#plus the likelihood that she ordered cinder not to go to amity

[bestworstcase]

lying on the floor thinking abt how ironwood embodied and was corrupted by the ugliest characteristics of the god of light; the desire for absolute control, the latent hostility and disdain for human emotion, the absolute inability to see beyond his own designs for the world and his perceived creations—even ironwood’s obsessive single-minded focus on getting penny on a leash no matter the cost echoes the way light responded each time salem defied him—

& like. ozpin is absent throughout v7 but oscar devotes most of his time on screen to prying ironwood away from that path, with negligible success—there’s the beginning of a turn after jacques’ arrest, yes, but by the end of the volume it’s crystal clear that ironwood went for the “tell the truth, protect and rally mantle” plan because it made him feel in control of the situation again and the instant cinder and salem shattered that illusion of control, he recoiled from it and lashed out at the allies he perceived as having tricked him into letting his guard down—and ozpin doesn’t return until oscar’s effort in this regard has finally and irrevocably failed. which keeps sticking in my brain as important, particularly in light of watts in 6.4 saying that ozpin is the only person who stood a chance of getting through to ironwood.

(sidebar i think watts was being overly pessimistic there, about the possibility of ozpin foiling them by talking sense into ironwood. even before ozpin died and ironwood entered his fascism death spiral, ironwood marched into an allied kingdom with his armada in tow without so much as a courtesy warning, chafed openly when ozpin declined to blindly deploy that armada on the basis of hearsay from a fifteen year old kid, politically stabbed ozpin in the back by freezing him out of his own council, and throughout it all moped about ozpin not trusting him enough. like,, lmao)

and then of course there’s the fact that atlas was specifically a project that ironwood and ozpin shared—and atlas itself is and has always been used narratively as a symbol for the hollow promises, failures, and illusory progress of the post-war society ozma designed—and the entire story up to this point was a slow inexorable build towards the fall of atlas.

it just seems like a microcosm of what’s going on with ozma and the god of light and the divine mandate? in that ozma’s loyalty to the gods (or at minimum, the inertia of his original loyalty to them) feels reflected in his choice of ironwood to guard the relic of creation and shepherd the floating city meant to represent the ideals ozma thinks humanity needs to achieve to earn salvation—he picks a champion who resembles the god of light himself!—and then, when the budding tyrant he trusted spins around to shoot him he’s not even present to—like his self-imposed isolation inside oscar’s head renders him powerless to even try to change this situation for the better! ozpin later claims that he was secretly there all along, but the only times he resurfaces are when oscar is in immediate mortal peril so i’m not sure that i buy that, at least not in the sense of ozpin having full conscious awareness of what was happening around oscar throughout v7; but either way, his miserable isolation blinded him to the developing crisis—either literally or willfully—and he roused himself just a little too late to prevent catastrophe. again.

(gestures vaguely at lost fable, at ozma trying so hard to have it both ways with salem, to be with the apostate and manipulate her into serving the gods so he wouldn’t have to choose, for years and years and years until his lies and passivity metastasized and they destroyed each other, gestures vaguely at the v5-6 promising not to lie in one breath and immediately lying again in the next, until his secrets got squeezed out of him by the avatar of knowledge who palpably holds him in disdain and his house of cards imploded in his face; also gestures vaguely at ozma the heroic knight errant who faced down an army alone to save one person, and how thousands of years have whittled him down to a morally bankrupt shell of what he was and how that slow putrefaction of his character has been driven every step of the way by refusal to act in some form or another. waves hands it’s about the paralysis of being caught between his conscience and his god-given task)

anyway

i think a normal amt about the blinding of rapunzel’s prince and the exile in the desert and the restoration of his sight when she finds him there

ANYWAY, with the way things are resolved re: ozpin’s return in v8 and the fall of atlas having set the stage, narratively, for a massive paradigm shift in the immediate future and the kids who didn’t fall being in vacuo now—kingdom of destruction, presumable home of the maiden whose fairytale theme is “dont view the world at a distance, take an active part in it,” and the place where eighty years ago ozma won a war with a magical sword nuke and sculpted the world into what it is now, stagnant rotting husk of his ideals that it is—on top of the structural change in salem’s role in v7-8… i just. i just,,

hhhhhh