#and they were both reborn with Penny in the winter womb Fria constructed

[onewomancitadel]

#winter schnee #marrow amin #rwby #helen writes meta #there is something like. gallingly poetic to the point where it's just shy of kitsch #about the throughline of winter letting penny go and then penny letting emerald go #(and then emerald helping free oscar with JYR and hitching a ride on the other strand winter left trailing behind) #it's not about causation. it's not that simple #it's about the ways that penny is both winter's apotheosis and (dare i say it) mirror#as maidens so often are for each other #so that winter's desperate compromise becomes in penny's hands a transcendent mercy #winter would not have spared emerald. and penny is not there solely because of winter #but they constitute and echo each other even apart in the kingdom of creation #winter might call that being 'human' but penny would call it something else# me yesterday: teehee i think i will make a leetle joke #about how winter has done more for the war effort than ironwood by basically doing fuck all #HOURS AND A ZILLION WORDS LATER #listen. do i regret it? yes. do i wish i'd done something more productive? absolutely. do i wish i could hyperfixate on anything else? ye

I got to the tags and it drove me bananas because, other than this incredible meta about my favourite character (Winter) and one of my favourite new characters (Marrow), you touched on ‘the cycle of compassion’ vs. ‘the cycle of abuse’ that underpins the monomyth of RWBY and Winter -> Penny -> Emerald -> Oscar --- quite rightly it’s more complex than that, and involving the Maidens like you say really transforms it for what they represent... (not just power over the elements, but actual ideals/ideas, enshrining and protecting them)...

Anyway I love this and hope you don’t mind me copying and pasting the tags here because very good thank you love it here for it.

a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride

honestly there is just like. no point as of Witch (if not earlier) in thinking about Marrow and Winter as following along the same defection path, and downright facile to compare the two in terms of who is “closer” to defecting and therefore “less problematic” (even setting aside that making value judgments along those lines in fiction is…never that straightforward), when the narrative has emphasized REPEATEDLY how they are on entirely separate tracks in terms of character and role in the Atlas military.

seriously, it’s like saying “this orange is bad because you can’t eat the peel like you can eat an apple skin”

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