#i am also (all conspiratorial tinhatting aside) unconvinced that

[bestworstcase]

re: the interview scene--my assumption is that ozpin knew or at least guessed blake’s ties to the white fang from the start and didn’t care, until qrow interrupted his monitoring of the harbor security feed to inform him that salem had agent(s) at beacon, whereupon he leaps right to implicit accusations that she is associated with “the forces that conspire against” the world. taken in context with his general fixation on salem it does... paint a picture.

/tangent

cut for reasons of length.

fantasy religion is my first weakness and magic systems my second

on ‘the judgment of faunus’:

i’m curious about the reading of ‘judgment’ as implicitly aligning the faunus with dark, actually, because to me it seems the opposite: the characterization of the unnamed god portrayed in ‘judgment’ is so in line with the way light is characterized in the ‘the two brothers’ that i read the former as a syncretism of faunus myth into brother-cult doctrine.

both the unnamed god and the god of light are depicted as sternly benevolent, uncomfortable with violence, and motivated to maintain order; the god of light “had grown attached to all the different forms of life he had brought forth [...] and felt some measure of their agony [when they suffered].” likewise the unnamed god in ‘judgment’ intervenes to protect humans and animals (both creations of light’s, in brother-cult doctrine) from mutual destruction. moreover the warning the unnamed god offers to the warring parties (“if you do not agree to live in peace, you will kill one another off, and perhaps destroy the world in the process”) and the solution he offers (of combining them into hybrids) are strongly reminiscent of light’s rhetoric and approach to compromise with his brother in the ‘the two brothers’.

meanwhile dark, as characterized in the creation myth—and one presumes in brother-cult doctrine generally—is, at best, a capricious force of nature who admires human resilience, and at worst a callous sadist who entertains himself by making grimm to plague humanity and causes devastating natural disasters for the joy of watching humans crawl out of the rubble of their lives. that the unnamed god in ‘judgment’ abandons the faunus to the depredations of the grimm and prejudices of humanity might plausibly be construed as a reflection of dark’s cruelty if it didn’t also align so closely with the doctrinal characterization of light, who despises the grimm but—out of nominal adherence to the arrangement he made with his brother, and because he wants humankind to sink or swim on their own merits as a matter of principle—declines to intervene directly on humanity’s behalf after dark refuses to get rid of the grimm.

[sidebar: in ‘the two brothers,’ following that refusal, the god of light is said to secretly grant humanity a “special gift to defend themselves against the grimm.” for us this is obviously meant to evoke silver eyes, but for the diegetic audience, i think it would most often be understood to mean semblances… or some other common and well-known phenomenon that might give warriors an extra edge against the grimm. like, for example, the superior physical abilities of the faunus. and because reading the unnamed god in ‘judgment’ as the god of light requires an explanation for his evidently unilateral creation of the faunus, the indeterminate nature of this secret, special gift makes for an intuitive space into which to insert ‘judgment’—albeit probably not a particularly popular one outside sects with faunus majority congregations. regardless, i imagine this is a widespread theological interpretation among faunus who subscribe to the modern brother-cult.]

doctrinal headcanon aside, insofar as ‘judgment’ draws a deliberate connection between the faunus and the grimm, it’s overtly presented as incorrect: the new faunus seek refuge from the grimm in a human village at the end of the tale, and those humans blame them for leading the grimm there on purpose. this is framed very bluntly within the text itself as narrow-minded and wrong, which lines up with the portrayal of the unnamed god as a benevolent figure and transformation into faunus as a positive experience for those who undergo it, unintended consequences notwithstanding. it might be that more traditional telling of ‘judgment’ take a more anti-faunus slant—in-universe, the text is accredited to lionheart, who would presumably have approached its telling through the faunus perspective—but given that ozpin’s commentaries elsewhere in ‘fairytales’ are used to explicitly identify major discrepancies between the traditional tales the diegetic audience would be familiar with and the stories as written (re: ‘grimm child’ and ‘the infinite man’), i think it’s safe to assume that the tale as written is a fairly conservative telling. that ozpin’s annotation suggest the structure of ‘judgment’ is characteristic of faunus storytelling and literature in general supports this also.

and… speaking of ozpin’s notes, ‘judgment’ is an interesting text for the incongruity between ozpin’s apparent reading of it and the story itself, in that his assertion that human tales—i.e. ‘judgment’—portray the god of animals as a “trickster, not to be trusted” is not, i feel, especially well-supported by the text as written. certainly the new faunus are taken aback by the outcome, but all quickly decide that they have been much improved by the transformation, reveling in their new forms; the rejection they experience later is very much the fault of closed-minded humans and described accurately as unfair prejudice. likewise the worst that can be said of the unnamed god is that his intervention in the humans-vs-animals conflict doesn’t solve so much as it changes the nature of the problem, and he leaves the faunus alone to face the repercussions as they will—but the same can be said of light’s treatment of humankind in ‘the two brothers,’ which unequivocally frames light as the benevolent half of the pair. further, the god of animals as characterized in ‘the shallow sea’ comes across far more as a (benevolent) trickster archetype than does the unnamed god of ‘judgment.’ they’re described as perspicacious and sagacious, yes, but also inquisitive, lively, and easily bored; they’re “stubborn as a bull” and “crafty as a fox,” and in classic trickster fashion they go about the world in disguise in order to find their chosen people. by contrast, the unnamed god is moralizing and rather stern, and presents himself to the warring parties as an adjudicator; he offers authority, not companionship.

ozpin’s commentary, then, seems to either gesture at a much larger body of faunus fairytales (and human stories about faunus) of which his diegetic audience would be well aware… or it’s yet another case of ozpin superimposing his own beliefs and baggage onto a fairytale. (or both, most likely.) ozpin’s history with the actual god of light being what it is—namely receiving from light only a fraction of the salient information before being asked to make an irreversible choice, with the result that he inadvertently consigned himself to an indefinite number of lifetimes miserably acting under divine auspices in service of eventual judgment—the reasons for his reading of the unnamed god of ‘judgment’ as an untrustworthy trickster aren’t difficult to parse, though it does intrigue me on the grounds of the marked similarities between this god and the characterization of the mythical god of light (which must, logically, derive ultimately from ozma’s depiction of the character of his god). it’s one of a handful of annotations throughout ‘fairytales’ that collectively strike me as coming from a place of deeply-buried skepticism if not outright distrust.

in… any case. the core reason i read ‘shallow sea’ as the older tale and ‘judgment’ as specifically a brother-cult syncretism thereof is that ‘judgment’ retains the essential theme of a joyous (if startling) transformation and even echoes the traditional jab at human prejudice (“the sea revealed the shallowness of their thoughts” / “were we so narrow-minded when we were human?”) while fitting the faunus neatly into the doctrine of the brother-cult by way of the strong resemblance and thus implicit identification of the unnamed god with the god of light.

(if ozma himself is responsible for originating ‘judgment’, which is possible given his use of legend and fairytale generally, i would imagine its narrative has less to do with whatever he believes made the faunus and more to do with patching the anti-faunus implications baked into the doctrine of the brother-cult and its conspicuous exclusion of the faunus from its creation myth. ‘judgment’ being, in essentials, an aesop about salvation through unity and unconditional submission to divine judgment grafted inelegantly onto of the structure of ’the shallow sea’ leads me to believe that even if ozma didn’t devise the tale in the first place, he certainly co-opted it to promote his agenda at some time or another.)

on jinn, ambrosius, and the possibility of divine censorship:

while i would by no means put it past the god of light to impose a magical gag order on the four spirits if he deemed it necessary to protect whatever secrets he may have, i’m not so convinced that he would consider it a necessary precaution. his condescension towards humanity ran deep even before he and his brother killed them all, and when he delivers the ultimatum to ozma light is very clear about his feeling that modern humans are inferior facsimiles of their predecessors. he also seemed not the slightest bit concerned that ozma might disregard his warning, go right back to salem, and listen to her—despite salem having talked entire kingdoms into open revolt against him and his brother in the past. likewise salem’s decision to seek help elsewhere after he denied her appears to have caught him entirely off guard, as did her subsequent defiance when he tried to punish her into submission.

in order to restrict what the relics can say, light would first have to foresee the possibility of humans asking questions he doesn’t want answered, but every decision he makes in lost fable bespeaks a psyche unable or unwilling to conceive of humans doing anything contrary to his design.

worth noting in this regard, i think, is that so far the only known arbitrary restriction on what the relics are allowed to do is bring people back from the dead—meaning light went out of his way to forbid ambrosius from doing what salem is ultimately being punished for asking.

(ozpin’s statement that the lamp “cannot tell of events that have yet to happen” is generally taken to mean that jinn can’t answer questions about the future period, but i think the precise wording is important here. this being a story in which genuine free will explicitly exists and is a defining feature of human nature, the future must be indeterminate. however, jinn can—and i argue has—answer questions about the future as long as the answer can be meaningfully predicted based on the past and present. “what do ruby and her friends have planned?” is a request for information about the future, which jinn answers by allowing cinder to spy on her opponents as they hammer out their strategy. in contrast to the prohibition against bringing back the dead—something that is demonstrably possible by both magical and (in highly specific circumstances) scientific means—i think foretelling the future is something jinn can’t do because it’s impossible.

the mythologized crown of choice is portrayed in ‘indecisive king’ as showing its wearer visions of the future, which stands to throw a wrench in this line of reasoning if it turns out to be an accurate depiction of the real crown; however, 1. it is a fairytale, 2. ozpin places such particular importance on the crown that him having deliberately misrepresented its abilities using fairytales would hardly come out of left field, and 3. even if the crown does work more or less as advertised, there’s little if any reason to assume that its visions are absolutes rather than possibilities. this casts the mythical depiction into enough question that for the time being i don’t consider it evidence against an indeterminate future.)

/tangent

point being, my inclination is to read omitted information in terms of the stated function of the relics and the personalities (and agency) of the spirits themselves. broadly i assume that the lamp, like the staff, operates on a literal-wording principle: ambrosius meets the exact, word-for-word specifications of each request and jinn, likewise, answers the exact, literal question asked. thus the question “what is ozpin hiding from us?” leaves intact ozpin’s biases and misconceptions and omits 1. any information beyond his knowledge (e.g. salem’s side of the story) and 2. information he hadn’t shared but wasn’t deliberately hiding from them (e.g. the answers to the first two questions he asked jinn).

beyond that it seems fairly clear that the spirits do have some discretion in how they carry out the requirements of their relics. jinn’s tangible dislike of ozpin colors the curt, mocking answer she provides when he asks her how to destroy salem. similarly the satisfaction she seems to take in exposing the lie that she’s out of questions informs the relish and drama with which she answers the question of what he’s hiding. she allows ruby to summon her without a question because she approves of ruby’s cleverness, and unhappily shows cinder the bare minimum necessary information to answer her question because she doesn’t want to betray the kids. the rules of the lamp compel an answer, but the depth and detail of her answers appear—based on our admittedly quite limited sample size—to correlate with how she feels about the person asking the question. (what i’m getting at here is i think jinn has never liked ozma very much—the smug grin with which she delivers “you can’t” sure doesn’t suggest sympathy lmao—and consequently he’s never gotten the kind of enthusiastically thorough answer that ruby received in lost fable.)

by the same token, ambrosius is vocally resentful and bored of the limitations imposed on him by the staff and seems to be driven primarily by a desire for new and interesting things to do; he takes a shine to the kids because they give him a bona fide challenge that tests the limits of what even he knows is possible. that this in no way prevents him from taking literally the flippant “a one-way ticket to vacuo” remark might suggest either that the literal-wording principle is baked into the rules of the staff itself to an extreme degree or ambrosius himself is just… kind of a dick wklghsdfg. and… while i do assume that principle is embedded in the rules for all the relics, his general demeanor—totally indifferent to the plight of their dying friend until they make it interesting for him, for example—and the fact that he literally says “i will give you exactly what you ask for and i don’t want any complaining when it’s not what you wanted” leads me to believe that unless he finds the task sufficiently engaging in its own right (as turns out to be the case with penny), ambrosius takes exactly-what-you-ask-for to its logical, nitpicky extreme on purpose for his own entertainment. because he’s bored.

with that in mind, “do not fall” doesn’t read to me as ambrosius trying to convey his warning around something he’s forbidden to disclose; it feels more mischievous than sincere, especially with it coming on the heels of “well, everything appears to be in order. you were… quite thorough. disappointingly so.”

(as an aside i am also, i have to admit, rather skeptical of the implication that ozma might have asked jinn about the origins of the faunus in the first place. lost fable suggests pretty strongly that upon reincarnating he just kind of… took it as a given that faunus weren’t really people: jinn’s narration from his perspective identifies them as “creatures,” if ozma felt the slightest concern about the horrific persecution they faced it was apparently minimal enough to be glossed over altogether, and the fact that the people sharing fearful stories about a “terrifying sorceress who commanded dark powers in the wilds among the beasts and monsters” were also the people hunting, enslaving, and caging the faunus doesn’t seem to have factored into his assessment of salem’s trustworthiness whatsoever. while he has, obviously, revised his view of the faunus since that time his acceptance of their personhood appears to go hand-in-hand with having lumped them together with humanity under the divine mandate, implying an [incorrect] assumption that light made them. i’m just… not convinced he ever really questioned where, or who, they came from, unless salem happened to bring it up.)

on the relic vaults and the ever after:

tangential to the discussion of how the relics work and the literal-wording clause the staff, at least, explicitly abides by, i’m hedging bets for the time being on whether the vaults do or don’t link to the ever after. the exact wording of yang’s instructions to ambrosius regarding the location of the ‘central location’ is “here. a place like these vaults. wherever they are, they’re not part of remnant; only accessible if you know the right way in. seems like a safe enough place for thousands of refugees.”

this provides several parameters, the three most important of which are: 1. NOT part of remnant. 2. NOT the vault where ozpin hid the staff (“here” is amended). 3. SIMILAR TO, but not necessarily THE SAME AS, the relic vaults.

to my mind that “like” places a huge asterisk on the relation of the vault interiors to the realm ambrosius used for the central location, and the ever after itself by extension. we know virtually nothing about the realms beyond remnant—indeed the only definitive information we’ve been told up to this point came from a nakedly untrustworthy source [the god of light] and merely identified the white void people pass through when they die as a place “between realms,” which has (on its face) little relevance to the question of where and what the ever after is.

however, if it’s true, that tidbit of information—that the white void is a liminal in-between space, not a realm in its own right—does provide context for the flash of white that appears when the camera follows a character’s perspective through one of the portals; we’re seeing a glimpse of that liminal emptiness... and that glimpse is something that conspicuously doesn’t happen when characters enter or leave one of the relic vaults. the vault doors, once opened, also afford a clear view into the interior realms from the outside and vice-versa.

the vaults and portals having been created by different characters using very different means could sufficiently explain that discrepancy—but equally so could a material difference between the realms they lead to, for instance if the vault interiors are pocket “realms” created by magic from remnant itself where the ‘central location’ is in a genuinely separate realm accessible only after traversing the white void. i believe the latter explanation fits better with the other key difference between the vault interiors and what little we’ve seen of the dark realm and the ever after so far: the vault interiors are flat and featureless, with blank “skies” that unnaturally cut into the ground. there’s nothing in them save the plinths for the relics and the paths to the door. by comparison the dark realm is nebulous and vast, with what appear to be native structures of its own (the armillary sphere-ish thing floating behind ambrosius’s portals, maybe—the collapse of the portals doesn’t provide a clear enough view to say for sure if it sticks around or not), and the ever after is a fully-fledged world in its own right. on… balance it seems likelier to me that the vault interiors are magical little bubbles designed for the specific purpose of containing the relics than that ozpin cordoned off little slices of the ever after and stashed the relics inside.

(hiding the relics in an alien realm as opposed to magically fabricating small pocket dimensions for them would also run the obvious security risk of inhabitants of the alien realm, like, stealing them. or worse, if ozpin has the kind of magical power necessary to do this at his disposal without relying on the relics, salem does too, and what’s stopping her from opening her own doorways into the ever after to take a crack at breaking into those vaults from the other side?)

for the sake of completeness i will add that, if the vaults are indeed directly linked to the ever after and the kids do ultimately use them to escape, i’m certain it won’t be through either of the vaults that have been opened so far: the atlas vault isn’t an option for obvious reasons, and the haven vault is defunct or dormant as of 6.7, presumably owing to the removal of its relic. the funniest possible option here is for cinder to open the crown’s vault and find These Fucking Kids Again on the other side. i think she would combust.

on the brother gods and the brothers grimm:

this is something i’ve been intermittently chewing on for months, but my thoughts so far are twisty and still cooking. bear with me while i dissolve into incoherency please

i’m generally familiar with assorted speculation to the tune of the brother gods having to some degree or another misrepresented themselves as The Creators, in both “two missing gods of choice and knowledge” and “brothers are interlopers passing off the true deity’s work as their own” flavors, and the analytical emphasis placed on the grimm brothers allusions that tends to go along with that. and–

well let me preface by saying that what makes this so tricky for me to parse is that, if rwby’s laying down what i think it’s laying down re: the gods i am Very Into That, whereas if it’s more in the vein of this i feel Significantly More Hinged about it. anyway:

the fraudulent brothers body of theories all kind of turn on the question of legitimacy: the uniting thread is a presumption of one (or more) additional gods of equal or greater power to the brothers and an older or deeper or otherwise more legitimate claim to remnant than theirs, making the brothers’ own narrative similar—as noted—to the distortion of folktales at the hands of the grimm brothers. by no means is any of this an analytical stretch, but i think centering the inevitable confrontation between the brothers and humankind on the supposition of their illegitimacy innately results in implications that dilute the thematic punch of the divine-rebellion narrative as a whole; if resistance to divine genocide is predicated on the illegitimacy of the deities responsible for it, then acceptance of divine genocide by a legitimate deity must logically follow. any rebuke of the brothers made on the grounds of their not being what they claim to be by necessity implies that they would be entitled to judge and summarily execute the whole planet if they truly had created it.

i’d happily take it over a full narrative swerve into validating the rightness of the brothers, but it’d still go in the “turned out christian after all” pile.

that

said

i really don’t think rwby’s headed in this direction: between the steady volume-by-volume escalation of the “authority must be questioned, challenged, and if necessary defied in order to do what’s right” theme and increasingly unsubtle telegraphing re: salem’s arc, the narrative momentum feels solidly headed toward rejecting the authority of the divine altogether. sundry other reasons too, but this post has gotten long enough as it is.

returning to the actual subject at hand: i think the symbolic meat of the gods’ allusion to the grimm brothers is more abstracted than a direct correlation between the divine act of [alleged] creation on the one hand and collecting [bastardizing] folktales on the other, and pun on “the brother’s grimm” in lost fable notwithstanding i don’t think the brothers themselves are even the true locus of that allusion BECAUSE

there is a character who expressly uses folklore and fairytales to serve his agenda and who literally collected and published an anthology of traditional fairytales in which it is made crystal clear to the non-diegetic audience that he deliberately manipulated the traditional details of several stories in order to promote his ideals and reinforce the social narratives he has spent lifetimes cultivating; it feels somewhat disingenuous to interpret the brother gods as straightforward allusions to the brothers grimm when ozpin like… exists. who wrote the stories? whose hand held the pen?

certainly not the absent gods.

ozpin is at once a character acutely aware of the immense power of storytelling and control over the narrative and one trapped in his own story by his terrified refusal to subject the narrative he was given to meaningful scrutiny; his commentaries on both his and salem’s fairytales are deeply preoccupied with propaganda, perception, and the nature of truth. he retreats into fairytale to explain himself and make sense of his life and has so thoroughly entrenched himself in his narrative he’s lost the thread of what he actually believes. so much of this story’s lore has come to us filtered through ozpin’s perception and warped by his dishonesty and doubt, to the point that sifting out the truth from fiction is as much an exercise in analyzing his character as it is fitting pieces of the puzzle together.

and, as of volume eight, after the long slow boil revealing precisely how untrustworthy ozpin is, the narrative has begun to pick at the decaying seams of his narrative—the one where the god of light is a benevolent authority with the absolute right to judge and mete out punishment as he pleases and everything would turn out alright if only salem could be destroyed somehow, pay no attention to the unfathomably sadistic eternal torment behind the curtain. it begins with the pointed uncertainty as to salem’s true motives in eight and it’ll go off like a grenade in nine.

all of which to say that insofar as the gods themselves allude to the brothers grimm, i think they represent not the brothers but the corrupted stories. irrespective of how they presented themselves to ancient humans, they relinquished control over the narrative when they left and ozma has taken over it in their stead—obscuring their cruelty and condescension and ultimately constructing a narrative in which eternal suffering and genocidal massacres are just punishments for the volatile reactions of a grieving young woman and gods simply have the right to absolute dominion over their creations.

my expectation then is that the dismantling of distorted narrative and restoration of truth doesn’t involve taking the brother gods to task for their deception, as the fraudulent brothers body of theories would predict, but rather changing the nature of the brothers themselves; healing their brokenness, putting an end to their violent tyranny and by extension soundly refuting the warped narrative ozpin invented to justify it.

[i’ve got another post floating around somewhere that goes into how i think this’d work mechanically but tumblr search being… what it is i’m too lazy rn to go digging for it; the very basic gist is: combine the gods you get a human being, the mythical gods are the sundered halves of a primordial dragon, ergo the brothers are in effect spiritually mutilated humans and can be fixed by putting them back together; salem is evidently experimenting with fusions of light and darkness through the medium of silver eyes, an intrinsically human power, and horrifying methods aside she’s likely on the right theoretical track in that silver eyes are the key to reunification of the gods; after the inevitable enemy-of-my-enemy ceasefire and sharing of notes ruby is going to glare at the brothers so hard she turns them human.]

on the ever after and its tasty secrets:

i’ve got more half-baked theories about the ever after rattling around in my brain than any one person reasonably needs, but all details aside i’m still pretty firmly in the camp of where i landed right after the trailer and teaser clip dropped in july, in that i anticipate that a lot of the thematic and symbolic storytelling themes rwby has built up to this point becoming very literal in the ever after; that the material fabric of the world itself is narrative. (a vague gesture here at the manner in which carroll’s wonderland constructs so much of its nonsense through the absurd literalization of mathematical and logical concepts or idiomatic figures of speech. fundamentally the weirdness of wonderland arises from the actualization of the abstract.)

accordingly i don’t expect whatever lore developments occur in v9 to take the form of revealing profoundly new information; i think most if not all of the salient facts have already been provided and that the expository function of the ever after arc will be defragmentation and rearrangement into the correct order. a reconstruction of the truth from the unreliable narrative, as it were. i think we’ll be getting mostly kernels of connective tissue and clarifying new perspectives.

and… because of that expectation, a reveal regarding the brother gods is actually quite low on my list of possibilities. we’ve seen both the distortion through the lens of ozpin’s quiet zealotry and the plain brutal truth of who the brothers are and what they did; and there are plenty of hints in ‘the two brothers’ and ozpin’s other commentaries throughout ‘fairytales’ as to their likely trajectory going forward. it all adds up very tidily; what does the addition of significantly new information accomplish for the narrative that cannot be achieved with the same or greater impact by simply divorcing the narrative framing from ozpin’s point of view? if new deities are brought into play, where do they fit and how do the existing narrative patterns rearrange coherently around their presence? and so on. the brothers lack the conspicuous gaps that exist elsewhere in the lore, which makes them, i think, unlikely candidates for being the subject of any major paradigm-changing reveals.

(with the exception of a reveal that light’s ultimatum was a unilateral action taken after the brothers parted ways more thoroughly than has so far been implied, a possibility that would change the calculus re: conflict the brothers without disrupting the tightly-knit existing lore. given the established imbalance of power between the nominally equal brothers and dark’s resentment of it, in combination with the thesis rwby appears to be building vis-a-vis creation and destruction conceptually, and the adoption of the divide-and-conquer strategy by the heroes as of volume six, an endgame scenario wherein dark aligns himself with humankind against his brother isn’t exactly out of the realm of plausibility.)

in contrast: we know virtually nothing about what salem did between the divine massacre and reunion with ozma and even less about what she did after the ozlem kingdom fell; and the narrative has made a, frankly, hilariously conspicuous point of emphasizing that nobody really knows what she wants.

every piece of expository information we’ve been given regarding the silver eyes has been explicitly speculative or derived from myth, and several observable attributes of the power are incongruous with the conclusions the characters have drawn from those sources.

while the factual origins of the faunus may or may not matter to the narrative except insofar as they weren’t made by the brothers and thus represent, symbolically if not literally, mortal liberation from the tyranny of the divine—their narrative role, the cultural myths surrounding their existence, and overt use of the grimm as a symbol for their persecution brings them to the nexus of the conflict between gods and humankind; this puts significant tension on the implied dichotomy of that struggle that has yet to be resolved. (it could be resolved through the introduction of the god of animals as a genuine third deity, but because doing so would necessitate loosening of the brothers’ lore i come down on the side of the god of animals more likely being mythologized from something or someone else.)

and if the spirits in the relics were indeed imprisoned rather than created as part of the relics themselves, then by extension they must have existed as autonomous beings somewhere before—and if they originated on remnant, regardless of how they came into being, there’s the obvious and to my mind far more interesting question of what history they might have with salem and what role they might have played in the resurrection of humankind.

& ultimately the common thread between these gaps is their existence outside of ozpin’s narrative: the things he doesn’t know or omitted for reasons of bias or misconception or confusion. the things that cannot be made sense of without first discarding the rightness of divine authority and accepting rebellion as a human imperative. what links them together is, i think, not a revelation that the brother gods lied but rather repudiation of the belief that they are right. (i think it’s probably a toss up as to whether the brother gods know or care about the existence of the ever after at all: narrative is a human invention, and the gods demonstrably do not comprehend the nature of humanity.)

- shapeshifting is a magical ability

- someone with magic can give that specific ability to other people

- possibly at the cost of losing the ability themselves, though i do have doubts re: ozpin’s “dwindling” magic

- faunus traits are explicitly magical/spiritual in nature, not genetic

- both origin myths involve transformation from humans into faunus

- “to this day they resent us for reminding them what they are not and what they never can be” + “replace them with what they could never be” hm

- consistent use of the grimm as a symbol for humanity’s persecution of the faunus; particularly in v1-2 but continually reinforced through use of white fang grimm masks

- god of animals in traditional faunus folktale dons the “awkward form” of a human to seek out misfits and outcasts, then guides them to a seemingly inhospitable island

- that tale also makes a deliberate, repeated point of rhetorically dodging implied questions about the grimm