#i don’t know if this page exists for other regions (yet) but. fucking infuriating.

[r-18g]

killing and killing and killing and killing and killing

(from this page on their au site.)

[theseerasures]

YOu have a lot of interesting thoughts abt Winter what dyou think will happen with her this season?? Iknow you already said she won't die but. other stuff?? What do you think of the idea that she defects to salem

y’know, anon: i was actually gonna write something to this tune unprompted before the hiatus ended? i didn’t, because when it’s inevitably revealed that i was wrong about Everything and the village children throw their eggs and laugh i didn’t want to give them any more receipts, but now that someone has asked i might as well

quick disclaimer before i start! these are subjective speculations about a character who has thus far been--particularly in 8.1--sparsely and ambivalently characterized, on purpose. i am spinning from the same subtext as anyone else, and if i am reading it differently, then all that means that i am reading it differently. Mr. Teeth is not sending me secret data. i am not the Steve Kornacki of RWBY Defections, as hilarious as it is to imagine someone like that existing.

okay? okay. below are some ideas and theories about where Winter could be going this season

The Defection (no not that one yet)

yeah, i’m still an “AceOps defect as a team” truther. this one actually has the least to do with Winter, and most to do with story economy. and the story of the AceOps is this: under Clover they were “the perfect team”--efficient, powerful, professional, and the perfect emblem of Atlesian values. law and order above all else. the mission matters more than the team. don’t get attached.

Clover’s absence from the team begins in late season 7, which means all that shiny varnish is stripped from Atlas at the same time it’s stripped from the AceOps. it turns out that the law isn’t always right, it turns out it’s super easy to turn “the needs of the many” into “the needs of the few who have many,” and it turns out once you go even a single inch past their facade the “best Huntsmen in Atlas” are conflicted, directionless, and squabble like children. they have a better showing against Penny this season, but their continued dynamic shows that fault lines--particularly between Marrow and Harriet--are reaching crisis. The AceOps model is unsustainable, in the same way that all of Atlas is ultimately unsustainable.

then Ironwood puts Winter in charge, and at first i did think: well, this is probably just to accelerate the inevitable fallout. they are, by their own testimony, emotional strangers to each other, and now some of them disagree on ideological grounds to the point where they can barely stand to be in the same room; slapping an abrasive volatile live wire on top of all that is pouring gasoline on Rome while Rome burns.

but the revelation of Renvision was that they’ve been lying--about HAVING feelings, but also about their feelings with and about each other. moreover: Winter’s own emotions mirror theirs. they’re speaking, in whatever horrifically repressed way, a similar language.

i’m not going to discount the possibility that this kind of ice-water-in-the-face moment might not be enough for some of them; one thing i’ve always respected about RWBY is its unwillingness to flinch away from the idea that sometimes it IS too late for people. but when it comes down to the AceOps, i think the operating question isn’t “will they pick JOYR over setting off the bomb,” because they’re not ready to make that kind of decision together as a team yet. no, the operating question is: if it comes down to one of them, or setting off the bomb, what will they choose?

Clover would set off the bomb, without hesitation or remorse. the mission and protocol HAVE to come first, and in this case there’s a compelling argument that it’s the right call. the team under Clover would have followed suit. the team without Clover would have likely done the same.

the team under Winter...

well, the thing about Winter is that she’s NOT Clover. not a perfect soldier, but--let’s stick with “not a perfect soldier.” she cannot lead in the same way Clover did, with that infuriating mixture of self-assurance and personal charisma, but i don’t think she thinks of herself as any less in command, which means that for the time being, the AceOps are her team. i can’t be certain what Winter would choose in this situation--whether her personal feelings can win out against years of consequentialist thinking--but i do feel fairly confident in saying that she’d be more willing to sacrifice HERSELF in order to choose both.

and in this crucial moment where the AceOps are forced to re-evaluate how they feel about each other, and the team, that might count for something.

so tl;dr #1: the AceOps find a team identity separate from the Atlesian structure. whether they defect to the RIGHT people, or survive defection, and whether Winter counts narratively as one of the AceOps by that point, i’m less sure about, but a cursory stab in the dark would be: yes, not all of them, and no.

The Return

how much do the writers care about the Winter-Ironwood dynamic? probably less than i do, but i also care more than any human should be permitted to under the law, especially since people have moved onto speculating about all the hot NEW abusers she could have in her life. whatever--it is something that needs closure, and i think the writers know that. my preference is still that they confront each other in person, at Atlas Academy (Qrow having fucked off via either healthy decision making or force). if this does happen, i don’t think there’s any chance that both of them will make it out alive; Winter would ONLY confront Ironwood if she’s forced to--either by him or other forces--and both of them are too rigid with themselves and with each other to offer any kind of give, or forgiveness.

that’s what i’d prefer, but it no longer seems the most likely option; Winter clearly has no plans to make it back, and the queue for “people who want to slug it out with DILF Jimmy” just keeps getting longer. it’s possible that they’ll end on the same personal-impersonal teeter-totter which they’ve always resided, where they’re just voices in each other’s earpieces, and she’s giving him a report, and he is issuing her orders.

there’s a way to make that meaningful, though: Winter HAS just disobeyed an explicit order--the first she’s done when she fully had the capacity to carry it out. her own treasons are piling up, and it’s a secret that he should know, for plot and character reasons. the obvious choice among the AceOps to tattle is Harriet, but i also think there’s a nonzero chance that, if asked, Winter herself will tell him. for all her flaws, i do think Winter is capable of owning up to her decisions (it’d make a nice parallel with Yang telling Ironwood about what she and Blake did during Gravity, but that’s neither here nor there), but even more importantly...i think she’d tell him because she wants to be reassured. that she did the right thing, but also that they’re still on the same page, and that he’s still the same person he always was, with her.

he won’t reassure her, of course. especially after he finds out that she disobeyed him for Ozpin. she’ll have no one left.

tl;dr #2: Winter and Ironwood have to reach some kind of End by the finale. whether it’s with a bang or a whimper i’m again less certain of, but if it DOES end with a bang one of them will die, and it’s going to be Ironwood.

Winter Alone

i, like many others, assumed going into the season that Winter’s core dilemma would be something like “her family or her family,” meaning: her sisters or her (adoptive) father. but i think as far as the show’s concerned that conflict was resolved when she let them go in The Enemy of Trust, and it’s not worth re-litigating. since the season started she’s just missed Weiss and/or Penny TWICE by narrative contrivance--during the Amity heist, and the abortive recovery mission--and she’s been sent away from Ironwood. it’s increasingly looking to me like Winter and Weiss will not talk to each other at ALL this season (do they have Scroll reception in the whale? i guess they must if Watts talked to Tyrian), or at most will only catch a tantalizing glimpse of each other before being whisked away again. all of this points to the issue not being “whose side will Winter choose,” but “what kind of person IS Winter, when she doesn’t have anyone else’s ideology to fall back upon?”

which is very exciting to me! the What You Are in the Dark trope is an obvious staple, but i’m especially a sucker for it when it happens to characters like Winter, who lucked out in the sense that their more selfish motivations (protecting herself from Dad) have never quite conflicted with doing Good (protecting other people). the cognitive dissonance for that with Winter has already been played up to the max, so for it to come to a crisis for her, at a point when EVERYONE WHOSE OPINION SHE CARES ABOUT HAS ALREADY FUCKED OFF, is just great drama. it’s made all the better by the fact that RWBY specifically has a lot of villains whose backstories involve them being put in a similar situation, and choosing wrong: Adam chose spite. Raven chose cowardice. getting to see someone make that choice in the story proper, then, adds to and complicates what RWBY has to say the conditions of possibility for heroism and villainy.

furthermore, and this might be where my biases become delusions: that Winter is being maneuvered to make these decisions for herself, BY herself, points to the possibility that she might be graduating from a mostly region-locked character (Ilia, the Belladonnas, Beacon staff and students) to full-on supporting cast (TRQ, Maria, the villains). if Weiss and/or Penny reach out to Winter in a climactic confrontation this season, then the story isn’t NOT about Winter, but it would place more emphasis on Weiss and/or Penny, as main cast members, and their ability to save a person they love. but if their relationships are given more space and time for breathe (or fester!)--if Winter gets to change away from Weiss in the way that Weiss changed and grew away from Winter in Mistral, for example--then it points to a greater parity in terms of their mutual importance in the story.

tl;dr #3: Schneester Bowl might have to wait at least another season, because Winter’s too busy trying out independent thinking. now, whether Winter will make the RIGHT choice, or the story will LET her make that call after she’s decided...

2Defect2Salem

i actually touched on this before, so tl;dr #4.1: i do not find the ways that people talk about HOW Salem gets Winter to defect to be very convincing. the idea that Salem could easily manipulate Winter because they have similar backstories makes me...tilt my head, but i think that’s more due to my personal belief that people who are similar in those ways actually tend to be each other’s blind spots (i also think this about Blake and Winter, FWIW). more to the point: my personal reading of Winter locates a streak buried deep within that is unyieldingly CATEGORICAL. despite being embedded within Atlesian rationality, despite her mentor being James Ironwood, there is something in Winter that instinctively judges an immediate instance to be right or wrong, and she’s never been able to suppress that all the way.

and with that in mind, i genuinely don’t think Winter is enough of a long-term, big picture thinker to give herself over to despair for Atlas as a whole. oh, we see her parrot “for the good of all, not just a few” just fine, but if she was already having trouble internalizing that when it was coming from IRONWOOD, a man she loves and trusts, then why would Salem--a person she is predisposed to distrust--be better at convincing her that the ends justify the means? why would she believe that submission is preferable to extinction from someone that EVERYONE SHE KNOWS considers an enemy? it’s hard for me to conceive of a Winter who, perched at the lip of the despair event horizon, will a) think enough of herself to make a decision for everyone and b) accept that the decision is imperfect and compromise, when she could just do what soldiers do, what she’s been asked to do, and die for an impossible cause.

(also not to belabor the point, but: ...how is she supposed to deliver Atlas to Salem? are we assuming that the Atlas Military works via Klingon Promotion, or that Ironwood gave her all his passwords?)

this is not to say that i think Winter will completely no-sell Salem (though that would be VERY funny). assuming that she and Salem do end up in the same room (which is still up in the air), i can easily picture a scenario where Salem manipulates Winter into making a bad decision (though honestly, Winter’s been doing just fine with that all on her own), but the distance between “a bad decision” and “a decision that she knows will help the Big Bad” is still quite far. i can similarly picture a scenario where Salem gradually sways Winter--not a single Anakin-style dramatic reversal, but an Atris-style descent-by-inches, through a million little non-choices--but that’s the thing: manipulation takes TIME, no matter how good at it you are, and we’re running up against the fact that the season ends in 6 episodes, and Winter is only one of about a trillion dangling threads.

tl;dr #4.2: the only way i can see Winter defecting to Salem THIS SEASON, then, is if it’s not her choice at all. for me, this makes the most thematic sense--that she’s been playing keep-away so long with her own agency, and Salem ends up resolving the issue by taking it away from her completely. that she wants so much to be sure she’s making the right choice, or to not have to make the call, and Salem gives her exactly what she wants. she’ll never have to think for herself again. we know Salem is capable of something like that, because we’ve just seen the Hound. Winter won’t be another Hound, if only because churning out the same horror will only yield diminishing returns, but she might be...something else.

regardless, tl;dr #4.3: if “Winter defecting to Salem” shakes down in any way--either as originally posited or as i just described--it would be an FANTASTIC story and character engine. i’ve already talked about the potential conflict this could create within Team RWBY, but like...imagine Weiss talking to ANYONE about her sister. imagine Weiss talking to Emerald, who would have just joined the heroes, whose decision to cut herself off from Cinder would feel like a portent. imagine Winter with the villains! not just Salem, but Cinder! imagine the subtextual parallels between the two becoming TEXT. imagine the two of them having to work together! imagine how Cinder would feel to lose Emerald and get Winter. imagine how Mercury would feel! can you imagine Winter and Mercury bonding over their daddy issues?? because i can’t! but i wanna. my love for Winter isn’t contingent on her making the right choices, but on her getting the right material. this would not only be the right material, but A LOT OF IT, and if the writers do choose to go in this direction, i trust them enough to be excited about where it might go.

[putris-et-mulier]

This shit is why I prefer reading scanlations (as opposed to licensed manga in a graphic novel)

Note: I talk about fangirls and fanboys not referring to gender or sexuality, but in the social structure way of being in a geeky subculture split into two subcultures of its own: consumerist geeks (fanboys) and creative geeks (fangirls)

Honestly, and this is super overdramatic, but I kind of feel loved when I read scanlations. Whether it's funny things like this to cover up unavoidable things that the licensed version could easily get around or a word is misspelled it makes me appreciate the work people have put into it and how proud I am to be part of that tradition.

One page takes multiple people working together just to share something they already have with other fans and depending on the fandom also made it mandatory for work like this to be done by people of different races regions of the country. The Internet was a huge boon because before that it was strictly zines and people in your neighborhood but it also added an element of people from different countries also being required to interact.. It's a lot easier now but in the 90s fangirls, much like our foremothers, somehow worked as a hive mind. No matter who you were or what languages you spoke you could contribute. (Six And I would argue you still can.) I was so lucky to near different Asian communities as well as like a lot of pop culture from Asia. When we were able to go, and had money, we would go and pick up specific titles, if possible, of things the translators wanted or else just get anything that seems the most unfamiliar. It could become a prized jewel of an OTP.

I think it's harder to feel like a community now because the "regular" fans who can't produce art or fiction or translations or brilliant meta have a lot less of a role. They are who kept the community tight and in contact with each other while those of us who could would lose a couple days because we were scanning every single page of a stack of graphic novels or magazines. I knew that if I ever needed to know or find anything I could just shout it out into the fangirl void and I would get an immediate answer because the "regular" fans were librarians on speed. That's how I met one of my closest friends, cosmic, the one I do the podcast and everything with. One of us was very loud and had a platform while the other lurked everywhere and saved everything. When I found out years later that she had seen something I had made before we met and she liked it was amazing. I wasn't upset that other people had taken it and put it on other websites or that she had taken it (and probably immediately delete it, such a jerk) I was really honored. 

It always breaks my heart when someone writes in about the podcast or something else and says that they wish they could have friends with a relationship like ours, not just because we are close but because we like different things and have different opinions and not only still get along, we respect each other's opinion and genuinely listen to each other even if we both know we will never let the other person have the last word. I've never met cosmic in person but I've known her for almost half my life exactly but I love her, she's my sister, and we wouldn't have met if the two of us were in fandom now because of the strict class differences.

The "regular" people who surfed around saving pictures and reading over any public conversation knew everything and if they didn't know they knew someone who did. Don't get me wrong, those people who didn't talk to anyone, whether to be informative or just be friendly, were despised lurkers.

The "regular" jobs are easier now but the etiquette laws are a lot more strict. It was a lot simpler when it was all just illegal and "credit to whoever made this" was widely accepted. Mostly because someone would immediately tell everyone who the creator was and people were genuinely interested in the answer because seeing anything new meant that there was something going on somewhere that you aunt and there could be things you have seen yet. It was also a lot easier to excommunicate people from the community who did things like steal fanart/fic because everyone had one IP address.

Everyone's biggest concern was sharing source material with each other, I see fans now who make gifs who are adamant about people not using them or if they do use them to credit them even if they put a watermark on it and I… That perplexes me.

Gifs were my shit, I did them for years and I started back when you did it by taking a screen cap of every frame but you would have to rewind after taking one cap and go back to hope you can identify the next one. It's because videos were impossible for so many people to view but gifs were something everyone could load at least one of if they had a few hours. It was imperative to the fandoms that connected overseas or through a different language like anime and manga fandoms. I would put hours and hours and so many fucking hours into making these things because I was an American with a good Internet connection and parents who hadn't yet found out the dangers™ of the World Wide Web™. I would lovingly make gifs of my OTPs and then begrudgingly make gifs of my nOTPs of things I was even an anti-fan of (usually a competing boy band fandom) because I had the ability to do it and there were tasteless bitches out there who couldn't and might not be able to see it unless I did it and I did this for them and I did because they were my sisters.

Also it made a fandom look bad if the anti-fandom had them out before you.

So, just like sisters.

It's so much easier to make gifs now and the majority of people have the ability to watch the original videos so people making gifs are doing the ones that they love to share with other people that also love them. But that's it? You don't want people to save them and post them as many places as possible so everyone can see what you love? Is that love? It sounds like an abusive relationship, like, "your family is allowed to come over if I know about it in advance but you can't go out with your girl friends anymore" kind of thing.

I get that a majority of fandom still only follows things through gifs so the work is still important but it's so easy to do now and unless you are in a rare fandom someone else is probably already making it. That's why I stopped; but that's another holdover I have from old fandom culture because if I made a gif of something and then someone else did it was a huge insult, and insult I would not make. 

Fanart/fic is different so although my being old school makes me less sympathetic to people who don't watermark (and people who cut off watermarks were the scum of the earth) it's also less important than the issue that corporations that have been stealing fanart/fic. Fanart/fic being published, putting fan works under their licenses, it's the thing is a community should be at least concerned about. That goes for people whose fanart is shown on TV or fan fiction is read on TV or a podcast. Fangirls from my era have literally put together legal teams to fight this. I'm proud that a lot of us have used our grown-up skills to still participate in fandom and aren't ashamed of their age.

But gifs? The tiny moving picture you made purely for self-indulgence makes you mad? I get that we came up in different fan cultures but I saw a gif on this website that I had made a decade ago on servers that no longer exist and I cried.

I had made something that I loved and not only did other people love it enough to keep it this whole time but it was thing that people who weren't even born when I made it are enjoying. They are looking at the same little pixels as their foremothers did having the same experience as generations of fans from around the world.

I sound like a fucking hippie but I swear to God I was born in the 80s and I have an obscene amount of Terminator trivia to prove it.

One of our foremothers, who in respect will remain nameless, literally invented slash as the Western genre and she didn't want anyone to know who she was. That seems a little extreme to me but that was the generation before me and so I suppose my generation probably seems out of date.

Regardless of my communist attitude I would be pretty disgruntled doing that job in this current time because you are required to do a great and unique job or no one will even notice what you made. Even if you have a huge talent for it seeing anyone insult you or just not be thankful would be infuriating.

I can also sympathize with the "regular" fans now who feel like they don't have a place. I've had a lot of people tell me that they feel guilty or they are embarrassed that they can't make anything, they can only share it, and I've also had people tell me that they wanted to get into a fandom but because they couldn't make anything they didn't bother because no one cares about them. They didn't watch movies or read books or comic books or listen to music that they may have come to really love and would play an important role in their life. They stick to their wheelhouse and their wheelhouse is what society says people that look or live a certain way determines what the you are allowed to consume.

If that isn't obvious I'll put it simply: diversity becomes more and more scarce this way. People always start with what they are expected to enjoy. Everyone comes into their hobbies and interests starting with what they've been given, already we start out with segregated media/merchandise depending on any minority or "demographic" but people coming into fandom are now coming in already segregated, even amongst people geographically similar to them. The culture of fandom, at least girl fandom, depended on people of different kinds to work together. Diversity is the lifeblood of a subculture like this/these.

The "real" fandom, the part of fandom that has kept the culture going since even the 1700s going, are the ones wasting their time with this because they genuinely love it, if you found something you love that much the fandom becomes your family. Kind of like Drag… Which makes sense because it's art based off of pre-existing work. We form a relatively diverse (based on subcultures) patriarchal communities with people who become closer to us than family, and we half ironically use matriarchal terms and even feminine pronouns universally. Straight dudes in our community were flattered when people assumed they were girls. If a straight dude could pass as a girl on a message board he would get all of the straight girl ass.

I'm not saying that's great or isn't incredibly problematic, I'm just saying… What am I saying? I guess I'm saying that smart straight guys not  afraid of masculinity's fragility enough to be effeminate always have stacks of girlfriends. Guys that try that now and fail call it being "friendzoned."

Maybe that's why I love straight guys, I knew all the greatest ones because they were the guys that got into our communities. They were all annoying perverted assholes but they have been some of the best people I've ever known. And they were smart enough to know how to socialize with women naturally enough to understand their relaxed social cues and then they know what the flirting language is amongst general straight women and they use the girls own language to seduce them. That's a good strategy and also safer because you both will have the same expectations of how to broadcast what you are thinking or going to do. And you know how people think that people with foreign accents sound sexy? It's like that but instead of the tone of your voice you could just use a regionless DVD player and some anime.

Straight girls now just have… A bunch of grandmothers around them (you know, people that you don't really want to touch and won't stop telling you what to do) just going on and on about how disappointed they are in you but refusing to even attempt to speak your language so you understand just enough to know you want to get out of the room as quickly as possible and if they suddenly died it would clearly be God's will.