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rwbyrg · 2 months ago

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hi! noticed the ask by the anon about the reactions to rosegarden and i can't help but wonder...

do you think any of them would have some reservations because of the oz in oscar's head thing? i reckon there may be some slight lingering intensity for each member regarding him so there's a chance they could be wary... but more so for ruby and oscar, rather than exclusively ruby

I answered the last ask on the assumption that them becoming canon wouldn't happen until after the war is won and the Oz curse is broken. Simply because I don't think either of them have the time or capacity to tackle that sort of relationship before the main plot is resolved. So in the hypothetical situation that they would get together and it's before the curse is broken, I think there's a chance some of the people around them might be a bit wary. At least Qrow, Tai, and maybe Yang. However, with it being so close to the final fight, it would probably be the least of anyone's concerns at that time. "Seeing as the world might end in three weeks, so long as those two are happy for whatever time we have left, I don't really care if Oz is around for it or not", if you know what I mean?

That being said, I think I am too biased to answer this in a yes-and kind of way. I know you're probably asking in good faith, but in full transparency, I'm pretty jaded by how often this particular topic gets brought up. Since this is not the first time and probably won't be the last, I'm going to take this as an opportunity to share my stance on this idea as a whole.

Ozpin's place within Oscar and RG's stories is one of conflict; which is what all stories revolve around. And it is not, nor has it ever been, a deal breaker for RG's relationship to me. The Ozcarnation curse is an allegory for a few things. The first is simply growing up. RWBY is a coming of age story, and Oscar isn't the only one going through that arc. But this conflict and grief of how he doesn't get to choose the kind of person he wants to be - largely because of the people he's met and things he's experienced - is not unique to him. The curse is just a fantasized and exaggerated version of it.

The next one isn't so much an allegory as it is plainly stated in the text, but it's a story about choice. It's about how even when we are irreversibly changed by things outside our control, we can still choose who we want to be. Even when it's hard, even when the influences are strong, even when it's downright traumatic. Oscar's story is about self discovery and self acceptance; about choice and change. Regardless of if Oz fades into the background, or his curse is broken, or they become a blendy merge of the two of them, Oscar is still going to remain his own person in some way by the end of it. Because this is ultimately a happy story and that is the main driving conflict of his personal arc.

The assumption that Oscar is going to get absorbed or overwritten by Ozpin being such a common take in this fandom never ceases to confuse me because of that. It also confuses me because the show - while it doesn't fully explain the extent of the merge mechanics - has told us that Oz has had families in his previous lives by "learning to live with the souls with which he had been paired".

The other allegory I'll mention - of which I am not the first, nor necessarily the best, to be pointing out (here is a great example from a little while ago) - is one for plurality. Some of the friends I've made in RG spaces have DID and have spoken to me about how they interpret the Ozcar situation; how it's similar or different to their own experiences. Hearing those stories, once again, makes it really hard for me to see Ozpin as any sort of deal-breaking barrier to a rosegarden relationship. This idea that Oscar must be isolated from his friends and constantly scrutinized when showing interest towards any romantic partners because of Oz's presence lacks both imagination and compassion for me. Oscar never asked for this curse, he didn't do anything to deserve it, and to condemn him to a lonely life because of something like that seems really antithetical to the themes of this story and to the characters involved. While some characters within the story might have some doubts about the relationship, at the end of the day it is not up to them on what Ruby and Oscar decide to do for themselves.

Again, this isn't aimed at you, Anon. I just wanted to say my piece on it given how pervasive this topic is. I truly look forward to the day where folks can talk about RG without this being the first thought or argument that everyone jumps to.

#sorry #but if i had a dollar for every time someone brought up the 'but there's an old man in his head' argument #i could probably fund v10's production by now #ask #asks #anon #discourse #kind of #rwby rosegarden #oscar pine #idk man. it's a story about breaking cycles and hope and fighting for a better world #it's right there in the lost fable and in 'you're your own person'#it's just such a strawman argument to me now and i'm tired #live a little. use your imagination. stop worrying about oz in oscar's head and worry abt killing the an/ti rhetoric in your own

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bestworstcase · 3 months ago

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Anything from Volumes 1-3 that is setup that you don't think is given enough attention or respect for good setup?

Sidenote to this:

Open seat with no person in it + Salem having someone looking for the Choice Relic was hinting at Summer Rose. Did we have anything hinting at her pre Beacon's Fall or just things that she fits given additional context?

regarding summer specifically, while i wouldn’t call them hints per se, there are a handful of beats in v1-3 that smell like foreshadowing to me:

the first is “she was right about you; such arrogance.” – cinder might well be referring to salem here, of course. however. what strikes me about this remark is that arrogance is not a characteristic that salem seems to perceive in ozma; rather she describes him, in her soliloquies and songs, as a self-destructive, deceitful, manipulative fool blinded and trapped by his faith in the old gods. cowardly. fallen from grace. think of what she says to oz in 8.9—look how you’ve diminished, how you’ve lessened yourself—she sees him groveling at the feet of tyrannical monsters and sees debasement.

does it follow for salem to characterize ozpin to cinder as, primarily, arrogant? i’m not convinced it does. but summer rose? well… hm. consider, also, that the full line is “this whole time, right beneath our feet… she was right about you; such arrogance…” <- i think it is more likely than not that “she” is someone inside the brackets of “our,” and in context “our” is either [cinder + ozpin] or [cinder + her associates physically present at beacon].

in the event that “she” is not part of “our” the more naturalistic phrasing is “beneath our feet… salem was right about you” – because “she” otherwise has no antecedent. of course, some allowance here for this to be a narrative choice not to name salem yet, but we’re one (1) episode off from revealing her face and by this point we’ve known for a while that cinder works for someone else, so the choice to drop the name here or in the volume credits is of fairly trivial importance. unless of course cinder isn’t talking about salem.

second: “Oh! We've also stopped some bad guys, too! I guess it's like they say: "like mother, like daughter"! I still wonder why Ozpin let me into the school early…” [laugh track] – obv this part of ruby’s address to summer’s memorial headstone foreshadows ozpin’s conspiracy and team strq’s involvement therein. but it also foreshadows this exchange:

RUBY: We don’t have to kill you to stop you, and we will stop you. SALEM: Your mother said those words to me… she was wrong, too.

and i think it bears pointing out that ruby is wrong here, and later in the volume qrow specifically calls attention to this and lays out why she’s wrong. team rwby didn’t stop the bad guys; they cut off one avenue of attack and cinder circled around from a new direction that took advantage of torchwick’s imprisonment, and this also resulted in the public break between ozpin and ironwood which eroded the cohesion of the inner circle. ergo, ruby thinks she stopped the bad guys but in the long run the consequences of the breach all benefited salem.

looks into the camera like im on the office.

like mother, like daughter!!!

further, that sequence of events ultimately leads to the final confrontation between her and torchwick – wherein he declares “if you can’t beat them, join ’em,” and shortly gets eaten by a grimm right after making it clear that he intends to kill her. torchwick’s death is thematically motivated – a narrative rejection of his cynical every-man-for-himself, dog-eats-dog outlook – but consider that:

summer rose, if she is indeed salem’s willing agent, is certainly at beacon tonight – because she’d be the one who stayed behind to hold the fort.

summer is thus the one salem instructs to “reinforce our numbers at beacon,” meaning the grimm; that instruction only makes sense if the person receiving it can communicate with or command grimm. ergo, summer must have some degree of control over grimm.

ruby is disarmed and on the ground getting beaten by a man who fully intends to kill her, and a grimm swoops down out of nowhere to eliminate him faster than he can blinks. and then… the grimm rears up, roaring at her, and comes down with a sweep of its wings that creates a blast of air that pushes her away. that isn’t aggression!! that’s a defensive threat display!! (the feilong in v4 does the exact same thing – trying to push the boat away). it’s ruby who charges the gryphon, and while it lunges forward in reaction to her charge, all that happens is she gets her feet on its head and pushes off to leap over it, and the grimm goes fucking flying so hard it crashes into the ship’s interior and never emerges. the point being,

math.

it’s plausible that the grimm was drawn to torchwick’s murderous rage. but the way it behaves immediately after it swallows him – that very clear “get away from me please” body language, and ruby -apparently- kicking a grimm the size of a goddamned clydesdale dozens of feet and then through the hull of a literal warship? ruby is strong, but she’s not… that strong. but if the grimm didn’t want to engage her and propelled itself under and past her at the same time as she vaulted off its head? that would explain what happens perfectly – ruby’s kick altered its launch trajectory just enough that it crashed.

minutes later, someone loyal to salem scraped a very badly injured cinder off the top of beacon tower and left ruby alive where qrow would find her. salem’s vested interest in keeping ruby alive is VISIBLE throughout the battle for beacon, and notably include a perfect opportunity to capture her while she’s in a coma atop beacon tower that isn’t taken – suggesting that salem makes her singular attempt to capture ruby solely to reassure cinder that Something is being Done.

and if summer rose has command over grimm and was at beacon that night… the gryphon’s behavior is exactly what i’d expect if all the grimm had marching orders to insure this one girl in particular – the spitting image of their commander – doesn’t come to serious harm. there’s a nonzero chance that gryphon did in fact save ruby On Purpose!

…and that happens in the context of a fight between ruby and the bad guy she thought she stopped (but she was wrong), who joined salem because “if you can’t beat em, join em.” (salem voice) she was wrong, too…

also

<- like mother like daughter. summer had a nevermore’s eye view of the battle for beacon, in this essay i will –

third: this one is something i didn’t really Think About until v9 and specifically the v9 ost dropping, but some of the things cinder says in v2-3 strike me as like – she got that from summer im sure of it. for example, in midnight, cinder’s view of huntsmen is that they’re free, they have power, they can go anywhere and do whatever they want, and rhodes never contradicts this. where did she get “huntsmen and huntresses should conduct themselves with honor and mercy”? who taught her the aspirational moral ideal?

summer rose, maybe.

but in the deeper sense,

where did cinder get the ‘destiny’ conceit? her underlying beliefs about how the world is are a product of her childhood, but the overt framing of fate/destiny isn’t present in midnight; nor has salem ever spoken of destiny and her philosophical views are in many ways a rejection of destiny – salem does not believe in fate, she is the woman who dedicated her life to toppling the gods.

and on close examination this looks like yet another suspiciously summer rose shaped hole!! “you’re special, ruby […] special the way your mom was special […] it was said that those born with silver eyes were destined to lead the life of a warrior.” – in after the fall, ozpin gives coco an entire pep talk whose central conceit is embracing and submitting to the turns of fate – sacrifice “show them gods and deities/blind and keep the people on their knees” & guide my way “you were born to hypnotize them all/they all said their prayers/can you hear me up there?”

cinder, of pyrrha: “people assume she’s fated for victory, when she's really taking fate into her own hands. interesting. add her to the list.” & “it’s not about overpowering the enemy; it’s about taking away what power they have.”

<- that second statement is salem’s strategic doctrine, through and through. but the ‘power’ cinder is talking about here is derived through manipulating the perception of destiny; the self-fulfilling prophecy. the invincible girl cannot be touched because she makes subtle adjustments to insure that no one is able to try. it is pyrrha’s belief in destiny that destroys her, as it destroys ozma. ozpin invokes fate to justify and explain his choices. those born with silver eyes are destined to lead the lives of warriors.

summer rose was destined to live and die fighting the grimm – so the world promised her. maybe she believed, maybe she felt like she had no choice but to accept her prescribed fate. until she met salem, and took fate into her own hands. made a choice. broke the chains. it’s about taking away what power they have, like salem did when she tore the scales from summer’s eyes, like summer did when she refused her destiny and joined hands with the grimm instead.

what does summer rose look like through cinder’s eyes? she was a huntress. she was literally destined to be one of the greatest huntresses in history, a hero, the shining pillar upholding the world order that chose the enslavement of children as a fair price for peace. fate dictated that she be the icon, the idol, the embodiment of the system that brutalized and subjugated cinder – she had every privilege cinder could ever dream of, freedom and security and a home, a loving family – and she chose to walk away.

and if they talked about that like, ever, and specifically if summer talked about that warrior’s destiny as a cage, a curse she had to escape – is it any wonder that cinder would adopt that framing to make sense of what happened to her? if summer rose was fated to stand at the pinnacle, then does it not follow that cinder fall was fated to be ground into the foundations? and likewise, if summer rose can shatter her pedestal and fall from grace, then cinder fall can shatter her chains and rise. summer proves that the idea of destiny is powerful but not inviolate. and it is hollow, it is a lie, a fiction, and that means it can be taken away. revealed as a deception. destroyed.

anyway

to the broader question

i think people really, really do not give the jaundice arc enough credit for the long-term set up it’s doing.

(or the very overt textual statement from THE HISTORY PROFESSOR! placing the blame for the violent radicalization of the white fang squarely on human bigotry and persecution of faunus in general; the white fang arc is clunky and hamstrung by the inadequacy of its vocabulary, but the fandom talking point that the narrative perspective on this subject has “evolved” or “improved” is just. not true. v1 is very emphatically clear that 1. terroristic violence is not activism, 2. ascribing the terroristic violence of a few to an entire minority group to rationalize bigotry is bigoted in and of itself and completely unacceptable, and 3. violent radicalization is created through relentless discrimination and hate, which creates a self-reinforcing circle wherein the justifiable outrage of the persecuted outgroup and the extreme violent reactions provoked by the persecution are distorted into a justification for further persecution by those of the in-group who materially benefit from perpetuating this cycle!!! all of this is explained in an almost afterschool special manner by the main character faunus rights activist and the history professor!!! in volume one!!! what changed is that the writers developed the skill and vocabulary necessary to weave these ideas into their storytelling in a more effective and more cogent way!!! literally begging the rwby fandom to start listening to the actual words the characters say)

ahem. the jaundice arc lays so much of the groundwork for jaune’s and ruby’s character arcs reaching all the way to v9 and undoubtedly beyond; it sets up the first pieces of the ozlem fractal; it foreshadows the white fang arc and sets up blake’s character arc of self-reclamation and figuring out how she wants to use her voice as an activist; it draws attention to the misogynistic cultural norms that define and are defined by the history between ozma and salem; it lays the foundation for the scene in v2 where ozpin questions blake, which hits the way it does because we have the context of anti-faunus harassment occurring openly at ozpin’s school and nobody doing anything about it, and by extension is the first stroke of the salem-faunus connection that is almost certainly the keystone holding the entire narrative together because it is her relation to the faunus that provides the key to decipher the lost fable.

the jaundice arc is a crucial load-bearing pillar that supports the entire narrative and people revile it because nobody in this fandom can be fucking normal about jaune. lmao

#in general i don’t think rwby gets enough credit for how much gets set up in the first two volumes #or how well the dominoes falling in v3 is executed #like the fandom gets properly excited when things from v1-2 come to fruition but like #i think there’s a really strong tendency across the board to kind of #mentally compartmentalizing the beacon arc as this sort of #experimental prelude to the actual story. the writers figuring out how to write by trial and error #and by extension to treat these long game narrative culminations as just. ''callbacks''#or post-hoc stitching together from the raw material of the early volumes #when really it’s just. the story was planned out from the start! lol!#''oh but the maidens didn’t even exist until v3'' salem and cinder are in the first goddamned episode.#their narrative arcs were planned in advance but probably had a hole (like ‘what is cinder hoping to get out of this specifically’)#that was being actively workshopped while they worked on the first couple volumes #until someone came up with the idea that the keys to the magic vaults salem needed to open #could be people whose magic you can steal and that’s what cinder wants #this is how planning a story works you block things out roughly and refine more and more as you go!!!#ahh!!!!!#there is too much foreshadowing and critical setup in v1-2 for it to be anything but on purpose and planned #nobody has any business being surprised at this point when seeds planted in v1-2 sprout. and yet

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amelia-yap · 9 months ago

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hap borthday

#ruby rose #weiss schnee #blake belladonna #yang xiao long #rwby #derg AU #my art #the goof ever #just a bunch of doodles bc idk what to do #they probably should've specified how she should blow out the candle lmao #you guys are once again stuck in my dragon weiss brainrot #(yes she stole one of ruby's hoodies)

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sketch-shepherd · 2 years ago

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Me disowning that damn cat after warming up to them for the first five episodes

#rwby #rwby spoilers #it’s ok I’ll probably still love him after this ep #but still… this shady motherfucker #I still have too many thoughts about what the fuck I just watched I’m just meme’ing them as they come HHHH #curious cat #rwby curious cat #sketch text

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sirazaroff · 1 year ago

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How do you think Velvet flirts with Coco?

This is one of the funniest asks I ever got and im glad cause this is just gold. Like how does the Bun™️ woo her stupid bozo?? ———— 

I have my biased takes on what Coco and Velvet are like as characters, but to start off I wanna focus on what Vel brings to the table.  I think a lot of people have moe’d her down to a nervous/scaredy bunny girl and…that’s not her at all. She’s a real multilayered character who can and will kick your ass flat. She’s also…

- very very attentive to people

- excellent at memorizing things she sees and hears, and quickly at that

- very emotionally in tune with people, herself included

- insanely kind and helpful

- honest about her feelings and will voice her thoughts when ready

Also she’s a bunny like come on. Is baby. It’s impossible to not find her likable.

I can go on forever, but I think these are enough likable traits to work with.

 Time to shift. Now we focus on what I think Coco likes in a person:

- Hot girls

- Complexity

- Someone true to their nature

- Some sense of honor

- Someone striving to learn and to better themselves

Hopefully it’s not lost here, but there’s some compatibility don’t you think? Velvet’s got some of those traits that Coco likes.  ————

So where’s the flirting? It’s coming I swear, I just needed the background info to help support the answers.

Bun bun flirts two ways: intentionally and unintentionally. The latter is usually what’s happening most often.  Her intentional flirting is what you would expect. Some cheeky words, being a playful tease in her actions like when she flashed her camera in After the Fall. I think she would 1000% take advantage of her physique and incredibly vast skillsets. She is totally totally showing off during training and sparring. Coco might hide her gaze under her glasses but that dumb bitch is so easy. So so easy…

Now her unintentional flirting is basically that Velvet is just doing her thing. She’s comfortable and loved by her team. With them she’s able to be herself and have fun, and that’s what coco loves most. Seeing Velvet thrive and not feel like she has to hide herself away from the world, and with it comes moments and actions that make Coco, much to her surprise, fall for Velvet.

I guess simply put, Velvet flirts by being her cheeky self around Coco, and her leader falls for her every time.

#fooze #smugm3ss #rwby #rwby fanart #velvet scarlatina #rwby velvet #coco adel #rwby coco #crosshares #rwby crosshares #of course these are just my playful opinions #but yeah I mean these two kiddos are funny and idiot goobers but they’re also so sugary sweet to each other #without any compromise to their personalities either #I just wanted to answer this already but I had a lot more tender moments planned for these two to show #I’m a firm believer that they’re perfectly made for each other. they kinda remind me of bees but just. different you know?#wow Fooze so much stuff to answer a simple question~ SORRY IDK I HAVE THOUGHTS and it takes months to get them out okay?!?!#probably doesn’t even make sense either!#anyways velvets favorite pastime is raising coco’s bp just by looking at her for longer than 5 seconds #sorry if this is also formatted weird I’ll fix it tomorrow if need be

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