#if 'the shallow sea' is salem's story and she's the god of animals--

[bestworstcase]

first paragraph of 'the shallow sea':

Long ago, before the fish had scales, before the birds had feathers, and before the turtles had shells, when our god still walked and crawled and slithered the earth, there were only Humans and animals. (And Grimm. There have always been Grimm. There will always be Grimm. But those creatures don’t figure in this story, so just put them out of your mind, if you can.)

last paragraph:

From that moment on, there have been animals, Humans, and Faunus. And the descendants of the Humans who turned away from our god’s great gift have always carried envy in their hearts. To this day, they resent us for reminding them of what they are not and what they never can be.

"only humans and animals (and grimm, but never mind them)" -> two more rhetorical "interruptions" bringing up the grimm specifically to instruct the listener not to think about them -> "now there are animals, humans, and faunus"

omitting the grimm from this paragraph—after the recurring references to them—is. an interesting thing to do given the parallelism of "humans and animals (and grimm)" / "animals and humans and faunus"

and then. "what they are not and what they never can be"

is such specific wording

"what they could never be." "what they never can be." the latter is a statement of pride in having chosen to change mingled with scorn for humans who refused to change and persecute the changed. the former…

"why spend our lives trying to redeem these humans" <- why spend our lives trying to appease the old gods and return things to the way they were before; why spend our lives resisting change.

"when we could replace them with what they could never be" <- salem has always been about overthrowing and replacing the gods, and she is also not human anymore; 'the shallow sea' is an allegory about the faunus but also it is just salem's story, a leap of faith into mystical waters that changed her into something new. and that myth is an ancient oral tradition. and in the lost fable, salem quotes its concluding lines to express her alternative path to the mandate

(which. would be in line with salem's manner of speech generally; as i've discussed before, her big speeches are rehearsed and she struggles to go off script. it makes…sense that she would fall back on quoting from an oral tradition like this in a tense moment, and in many ways 'the shallow sea' does challenge the brothers' perspective on humankind in ways that are cogent for her rejection of their mandate, so it also makes sense that salem would connect the dots)

at a minimum i think "what they never can be" signals that "what they could never be" is also not a statement of genocidal intent because… why would you end this faunus-origin myth with an almost identical phrase to salem's final words in her origin episode if she was proposing genocide, lmfao

especially when:

In the aftermath of the Great War, when Faunus settled on Menagerie, the story of a magical island made just for them has become tinged with bittersweet irony. Consequently, the story has fallen out of favor and I understand it is rarely spoken these days. This, too, influenced my to record it before it is lost to posterity.

Here I will remind you that this story—dare I say every story ever told—may still hold a kernel of truth, even if the plot details are contrived. Whatever the criticisms laid upon “The Shallow Sea,” in my opinion it still holds deep truths about Humans and Faunus that everyone should take the time to consider.

ozpin's annotations on all of these tales contain pretty fucking blatant foreshadowing, and his notes on this one flag that this myth is one of the stories that is "true" for a given value of truth. compare 'the two brothers':

Remnant survived the Great War, but while the four kingdoms now cooperate and coexist, our bond seems tenuous. We have a fragile peace, and in some ways, we are more divided than ever. Even if the gods aren’t real, even if they don’t return to judge us for our deeds, we should act each day as though they are arriving tomorrow. In the end, we will be the arbiters of our fates. We will either create a beautiful, peaceful world and live in harmony together or destroy ourselves and our planet, and the gods will judge what we have chosen.

(<- note that these and 'the hunter's children' are the only stories wherein ozpin mentions the great war; on 'the hunter's children' he "speculates" that the last king of vale based the four-huntsman teams idea on the fairytale, and his reason for invoking the specter of war after 'the two brothers' is obvious, but that leaves 'the shallow sea' as the odd one out… unless you associate the story with salem, and then ozpin's choice to emphasize that this particular story has fallen out of favor and is seldom told anymore is perhaps worth raising an eyebrow at.)

[masterweaverx]

Come follow me on this journey, where we connect random dots...

First, Lightbro and Darkbro are two known gods. Two, in a show where four is an important number. Many people have speculated there are actually four gods that influenced Remnant, with such evidence as there being four spheres when Salem initially shows off her magic in the Lost Fable, the God of Animals being a thing in Fairy Tales of Remnant...

Now, team RWBY already has a known connection to two of these gods. Ruby herself has the Silver Eyes, which have been connected to Lightbro in-universe. And of course Blake is a Faunus, which connects her to the God of Animals. Do the other two have connections? Mmmmmmmmmmmwell...

Stepping into speculative territory, I have long held the belief that the Schnee Family Semblance does not make sense as a semblance. There is just too much that isn’t semblance-y about it, especially when you stack it up next to actual magic users. Cinder used some sort of shieldy glyph thing in the first episode fight, Glynda used glyphs as well, and--oh hey--Salem summons Grimm through friggin’ glyphs. So, if we go off the assumption that Glyphs are magic, and that the Schnee Family Semblance is therefore magic, that means Weiss has a gift from Darkbro--i.e. mister “My own gift turned against me.”

Makes sense, right? Light magic for Ruby, Dark magic for Weiss, Animal magic for Blake... Ah, but then there’s Yang. And that leads to the inevitable question, does Yang have any connections? Any at all? Well she’s got a dragon theme, sure, and that’s interesting... but that’s the wrong part of her name to look at.

See, the God of Animals appears in two stories in the Fairy Tales of Remnant book: the Shallow Sea and the Judgement of the Faunus. Two out of twelve. Now there are six stories in the book which touch on things we already knew about--Warrior in the Woods, Indiscisive King, Infinite Man, Two Brothers, Story of the Seasons, and Girl in the Tower. And two of the remaining stories are introductions to some small things that flesh out Remnant as it is, that being the Hunter’s Children and the Grimm Child.

That’s ten. What about the last two, the Man who Stared at the Sun and the Gift of the Moon? Well here’s an interesting factoid: The Sun is a character in both. This is a trait shared with the God of Animals. Which is something I missed myself, until I went back and reread after hearing about the animated series. And the Sun has the same characterization in both stories--prideful, arrogant, easily persuaded by mortals to accomplish a challenge, which winds up hurting the Sun and the mortals involved (although the mortals prosper after all’s said and done).

In many, many real world cultures, the sun is a god of some sort, and RWBY is known to remix myths a lot. And Yang Xiao Long has been called a Sunny little dragon. Sun magic, hmm? Sun magic... like the magic to help others grow, the magic to burn enemies with brightness... Yang even went through something like the Gift of the Moon story.

I don’t know what this means, mind, I’m just connecting dots. But... in that preview with the island... there were two suns...

[saphraen]

RWBY Vol 5 Review

And so ends volume 5! I'm not going to go too in depth for this specific episode since I think others have substantially covered it, but I'd like to share my overall thoughts on this volume. ​I posted this on the RT forums, but I figured I might as well post here too so it doesn’t get lost in a sea of comments. 

What this volume did well:

1) Character development

Bravo! I was really, really impressed by how well you guys developed your characters this volume. It was something that the show has been lacking in favor of plot and action and you really made up for it this time. As much as I love the story and the world that you have created, what consistently draws me back in are the characters. The four main girls mean a lot to me for many different reasons, and it's been so rewarding seeing them grow and address their flaws. Others have said that many characters took a backseat this volume, but I think that's okay. It's impossible to develop every character at once, and that's why different volumes have focused on different characters. If we look back:

Volume 1 - Jaune and Blake

Volume 2 - A bit of everyone (i.e. Mountain Glen)

Volume 3 - Yang?

Volume 4 - Weiss, Blake, Ren/Nora

Volume 5 - Yang, Blake, Ilia, Raven

The biggest problem within the topic of character development, of course, is Ruby. As the main protagonist she desperately needs some development of her own, but little things like the "I'm angry" line and her working on hand-to-hand combat show that she hasn't entirely been forgotten, so I suspect you're saving the focus on her for later when we finally delve into the Silver Eyed Warriors and Summer's backstory. I'm desperately holding out for a moment when she reaches her limit and needs her team to pull her back together.

I'll just quickly go over a couple of the characters that we focused on in Volume 5. First off, Yang! Finally we get some development for this girl! I'll be honest here: for the first 2.5 volumes I didn't care about Yang at all. She was badass, her semblance was cool, and her puns were great, but she was also very shallow. It wasn't until the end of volume 3 that I actually became invested. Cutting off her arm was perhaps the single best decision ever made for her character, because it finally made her real. It forced her to sit down and examine a) what her flaws are and b) what she's fighting for. I loved that this volume she decided that her priority was protecting Ruby, that she decided fuck you mom I'm better than you. Her speech to Raven in the finale was very powerful, because it shows the true nature of her character. She's not simply the party girl here for a good time, she's the rock that holds team RWBY together. I liked that in this volume she was clearly very broken and still working through the physical and emotional consequences of what happened at Beacon. She very obviously isn't okay, and I hope that comes back in Vol 6. I also think that her decision to accept Blake's return is extremely significant, and shows how she's grown. Raven just ran away, again, at the exact same time that Blake came back, and I think that in that moment Yang realized that they're not the same person. That being said, I really really hope that in Vol 6 they have to work to repair their friendship, or at least have a conversation about it.  

And now on the topic of Blake! Oh man you guys really killed it this time. Blake is perhaps the character that receives the greatest spotlight in this show, and although this frustrates some I think that it's ultimately paid off. She's come such a long way from the quiet, closed-off girl of Vol 1 and 2. I almost cried when we found out that she asked Sun to come with her when she talked to Ilia. Finally, finally, she's learned that she doesn't have to do everything alone. Many have criticized the Menagerie subplot for being unnecessary and boring, but for the most part I disagree. Was it perhaps a bit drawn-out and repetitive at times? Absolutely. But it was also so unbelievably important to Blake's arc, and provided an opportunity in the form of Ilia for Blake to put in practice what she's learned about accepting the help of others and not running away. It ultimately allowed her to return and be able to face both Adam and her team. Seriously, she called out to both Adam and Yang! Pre-Menagerie Blake would never have been able to do that out of fear and guilt. Furthermore (and I truly honestly never thought I would say this), this volume made me love and appreciate Sun. He is perhaps the single best friend in this entire show, and he has been so essential to teaching Blake that she needs to let her friends in. He has consistently been the force that drives Blake back to her team (asking her in Vol 1 why she hasn't told her friends about being a faunus, telling her in Vol 4 that Yang would sacrifice her arm again to protect her, the tail grab to spin her to face her friends this episode!! YOU GUYS!!!), and it was so cool to see Blake recognize this and thank him for it. You did so well with these two, CRWBY, so thank you.

2) Technical animation I was really blown away by how visually stunning RWBY was this volume! It seems the crew has really gotten into their stride using Maya, and it certainly paid off. The detail in every shot was absolutely incredible - the backgrounds are beautiful, hair is looking better than ever, and the expressions!!!! Holy shit you guys all of the facial expressions were so well done. You were able to convey so much simply with eye animation. They really gave us a sense of exactly what each character was feeling without saying a single word. A great example of this that stood out to me was Weiss during the RWY reunion. She didn't say anything, but just from the animation of her face I could tell what was going through her mind: happiness at seeing her friends reunite with their family, then sadness upon realizing that she's not part of it and no longer has a home, and then finally utter relief and joy at being welcomed into that family. And Blake's cat ears!! Thank god the bow is finally gone because I absolutely loved seeing her emote with them. Excellent job with this.

3) Emotion I suppose this one is sort of a combination of my previous points, but I think it warrants its own discussion. There were so many times this volume where I was moved to tears, where I yelled out loud, where I rewatched over and over because those scenes were just so impactful. I lost it completely when Weiss finally sees Yang and just tosses aside her sword and jumps onto Yang, declaring how much she missed her. This is why I love RWBY. Not because of the world, not because of the fights, but because of the depth of the characters and their relationships with each other. Weiss Schnee, the perfectly composed and aloof heiress, just threw her most prized possession that she'd finally gotten back on the ground so that she could embrace the only friend she'd seen in months. That moment, and many others like it, were so unbelievably powerful. Even small moments, like Ruby saying "soon you'll be combat ready!", Raven saying "I'm sorry", Ilia saying "I don't know what else to do" really tugged at my heart. Another example I'd like to point out was Emerald's reaction to Cinder losing in this episode. It was so cool to see Emerald, whose entire world is Cinder, completely break down, and I can't wait to see what's in store for her character next.    

Finally, there are two other things I'd like to point out that don't exactly fit under those categories. The first is the plot twist that revealed Raven to be the spring maiden. Although a few guessed it, I myself did not see it coming at all and was completely blown away. The red herring with Vernal completely fooled me, and the reveal was perfect. Raven throwing off her mask and saying "Vernal's not the spring maiden. I am" sent chills down my spine. And it added a level of complexity to Raven's character that was desperately needed. Suddenly her motivations make more sense. She's a fascinating character because, on the one hand, she portrays herself as someone who prioritizes survival over emotional attachments, but on the other hand she literally has a semblance that is grounded in those attachments. There's clearly a lot more to her character that we haven't seen yet, and being a maiden could go a long way in explaining her actions. Many have criticized her for sort of being all over the place, which if we take everything at face value is true. The thing is, I'm not entirely convinced that what she says is the truth. Did she really kill the previous spring maiden? If so, the explanation that she left her family to prevent them from being a target due to her maiden powers falls apart and she becomes much less interesting. And did she really want the relic to protect her tribe against Salem? Because there's no way she didn't realize that Salem would then hunt her more until Yang pointed that out. So the jury's out on her, because a cowardly character who left her family simply because she's selfish is much less compelling than a character who puts on a front of being strong and distances herself from those she loves to protect them. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see, but nevertheless good job in crafting an extremely complex character!  

The second is Ilia. There has been a lot of discourse regarding this character, and I'd just like to share my own perspective. Personally, I think CRWBY did an absolutely fantastic job with this character. I've been waiting for LGBT representation in RWBY for so long, and although it's perhaps a bit overdue, I can honestly say that I am so grateful for the character that they gave us. I'm a sucker for redemption arcs, so I liked her even before we found out about her feelings for Blake, but that just cemented my love for her. I'm saying this as a gay woman, and I think that you handled the reveal perfectly. Her declaration felt very natural in the moment, and it went a long way in adding a level of complexity that explained her actions. Ilia wasn't working against Blake's family out of revenge for Blake not returning her feelings; rather, those feelings were what made carrying out those order so hard. The outrage that RWBY's first openly queer character was a villain was unjustified because she was never shown to be irredeemable. She was never an evil, heartless villain. In fact, she was set up to be a foil to Adam, who is the evil irredeemable villain. People have said that her redemption was too abrupt and unbelievable, but I completely disagree. From the moment she first appeared on screen, she was consistently shown to be conflicted about working for the White Fang and hurting Blake. And she got that redemption! And she didn't die! I love this character so much, and I know that CRWBY does too, and I just wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude for her. Thank you. Truly.      

Okay now that I'm done gushing, onto what didn't work this volume! Much of what I'm going to say has been said by others, but I feel it bears worth repeating.

1) Show vs. tell: As I mentioned before, a strength of this volume was the character development. I appreciate that you took the time to address that, and I feel that there were many conversations in this volume that added a lot of necessary dimension. A good example was the scene between Weiss and Yang, where we finally got a look into Yang's feelings towards Blake leaving, and a seed was planted for whether or not Yang will forgive her when she returns. That being said, there were many conversations that didn't add anything. Dialogue is great when it furthers a character, but using it to further plot is... iffy. You guys have built an incredibly complex world, and I get that this volume was an attempt to a) get all of the characters up to speed and b) explain gaps in your story and world. And that's okay to do occasionally (for example, explaining more about aura since that's been a confusing and inconsistent topic), but when every episode has a long exposition scene... I swear, there were at least three scenes that took place with everyone sitting on those same couches in the same bland setting. The biggest problem with these exposition scenes was that, for the most part, they covered things that the audience already knew or could figure out, with maybe one or two new pieces of information. The scene with Yang and Weiss in Raven's tent was infuriating, because it had been built up for four seasons with very little payoff. And then everything we learned was basically restated a couple episodes later in the living room. In a show with a mere 14 episodes averaging 15 minutes each, you absolutely cannot do this. Every second is crucial and must be treated as such. If specific characters need to be filled in, that should generally happen off-screen with a line acknowledging that it happened. This volume started off quite well, with the fast pacing allowing RWY to be reunited by chapter 6. After that, though, the show slowed to a halt because of episode after episode of dialogue. Early RWBY volumes relied too much on action, but this volume relied too much on exposition.  Ironically, despite its criticism for not advancing the plot and spreading itself too thin, I think that Vol 4 had the best balance of action and exposition. I believe that one day you guys are going to get it right, and I hope that this feedback can help that!      

2) Action And nooooow onto the most heavily critiqued aspect of this volume. I'm not going to lament for the days of Monty's fight choreography, because I think that's completely unfair. Monty was an incredibly skilled animator, and his fights were absolutely unique. They were what drew many people to the show in the first place. And the thing is, it's okay that the fights aren't yet up to par with what he could do. It's okay that RWBY has evolved past being a show that is entirely driven by its fight scenes! I'd rather have a well-balanced show with good plot and character development than something that is only entertaining because of its flashy action shots. THAT BEING SAID: I don't expect you to be on Monty's level, but I do expect you do actually include fight scenes. I'm sorry, but you just can't get around that. This is a show about a group of teenagers who are training to become fighters in order to save the world. At its core, that is RWBY. Unless you want to change the whole premise of the show, you simply cannot avoid animating fight scenes. I suppose this comment is more directed at the fans who rail against people for being upset about the lack of action in RWBY, rather than its creators, since I'm sure they're already aware of that. I'm not an animator, so I'm not going to comment on the quality of the fight scenes since I honestly have very little idea what goes into creating a good fight scene. But I will comment on the fact that over the course of this volume it became obvious to me that CRWBY was avoiding animating fights whenever they could. The exposition itself wouldn't have been so frustrating if it had culminated in action. The problem was, any time dialogue naturally built up to a fight, either it was diffused before getting to that point OR the camera cut away and came back after the fight had been finished. And the most frustrating thing about this volume was that there were plenty of moments that naturally led into fight scenes that we didn't get to see! To name a few: Blake and Sun vs the bat and spider faunus, Weiss and Yang vs the tribe, Emerald vs the bandits, Yang vs Merc (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY DID WE NOT SEE THIS REMATCH), Ruby vs Emerald, Ruby Weiss and Blake vs Emerald Merc and Hazel (SERIOUSLY??? THIS ONE WAS THE MOST INFURIATING!!!! WE FINALLY HAVE A CHANCE FOR A TEAM FIGHT AND THE CAMERA JUST CUT AWAY? Please you guys I'm begging). And the thing that gets me is knowing that CRWBY canstill animate compelling fights. They did it in Vol 4, they did it with Yang vs the bandits, and they did it with the Maiden fight! I know you guys can do it, which makes it so frustrating that you don't. The pacing of this volume would have vastly improved if you'd let those scenes fully play out, instead of cutting to another dialogue scene and destroying all of the tension you had carefully built up. If the animators are afraid of animating fights, then its time to hire someone who isn't because, as I said before, this is an action show. It's like if BNHA (another story about teenagers going to school to learn how to fight) suddenly stopped showing all their fights. It wouldn't be nearly as good of a show if you didn't get to see all of the training the characters have done finally pay off. Thus, going into Volume 6, you really need to evaluate where your resources go. Many others have suggested this, but I really think that having fewer, longer episodes would go a long way in allowing you the time to create a more polished and balanced show. I'm okay with waiting an extra week if it means that the pacing isn't constantly disrupted by cliffhangers and cuts away from action.  

3) Mistral???? The last comment I want to make is one that I haven't seen many others bring up yet, but I think it's important to address. An issue with this volume was that there was this big battle built up for Haven, but neither we nor the characters were given any reason to actually care about Haven beyond "it would be bad if Salem gets the relic." If you craft this huge world, giving us four very distinct kingdoms and allowing the characters to explore them, then you need to actually let the characters explore them. I liked Vol 4 because we moved through the different towns in Anima and got to see how they were different from Vale. And Mistral was set up to be this fascinatingly complex kingdom, with a vibrant landscape and a complex social hierarchy. I loved learning about it in WoR, and was excited to explore it more this volume. Except then we barely got to see it at all... We had a beautiful montage at the beginning of the volume, and got to see Qrow wander around looking for huntsmen, but that was it. I seriously can't believe you guys wasted such a great opportunity to explore the kingdom. I get that it's hard to fit in everything, but if you had taken one of those exposition heavy scenes and placed it while the characters were walking through the city you would have killed two birds with one stone. Instead of having everyone catch up around the dining table have them do so while exploring the market! Have Weiss and Yang talk on a fountain outside of the house. There's no point in giving us information about Remnant if you don't actually use it in the show, ya feel? I'm saying this now because we still have two kingdoms left to explore, and it seems as though Atlas is next. So here is my advice to you for Volume 6: show us what Atlas is like. Show us why it's different from Vale and Mistral. Give us a reason to care about saving it.

And there you go! This is most of my feedback for RWBY Volume 5. Props to you if you read this whole thing, and thanks for taking the time to listen to my thoughts! I would like to finish this by saying that the criticism I give is not out of malice. There's this absurd notion that to enjoy something means that you can't criticize it, and I think that that's a very unproductive mentality. RWBY is a show that is very important to me, and I just want to see it be the best that it can be! If my feedback is at all read and considered, then it was worth spending a couple hours typing up. Despite the problems I had with this volume, I certainly enjoyed watching it - this was my first time watching the show serially and engaging with the community has been a lot of fun! RWBY is only getting better, and I absolutely cannot wait to see what the future has in store. All of your hard work certainly doesn't go unappreciated, so thank you again for a great volume :)

[therearemonsterseugene]

The Movies I Watched -- 2017

Here’s an inelegant list of the movies I watched this year:

1. Joe Kidd (1972) -- John Sturges (US) 2. Friday the 13th (1980) -- Sean Cunningham (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 3. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) -- Steve Miner (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 4. Jurassic Park (1993) -- Stephen Spielberg (US) -- rewatch 5. Horns (2013) -- Alexandre Aja (US/Can) 6. A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012) -- Crispian Mills, Chris Hopewell (UK) 7. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) -- Howard Hawks (US) 8. The Court Jester (1956) -- Melvin Frank, Norman Panama (US) -- rewatch 9. The Wailing (2016) -- Na Hong-jin (S. Kor) 10. Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) -- John Landis, Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton, Robert K. Weiss (US) 11. A Wedding (1978) -- Robert Altman (US) 12. A Brief History of Time (1991) -- Errol Morris (UK/US/Japan) 13. Frank (2014) -- Lenny Abrahamson (UK/Ire/US) 14. The Housemaid (2010) -- Im Sang-soo (S. Kor) 15. Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) -- Bong Joon-ho (S. Kor) 16. Assassination (2015) -- Choi Dong-hoon (S. Kor) 17. The Nice Guys (2016) -- Shane Black (US) 18. A Single Shot (2013) -- David M. Rosenthal (US) 19. I Am Not Your Negro (2016) -- Raoul Peck (US) -- in theater 20. Lost in America (1985) -- Albert Brooks (US) 21. Tokyo Twilight (1957) -- Yasujiro Ozu (Japan) 22. Vernon, Florida (1982) -- Errol Morris (US) 23. I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore (2017) -- Macon Blair (US) 24. Get Out (2017) -- Jordan Peele (US) -- in theater 25. 44 Inch Chest (2009) -- Malcolm Venville (UK) 26 To Be Or Not To Be (1942) -- Ernst Lubitsch (US) -- in theater, 35mm 27. Passion (2012) -- Brian de Palma (Fr/Ger) 28. Never Let Go (1960) -- John Guillerman (UK) 29. Ghostbusters (1984) -- Ivan Reitman (US) -- in theater, 70mm, rewatch 30. Grand Slam (1967) -- Giuliano Montaldo (It/Sp/Ger) 31. The 'Burbs (1989) -- Joe Dante (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 32. The Void (2017) -- Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanki (Can) -- in theater 33. Whiplash (2014) -- Damien Chazelle (US) 34. Mazes and Monsters (1982) -- Steve Hilliard Stern (US) 35. Colossal (2016) -- Nacho Vigolando (Can/Sp) -- in theater 36. Skins (2017) -- Eduardo Casanova (Sp) 37. Good Morning (1959) -- Yasujiro Ozu (Japan) 38. God Help the Girl (2014) -- Stuart Murdoch (UK) 39. Empire of Passion (1978) -- Nagisa Oshima (Japan/Fr) 40. Fast and Furious (2009) -- Justin Lin (US) 41. The Daytrippers (1996) -- Greg Mottola (US/Can) 42. Alien: Covenant (2017) -- Ridley Scott (US) -- in theater 43. The Sweet Hereafter (1997) -- Atom Egoyan (Can) 44. A Dangerous Method (2011) -- David Cronenberg (Various) 45. Train to Busan (2016) -- Yeoh Sang-ho (S. Kor) 46. It Comes At Night (2017) -- Trey Edward Shults (US) -- in theater 47. Le Mans (1971) -- Lee H. Katzin (US) 48. Cabaret (1972) -- Bob Fosse (US) 49. Finding Dory (2016) -- Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane (US) 50. The Four MusketeersK Milady's Revenge (1974) -- Richard Lester (Sp/Pan) 51. Girlfriend's Day (2017) -- Michael Stephenson (US) 52. The Bad Batch (2016) -- Ana Lily Amirpour (US) -- in theater 53. Sweet Smell of Success (1957) -- Alexander Mackendrick (US) 54. Okja (2017) -- Bong Joon-ho (S. Kor/US) 55. One Million Years B.C. (1966) -- Don Chaffrey (UK) 56. Mascots (2016) -- Christopher Guest (US) 57. Amarcord (1973) -- Frederico Fellini (It) 58. Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) -- John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, George Miller (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 59. Moana (2016) -- Ron Clements, Don Hall, John Musker, Chris Williams (US) 60. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) -- Stephen Spielberg (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 61. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) -- Stephen Spielberg (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 62. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) -- Stephen Spielberg (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 63. Things to Come (1936) -- William Cameron Menzies (UK) 64. Moana (2016) -- Ron Clements, Don Hall, John Musker, Chris Williams (US) -- rewatch 65. Baby Driver (2017) -- Edgar Wright (US/UK) -- in theater 66. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) -- Matt Reeves (US) 67. Circus of Fear (1966) -- John Llewellyn Moxey (UK/Ger) 68. Win Win (2011) -- Tom McCarthy (US) 69. Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987) -- Norman Mailer (US) 70. Her (2013) -- Spike Jonze (US) 71. Dunkirk (2017) -- Christopher Nolan (various) -- in theater, 70mm 72. The Shallows (2016) -- Jaume Collet-Serra (US) 73. The Sea Hawk (1940) -- Michael Curtiz (US) 74. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) -- Richard Fleischer (US) 75. The Mayor of Hell (1933) -- Archie Mayo, Michael Curtiz (US) 76. Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (1973) -- Noribumi Suzuki (Japan) 77. l'Atalante (1934) -- Jean Vigo (Fr) 78. GLOW: The Story of the Glorious Ladies of Wrestling (2012) -- Brett Whitcomb (US) 79. The Killing (1956) -- Stanley Kubrick (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 80. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) -- Peter Yates (US) 81. The Neon Demon (2016) -- Nicolas Winding Refn (Various) 82. The Iron Rose (1973) -- Jean Rollin (Fr) -- in theater, rewatch 83. In Like Flint (1967) -- Gordon Douglas (US) 84. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) -- Tomas Alfredson (Various) 85. Kill Me Three Times (2014) -- Kriv Stenders (US/Aus) 86. The Man With One Red Shoe (1985) -- Stan Dragoti (US) 87. The Age of Shadows (2016) -- The Age of Shadows (S. Kor) 88. Adam's Rib (1949) -- George Cukor (US) 89. Happiness (1998) -- Todd Solondz (US) 90. Kong: Skull Island (2017) -- Jordan Vogt-Roberts (US) 91. Resolution (2012) -- Justin Benson, Aaron Scott Moorhead (US) 92. The WIndmill (2016) -- Nick Jongerius (Netherlands) 93. The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971) -- Paolo Cavara (It/Fr) 94. Fiend Without a Face (1958) -- Arthur Crabtree (US) 95. Versus (2000) -- Ryuhei Kitamura (Japan) 96. Little Deaths (2011) -- Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson, Simon Rumley (UK) 97. Village of the Damned (1960) -- Wolf Rilla (UK) 98. Children of the Damned (1964) -- Anton M. Leader (UK) 99. The Vampire Bat (1933) -- Frank Strayer (US) 100. Hush (2016) -- Mike Flanagan (US) 101. Extraordinary Tales (2013) -- Raul Garcia (Various) 102. The Boogens (1981) -- James L. Conway (US) 103. The Black Room (1935) -- R. William Neill (US) 104. The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) -- Nick Grinde (US) 105. The Thing (1982) -- John Carpenter (US) -- in theater, 70mm, rewatch 106. The She Beast (1966) -- Mike Reeves (UK/It) 107. Idle Hands (1999) -- Rodman Flendor 108. Knights of Badassdom (2013) -- Joe Lynch (US) 109. Requiem for a Vampire (1971) -- Jean Rollin (Fr) 110. Beyond the Gates (2016) -- Jackson Stewart (US) 110. Society (1989) -- Bryan Yuzna (US) 111. Full Moon of the Virgins (1973) -- Luigi Batzella (It) 112. Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal (2012) -- Boris Rodriquez (Can/Den) 113. Christmas Evil (1980) -- Lewis Jackson (US) 114. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) -- Lucio Fulci (Various) 115. Little Evil (2017) -- Eil Craig (US) 116. Stagefright (1987) -- Michael Soavi (It) 117. Day of the Animals (1977) -- William Girdler (US) 118. The Leopard Man (1943) -- Jacques Tourneur (US) -- in theater, 35mm, rewatch 119. The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) -- Charles B. Pierce (US) 120. Pacific Heights (1990) -- John Schlesinger (US) 121. Sleep Tight (2011) -- Jaume Baluguero (Sp) 122. Pigs (1973) -- Marc Lawrence (US) 123. Salem's Lot (1979) -- Tobe Hooper (US) 124. Black Cobra Woman (1976) -- Joe D'Amato (It) 125. Sinister (2012) -- Scott Derrickson (US) 126. Madman (1981) -- Joe Giannone (US) 127. The Woman in Black (2012) -- James Watkins (Var) 128. Burnt Offerings (1976) -- Dan Curtis (US/It) 129. Cold Prey (2006) - Roar Uthaug (Nor) 130. Shocker (1989) -- Wes Craven (US) 131. X the Unknown (1956) -- Leslie Norman (UK) 132. Design for Living (1933) -- Ernst Lubitsch (US) 133. Peter Ibbetson (1935) -- Henry Hathaway (US) 134. Ultraviolet (2006) -- Kurt Wimmer (US) 135. Love Crazy (1941) -- Jack Conway (US) 136. Cinderfella (1960) -- Frank Tashlin (US) 137. Wacko (1982) -- Greydon Clark (US) 138. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) -- Martin McDonagh (US/UK) -- in theater 139. The Firemen's Ball (1967) -- Milos Forman (Cz) 140. Village of the Damned (1995) --- John Carpenter (US) 141. Funeral Home (1980) -- William Fruet (Can) 142. Quiz Show (1994) -- Robert Redford (US) 143. Black Christmas (1974) -- Bob Clark (US/Can) -- rewatch 144. Cast a Deadly Spell (1991) -- Martin Campbell (US) 145. The Incubus (1982) -- John Hough (US) 146. Blackboard Jungle (1955) -- Richard Brooks (US) 147. Kong: Skull Island (2017) -- Jordan Vogt-Roberts (US) -- rewatch 148. Phone Booth (2002) -- Joel Schumacher (US) 149. How to Steal a Million (1966) -- William Wyler (US) 150. The Shape of Water (2017) -- Guillermo del Toro (US/Can) -- in theater 151. Volunteers (1985) -- Nicholas Meyer (US) 152. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017) -- Osgood Perkins (US/Can) 153. I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) -- Hy Averback (US) 154. Adventures in Babysitting (1987) -- Christ Columbus (US) 155. Fascination (1979) -- Jean Rollin (Fr) -- in theater 156. The Trouble With Spies (1987) -- Burt Kennedy (US) 157. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) -- Brian Henson (US) -- rewatch 158. The Undertaker (1988) -- Franco Steffanino (US) 159. Witchcraft (1964) -- Don Sharp (UK) 160. Beetlejuice (1988) -- Tim Burton (US) -- rewatch 161. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) -- Kathryn Bigelow (US) 162. Raw (2016) -- Julia Ducournau (Fr, Belg, It)

[recentanimenews]

RWBY Future Predictions

Last Saturday, RWBY’s sixth season wrapped up with the main cast approaching the flying kingdom of Atlas. Throughout the season, the audience and main cast learned much more about the past of the world of Remnant, like Ozpins and Salem's backstory, while older plot threads continued to develop, like Jaune continuing to mourne Pyrrha.

While fans wait for season seven to begin, the various clues and loose threads of the story can help to give some insight as to where the show may be heading in the future.

For the sake of compartmentalization, I have split the various story ideas in to the near, middle and far future. These correlate to the next season or two of the show, sometime in the next five seasons or so and likely near the end of the series, respectively.

Near Future: Pyrrha comes back

After Cinder killed her in the season three finale, Pyrrha has strangely not entirely left the show. She keeps coming back in scenes mostly focused around Jaune but also occasionally from other characters referencing either the Fall of Beacon or what they’ve lost. In season six, a fallen leaf guides Jaune to a statue of Pyrrha where he speaks to a woman with red hair and green eyes, like Pyrrha.Add in that it is snowing and that Pyrrha was the Fall Maiden, and the show may well be indicating that she is not fully gone yet.

With how much attention she’s gotten, it’s entirely possible that she’ll come back in some respect. Most likely, this would not be a true resurrection though. Rather, she would probably take one of two forms. Either she is like Ozpin, reincarnating as a guiding voice inside someone else’s head, or like a Force ghost, appearing for a short time to give guidance or closure but not influence any events.

Near Future: Emerald joins Cinder / a third faction fully forms

We have already seen some of this take start to take shape, but Cinder and Neo may form an entire faction unto themselves, and since season six made it clear just how devoted to Cinder Emerald is, the moment they know where each other are Emerald will almost certainly leave Salem and the rest to rejoin Cinder.

An interesting development to this dynamic would be if the new faction stop being fully villainous and become closer to anti-heros. When Grimm were attacking Beacon, Emerald seemed horrified while she and Mercury looked over the city. Cinder wants to make Ruby suffer, but if Salem is about to kill all of humanity, she may hold off and join the heroes long enough to ensure that she gets to kill Ruby herself.

Middle Future: Beacon restored / the return of the original cast

In the World of Remnant series, Ozpin made it clear that the communications towers connect the kingdoms, and that if even one goes down, the others cannot connect. Since the Fall of Beacon, we have never heard about any efforts to restore the tower or kingdom, and also haven’t heard anything from many characters present in the first three seasons.

This potentially sets up a great season finale in the future, where team RWBY and the rest are struggling against an onslaught of Grimm and don’t expect any help, but then their scrolls start lighting up with radio chatter from other kingdoms. While the commotion died down, new people show up to help, and we get the return of the more memorable characters from earlier seasons, like Velvet and Professor Goodwitch. This would also allow for more hated characters like team CRDL to grow off screen and come back as much more developed characters.

Middle Future: The general populace learns about silver eyes

Due to the extreme circumstances she has been through, Ruby has not done much to hide her eyes’ power from the world. At the Fall of Beacon, it seemed like no one but Cinder was present to see Ruby when she turned the Wyvern to stone. When she did the same to the Leviathan at Argus though, there was clearly a large crowd watching everything.

Since the power is presented as something that many people know about but think is nothing more than a fairy tale, this provides a way for many more people to come to accept that magic is real and that the fairy tales they grew up on might have more truth than they thought, or for other people with silver eyes to come forward in future seasons.

Middle Future: More fairy tales come true

All of the fairy tales of Ramnant are supposed to have some basis in truth, even though the stories themselves are generally regarded as fiction. However, throughout RWBY, we’ve learned about the Tale of Two Brothers, the Silver-Eyed Warriors, and the Four Maidens in explicit detail. The first are the gods of light and dark that cursed Salem and Ozpin, the Maidens were originally their children and the warriors clearly existed since Ruby and Maria have their power.

However, opens the door for other fairy tales being more grounded in reality than expected. The audience does not know of many other fairy tales, only the Shallow Sea and the Girl in the Tower, but with all of the travelling the main cast has done in the past three seasons, it is entirely possible that they might stumble across either the original truth that created the myths, or whatever happened as a result.

Far Future: Judgement Day

During season six, we learned from Jinn’s flashback that Ozpin keeps reincarnating because he was chosen by the light god to be the one person who would remember when they were around, and that they were also leaving four relics behind. In the same flashback, we learn that when all four relics are brought together, the pair of gods will judge whether humanity has learned to cooperate and that if not, the gods will end humanity entirely and try again.

Our heroes already have one relic, so will they ever gather the other three? Will the show actually provide a definite answer to something like the worth of humanity, or will it remain a driving force that no one ever actually reaches?

Realistically, it probably won’t. Even if the show picks up its pace and either splits the main cast of just fast forwards their travel to the other kingdoms, it will still probably take at least three or four seasons just to get the other relics, then another season building up to the actual judgement, and of course calling gods to judge whether humanity should be eliminated entirely or not is generally a plot point reserved for the finale of a series.

If the judgement happens and the show isn’t over yet, it enters an entirely new phase. With the gods returned, humanity has access to magic again and the Grimm are likely gone due to the god of light’s influence. However, humanity has been without the gods for so long that they may unite against them, or some could choose to go to the dark god, like Salem did previously.

Far Future: They finally graduate

It’s worth remembering that team RWBY and their peers went through a semester or so of school before the Vytal Festival and the rest of season three. Assuming that the Academies work like college/university, they have another three years of schooling before they are professional huntsmen and huntresses.

If this is ever touched on in later seasons, it will likely be either glanced over as something that the main cast doesn’t need since they have so much experience actually fighting Grimm, or an afterthought in the final episode showing them finally getting diplomas during the credits. A humorous way to wrap up this plot point would be if they cast revisits Beacon after so much fighting and training and take three years of tests and training over the course of a week to show that they are officially qualified.

Those were my thoughts on some of the plot threads in RWBY and where the show might be heading in the next season and beyond. Personally, I actually really want the graduation montage and the return of the season one through three cast, but what do you think about my ideas? Do you have any other thoughts or theories about where the show’s headed? Let me know in the comments below!

----

Kevin Matyi is a freelance features writer for Crunchyroll. He's been watching anime for as long as he can remember, and his favorite shows tend to be shonen and other action series.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!  

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[bestworstcase]

mankind, salem says, is strong, wise, resourceful, passionate, and ingenious. (she notes “resourceful” twice.) there will be no victory in strength, and notably she excludes “strength” when she lists the traits that allowed humanity to prevail and thrive despite the grimm; ergo wisdom, resourcefulness, passion, and ingenuity are the four virtues she actually values.

wisdom—experiential knowledge and soundness of judgment—choice.

resourcefulness—the ability to analyze a problem and apply what you have intelligently to resolve it—knowledge.

passion—intense emotion and, via christianity, connotatively profound suffering and death leading to resurrection—destruction.

ingenuity—inventiveness and originality, imagination—creation.

these are the four divine qualities she’s talking about, creation and destruction, knowledge and choice, but rather than recite them by rote as ozma does, salem defines what they mean to her, and in doing so she reveals that she values knowledge above all, because she sees choice and destruction and creation as things arising from different forms of knowledge. when she says ‘there will be no victory in strength’ what she means is ‘victory lies in knowing.’

[in ‘the shallow sea’, the god of animals is characterized as sagacious, perspicacious, and veracious—wise, insightful, honest—and fascinated by human adaptability or, you might call it, resourcefulness. do you hear the way this rhymes?]

you have traveled here today in search of knowledge, says ozpin, to hone your craft and acquire new skills. but all i see is wasted energy in need of purpose, direction. you assume knowledge will free you of this, but your time at this school will prove that knowledge can only carry you so far. it is up to you to take the first step.

salem believes that knowledge is everything; that it underlies creation and destruction and choice, that it is essential, that without it humanity would have never risen from the ashes the brothers left behind and could never have survived in this unforgiving and unforgiven world.

ozpin states in no uncertain terms that the pursuit of knowledge is a waste of energy. he believes—or at least he would like his students to believe—that knowledge is impotent, that what matters is to be given direction and guided by unerring purpose. what he values is faith, as he tells coco in ‘after the fall:’

Make no mistake, there is a higher power guiding our actions. Call it Fate. Call it Destiny. Call it the gods. Or maybe it’s simply the randomness of existence. Whatever it is, I have to trust that we are here for a reason.

from the very beginning, in plain sight, this story has been about the ideological conflict between one who champions the truth and one who stands for blind faith. the undoing of ozpin’s cause is his decision to lay his hopes on the shoulders of a more honest soul.

the grimm are manifestations of anonymity, pyrrha says. that is why they lack souls, why they are the darkness and we are the light; but it’s about knowing, understanding both dark and light (and everybody has some of both). yet it is the grimm-witch who values knowledge and the huntsman who rejects it.

while ozpin tells ruby that she has to be perfect all the time lest everyone turn against her, port tells weiss that her bad attitude reflects poorly on her and she ought to spend less time worrying about not getting what she felt entitled to and instead focus on honing her skills and becoming the best person she can be. both ruby and weiss take the advice they’re given utterly to heart, winding it into the very core of their selves; ruby drowns, and weiss blossoms.

the subtext has a bullhorn.

[bestworstcase]

Out of curiosity (and some confusion), how do you think Faunus came about? Unless I'm misremembering (in which case this would be pretty awkward) Faunus didn't exist in the First Wave of Humanity, and given that the two creation myths we're presented with (not even by an actual Faunus) disagree on almost every point I'd be surprised if there was an actual answer-

you’re remembering correctly that the faunus are unique to remnant. also tonight has been one of my periodic episodes of being unhinged about this so here is some Background Reading.

of the two faunus creation myths one is explicitly a very old faunus oral tradition and the other reads to me very strongly as a syncretism with the (human) brother-cult, in that the earlier conceit of freely chosen, joyful transformation and liberation by a wild but benevolent trickster god is retained but presented within an explicit framework of divine judgment and moral imperative to be peaceful and harmonious or else bring about self-annihilation through conflict. which is exactly the sort of cultural evolution that you’d expect to get from refracting ‘the shallow sea’ through the eschatological prism of ‘the two brothers’ and the doctrine of the brother-cult generally.

(for a real historical exemplar of this sort of shift occurring, see the cultural remapping of ambiguous deities in many pre-christian polytheistic traditions onto the christian idea of The Devil; this is fairly ubiquitous but the most generally accessible case is the popular conception of hades as an evil god and hades as hell, whereas in actual practice hades was the god who ruled over hades, which was where everyone went when they died and encompassed a variety of different areas raging from very nice to okay to unpleasant.)

see also: ozpin’s commentaries on ‘judgment,’ which gestures at exactly this phenomenon. “faunus always cast their god as a wise and noble figure, while human stories portray the same god as a trickster, not to be trusted.” he identifies both tales as faunus in origin (& certainly the characterization of the god of animals in ‘judgment’ is more ‘wise and noble’ than ‘trickster,’ although i think ozpin is also showing his own biases here because the god depicted in ‘the shallow sea’ is a trickster who is also very wise, honest, and fair. so ‘wise and noble’ vs ‘untrustworthy trickster’ is something of a false dichotomy, but also one that maps perfectly onto the gods of light and darkness as depicted in brother-cult doctrine.

<- the way rwby Handles religion is really excellent

anyway. i have a theory.

it’s lightly implied that grimm and faunus came first, humans second. (per WOR: there has never been a time in human history without grimm, and faunus have been around as long as humans “if not a little longer,” and there was a historical period when faunus were more numerous than humans.)

which is incongruous with the faunus’ own creation myths, both of which hinge on humans choosing to be transformed into something new by divine power.

salem squares that circle. salem was the last human of the old world, all that remained of humanity, and by extension she was also the first person of remnant. if faunus came to be before humans were revived, and salem embraced the faunus as her own people as discussed in the background reading post, it’s perfectly cogent for the faunus to be older than this humanity whilst understanding themselves as a people who came from humans, because for the very oldest one of them that was true.

which explains the myth, more than the factual history, but i do think it probably gets at the factual history too, because…

mechanically speaking.

what did salem do when she jumped into the pool of grimm? she combined the waters of life (pure creation) with the waters of grimm (pure destruction) into a new kind of being (herself, a grimm-person) in the same pattern as before (herself, a human-person with free will and a dualistic nature).

that’s, uh, how the brothers created humankind. and the jabberwalker. and the cat by combining their magic (dark’s fire, light’s smoke) into new kinds of beings modeled after themselves.

what did salem hope to achieve by rebelling against the brothers? she wanted humanity to “claim the powers of their creators and perfect their own design.”

and she failed but also succeeded in the end because she Did That—in the very literal sense. salem Remade Herself in the pool of grimm; jinn’s framing of the story through ozpin’s point of view elides salem’s agency at every step and implies an uncomplicatedly suicidal motive for jumping into the pool of grimm, but—i mean–

—the blacksmith has been right under our noses this whole time because she’s the form that salem gives to the idea of remnant’s souls. the lore put forward in v9 recontextualizes and clarifies a lot of what happens in the lost fable, not just in terms of the interpersonal history with the brothers but also the reason certain things unfold as they do and (most importantly) where the missing pieces might be.

the god of light’s understanding of balance is wrong. death as permanent unconscious stasis is not the natural order of things, it’s an arbitrary rule the brothers made up, and they themselves are beings from a place where death is a moment of rest and healing before rebirth as yourself again. they made humans in their image. balance is something that happens when things are given the time to figure themselves out.

what happens to the nature of life and death on remnant when the brothers remove themselves from the artificial system they created? it’s not balanced. it’s like a ball perched juuust at the upper rim of a ramp after you pull your hand away: it might not start rolling right away, but if you leave it long enough then something will eventually give it a nudge, whether the wind or the vibrations of a truck passing by or tiny imperceptible movements of the earth, and then that potential energy will be released.

the “death is when you stop and don’t change, forever” system was a ball sitting on a ramp in a room with someone who both really wanted to get the ball rolling and had absolutely nothing better to do than figure out how to give it that nudge. for millions of years.

yeah? here’s salem telling ozma “our souls transcend death.” that’s a surprise tool that will help us later.

the natural order of things, in remnant as in the ever after, is change. changing, it rests. ascension is just how it is in the ever after, meaning it’s in balance, meaning it’s the rhythm the ever after kind of settled into over time. the ball is on flat ground down there, jabber and all.

but the ever after didn’t begin the way the brothers’ world did—it wasn’t created ex nihilo with a specific prescription for how life/death were going to work, it was cultivated into a garden from wilderness. (ascension is the cycle of the harvest: when you have finished, when you are ready, the tree calls you back—you’re reaped—and then the seeds of you are sown and you begin again. this is a life/death system that developed through gardening!)

so it’s silly to imagine remnant’s balance will necessarily look exactly like the ever after’s balance. different beginnings, different variables, different environment. neither the ball nor the ramp are identical, so why in the world would the outcome be the same?

here’s pyrrha chanting that it is in passing we achieve immortality, through this we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all, infinite in distance and unbound by death, i release your soul. that is also a surprise tool that will help us later.

but we can look at the ever after to get an idea of what the “lowest energy state” for the rolling-ball of a life/death system is, practically speaking, because—like i said—ascension is a cosmic repetition of how the ever after was made. the garden is populated by living fruits and blossoms of the tree who are reaped and sown in a continual cycle. the proverbial level ground is a pattern that wears in some grooves for the changing to follow. rivers, to change up the analogy a bit, don’t go flooding around everywhere all the time; the water flows through its channels, generally.

so, what patterns has remnant got, potentially?

death either takes a really, really long time (because it was dammed up for so long, the reservoirs is deep) or happens really fast, in a flood (what happens when a dam breaks?)

dying once makes you infinite (salem drowned in the fountain of creation, and became immortal)

dying twice unbinds you (salem drowned again in the pool of grimm, and remade herself into something new)

the “really fast” way of dying can maybe bind you to someone else, changing both of you in ways you may not like (ozma’s soul is continually recombined with another and he is changed against his will)

penny ambrosius bootleg ascension (i hope ambrosius enjoys his probable eventual new role as the chthonic god of remnant’s very complicated afterlife. he cannot possibly do worse than the guy who built the dam.)

however ozma’s curse gets resolved is likely to complete or alter the existing pattern(s)

gestures at the maidens. that’s a “really fast” way of dying that follows both the ozma pattern (the maidens cleave to new hosts) and the unbinding salem pattern (maidens choose themselves and also do not compromise the free will of the host or corrupt or take over the host’s conscious mind or identity)—maidens are twice-dead because they were cut out from ozma’s soul (<- spiritual death) and their cycle began with the deaths of the first four women who were given this magic.

gestures at whatever the hell is going on with silver-eyed psychopomps and the white liminal space between life and death. ruby’s eyes make her a conduit of some kind for that passage through the void; she hears pyrrha’s and penny’s cries for help (and pyrrha’s last words) after they die, and in the ever after she is haunted by penny’s sword. and the light motivated by her desperation to save people she cares about appears to be the white light that fills the void where life and death both part and come together again.

if death is a reservoir behind a dam and it happens either quite fast or very slow, what—or who—are the floodgates? [checks notes] the biological children of the “really fast” pattern-maker absent the interference pattern of salem. obviously.

notably, ozma’s influence as a pattern-maker is constrained to specific things with a direct spiritual or biological connection to himself, which tracks because his reincarnation sitch is relatively new. (likewise, i expect the penny ambrosius bootleg ascension deal will not have far-reaching effects any time soon; there are much older, deeper patterns at work here.)

salem, on the other hand, is two fucking hundred million years old. probably. on account of plate tectonics. which means that she has a much greater gravitational pull, so to speak, and is most likely to be that pattern that life/death on remnant ‘wants’ to fall into. the ball rolls down; water will flow into the deepest available channel.

so she died and became infinite and then died again in a manner she hoped would “take [infinite life]” away from her (TAKE AWAY FROM AN INFINITE QUANTITY AND AN INFINITE QUANTITY REMAINS. WAS SHE SUICIDAL OR DOING MATH.) and so remade herself.

salem wandered the face of the planet alone, awaiting a death that would never come. then she jumped into the pool of grimm. then ???. then the god of light pulled ozma out of stasis and told him “mankind is no more, but in time they’ll come back” and also he’ll kill everyone again if ozma doesn’t make them obey teach them to live in harmony with each other and stop demanding things from the gods :). THEN ozma comes back and there are human civilizations everywhere and all the faunus he encounters are in cages.

remember how the faunus are older than humankind? tha-at would be our “???” gap between salem crawling out of the grimm pool and light digging up ozma. probably.

you’ve got grimm. there have, as it’s said in ‘the shallow sea,’ always been grimm. they survived the moonfall.

you’ve got faunus. they were created when salem remade herself—the infinite life taken away from her brought them to life, in her image, just as original humans were brought to life by the brothers’ power in the brothers’ image (and of course the power salem has now was the brothers’ power and is now hers). this is maybe not what she was expecting to happen but she’s not alone anymore and, unlike humans of old, the faunus can coexist peacefully with the grimm with salem to mediate.

you’ve got the god of light taking a peek to see if perhaps salem is ready to grovel in repentance yet and going HEY WHAT THE FUCK THAT’S NOT ALLOWED…

…and hastily attempting to get the situation back under control by arranging for the “right” creations (he and his brother’s) to crowd out the ones salem defied him by making (WHEN WILL SHE LEARN HER LESSON!) and for good measure sending her beloved to punish her (SURELY THIS WILL MAKE HER SEE THE ERROR OF HER WAYS. BECAUSE SHE’S DEFINITELY THE ONE WHO’S WRONG.) because he is the god of the sunk cost fallacy first and foremost.

of course, the mere fact of allowing mankind to rise again achieves nothing but completing the “very slow” pattern—humans were dead for a long time and now they’re alive again. whoops! this is what happens when you meddle with forces you don’t understand.

anyway i think probably everyone on remnant reincarnates very slowly, not the way ozma does and also not the way ascension happens. i think when you die in remnant a part of you stays behind—infinite—to wander the face of the planet until it finds a way to guide the rest of you back home, in whatever form that takes. (BUT AS A BABY PROBABLY.) ’cause that’s the salem pattern.

points at the autumn leaf dancing around pyrrha’s memorial statue that guides jaune to see her so he can meet her mother and say goodbye. That’s Actually Pyrrha For Real. maybe. probably. a sliver of her soul left behind to find her way. i think faunus have the same cycle but it’s a bit smoother for them because they were never stuck in the old artificial death-as-stasis system and also this is why faunus genetics are so FUCKING weird, it’s because if you’ve got cat ears the first time you have cat traits forever even if in one of your lives your parents are, like, a crab faunus and a tortoise faunus. possibly children of interracial couples are more likely to be new, hence the more genetically logical outcome of usually inheriting the faunus parent’s animal.

but yeah i think the faunus like popped into existence as a consequence of salem grimming herself. that was my working theory prior to volume nine on the basis of mechanically how humans were created but in light of the v9 lore it’s quite literally the most thematically coherent explanation.

[bestworstcase]

When the truce happens and the people of Remnant learn the truth about Salem, there are going to be people who worship her.

I wonder how Salem will feel about that?

it wouldn’t be the first time!

salem’s fingerprints are all over ‘the shallow sea’ and ‘the judgment of faunus’ but not in the same way that ozma’s hand is visible in ‘the two brothers’—the faunus myths are allegories of salem’s story, and while the mythical god of animals bears some resemblance to either brother depending on the story, their regard for humanity and dedication to freedom is all her. i do think she was the god of animals, back in the day, before humans came to outnumber the faunus and cultural pressures led to a movement away from self-identification with the grimm.

and in the present, she tolerates tyrian’s slavish religious devotion and there’s the echoes of salem’s religious views evident in how she handles cinder’s defiance.

and obviously in the lost fable, she and ozma receiving cult as gods to their people was her idea, “we could become the gods of this world” and all.

like i keep saying, rwby handles divinity and religion in a very polytheistic way and one aspect of this is that the line between man and divine is vague and mutable. salem’s ease with the notion that a person can become a god is generally parsed as a “god complex” by the fandom, egotistical delusions of grandeur, but the reality is that—from a polytheistic point of view—salem is a god. she has supernatural powers culturally understood to be divine (magic, immortality, command over grimm) and she herself has been worshipped as a god by various peoples throughout history, ipso facto she is a god.

for salem herself, this is less ego than just facing the world as it is. her apparent dislike of tyrian and rewarding cinder’s defiance suggests that she does not appreciate the groveling—which tracks with her disdain for cowardice—but i think that with regard to people who aren’t afraid of her, being worshipped is probably the kind of relationship she’d be the most comfortable with because of the reciprocal and ritualized structure involved.

(<- note the explicitly transactional way she engages with her inner circle. salem doesn’t expect, and i think doesn’t believe, that anyone will do anything for her without receiving something in kind.)

[bestworstcase]

I urgh, made a reblog earlier on your post about The Shallow Sea, asked a question there which you might have seen and then accidentally deleted it (oops!)

Anyway I wanted to ask do you think the fanus’s struggle for equality will be involved somehow in salem’s villian-to-hero arc? Because fanus and salem (and grimm) are just so heavily connected. She actually had a very great chance with sienna but unfortunately adam killed her.

And also if you could elaborate this salem being the god of animals thing, did she actually created fanus or it’s more about symbolic connection?

An additional note which’s just something I found very interesting. In the opening of v6, adam appears as the leader of white fang while the song goes ‘the river knows to reach the sea’. Besides the chronological order goes cinder-adam-the rest of salem’s force. (Added that rising is a salem song)

oh i. i think about salem and the faunus and grimm only a normal amount. there's more that i've written on the topic than that (among others, i have a relevant post about tyrian and his worship of salem somewhere but i cannot for the life of me find it) but tumblr, u know. 

not directly faunus related but the god of choice post is salient because rwby handles divinity in a very polytheist way, and while the recent alchemy post was just for fun it does also lay out the thematically essential death/resurrection element of salem's immortality with more clarity. 

(my other mythology tin hat is that salem was the original inspiration for 'the warrior in the woods') (<- tangent). 

TL;DR: i think she is the literal, though possibly indirect, creator of the faunus (through her combination of human + grimm into own being; the faunus descend from this harmony of opposites in some way) and that at some point in history, she belonged to faunus civilization and the mythical figure of the 'god of animals' arose through a combination of worship of salem herself + stories she told about the brothers in relation to her transformations.

(notice that the god of animals in 'the shallow sea' resembles darkness in character, and the one in 'the judgment of faunus' resembles light, but both versions are also unrecognizable as the brothers because they interact with their chosen people in a reciprocal manner—faunus choose to be changed in both stories. where ozma uses myth to guide humans toward what his god wants them to be, salem used myth to uphold her idea of what the brothers should have been and what kind of gods deserve reverence.)

the narrative has not ever been shy about making symbolic connections between the faunus and the grimm—like, blake reveals her ears for the first time whilst gazing at and identifying herself with the beowolf trampled underfoot by human huntsmen in beacon's statue. the white fang wear grimm masks because "humans wanted to make monsters of us, so we chose to don the faces of monsters." qrow in the faunus WOR episode more or less explicitly describes faunus as in-between humans and grimm.  

(<- which is not necessarily accurate because qrow's narration is chock full of obvious subconscious bias—to the point of straight up saying "honestly, it's not too hard to sympathize" with the perspectives of humans who hunted down the faunus like animals because "seeing something that looks like you and acts like you walk out of a forest and reveal a pair of fangs can be… upsetting" and in no way are we meant to take that as an objective statement; in V1 weiss is unambiguously portrayed as the one in the wrong for hating faunus on the grounds that the white fang is at war with her family's company, a reason that is a lot less shaky than "fangs are upsetting" and yet is (properly) framed as irrational and bigoted.

but qrow's perspective is meant to reveal cultural attitudes, not objective facts, and his overt placement of faunus between humans and grimm is interesting in the context of everything else the narrative does to draw a connection between faunus and grimm)

salem is "your grace" to her followers and ghira is "your grace" as the chieftain of kuo kuana, implying that salem might outright self-identify as a faunus. she wants to secure  sienna khan's alliance (<- a genuine activist) and drops adam (<- a terrorist) like a hot potato after he murders her, she explicitly has no plans to attack menagerie, and menagerie doesn't… seem to have a grimm problem… like at all. zero grimm attacks in kuo kuana across two volumes there and not a single character in menagerie mentions them as a problem.

so rwby is not exactly being subtle. 

generally, i do not think the heavy emphasis put on the white fang arc was solely being overambitious about doing a Racism Subplot; i don't think it's coincidental that the narrative completed the white fang arc and then immediately launched the "salem backstory" arc with the lost fable. the white fang arc sets up for the lost fable and salem's arc is inextricable from the faunus-persecution narrative because she, in every way that matters, IS a faunus herself.

and i think that is very much going to eventuate in V10+ yeah. it's already beginning to—the affirmation of jabber's personhood and overt sympathy afforded to neo and the cat, in tandem with blake's arc in V9 being toward vocally embracing and taking pride in being a faunus as the culmination of her journey out of shame in V1-6 and quiet figuring-herself-out in V7-8, points strongly in that direction. 

[bestworstcase]

Do you think The God of Animals from the RWBY fairytails The Shallow Sea and The Judgement of the Fanus might be another powerful Afterian who decided to go through the door? Because looking at the stories I'm not sure, but the creation of Fanus in the stories does actually seem to be pretty similar to ascension so I feel like there was influence from it. Maybe someone brought a bunch of Tree leaves to Remnant and the tea or smoke made from it turned people or animals into faunus.

genuinely i think the god of animals—as in the inspiration for the mythical entity, i don’t think there is an actual ‘god of animals’ in the way that the brothers are real—Is Salem.

one of the faunus creation myths is about outcasts with nowhere else to go and nothing to lose choosing to jump into magical waters offered to them by a capricious, wild god, and emerging transformed and liberated from their unhappy fates only to be condemned by humans who perceive their changes as horrific. the other is about being transformed by the judgment of a god into beings who are then immediately blamed for leading grimm to a human settlement and exiled forever.

salem is “your grace” to some of her followers, particularly tyrian, and this is also the form of address used for ghira belladonna—she is literally addressed by her own followers in the form of a faunus monarch! there is a cultural adjacency to faunus baked into referring to her this way!

the world of remnant episodes on grimm and faunus imply HEAVILY that 1. faunus have historically been viewed by humans as adjacent to grimm and 2. there is a strong cultural perception that grimm are an existential threat to humans specifically, with faunus being at best an afterthought. and of course adam’s white fang carted grimm around no problem and menagerie just…doesn’t seem to have a grimm problem, so it’s entirely possible that grimm really don’t prey on faunus except incidentally.

in ‘after the fall’ as in V2 ozpin singles out The Faunus Member Of The Team for questioning after an incident, and while we don’t get to see it directly with velvet she is in tears when her teammates burst in, and of course with blake it is transparently obvious that ozpin suspects blake of being salem’s spy; it probably also bears repeating that back in the day ozma factored “the people telling me scary stories about The Witch who lives among Beasts and Monsters also enslave faunus and keep them in cages” into his assessment of these stories not at all, and doesn’t seem to have been all that fussed about the cages situation itself. the man is quietly racist but also, like, “beasts” in this context is a euphemism for faunus, we’ve all grokked this, yeah?

all of which is to say, there are a lot of small hints as to a cultural Connection between salem and faunus that together add up to, well, i think at one point she was similarly influential to the development of faunus myth as ozma was to that of human folklore, if probably not with the same degree of intentionality. like ‘the shallow sea’ is an allegorical retelling of salem’s plunge into the grimm pool told from the perspective of freely chosen transformation being a good thing. also the god of animals is said to be a shapeshifter and we know that shapeshifting is something magic users can do. also ‘the shallow sea’ Specifically brings up the grimm three separate times just to say “don’t worry about them, they’re not a problem in This story” which, Okay.