#now hear me out... the twins wear diadems which are kind of circlets + Jax's mind control sembalnce...

[sailorb00]

Sorry don't mind me, just reblogging this mostly to act as a bookmark for me to reread later because it's very insightful and my ADHD doesn't do great with long texts unless I'm committed to the task fsdf

Also just wanted to also write down some thoughts I got when reading through this (mostly for myself in case I forget them later lol)

I think you're absolutely on the money w/ everything in your post, but especially that last thought; i.e. the relics being a reflection of their corresponding maiden in the current story.

Like, yeah, I always found it strange how the relics didn't align w/ what we (the audience) would perceive to be the rational corresponding season/maiden (i.e. spring=creation; summer=choice; fall=knowledge; winter=destruction) and that they actually appeared to be more arbitrary/random in nature??

I mean, like you've said, the maiden mythos/fairytale supports the audience's initial view of the 'correct' order, but then instead we have spring=knowledge; summer=destruction; fall=choice; winter=creation, which seems out of place.

Until you look at the current Maidens and their actions/motives/narratives.

(these are just basic ramblings/thoughts and not super in depth, so forgive me fsdff. also apologies if you've touched on this before in a previous post or s/t)

First you've got our Fall Maiden and Choice, Cinder.

Girl has made so many spicy choices; some resulting in favourable outcomes, many not so much fsdf

— She willingly defies Salem's orders/plans in want of her own desires i.e. going after Winter maiden powers

— She killed Watts (which while yes, his usefulness at the end of the Atlas Arc kinda ran its course, I'm sure Salem might beg to differ, or at least not appreciate Cinder killing her followers w/o her say so)

— She also lied to Salem about Ruby being killed by Neo + about RWBY using the lamp (though we know she more than likely saw through that fsdf)

(also, yes she isn't a Maiden, but Pyrrha was forced to make The Choice™ and I think that is also vital evidence/fuel for this theory fsdf)

Then you have the Spring Maiden and Knowledge, Raven.

— She tells Yang in V5 to keep asking questions, to question everything about Ozpin, etc.

— She clearly knows what happened to Summer Rose and the previous Spring Maiden, and that knowledge has made her fearful as all heck, forcing her to go into hiding.

Then you have our Winter Maidens and Creation, Penny and Winter.

— Penny is literally created 3 times. Twice in robot form/s, then lastly as a human. She is a Creation™ and also embodies the theme of spring/creation most. i.e. youthful, naive, etc

— The obvious Winter comparison is the Scheme family semblance of summoning. She also sees Penny transference of the Maiden power as a gift, which I see as also kind of aligning w/ 'creation'. Kinda pulling at straws there, but I'm sure there's something I'm missing fsdf

Then we have Summer and Destruction, ????

— while we don't know who the Summer Maiden is, I have a sneaking suspicion they're going to be connected to destruction in some form, whether they do some destruction in their past and that has made them fearful of their powers or something along those lines, or that they will be destructive in the future volume, whenever it is released.

I am so excited for V10 and Vacuo, etc and really hope RWBY Beyond helps quell my anxiety and anguish that it may be the last RWBY content we get for some time 🥲

Read your post on the relics and I did not pay any attention to the chains until you brought it up.

I remember seeing a theory that the sword will essentially be Excalibur and the spirit inside will essentially be the lady of the lake. Her name in Arthurian lore is either Vivian or Nimue.

Also have you noticed that the environments in the vaults is the season AFTER the corresponding maiden’s? The spring maiden’s vault had a hot desert (summer) and the winter maiden’s vault had a grassy field (spring). Which if the sword does turn out to be Excalibur, then the summer maiden’s vault might end up looking like a pond surrounded by trees with red-orange-yellow leaves.

Then imagine if the fall maiden’s vault looks like a snowy forest, just like Ruby was walking through in the red trailer.

kinda of two minds on the sword-as-excalibur thing because, while it does seem like the obvious pull and it is where i landed when i first started mulling over the sword and the crown for the purposes of fanfic (which is something of a complicating factor here, in that i have a pair of full-blown OCs and i gotta be real clear to myself on the distinction between "this is lore i assembled out of canonical crumbs to suit my fanfic" and "this is a theory i have about what's going on in canon," particularly when the two overlap significantly, which in this case they do)… well, rwby doesn't often go for the obvious pull. and jinn isn't an allusion to arthurian myth, so there's not exactly a pattern here, ya know?

the thread of imprisonment linking the genie in the lamp to merlin in the tree might be a pattern, or a coincidence, but as far as speculation goes i think “mythical characters for whom being trapped is a notable theme/event” is probably a category worth taking into consideration.

(for what it’s worth: the pulls i made for the aforementioned OCs were loki [sword] and prometheus [crown], and while obviously constructing OCs is a WHOLE other ballgame, on the most basic level of possible allusions they do check the “imprisonment” box and hold water if refracted through the lens of “spirit of destruction/choice,” so it’s like. i wouldn’t be SURPRISED? if rwby also went there. prometheus in particular feels like a solid candidate for the spirit for the crown because, well. something about choice and stealing fire from gods. and cinder lmfao.)

and oh ho ho i have a... theory? a thought ? about the interiors of the vaults. because it's, well, arbitrary. the maidens all have the same pool of general elemental powers. likewise the relics don't just lack any clear reason for their associations with the season of their respective maiden— they strike me as deliberately flouting the associations you might expect them to have based on the common cultural associations the four seasons have. like:

spring - the planting, the world thawing after winter = creation summer - a time of growth, freedom, maturation = choice fall - harvest time, preparation for winter = knowledge winter - cold, dark, symbolically everything 'dies' = destruction.

yeah? and where it gets even weirder is that the symbolic 'lesson' of each sister/season in the canonical fairytale describing the origins of the maidens themselves also fits much more naturally into the spring-creation, summer-choice, fall-knowledge, and winter-destruction schema:

spring plants a garden and teaches the hermit to tend to it; "life returned to the tired hermit and the forest, which flourished and became green and lush." creation, right?

summer dances and teases and invites the hermit out of his shell, reminding him of the possibility of joy and freedom. he learns not to limit himself to passive observance of the world and to instead takes an active part in it. that's choice!

fall advises the hermit to let go of his misconceptions about himself and his life and see himself clearly at last; he "realized that Fall was right" and eventually achieved a fuller understanding of himself. knowledge!

and winter—who arrived first, encountering the hermit at the height of his isolation, taught him to reflect and meditate until he found serenity and a renewed sense of purpose—in a sense, transforming his metaphorical 'death' into a period of rest or hibernation until his frozen solitude began to thaw. destruction, before the creative energy of spring entered his life.

and yet:

spring maiden = the maiden of knowledge summer maiden = maiden of destruction fall maiden = maiden of choice winter maiden = maiden of creation

why?

(the important thing to keep in mind here, i think, is that rwby has never presented these associations as a natural or intrinsic quality. the maiden-season-relic connection only exists, in-universe, because ozma set it up that way.)

now consider that—as you said—the two vaults we've gotten a look at so far don't line up with the seasons they're 'supposed' to have, with winter's vault [creation] being lush and green inside and spring's vault [knowledge] being a barren desert. so we've got this winter->spring, spring->summer pattern going on, and if that holds we should expect summer's vault [destruction] to be evocative of autumn and fall's vault [choice] to be evocative of winter.

BUT. i think—because of the arbitrariness of the seasonal associations in and of themselves, and because those associations are explicitly a social construct, and because if we follow the seasonal associations the plot has gone fall->spring->winter->summer and that’s um, not right, and i think it’s deliberately not right—there may be something different entirely going on.

namely, the relics exist in two different sets of pairs. right? we've got destruction+knowledge and creation+choice—the pairs given to humanity by the two brother gods. and we've (maybe) also got creation+knowledge and destruction+choice—the complementary power pairs, with the lamp able to eliminate (or at least mitigate) the risks of using the staff and (maybe) the crown and the sword being similar. [the world of remnant episode pertaining to the great war makes a heavy visual implication that ozma used the crown of choice in tandem with the sword of destruction, is where i'm getting that.]

moreover, the four relics symbolically [and perhaps literally] represent the four essential qualities that, together, define what humanity IS: creation AND destruction AND knowledge AND choice.

not four individual, separate magical artifacts. it's a set. we know there's a way to combine them into one thing that will summon the brothers back to remnant, and with the limited information we have now about how they work mechanically it seems very much like they are intended to be used together.

so: the vault with the lamp of knowledge inside it. what does it look like, on the inside? a desert.

knowledge was one of the gifts given to humanity by the god of darkness; the other was destruction. and where is the sword of destruction locked away? the desert of vacuo.

likewise, the staff of creation? hidden in a vault filled with green, grassy meadows. very much like the landscape of vale. where the crown of choice is hidden—and if i'm right about precisely where the crown's vault is hidden, namely the circular ruins where beacon academy's initiation is conducted, the crown is in fact hidden directly under a large, grassy meadow!

further: the vault doors we've seen echo the color scheme of the relics they protect. removing a relic from the vault destroys the doors, which to me suggests that the relics themselves might be the 'anchor' that sustains the vaults themselves—we don't really know enough about how magic works mechanically to say for sure that an 'anchor' is truly necessary, but cinder's use of the staff in v8 demonstrated that if you directly use a relic to create a portal to another realm, you cannot then destroy those portals until the relic has been removed from the 'interior' realm. the vaults were created by some other means, but the same basic principle of linking the existence of the vault to the presence of the relic inside it could very well still apply.

aaand if the vaults are materially connected to the relics in some way—if the presence of the relics in the vaults is somehow providing the energy necessary to maintain them, like plugging in some kind of magical battery?—then... it's not that much of a leap to wonder if maybe the vault interiors symbolically reflect, or are influenced by, the location of that relic's missing pair.

especially in light of the fact that: 1. the nature of the spirits inside the relics is very humanlike, with both jinn and ambrosius clearly being emotional, fully sapient beings, and 2. it rains in the ever after when ruby starts to cry.

[my secondary theory here is that—well. the god of light says explicitly that modern humans do not have the divine blessings given to their predecessors, and while mechanically that seems to mean "they don't have magic," metaphysically it's not... entirely implausible that for ancient humans, "creation, destruction, knowledge, and choice" weren't abstract capabilities but rather actual. literal gifts, something that materially, measurably existed in the human soul, were the source of magical abilities, and were taken away when the gods left. (consider the four larger orbs of energy salem conjures when she's fidgeting with her magic at the beginning of lost fable, which are conspicuously missing when her daughter does the same trick later on.)

ozpin's explanation of the maidens is that he "divided his magic" somehow and his "remaining" magic is now dwindling, but the thing about that is magical power doesn't really... seem to be a limited resource in the way that aura is? we've yet to see anyone with magic 'run out' like people run out of aura. even ozpin seems to be fairly cavalier in his usage of magic—he's cautious of giving it away, and it's not the first thing he turns to in a fight, but he's never hesitated to make full use of his own power when the situation calls for it.

i've been thinking that maybe?? what he actually did with the maidens was give them each one of the divine blessings. like literally, removed the Quantifiable Gift Of Creation from his own soul and gave it to winter, and so on, leaving himself with the metaphysical capacity for these qualities—because that can't be taken away, just as the gods couldn't truly obliterate humankind—but giving up the limitless energy source of the blessings themselves; ergo, his magic is 'dwindling' in the sense that he has to use aura to fuel it now.

this does leave the question of how the hell he gave the branwens shapeshifting abilities, but considering salem seems to have given cinder the ability to control grimm long before she got the maiden powers... maybe folks with magical abilities can just do that? share specific skills? and what makes the maidens so uniquely powerful is that they didn't get specific skills, they got the power source.

anyway all that to say i do wonder if maybe 'seasons' are just an arbitrary smokescreen ozma fabricated and the maidens are literally rather than symbolically the maidens of choice, creation, knowledge, and destruction, with the relic vaults each being linked to the maiden with the matching blessing.]