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old-people-like-avatar · 7 months

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Netflix Avatar the Last Airbender S1 - Overall Thoughts [SPOILERS]

I am a longtime fan of Avatar the Last Airbender. I did not watch it in its original 2005 run, but I discovered it in around 2010 after my good friend R.S. recommended it to me. It's been my #1 favorite TV show ever since and I have rewatched it more times than I can count. I was cautiously optimistic about NATLA.

Now, having watched the whole first season of NATLA, and looking at the season as a whole, I think the best word to describe it is uneven. I can't say that I loved it, and I can't say that I hated it. But there were things I really liked about it and things that really did not work for me. Overall, I enjoyed watching it -- if only to dissect what did and did not work about the adaptation -- and would want to watch more.

WHAT WORKED

Everything to do with Zuko and Iroh. I found myself going back through just to rewatch all of the Zuko and Iroh-related scenes. I thought Dallas Liu really nailed Zuko -- from tantrums about his journal being stolen to incredible action sequences to the boyish vulnerability of worrying about the laces on his gauntlets. He took an iconic character and made him his own. NATLA added some incredible scenes and lines to my favorite duo: Lu Ten's funeral (coupled with orchestral version of "Leaves from the Vine"); Zuko's first war council; Iroh choosing to go with Zuko on the boat; the 41st Division; Iroh putting a blanket on Zuko. And I liked that NATLA emphasized that Iroh needed Zuko in the wake of Lu Ten's death as much as Zuko needed Iroh after his mother left.

Daniel Dae Kim's interpretation of Ozai. Ozai in ATLA is kind of one-dimensional. Daniel Dae Kim's Ozai adds a deeper layer to him in that he genuinely seems to think he's doing legitimate parenting -- even going so far as to visit Zuko after burning his face and remarking, glibly, that he'll recover ("but he'll never heal," says Iroh). It adds an even more monstrous angle to his cruelty because Kim's Ozai seems to think he's doing it for his children's own good. This post perfectly encapsulates my feelings about why I thought the agni kai between Ozai and Zuko was an excellent addition to NATLA.

Zuko/Aang. These two bonding over goat hair brushes was the scene I never knew I needed. The way Aang managed to wrest a little smile out of Zuko in that scene before Zuko blew up at him for criticizing the Fire Lord? And the way that tied into the "Compassion is a sign of weakness" scene from the agni kai? Great character work.

WHAT DID NOT WORK

Dialogue. I already observed at length my dissatisfaction with the clunky, exposition-dumping dialogue in my episode-by-episode writeups. It certainly wasn't as bad as the Movie-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, but . . . there was no art or subtlety to it, and no trust in the audience. A disappointment.

The GAang did not feel like family. The lack of breathing room in the 8-episode season meant that all of the "filler" episodes that fleshed out the relationships between Aang, Katara, and Sokka were sacrificed. I am not saying NATLA needed to recapture each of the filler episodes. But they needed to build the foundational bonds between the main trio with showing not telling and they really didn't. They separated them for big chunks of 2 episodes. And, really, they just felt like traveling companions. That took all of the emotional heft out of, well, everything related to Aang, Katara, and Sokka. I mean, frankly, the kid actors did a better job establishing the "family" dynamic just by being themselves in their press interviews than the show did with the characters.

Aang did not run away from responsibility. I am not one of those people that's just mad that the show wasn't exactly like the cartoon. No. What I mean is, even putting aside the cartoon, even if you just look at NATLA itself: their own themes were undercut by never showing Aang actually running away from responsibility. Each avatar seemed to be berating Aang for doing something he was never actually shown to be doing.

Katara. I really don't think this one is on the actress. Katara felt like a fundamentally different character from ATLA's Katara. It's not to say an adaption is not allowed to have their own interpretation of a character, but... I just did not understand NATLA Katara. There was no passion, no rage, no overbearing nurturing. She was... I don't know what she was. Traumatized, yes, but nothing grew out of that trauma? Meek, until the plot demanded that she suddenly become a waterbending master without any guidance other than a waterbending scroll? The "younger sister"? More than any of the main characters, I'm not sure what NATLA was trying to say about Katara at all. And, as a result, I'm afraid the word to describe it might be uninteresting. And given that she is the heart and soul of Team Avatar, this one was really tough.

Despite the fact that a lot of NATLA did not work for me, I still enjoyed it because the things that did work for me, well, really worked. So. I'm here for all of the Zuko/Iroh scenes!

#avatar the last airbender #atla #a:tla #avatar: the last airbender #netflix atla #natla #netflix avatar #live action avatar

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loveandlegacy · 2 months

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the mutation must survive

singed, viktor, power, and progress

ok i said!! some while ago that i think the line 'the mutation must survive' is deeper and/or more sinister than it seems at first and talking with a few friends finally motivated me to articulate the whole. red-string board thing in my head about the themes of progress and power in arcane and specifically what singed and his estranged mentee, viktor, represent at the intersection of both.

ime most off the cuff responses take ‘the mutation must survive’ to mean something like ‘one must survive at all costs’, or that singed, the line’s speaker, believes that nature is brutal, and survival by any means necessary is always justified. i’ve always been kind of dissatisfied with that reading because there’s already a character who expresses this belief in so many words (silco), and it seems unnecessary and redundant for singed to have a world philosophy that's basically a duplicate of one of the major characters.

so what is he doing? what does ‘the mutation must survive’ mean and why is singed the one who says it? despite having quite a lot of influence on the story, singed is far from a major character, why have him say anything that feels Thematic at all?

there’s a lot going on in arcane, and conversations about power and progress recur frequently. characters approach the question of both from different positions, but the story makes the point that each begets the other. they're inextricably intertwined.

jayce, enchanted by magic, consistently reiterates that piltover should step into its destiny as the city of progress and embrace the arcane. he gets his way eventually and inadvertently creates tools of power - the atlas gauntlets and the mercury hammer - and uses them violently against the already downtrodden zaunite workers in a shimmer factory. heimerdinger opines about piltover’s legacy of progress, oblivious to the literal human cost of his idealism, and fearful of “a world that cannibalized itself over power and pride.” silco proclaims power as the avenue to revolutionary and liberatory progress.

on the fringes of these interwoven ideologies, we have singed. the story never presents him as an agent who cares about power in the same way that any other character does. granted we like have to pause here to define what 'power' is in the world of arcane, and that has a multifaceted answer. for the individuals seeking some kind of social control or liberation or domination, arcane outlines systemic power as some combination of wealth access, the ability to enact wide-scale violence without fear of retribution, and a willingness to use the first two to further one's own interest.

i imagine most people in piltover would follow heimerdinger’s example and say they don't care about having this kind of power, or that they think pursuing it is dangerous or kind of gauche, but implicitly piltover's whole existence is all about systemic control - and how power permits dominion over zaun in particular. this implicit disposition all comes out very explicitly in like. marcus. and the other enforcers and their brutality.

and then in the undercity there are varying attitudes about what to do with systemic power. vander gives up on the pursuit of power and liberation after the day of ash in the hopes that the enforcers will meet him halfway for a peace he’s never really granted. caitlyn’s statement that the people of zaun live in fear of “violent crimelords” implies that the chem barons deal in very direct acts of violence-as-power for the sake of amassing greater wealth. silco is obsessed with "real power" belonging to people who will fight for it (ie ruthlessness, the willingness to use violence and/or wealth to further his ends).

in a standout contrast to this, singed doesn't really express any interest in this type of systemic power. even in cases of violence, his behavior is framed as an almost personal interest compared to other characters. marcus, the chem barons, silco, vi, sevika, and even ekko and jinx all have intimate relationships to violence, but their intimacies are somewhat utilitarian. brutality is one act among many that a person might undertake in the interest of self defense, intimidation, protection of a loved one, or political domination. in other words, violence is a social tool and not a curiosity in and of itself.

by contrast, the story rarely confronts singed with circumstances that would require violence. he never needs to defend himself except in the one instance where silco threatens him after jinx’s shimmer infusion. and singed doesn’t physically fight with silco, he only states the obvious: that he saved jinx’s life.

he also never uses brute force to intimidate anyone. he has no loved ones to speak of, much less protect, and he never demonstrates any interest in organized violence for the sake of politics on the scale of silco’s vision or vander’s naive idealism. if anything, the story presents him as a man who was doing what he wanted to do long before he met silco and as a man who might continue to do what he wants to do with or without someone in political need of his skills. and what he wants to do could loosely be defined as scientific research but veers pretty wildly into the realm of malpractice and torture.

maybe the easiest thing to scan about singed is that he’s a solitary man with a sadistic interest in interpersonal power, primarily held over his patients and test subjects. he demonstrates some glee in condemning a cat to die by way of a shimmer-sickened mouse and he cheerfully informs jinx that the agony of her shimmer infusion will “only get worse.” so we could maybe say that violence comes easily to him, but an interest in political, social, financial, or military control is absent.

instead, he chases after progress.

out of the show's ~6.5ish hr runtime, singed has less than 10 total minutes on screen, and he spends most of that time talking about life, death, or survival ("will he live?" / "long enough"; "she's dying….the mutation must survive"; "rio will live"; "i thought you understood. the mutation must survive"; ”[shimmer] should provide everything one needs to survive a violent transition"; "i know the look of a doomed man"; "are you prepared to lose her?"; "sometimes death is a mercy"; "i saved her life").

he never abjures death and he doesn't glorify life. death is a mercy. a person can live ‘long enough’, which isn’t the same thing as living especially well. all these lines of dialogue frame him as the man who stands at the boundary between life and death and who views both things as obvious consequences of nature, equilibrium-like in their relationship if left undisturbed.

progress, though, requires one to contravene nature’s apparent life-death equilibrium, as he tells viktor repeatedly.

in his first meeting with viktor, singed describes rio as a "rare mutation that [he] cultivated" - presumably from some other genetic lineage that occurred by way of stochastic process. this selective breeding is his first intervention on life and death, on what genes are expressed and passed down through generations. he then goes on to say that rio is dying. i'm attempting to prevent that - another intervention.

everything dies, and there's no reason to believe singed takes issue with that fact in a general sense. a later scene even reveals that he isn’t trying to save rio’s life out of sentimental attachment to her, and in one of his culminating interactions, he tells silco sometimes death is a mercy, all of which suggests that even if “the mutation must survive”, survival isn’t always the better outcome for the subject in question.

looking at these two statements - ‘the mutation must survive’ and ‘sometimes death is a mercy’ - side by side, singed’s attitude highlights that there’s value in diverting what might have been the most obvious or best outcome for an organism if there's a chance the consequences will prove interesting by his metric. all well and good, if not for one problem:

nature has made us intolerant to change.

on the global level of arcane as a text, this statement seems to be true, particularly of people with access to systemic power. the piltovan council is incredibly inflexible and suspicious of change regardless of whether that change is likely to benefit them (hextech) or endanger their interests (zaun's liberation). zaun's most powerful figures, the chem barons, are similarly resistant to change. they would prefer to dispense with silco's vision for liberation because it destabilizes their present-moment interests. the underground's former leader, vander, had completely given up on the possibility of change before he died. silco even accuses him of this directly, in an observation that draws a circle around singed's point that real change is quite hard for most individual people to embrace: you'll die for the cause…but you won't fight for one.

despite his revolutionary ideology, even silco has a brittle attitude towards change. his liberatory strategy involves reproducing a violent, class-stratified regime within zaun where the chem barons comprise the ruling class in question, presumably doing as little for zaunites as the council of piltover. his aspirations are noble! but even for him, change involves retracing the boundaries of a known quantity.

whether or not change is necessarily always a good thing in arcane is a conversation of its own, but it's clearly a desirable thing to singed. after stating that an intolerance to change is common among [us], he adds: but fortunately, we have the capacity to change our nature (emphasis mine).

given this context, i think it’s worth returning to the note that power and progress are deeply intertwined in arcane, with different characters pursuing both in different ways. singed seems like an oddity at first in that he’s disinterested in systemic power but interested in progress, as outlined above. but his disinterest makes sense. his vision of progress requires a power mechanism that seems almost orthogonal to intercultural struggle. given everything described up to this point, singed’s ethics (or his cosmology, or whatever you want to call it) can be summed up as:

living things are resistant to change

change is desirable because it produces interesting, unexpected outcomes

being able to influence or alter the expected outcome of biological events is therefore also desirable, given the first two points

in this way, power and progress are not separate for singed any more than they are for any other character. but for most of the figures in arcane, power and progress have some attachment to society. through singed, certain forms of power take shape in the slippery alchemy of biology and chemistry.

shimmer is power because it drives living things off whatever course their natal biology set for them (it should provide everything one needs to survive a violent transition). genetic engineering is power because creates novelty (the mutation itself). manipulating the circumstances such that the mutation can survive (lol) is power too. arguably, creating those circumstances is the most influential force pervading all life, and the one that is most emblematic of progress: evolutionary power.

it’s easy to confound this. ‘evolution’ is pretty frequently conceptually misapplied irl in kind of shitty popsci and pseudoscientific texts. so i want to pause here and say: don’t take ‘evolutionary power’ to mean ‘the pursuit of optimization’ or ‘in search of an apotheosis’ in this case. singed doesn’t articulate an interest in specific end states for a mutation’s survival. even for rio, his interest is dispassionate. she must survive for the circular reason that he wants to know if she can survive by infusing her with the precursor to shimmer. he never opines about a subject’s teleology - that’s silco’s deal.

in other words, on the occasions where singed discusses survival, survival alone is the only qualifying criteria of interest - ‌[he’ll live] long enough; the mutation must survive; i saved her life. the quality of life for the subject or the general function of the mutation in a state of survival never comes up. when he tells viktor that shimmer should provide everything one needs to survive a violent transition, he also cautions him about the cost of said survival, implying that the other side of this rapidly-approaching event horizon might actually be the opposite of optimal.

if you take this path, they will despise you…

all this paints singed not as a man invested in the eugenic concept of survival of the fittest, but as the eerie steward of change itself. evolution drags all things along in its inexorable tide, mutations are the delimited space between what was and what will be, violent transitions are the catalysts for change, and whatever survives the fallout is the interesting data from which new truths about that change can be divined.

if you want to know what a mutation looks like on the other side of the catastrophic break between ‘before’ and ‘after’ - well. you’ll have to manipulate the circumstances such that the mutation survives. and if you succeed, and if you gather new, glittering fragments of truth out of the wreckage - if you’ve learned something novel - that’s progress.

but what does all this have to do with viktor?

taking everything together, singed’s presence in season 1 foreshadows quite a bit about viktor’s arc in season 2. i’m going to turn away from what i guess is pure analysis at this point and into the realm of theory-crafting from here on out, so…enjoy.

if viktor goes the way of league lore (and i assume he mostly will), his fate quite literally includes the word ‘evolution’. but in contrast to singed, viktor’s glorious evolution is all about a certain apotheosis. he is likely to become his former mentor’s obverse, leveraging an engineered evolution towards a specific telos, rather than dwelling at the threshold of change itself.

as an audience member, i hope the story doesn’t set viktor on a redemption arc. even if the narrative continues to build out his choices as understandable reactions to his circumstances, it's better to sit in the mire of people digging their own graves. and i do think viktor’s history with singed might make redemption impossible.

at the end of season 1, viktor tries to steer himself off the path he’s chosen, realizing too late that it involves the literal blood sacrifice of the woman who loved him. but we all know he won’t stay the course. he’s touched the void, the hexcore is hungry, and even if he escapes the hexcore’s direct influence, he’s about to witness the crumbling of what little good will exists between piltover and his home.

depending on which version of the lore you prefer, viktor’s eventual rise to accidental cult leader happens for one of two reasons. he either takes up his quasi-transhumanism because he comes to view his faith in human goodness as a product of emotional naivety (the new lore) or because he specifically wanted to carve out the jealous parts of himself that left him feeling broken after stanwick’s repeat betrayals (the old lore). in arcane, i think the story will change again.

in a last-ditch effort to cure his own terminal illness, viktor returns to his creepy former mentor for help. he claims to ‘understand, now’ what singed told him all those years ago about mutations and survival. knowing what comes next (sky’s death), one has to wonder if he really does. after all, before giving viktor the shimmer variant that might save his life, singed pauses to warn him that love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress.

it’s a leading line that invites a lot of questions. what love, whose love? sky’s maybe. or jayce’s. or heimerdinger’s, whose love is very flawed, but is arguably still love that viktor could lose. those are all compelling particulars or parts of the puzzle of viktor’s life, but i think singed is pointing viktor towards something more totalizing.

throughout season 1, viktor’s story has deviated from his league lore somewhat. he hasn't really been preoccupied with human error; instead, he has both desired and rejected different kinds of affection. rather than grappling with jealousy or heartbreak over stolen work, he wants to help the undercity - but ultimately mourns the fact that his illness will steal his opportunity to build a legacy, not his chance to make the world a better place.

summoned back into the role of necromantic mentor, singed seems to intuit this new emotional framework when he reminds viktor that progress has no room for love or legacy. those are the two sacrificial lambs required for progress to take place.

but if viktor truly believes what singed says (and it seems like he does at least a little bit), i don't think he’ll be able to abandon the want for either on his own. even in the wake of killing sky or in the wake of what we assume will be a very painful falling out with jayce, the story still frames him as a person with the basic human desire for closeness. he's afraid to tell jayce what he's done to sky, after all. if progress, otherwise known as the glorious evolution, is to proceed, he'll have to cut out his own heart not for the failings of jealousy or illogical inefficiency, but because the need for love and recognition has made him selfish.

he won't succeed, obviously. not the least in part because no need or feeling is entirely black or white. love brought him to his friendship with jayce. legacy made him brave enough to defy heimerdinger and chase magic. but pain, loss, and self-loathing distort all things, and i think that, in viktor's view of himself, the fragile yearnings of the human heart will become grotesque, the source of all his own wrongdoing.

in this way, singed’s unifying thesis has loaded the spring-trigger guiding viktor’s trajectory. if viktor hopes to forge a better way for the people of zaun, if he hopes to build something new in the world, he'll have to eviscerate himself first. such is the bloody price of progress, and so goes his evolution's apotheosis. it's not the man who matters. the mutation must survive.

#i was born to be this degree of unwell actually it's my calling #i could say more!!! even!!! if you can believe it!!!#especially about singed murdering his daughter #because he did murder her for the sake of progress hello #viktor is just like him and nothing like him all at the same time #viktor #singed #arcane #analysis #s2

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rwbyrg · 4 months

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A Rosegarden by Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

AKA Reasons Why Rosegarden is Canon #015: Ruby and Oscar's Multiple Shared Allusions to Other Fairytale Love Stories

Typical disclaimer that while all characters within the RWBY narrative have a main allusion, they often have secondary allusions that apply to the roles they fill in relation to other characters stories. Like how Yang is Goldilocks on her own, but becomes the Beauty to Blake's Beast when paired together.

The first, most notable example for Rosegarden is, of course, The Little Prince (expanded upon here). Oscar's primary allusion is of a boy who grows up on a planet "scarcely bigger than himself, who was in need of a friend", and one of his most influential relationships is that to a rose with whom he loves. They spend much of the story separated from one another, while the prince wanders lost in a desert, pining for a way to reunite with her back home.

Important to note this isn't the only time Ruby has been a Rose for another fairytale. She also slots in as the Rose Red to Weiss' Snow White, she acts as the successor to her mom as The Last Rose of Summer, and she also stands in as the Enchanted Rose to Bumbleby's Beauty and the Beast given how it's a "true loves kiss will break the spell before the last petal falls" situation... and BB kisses two episodes before Ruby Rose "dies".

The second notable allusion for Rosegarden is the Warrior in the Woods (expanded upon further here), a canon RWBY fable from The Fairytales of Remnant. The very first story within the book is about a village boy who becomes a huntsman after being inspired by a huntress he meets in the woods. A huntress, I might add he fell in love with the moment he saw her silver eyes.

Something to note about both of these examples, is that they are each stories with a focus on caring for someone else in unique ways. With The Little Prince, the Rose is vain and has many demands and asks the prince to tend to her; while in WitW, the warrior works tirelessly without thanks to protect a village. When the boy meets her, he starts looking after her for a change because he figures that's the least he can do to repay her. Both of these tie in well to RG's dynamic of Ruby carrying such heavy responsibilities alone, with Oscar making a conscious and active effort to help her shoulder those burdens.

The third, more subtle allusion, is their respective ties to The Wonderful Land of Oz. Oscar's first confirmed allusion before the Little Prince reveal was originally to Princess Ozma/Tip, the heir to the Kingdom of Oz given his proximity to Ozpin as the man behind the curtain, as well as to fit a "genderbend" character within the framework of team JNPR.

How does Ruby tie into this one? Well, we have to work backwards a bit. Ozpin's initial four lieutenants were all linked to the original cast of Oz:

Qrow as The Scarecrow without a mind (travels around as a crow and is regularly inebriated)

Ironwood as the Tin Man without a heart (his multiple cyborg prosthetics and character development in Atlas)

Lionhart as The Cowardly Lion (his fear overtakes him and pushes him to join forces with Salem to save his own skin)

Theodore as Dorothy Gale (donning ruby gauntlets instead of the traditional red slippers)

But RWBY is a story about legacies and breaking cycles. With the new generation of huntresses in Oz's inner circle, they replace those who came before them.

Blake takes Lionheart's place (cat faunus that ran out of cowardice, only to become brave and return to the fight)

Weiss as the Tin Man (aka Ice Queen, who's heart melted as she became kinder and grew more attached to those around her)

Yang the Scarecrow (no longer blindly following orders, but making an active effort to question the words and intentions of those around her)

Ruby as Dorothy (her little dog Zwei and the red - or silver, depending on movie or book adaptation - slippers that lead them all on their journey)

Why bring up Oscar as Princess Ozma and Ruby as Dorothy? Well, according to the original books and not the movie, "Dorothy and Ozma are each other's closest relationship" as illustrated here:

Very good friends. Just gals being pals. Sharing the responsibilities of leadership with one another. Smooching in the palace gardens. Dorothy as the only one who's allowed in Princess Ozma's rooms without an invitation. #BFFS4EVA

These are all the canon ones that are easy enough to parse, but there are some similarities to others famous stories that can be found with a bit of squinting that I will also share just for fun.

The first is how Ruby's experience in the Tea Party acts as a near perfect display of Romeo and Juliet's ending. For those unfamiliar with - or who have forgotten - the bard's infamous tragedy, it is a story about two star-crossed lovers very much doomed by the narrative. It ends with Juliet faking her death without telling Romeo. So when her prince charming comes across what he believes to be her corpse, he drinks a vial of poison and kills himself out of grief. When Juliet wakes and sees he has left her, she takes his dagger and stabs herself so they might be together.

In the tea party, Ruby fills the shoes of Romeo and Oscar of dear Juliet. Oscar is "killed" by Ruby's blade, but it is an illusion. He's not real. Like Juliet, he's not really dead. However, the vision is still enough to push Ruby into drink a vial of poison (the tea that takes her to the tree), giving up in the face of her grief, just as Romeo does.

And if we need any more evidence for this one, can't hurt to bring up the infamous quote of Juliet wherein she likens her love to an oh-so-familiar flower:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;

A line that Juliet says to proclaim that if her Romeo weren't a Montague, then she would still love him regardless, but through which implies that it would be easier for them to be together if he were not himself. And within V9, Ruby's cited motivation to go to the tree is because she doesn't want to be herself any longer.

And last, but certainly not least, is how a lot of ships within RWBY seem to have fairly direct parallels to the myth of Eros and Psyche. It is a classical tale about the trials of love, putting the protagonists under multiple tests of loyalty and attachment before letting the two lovers unite at the end. Both love stories within Beauty and the Beast and Snow White and Rose Red pull inspiration from the myth, and we see it in CRWBY's approach to writing romances throughout the show thus far.

Blake and Yang being separated, breaking and rebuilding trust, before coming together in V9; Ren and Nora going through trials and conflict, currently apart now so they might discover who they are on their own before re-uniting with one another again; and Rosegarden having constant reunions, separations, and trials with strong focuses on their attachment to each other. Another common archetype they use from Eros and Psyche is that of the "Animal as Bridegroom", wherein at least one of the partners undergoing a transformation that is often monstrous in nature.

Bumbleby is self explanatory

WhiteKnight has the issue of Jaune being lost to time and becoming an Old Man, who's curse is reversed by magic. It alludes to his role as the Prince within Snow White and Rose Red who was initially turned into a bear via a curse

Rosegarden, has this instance for both characters. Oscar as an Ozcarnation (becoming something he doesn't want via a curse they are trying to break before time runs out) and Ruby's future fate should she be captured by Salem (being turned into a Grimm by the wicked witch - or eaten by the wolf - like her mother before her).

All of these line up with the myth's structure as well as Monty's foundational philosophy on love stories that we see in his quote from many years ago:

A lot of these all have really tragic endings so uh. Good thing RWBY likes to subvert the stories it's telling, right? They're going to get a happy ending, right CRWBY???? 😰

#hehehe #rwby #ruby rose #oscar pine #rosegarden #rwby rosegarden #ship parallels #rwby ship parallels #meta #analysis #rwby meta #reasons why rosegarden is canon

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