#an expression of the things salem cannot yet bring herself to say – incited by the act of making cinder grimm. like herself

[bestworstcase]

“unreliable narrators” is not code for “arbitrarily cherry-pick what you believe to be true from the text based on vibes and what you want to happen, and ignore any textual evidence that contradicts your theory-fanfic on the grounds that narrators are unreliable” it means you have to be skeptical and think critically about what every character says. only by evaluating the text in a holistic manner is it possible to determine the narrative truth.

you cannot just say “well this character is just lying/wrong, because unreliable narrators” – you need to actually interrogate the context. are there discrepancies between what this character said and what has been said by other characters? what about things we’ve been shown, not recounted to us through the lens of a character’s dialogue? does this character have a motivation to lie? are there relevant facts of which this character is not aware that might change their view? is the character stating a conclusion based on logical reasoning from the information they have or are they speaking from emotion? does the character have any biases that might inform their interpretation of what they know or see?

[bestworstcase]

#this post is about grimm summer yes#ruby makes an incorrect assumption because she does not yet have all the facts#but it is laughably clear that cinder was the impetus for the hound –#experimental monstrous replica of the stuffed toy dog salem’s youngest carried around which she created after cinders near-death at haven#whom salem 1. uses attempt to uncover the location of cinder’s vault and 2. sacrifices to protect cinder from the winter maiden#after cinder nearly dies at penny’s hands. the hound is not just a red herring for summer he is#an expression of the things salem cannot yet bring herself to say – incited by the act of making cinder grimm. like herself#insofar as him being silver eyed matters it’s the desire to preserve life – to protect – that betrays salems underlying motivations#this is a monster she made to protect her daughter

(<- my tags)

it’s about grimm!summer but it’s also about taking ‘jinn is an unreliable narrator because ruby only asked for ozpins side of the story’ to mean that the lost fable is wholly fabricated –no the god of light is not secretly the one who really obliterated humanity, to suggest that is as absurd as it would be to suggest that salem’s rebellion against the brothers is a fiction; the lost fable is what ozpin believes, and it is abundantly clear that everything he believes about what happened after ozma died is a product of what salem told him, distorted by centuries and centuries of frantic rationalization because he needs salem to be the one who deceived and manipulated him or his psyche will implode.

it’s also about taking maria’s conclusions from the lost fable at face value as factual and correct, ignoring the silver-eyed children oz had after several deaths/reincarnations and the very pointed subsequent demonstration that maria cannot discern eye color and only recognizes ruby as silver-eyed when she sees the light, thus demonstrating that “maybe there’s something you’re not seeing” is quite literally true of maria too.

and it’s about the stubborn resistance to considering that cinder’s vulnerability to the glare – which has been noticeably diminishing over time as she synthesizes with the grimm arm – might not be because of the presumed(!) parasitic residue of the grimm beetle in her body, because i guess it’s easier to believe that cinder is a complete moron who’s somehow been kept in the dark about what silver eyes can do and salem is lying to her to prevent cinder from figuring out that the glare harms grimm than it is to grasp that the question is not “why did the glare hurt cinder’s (hypothetical) grimm passenger” but rather “why did the glare, which is supposed to only harm grimm, burn cinder’s human flesh” – and it’s also about the nonsense theory that salem cut off cinder’s arm herself for the specific purpose of making her more grimm and/or deliberately inciting cinder’s desire for vengeance against…a girl salem keeps telling her not to harm.

(if you think salem is THAT STUPID you don’t get to turn around and call her a master manipulator. lol)

the point is that this is a consistent pattern with this fandom – invoking the unreliable narrator to dismiss this or that textual evidence, including literal on-screen events, if it contradicts the viewpoint of whatever character has been arbitrarily deemed correct. and then, when the popular speculative theories founded on this approach inevitably fail, that’s fed into the fandom narrative that rwby is all about surprise twists and turns, that it’s impossible to predict what comes next, and – implicitly – that expecting the story to be structurally and narratively coherent at all is a fool’s errand, because don’t you know rwby is about subverting tropes!, as if rwby isn’t a masterclass on effective foreshadowing.

“unreliable narrators” is not code for “arbitrarily cherry-pick what you believe to be true from the text based on vibes and what you want to happen, and ignore any textual evidence that contradicts your theory-fanfic on the grounds that narrators are unreliable” it means you have to be skeptical and think critically about what every character says. only by evaluating the text in a holistic manner is it possible to determine the narrative truth.

you cannot just say “well this character is just lying/wrong, because unreliable narrators” – you need to actually interrogate the context. are there discrepancies between what this character said and what has been said by other characters? what about things we’ve been shown, not recounted to us through the lens of a character’s dialogue? does this character have a motivation to lie? are there relevant facts of which this character is not aware that might change their view? is the character stating a conclusion based on logical reasoning from the information they have or are they speaking from emotion? does the character have any biases that might inform their interpretation of what they know or see?