#hazel the v2

[v4point5]

I'm getting better at not being so particular abt the pics I take of these guys but I wanted good lighting to compare this pic of hazel and his son to ivy and her son on the keitai. so, the progress of me taking pics of tamas at almost 1am.

[dreamweavers]

my V2 Connexion is here! I've been wanting a V2 for a while, and it being a Connexion just feels cool to me. it's kinda beaten up and the screen isn't in the best shape, but as long as I can see what's going on that's okay for me. I'm happy w the price I paid. the listing said the buttons require a bit of force to work, but they're better than I thought they would be.

had to wait a bit to put the batteries in since it's 3°F outside and the V2 got condensation on the screen when I opened it (you can see in the pics)

my first tama is named hazel! excited to see who he evolves into. hopefully I'll be good at the V2 games lmao. it's fun to see the differences between the V2 and V3!

[imasradiantasthesun]

Ez’s Hunger Games aesthetics, part 16: The Second Quarter Quell Generation, part 1

Jack Hawthorne, the miner’s son

Alys Everdeen, the apothecary’s daughter

Gordon Jet Everdeen, the musician’s son

Hazelle Hawthorne, the hanged man’s daughter

Leiney Undersee, the lonely twin

Maysilee Donner, the candy maker’s daughter

Nick Mellark, the baker’s son

Dahlia Mellark, the teacher’s daughter

Haymitch Abernathy, the orphan

[howlingday]

Ultimate Hunters V2

Mercury: Well, why don't we get the introductions outta the way?

Oscar: Huh? Introductions?

Mercury: I'm Mercury Black. Nice to meet ya! Guess I shoup tell you why I'm attending the Academy, too, while we're at it. Of course, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe it's a special talent.

Oscar: It's not a special talent? What do you mean?

Mercury: I'm lucky.

Oscar: ...What do you mean?

Mercury: No, really, that's my special talent. I'm the Ultimate Lucky Student. Or that's what they call me, anyways.

Oscar: Ultimate Lucky Student?

Mercury: There was a world-wide lottery, and I just so happened to win the grand prize of getting to attend as "The Ultimate Lucky Student."

Oscar: (Thinking) Is that really a thing?. Can you really call being luvky a talent?.

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May: Hey~! Who're you dudes?

Oscar: Nice to meet you. I'm Oscar Pine.

May: Gotcha... And who's this other dude?

Mercury: What? Didn't we already meet?

May: Oh, right! Haha! My bad! I'm not the best at remembering names, and I've already met so many interesting characters!

Mercury: I'm Mercury Black. Please try to remember this time...

May: Yo! The name's May Marigold! Nice to meetcha!

Mercury: May's known as the all-around super athlete, the Ultimate Gymnast. They also say she's a bit of a troublemaker, but her athletic skill is already off the charts. But her basics and fundamentals are kinda all over the place, so most of her work is improvised. If she's in her groove, she's amazing! If not, then she gets bored and switches things up.

Oscar: No matter how you slice it, she still sounds like a troublemaker. Still, she's got an amazing physique, like a Vytal athlete!.

Mercury: Hey, what are you... Oh, I get it. You got a thing for sexy bodies, huh?

Oscar: Please don't say that out loud. People will actually take you seriously.

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Fiona: Squish! Squish!

Oscar: What's she doing?. She's just sitting on the floor, pressing her fingers to the dirt.

Oscar: Uh, are you okay? I haven't introduced myself. My name is Oscar Pine.

Fiona: Huh? I'm Fiona Thyme.

Fiona: Squish! Squish!

Oscar: She's not stopping. What is she doing?. And she looks so young... Is she really a high schooler?

Mercury: Fiona is the incredibly talented Ultimate Traditional Dancer. As a rookie, the dance industry expects a lot from her. She's already performed in other kingdoms many times. Her dancing is really popular with young audiences, which is rare for the dance industry. Then again, a significant number of her fans are also men.

Oscar: It's probably a niche thing, or something.

Fiona: Squish! Squish!

Oscar: Uh, what are you doing?

Fiona: Hm? I'm squishing!

Oscar: Squishing what?

Fiona: Mr. Ant! Duh! I'm squishing lots and lots of Mr. Ants!

Oscar: ...Come again?

Fiona: If you squish their bellies just right, it makes an awesome sound! Wanna try?

Oscar: H-Hell no!

Fiona: Aw... Okay! Pfft... Pansy...

Oscar: This girl... her attitude and her appearance don't match at all.

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Roman: Who the hell are you? Don't go acting all chummy with me, shithead.

Oscar: This guy is already so hostile.

Roman: Huh?! You got something to say, punkass?

Mercury: Easy, Roman. We're just introducing ourselves.

Roman: Introducing yourselves?

Mercury: Yeah. Not like you two have actually met before, right?

Roman: Hmph...

Roman: The name's Roman Torchwick... Just so we're clear, I don't plan on getting all chummy and shit with you.

Oscar: He looks so young, but he's also really rude.

Mercury: Roman is a student and also their heir to the Spiders.

Oscar: Spiders?! You don't mean-

Mercury: Ah, so you have heard of them. Spiders are the largest criminal organization in Remnant, with a membership of well past 4000 members. In other words, he's the Ultimate Gang-Boss.

Mercury: By the way, don't go mentioning his babyface around him, so be careful. You'll be outta fingers before he's done with you.

Oscar: I-I wasn't going to, but I'm glad I know now!.

Oscar: Mercury, you saved my life...

Mercury: Haha, you're joking right? ...Guess not.

Roman: Hey, if we're done here, you mind making like a tree and fuck off?

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Velvet: Excuse me, but aren't you the guy who was squatting on the beach earlier with your head buried in your arms?

Oscar: Er, y-yeah...

Velvet: You gotta keep it together, y'know? Nobody wants a crybaby for a husband.

Oscar: Y-You're right...

Velvet: You're waiting for me to introduce myself, right? I'm Velvet Scarlatina, and I'll be counting on you from now on.

Mercury: Velvet's the Ultimate Photographer. Naturally, she has a promising future as a photojournalist. I'm not exactly an expert on photography, but I hear she's already won a ton of awards. That said, she's known for her skill at taking pictures of people.

Oscar: The Ultimate Photographer, huh? Makes sense, seeing that camera around her neck.

Velvet: To be honest, I'm a little relieved. You seem decent enough.

Oscar: Decent?

Velvet: There's a lot of weirdos here. I can't tell if they're Ultimates, or just insane. I'm eager to get along with everyone so we can all get off this island.

Oscar: Get off? What do you mean?

Velvet: Huh? You don't know? It's what that stuffed animal Somewhat said. After you finish getting everyone's Hope Crystals, we can all go home and leave this island together.

Oscar: Th-They said that?! We can go home?!

Velvet: You should pay more attention! This is super important!

Mercury: You must feel relieved after hearing that, huh, Oscar? So long as you get along with everyone, we'll be heading home in no time!

Oscar: I guess, but why go through all this trouble in the first place? What's the point of us being on this island anyways?

Mercury: Beats me. Doesn't seem like that big a deal.

Oscar: Not a big deal? It couldn't be any bigger of a deal!.

Velvet: Hey!

Oscar: Ack!

Velvet: Don't "ack" me! I gave you my introduction. Now give me yours!

Oscar: O-Oh... Um, I'm Oscar Pine. It's nice to meet you.

Velvet: Oscar, huh? Well, too bad for you, because I've already made a mental note as "Unreliable Oscar". It'll be hard to change my mind, so you better be a man and do your best!

Mercury: Haha! You're already so whipped, Oscar!

Velvet: I'm talking to both of you! Got it?!

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Hazel: Hm? Oh, right. We gotta do introductions.

Hazel: I am the Ultimate Team Manager, Hazel Rainart!!

Oscar: U-Uh, hello. I'm Oscar Pine.

Hazel: Hey! Your voice is too soft! Speak from your gut!

Oscar: U-Um... I'm Oscar Pine!

Hazel: Louder! You can do better than that!

Oscar: My name is Oscar Pine! Pleased to make your acquaintance!

Hazel: I AM HAZEL RAINART! I AM THE ULTIMATE TEAM MANAGER! Don't forget it, even if you go to hell!

Hazel: I am the Ultimate Team Manager, Hazel Rainart!

Oscar: Y-You don't have to keep repeating your name so much.

Hazel: HA! I agree to your terms!

Oscar: He's so boisterous... It's not just his voice, but his whole body seems loud.

Mercury: Hazel Rainart, as you probably figured, is the Ultimate Team Manager.

Oscar: What does that mean? He's not on a team, but he manages it?

Mercury: Not JUST a team manager. He's an Ultimate. He's gone from town to town and played an active role in managing various sports clubs and their teams. In fact, he led a delinquent team of rugby players to victory in the national playoffs, rescued a baseball team from shutdown and took them to a finals victory, and rumor has it he's training some hotshot new champion in Mistral.

Oscar: If that's all true, then he definitely deserves the title of Ultimate Team Manager. But... with a build like his, he should be PLAYING those games instead.

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Oscar: Urgh!

Mercury: What's wrong?

Oscar: N-Nothing...

May: ...

Oscar: Why is she staring at me?.

May: Ah, uh, um...

May: Um, you know...

May: ...I-I'm sorry.

Oscar: Why is she crying?!.

Mercury: Bullying a girl? That's not cool, Oscar.

Oscar: I-I didn't do anything!

May: Oh, your name is Oscar. If you don't mind, I'd like to remember it.

Oscar: Uh, no, I don't mind you remembering my name.

May: M-My name is May Zedong. From the bottom of my heart, I hope we can get along.

May: Um... You know... Um... Um um um... Uh... My mind is drawing a blank... I'm so nervous! And I even went through the trouble of preparing over 5000 topics for us to discuss after introducing ourselves!

Oscar: Talk about excessive...

Mercury: It's okay to take your time. We can wait as long as it takes. Heck, we'll wait forever if you want us to!

May: Huh... AAAAH!

Oscar: You're just putting more pressure on her!.

Oscar: I guess I'll ask you instead. What's her deal?

Mercury: May here is the Ultimate Nurse. Anytime you're hurt, she'll help you out, so you should probably get along with her. Chances are that if you get wounded and don't get it treated, it'll get infected and you'll die!

Oscar: Don't say something so morbid so naturally...

May: Heh heh heh..

May: AH! I'm sorry for laughing so suddenly! I... I just can't help myself. I'm so happy,I can't remember the last time I made any friends... Ah, not that you actually want to be friends with me! I'm sooooooo sorry I said something so presumptuous! I'll do anything you want! Just please don't hate me!

Mercury: Bullying her again? So not cool, Oscar.

Oscar: Why does this keep happening?.

May: I'm sorry... I'm so so sorry!

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Ilia: Peeking... Peeking... Oh haiii! Who're you?

Oscar: U-Um... Oscar Pine?

Ilia: Helloooo? Your tension is too low! You feelin alright? Ah, well, introductions are already a go-go!

Ilia: Ih! Lee! Uh! Am! Ah! Toh! Lah! Put it all together and whattaya get? Ilia Amitola~!

Ilia: Alright, introductions are done. More importantly, check out this supermarket! Hamburger, ramen, chili, bratwurst, spaghetti... OOH! Melons!

Ilia: Valian, Vacuan, Mistrali, and Atlesian... Even folks from Menagerie would shop here! Man, I'm getting hella stoked! I am thirty-one flavors of stoked for all of this deliciousness! And when I'm hungry, I get reeeeeeeeeeeal munchy-crunchy! It doesn't make sense! Why am I always hungry when I get excited? Hahaha! The body sure is a total mystery!

Mercury: Uh, yeah, this is Ilia Amitola, the Ultimate Musician. She used to play guitar in an all-girl band that was super popular with other girls our age. Their number one hit, "After Class Poyoyon Hour," sold over a million copies.

Oscar: A super popular all-girl school band... Why does that sound so familiar?.

Mercury: Sadly, like so many before them, they broke up due to creative differences.

Oscar: Creative differences?

Ilia: You wanna know?

Oscar: Ack! You heard me?!

Ilia: Duh! Ilia Amitola IS a musician! Like the other greats such as Schnee, Wine, Merlot, Polendina, and Willows... I am an awesome musician, too!

Oscar: Oh, I guess it does make sense that you have good hearing if you're a music- Wait, some of those people aren't even musicians.

Ilia: Don't sweat the details~.

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Oscar: An airport? Wait, can't we use those bullheads to escape?

Robyn: Nope, sorry. Even if they were broken and busted, I could fix 'em. But it looks like they're just for show.

Oscar: Just for show?

Robyn: There's no engine. Can't fix what isn't there.

Oscar: No engine?!

Robyn: Oh, right! I forgot! I'm Robyn Hill, the Ultimate Mechanic. Nice to meetya!

Mercury: I guess I shoulda known the Ultimate Mechanic would have figured it out. Robyn's a bit of a savante when it comes to machines. If she says it won't fly, then it definitely won't fly.

Robyn: Even so, if someone took out the engine before they brought us here, then they planned this out to a T.

Oscar: Kinda weird, don't you think?

Robyn: Yeah, it's weird, but it's a kind of weird I can understand.

Oscar: Huh?

Robyn: It makes sense, though, don't it? Whoever dropped us here... I mean, it's not like they're expecting us to kill each other, right? That's what the school regulations in our e-handbook say.

Robyn: Besides, if you look enough at that cute mouse plushie, you might actually fall in love with them.

Oscar: I really hope it doesn't come to that.

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Sienna: Stop right there! If you value your life, do not take one step closer!

Oscar: ...Huh?

Sienna: I said stay back! Oh, very well... I shall accept your courage!

Oscar: What is she talking about?.

Sienna: You wish to know my name? Kehehe! Some may think your courage recklessness, but I welcome the challenge. In honor of your courage, I shall reveal to you my name! I am Sienna Khan! Remember it well, for it is the name that shall rule the world!

Oscar: R-Rule the world?! She's kidding, right?.

Sienna: Now I must ask you; whose master are you?

Oscar: What?

Sienna: Don't play dumb! Which tribe did you make a pact with? Answer me!

Oscar: Um, what do you mean by "pact"?

Sienna: Answer me now, though I shall cast you to the sea once you do!

Oscar: Then I'm definitely not answering!

Mercury: Uh, maybe I should explain. See, she's asking you what kinda of pet you used to have.

Oscar: P-Pet? I've never really had a pet. Closest thing I had to a pet was a hermit crab we passed around at school.

Sienna: A hermit crab! No better than an insect! Why, your magical essence caps at a mere five! Absolute trash!

Oscar: Trash? Really?

Sienna: Is it wrong to call trash "trash"? Why, trash like you dare not speak against higher beings like me! I am Sienna Khan, Overlord of Fire!

Oscar: H-Hey! Something just climbed out of your robe!

Sienna: Allowing the beasts to bed upon my person in exchange for their servitude is the secret of the Khan Empire!

Mercury: Yeah, seeing all those rats crawling around on her might seem like something out of a horror movie, but it's just another part of what makes her the Ultimate Breeder.

Sienna: As the Dark Beast of the South, Ghira Belladonna once said, "There are no gods or kings mighty enough to fell the bonds of brotherhood!"

Sienna: MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Mercury: Yeah, I, uh, know she's kinda weird, but she does really well as part of her school breeding club. They say she can tame any animal and even proliferated an endangered species. I've even heard she can speak with animals, but I don't think it's true.

Oscar: It sounds crazy, but... she does have more than a few rats crawling in her robe.

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Coco: ...What do you want?

Oscar: This girl's presence is overwhelming. Even her body seems too overwhelming for me to approach!.

Mercury: Hey, Coco! Got time for a quick introduction?

Coco: ...Introduction?

Mercury: C'mon, Oscar!

Oscar: O-Oh! Right. Um, hello. My name is Oscar Pine.

Coco: ...My name is Coco Adel. ...I'm done. That's it, right? Back off.

Oscar: Even I can tell she's thumbing her nose at me.

Mercury: Well, that's Coco for ya.

Oscar: What do you mean?

Mercury: Even by Ultimate standards, she's pretty special. She's next in line to inherit her family's fortune, which is a multi-billion lien conglomerate. She's already started making big moves in the business world. Simply put, she isn't called the Ultimate Affluent Progeny for nothing.

Oscar: That's... That's like a comic book origin.

Coco: You there. Oscar, wasn't it?

Oscar: Huh?

Coco: Why did the academy choose you? What's your Ultimate talent?

Oscar: Um, well, I... I can't remember...

Coco: You can't remember?

Mercury: The shock of all this must've triggered some kinda amnesia on him.

Coco: How foolish. ...We're done, aren't we? How much longer are you going to stand there?

Coco: Move along! That's the only thing you scrawny ones are any good at.

Mercury: Let's just leave, Oscar.

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Joanna: State your business.

Oscar: Oh, uh, w-well, I just wanted to do an introduction with you.

Joanna: An introduction? Understood. I don't mind.

Oscar: I'm Oscar Pine. It's nice to meet you.

Joanna: I'm Joanna Greenleaf. It is nice to meet you, too.

Mercury: This dignified looking woman is known as the ultimate swordswoman. Yeah, color me shocked, too, when I learned this tall woman could be so skilled with a blade. I've heard even veterans with decades of experience have trouble fighting her!

Oscar: I can kind of see why. The way she's staring at me is really intense.

Joanna: If what the mouse said was true, then we are expected to live on this island together. If this is true, then men and women are expected to treat each other with respect. Don't try anything inappropriate. I'd prefer not to kill anyone.

Oscar: I-Isn't that just a wooden sword?

Joanna: It may seem impossible, but a misaimed blow could prove fatal. Well... aimed blows can also prove fatal as well.

Oscar: (Gulps) I'll remember that.

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Sun: ...

Oscar: Looks like he's playing the arcade. More than that, it looks like he's completely ABSORBED by it!.

Sun: ...

Mercury: Hey, Oscar, haven't you introduced yourself to him yet?

Oscar: R-Right! I'm Oscar Pine. Nice to meet you.

Sun: ...

Oscar: Uh...

Mercury: Yo! Sun!

Sun: ...Huh? Sorry. Musta been real focused on this game or somethin'.

Oscar: Y-Yeah, or somethin'.

Sun: Introductions, huh? Alright. The name's Sun Wukong, and I'm the Ultimate Gamer. And I like all genres. ...Nice to meetcha.

Oscar: I'm Oscar Pine. Nice to meet you, too.

Sun: ...Uh-huh, totally.

Oscar: I don't think we're getting much further than this.

Mercury: Yeah, he's really into his game right now.

Sun: Nah, nah. It's more like I gotta charge up my thoughgs, and it takes time to do that, so I can't really talk unless I'm fully prepared, y'know? Especially with new people. Once I get to know 'em, I can talk a lot better.

Oscar: And yet he hasn't looked at me once. Sure, he's the Ultimate Gamer, but how can anyone game at a time like this?.

Sun: ...Ah! Hah, I'm sleepy...

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Mercury: Let's finish introducing ourselves to those two people over there.

Marrow: That's right. I'm having a really hard time because it's full of poison. Speaking of which, I'd appreciate it if you could use your mouth to suck it out~.

Whitley: Poison... I see...

Oscar: Hey, uh, do you guys have a second?

Marrow: (Sighs) Denied.

Oscar: Denied?.

Whitley: Hello. It is nice to meet you.

Oscar: It's nice to meet you, too. My name is Oscar Pine.

Marrow: Oh, so you're the new kid on the block, huh? The name's Marrow Amin, known on the streets as the Ultimate Cook, but I'd much prefer it if you called me the Ultimate Chef instead. Has much more of a big city flavor, y'know?

Whitley: Oh! I forgot to introduce myself! Forgive me! My name is Whitley Schnee. I am a foreign exchange student from Atlas. Hopefully I do not cause you too much trouble.

Oscar: Uh, same.

Oscar: His skin is like porcelain and his eyes are like sapphires! It's almost like looking at a fragil doll...

Mercury: Enchanted, Oscar? That's to be expected, since you're talking to the real Ultimate Prince, which means he's actual royalty!

Oscar: A real prince? Normally I'd be surprised, but looking at his graceful appearance, it's only natural to come to that conclusion, right?.

Whitley: I understand this may appear rude, but... I do feel happy to have met all of you.

Oscar: Huh?

Whitley: In my home country, I... I did not have a friend to call my own. Those of my age did not share my status in society. So to do something like this with everyone is a new experience for me...

Whitley: I EXTOL YOUR VIRTUES!

Oscar: Oh, uh, th-thanks?

Oscar: What's going on?! Why do I feel this sudden urge to drop to my knee and bow?!.

Marrow: H-Hey, I hope I'm not being left on the menu here.

Oscar: Huh? Oh! No! I-

Mercury: So Marrow, how's the restaurant look? Up to your standards?

Marrow: Hmhmhm... I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested. Yeah, it's up to my standards. But I prefer the big city flavor of my hometown, even if this open country air is refreshing. Mhmhmhmhmhmhmhmhm...!

Oscar: Hey, aren't you...?

Marrow: Refined? Cultured? Guilty~!

Oscar: N-No. Worried.

Marrow: Worried? Why would I be worried? Honestly, I'm happy!

Oscar: Really? Why's that?

Marrow: Well, if I could get serious for a quick second... I've got a sneaking suspicion that Somewhat character is a real freak, if you get my meaning.

Oscar: ...What?

Marrow: I'd bet good money they're wearing a black thong as we speak! Or should we discuss this somewhere more privately? C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon!

Oscar: ...No.

Marrow: Alright, I'll put that aside for now. This might also be a bit of a shock for you, but I've got it on good intuition that Mister Schnee over there is one to put out, y'know? See, royalty are groomed to lack common sense, right? That makes them easy prey, like how I tried telling him my "loins" were poisoned and could only be cured if I ask him to suck it out.

Oscar: Is that what he was talking about earlier?

Whitley: Hm? What are you two talking about over here?

Marrow: We'll talk about this later.

Mercury: You better not.

Marrow: Still, when I fantasize about things like that, I can't help but look forward to living on this island! When it comes to love ans cooking, passion is the most important ingredient! Mhmhmhmhm~!

Oscar: This guy is dangerous... but not for the reason I first thought.

[hazel-of-sodor]

Presenting the LNER V2!

[leafywillow]

hazel's fits, green/black edition🍃

hair (v2) | top | skirt | boots

hair (v6) | bodysuit | skirt | shoes

hair (lexi hair) | dress | boots

hair (v2) | dress | boots

hair (v1) | top | skirt | shoes | necklace

Ty to all the cc creators! 💕 @sentate, @jius-sims, @livixo, @marsmerizing-sims, @arethabee, @simstrouble, @ms-marysims, @oydis, @serenity-cc, @arltos, @okruee

[misstrashchan]

I know people have picked up on the board game scene in RWBY V2 Episode 2 (Welcome to Beacon) as foreshadowing the events of the show, but for funsies I want to take a stab at how it foreshadows the general arcs of each four kingdoms myself.

So we have Blake playing as the Kingdom of Vale, and she's completely unaware of the events of the game unfolding and not really paying attention, clearly distracted.

"Alright Blake, it's your turn!"

"Huh? Sorry, what am I doing?"

"You're playing as Vale, trying to conquer the four kingdoms of Remnant!"

"...Right."

The Vale arc is the first three volumes of RWBY, where all our protagonists are at Beacon, but during that time, much like Blake during the game, they're unaware of the larger conflict with Salem, and aren't actively participating in the war at that point. They are ignorant and reactive instead of active. However it's ironic that Blake plays as Vale, since the reason she's not paying attention to the game and seems distracted is because, out of all the main characters in the Vale arc, she is the one most concerned about being kept in the dark and that they're ignorant as to what's really going on.

Blake: I just, I don't understand how everyone can be so calm.

Ruby: (approaching Blake) You're still thinking about Torchwick?

Blake: Torchwick, the White Fang, all of it! Something big is happening and no one is doing anything about it!

She also leaves the game during her turn, much like how she runs away after the FoB and the end of the Vale arc.

"Right. Well, I think I'm done playing, actually"

Yang is playing as Mistral, and she's the most savvy and knowledgeable (hah) player, winning many rounds of the game, teaching Weiss how to play, and has the other players falling into her trap cards.

"Heh, pretty sneaky sis, but you just activated my trap card!"

There's two ways this can be interpreted, with how the Mistral arc (volumes 4-6) is when our protagonists start to gather more knowledge and awarenesses of themselves and the world. It's also in Mistral that our heroes have their most decisive victory so far. It's fitting to have Yang playing as Mistral then, since during the Mistral arc she's the one who who learns from Tai to fight smarter, and to question the authority figures around her from Raven, and after confronting her in the vault is the one who retrives the relic of knowledge.

But, most of the losses our heroes experience are because of Cinder, who is from Mistral, and them falling into her own "trap cards" with the Fall of Beacon being orchestrated by her, killing Pyrrha and Ozpin. And in Atlas the same, with her manipulating Ironwood, undermining the heroes plans to evacuate everyone from Atlas, and killing Penny. She often finds ways to trick and exploit others, and is most dangerous when overlooked and underestimated, like falling into a trap.

Which brings me to Ruby playing as Atlas, where Ruby and Yang have this exchange after Yang's trap card is activated by Ruby:

"Giant Nevermore! If I roll a seven or higher, fatal feathers will slice your fleet in two!

"But! If you roll lower a six or lower, the Nevermore will turn on your own forces!"

"That's just a chance I'm willing to take"

In the Atlas arc (volumes 7-9) the theme of trust and taking risks is very prevalent. Like the move Yang makes in the game it is a risky one, that could end badly for her, but it is one worth taking nonetheless. They take the risk of trusting Ironwood but he ends up turning on our heroes. Oscar takes a risk trusting Hazel and Ozpin, as well as Emerald later on being accepted into their group, and it ends up working out for them. Ruby takes a risky chance in sending a message out to all of Remnant and evacuating Atlas, which saves a lot of people, but they still lose some, including Penny, a dear friend of Ruby's.

"Noooooo! My fearless soldiers!"

"Eh, most of them were probably androids anyways"

"Goodbye my friends... you will be avenged!"

Ruby acts distraught when losing her turn in the game as Atlas, expressing anguish over losing her friends who are described as androids by Yang, just like how Ruby is incredibly depressed and broken after the Fall of Atlas in V9, mourning the loss of Penny, who was both a sentient android and Ruby's friend. (I do wonder if Ruby's comment on avenging her friends might be foreshadowing for her wanting to avenge Penny's death in the future, like how Jaune tried to 1v1 Cinder in V5 to avenge Pyrrha, but I think it's too soon to say)

As a sidenote the fact it is a Nevemore in this turn that has a chance of turning on Yang or helping her is interesting, as it puts me in mind of two characters who can turn into ravens/crows, like the bird and poem Nevermore is associated with. It could pertain to Raven, someone who turns on Yang in v5 during the battle of Haven, but appears to help her and her friends in the V9 epilogue. It could also be about Qrow and his semblance, since during the Atlas arc it begins to evolve so that it is not simply a bad luck semblance, but one that can generate good luck too. In other words he can affect whether the chances are in people's favour or not.

After defeating Ruby (Atlas) Yang says this:

Yang: Not until I draw my rewards! Which are double this round thanks to the Mistral Trade Route!

Ruby: Bah!

Yang: Oh, and what's this? The Smugglers of Wind Path?

Ruby: Bah! Bah, I say!

Yang: I say, it looks like I'm taking two cards in my hand!

After the Fall of Atlas Cinder retrives not one but two relics for Salem, and with Atlas falling into Mantle, two kingdoms are destroyed in one fell swoop.

Then it's Weiss's turn. Weiss is playing as Vacuo, but has no idea how to play the game. Yang takes it upon herself to teach Weiss how to play and what she can do to win the game:

Yang: Well, Weiss, it's your turn.

Weiss: I have... absolutely no idea what's going on.

Yang: (Yang slides up beside her and puts her hand on her shoulder.) Look, it's easy! You're playing as Vacuo which means that all Vacuo-based cards come with a bonus.

Weiss: That sounds dumb.

Yang: See, you've got Sandstorm, Desert Scavenge... Oh, oh! (She pulls up a card to show Weiss.) Resourceful Raider! See, now you can take Ruby's discarded Air Fleet—

Ruby: (crying) Nooo!

Yang: —and put it in your hand!

We know from the end of V9 that what remains of the airfleet of Atlas, as well as the airfleet of Mistral and Vale, have all flocked to Vacuo's defence. What remains of the kingdom of Atlas, the airfleet, but most importantly the people, have now fled to Vacuo and are trying to make a home there.

Yang continues to give Weiss advice on how to win the game to Weiss, building her up, until Weiss starts to get arrogant, believing she's going to win the whole game and is the one in control:

Yang: And since Vacuo warriors have an endurance against Natural-based hazards, you can use Sandstorm to disable my ground forces and simultaneously infiltrate my kingdom! (Yang points a finger at Weiss.) Just know that I will not forget this declaration of war.

Weiss: And that means...

Ruby: You're just three moves away from conquering Remnant!

But then Yang turns on Weiss, activating her trap card, and Vacuo loses.

Since this is may be foreshadowing for the Vacuo arc that we haven't seen yet, I can only speculate what this might mean.

...But judging from the V9 extended epilogue and the books, my best guess would be that if Yang/Mistral is meant to be in part Cinder/Salem and their forces, then Weiss as Vacuo is in part the Crown. In the extended epilogue Jax and Gillian appear to be recieving help from Tyrian and Mercury, meaning Salem has decided to recruit them to her cause.

The Crown wants to restore the Vacuoan monarchy and detest outsiders, especially Atlesians. They do however wish to protect Vacuo from the same forces that destroyed Beacon, aka Salem, and so they are likely going to be manipulated like Weiss is by Yang in the game, being offered aid and giving them advice on how they can win and achieve their objectives, making them believe they can "conquer Remnant", only for them to realise later they were being tricked and used.

"Once again, Vacuo had been isolated from the conflict raging throughout Remnant—only this time it was an opportunity. With the global CCT network disabled, Vale in ruin, Haven leaderless, and Atlas closed off, Vacuo was theirs for the taking. This was likely their last, best chance for a generation. And it was their only hope to defend Vacuo against whomever had been targeting the other kingdoms. In likelihood they had written off Vacuo, like everyone else did, but if they tried to move against the Crown, they would have an unpleasant surprise.

Vacuo wouldn't break this time around."

Weiss: (Weiss stands and a thunder clap accompanies Weiss' overjoyed psychotic laughter.) Y-yes! Fear the almighty power of my forces! Cower as they pillage your homes and weep as they take your children from your very arms!

Yang: Trap card... (Yang's arm appears holding the card.)

Weiss: Huh?

Yang: (Yang shuffles the pieces on the board, Weiss' pieces disappearing in a puff of smoke.) Your armies have been destroyed.

Weiss: (Weiss slumps in her chair, cries and whines.) I hate this game of emotions we play!

Weiss as Vacuo may lose to Yang after realising they've been tricked, but is offered comfort afterwards by Ruby who relates to her losses and empathises with her, which is interesting since Ruby plays as Atlas. So I'm predicting at the end of the Vacuo arc they'll experience somewhat of a loss, whether that's the Crown, our heroes, or likely both, but Atlas will give support to Vacuo and the two kingdoms will come together to heal and ultimately work together, making steps to overcome their tense history with one another.

"Stay strong Weiss we'll make it through this together!"

"Shut up, don't touch me! "

...Which does make Weiss specifically playing as Vacuo especially intriguing, as she is the SDC heiress from Atlas, and Vacuo is a kingdom that has suffered the most in being exploited and colonized for it's natural resources by Atlas. From the epilogue it seems like the Schnees are being confronted directly with all the harm that has been caused by their family and kingdom, so I wouldn't be surprised if Weiss recieves a certain amount of focus during the Vacuo arc in deciding what her legacy as an Atlesian and heiress to the Schnee name will be. Moving forward to make amends, maybe inspiring the citizens of Atlas/Mantle to come together with Vacuo so they can all help and support one another, instead of isolating themselves and suffering alone.

Jaune offers to plays Weiss's hand for a turn also, with Weiss refusing:

Jaune: (Begging with both hands folded together.) Come on, let me play your hand for a turn!

Weiss: I'm not trusting you with the good citizens of Vacuo!

Which is reminiscent of how Vacuo is mistrustful of outsiders, as we've seen in After the Fall and Before the Dawn books.

Yang follows up to say that Weiss attacked her own forces, which could reference the infighting in Vacuo, especially with the Crown.

Weiss: Besides, this game requires a certain level of tactical cunning that I seriously doubt that you possess.

Yang: Uhh, you attacked your own naval fleet two turns ago. (Weiss makes an annoyed sound.)

Overall Weiss as Vacuo recieves the most help as any player during their turn, being taught how to play by Yang, offered comfort by Ruby after losing, and Jaune wanting to help her by playing her hand for a turn. This seems to fit with both how all kingdoms have flocked to Vacuo's aid in response to Ruby's message, but also Weiss as a character, who starts out "the loneliest of them all" but gradually opens up and warms up to other people. The crux of her arc being looking outside herself and at the people around her, relating to their struggles and coming to support them and being supported by them leads to her better understanding herself and becoming stronger for it... Which is kind of what the Kingdom of Vacuo needs to learn too!

Following this is Blake's turn as Vale, which I covered at the start of this post, but that's not the end of Vale's turn. We don't actually see it, but we know the aftermath of the game is this:

Yang: Ugh, we should have never let him play!

Ruby: You're just mad cuz' the new guy beat you!

Blake leaves the game during her turn as Vale, and presumably the "new guy" which is likely Neptune, who they'd just been introduced too, takes over her hand as Vale and wins the game of Remnant overall, even beating Yang and her trap cards. This is likely the endgame of RWBY itself, our heroes return to Vale after the Vacuo arc during the last volume for the final stand, where they win.

How and what that victory will look like I don't know, as we don't see the last turn of the game, so yet again this is even more vaguer speculation. Neptune doesn't really have much plot significance so I can't think there's any meaning to that except that he's a minor foil to Jaune, and the line of it being "a new guy" that wins, so maybe someone who recently joins our heroes side in the final act of the story, possibly Mercury or Cinder.

[scre6m]

@lgbtqcreators​ creator meme (v2): [4/5] lgbtq+ headcanons — hazel callahan + nonbinary

[sierratoninsims]

♡ 𝖛𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖌𝖊 ♡

a 70's inspired lookbook for day 1 of @msmiki1218's CAS challenge! cc linked below cut! <3

hair: @simstrouble - isabel hairstyle top: @huiernxoxo - fanny top pants: @serenity-cc - courtney pants shoes: @jius-sims - patchwork boots sunglasses: @greenllamas - skylight cloud glasses scarf: @serenity-cc - ari scarf belt chain accessory: @trillyke - eenie meenie skirt earrings: @clumsyalienn - bloom earrings rings: @arethabee - mia rings nose piercing: @adrienpastel-blog - urban homage add-ons eyeshadow: @swagsimsfairy - mango eyeshadow eyeliner: @pralinesims - scandal eyeliner N126 eyelashes: @mmsims - maxis match v2 blush: @chewybutterfly - phia blush lipstick: @crypticsim - hazel gloss skin overlay: @twisted-cat - lara skin mouth highlights: @emmibouquet - matte smooth skin overlay skintone: @lamatisse - bare skintones freckles: @twisted-cat - dewy freckles babyhairs: @ceeproductions - snatched edges fullbody blush: @thepeachyfaerie - hint of color fullbody blush chest tattoo: @nekochan-simmer - yara tattoo

[drksanctuary]

DRK-SANCTUARY'S WIP/FIC MASTERPOST:

FINISHED/ WORKS IN PROGRESS:

BANDITS AND SHERIFFS:

Completed western AU for the PJO BigBang back in 2014. Around 50k words, collaboration with @thomas-life. Fictional "western setting" not historically accurate American west.

Original post for it HERE.

Link to Fic on Ao3: HERE

Title art HERE.

Character art HERE.

LIFTING THE MIST CURSE COMIC

(Mist Comic): A fan comic that chronicles an alternate timeline where Nico Meets Al after the event of BoO. Al comes to CHB to have people help him Lift the Mist Curse. (Rated M)

Chapter 1 HERE.

Miscellaneous Mist Comic:

Sketches

Excerpt with Al and Dionysus

nicobaster comic "Oreo Meme"

Nicobaster fluff scene

Dreams "amv" comic.

SON OF MAGIC VOLUME 2

(SoM V2): similar to mist comic Al and Nico meet after BoO (but waaay after in their early to mid 20's). Al is mired in the Olympian Underground/black market, Nico who is just trying to be a good camp recruiter gets dragged into Al's problems, but he kinda likes it. (Rated M)

Chapter 1 (TBD)

Miscellaneous SoM V2:

Post with better context

cover sketch draft

misc sketches and context

Al's updated club outfit

Silly meme

Excerpt from (likely) chapt 2

THE NEW GOLDEN AGE (Titan AU)

Al and Nico meet during the titan war, Titans end up winning with the help of the Giants. Like PJO but infinitely more YA novel about it. (Rated T)

Prologue: A03 post and link HERE, Regular Tumblr Post HERE

Chapter 1: HERE

Chapter 2: HERE

MAKING YOUR MARK ON ME (Tattoo AU) (EXPLICIT)

AU where Nico and Al meet as adults well after the wars. Alabaster Torrington owns a Magical Tattoo Parlor/Magic Shop. Nico di Angelo is a frequent customer, but when Nico goes there this time, it’s not for business… it’s for pleasure. (Rated E for language and sexual content. You have been warned)

Chapt 1 SFW (just the picture): HERE

Sketch of Alabaster SFW: HERE

Chapter 1: NFSW (Pic and fic) tumblr post HERE and Ao3 link HERE (rated M, really)

Chapter 2 (Actually rated E): on Ao3: HERE

HIDDEN GEM CAFE

technically the fic is a little fluff piece entirely written by @thomas-life not me but I drew the picture. link HERE. (Rated G)

CAMP CHTHONIC

More AN RP blog than a fic but if i do fics they will be posted on the sideblog: @campchthonic

OUT OF TARTARUS

A comic we started after the release of Mark of Athena. Nico escapes tartarus and immediately runs onto Alabaster. (rated T)

Chpt 1 Part 1/Pages 1-10 HERE

Chpt 1 Part 2/Pages 11-20 HERE

Chpt 1 Part 3/Pages 21-27 HERE

Chpt 2 Part 1/Pages 28-37 HERE

Chpt 2 Part 2/Pages 38-47 Pages HERE

Chapt 2 Part 3/Pages 38-57 (and bonus pg 58 posted later) HERE

A PIECE OUT OF PLACE

Victorian AU Jasico and Bianca/Alabaster (i know its odd but trust me it made sense). also i know, NOT NICOBASTER??? wha??? (Also rated M)

Jasico Week Picture And Summary HERE

Jasico Dramatic Kiss pic HERE

Jasico steamy scene pg 1 and 2 (kind of NSFW) HERE

Victorian Sketches HERE

Victorian Sketches (old) has Piper bc it was before we changed it to Bianca HERE

Cute Jasico Sketches HERE

Victorian Jasico Meet-cute HERE

Jason and the wolves HERE

SNIPPET FIC/IDEA DUMPS

CHTHONIC CAMP AU (fanfic for a fanfic)

Not to be confused with the camp Chthonic blog above these are all the links for stuff I did for my interpretations and headcanons and AUs for @gutsybitsies Chthonic Camp AU. Their original fic HERE.

Jason and Nico and Al. HERE.

Nicobaster ficlet. HERE

Nicobaster looking bamf. HERE.

Alabaster being extra: HERE

ANCIENT CHTHONIC NICOBASTER (rated M)

"But your highness our love is forbidden" pic. HERE

APHRODITE NICO/THEMIS AL

Original post: HERE

Post with Drew (Nico's sister): HERE

Aprodite!Nico and Mars!Jason: HERE

JACKSON HOUSE NICOBASTER (rated M ig)

Idea post HERE

SLUT AU (rated M)

Idea post HERE

NICOBASTER FANFIC TO ORIGINAL WORK PIPELINE

MEDIEVAL PJO (KnightSlayer)

"A bastard shall be king." ....So reads the Prophecy of the Ages. But with a war on the horizon and Hazel to feed, Nico has more to worry about than kings and their bands of upper class sycophants. That is, until Percy comes along, and suddenly he finds himself right in the middle of it all... (rated M)

Ao3 link: HERE

Al and Nico Meeting: HERE

Nico and Percy (kiss). HERE (might be considered mature by some)

Nico backstory. HERE (rated M for Violence)

Chapt Pictures i had planned. HERE

Ball Sketches HERE

Nico Backstory 2 (sad) HERE

Nico and Percy Thestral encounter HERE

Miscellaneous Medieval AU Nico Sketches: Sketch 1 HERE, Sketch 2 HERE, Sketch 3 HERE.

MERMAID AU (Through the Sea Glass)

Like "the little mermaid" but with extra fantasy world building and the prince (Nico) ACTUALLY falls in love with the Sea Witch (Alabaster) instead of the mermaid (Percy) rated G

Summary with pictures HERE

Octokind Alabaster HERE

PHANTOM AU - (Phantom Haven)

Nico's near-death experience endows him with powers and now he has to be a Savior which means he has to fight phantoms to keep people safe which would be a doable job, BUT that's not the only task of a Savior. He also has to uphold the integrity of the Savior System (ugh),Do good deeds and report them to his supervisor (double ugh), train his Lumen (dead eyed little thing doesn't like to listen to him so...ugh again!) and last but definitely not least he has to dedicate his life to figuring out how to use his endowment to cure a great societal problem... to perform... a MIRACLE TM. (yikes on bikes, no pressure). Will he be able to live up to the expectations of greatness that has been thrust upon him? or will he fail?

Character concepts 1-6 HERE

Character concepts 7-8 HERE

CHIP AU - (No original title yet)

Modern Human AU in which an aimless Nico's life is changed for the better when someone abandons their little baby girl (Hazel) on the steps of the refurbished fire house he now lives in. Years later he finds a little kid named Frank and adopts him as well. Now he just needs to navigate life as a single parent which he is mostly fine with until Bianca tries to set him up with her fiance's best friend (Alabaster). Will this romance stay the casual fling it started as or could it blossom into something more? (Rated M)

NIco with bb hazel HERE

CHURCH AU - (no original title yet)

An AU where Nico sells his soul to save his family from dying, when he meets his untimely death however he finds that Hell is not what he expected, its a quarry, and is he does his quotas, he can ascend the ranks, and even make it to heaven. Each Level comes with its own set of rules. The level right before heaven, which requires Demons to go to earth to collect evil humors that taint people's souls, has the MOST rules. With him being unable to see his family, not knowing what he's doing, and finding out that his childhood friend has grown into a handsome...Preist in training?!? Nico finds that he can't keep the all of the rules straight, especially because he's not. (Rated M)

Nico as a Demon pic HERE

There's quite a few more AUs but the above shows most of them.

If you'd like to know more about the above or about the ones not mentioned please subscribe to "Nicobaster premium" for the low low price of Free.99! And if you are 18 or older and interested I also have Nicobaster Premium 18+ (for the same price for all your smutty needs. Tee Hee!)

That's all, Nicobaster Houshold!...FOR NOW!

[passionmaterial]

Its the one you've all probably been waiting For..

If Timmy Turner was in A New Wish!

More info Under the cut

Edit: forgot to link prev ones

First | Prev | Next | VER 2

Name:Timothy Tiberius Turner (or Timmy Turner)

Age:30

Important note: I do not account for the Secret Wish, that's why a lot of them are in their 20's and 30's

I've thought about his character a lot, so this is gonna be a long story here.

Short Summary:

Timmy remembers his Fairies, he married Tootie and had two kids, he lives in the apartment to the left of Cosmo and Wanda, and he's friends with the wells family, and does tell Hazel he remembers his Fairies. Also, he got his Overbite aligned as well, but he had to wear braces in high school.

Long Version:

So obviously, once timmy turned 18, he could no longer remember Cosmo, Wanda, or Poof, or at least he was supposed to not remember. Something somewhere along the Memory Wipe Process failed, and he was able to retain his memories of them.

Look at V2 for how he remembers.

Anyway, he still loses Cosmo, Wanda, and Poof, and naturally they think the memory wipe worked.

Now, to answer the question, everyone's probably been thinking since I said he didn't get with Trixie, Is "who did timmy end up with?." And the answer is Tootie. He ends up marrying tootie after high school, unfortunately making Vicky his Sister in Law. The good thing is that both of them are no-contact with her, making it not really a problem. He has two kids:Tammy and Tommy(his kids from channel chasers)

Anyway, after tootie gets a job in dimmadelphia, they have to move there, and just so happen to move in to the apartment on the left side of Cosmo and Wanda's, making it quite awkward when the two of them introduce themselves to the neighbors.

Aj offers timmy a job at the Galax Institute, which basically consists of just visiting and chatting with AJ Every day, which he doesn't mind. To him, the pay is a bonus.its a rather rewarding "job" for him. AJ just knew he was in need of a job but knew he didn't have the intellectual prowess for the actual work.

He becomes good friends with Marcus Wells, which is how he met Hazel. Him and Hazel have a good friendship. He likes that she is so optimistic about everything. Eventually, being grown, he does tell her that he was Cosmo and Wanda's last godkid, which doesn't surprise her, but does shock her that he remembered cosmo and wanda.

So naturally, after that, Timmy reunites with Comso and Wanda genuinely. Also, he totally cried at how his baby God brother is now an adult.

Edit:

Okay, I forgot to do this, but I was gonna talk about his Overbite/Buck teeth. Like the summary said, he does get them fixed, which I did look up, and you can get an overbite aligned, and also had he kept the overbite like shown in channel chasers, he probably had P A I N in his teeth, because according to the websites I looked at, Overbites can start to hurt if not fixed. (I myself have a slight overbite and I can actually kind of verify this, because sometimes my bottom teeth will just feel weird..like not in pain but not normal.)

So yeah, Timmy gets his Overbite aligned and doesn't have pains.

[v4point5]

goodnight from mametchi and petitchi, keitai vs V2

[bestworstcase]

I can't remember whether you've answered this before, but. You postulate that everything Salem does in 8.9 after learning Yang's identity is a ruse to justify letting Yang and the others go free; that threatening Emerald is a deliberate attempt to provoke Hazel into attacking her so she has an excuse to turn her attention away from the prisoners.

My question is: Why does she need an excuse? Salem doesn't answer to anyone, and I can't see any particular risk in just saying "I've decided you're free to go, goodbye" and leaving the kids baffled. So what does she have to gain from... making herself seem more dangerous and unreasonable than she is? Not that I think she feels any hope she could convince the heroes she's reasonable -- as you've stated, Oz has done a very good job de-personing her for a very long time -- but I'm not sure why she would go to the effort of constructing an artificial scenario solely to make her enemies think she's more monstrous. What's her motivation here?

in the course of answering the question of her motivation i'm actually going to lay out my argumentation for reading the salem vs hazel fight this way, 'cause i don't think i've ever done so comprehensively before. (on tumblr, anyway.)

the foundational theory isn’t "salem did all this as a ruse to let her hostages go" but rather that this duel with hazel is a performative means to an end. and the reason i think that is the way the fight itself, along with the duel in the lost fable and the brief altercation with the kids preceding the fight, are choreographed.

to preface this discussion, rwby's fight choreography is subordinate to characterization. (this is less true in v1, wherein centerpiece fight scenes put a greater emphasis on style and spectacle, but from v2 onward there’s been an increasing focus on using combat to develop character.) team rwby vs ace-ops is a good example of this: ruby struggles in her matchup with harriet not only because she’s a grimm-fighting specialist whose main advantage (agility) is negated by her opponent being able to match her speed, but also because her heart isn’t in it; she pauses to plead with harriet to stop and think about what she’s doing and never really recovers her footing.

so my first presupposition is that salem isn’t an exception to this principle and her fight with hazel is not meant to just be a dramatic spectacle that Looks Cool but has nothing substantive to say about the characters involved. the writing and fight choreography are reliably cogent and i trust that the same amount of thought was put into this scene. i say this because i think "empty spectacle" is the only other way to parse what happens here.

now on to the most salient piece of context: we know that salem can fight well. because, as ruby puts it, we’ve seen what she’s capable of. the lamp showed us.

in the lost fable, we see:

salem and ozma fighting together, back-to-back, as they escaped her father’s fortress together.

salem stopping a nevermore the size of a commercial plane cold, and then crumpling it up like tissue paper.

salem matching ozma, a skilled, highly-experienced warrior who at the time had the combined might of the four maidens put together at his disposal, exactly blow-for-blow in their last duel.

nevermore crunch gives us a sense of not just the force but also the sheer precision of control that salem has over her magical power. the first fight tells us that even with no formal training, salem had the raw talent (and desperation) to keep up with ozma and hold her own against professional soldiers; the second fight tells us that by the time the ozlem kingdom fell, salem and ozma were equally matched in terms of skill.

the fanon idea that salem can't fight but won their duel by virtue of her invulnerability—whittling ozma down one lucky hit at a time—is a) contradicted by the swift and even back-and-forth volleys shown, and b) plainly at odds with the fanon nonsense that ozma spent most of the duel desperately and futilely on the defensive fighting to shield the girls from her onslaught.

from the tableaux in the second fight, it's hard to determine whether salem bothers with self-defense under normal circumstances (she doesn't, in the tableaux, but nor does ozma). but that in itself isn't a reason to presume a lack of skill in combat because salem has no incentive—other than pain avoidance, which given her extreme tolerance for pain isn't much—to fight defensively.

with all this in mind: we begin with her altercation with the kids.

salem enters the scene by exploding her way out of the whale. notice the kids knocked over like bowling pins on the left: oscar was standing approx. fifty-three feet away from the epicenter of the blast, measured based on salem being six feet tall. (<- with perspective taken into account. from wall to edge, the dock is 48ft wide)

emerald keeps her feet, perhaps because she knows better what to brace for; she's about the same distance away. in any case, salem's next move is to launch herself to the edge of the dock (again, a distance of 48ft—measured based on a different screenshot) and stretch to grab emerald in a fraction of a second.

ok. the women's world record 60m sprint is 6.92 seconds; this works out, rounded, to about 28.4ft/s. at that speed, you can cover forty-eight feet in about 1.7s; salem closes the distance in about half a second, which works out to 96ft/s. from a dead stop.

salem is could-probably-keep-up-with-ruby-rose fast.

next point. these two frames:

are a split second apart. the blast is aimed at ren and when jaune leaps in front of him, hits his shield right in the middle:

had jaune not gotten there in time, this would've hit ren squarely in the chest. in any case it hits with enough force to blast both boys off their feet and slams them into the flesh wall (roughly, eyeballing it based on several shots) 20-30 feet behind them hard enough to visibly strain jaune's aura. keep this timing in your mind for later. salem can fire these things off literally faster than you can blink.

the distance between her and ren at this point is approx. forty-five feet, again using the wide shot from earlier to measure. precise accuracy isn't impressive at this range necessarily but it's worth noting in relation to ren, who fires on her from the same distance, kneeling, with his fully automatics. every bullet goes wide:

& then salem whips around and noscopes him.

similarly, she sticky-hands yang in the face (catching her gauntlets only because yang throws up her arms to shield herself) while upside down with her eyes closed and paste for bones. she's a GOOD shot.

another detail to note here is the difference in salem's reaction to ren's attack versus yang's; ren fires on her, misses, she retaliates with her magical equivalent to his guns, but when yang punches bombs into her chest a second later, salem literally just stands there, even lowering her arm to let yang do it...

...and then after being blown up, rather than firing back with magic, snags yang and pulls her over to look intently at her:

we know that the reason salem grabbed emerald is with the intent to question her about what happened to the lamp, because salem concludes from the available facts that em must have stolen it. we also know that when ren shot at her, salem returned fire immediately, within a fraction of a second—this woman is inhumanly fast, and the time between these two frames:

is exactly equal to the time between these two:

what this tells is that salem did have time to blast yang in the gut with magic. through the whole sequence with yang punching her, salem is looking at yang's face, her gaze tracks down to follow her movement. she sees this coming and she's reacting to it, just making a deliberate choice not to retaliate.

and then she grabs yang.

this is the first weird thing salem does in this scene—every move she makes prior unambiguously follows from salem's belief that emerald stole the lamp and her desire to recapture oscar and take the relic back—and i don't think it's a coincidental that the weirdness begins with salem noticing yang...

...whom she saw like, two days ago rushing forward to comfort ruby after salem your mother-ed her to the ground. i've made this point before but prior to her arrival in atlas salem might at most have seen toddler pictures of these kids; ruby takes after her mother enough to be impossible to mistake for anyone but summer's daughter, but yang isn't even biologically related to summer. so salem wouldn't know her on sight. but this interaction a couple days ago would've given her enough circumstantial context to at least guess that this girl is summer's eldest.

so here, when salem sees yang and instantly flips from slinging bolts of magic around with enough force to break or at least visibly strain jaune's aura to sticky-handing yang to drag her over and grab her, the question is okay, why? why does that shift happen? what is it about this moment that alters salem's motivation? and because the situation hasn't changed whatsoever and there's no other reason for yang to have any significance to salem, the simplest and really only cogent explanation is her relation to summer rose.

onwards. salem isn't expecting oscar to zap her. you can tell because every time salem takes a hit on purpose in this scene, she either tracks her opponent's movements or visibly braces herself and neither of those things happens in the split second between oscar starting to fire and his blast hitting her; and also, she grunts in pain both when it hits her and when she doubles over afterward. given that oscar shouts at her first (so he has her attention) and what oscar and ozma say when they discuss the state of the merge in 7.13 and earlier in 8.9, i think it's pretty likely that salem didn't realize oscar could tap into ozma's magic and thus he caught her off guard.

also i'm not sure oscar realized he could do that until he did it. look at this boy. he's so busy going "wait what?" at himself that he doesn't even notice salem yeeting yang at him until a split second before yang hits him ->

that, or oscar's use of magic jostled oz to the front and neither of them were expecting that to happen.

at this point salem stops fucking around and pins everyone to the floor. and again this is something i want to emphasize because it is effortless for her. when she does this to hazel in 6.4 she makes a gesture with her hands, but here she just decides it's going to happen and it does. (which tells us that the gesturing in 6.4 is for show, just like flipping the table and raising her voice. she's exaggerating her irritation into this over-the-top anger for the sake of intimidating everyone else in the room. it's performative.)

anyway, she hangs emerald on the wall, conjures a ball of magic, and:

SALEM: What did you do with the lamp? EMERALD: ...N-nothing! [Salem leans in to hold the magic close to her face.] SALEM: It's missing. Where is it? EMERALD: I didn't do anything with it! SALEM: Where—[she lowers her hand, turning away]–is it?

ok. salem can tell when people lie. she's also grimm—she can probably sense or perceive emotion the way all other grimm do.

emerald isn't lying to her and salem knows she's telling the truth. the pseudo-repetition of the questions obfuscates this a little, because they're almost but not quite the same, but salem believes both of the truthful answers emerald gives her.

her initial assumption is that emerald stole the lamp and must have done something to hide it ("what did you do with it?"). emerald is startled, confused, and answers "nothing." salem explains why she's asking ("it's missing") and then asks if emerald knows where it is or who took it ("where is it?") because her next guess is that emerald conspired with somebody else who stole the lamp while emerald snuck oscar out.

when the lamp went missing, there were eight people on the whale: salem herself, hazel, emerald, neopolitan, oscar, yang, and these other two children whose names salem probably doesn't know. right before the seers sounded the alarm about intruders, salem encountered emerald and someone she thought was hazel in the corridor. at that point in time, salem expected hazel to still be interrogating oscar, as she's mildly surprised to see him: "ah, hazel. have you gotten what we need yet?"—and 'hazel' behaved oddly enough that salem was side-eyeing him before the alarm distracted her. her reaction to emerald a few minutes later ("you really have been honing that semblance of yours") confirms that she's figured out that 'hazel' was really oscar.

hazel assumes there is an alarm that will go off if they move the lamp, but he's wrong: neo swipes it seconds after they leave the chamber, and salem doesn't know anything is wrong until a) the seers alert her to the presence of intruders, several minutes layer, and b) she goes to personally secure the lamp and finds it already missing.

so salem does not know exactly when the lamp was taken, only that it happened before the seers sounded the alarm. that her suspicion falls first on emerald suggests that salem has—for whatever reason—already considered and ruled out the possibility that the intruders are the thieves (most likely, because the seer alarm calls convey more information than just "stranger danger!" and salem knows the intruders didn't get that far into the whale before being caught). plus by the time she's questioning emerald, salem has a) terrified emerald well past being able to maintain her semblance, which requires active focus, and b) visually confirmed that none of the intruders nor oscar are carrying the lamp with them.

ruling out emerald as the thief therefore leaves her with just two suspects: neopolitan, or hazel. now, salem does not have any reason to trust another of cinder's little pet illusionists, so on the face of it neo might seem to be the obvious suspect.

BUT.

salem expected hazel to be in oscar's cell at the time she unwittingly caught emerald in the act of helping oscar escape. and she knows that hazel is attached to emerald—that's why she punishes him for lying to her in 6.4 by forcing emerald to answer the question hazel tried to dodge, she knows hazel lied to protect emerald.

and emerald could not have freed oscar from his cell without hazel knowing about it.

based on the facts of the situation as salem understands them at the point when she turns away from emerald to ask, rhetorically, where the lamp is, there are only two possible explanations:

hazel stole the lamp while emerald helped oscar escape.

neo stole the lamp while emerald tried to sneak oscar out, either with hazel's assistance or while hazel was somewhere other than where salem expected him to be, doing something he shouldn't.

there is no way—no way—that salem does not realize, at this juncture, that hazel has most likely betrayed her. this woman is a clever strategist who has been running circles around ozpin and his inner circle since the show began and, while she lacks the charisma and social dexterity to be a truly masterful manipulator, she understands human nature and her manipulative tactics are always very shrewd. unless you're willing to assume that the writers just idiot balled her for the sake of the plot—which i'm not; rwby is too well-written—salem's assumption now is that hazel stole the lamp.

(which, she's wrong, but the underlying reasoning in how she handles the situation on the docks up to this point is an application of occam's razor; she begins with the simplest explanation and works upward in complexity from there, so she'd land on hazel stealing the lamp before she got to "neo stole the lamp, emerald freed oscar, hazel was doing something else.")

the shift in her tone as she turns away from emerald and the things she then says to oscar evince this also: her second "where is it?" is rhetorical. she knows that either hazel or neo has it, and hazel is the more likely suspect. since neither of them are here at the moment, but neither of them can leave the whale except through the dock, the question is no longer urgent. she has the situation fully under control. all she needs to do is wait.

so her attention shifts to oscar or ozma. (whether oz is fronting or salem thinks he’s fronting because oscar used ozma's magic is somewhat unclear, but given that she correctly identifies them in both 8.4 and 8.6 i'm inclined to think she’s right this time too, and oz got pulled forward by oscar’s use of his magic)

SALEM: Look how you've diminished. How you've lessened yourself—and for what? These children? This ruined world...? Why—do—you—keep—coming—back? YANG: Why do you?! [Salem glances at her, startled.] YANG: All of this endless death, just because something bad happened to you once upon a time? Nobody gets a fairytale ending! Everything I've lost—every person I've lost!—is because of you! SALEM: And who is it I've taken from you, girl? YANG: Summer Rose. My mom. SALEM: Hm. [amused] Her again?

as i said, salem already has reasonable confidence that this girl is summer rose's eldest daughter, but if she had any doubt or uncertainty prior she now knows for sure. "and who is it i've taken from you, girl?" is salem both engaging with what yang said to her and also fishing for a confirmation that she is who salem thinks she is, which yang obligingly gives to her.

so at this juncture salem now has three goals:

don't severely hurt or kill summer's daughter.

determine who stole the lamp and get it back.

recapture oz/oscar.

with the third being a means to the end of finding out how to access the lamp. this makes #3 the lowest priority, because there are at least six people who know the "password" (ozma, oscar, ruby, yang, and their two teammates) and if salem loses oz/oscar now she can still try to capture one of the other children later.

of the first two, which is more important doesn't really matter yet, because right now they aren't in opposition. she can accomplish the first by not doing anything to harm yang and the second by staying put until the thief—either neo or hazel—tries to get past her.

of course, then hazel IMMEDIATELY shows up. he is, remember, salem's primary suspect at this point and she knows that he, at a minimum, wasn't where she thought he was when emerald snuck oscar out of his cell. even if hazel doesn't have the lamp, salem has to consider him a possible traitor until proven otherwise because there is also this unspoken question of how emerald got oscar out. either hazel was incompetent or he was an accomplice.

salem wants to know which it is.

he walks onto the docks, greets her. salem glances over at him and sees that he does not have the lamp, so either he stashed it somewhere on the whale with the intent to sneak it out later or he isn't the thief. the question of how emerald got oscar past him remains. there is a possibility that hazel wasn't involved in the jailbreak or the theft—he's been in and out of that cell all day—and if salem makes this accusation and she's wrong, she risks losing his loyalty. right. like hazel is already terrified of her and she knows ozma has been feeding him bullshit all day about how she's bent on destroying the world, she walked in on that.

if she takes an aggressive posture here on the basis of an incorrect suspicion that's going to play right into ozma's hands by making her look unreasonable, untrustworthy, dangerous. even if he remains loyal in the moment, he'll have all of this in the back of his mind and he might turn against her at a more crucial juncture in the future.

salem is very risk-averse. she's not going to do that. so now she has a fourth goal: test hazel in a way that will strengthen his commitment to her if he remains loyal, or else force him to definitively prove himself a traitor.

when salem meets emerald and 'hazel' in the corridor earlier in this episode she says "ah, hazel. have you gotten what we need yet?" and then, after the seer alarm, "it seems we have guests [...] find them!"

when hazel arrives at the docks, salem says "ah, hazel. i found our guests." the intonation of "ah, hazel" is the same but exaggerated, and salem's taking "we have guests: find them" and flipping it around; "i found our guests." now, she's aware that the 'hazel' she spoke to in the corridor a few minutes ago was really oscar, so hazel doesn't have context for why this is funny. but she's making a sarcastic little joke at his expense about how she doesn't trust him now.

"ah, hazel" is how she greeted the false 'hazel' whom she did trust and told to find their "guests." she suspects that the real hazel was an accomplice to this scheme so she parodies that greeting and then makes a sardonic jab at him as if the false 'hazel' in the corridor were real and just failed so abysmally at finding the intruders that salem had to do it herself. and then she specifically draws his attention to emerald and goes "this one was helping them."

and this is the test, right.

before she asks emerald "what did you do with the lamp?" salem conjures up a ball of magic and holds it up where emerald can see. very unsubtle threat. she does the exact same thing here.

"this one was helping them," she says, magic crackling in her hand where hazel can see it. there is, again, a very unsubtle threat that she'll hurt emerald. and then she pauses for a solid three seconds, which doesn't sound like a lot but it's the similar in length to her other dramatic pauses like "find the girl that did this to cinder... and bring her to me" (~3.5s) and "before you go, inform tyrian... that i wish to have a word with him" (~2s)

in 6.4, salem asks hazel to give her a specific piece of information about cinder, and he tries to evade by saying "i take full responsibility," so she flips the table, pins him to the ground, and intimidates emerald into telling her instead, because she knows hazel is lying to shield emerald from the imaginary threat of salem's wrathful retribution.

in this scene, salem has emerald pinned to the wall and makes an implicit but extremely clear threat to hurt emerald because, she tells hazel pointedly, this one was helping the intruders sneak oscar, the boy hazel was supposed to be interrogating at the time, off the whale: SIGNIFICANT LOOK. DRAMATIC PAUSE.

this is the test. this is the test. the last time salem put hazel into a situation where he anticipated a punishment falling on emerald's head, he lied to try to redirect that punishment onto himself. if he tries to do the same thing now, he's either going to implicate himself as an accomplice, attack her, or exonerate himself by lying (because salem will know that he's lying if he falsely claims to have been in on it a la "i take full responsibility").

she's not making any accusations but she is giving him the chance to come clean. the last time this happened and he lied to her, she bullied emerald to punish him. the implicit promise she's making this time is that if he was also "helping them" and he tells her the truth now, she won't hurt emerald. if he gives her what she wants, she'll reward him with what he wants.

as. usual. she does not communicate this clearly enough for it to be effective (⭐️ SHE TRIED) and hazel doesn't give her anything to work with, just stands there silently, so... she escalates. "take the boy back to his chamber; i have work to do with this one."

if hazel's silence is because he's upset but still remains loyal, he'll obey and she'll know that she has a much firmer hold on him than she thought. if... he was involved, then his silence is because he's trying to figure out a way to salvage this situation. she still does not have absolute certainty. so she provokes him by raising the stakes and turning her back on him.

um, another noteworthy detail that i think supports reading "i have work to do with this one" as a performative threat salem's making to force hazel to make his loyalties clear:

salem touches emerald's face with this very ominous-looking magic crackling around her hands and nothing happens. the specific threat she's been making in this scene of "answer me or i'll burn your face with this nasty dark magic" is quite literally bluffing. it doesn't hurt emerald upon contact with her skin. emerald just experiences the untold horrors of salem grabbing her face.

HOWEVER. escalating in this manner a) takes the risk of hazel choosing to betray her for emerald’s sake right now even if he wasn’t an accomplice before, and b) insures that if hazel is already a traitor, there will be a violent altercation.

the former is a much less dangerous risk than alienating hazel if he's truly loyal by making open accusations (an immediate betrayal that she provoked and is prepared to handle vs a possible betrayal an unknown amount of time in the future which might catch her with her guard down). the latter is a problem, because there are children glued to the floor who will be in the crossfires of any fight, and one of those children is her general's eldest.

and this is where that second goal of "don't severely harm or kill summer's daughter" comes into play and comes into conflict with salem's need to recapture oscar & oz and recover the stolen relic. it's at this point salem has to make a decision about what to prioritize, and her choice is to—if hazel does what she expects him to do and attacks her—let the children go while she "fights" hazel, then pry information out of hazel once they're gone. so she reveals that her priorities are:

summer's daughter.

the lamp.

hazel's loyalty.

the lamp's "password."

also notice that salem does keep her implicit promise not to harm emerald if hazel gives her what she wants—she releases emerald, too, after hazel punches her. she's thinking ahead to what she'll do once the children are gone and she has hazel alone on the docks. by letting emerald and the rest of the children escape, she removes his motivation for betraying her: he no longer has anyone around whom he could possibly sacrifice himself to protect from salem, because all of them have made it to safety. now salem can pin him to the wall and start asking questions.

either hazel took the lamp and stashed it somewhere on the whale once he realized she'd caught the children, or neopolitan stole it and—if she's still aboard—will need to pass the docks sooner or later. so salem stays put, with hazel, until she has the lamp in hand again or knows where hazel hid it. summer's daughter is safe, hazel has no one to sacrifice himself for (and she has some leverage to counter ozma's lies; letting the children go is her proof that she isn't unreasonable), and salem has everything she needs to get the lamp back. she might have to capture someone again in the future to extract the lamp's password, but there's a chance hazel learnt it from oscar before the jailbreak and theft.

worst case scenario, neo stole it and escaped before salem intercepted the jailbreak on the docks, but at least by questioning hazel she'll be able to determine whether that's the case.

a partial victory is preferable to a loss, and knowing what to sacrifice in pursuit of one's priorities is important. this is salem's basic strategic philosophy and it shows through in her actions throughout this scene; she's making choices about what matters to her most and what she can afford to let go, always with the intent to achieve as many of her goals as possible, in descending order of importance.

with salem it's important to keep in mind that she thinks like this. strategic acumen is her greatest strength and being able to evaluate all of one's objectives in terms of priority, feasibility, and tactical means at once is a critical strategic skill. strategy is about the long term, big picture thinking, where salem excels. so she almost never does anything for just one reason; every decision she makes is a balancing act taking into account all of her important short- and long-term goals.

speaking of which, i've so far limited this discussion to her immediate objectives in this scene, but it's worth remembering that salem has long-term plans that she is working toward and her actions and choices in any given scene are mediated by the big picture; her inner conflict regarding cinder aside, salem is never going to do anything that achieves a short-term goal by harming her strategic ends (and her erratic behavior toward cinder arises from a conflict between her strategic ends and her increasing reluctance to treat cinder like a pawn, i.e. her big-picture wants and needs can no longer be easily reconciled.)

it's much harder to discern salem's long-term objectives because we don't really know what her plan is, except in the broadest strokes. but we can hazard a few guesses:

salem is very circumspect about what happened to summer rose; it may be necessary for her plans to preserve the heroically-martyred idea of summer rose—the most obvious reason would be that "summer was the best, and even she failed" is a very exploitable weakness in her opponents' morale.

if salem intends to confront the brothers face-to-face, using the final judgment as bait, and she fails, the only thing she can do that might prevent the gods from annihilating remnant is ensuring that everyone is rallied against her. forcing the truth of her existence into the open while performing to "monstrous evil witch bent on destruction of all things" expectations is the surest way to do that.

likewise, winnowing her own inner circle such that she is truly and completely alone by the time she has all four relics in hand may be part of the plan.

also worth taking into consideration are the ways salem's trauma circumscribes her decision-making. she is:

terrified of rejection.

terrified to care or admit to caring because the divine mandate is a justification and a threat of genocide strictly to punish her, and she knows it.

convinced that no one will ever truly care about her, hear her, or want to help her without getting something in return.

resigned to being seen as a monster no matter what she does, solely on the basis of her inhuman appearance.

all of these things predispose her to retreat behind her emotional walls and just reflect the expectations of others back to them. she's been viciously, brutally punished every single time she's tried to be authentic and vulnerable with others and it hurts less to shut down and be what she's "supposed" to be than to try and be cut down over and over again. this is a defensive learned response and it informs both her strategic planning and her tactical decisions; even in situations where breaking expectations and being emotionally honest might benefit her if people were to give her a chance, she's not going to do it unless she is really, really certain that she won't be punished for trying again.

now, to wrap this up, let's go over the fight with hazel.

i actually debate with myself a lot as to whether salem did or didn't anticipate hazel punching her, because she a) doesn't brace and b) cries out when his fist makes contact with her face, but i am certain that by this juncture salem did expect and was counting on him to do SOMETHING to stop her. the sequence of events is this:

salem approaches emerald while telling hazel, "take the boy back to his chamber; i have work to do with this one." after a brief pause, hazel answers "yes. of course," and begins to walk over to oscar. at this point, salem puts both of her hands on emerald's face and leans in to emphasize the threat, but still doesn't hurt her.

keep in mind that there is a significant distance between salem and oscar. relative to her position when she entered the scene, salem has moved (roughly, eyeballing) about thirty feet to the left and knocked oscar about the same distance from where he fell when she burst through the side of the whale. so they're still about fifty feet apart.

an able-bodied human walks about 4.2ft/s at a normal pace on average; hazel is quite tall—i believe word of god is eight feet, but he is NOT two feet taller than salem, the top of her head is level with his shoulder line, which if salem is six feet tall exactly would make him about 7'2"—which gives him a much longer than average stride, so we'll presume his normal walking pace is about 4.5ft/s.

when salem walks from emerald over to oscar, it takes her about twelve seconds. if we assume that her pace is the average 4.2ft/s, that would make this distance just about exactly fifty feet. 50ft 5in, to be precise. the consistency here between the visible spatial distance and the temporal distance suggests close attention to detail on the part of the creative team.

(salem returns from oscar to emerald, off screen, in about two seconds, but this is not problematic given her super-fast gliding pace—we can assume that salem slingshot herself across most of the distance and then walked the last couple steps.)

so at a normal pace of 4.5ft/s, it should take hazel about eleven seconds to walk from salem's side to where oscar is... and in fact it takes him exactly that: he begins to walk at 14:35 and stops in front of oscar at 14:46. again, the consistency is telling—particularly because there is no dialogue at all in this span, so how long it took wasn't dictated by the length of a spoken line.

hazel picks oscar up, murmurs "no more gretchens, boy," into his ear, pushes the long memory into his hands, and then drops him again. this takes another ten seconds. hazel turns away from oscar and begins to walk back toward salem at 14:56, punching her at 15:04, so his return is faster but within the range of a brisk walking pace (eight seconds, fifty feet, approx. 6.3ft/s).

the reason i'm belaboring this point is that salem says "i have work to do with this one," and then... stands there without doing anything except holding emerald's face menacingly for a genuinely awkward amount of time. thirty-one seconds, counting the beat before hazel began to move. it's not even clear that salem said anything to emerald—when hazel turns away from oscar and the camera cuts back to emerald and salem, em blurts out "i really don't know!" but whether this is in response to another question salem asked off-screen or just responding to what she assumes salem wants from her is ambiguous.

compare the way salem questioned emerald earlier in this scene: she asked two questions, one after the other, confirming that emerald didn't take or hide the lamp and doesn't know where it is. as soon as it became clear to her that she wouldn't get useful information from emerald—because em truly did not know anything—salem dropped it and moved on to Plan B. she doesn't LIKE emerald and she's ANGRY that em tricked her and helped oscar escape, but what salem CARES about is finding out what happened to the lamp. she's not going to waste her time trying to get blood from a stone.

and compare the way salem conducts herself when she interrogates oscar in 8.4. again, her questioning is guided by practicality, but the more salient point of comparison for this discussion is what salem does when she shifts gears to punishment and torture. namely, she just tortures him. no hesitating, no warnings, no threats, no grandstanding, she just turns around and does it. practical, again.

if what salem intended to do at this point in the scene was torture emerald, either to punish her or for information, she would do so.

instead, salem just...clutches emerald's face. evilly.

for thirty-one seconds.

now, i will remind you that salem has excellent spatial awareness; she sticky-hands yang from at least ten or fifteen feet away while upside-down with her eyes closed. hazel's footsteps are clearly audible. when hazel enters, salem hears him speak and answers him across this fifty-foot span. oscar cries out when hazel picks him up and grunts in pain when hazel drops him, which also makes a quite loud thud. hazel's footsteps would also be audible to her when he returned, although they aren't to the audience.

so she'd be able to sense hazel approaching her again, and if she paid attention—which she must have, because salem's just spent half a minute doing the bare minimum to sell that she's toootally going to start torturing emerald, any second now, and the only reason for her to do that is if this is about intimidating or provoking hazel—then she would have at least heard him dropping oscar, so she knows he isn't "taking the boy back to his chamber" as ordered.

ok.

when the focus shifts back to them, salem's got emerald like this:

this shot is at 15:01.167. hazel will punch her at 15:04 exactly, which at his brisk pace of 6.3ft/s means he's about eighteen feet away. around 15:02.750, when hazel is less than eight feet away from her, salem begins to pull back, lifting her arm as if preparing to strike:

she holds this pose without moving for almost a whole second. remember just how fast salem can be. her release when she fires back at ren, from the moment she begins her 180° spin to the moment the opalescent bolt leaves her hand, is sixteen frames. from the appearance of the black/violet magic bubbles to the release of the opalescent bolt is one frame. ONE.

when she reaches this position, hazel is quite literally right next to her. he cannot be more than three or four feet away, and we can see in both the initial shot and the replay from the opposite angle that he comes at salem directly from the side, not from behind her.

the point is that salem can see him. unless you have vision problems impacting your peripheral sight, even if you're looking straight ahead, as salem is here, you can visually detect motion directly to the left or right within a close radius. and indeed:

salem's gaze flicks to the side before his fist makes contact, and the wider shot from behind shows just how close he is to her before throwing the punch.

and the last detail i want to note regarding the punch is that salem lets go of emerald when hazel hits her, which is something that she does NOT do when yang blows her up:

if salem can remain standing and keep her death grip on this girl's arm while her ENTIRE TORSO IS EXPLODED WITH BOMBS, it... does not matter how strong hazel is or to what degree salem may have been caught off-guard. she had at least a split second recognition before his fist hit her face; that alone is enough to reflexively clamp down on emerald's jaw if she didn't want to let go.

so whether or not salem anticipated that hazel would punch her in the face specifically—and it doesn't seem like she did, given that she yelps—she must have had at least a vague awareness of his presence/approach (because he marched right up to her), and she made the choice to just ragdoll with the hit. the simplest explanation is that once she heard him drop oscar and start power-walking back toward her, salem knew he was going to try something to save emerald and committed to the bit.

she also isn't actually ragdolling; she lets the force of hazel's punch throw her off her feet, but then instead of falling she soars away in this high arc, flips herself around in midair, drops down in a perfectly-controlled landing at the far end of the dock, and rises again:

ok? ok. this sequence, from the end of the slo-mo reaction shot to when salem reaches altitude, runs 15:08 to 15:11—three seconds.

and then she just, erm...hangs out there, not doing anything, until hazel finishes cramming dust into his body and turning his back on salem to give his heartfelt last goodbye to emerald and everything, and faces salem again at 15:41. at which point she says "so, you've decided against vengeance for your sister, after all this time?"

thirty. seconds.

during which the ONLY ACTION salem takes is this... this:

<- make a particular note of how jaune reacts. the tactics guy. while the other kids gasp in shock/relief, jaune is like "wait what?" as he pushes himself up to look at salem—he's confused, because he knows intuitively that Something Weird just happened.

why did she do that?

she didn't need to. it wasn't an accident. salem manifested these sigils with a mere thought, and later in this same scene we'll see her do that again right after hazel smashes her head like an egg. summoning these things also clearly doesn't inhibit any of her other powers, so this is effortless for her and costs her nothing to maintain.

either happened by narrative fiat, because the kids had to escape and the writers just couldn't be bothered to figure out how. the... problem with this explanation, aside from the obvious that rwby is a well-written story that doesn't pull this sort of bullshit, is that the prelude to the big fight makes a HUGE POINT of,

this! oscar is already free and has long memory. if the intention is for the kids to escape while hazel keeps salem distracted, you don't need a narrative contrivance like this; you just slip in a shot or two of oscar snapping these grimm hands or disarming the sigils with his own magic to release his friends instead.

orrr... salem let them go on purpose.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

wheeze. ok. we're almost done.

remember how salem can go from empty fist to black magic bubble to releasing an opalescent blast in just three frames?

this first shot is at 15:49. the second is at 15:51. in between, salem just kind of sways side-to-side and then waves her arms around for forty-five frames. even if we count only from her conjuring of the Big Bubble at 15:50, it's twenty-two frames—longer than it took her to snap around and fire off a blast that hit her target dead-on and slammed two teenage boys into a wall some 20-30 feet back.

woman's telegraphing harder than a dark souls boss here.

and speaking of aiming...

these are the three bolts salem fires in the wide shot. top row on the left is her first shot in the instant before hazel begins to run up the slope—i've marked the trajectory and the eventual point of impact in green to make it easier to see that this would not have hit him even if he hadn't moved. top row on the right is the real impact, with hazel now running. on the bottom row are her next two shots. one strikes the edge of the dock nowhere even close to him, the other hits the ground about 8-9 feet in front of him (measuring based on hazel being 7'2" tall). and in the next shot:

it's not that she never hits him. hazel is quite a bit farther away from her than ren was and he's also running at a dead sprint while dodging blasts. tricky target. it wouldn't be strange at all if she missed.

but look at where she is aiming.

top row: both bolts strike the ground 1-2ft directly ahead of him—in the shot on the left, he's veering closer to the wall to avoid stepping on the point of impact. bottom left: this is a second bolt aimed just a little bit forward and 1-2ft out from the wall relative to the top right; these two bolts strike eight frames apart and hazel lunges sideways toward the dock's edge as the second one comes into frame, so when salem fired the second one, hazel was still where he is in the top right. and (the clincher) bottom right: this bolt strikes six frames after the one preceding, 1-2ft directly in front of him, and hazel swerves toward the wall to avoid stepping on the point of impact; notice the correction from #3 to #4 when hazel swerved more toward the ledge than salem anticipated.

not a single one of these bolts is actually aimed at hazel. salem is aiming to hit the ground directly in front of hazel, close enough to convince him that she means to hit him but also low enough that if she misjudges his speed she's going to strike his ankles... and when one blast nearly hits him in the head or chest because he jumped further sideways than salem guessed he would, she instantly corrects her aim to ankle-height again.

she is herding him.

up the docks, closer to her, away from the children, all while taking care NOT to hit him without being obvious about it.

this is the same kind of behavior we see from her in 6.4, where she's at worst a little vexed but flips a table and shouts and throws him to the ground as if she's in a terrible fury—and then a minute later hazel tells her something that genuinely infuriates her and we see her freeze while the windows start to crack, before she sends them all out of the room and struggles to press this rage back down.

because there is a huge difference between the loud, explosive "anger" salem performs to intimidate her associates and her real anger, which she tries very hard to contain.

in a similar vein, we get this fleeting glimpse of salem's actual skill in combat when she spins around and blasts the boys into a wall in the time it takes to blink... and then she sees yang, and the key changes. instantly. for the rest of the scene.

onward. hazel vaults over salem's final bolt and launches three fireballs at her. as these spiral up toward her, salem threads herself between them like they're not even there—it's really fast, the whole sequence from when the fireballs form in front of his fist to when she slings past the third one is forty frames and if you count from when the first fireball enters the frame, her evasive maneuver is over within twelve frames. as she continues past the last fireball, salem swings her arms to finish her movement, as if she's going to lash forward and fire off a riposte:

but then instead, she re-centers, pauses, and does... this:

which i'm sure looks very impressive and terrifying for everyone on the ground, but she is... literally just tossing magic around in random directions. this is not an attack. this is a light show. a firework. her big swarm of magic bubbles spits out of of the opalescent bolts and only one hits anywhere close to hazel. she is just fucking around.

from here, hazel sprints to the edge of the dock and launches himself into the air above her, where he dust-conjures a biiiiig spiky boulder to smash her with... and, uh. three things. first:

this shot occurs in slo-mo to really underscore what happens here. note that salem is looking up at him and has a firing bubble ready to go. hazel is approx. twenty-eight feet directly in front of her (measured in salems); a few minutes ago we've seen her be dead accurate at just a bit more than half again that distance, and we know a blast from her has plenty enough force to knock hazel out of the sky. from the beginning to end of this shot her head moves as she tracks his motion.

she has a clear shot lined up here. she chooses not to take it. then:

hazel conjures The Boulder, and we get this shot of salem's reaction—from waiting indifferently to see what he'll do to wry amusement. and then she physically braces herself to take the hit:

after which point salem just Lies There letting him pummel her for a few seconds before evidently deciding that she's done enough fucking around for those children she let out of gay baby jail about sixty seconds ago to have gotten away so she'll just flick her fingers (while her skull is caved in and her brains are splashed all over the floor, mind you) to pull some more grabby hands out of the air and wrap this one up except—

—NO WHOOPS THEY'RE ALL STILL HERE. lol.

like the fight is over, when the camera cuts back to the kids. salem has hazel completely immobilized. jaune is at the other end of the docks, shouting for everyone to hurry. "she'll just come after us," oscar says, but if salem cared to recapture any of them she would've left hazel restrained and dropped down off the dock to scoop them up as they hit the ground.

she's visibly irritated after regrowing her face, yes. but we have seen over and over—there are multiple examples in this scene alone—that salem can and will set irritation aside to focus on what doing what is necessary to advance her practical goals. she's poisonous with emerald but asks her two questions and then turns away as soon as she's confirmed that emerald doesn't know anything. she takes a deep breath and shelves her fury at ozma to listen calmly while yang yells at her. salem just isn't a character ruled by her anger.

so the fact that she a) continues to focus all of her attention on hazel after restraining him, and b) actually hurls him out of the restraints, in the opposite direction from her escaping prisoners, and turns away from them to just bash hazel's face repeatedly into the floor, suggests to me that her annoyance is perhaps more because these children are STILL FUCKING HERE and she needs them to be gone before she can start to properly wring the truth out of hazel.

she pays zero attention to the children until she hears long memory activate, which seems to startle her; after that she straightens up and stares him down for about four seconds.

they're about ninety feet apart here. salem covers a just over half that distance in two seconds... meaning she is gliding at what is for her a downright leisurely 24.5ft/s. that's a little bit more than a QUARTER of her top speed which is, in case you've forgotten whilst reading this very long post, 96ft/s. or 65mph.

(and here i will remind you that the walking speed distance math earlier checks out perfectly with the measurable spatial distance between emerald and oscar. this scene was choreographed and animated with very close attention to time and distance and i think that's because the speed at which salem does certain things at different points is doing a lot of narrative work. it's seldom necessary to be this precise but in this scene it matters.)

the point is that while salem does slingshot herself at oscar pretty fast here, relative to how much faster she CAN go, salem isn't trying especially hard to Get Him. this is like a brisk jog for her.

now granted, if hazel hadn't scraped up the wherewithal to, i assume, yeet himself after salem with all the dust cooking his body from the inside out, oscar would have been toast whether salem zipped along at a normal human sprinting pace or clotheslined him at car-on-a-highway speeds. but it does speak to the intensity of salem's interest in getting oscar in this moment versus when she went for emerald at the top of the scene.

salem had, by this point, already given up recapturing oz/oscar as a loss, accepted sacrificing the opportunity to do that as a price she was willing to pay for the sake of 1. getting summer's daughter safely off the whale and 2. after clarifying hazel's loyalties, removing the children from the equation so she can squeeze him for information about what happened to the lamp. i think the possibility that oz/oscar might have shared the "password" with hazel when hazel decided to help them escape would've at least crossed her mind as soon as she narrowed her list of suspects down to hazel and neo, too.

there's also the factor that with hazel now compromised, the only person around to interrogate oz/oscar is salem herself, and because that would involve being in the same room with and talking to ozma for an indeterminate amount of time, i don't think salem's all that keen anymore.

thennnn hazel sets her on fire and she screams and thrashes because she's having traumatic flashbacks to the moonfall and then oz blows her and her whale the fuck up.

thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

[imasradiantasthesun]

Women (and Girls) of Twelve – part 4

Alys Everdeen, Prim Everdeen, Hazelle Hawthorne, and Effie Trinket

[howlingday]

Marrow: Hey~! I've got suntan lotion~! Anyone want a rub down~?

Hazel: Oh, how considerate! Will you apply it right away?

Marrow: R-Rubbing down a big, muscular man?

Marrow: Alright! No problem! I'm pretty open about my tastes, y'know!

Marrow: I'll make sure you're slathered with lots and lots of oil~!

Hazel: W-What is this sense of bloodlust?!

[beetletricks]

Main Issues with Rosegarden vs Ones That Can Be Easily Argued Against

Main Criticisms that better describe the main concerns with Rosegarden:

-Issue 1: RWBY often relies heavily on subtext and fan interpretation to build ships rather than explicitly showing relationships develop on-screen(Pyrrha explains her reasons for liking Jaune but we don't see them onscreen as this was in only Volume 2). This creates frustration for fans who feel that certain relationships aren't explored enough or are left too vague.

-Issue 2: Some relationships receive far more screen time and development than others in RWBY, or are onyl focused for specific volumes, which can lead to certain ships feeling more like fanservice or being sidelined entirely.(Weiss and Ruby not hanging out much compared to Penny and Ruby in V7)

-Issue 3: Ruby and Oscar haven't been in the forefront resulting in conversations which other lacking banter vs conversations they have with characters who are in the forefront(Oscar being sassy with Hazel, Emerald, and Ozpin)

Criticisms that that are often contradicted:

Oscar is too old for Ruby

Other media: -Kagome (15) and Inuyasha (over 200 years old)

RWBY: Ruby being fine with being friends with Penny who was a robot

Ruby Should be with ______

Other media: -Quintessential Quintuplets(despite different shipping author gives reason as to why the MC ended up with the specific love interest compared to others)

RWBY: Will probably explain why if ends up canon, did so for Pyrrha in Volume 2

Oscar is to young for Ruby

Other media: Usagi (15) and Mamoru (17) from Sailor Moon

RWBY: Again Penny having no biological age 

Ruby will just take care of Oscar

Other media: Luz would start off causing dangerous situations Amity needed to help deal with in the Owl House before indirectly motivating her to stand up to her parents in the Owl House

RWBY: Ruby does this for literally everyone

Oscar is just a plot device of the most part

Other media: Shuichi Minamino represents Kurama's internal conflict and transformation with their merge in Yu Yu Hakusho that happened before the events of the show

CRWBY: Ruby having Silver Eyes

Ruby and Oscar don’t have enough time for romantic development in the show

Other media: Hinata and Naruto from Naruto the Last Movie 

CRWBY: Pyrrha admitting she liked Jaune in only V2 for treating her like anyone else which we only learned in that volume.

Oscar will merge with Ozpin

Other media: Ultraman Tiga-gradually merges while regaining past life relationships but still gets married to new love interest

CRWBY: Blacksmith is god and gives Ruby a choice in changing or not for her acceptance 

Ozpin being around

Other media: Asuka still loving Jaden despite his trauma and fusing with Yubel in Yugioh GX

CRWBY: Ozpin only appearing for plot stuff 

Ozpin will take over Oscar

Other media: Ultraman Tiga, Kurama(Yu Yu Hakusho) from above

CRWBY: Blacksmith gives a whole speech about balance at the end of Volume 9 rather than control 

Oscar is just discount Jaune 

Other Media: Like Edward, Alphonse is on a similar journey and reacting to new stuff, but his own struggles and quiet demeanor separate him from his more forward brother. Over time, Alphonse proves his individuality and importance to the story in Fullmetal Alchemist. 

CRWBY: 

-Jaune being in a rare position of being a foil to Ruby but even since volume 1(likely due to family legacy) would act like he has everything under control resulting him lashing out, hence him opening up in Volume 8 and 9 represents important growth

(learning to be forward-facing even in the midst of truly knowing and understanding everything that’s wrong with the situation.)

-After Oscar getting frustrated in Volume 5 he adapts as well in how he doesn’t follow Ozpin’s mindset as much as Jaune since Volume 1 which added to his repressive habits in Volume 9 partially, in how despitee struggling with becoming an immortal wizard he is capable of making more meaningful connections compared to Ozpin who even if he ignoring the Salem secret didn’t trust anyone emotionally resulting in him quickly leaving.