin → the wizard oscar → jack pumpkinhead glynda → good witch of the ✨north✨ [NOT GLINDA] theodore  → dorothy gale lionheart → the soldier with the green whiskers ironwood → nick chopper [the tin woodman] qrow  → the scarecrow raven  → the woggle-bug taiyang → the cowardly lion [provisionally**] maria → the sawhorse summer rose → general jinjur and, last but not least, salem → glinda the good [TRUST. ME.]

*the god of darkness is sir not appearing in this book, but if rwby does what i think it will re: theodore, i’d place my bets on the nome king.

**taiyang is an unknown quantity in that i don’t think his primary role in the narrative has revealed itself yet; he might alternatively turn out to be the gump or the queen of the field mice. my money is on the lion, though, because the lion is also sir not appearing in this book but, like dorothy, appears in the next as a member of ozma’s retinue.

MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ ANY% NO GLITCH—

long story short, in the before times the land of oz was ruled by a king named pastoria who took up with the fairy-queen lurline and had a baby, ozma, rightful heir to the ozian throne; shortly thereafter, oscar diggs crash landed in oz, deposed pastoria, disappeared the infant princess by giving her to mombi, sorceress of the north, and became ✨the wizard✨. ...some... amount of time later, dorothy crash lands in oz, yellow brick road, silver slippers, smashes one witch and melts another, yada yada, the wizard sails off back to omaha in his hot air balloon, CUE MARVELOUS LAND; the starting positions are thus:

the scarecrow sits on the throne of oz in the emerald city, having been appointed to rule in the wizard’s stead on account of being Very Wise.

winkie country, liberated from the tyranny of the wicked witch of the west, is now the domain of the tin woodman.

dorothy is back in kansas where everything is grey and sandy and horrible.

the lion is...somewhere, presumably doing king-of-the-forest things.

glinda the good is occupied with research [trying to find out what the wizard did with ozma] in her home in quadling country, to the south.

QUOTE, the winged monkeys are now the slaves of glinda the good, who owns the golden cap that commands their services, END QUOTE.

mombi transformed the infant ozma into a boy named tippetarius because, why not, and raised him as her ward on a farm in gillikin country, to the north.

tip is a teenager and he does teenager things like making a life-sized puppet with a jack-o-lantern head to scare mombi with, as one does, and mombi has about had enough of this so she brews up a potion to turn him into a marble statue, as one does, and tip who does not especially want to be turned into a marble statue instead steals a pepper-box full of magic powder that makes things come to life, and runs away with his newly animate bestie/son jack pumpkinhead, AS ONE DOES. subsequently uses the magic powder to make a wooden sawhorse come to life so they don’t have to hoof it all the way to the emerald city.

the sawhorse is born with a limp and the personality of an octogenarian with no fucks left to give and also he periodically goes deaf on account of his ears breaking off, so when i say maria calavera is the sawhorse—

ANYWAY, minor hijinks ensue. jack blithely accepts everything his dear father says without question because his head is a pumpkin and he has been sapient for approximately eight hours, the terrible trio splits up for a bit on account of tippetarius falling off the sawhorse who likes to go real fast, consequently while jack and the sawhorse make it to the emerald city and meet the scarecrow, tip falls behind and crosses paths with general jinjur and her army of revolt.

jinjur is sick of the way things are and the powers that be and is therefore en route, armed with a pair of very glittery very pointy knitting needles and a lot of other girls outfitted in the same, to conquer the emerald city. tip is not about this revolution thing but tags along because he wanted to appeal to the scarecrow for help with the marble statue nonsense anyway; upon arrival jinjur and her army conquer the emerald city in approximately 0.2 seconds on account of the entire royal army being composed of one (1) man, the soldier with the green whiskers who guards the gates but squeals and books it at the first hint of a brandished needle.

tip races to the palace well ahead of the girls, who are busily sacking the city, to warn the scarecrow of the situation and reconvene with the rest of terrible trio, whereafter they and the scarecrow leave the cowardly soldier to his fate and gallop like the dickens to escape the city, heading west to regroup with the tin woodman. jack is now wracked by existential dread on account of the scarecrow having told him that pumpkins rot, meaning he spends the rest of the book worrying about his imminent decay and rapidly dwindling lifespan, this is fine dot jpg.

one unfortunate incident with a river and some drying-out and a nap later, they reach winkie country and rendezvous with *ahem* the magnificent! nickel-plated tin woodman, celebrated! emperor [it wounds his pride to be called only a king] of the winkies, nick chopper. who sweeps the scarecrow up in a hug because of how delighted! he is to see him again, tells jack not to be such a downer about the my-head-is-slowly-inevitably-rotting thing, and whose immediate response upon learning that the emerald city has been conquered is to declare, quote, we do not need an army; we four, with the aid of my gleaming axe, are enough to strike terror into the hearts of the rebels, end quote, also everybody gets tidied up and repaired and the scarecrow’s strutting by the time they disembark again.

somewhat less minor hijinks ensue on account of mombi not being pleased about tip skipping town and attempting to waylay them by means of dazzling, blinding illusions and, when that fails, dramatically altering landscape in hopes of getting them lost. the sawhorse breaks his leg and the group encounters the woggle-bug, who is very large and very keen to impress upon them that he is, having snuck into a schoolroom long ago and listened in on classes for months, thoroughly educated; eventually he was caught by the professor, transformed via magnifying glass into his present size, and subsequently ran away to do woggle-bug things. on his suggestion they fix the sawhorse’s leg by amputating jack’s, because jack is riding anyway owing to his poorly-fitted knees, and using that as a prosthetic for the sawhorse [LAUGHS NERVOUSLY]. from there the woggle-bug swiftly proceeds to earn the whole group’s ire by making an offensive number of puns at their expense. they navigate through four more illusory obstacles [a raging river; a granite cliff; a writhing maze of dancing roads; a wall of fire] with the aid of the queen of the field mice.

on making it to the emerald city they are promptly captured by jinjur, who plans to dismantle everyone except tippetarius on the grounds of their not being human, but is interrupted by the timely arrival of some mice who frighten her out of the room long enough for the gang to escape by constructing a... thing, called the gump, out of a pair of sofas and a stuffed elk-like creature’s head and various other bits and bobs and animated with the final pinch of magic powder. it flies them out of the emerald city and overshoots quadling country by a wide enough margin to crash them into a nest of nasty jackdaws somewhere not in oz, a misadventure which mainly serves to facilitate the discovery of a secret compartment within the now-emptied pepper-box and, inside that, three silver pills that grant a wish when swallowed.

tip tries one to wish the gump repaired, which doesn’t work because it pains him so badly that he instead wishes he’d never taken it; the woggle-bug does the same and succeeds, they fly back home, the pills are lost, and they reach quadling country at last.

the squad attempts to fill glinda in. she already knows everything.

she fills them in on what she’s been up to, presents evidence mombi aided the wizard in his scheme to disappear ozma, and marches with them to reclaim the emerald city, intending to capture mombi and force her to reveal the truth. further illusion-based hijinks ensue of which the most potentially interesting as it pertains to rwby is that mombi transforms herself into a red rose in an effort to escape detection.

glinda sees through the ruse. mombi transforms herself into a griffin and flees, pursued relentlessly by glinda until she collapses from exhaustion in the desert waste beyond the border of oz—whereupon glinda lassos her with a golden thread that stifles her magic, drags her bodily back to the emerald city, and demands that she tell the truth or else die by glinda’s hand. mombi tries to lie, glinda is furious and having none of it, and mombi begrudgingly reveals tip’s true identity, whereupon glinda forces her to undo the curse and then strips her of her magical power forever; tip is restored to her true self, jinjur is swiftly deposed, and peace restored, hooray!, the end.

QUESTIONS!

WHY ARE YOU SO SURE SUMMER IS JINJUR? frankly a decent case could be made for interpreting cinder as the allusion to jinjur instead: jinjur is a wrathful but cunning scullery maid raging against the powers that be, and after all it is cinder who sacks beacon academy—i.e., the emerald city stand-in.

but here’s the thing: after routing the royal army, jinjur installs herself as the queen of oz and rules without interruption for most of the story. she is not ousted from this position until the final chapter. cinder is grievously injured before the battle is even properly ended, returns immediately to salem’s side, and has been a thorn in her side and also the sides of the heroes ever since—meanwhile, all this time, salem has had an unknown lieutenant stationed at beacon, searching for the crown. somebody has been holding that throne, as it were, and we have a certain silver-eyed warrior still unaccounted for.

further, jinjur’s army of revolt makes quite a conspicuous show of being united from every province, and she herself wears the colors of all four; in the event summer turns out to be working for salem of her own accord, which i think likely, her presumable reason is something along the lines of having burnt out and shattered under the pressure of being the ideal huntress, the lone guardian, the blessed warrior—precisely in the same way that we have seen ruby begin to crack under the same—and this, i think, dovetails tidily with the imagery of jinjur’s revolt. a turncoat summer rose who still holds to ozpin’s ideal of strength and peace through unity, who is perhaps reinforcing salem’s numbers at beacon by recruiting the people of vale, is what ozpin asked her to become, turned against him for how she suffered in becoming.

also, look at this flower. common name, malay rose:

it’s not a true rose; it’s etlingera venusta, and it belongs to the ginger family.

sidebar, i don’t think cinder has an ozian allusion except insofar as i suppose she performs the functional role of glinda’s army through her relation to salem. she’s, well, cinderella, and in being cinderella also a symbolic repetition of salem through her rapunzel aspect—cinder echoes the desperately furious girl in the tower, the fairytale heroine trapped by forces beyond her control, not the formidable sorceress who would lay waste to the gods.

BUT SALEM AS GLINDA, THOUGH? REALLY?

while it is clear that rwby’s primary reference is to marvelous land, there are a handful of overt nods to the film adaptation of wizard of oz specifically, in theodore’s ruby gloves and the black-and-white photo of the girl in gingham with the little black dog. naming the good witch of the north glynda as a nod to the film (and pop culture generally) conflating the two is hardly out of the question, and a tidy bit of narrative sleight-of-hand besides.

and, listen. it’s not just enslaving the flying monkeys and it isn’t just serenely running mombi into the ground and forcing her to reveal the truth and undo the harm she did to ozma; it’s also not just that glinda the good plays a critical narrative role following the wizard’s departure and the good witch of the north does not. it’s also that of the pair glinda is the more powerful and more formidable by an order of magnitude, and indeed glinda is said to be ageless, ancient, and perhaps the most powerful sorceress in the land of oz; it’s also that the ozian color-coding checks out in both directions (in glinda’s quadling country, everything is red; and gillikin country is purple); it’s also that glynda goodwitch was faultlessly loyal to a secretive cabal and believed in ozpin, as the good witch of the north believed in the wizard, whereas salem, like glinda the good, knows ozpin for a fraud, despises emerald for her deceptive semblance, and has a keen intuition and a short temper for being lied to.

the only respect in which salem and glinda do not, within the context of rwby’s ozian narrative, almost perfectly align is that salem is an antagonist and glinda is not—but here let me remind you that rwby’s mombi is the god of light, with her deceptive shape-changing and illusions reimagined as defter subterfuge and symbolically intertwined with the blinding of rapunzel’s prince. the god of light poisoned ozma’s ear against salem so well that he persuaded ozma to drink the potion and become the wizard of his own volition, cursed and blind to the true nature of the gods, his mandate, and his lost love.

but tippetarius learns the truth and finds ozma again; rapunzel’s tears heal the ruined eyes of her prince.

where do you think rwby is going with this?

AND LEO LIONHEART, THE LION FAUNUS, ISN’T THE COWARDLY LION?!

he’s the easily-cowed and fully-bearded guardian of the closest thing rwby’s scarecrow has to an emerald city to administer on the wizard’s behalf, and he is in this capacity an army of one because he’s sent every other warrior in the faculty away and sold half the huntsmen in mistral out to salem. salem sends her needling bastard of a henchperson to menace him and lionheart folds like wet cardboard, handing over the keys to the vault without a whisper of resistance. and once the battle for haven is ended, the former allies he stabbed in the back shrug and leave him to his fate at salem’s hands.

leonine faunus or not, the role lionheart plays is precisely that of the soldier with the green whiskers, the solitary and pathetically inept guardian who betrays the scarecrow and his allies out of panicked cowardice.

meanwhile the cowardly lion does not appear in marvelous land at all, but he does figure in ozma of oz—the third book—wherein he professes himself a coward still but acts no less bravely than he ever did, now a loyal member of ozma’s retinue and accompanied by his new friend, the hungry tiger. taiyang, who has either been doing big important secret cult things or else trying to psych himself up to leave his empty nest depression cabin ever since beacon fell and ozpin died, is a much likelier candidate for being the cowardly lion’s true analogue by far.

IS RAVEN JUST THE WOGGLE-BUG BECAUSE SHE’S KNOWLEDGE?

that’s part of it but not the entirety; note that the woggle-bug is not merely intelligent but gleaned all of his knowledge by spying, for no other reason than burning curiosity; note the professor who caught him and irrevocably changed him, for better or for worse, and his hasty escape for fear of being exploited thereafter; note that he is pompous and anxious and performs intelligence far more than he shows it, and note that his often-callous and sometimes-snide commentary is met with such sharp hostility by the others that at one point nick chopper implies a threat to murder him if he makes another pun at a companion’s expense.

and note, finally, that the woggle-bug does not properly enter the narrative until after the protagonists leave winkie country, the province for which atlas is very obviously an analogue. raven played a major role in volume five, of course, one which thoroughly alienated her from the rest of the ozian characters on both sides of the conflict... but then she vanished into the ether without a shred of resolution for anything but the question of whether the relic of knowledge would be retrieved and by whom, and if that isn’t a mere prelude in her character arc i’ll eat somebody’s hat.

and as for what her future role in the story might entail. well. three silver pills that grant you wishes—and one that poisons tip when he tries,  the same one the woggle-bug uses to mend their way home. three silver-eyed warriors ostensibly blessed by the god of light—and one a turncoat poisoned by the unbearable weight of ozpin’s ideals.

we still don’t know what raven knows, or who she learnt it from.

IF THE SILVER WISH PILLS ARE SILVER-EYED WARRIORS THEN, MARIA?

to activate the pills you need to swallow them and then count up to seventeen by two. the sawhorse is the one who solves the riddle, which is to start with half one, double it, and then count up by two from one to seventeen.

...WHAT WAS THAT YOU SAID ABOUT FOUR ILLUSIONS AND A MOUSE?

the ever after may be bleeding wonderland out of every frame—and oh boy is it!—but, look, what is rwby if not a gleeful mishmash of inspirations and in the trailer and preview clip alone we’ve got a helpful mouse and three of the four [twisting, impossible paths? check. impassible cliff? check. walls of fire? check, twice over]. as obstacles go a torrential river crossing is not exactly out of left field in any setting—and then there’s the girl on the beach who’s wearing ozma’s original colors.

to say nothing of how well those four obstacles align so very nicely, symbolically, with ruby (paths), weiss (flood), blake (cliff), and yang (fire).

it’s a little eyebrow-raising if nothing else. something to watch.

[bestworstcase]

there are six chairs at salem’s table: watts, hazel, tyrian, cinder, and two vacant seats.

summer rose accounts for one of those empty chairs. (silver-eyed warrior, turncoat, fallen huntress.)

the hound’s core is a silver-eyed faunus. he’s revealed when the hound’s maw is torn open—the dovetailing with with the big bad wolf who eats red riding hood is self-evident, but lovecraft’s hound is also a corpse-eater.

i’m just—

In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face […] The expression on its features was repellent in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. […] Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as […] the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments […] drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.

—saying.

where did salem find him?

“that’s what happened to mom; as soon as i saw its eyes, i knew.”—summer rose sought salem out and then joined her. fourteen years of unswerving loyalty; salem trusts her without question. (she’s general jinjur, holding the emerald city and searching for its crown.)

it’s a red herring—summer isn’t a hound and never was, the hound is an experiment—but ruby might also be right, just… not in the way she thinks.

he’s dead. he died. the hound’s core is a decayed but still-living corpse; lovecraft’s hound inhabits the corpse of a ghoul buried with its amulet.

there’s a sixth empty seat at salem’s table.

silver-eyed warriors are, at least symbolically, psychopomps. the grimm reaper; the scythe; the one who never came back; the corpse alive in the hound. the witch the warrior living alone in the woods, lone survivor of a massacre wrought by humans, not grimm.

maybe salem hunted him down. maybe he—like the ghoul stealing the amulet—took something from her, or tried to. (with a glare?) maybe he was the silver-eyed warrior hazel “dealt with” in the past. or maybe that sixth empty chair belonged to him, and then he… fell in battle, or betrayed her and died by her hand. how long was he dead before she used his body to make a grimm?

ok but is the hound a deliberate allusion to the hound bc like. it’s not just the coincident winged-hound/ghoul thing it also fits the silver-eye-warrior-psychopomp motif suspiciously well.

[bestworstcase]

ozpin isn’t ozma and he isn’t quite the wizard; he’s tippetarius, but the twist is that there was no wizard, there was just ozma agreeing to hide himself away, and in hiding he ultimately became the wizard—so lost to himself that he became his own warden, locked himself inside his own prison of lies and self-destruction. he’s the tip who drank the potion because mombi told him he had to.

*points at the god of light*

mombi