#credit to alexis for bringing up the silver eyes montage and making me think of this again

[theseerasures]

Ruby and Yang’s conversation in the last episode is making me think back on the Silver-Eyed Warriors, and in particular Ruby taking down the Leviathan--still the most straightforward articulation of how these powers work imo. we first see Ruby try to follow Maria’s advice, and cycle through a sequence of images that only upset her; then she course corrects and thinks of different images, but roughly the same people, and then the powers work. the cursory (and valid) explanation for why would probably be something like: the images the second time are nicer, so what Ruby did was compartmentalize the bad parts of “life” away, and focused on the good bits instead of what makes her more stressed out.

what i’m stuck on with this explanation, though, is that the images from Ruby’s second go-round are still mostly of the PAST, and one that she no longer has access to. with the exceptions of the Oscar and Maria flashes, everything else is from Beacon, and we end on Penny and Summer--both of whom were dead at the time. why are even these happy images tinged with loss? well, i’ve always read this scene as not “unhappy vs happy” or “anxious vs determined,” but the show’s core argument on the passage from trauma into grief. Ruby’s first images go from the idyllic into moments of profound trauma--not just for her, but for all of her friends. pivoting from that isn’t just about repression (tho it probably is a little, it’s Ruby), but an acknowledgement that...sometimes you have to look at it slant. there is something indissoluble about trauma, but through shared grief and memory, you can cope with it, move forward, and live.

and living is the whole point. Maria tells Ruby that life must be protected, and the way this show defines what is alive--what makes life meaningful--is often inextricable from what can be mourned. Pyrrha is an excellent example of this, because on paper her death was ENTIRELY meaningless: she failed to stop Cinder, she failed to stop the CCT Tower’s fall, and she died knowing very little of what she was actually fighting for. it would be so easy to say that she died for nothing, and the entire trajectory of her life just led to this great big nothing. it’s telling that Jaune falls into this line of thinking just a few episodes out from the Leviathan fight, but it’s even more telling how the show resolves it, both in-universe and metatextually. Pyrrha’s life mattered because she’s important to people; she’s still important to JNR, she’s still important to us, the audience, and she’s still important to the show, because three years after her death we got a new song about her. what makes life beautiful and precious is the people, and even after they’ve been snuffed out, you carry them with you.

we go from that triumphant moment to Atlas, the Kingdom of Creation, which has accordingly pushed the boundaries of life in amazing and horrifying ways. in the former category we have Penny, who not only came back to life but became an ecstatic expansion of what it means to BE alive, despite not existing comfortably within the boundaries of the human; in the latter category we have...the Hound.

the Hound is a violation of life in a variety of different ways. on the most explicit level he is a violence of the flesh, or more accurately: a violence INTO flesh, whereby discrete bodies are forcibly made fungible, then combined, so that he becomes “an experiment.” a living Petri dish. his mind is robbed in the process, and he is unrecognizable, both in the sense that he’s a horrible monster and in the sense that no one knows who he is. his identity is indeterminate; we don’t know his name, in a universe where even weapons have names--only two letters, the way you’d catalogue something for which uniqueness does not matter. the Hound, then, exists in a state that is not life, but undeath, or will-not-let-die; he is only sustained by Salem’s intent and her continued mangling of his flesh. and in the end he is disposed of, but. Ruby recognizes him, in a way: she looks at him, and says not that was a monster, or even that was a Silver-Eyed Warrior, but that was a person.

and that...has implications, because this isn’t the first time we’ve had this kind of conundrum in this show. Salem herself exists in a state of will-not-let-die; she first received the curse because she refused to let her trauma pass into grief, and the gods made it so that her own life would literally never be mourned. jumping into the Grimm pool compounded the paradox instead of resolving it--now she would live forever, be bent towards destruction, and yet remain inescapably herself. what does it mean for creation to reside within destruction? well, we don’t even have to look at Salem for that, because that’s what ALL Grimm are supposed to be. and the Silver-Eyed Warriors destroy them, because Maria says that preservation is the enemy of destruction...but they don’t. Ruby only encased the Leviathan in stone. the wyvern is still immobile at Beacon. something always remains.

these contradictions point to some fundamental fissures about the gods, and their denied interdependency, that i suspect will end up remaking the world. at the heart of it, though, it is (as it always is with this show) personal. that’s what happened to mom. we don’t know if she was a prototype for the experiment that was the Hound, or his improvement, but it now seems certain that Summer Rose was not killed but unmade, and perverted to Salem’s will. how do you turn back the hands of time on grief, when the person you grieve for isn’t alive again (as with Penny), merely not-yet-dead? when you come face to face with that person again, will you recognize her in time? what will you do with the painful paradox of her existence? do you try to resolve it by cutting away the parts of her that aren’t her (as if that’s an easy thing to calculate, when she now relies on some of those parts to remain), or do you just try to cope with it, recognize her personhood in spite of all, love her, and try to live with this unliving reminder of a grief that has been overwritten back into trauma?

and at what point can you mourn again?

did you ever stop?

[angstandhappiness]

Your words are poetry

OP @theseerasures  #yes i am a monsterfucker on top of being a toasterfucker#me in january: still kinda hope summer stays dead tbh :/#me now: summer rose is the skeleton key to the show's trauma-grief-death-life palimpsest actually#and the point isn't to solve it. it's not a puzzle#it's life#there's more to say here about like. how the schnees have a hereditary tie to creation-preservation-destruction through their grimm summons#but i'll save that lil pet theory for later#rwby#credit to alexis for bringing up the silver eyes montage and making me think of this again#and like. butler puar and spillers but i don't think they're reading my rwby meta#for my next trick i will make this show into *checks notes* queer necropolitics

@springhealed-walker  #trauma into grief huh

Ruby and Yang’s conversation in the last episode is making me think back on the Silver-Eyed Warriors, and in particular Ruby taking down the Leviathan–still the most straightforward articulation of how these powers work imo. we first see Ruby try to follow Maria’s advice, and cycle through a sequence of images that only upset her; then she course corrects and thinks of different images, but roughly the same people, and then the powers work. the cursory (and valid) explanation for why would probably be something like: the images the second time are nicer, so what Ruby did was compartmentalize the bad parts of “life” away, and focused on the good bits instead of what makes her more stressed out.

what i’m stuck on with this explanation, though, is that the images from Ruby’s second go-round are still mostly of the PAST, and one that she no longer has access to. with the exceptions of the Oscar and Maria flashes, everything else is from Beacon, and we end on Penny and Summer–both of whom were dead at the time. why are even these happy images tinged with loss? well, i’ve always read this scene as not “unhappy vs happy” or “anxious vs determined,” but the show’s core argument on the passage from trauma into grief. Ruby’s first images go from the idyllic into moments of profound trauma–not just for her, but for all of her friends. pivoting from that isn’t just about repression (tho it probably is a little, it’s Ruby), but an acknowledgement that…sometimes you have to look at it slant. there is something indissoluble about trauma, but through shared grief and memory, you can cope with it, move forward, and live.

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