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bestworstcase · 3 years

Note

I read your giant rwby narnia post and I found it very very interesting! It was a pleasure to read. I had a question which I think you discussed but didn't directly answer, unless I missed it--so I figured I'd ask here: Do you think Penny is coming back? I'm sorry if you actually did answer that and I just read your post wrong. (If that's the case, do you mind pointing me towards where you answer my question?) Thank you, and I hope you have a good day!

anon i promise if i’d really gotten into the weeds with penny’s deaths and the penny resurrection theory in the narnia post you would probably still be reading it on account of it being… a lot. A LOT!! longer than it already is fskjdkl

in brief,

no.

if she does, it won't be through the doors the penny 3.0 crowd are watching, because

the only narratively coherent way to bring penny back involves aligning the heroes with salem against the gods.

and relatedly,

i'm not a fan of how...not all but a considerable number of penny 3.0 theorizing reduces penny to just, ruby's love interest, and i'm really over the dismissiveness of the same cohort towards penny's friendship with winter.

if the rwby narnia post was a marathon, this one’s a goddamn triathlon. i hope you like to read.

table of contents (😐)

1. rwby's approach to death and grief 2. the three deaths of penny polendina 3. penny, winter, & the battle for personhood 4. pyrrha, penny, & passing the torch 5. ozlem as a cautionary tale 6. regarding various yes-resurrection theories … a. suicide and the glorification thereof … b. why even bother then? … c. narrative loose ends … d. crwby broke the fandom’s trust … e. the screaming void … f. the breaking of jaune’s aura … g. why gold instead of green? … h. taking “i’ll be a part of you” literally … i. but rwby is hopepunk! … j. but nuts and dolts! 7. the thematic case against resurrection 8. the logistical case against resurrection 9. (but here's how penny 3.0 can still win)

GOOGLE DOC VERSION FOR YOUR HEALTH & SANITY

1. rwby’s approach to death and grief

i’m going to open by quoting from the letter ruby writes to yang in 4.12, because it might as well be rwby’s thesis on its own central themes:

It’s been hard on all of us, and I’m not just talking about the monsters we’ve fought out here. Every step we made took us further and further away from the things we knew, and every morning we woke up wondering if just over the next hill would be something good, or something terrible. It’s scary not knowing what’s going to happen next, and the things we do know now, just how bad it can get, almost makes it all worse. You told me once that bad things just happen. You were angry when you said it, and I didn’t want to listen, but you were right. Bad things do happen all the time, every day. Which is why I’m out here, to do whatever I can, wherever I can, and hopefully do some good. We’ve all lost something, and I’ve seen what loss can do to people, but if we gave up every time we lost, then we’d never be able to move forward. We’d never have a chance to see what beautiful things the future might have waiting for us. We’d never have the strength to change, whether it’s ourselves, or the world around us. And we’d never be there for other people who might one day be lost without us. This is what we were training for, Yang. To become huntresses. To become the ones who stand up and do something about all the bad in the world, because there are plenty of people out there who are still lost, and even more who will try to gain everything they can from their sorrow. Believe me when I say I know it can feel impossible, like every single day is a struggle against some unstoppable monster we can never hope to beat, but we have to try. If not for us than the people we’ve already— than for the people we haven’t lost yet.

rwby is, and has always been, a show about love, loss, and the ways fear and hope shape how people act in grief and in love.

consider salem.

the root of salem’s suffering is the utter absence of hope. that is the essence of the curse the gods inflict on her in 6.3: that she will never find relief, never get a reprieve from the pain of grief. in making her immortal they tore away her hope and promised her an eternity of suffering, and each time she tried to change that fate she got dragged in deeper and deeper—until she gave up, surrendered to despair, and became the monster she is now. salem is pain and misery and destruction incarnate—trapped in grief, mired in agony, unable to heal or move on. so she stews, and stagnates, and externalizes all of her pain as cruelty.

in contrast, ruby’s deepest strength is her ability to hold on to hope and inspire that hope in others. she knows loss and fear and pain and she refuses to flinch away—and because her nature is to love fiercely and stubbornly and without reservation, ruby finds herself surrounded by people who reflect this strength back at her, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her in a war with hopeless odds, and who, like her, choose to hope anyway. she’s not alone—none of the heroes are alone. and when they lose someone, whether to death or to darkness, they reach out for each other to mourn and support each other in their grief; they don’t stop, they don’t look back, they don’t get stuck in their pain. they move forward. they heal. they honor the fallen by carrying on their legacies. they keep trying.

that is what sets them apart from salem and her ilk. think of hazel, who in betraying salem also rejects her model of grief and adopts the heroes’ instead.

the essence of rwby’s approach to death is this: it hurts, but you have to keep going. there’s still hope—there is always hope. there is light and love and beauty and goodness in the world, and those things are worth searching for, worth cherishing, and most of all worth defending. grief hurts, but even worse than the pain of loss is the agony of letting it fester.

life belongs to the living, and you have to live.

2. the three deaths of penny polendina

i. penny as a character exists in this tension between her purpose—she was quite literally created to be the ultimate weapon against the grimm—and the reality that she is, by any metric, just a person with a metal body. when pietro describes how penny came into existence in 7.7, he explains that ironwood challenged him and several colleagues to “find the next breakthrough in defense technology,” and that out of all the proposals submitted to answer that challenge, ironwood chose penny.

which is to say: penny’s father received military funding to develop advanced technology for the sake of fighting the grimm, and instead he made a little girl with a piece of his own soul.

penny is a child soldier who was built and programmed to be a weapon, but she has a soul—and she was a person, and she wanted to be free, and then cinder fall murdered her on live television to make a statement.

This is not a tragedy. This was not an accident. This is what happens when you hand over your trust, your safety, your children, to men who claim to be our guardians, but are—in reality—nothing more than men. Our academies’ headmasters wield more power than most armies, and one was audacious enough to control both. They cling to this power in the name of peace, and yet… what do we have here?

there is a reason cinder fall chose penny as her victim, and it goes well beyond the convenience of exposing her robotic nature in order to stoke fear of atlas. because—while everything cinder says in this speech is calculated to sow division and distrust—one of the reasons it is so effective is that it does contain a genuine kernel of truth about atlas and about the institution of hunters and huntresses generally.

it’s a truth that cinder—raised a slave in atlas, brutally tortured at the whims of her owner, trained by a mentor who never lifted a finger to rescue her but turned on her the instant she defended herself—knows intimately.

and it’s a truth that penny embodies. she’s just a kid who wants to have a life and friends and for everyone to be okay—but she is also a living weapon, a perfect soldier, a symbol of atlesian strength and a cog in the machine of the atlesian military.

one idea i’ve seen expressed a couple of times is that penny’s death at the end of vol3 was meant to represent a loss of innocence—but i submit that with penny’s first death rwby was actually doing something quite a bit more complex than that; revealing something about cinder, something about penny, and something about the authoritarian rot that is hollowing atlas out from the inside, by symbolically connecting the innocent child who became cinder fall to the innocent child penny wants so very much to become. (does that first part of cinder’s statement not describe the very essence of the atlas arc?)

the first time penny polendina dies, it is because cinder fall makes of her a tragic symbol of all that has gone wrong in atlas since its very inception.

ii. pietro loves his daughter.

her death is senseless and unfair and cruel, and her dad, who loves her so much that he can’t bear to lose her, tears out another piece of his soul and uses it to bring her back.

but the thing about bringing penny back is this: he can’t only revive penny the kind-hearted child who just wanted the freedom to be herself. he has to also bring back penny the child soldier trapped in the jaws of the atlesian military, and no matter how much pietro loves her, he can’t save his daughter from that.

when we meet penny again in vol7, it seems at first like she’s come into her own. she’s confident and happy, surrounded by her friends, and content to fulfill her purpose as the protector of mantle… but it doesn’t take long for the fascism rotting atlas from within to begin to seep through the widening cracks in the façade, and a conflict between following orders and doing what is right emerges, tilting with penny as its fulcrum.

(she’s a weapon and a tool and the face of atlesian authority. she’s the helpless pawn watts uses to light the kindling of tensions between impoverished mantle and high, untouchable atlas. she’s a child who just wants, with all her heart and all her soul, for everyone to be happy.)

penny tries throughout vol7 to navigate this ever-more fraught conflict by balancing her duties with the demands of her conscience and her heart; until, in 7.13, she’s forced to choose.

fria, addled and exhausted on the brink of death, offers the power of the winter maiden to penny—contrary to ironwood’s design—and penny accepts. she does it to save winter’s life, but nevertheless by that one simple act she tears herself violently out of the atlesian machine. she subverts ironwood’s orders, defies his will, and in the eyes of atlas steals something that does not rightfully belong to her. she flees from atlas with her friends, all fugitives now, as the rift between atlas and mantle is wrenched open into an uncrossable divide.

becoming the winter maiden separates penny from atlas, but it cannot make her free, nor can it save her from the tyrant who sees her and that power as his weapon to wield however he chooses. precious few of ironwood’s choices afterwards are truly about fighting or fleeing from salem. besides the attempt to bomb the grimm whale, every significant action he takes from this point forward is a ploy to force penny back in line. the blame. the manipulation. the guilt he piles onto her shoulders. the devil’s bargain he makes with watts, the virus. the bomb and the ultimatum.

the second time penny polendina dies, it is because the ruthless indifference and all the cruelties and injustices of the atlesian regime killed her; all the ugly little truths hidden in the statement cinder made of penny’s first death, rendered now in real time, in clear, horrific detail.

iii. think about that death. all technicalities and loopholes aside, it ends with penny watching her own body tear itself apart. she sees the life fade from her own eyes. she witnesses the disintegration of her corpse. her friends love her—her friends try so fucking hard to save her, and this is the best any of them can do.

this is a horror story.

and think about the child who became cinder fall, tortured and tormented by the madame and her daughters. the closest thing she ever had to someone who cared for her was a hunter more concerned with protecting the status quo than protecting an innocent child, and when she tried to save herself in the only way she could he treated her like a monster.

this is a horror story.

the thing about cinder fall and penny polendina is that they are not the same but they could have been so, so easily. if cinder had been truly loved and led by that love into the soul-crushing military pipeline of atlas academy, if pietro had been cruel instead of kind. cinder had nothing and no one to shield her from the brutalities and degradations of atlesian society, and it crushed her into the ground; she has never known anything but war.

and penny had love—penny was so loved, by almost everyone who knew her—but she was made to serve atlas, and atlas chewed her up and ground her down and took and took and took from her until she had nothing left to give. atlas stripped everything away from penny except for the only things it couldn’t: her humanity, and the love of her friends.

and so: unarmed, unarmored, with nothing left but her human soul, penny walks into battle barefoot and vulnerable, and there she dies.

the third time penny polendina dies, it is because cinder fall—broken and desperate and acting out echoes of the violence atlas inflicted on her long ago, unable to escape atlas even as it falls in part by her hand—is the one who murders her. one victim of atlesian exploitation slaughtered by another victim of its violence.

it’s a tragedy. it’s a horror story. and it has always, always been about how atlas tears people apart.

3. winter, penny, & the battle for personhood

one idea i’ve seen expressed time and again is that the struggle to define herself as a human being in spite of her robotic nature is a major pillar of penny’s character arc—and i think that is 1. not true and 2. missing the forest for the trees.

when her robotic nature is revealed in 2.3-2.4, penny is scared that ruby will perceive her as “not a real girl” and reject her for it, but she also states outright that she is capable of generating an aura—meaning, she has a completely ordinary human soul. and, once she’s cleared that hurdle of fearing rejection, the question of whether penny is or isn’t “real” ceases to matter altogether. she knows she’s a person, and so do her friends, and so does her dad, so does everyone whose opinion matters.

“does the sentient robot count as a person?” is a question rwby asks and answers, with an emphatic YES OF COURSE, in the space of about thirty seconds straight out of the gate and then never revisits because it doesn’t need revisiting. it’s a non-issue.

however.

penny exists in a fascist dictatorship, and that is what gives rise to the struggle for individuality and humanity—not just for penny, but for everyone caught up in the atlesian machine. winter, all the ace-ops, may marigold, willow and whitley schnee—even ironwood himself. one of the core themes of vol7-8 is how people keep or find or lose their humanity amidst a storm of rising tyranny and inescapable fear.

that one of them also happens to be a robot is beside the point.

segueing into the real meat of this section, i’m going to quote what i said in the narnia post: penny and ironwood spend vol7-8 in a pitched battle for winter’s soul, and penny wins.

to expand a little on this thought: one of the key threads developed throughout vol7 is the parallel relationships between penny and winter, on the one hand, and oscar and ironwood on the other; wherein penny and oscar serve as voices of conscience for winter and ironwood respectively. she succeeds. he does not.

and… i’ll just quote all the relevant conversations upfront.

in 7.7:

OSCAR: Well, I can tell you what I think. The path you’re heading down—where you’re the only one with the answers, where you do the thing you think is right no matter the cost—it’s not going to take you anywhere good. IRONWOOD: …We have to stop Salem. Nothing matters more. OSCAR: Some things matter more, I think; keeping our humanity. It’s what makes us different from her. IRONWOOD: Sometimes I worry that’s her greatest advantage.

in 7.8:

PENNY: Are you okay? WINTER: I’ll be fine. I just let my emotions get the better of me. PENNY: What do you mean? WINTER: You wouldn’t understand. PENNY: …Oh. Right. WINTER: Oh– no, no, what I mean is—this place holds a lot of memories for me specifically. I thought I was in control, but… well, you heard me. I sounded like a petulant child. PENNY: I thought you sounded fine. You were just speaking from your heart! WINTER: And that is precisely the problem. I should have just stayed in line. PENNY: I guess you’re right. I don’t understand.

in 7.9:

IRONWOOD: I… I tried to keep the kingdom safe, and now we’re losing everything. OSCAR: General? Earlier, you asked for my advice. IRONWOOD: I wanted Ozpin’s advice. OSCAR: And his advice probably would’ve been to keep your secrets. When we first got here, you already knew that wasn’t the right course. You had a new plan. IRONWOOD: It’s time to give up on that plan. It’s all falling apart. OSCAR: The panic you were worried about? It’s already happening. The secrets you’re keeping, they’re about to be in the open anyway. It’s time. Tell the truth.

in 7.12:

PENNY: The General is leaving Mantle to perish? WINTER: He’s saving Remnant. We can’t let the relics fall to Salem. PENNY: But all those people we just protected—they won’t survive. WINTER: We don’t have time to— PENNY: That doesn’t bother you? …What about your sister? Our friends? WINTER: My personal feelings don’t matter. We have orders. I’m to retrieve the power of the winter maiden so we can access the relic; you’re here to ensure my safety. Now come on. We’ve already lost enough time. PENNY: It should matter. WINTER: Penny… the General is making hard choices so we don’t have to. For the good of all, not just a few. PENNY: I do not see what is good about any of this. WINTER: …On that we can agree.

and:

PENNY: You said your personal feelings do not matter. WINTER: They won’t change my actions. What I’m committed to. The power of the winter maiden and the relic must be kept from our enemies; even if it means she dies. But… yes, Penny, we must still acknowledge our personal feelings. Wrestle with them. It ensures us that we’re on the right path. It’s… what makes us human. PENNY: I think… I think I understand.

in 7:13:

IRONWOOD: You still think I’m afraid. OSCAR: We all are. It’s what we do in our fear that reveals our— IRONWOOD: That’s easy for you to say! You can label me whatever you’d like, but the fact of the matter is I was right! The minute I softened, let my guard down, that’s when Salem had her opening. OSCAR: If you abandon Mantle, you abandon our best chance of reuniting the world—you abandon Remnant, leaving millions to fend for themselves so a few can survive! What kind of— IRONWOOD: All excellent philosophical points that won’t matter if Salem wins! OSCAR: Listen to me— IRONWOOD: No, you listen! I am done letting others’ inability to see the big picture get in the way of doing what’s right! Robyn, the council, this kingdom—even you. OSCAR: Then you’re as dangerous as she is, James. IRONWOOD: …James is what my friends call me. To you, it’s General. [He shoots Oscar, point blank, off the edge of the vault.]

and:

PENNY: She’s… gone. WINTER: N–no. She’s a part of you now. [beat.] I suggest you all surrender and comply with the General’s orders. WEISS: We can’t do that. WINTER: Then—I suggest you run. WEISS: No, you’re hurt! I’m not going to leave you like this— WINTER: You’re not leaving me! I’m giving you a head start!

i want to highlight all of these because i think, taken as a whole, they illustrate why penny could reach winter but oscar couldn’t do the same for ironwood. both penny and oscar are very blunt in expressing their disagreement and disappointment when winter or ironwood refuse to change course—but penny also seeks to understand winter’s perspective, while oscar leads with the (not incorrect) assumption that ironwood is acting out of fear.

penny ends the conversation in 7.8 by acknowledging that she doesn’t understand winter’s reasoning. she questions winter in 7.12, pushing her to articulate what she truly means—pushing winter to engage in a mutual conversation about the ethics of what they’ve been ordered to do and whether or not their personal feelings should be allowed to influence their decisions.

and, thus, winter confesses to penny that she, too, feels that ironwood’s decision to abandon mantle is not good, that her heart is at odds with her sense of duty, and that emotions do matter—that even if winter holds to her commitments, she needs to wrestle with her feelings instead of blindly following orders, or else risk losing her humanity.

ironwood is so lost to fear that he’s begun to think of humanity as a weakness, of salem’s indifference as her greatest advantage; and winter—his protégé and his most trusted deputy, the woman he hand-picked and molded into the perfect obedient vessel for the power of the maiden—winter tries so hard to emulate his cold, unflinching ideal, but penny’s earnest efforts to not just listen to her but hear her pierce straight through every layer of conditioning and abuse winter has endured to drag out the truth that winter knows she is in danger of losing herself, and even more importantly, that that matters to her.

and, mere minutes after this final conversation, winter schnee defies her general for the first time.

the situation is thus: fria is dying in penny’s arms. cinder breaks through the ice and, realizing what’s about to happen, lunges at penny in a desperate rage; and winter bursts through the ice to stop her by cutting off the grimm arm.

then, while cinder is writhing and incapacitated by pain, winter takes a moment to assess the situation. she sees penny holding fria, sees that fria is about to die, and—just as cinder did—she realizes that penny is about to become the winter maiden.

winter has two choices at this point.

cinder is incapacitated; winter is out of aura, but penny is in perfect fighting condition. winter could have rushed to switch places with penny, accepting the maiden power from fria while penny kept cinder at bay—just as ironwood ordered.

but she didn’t.

winter cares about fria, and she loves penny. seeing fria on the brink of death and penny cradling her, afraid and confused, crushes her—and winter allows herself an instant to feel that sorrow…

…and then her resolve hardens, and she focuses on cinder, bracing herself and—metaphorically if not physically—putting herself between cinder and penny. even with her aura broken, even knowing she doesn't stand a chance, even with ironwood’s orders directly to the contrary—when push comes to shove, winter chooses to protect her friend instead of following orders.

this scene and oscar’s last confrontation with ironwood are played against each other, and that juxtaposition underscores how important it is that winter makes the choices she does; because ironwood, her mentor, is similarly presented with a choice between his humanity and his authority, and he makes the opposite choice.

this is the moment where his path and winter’s diverge.

she isn’t ready to walk away from atlas altogether, not yet. but just as penny’s acceptance of the maiden powers irrevocably separates her from atlas, so too does winter’s decision to see and accept penny as the new maiden set her on a course away from ironwood’s control. when her sister and ruby arrive on the scene, she tells them to run; she calls for medical assistance and reinforcements, but omits enough details to allow ruby, weiss, and penny a clean escape.

it’s one small step. it’s a start.

and penny is the one who helped her get there.

and it really couldn’t have been anyone else but penny, because the thing is: both of them are trapped. both of them have been conditioned and dehumanized and treated like pawns, and—

okay.

i have read… a lot of discussion to the tune of winter being, in penny’s mind, just a backup plan because she believed ruby was dead, but i submit that it’s actually the opposite: when penny suggested that ruby kill her to circumvent the virus, she intended to pass the maiden power on to ruby only because—as far as any of them knew at that point—winter was still loyal to ironwood.

(if penny had been thinking pragmatically when she chose whom to bequeath the magic too, she would’ve chosen weiss. penny had no way of knowing whether or not winter could get to the portals in time to save jaune and weiss from cinder; giving the maiden power to winter meant risking her friends’ lives.)

because winter would always have been penny’s first choice. as much as penny vibes with ruby, and as close as they are, winter is the one who’s been through it all with penny. for penny’s sake, winter threw herself on cinder’s sword without a second of hesitation; and only moments before that, penny risked sacrificing both the maiden power and the relic to save winter.

penny, a literal machine created with so much love that she had a real soul, real feelings, real humanity that could never be overcome by her programming even as atlas sought to make her into a weapon; and winter, who grew up with an abusive father and tried to escape but found herself entangled in the violence of the atlesian military instead, broken and molded into someone who believed down to her core that her life and feelings didn’t matter, that she existed to follow orders and nothing else.

winter has been down in the trenches with penny in the atlesian war against their humanity since the beginning. and penny! the machine! is the first person to truly see and understand what has been done to winter and say no, that isn’t right. to say i do not see what is good about any of this.

ruby and the others are penny’s friends, but winter is her family.

and that is why penny chose winter: because they’re family, and because together the two of them are the face of resistance against the dehumanization of the atlesian fascist machine, which seeks in the name of safety to crush individuality and instill loyalty above all else. no questions, no thinking, just shut up and do as you’re told—they’re not banning art like pre-war mantle did, but that blueprint is still there, written inescapably into the fabric of atlesian culture, and it victimizes both winter and penny—both of them pressed and bent and sculpted into cogs of the war machine—and it’s the power of the winter maiden, the maiden of creation, that gives each of them a chance to escape.

and i think this is what they’re both getting at, when they say their goodbyes:

WINTER: You were always the real maiden at heart. I was just the machine—just… following orders. PENNY: You were my friend.

that’s what winter is going to carry forward. that’s the part of penny’s legacy she will become the standard bearer for, the dismantling of everything atlas stood for and creation of a new way of living where no one gets crushed down or asked to sacrifice their personhood on the altar of peace and security—a new world where everyone is free.

because that’s what the power of the winter maiden always represented for both of them.

4. pyrrha, penny, & passing the torch

penny’s third death is a direct echo of pyrrha’s.

both of them are murdered by cinder fall, who steals the power of the fall maiden from pyrrha and attempts to steal that of the winter maiden from penny. both of them are, in their final arcs, trapped in a tragedy from which they cannot escape.

moreover, penny is—in a way—the pyrrha to winter’s jaune, in the sense that both she and pyrrha embodied the qualities winter and jaune needed most: penny’s relentless love and stubborn insistence on following her heart and conscience above all, and pyrrha’s unflinching compassion, courage, and dedication to helping wherever she was needed, in whatever way she could.

and they were both so, so loved, so deeply and by so many people. they are and will be mourned. they are and will be missed, keenly and fiercely by everyone who cared for them.

we’ve already seen how the characters grieved for pyrrha.

jaune sloughed away what little still remained of his ego and bravado in favor of committing himself to quietly doing whatever needed to be done—even if it wasn’t glamorous, or heroic, or something that win him admiration or esteem. he picked up the torch of pyrrha’s kindness and kept it burning just as brightly as it had done while she lived.

and the others, too, drew strength and inspiration and comfort from her example, even though it hurt to be without her.

we’ll see them grieve for penny in the same way. winter has already begun; reawakened to her feelings by penny’s friendship and having cast off the shackles atlas bound her with. she made an implicit promise to penny to use the maiden power as penny would have—in accordance with what she believes in, what she feels, what she thinks, rather than blindly following orders.

it’s sad—of course it’s sad—it’s unfair and senseless and tragic. but part of the responsibility of grief is to keep the fires burning. to pick up the torch and carry on, because that is how the memories and legacies of the fallen are honored and preserved and kept alive.

5. ozlem as a cautionary tale

one of the most interesting things, to my mind, about the phenomenon of the penny resurrection discussion is how closely and… from what i can tell unwittingly the prevailing theories for how penny can be revived again mirror but don’t acknowledge the arc of a canon storyline about a young woman fighting to bring her loved one back from the dead.

like—it is absolutely astounding to me how much penny 3.0 theory-posting just straight up does not mention salem at all.

you know, salem. the woman who lost the love of her life and begged the gods to bring him back; the one they cursed with immortality for spite so she could never be with him again; the one whose anguish rocked the whole world to its foundations, because she refused even then to give up trying and incited a rebellion against them?

the one whose grief and rage they punished by slaughtering everyone on the planet and leaving her to rot on a world abandoned by its own creators as nothing but a pitiful failed experiment—the one who loved so fiercely and deeply that she lived long enough to see humanity evolve anew and submerged herself and was changed by the pool of grimm and yet still clung to her capacity for love afterwards, the one who endured unfathomable suffering without hope of reprieve for millions of years and did not break until the one she loved rejected her?

LIKE—COME ON.

when she lost ozma, salem did exactly what the yes-resurrection crowd want the cast of heroes and ruby in particular to do, and the gods punished her for it with quite literally apocalyptic brutality. all of humankind was obliterated in the blink of an eye in retaliation for her defiant grief—and her immortality twisted her into an unrecognizable monster, and ozma has spent god only knows how many thousands of years being shunted from host to host, unable to rest, bearing the sole responsibility for redeeming humanity in the eyes of the omnicidal gods upon his shoulders, buried alive under the threat that they will destroy everything if he fails.

(salem was right to call them monsters.)

team rwby knows all of this.

in and of itself that does not preclude their trying to bring penny back anyway, but any quest to do so will and must be carried out in the full knowledge that they are walking down the same path salem followed all those years ago, and that these are the consequences that hang over their necks should they fail.

6. regarding various yes-resurrection arguments

i have read… a lot of penny resurrection theory-posting and while i find it all, across the board, not really persuasive, for the sake of thoroughness i do want to at least touch on a few specific lines of reasoning.

a. suicide and the glorification thereof

alright.

describing penny’s final death as a suicide at all is absurd. y’all. cinder impaled her. through the chest. five times. that’s– that’s murder! cinder killed her!

“but jaune tried to heal her and she stopped him!” look

in 5.11 cinder runs weiss through with a spear, through the right side of the torso, close to the bottom of the ribcage—approximately, a clean pierce straight through the liver. as thoracic impalements go that’s one of the better case scenarios: no major arteries were severed, the spear did not pierce the heart, lungs, or any portion of the digestive tract, the spine was not damaged, and the liver happens to be the only visceral organ capable of tissue regeneration.

even if jaune hadn’t been there—even if his semblance hadn’t manifested!—it is likely that weiss would have survived that injury regardless. assuming that every scene in 5.12 and 5.13 happens in sequence—i.e. that the scenes with raven and cinder in the vault do not happen concurrently with what’s going on topside—then roughly fifteen minutes elapse between the time of the injury and the arrival of the mistral police force. within twenty minutes of being impaled, weiss could have been rushed to the nearest hospital for medical treatment.

(it’s also possible that the spear pierced her right lung. that weiss faints immediately following the injury suggests to me that her gasping afterwards is symptomatic of shock, but it might also be a sign of lung collapse. this is a more serious injury but the point stands; an open pneumothorax is dangerous but not rapidly fatal, and the odds for weiss to survive on her own long enough to receive proper medical care remain pretty high.)

jaune’s semblance manifests in 5.12 at 06:55 and he maintains it through the end of the episode (13:58). 5.13 opens (at 01:30) exactly where 5.12 left off, and from that point jaune continues to use his semblance until some point between 06:30 and 08:00.

again assuming that the scenes in the vault are not concurrent with topside scenes, jaune spends roughly 12-15 minutes using his semblance in order to heal weiss—or the more conservative estimate of roughly 8-12 minutes if we assume the vault scenes are concurrent.

so… what this tells us is that on average, it takes about ten minutes for jaune’s semblance to facilitate the healing of one serious, but not immediately life threatening, stab wound to the torso.

why am i harping on this?

in 8.14, cinder punches several holes into penny’s torso: one on the left side of penny’s abdomen, just beneath her ribcage, and four spaced high across her chest, just under the clavicle. the upper set of injuries missed the heart but certainly punctured both lungs and may have ruptured the aorta; the lower wound would have hit either the stomach or the top of the large intestine. these are much more serious injuries than the one weiss suffered.

for illustrative purposes let’s assume there is a hospital just outside the portal. if jaune scoops penny up immediately after cinder lets go and rushes her to that hospital, there is still a tremendous chance that penny will die. both of her lungs have collapsed. she’s likely bleeding from the largest artery in the human body. depending on whether cinder hit her stomach or her intestine, she’s leaking either digestive acid or fecal matter into her abdominal cavity.

penny needs immediate, intensive medical intervention in order to have even the slightest chance of survival.

with that in mind, let’s recall that jaune’s semblance is not healing—rather, he supercharges the recipient’s aura.

aura has a natural healing factor; we’ve seen it close minor superficial wounds in a matter of seconds, and when weiss impales hazel in 5.13, he’s able to shrug it off courtesy of his semblance, which enables him to just ignore the pain, plus the abnormally fast regeneration of his own aura.

thus, for people with active auras, there are two kinds of life-threatening wound:

1. severe traumatic injury that will kill you in a matter of minutes, before your aura has time to repair the damage.

2. serious injury that will deplete your aura faster than your aura is able to repair the damage.

in 5.11-5.13, weiss suffers the second kind of injury—her natural reserve of aura is not deep enough and doesn’t replenish itself fast enough to outpace the physical damage inflicted by cinder’s attack. the actual mechanism by which jaune “heals” her is just giving her more aura to work with, either by directly linking his own, much deeper aura to hers or by burning his aura to fuel the rapid regeneration of hers.

in 8.14, on the other hand, penny suffers the first kind of injury. both of her lungs are collapsing and her aorta is probably ruptured; she has a few minutes, if that.

what i’m getting at is, bluntly: i don’t think jaune could have healed penny. because the danger, for her, isn’t running out of aura.

it’s running out of time.

as discussed, it takes about ten minutes for aura-healing to fully repair a single best case scenario thoracic impalement, and penny, in all likelihood, does not have ten minutes.

but for the sake of argument, let’s say she did.

penny has ten minutes before she bleeds out. if jaune activates his semblance immediately after she hits the ground and maintains it for ten minutes, her aura will be able to rapidly heal enough of the damage to at least stabilize her, saving her life.

the only people remaining in the between-space of the portal are penny, jaune, weiss, and cinder fall. everyone else has already exited to vacuo and are unable to re-enter, meaning there are no reinforcements coming.

cinder’s foremost goal is to kill penny, but weiss attacks her, forcing her to release penny and engage weiss instead.

jaune and penny are non-combatants—penny because she’s grievously injured, and jaune by necessity because he must stay by penny’s side and concentrate in order to maintain his semblance. if his semblance lapses before penny has stabilized, she will most likely die.

(remember that in 5.11-5.13, nora stands guard over jaune and weiss until jaune deems that weiss is fully stable, meaning he could stop what he was doing in order to defend himself if someone were to attack them without endangering weiss by interrupting the healing process at a critical stage.)

it takes cinder just under one minute to disarm weiss and knock her to the ground (09:07-10:03). at most a few seconds later (10:09), she advances to strike a killing blow.

in canon, it’s at this point—10:09, slightly more than one minute after penny is injured—that jaune ends penny’s life. his anguished cry when he does it interrupts what would have been the blow that killed weiss instead.

what happens if jaune tries to save penny?

option 1: jaune ignores penny’s refusal and tries to heal her. cinder kills weiss, then turns right around and knocks jaune off the platform with a blast of fire—because he can’t fight and maintain his semblance—leaving herself alone with a dying, defenseless penny. she siphons the remainder of the maiden powers and walks away clean with both the staff and the lamp.

option 2: jaune grabs penny and sprints for the exit portal while weiss duels cinder. if he’s even fast enough to make it out, which is unlikely, cinder kills weiss and turns around just in time to see him rush through the portal. jaune and penny emerge into a crowd of terrified refugees, in the middle of a sandstorm, under attack by a horde of grimm—and, seconds later, cinder’s there, too.

every combat-capable person in that crowd has to make a choice between protecting thousands of innocent people from the grimm, or protecting jaune and penny from cinder. and while cinder is badly outnumbered, the onslaught of grimm, her ability to explode bystanders by the dozens, and the fact that she can turn the sandstorm into a cyclone of serrated glass will all work to her advantage here.

and if that wasn’t enough, cinder also has the staff of creation.

maybe she’ll manage to steal the power and maybe she won’t, but the heroes are going to suffer steep casualties no matter what. between the panicking refugees and the dearth of fighters, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that this battle becomes a massacre.

option 3: jaune leaps into the fight alongside weiss, hoping to overpower cinder. best case scenario? penny dies of her injuries and bequeaths the maiden powers to weiss, evening the odds and allowing them to survive. worst case? cinder swiftly dispatches both weiss and jaune, then rips the maiden powers out of penny.

option 4: jaune tries, and succeeds, at wrestling the staff away from cinder before penny bleeds out, hoping to pause time long enough to save her. however:

1. because healing is a temporal process by its very nature, aura healing might not even work outside of time.

2. jinn suggests that she can choose whether or not to answer if she senses that someone has summoned her without intent to use the relic for its true purpose. it’s quite likely the spirits of the other relics have similar flexibility, and even if ambrosius—not being omniscient—can’t sense jaune’s intentions ahead of time, nothing stops him from simply returning to the staff right away in a huff if he doesn’t appreciate this trick.

3. when ruby tried this with jinn, she bought herself about thirty extra seconds. jaune needs ten uninterrupted minutes.

4. jaune could probably stall for that long if he used the staff for its intended purpose but got very, very pedantic about what he wanted… but that will cause the bridges and portals to collapse, dooming everyone inside except for cinder. (in canon, it takes a mere forty seconds from the time cinder uses the staff to the total collapse of the portals, and jaune doesn’t even have enough time to run from halfway up the last bridge to the exit; when penny dies, everyone’s fighting on a landing somewhere near the center of the between-space, much further away from any of the portals.)

5. and all of this depends on jaune having the presence of mind to even think of this plan, while panicking, in the sixty or so seconds he has to make a decision before cinder kills weiss and turns on him.

even assuming he can get the staff from cinder—which is a long shot in and of itself—this scenario has way too many points of failure to be truly viable.

penny is smart and hyper-analytical. she can calculate and prepare for half a dozen plausible outcomes of a given combat situation in a matter of seconds (a la 7.5 “i will plan for six different outcomes!”). when she says, “there’s not enough time to heal me,” it’s because there’s not enough time to heal her. there is no plausible scenario where penny walks out of this situation alive.

she recognizes that, and she tells jaune not to try.

that’s not… suicide.

that’s just an acknowledgement of reality.

and given that reality—penny is going to die no matter what—the choice she makes is the optimal one.

cinder has both the relics. neither weiss nor jaune can overpower her and will likely die if they stay much longer. no reinforcements are coming. penny is dying and cannot be saved. the battle is lost.

the one piece still in play—the one uncertain variable here—is the maiden powers, which will either go to a person of penny’s choosing (if penny dies) or to cinder (if penny lingers long enough for cinder to kill her protectors).

if jaune tries to heal penny, he’ll keep penny alive long enough for cinder to kill weiss, then him, and then rip the powers out of penny via shadow hand.

if jaune does nothing, or tries to fight cinder, he might be able to stall her long enough for penny to bleed out, but that’s a gamble.

if jaune gives penny a quick death now, he and penny can guarantee that the power will go to someone who isn’t salem’s most important lieutenant.

that jaune chooses option number three doesn’t make him penny’s killer, and penny’s consent doesn’t mean she committed suicide! neither of those things would have happened if she weren’t already dying! cinder killed her! that was murder!

you can’t glorify suicide by having one character murder another character! just– just an ounce of critical thinking—

and yes, there’s a content warning at the top of the episode and a link to the national suicide hotline in the description, because the whole scene is emotionally intense and for someone who is already struggling with depression and suicide ideation it could be very triggering, yes! absolutely! i’m not arguing that—a depressed suicidal brain could easily fixate on penny asking jaune to end it now and spiral into crisis because mental illness is not rational and doesn’t care about context. there’s nothing wrong with putting a content warning on something tangential out of an excess of caution!

but the fact remains—look.

hazel knew with absolute certainty that salem would kill him if he fought her and he put himself between her and the kids anyway, and then he grabbed her and set himself on fire and told oscar to blow them both up.

was that suicide?

was that glorifying suicide?

no.

and neither was penny’s death.

b. why even bother then?

i’ve seen this sentiment expressed in… various ways, all of them flatly infuriating. why even bother bringing penny back if they were just going to kill her off. why even bother giving her a human body. why even bother developing her character. why bother putting her in any scenes at all!—as if dying rendered her character totally pointless, as if any role she played, any importance she had, any meaning she could have brought to the narrative was retroactively expunged by the fact of her death.

as if—not to name names about the specific fans who do this, or anything—the only value penny has as a character is to be alive and available for ruby to date.

full offense, but fuck you.

c. narrative loose ends

along similar lines, another recurring sentiment is that penny must be coming back because her character arc feels “unfinished” or she died without fulfilling her fundamental goals or only a few characters witnessed her death while the rest are in the dark—or it being odd for her to die after pietro expressed his fears about her dying—or various other arguments which, in my opinion, boil down to:

1. a failure or refusal to understand that sometimes characters do die in the middle of their personal arcs, and

2. grasping at straws for anything that could be construed as “evidence” that penny’s story isn’t properly over.

but… well, two things. the first is that some characters do just die without first reaching a clear end point in their personal arcs, and indeed characters often die before their fundamental goals come to fruition. this is, in fact, one of the essential tools a writer has when it comes to constructing a tragic death.

but the second and i think more salient point is that penny’s death is not merely tragic but the natural culmination of a character arc that is constructed as a classical tragedy.

briefly, a classical tragedy involves:

1. a noble, heroic character

2. who suffers a change of fortune from good to bad

3. as an inevitable but unforeseen result of their hamartia—a single tragic mistake.

(there are other characters in rwby besides penny whose arcs follow the trajectory of classical tragedy; pyrrha and salem both spring to mind, and while it remains to be seen what precisely happened to summer rose, what we do know of her story seems to be pointing in this direction as well.)

the suitability of penny’s character to play the role of a tragic hero is… obvious, given her endless compassion and kindness and desire to help people; she is good, unreservedly and unquestionably good, and that is the basic qualification for the tragic hero.

her hamartia occurs in 7.13 when she accepts the powers of the winter maiden—not because that was the wrong choice, that isn’t what hamartia means, but rather because it is this decision that puts penny on the inescapable path to death.

penny accepts the powers of the winter maiden because that’s what she must do to save winter’s life, and she cares more about winter than she does ironwood’s orders. in so doing, she locks ironwood out of the relic’s vault, thereby preventing him from using the staff to raise atlas beyond salem’s reach…

…which leads first to his effort to manipulate her into obedience, and second to him accepting watts’ suggestion of installing a virus to force her to do as he demands…

…which leads to penny’s fall from amity and to schnee manor, where her friends first defend her from salem’s hound and then aid her struggle against the virus…

…until they’re able to concoct a plan to save her from it altogether, by removing her soul from her original body and giving her a flesh-and-blood replacement…

…which, being squishier than her original body, leaves her comparatively defenseless in a fight where having the maiden power painted a target on her back.

moreover—though this part is speculation—i don’t think penny ever learned how to shield herself with aura, simply because she never needed to. it’s stated in 5.4 that learning how to raise a defensive aura is difficult in and of itself, and that mastering the skill to the point where it isn’t physically and mentally exhausting requires intense concentration and considerable practice; for most fighters, of course, the steep upfront cost of learning is more than paid for by the protection and safety a strong defensive aura can offer. but… for penny, a defensive aura only offers a tiny bit of extra protection relative to the natural durability of her metal body. simply put, she doesn’t need one, and it doesn’t feel like a stretch to think that learning more than the basics might’ve been considered a waste of time for her.

when penny stops a truck with her hands in 2.3, most of the skin covering her palms is sheared away to reveal the metal interior, without any sign of her aura breaking. likewise in 3.9, there’s no visible reaction from her aura before she’s torn apart by her own wires. and in 7.10, a goliath whacks penny hard enough to stun her and fling her several blocks—she lands in a crater of shattered pavement—without even a shimmer of aura, though her standby button does flicker. nor do we see penny’s aura break during the fight in 8.14, not even when cinder impales her five times through the chest; we do, however, see the characteristic shimmer when penny’s aura is agitated by jaune’s semblance.

and… if that’s true, penny was more than “comparatively defenseless.” she was uniquely vulnerable: stuck in a new and weaker body with unfamiliar limits, no armor, no defensive aura, and thrust into a battle where she had to improvise replacements weapons out of magic on the fly while cinder targeted her specifically. this is her downfall.

and all of that, as i mentioned, points unerringly back in time to that single act of accepting the winter maiden’s power.

rwby is not penny’s story—thus the ending of penny’s story is not the ending of rwby, and her death will reverberate loudly throughout the remaining narrative. of course there are loose ends to tie up; jaune and winter and weiss still need to deliver the news of penny’s death, and her father still needs to find out that he lost her again, and everyone who loved penny still needs to grieve. in that sense, the story of penny is far from over.

but her character arc? penny’s own story? it’s finished. it was a meticulously crafted classical tragedy and it ended the way all classical tragedies do, and must.

and it’s okay, it’s natural to feel sad, it’s okay for it to hurt! penny’s death provoked grief and anguish because those are the feelings a classical tragedy seeks to inspire; the heart of a tragedy is its sorrows!

and tragedy—i really need people to understand this—tragedy does not equal bad writing. it’s just a genre and a particular form of narrative structure, and that’s it.

which segues us into

d. crwby broke the fandom’s trust

leaving aside the issue of the kind of PARASOCIAL NIGHTMARE RELATIONSHIP you’ve got to have with the creators of a story in order to feel personally betrayed by a creative decision you don’t like—

no.

they didn’t.

rwby has been dealing with themes of death and grief since day one. the first shot of the first trailer is ruby visiting her mother’s grave; summer’s disappearance and presumed death is first discussed in 2.6 and the gravitational pull of that loss on her children’s lives has only grown since. the show’s first use of classical tragedy occurred in vol3 and culminated in pyrrha’s death in 3.12. the backstory portions of 6.3 likewise follow the arc of a classical tragedy—with the twist of the tragic hero being cursed with immortality, and surviving her downfall only to be warped into a monster by her suffering.

the point being that nothing about crwby’s handling of penny’s arc in vol7-8 was new. it didn’t break without warning from the story’s established tone. neither the use of classical tragedy in a character arc nor the violent, sudden death of a major character were unprecedented. (pyrrha and penny were even murdered by the same person.)

a story should establish expectations appropriate to the story—and rwby did that. rwby devoted three volumes to slowly and steadily building up to the tragedy of pyrrha nikos. it spent the next several volumes raising the stakes and building tension one piece of information at a time until it had all its dominoes lined up—and then we hit atlas, and it flicked the first one down, and we’ve had two volumes of an intensifying downward spiral. rwby has been as upfront as a story can be about the possibility that major characters may die and the heroes may suffer catastrophic losses.

writers do not owe it to you to not write tragedies. they don’t owe it to you not to utilize tragic tropes. you are not owed a happy ending for your favorite character. you are not owed avoidance of genre conventions that you don’t like.

crwby has zero obligation to appease their audience. penny’s death was a narrative choice, not a cruel personal attack that they need to “make right.”

get a grip.

e. the screaming void

these next few items are things i’ve seen presented as evidence of there being something unusual about penny’s death, which i want to touch on for the sake of completeness and because i think they’re silly. first:

there’s—apparently—some disagreement on the subject of the big scream in 8.14, which has led to speculation among the yes-resurrection crowd that it might be related to penny’s death or her connection to the staff of creation itself; that she’s a product or byproduct of the same magic that formed the bridges and portals, that perhaps the void itself is angered by the spilling of her blood.

and… nnno.

the order of events is this:

at approximately 13:10, winter knocks the staff of creation out of cinder’s grip and it falls onto the circular platform immediately above and behind the big platform leading to the exit. in this screenshot, taken at 13:12, we can see cinder hovering high above both platforms:

the staff is circled in light blue at the low center-left of the frame. jaune and weiss, circled in red, are visible at the high center-right, where they are just stepping onto the exit bridge—weiss injured, jaune supporting her. in this shot, we see cinder glance at the staff, then up at jaune and weiss.

at 13:16, cinder launches a volley of flame at jaune and weiss, which compels winter to rush to their defense.

13:17-13:18, jaune hears the approaching fireball, turns, and throws his… forcefield grenade thingy into its path. the hard-light shield catches the fireball but explodes on impact. the aftershock of that smaller blast knocks jaune and weiss to the ground…

…which cinder superheats in large radius beneath them at 13:20 and then detonates in a massive blast at 13:24.

jaune’s aura seems to absorb a lot of the force of this explosion; he’s thrown by the blast and skids a foot or two before coming to a stop, and his aura breaks. weiss—without a massive aura to protect her—is launched what appears to be hundreds of feet into the air and falls into the void. winter dives after her in a futile effort to save her.

at approximately 13:35, winter realizes that she’s too late and too far away to catch her sister and halts her descent, hovering in midair for a moment in horror before flying slowly back up to the exit platform, where she collapses to her knees, overwhelmed by grief.

then, between 13:46 and 13:47, winter’s sorrow transmutes into rage, and she lifts her head. this happens:

the focus of this shot is on winter, but we can clearly see cinder—circled in red—descending to land on the circular platform behind her and reaching down to retrieve the staff. then—

in the next shot, at 13:50, cinder straightens up, holding the staff, and turns around. her hair is blown back—as if by a breeze—and she grins as winter gets to her feet, prepared to fight.

between 13:52 and 13:57, the void screams, the bridges and platforms shake, and the portals flicker. what happened?

cinder uses the staff immediately upon picking it up. we see the exact moment she activates it—at 13:50, when she grins and that breeze ruffles her hair. (watch closely when weiss uses the staff in 8.12; that same little breeze moves her hair at the moment when ambrosius emerges from it.)

the staff pauses time for whoever uses it, but not for anyone else, and in that shot at 13:50 we’re seeing cinder from winter’s point of view. thus: we don’t see ambrosius, and we aren’t shown what cinder asks him to create.

what we do see, and hear, is this wrenching shriek and collapse of the portals. specifically, my thought is that the scream is a result of cinder having used the staff while inside ambrosius’ last creation—the staff must be removed before the deconstruction of the last and creation of the next can properly begin; hence why the collapse doesn’t start until after cinder has flown back through to atlas.

but regardless of the specifics, the order of events and the line of causation is very clear, and there’s no correlation between the scream and penny’s death almost four minutes prior.

f. the breaking of jaune’s aura

way back in vol1 we learned that jaune has an extraordinarily deep reserve of aura, and that is borne out in the sheer endurance he demonstrates when using his semblance—for example he’s able to amp weiss’ aura long enough to heal her from a full thoracic impalement and top her off so she can use her semblance immediately afterwards, all without so much as a twinge of visible strain—and in the fact that prior to 8.14 his aura had never broken.

like the screaming void, this has given rise to wild speculation in yes-resurrection circles that jaune may have done something to penny using his semblance, in the forty or so seconds he had to work with, which burned through most of his aura reserve and somehow prevented penny from truly dying.

but, friends. y’all.

cinder exploded him!

she blew up a chunk of the ground as wide across as jaune is tall, directly underneath him and weiss. just– for god’s sake just LOOK AT IT!

those teeny tiny smoke trails—THAT’S WEISS AND JAUNE. THOSE ITTY BITTY LITTLE SPECKS. LOOK HOW TINY THEY ARE COMPARED TO THE BLAST.

THIS EXPLOSION COULD’VE WIPED OUT A CITY BLOCK.

AND THEY WERE SITTING RIGHT. ON. TOP. OF. IT.

look at the different trajectories there. jaune caught less than half the height and way less distance than weiss did—because his extraordinarily deep aura reserve absorbed significantly more of the explosion’s force than hers.

this thing is orders of magnitude worse than any hit we’ve seen jaune take before sO OF COURSE HIS AURA BREAKS WHEN HE HITS THE GROUND CINDER EXPLODED HIM

his aura is extraordinarily deep—not infinite!!

everyone has a limit. it just took us eight volumes and one very pissed off fall maiden for us to find out what jaune’s is.

FURTHERMORE. it’s symbolically relevant that jaune’s aura breaks when it does. jaune’s semblance manifested for the first time in response to his pure desperation not to lose anyone else; jaune was TERRIFIED for weiss, TERRIFIED that cinder was going to kill another person he loved, and the strength of that terror and the love it sprang from awoke his semblance and granted him the ability to heal her.

and symbolically, the reason jaune’s aura breaks after penny dies? it’s because jaune couldn’t save her, because his aura, his semblance wasn’t enough to save her—and the exact thing he was so scared of happened. cinder fall killed his friend, and once again, jaune couldn’t do anything to stop her.

and that broke him.

g. why gold instead of green?

when penny bequeaths the maiden powers to winter in the white void, the flow of energy is pale gold, rather than green. this is incongruous with the transfer of powers from fria to penny, wherein the flowing energy was pale blue to match fria’s aura. which—again—has prompted a lot of speculation from the yes-resurrection crowd.

i will acknowledge that this one is something of a mystery.

it could simply be an oversight. rwby is meticulous about its use of color and symbolism, but it’s not immune to error, so i wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the animators just… made a mistake? stranger things have happened.

that said.

i do have my own theory.

to begin, we have a sample size of three: amber → cinder, fria → penny, and penny → winter. each one is anomalous in its own way, which makes them a bit tricky to compare—the first was violent (and animated with different software), the second was voluntarily initiated by the maiden herself, and the third occurs in the white void.

with that in mind, take a look at this. in all of the on-screen transfers, we’ve seen both the color of the giving-maiden’s aura and a bright glow occurring when the magic passes to the receiving-maiden. what we’re looking at here is:

1. amber’s aura - a medium mustard-yellow.

2. the colors of the glow - white and pale gold.

3. fria’s aura - a medium-light icy blue.

4. the color of the glow - pure white.

5. penny’s aura - a dark foresty green.

6. the colors of the glow - white and pale gold.

7. a side-by-side comparison of the glows from the amber-to-cinder and penny-to-winter transfers. the hue and saturation of both are roughly the same, although the amber-to-cinder glow is a little bit darker.

next, consider the different circumstances of each transfer:

amber → cinder: using the aura pods, ozpin initiates a transference of amber’s aura into a new vessel, pyrrha. we see amber’s aura flow through the machinery and surround pyrrha—and then cinder shoots amber in the chest with an arrow. amber’s aura pours rapidly back into amber, and the instant it’s all back in her body, a bright white-and-gold ball of light explodes out of her—shattering the glass screen on the front of the pod—and flows into cinder, who begins to glow as she absorbs it.

fria → penny: fria states that she’s ready to pass on the maiden powers and sinks into penny’s arms. as fria dies of purely natural causes, she asks if penny is the one ironwood chose to receive the magic. penny hesitates, but after a moment—because fria is on the brink of death and cinder is seconds away from killing winter—takes fria’s hand to accept the transfer. we see fria’s blue aura shimmer, engulfing both her hand and penny’s, as small jots of blue light begin to rise out of it. then there’s a brilliant flash of pure white light that blots out the screen and it’s over.

penny → winter: penny dies thinking of winter. her soul and winter’s soul are drawn together in the white void, which seems to exist outside of time. they say goodbye. penny takes winter’s hands, and as a shimmering white-gold light engulfs both of their hands, swirls of small green sparks—the color of penny’s aura—appear and float away. penny’s soul fades slowly to white, and the transfer is completed with a brilliant burst of pale gold light.

lastly, think about what we know about the maiden powers and how they’re transferred.

when a maiden dies, the magic leaves her body and flows into a new host—always a young woman, preferentially whichever young woman the maiden thinks of as she dies. the salient point, for the purpose of my theory, is the actual mechanism by which the maiden powers attach to each new host: namely, by anchoring themselves to the young woman’s aura.

thus the logic behind the aura-transference pods: if you take the aura of a living maiden and put it into a new vessel, the magic tethered to that aura should be brought along for the ride. (since this is how it works for oz—his aura and his magic are linked, and the magic follows him from one host to the next—it’s probably safe to assume this line of reasoning is correct.)

that is also, explicitly, NOT what happens in the natural passage of the maiden powers from one host to the next. in the natural process, the magic leaves its dying host—i.e., detaches from her aura—and then seeks a new one.

now—putting all these pieces together, my theory is this: the white-gold light we see in the amber-to-cinder and penny-to-winter transfers is the maiden power itself, separated from its last host but not yet attached to the next. further:

1. every transference of magic draws the souls of the old and new hosts together into the white void, but—because these encounters are spiritual in nature and occur outside of time—the transfer appears instantaneous to an outside viewer.

2. the green sparks that appear during the penny-to-winter are fragments of penny’s aura, scattered by the separation of the magic from her aura—very much like the scattering of aura sparks when a defensive aura is shattered.

3. every transference of magic appears, to the outside viewer, as a brilliant flash of white-gold light bursting out of the dying host and into the new one. if the old and new hosts are not in the same location, i presume that this light will appear to burst from the old host and dissipate, and appear around the new host as a spontaneous flash of light.

4. if, however, the old and new hosts are touching at the moment of death, there is no visible burst of light—the magic simply flows through the point of physical contact.

5. when cinder uses her shadow hand to draw the maiden powers out of other maidens, she’s doing more or less what the aura-transference pods are meant to do—ripping out bits of aura that the magic is tethered to—which is why the color of energy flow in these cases matches the victim’s aura. (while grimm cannot use aura, the CFVY books do establish a precedent for them being able to absorb or siphon it, so cinder draining aura through the shadow hand is not out of the realm of possibility.)

thus, for each of the onscreen transfers, i submit that all the visual discrepancies are a result of the point of view through which we see them occur:

amber → cinder: the outside perspective from beginning to end, from ozpin’s, pyrrha’s, and jaune’s point of view.

fria → penny: the perspective of the receiving-maiden, penny, up until her soul is drawn into the white void (that’s the white flash)—at which point the perspective shifts to the outside, from cinder��s point of view.

penny → winter: the inside perspective from beginning to end, from winter’s point of view.

of course—this is just a theory. it’s hard to draw certain conclusions with only three examples, and i might be wrong! how…ever, i find my theory much more convincing than the penny-resurrection-something-weird-happened speculation simply because… well, mine doesn’t rely on “something”s.

mine is based on specific observable evidence interpreted through the lens of what knowledgeable characters have to say about the mechanics of the maiden powers and their transference. there’s also a well-established precedent for magical events occurring outside of time—the relics—including one example of us seeing the instant a character experiences an outside-time event without our being shown the event itself—when cinder uses the staff.

my theory explains every visual dissimilarity between all three onscreen transfers without requiring any assumptions about the existence of information being withheld or secret circumstances or narrative sleight-of-hand during the moment of penny’s death. its weakest link is the slight difference in value between the pale golds of the first and third transfers, but that difference can be explained by 1. the different animation software and 2. the former being color-picked against a very dark background while the latter was color-picked against a very light one.

by contrast, the penny resurrection speculation tends to focus only on the fria-to-penny and penny-to-winter transfers and largely amounts to: this is weird, did jaune do something? did penny figure out something about jaune’s aura? did jaune’s aura evolve somehow? did jaune drain his aura to do something odd to penny? does it have something to do with ambrosius?

and… maybe? who knows! it’s not impossible! but this whole line of reasoning seems to be a significant pillar of the broader theory that penny will come back again—i think out of every argument i’ve read, this one pops up the most—and… i mean, “did something weird happen here that will bring her back?” isn’t… a compelling piece of evidence. it’s not even truly a theory. it’s just a question mark in the margins of the narrative being treated almost like absolute proof that penny has to come back.

h. taking “i’ll be a part of you” literally

this is in reference to this dialogue:

WINTER: Thank you, for trusting me with this. When you’re—gone… PENNY: I won’t be gone. I’ll be a part of you.

which the yes-resurrection crowd likes to take literally as some sort of hint that penny’s going to stick around somewhere in winter’s brain a la ozpin and oscar or—honestly i don’t have a lot to say about this one.

we know that isn’t how the maidens work. cinder doesn’t have amber in her head, and penny didn’t have fria in hers.

practically every single character who has ever died in any story ever written has some variation of this exact sentiment expressed about them unless they were Literally Evil. like—come on.

it’s they’ll be a part of you or they’ll live on in you or they aren’t gone so long as we keep their memories alive or they’re here in our hearts—or however else you want to articulate the concept that people who we’ve loved and lost still linger in our hearts and minds long after they’re gone. in penny’s case she is also directly and doubtless deliberately echoing what winter said to comfort her when she was distressed about fria’s death.

it’s said of pyrrha, too. not in the same words, but:

JAUNE: She should be standing here. PYRRHA’S MOM: She is.

the same feeling.

it’s not literal.

i. but rwby is hopepunk!

this is a sentiment i’ve noticed being tossed around in penny resurrection discussions from time to time with the reasoning that rwby is hopepunk, therefore the characters can, will, and must fight to bring penny back from the dead, and they can, will, and must ultimately succeed in that endeavor, because hopepunk meansrefusing to accept bad things. i’ve also seen the argument that penny… symbolically embodies or represents the idea of hope, and therefore she must come back because … hope.

both of these ideas are flatly ridiculous.

the essence of hopepunk is that terrible things can happen, do happen, and it is worth it to keep trying anyway. that you will be knocked down again and again and you’ll stand up every single time. that the war may be long and difficult and painful but you don’t have to fight it alone, because all around you there are other people who will stand up and fight with you, because fighting for a better world is worth it. the essence of hopepunk is that happy endings are not guaranteed and change is hard and kindness is important and caring about people is not only right but necessary. it’s about resistance and resilience—and it’s about the clean-burning fuel of rage against injustice.

it’s about holding on to your humanity as hard as you can, even in the darkest night, the bitterest winter, the bleakest and most dire circumstance—because without your humanity you have nothing.

it’s about hope, which is antithetical to denial.

you want hopepunk? ruby rose is fucking hopepunk:

OSCAR: I’m… scared. I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. Than I ever thought was possible. I always knew that I wanted to be more than a farmhand, but… this? Who would ask for this?

RUBY: We all went to Beacon because we wanted to help people, but… you’re right. None of us asked for this, either. We just have to press on and—

OSCAR: How can you be so confident? People have tried to kill you. The world’s about to go to war all over again! How are you okay with any of this?!

RUBY: …When Beacon fell, I lost two of my friends. Penny Polendina and Pyrrha Nikos. I didn’t know them for very long, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were two of the most kind-hearted people I’d ever met. But that didn’t save them. Pyrrha thought that, if there was even the smallest chance of helping someone, then it was a chance worth taking, and because of that, she died fighting a battle she knew she couldn’t win. And Penny was killed, just to make a statement.

OSCAR: I’m… sorry.

RUBY: I am scared. But not just for me. What happened at Beacon shows that Salem doesn’t care if you’re standing against her or not. She’ll kill anybody, and that scares me most of all. Pyrrha… Penny… I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t hurt, that I didn’t think about them every day since I lost them, that I didn’t wish I had spent more time with them! If it had been me instead, I know they would have kept fighting too, no matter how dangerous it was. So that’s what I choose to do. To keep moving forward.

hope and grief can coexist—

and, thus, so too can hope and tragedy.

(hope does burn ever in the blackest night.)

j. but nuts and dolts!

i’m sorry half your ship died. try fanfiction?

7. the thematic case against resurrection

so.

having said all of this.

it is self-evidently not impossible for rwby to bring a dead character back to life in some way. ozpin died at the end of vol3 and reincarnated as a voice in oscar’s head in vol4, and of course pietro rebuilt and reanimated penny after she was killed in amity arena. summer rose has been presumed dead by the characters, but the narrative itself is building toward some kind of reveal involving her and it’s not out of the question that she might turn out to be alive after all. all of these things occur within the context of a show whose central themes include grief and healing after death, which means that theme alone is not enough to say with certainty that penny polendina is not coming back to life.

however.

both times a character has died and come back, they did so separately from the core cast, and their reintroduction to the core cast came as a welcome surprise. with a singular exception, we have never seen a heroic character try or even consider trying to resurrect a fallen loved one—and that exception was salem, and her trying destroyed her and dragged the whole world into ruin.

when pyrrha died, her friends mourned her and emulated her and supported each other and kept moving forward. the first time penny died, her friends grieved for her and remembered her and tried to move on. thematically and narratively, rwby has affirmed and continues to affirm that this is the right way to answer loss, that part of taking care of yourself means refusing to sink into your pain and stagnate there, that the way forward lies through acceptance and healing and focusing one’s efforts on the ones who are still here.

it would be a drastic, egregious deviation away from that theme to make penny an exception to that rule—not the least because she wasn’t an exception last time—and likewise it would be pretty dramatically out of character for everyone involved except pietro.

rwby is better than that.

8. the logistical case against resurrection

but let’s assume for the sake of argument that penny is an exception, this time, to the established patterns of grief. maybe her death is ruby’s final straw; maybe the fact that she came back once represents a temptation too irresistible for her friends to resist; half of them are trapped on a bizarre magical island, after all, and lotus dreams are hardly out of the question.

how do they do it?

i think—at this late stage in the game, and for something as huge as bringing a dead character back to life—that whatever mechanism by which resurrection occurred would need to be something that we, the audience, have enough clues to piece together into a concrete guess. it needs to be genuinely PLAUSIBLE for penny to be brought back again.

ozpin’s surprise return worked with minimal foreshadowing because it happened relatively early in the story, at a time when we were still learning the rules of the setting. penny’s surprise return at the beginning of vol7 worked because—well, was it really a surprise? as shocking and sad as her sudden death was in 3.9, i know i’m not the only one who had that little voice in the back of my head saying: “oh, but she’s a robot; they can rebuild her. it might take a while, but she’ll be okay.”

but then, in 7.7, rwby made a specific point of explaining that penny’s run out of get-out-of-death-free cards, so to speak. her dad built her by tearing out a piece of his own soul, and to bring her back he had to tear out another, and he simply doesn’t have enough left to do it a third time.

someone else could rip out part of their soul and put that in a robot to create a being like penny, sure, but that new person wouldn’t actually be penny. penny’s soul came from pietro. you can’t just– you can’t grab a bit of whatever soul’s available and stick it in a vessel and expect to get penny! souls aren’t interchangeable! even ozpin and oscar are distinct characters—so much so that salem instantly sees through the ruse when oscar pretends to be ozpin in 8.4—and their souls are explicitly so alike in nature that they’re gradually fusing together!

in a similar vein, it has been shown quite clearly that the souls of former maidens do not inhabit the new hosts along with the magic itself; cinder doesn’t have amber in her head, and penny didn’t have fria in hers. it has been six volumes and six separate maidens since the concept of the four maidens was introduced to us, and never once has the narrative so much as hinted otherwise. winter does not and will not have penny in her head.

and “jaune maybe did something” isn’t a theory or speculation so much as it is a question mark with a lot of hope behind it. it’s perhaps a data point to bear in mind as we see whatever vol9 has in store for us, but on its own it’s not something we can extrapolate any meaningful clues from. (also, as discussed, i think all the pieces of evidence in favor of the idea are adequately and better explained in other ways.)

we know that ambrosius cannot retrieve people from the afterlife, either because he is forbidden from doing so or because it’s beyond his capability; also, the staff is presently in salem’s possession, which at least in the near term takes it off the table for any possible resurrection schemes.

one possible avenue that i’ve seen proposed a lot is the aura-transference pods, which have thus far made two major appearances with a near-miss on using them each time. this is beyond chekhov’s gun; this is chekhov’s nuclear bomb. absolutely, sooner or later someone is going to use these pods and we are going to see it. that said—

the aura-transference pods have never been portrayed as good or even neutral technology. pyrrha was horror-stricken when she learned what they’re for. glynda agreed with her that their intended purpose is intrinsically wrong, and so did ironwood, although he felt leaving things to chance would be even worse. ozpin—who has thousands of years of direct personal experience living with two souls in a single body—shows extreme hesitance to actually use the machines, and palpable guilt when circumstances force his hand. even winter seemed to feel apprehensive about using them, stating that she hoped fria wouldn’t feel any pain.

and—if the way pyrrha screamed in agony when she and ozpin tried to give her amber’s soul is any indication—the process itself is indeed very painful.

it’d be odd, to say the least, to devote all this time building up the aura-transference pods as a horrific last defense against the maidens falling under salem’s control—a last defense that might not even be worth the cost!—only to turn around and use them to bring a beloved character back to life.

i am very confident that when chekhov’s nuclear bomb finally detonates it is going to be bad.

moreover, while it’s very likely that whatever technology pietro used to tear out a bit of his soul in order to make penny works via the same mechanism as the aura-transference pods—both penny and the pods were developed in atlas, under the auspices of the atlesian military, and the end result of taking a soul in whole or in part out of its original vessel and storing it in a new one is near-identical—the aura-transference pods are limited by the souls they have available, i.e. there still remains the problem of retrieving penny’s soul from the afterlife, a feat that has hitherto only been accomplished by the gods, who are stridently against resurrecting the dead for any reason besides Tormenting Salem.

the one big uncertainty is the mysterious island-in-the-void. we are undoubtedly going to learn more information on that island that will deepen our understanding of magic, the relics, the gods, or possibly the grimm or salem herself, or some combination thereof. it’s… possible but i think unlikely that we’ll get any reveals about wholly new concepts, because it’s getting to be pretty late in the story for that, but there’s plenty of room in the extant categories for new information to change the calculus vis a vis the viability of resurrecting penny.

as it stands now, though, with the information we have to hand as of the ending of vol8, i don’t think there’s a mechanically viable path to penny coming back to life that doesn’t require violating any established rules of the setting.

9. (but here’s how penny 3.0 can still win)

but.

if you’ll recall, at the top of this absurdly lengthy post, i said this: the only narratively coherent way to bring penny back involves aligning the heroes with salem against the gods.

in 6.3, when salem’s history is revealed, the narrative invites us to sympathize with her. she is very much framed as the tragic hero of this story; the lonely girl locked in the tower, rescued by a kind and noble knight who falls every bit in love with her as she does with him. they should have gotten a happy ending together—but they didn’t.

the gods took a grieving, heart-broken young woman whose only wrongdoing was asking for their help and squabbled over her and her dead lover like toddlers fighting over a toy—literally played tug-of-war with ozma’s soul while he died and came back in her arms over and over again—and when she lashed out and called them monsters, they cursed her to an eternity of pain. and when she raged and rallied an army against her tormentors, they answered with an extinction.

team rwby saw all of this.

eons later, salem has long since shattered. she’s every bit as monstrous now as the gods who made her that way—but she is still, beneath all the evil she’s embraced and atrocities she’s committed, deeply human in her pain. still entangled in this conflict with ozma; still thinking of the family she loved and lost and found again and then destroyed and lost forever; still a victim of the gods’ unspeakable cruelty.

and if the heroes set out to bring penny back from the dead, they’ll step onto the very same road that led to salem becoming what she is now.

i think, thematically, narratively, if rwby were to build a pathway to penny coming back again, this is the only route that makes sense: for it to happen hand-in-hand with the heroes reevaluating what jinn showed them in 6.3 and coming to the realization that what the gods did to salem was wrong.

they don’t need to forgive her. they don’t need to work with her. they don’t need to stop fighting her, because the depth of her tragedy doesn’t make her present agenda any less heinous; and salem herself doesn’t need to undergo an arc of moral change in any form in order for the heroes to change the way they think of her. (although for the record, regardless of whether or not penny comes back, i think it’s at least not implausible for her to do so.) what would need to happen is for the heroes to approach bringing penny back from the dead as an act of ideological war against the gods—because fundamentally that’s what it is—and prepare accordingly, because it’s looking pretty certain at this point that the gods are going to come back to remnant before the story ends, and when they do—one way or another—the heroes are going to have to argue hard on humanity’s behalf.

so: if penny comes back—and to my mind that’s a very, very big if, because again i’ve yet to see a persuasive explanation for why penny should be the exception to the way the heroes grieve—i don’t think it’s going to be until very close to the end of the story, and i don’t think it’ll happen through the heroes finagling the laws of reality like they did to save her from the virus. i think it’ll be because the heroes convince the gods that they were wrong to treat salem as they did, and penny’s resurrection will come as a symbol of that ideological triumph.

10. secret bonus section for winners or, “for the love of god farran how long is this post?!”

it’s fifteen fucking thousand words long i am not sorry

#rwby #HELLO EVERYBODY I COME BEARING BRAIN WORMS

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