#rattles tin can

[fincharts]

Haruspex: Where are the papers?

Bachelor: See the ashes over there, on the floor? Barely managed to do it before you arrived. Smart of me to burn them, rather than eat them. You’re a surgeon — you would have dug it out of my gut.

Haruspex: I would have.

[thepromisedbride]

gay people can never flirt normally it’s always gotta be some shit like faking your death and becoming the deadliest man alive as revenge for your partner leaving you for dead so you can dismantle everything he ever believed in

[jjyo--01]

what if cryland but… charles is floaty

[smytherines]

he was a spy, he was a spy, can I make it any more obvious?

[comfortless]

*ೃ༄ Some thoughts on a lighthouse keeper König with a fem, harpy reader! 18+ MDNI.

Signing away months of your life for routinized labor comes with little internal protests for him, he’s done it before with military work. He’ll do it again without question; anything, anyplace to keep him away from a house that’s never felt like home.

König’s blessed with an abundance of skills and the strength to perform hard labor. He’s disciplined enough to embrace the solitude, maybe even thinks of this contract as a reprieve from other people, from creature comforts and the hustle and bustle of ordinary life.

He packs only the bare minimum for himself— clothing he doesn’t mind lantern oil spilling onto, thick books ranging from myth to histories, a trusty hunting knife he’s been keening for the time to polish and sharpen to bring back to its former glory. Food and shelter are already provided for him in a cabin battered by sea breeze and saltwater just a bit too small for a man his size mere paces from the pillar of light that he’s resigned himself to tend to.

Each day is spent checking systems, keeping the haunting yellow light clean and functioning well, jotting down weather readings, and meticulously keeping things orderly. The occasional sound of a boat’s horn would bellow out, as close to a voice calling it’s thanks as it could get from his self-sought isolation. The ocean is lively enough for him, anyhow. The sight of a whale a short distance off shore isn’t an uncommon one, pods of dolphins flipping up into the air like performers, a show just for him. Even the sky above is a sight with flocks of birds he could not name passing by, or sea gulls flying high above only to ground themselves on the rocky shore to cock their heads at him; he imagines that if they could speak their small, shrill voices would ask him ‘What are you doing here?’, and he’s thankful he would never have to answer.

Each night, he reads. The bed is a bit small for him, a cot, really. He has to curl in a way that makes him feel like a dog left to waste away outside, knees nearly tucked to his chest and an elbow propped to keep his head up while he turns to pages of his books. He always wakes to his head resting on a page, the scents of old ink, amber and cedar fill his nose when his eyes flutter open.

He makes himself simple breakfasts, the scent of black coffee lingers throughout the cabin each morning. Occasionally it’s bacon, occasionally eggs in a basket, something as simple as his life has become. He thinks about his days of war when he walks to the shore with his mug in hand, wistfully watching the waves, haunted and volatile, so very much like the ocean of his eyes.

It’s never quiet. The gulls call from above, their wings outstretched as they sail through the air, and the waves make raucous noise as they crash against the rock, wearing down every fine point to something softer. A part of him longs to be worn down too, to pry that aching from his heart, the scars tarnishing his body, the callouses on his hands, dissolve them all in dark, salty waters with a gentle ebb and flow. He’s never thought himself to be one deserving of gentle things, but he greedily yearns for them anyhow.

He admires the sea shells that wash up on the sandy patches of the shoreline, some are pearlescent and untarnished, he dares not touch those. The ugly ones with splintering cracks remind him of himself, he’ll allow his hand to reach for those, toss them back into the hellish abyss where they belong. He doesn’t need a reminder of what he is, why he’s here. He wants to surround himself in pretty things that no one can dirty with their fingerprints, not even himself.

A torrential rain breaks up the monotony of his duty for a few days. He’s soaked to the bare bones running back and forth from the cabin to keep the light functioning, wiping away condensation from the glass that confines it and fiddling with the old machinery to stop the massive light from flickering. He holes himself up there, in that old tower for two long, sleepless nights. He imagines ghosts, ghosts of the people he’s killed without remorse dancing at the corner of his vision, taunting him endlessly from purgatory with their frantic dances and unnatural jolts. When he turns his head, their faces are gone, carried away by the ocean breeze that rattled the walls of the lighthouse, yet can not touch him.

He’s hardly able to keep himself upright when the rain finally stops. Addled from a lack of sleep and an ache from hunger, he slinks down the steps to the wet ground outside. There are no gulls fluttering about with their squeals and questions and begging, and for the first time since he’s come here, the water is calm. The sun beams down from a cerulean sky, not a single cloud fattened and gray with rain water in sight.

Only a bird.

König’s taken note of the wildlife since he’s come, all of the sea creatures that would swim about, the pelicans, petrels and gulls that would make their rounds. He’s never once seen a bird this big. It’s wings stretch wide, gracefully flutter to soar higher only to rear back, knees kicked up to its chest in its graceful descent. It doesn’t ground itself to beg him for a crumb of toast or shriek at him, it only perches atop the lighthouse, looking down at him as if exacting some strange, silent retribution.

The bird shifts in place for a moment as his eyes squint to get a better view of it. He’s mesmerized when he takes note of a very human face, soft nude flesh in place of feathers right down to the ankles that house plush, downy feathers and the coarse skin of scales leading down to brutal, curved talons. Her breasts heave and legs tense as she stretches her wings out to take flight. With a single leap she takes back to the air, twirls in it effortlessly as if she’s in the midst of the most elegant, seraphic dance to return to whichever whisper of heaven she descended from.

The most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

The salt and foam must play their tricks, because he’s no where near deluded enough to believe he’s seen an angel in a place like this, that one would think to visit him at all.

Still, he’s an awful bastard, because his cock twitches in demand from the sheer sight of her flying far, far away from him. He doesn’t allow himself to touch pretty things, but god he wants to touch you. He settles for returning to his cot and tugging down the zipper of his pants to rest his length in his hand, slow, deliberate strokes with his eyes closed, bringing himself to ruin from just a fleeting memory.

He chalks it up to sleep deprivation the next morning, a waking wet dream. Even before coming to this little island, it had been well over a year since he had been in the presence of a nude woman. Work quickly makes him forget, keeps his hands tied and his mind emptied of softer flesh and beautiful skies.

She comes back with the next storm, a shivering mess in the rain. A rough gale struck her down and he watched her spin out amongst thick, wet clouds, her form aglow with the backdrop of thunder. She falls to briny water, and without thought he’s left his cabin to dive right in after her, scooping the poor thing up to haul her back to the safety of a warm home, a roof above her head.

König wraps her in the only blanket that he has, feels her gaze on his back while he stokes a fire all for her as she sits and shivers, trying to gather her bearings. Human kindness is unexpected, unwarranted, really. She signals great storms, her talons cruel. He looks at her in awe when she nestles against his shoulder, her eyes locked to his, both faces warmed by the glow of crackling flames and comfort.

He tells her he isn’t worthy of an angel wasting her grace on him. She tells him that nothing sent barreling out of the sky like she had could be as pure as he believes.

[girlcockholmes]

anyone know free spotify premium for iphone ☹️

[nephblrus]

i really don’t use tumblr a lot but. i made some cool sweaters that you can get for yourself.

[buwheal]

Anon that was probably saying sorry, I said sorry because I find what clown roll was saying judgy, it's not easy being broke and not being able to afford food, the last thing a poor person needs is a lecture on how unhealthy their lifestyle is. Like of course it's not healthy, you think someone would CHOOSE to live like that? To eat nothing but trash? Pretty sure if spamton could be eating something not out of the trash he WOULD, he doesn't need someone rubbing how awful his life is in his face when he doesn't really have a way to make it better, like "oh yeah just get some food not in the trash" for free??? Or if you're expecting him to pay, with what money??? I swear financially well off people seem to just forget you need money to do almost anything because of how much they have. If clowny roll really cared so much they should give him some damn money to buy something, granted maybe they can't because of askbox rules, but still.

THAAANKK YOU DUDE arrghhhhh,, frustrates me a little because theres some people in this box talking to him like he has a choice!!! HE DOESNT!!! I already did a WHOLE nasty thing with a whole bunch of the asks rubbing that shit in his face as if it were an apology,, reminding CONSTANTLY with stuff like "I had trouble finding sucess once!" sorry but that doesnt help guys... This isnt some one time thing where hes down in the dumps cause he got fired or smth HES HOMELESS... thankfully ive stopped getting those, but now its THESE ones about how unhealthy his lifestyle is............... like yeah......... hes not fucking stupid he knows....... they talk to him like hes a child waaghhh /lh Like, heres some examples, sorry to these anons, but if i had chosen your ask you'd get yelled at by Spamton AND the audience anyways,, so heres some that i think maybe... they forgot he cant really do a whole lot....

...do you see the irony in this one......

guuuyyyysss do you see the freaking issue here???? "EAT HEALTHER!"

huh.

what.....

WITH WHAT FOOD????? WITH WHAT OPTIONS???? sorry lmfaoo... but like. "doesn't mean you shouldnt try to do better!" WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOUSAYING RIGHT NOW... HES NOT CHOOSING TO????? HES ALWAYS "TRYING TO DO BETTER"... DID YOU GUYS MISS THE POST POINTING OUT THAT HE EVEN HAS TROUBLE FINDING SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT /REGULARLY/??? pleeaaseeee dude save me pleese wauughh

But. Dont go after anyone,, esp Clowny Roll!!!!! I think a lot of them dont ....really think about it. I also have a tinge of a feeling that Clowny Roll has a bit of bait intention with theirs!! nothing wrong with that!

[marbobar]

if i tentatively opened up some commissions…would anyone be interested 👉👈👀

Bg3 related most likely but I’m open to whatever

Any ship/oc/npc is fine 👍

[raps-hellion]

various dndifn scribbles (tiefany, esmerelda, + pip & pop the chicken)

+ how kribbit might play the dog

[isnotanoctopus]

Hey. Hey there. Yeah, you, fella.

You want... blinkies? You want rendered chibis? You want your lil guys looking like lil guys? I can get you some little guys. I can get you some of the littlest guys you've ever fucking seen for the littlest fucking price.

You see these guys? $20 for these guys. Look at them. Look at their big, blinking eyes. $20 for ur own big eyed blinking guy. I'll even size them down and crop 'em for better iconage, so you can have perfectly sized blinkies of your hoard of brain children.

Or maybe u want smth a big bigger? You want a lil guy that's a lil less little, a little more polished? I got those bigger guys too.

$30 for one of these big guys, that's right. Your own little-big-guy for the price of 3 tens via pay'd pal.

These big guys can hold a prop, a food, a weapon, a pet, you name it, I'll add it. You want a plain old human guy? I'll do it. You want a furry guy? You got it. You want your whole party painstakingly posed with their weapons and familiars ready to take on a TPK? I'll do it.

I can arrange for any guy, any where, any time. Just message me here or in the back alleys of discord at _calamari.

[dtwof]

I love beuatiful women...... What can I say

[tranakin-skywalker]

Anakin has never dealt well with stillness. He exists in perpetual movement, energy burning and bursting inside him like a reactor core. “Always on the move,” Obi-Wan used to say about him during his apprenticeship. He never once asked about the burn scar in the middle of Anakin’s back. It’s less a single scar and more a collection of years, layered one over the other until all the nerves around them had died. More than a decade later and there is still a spot the size of his hand in the middle of his back where he can’t feel anything. He’d been young when he learned that an electric prod switched to its lowest setting and pressed against skin would cause third degree burns if left there long enough. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out the best way to keep the prod off his back was to look busy. Stillness is anathema to everything in Anakin’s nature. He can’t remember how many times he’s been told off for his inability to sit still. The need to move, to go. Be anywhere but here. His teachers used to hate it. Something about the night always makes it worse. There is the dark, and the stillness, all other life succumbing to the nocturnal draw of sleep- leaving Anakin alone with only himself. It’s not so bad when he’s awake still because of some project, one day without sleep, two, three, it doesn’t matter. He has something to do, something to busy himself with. Usually something important. He can exist like that just fine. It’s when the nightmares drag him awake into the darkness- still much too early to begin the day but entirely incapable of falling back to sleep. When all he is left with is the confines of his chambers and the stink of fear-sweat and his own mind trying to cannibalize itself. Nightmares always somehow seemed to make the restlessness worse.  Maybe it’s the shot of adrenaline straight to his brain more potent than any stim he’s taken- triggering his body into thinking he’s about to die. Root deep fear of a mind that can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what it has conjured by its own imagination. Only it’s not always in his head. Sometimes- his nightmares come true. Sometimes he feels like he’s being eaten alive.  In the past Anakin would sneak down to the salles to practice katas until sweat rained down off his skin like Naboo waterfalls and his night-terrors were half faded memories- or he’d steal away to the underlevels of Coruscant and race until mortality seems a foreign concept, flying fast enough that for a moment it feels like he can outrun the death on his heels. Neither is a viable option to him now. Not injured on a star destroyer, barely able to move on his own. But there is something else that might calm the shaking and the fear-sweat soaking through his night clothes. It’s been years since he was a slave-child kept awake by the terror of his own future- but old habits are hard to kill. He doesn’t remember how young he was when he discovered a good way to spend sleepless nights was elbow deep in machinery, hours passed repairing whatever he could reach until the skin of his bare hands split open and wept with blisters. Old enough to realize that he was safe as long as he was useful. That’s not saying much, though. One of his first memories is watching a man being blown up from the inside out. On Tatooine, a child’s first lesson is to learn that they are replaceable, and their second is to learn now not to be.

i swear this fic is just 80% depressing introspection about Anakin's shitty life

[carlyraejepsans]

idk what it is about it, probably a sensory thing with the whole being nearly naked for hours out in the air, but there's nothing like lying on the beach to make you hunger for human contact

[pocket-notebook]

Found a screenshot on my phone from who knows how long ago, and my tin can of a brain immediately thought to put Him in it

Screenshot I was talking about below

[bestworstcase]

alright so

door one: the ever after led jaune to the clock tree because the rusted knight was always jaune, and jaune becoming the rusted knight is inevitable. a closed time loop is appealing in its simplicity but has serious thematic implications, namely that rwby occurs in a fundamentally deterministic universe.

on consideration i don’t think this is necessarily sufficient to rule out door one, because while the narrative positions destiny as a coercive and harmful force it has never taken the hard stance that destiny is not real. this allows for the narrative rejection of destiny to coexist with a deterministic cosmology because determinism itself can be personified (as the god of light) and fought to realize the anti-destiny theme. conceptually i think the most interesting aspect of door one is that it would draw such a stark thematic line in the sand: jaune falls backwards in time because he is destined to do so, and then he resigns himself to his fate and sits on a beach for decades until something else happens to him; acceptance of destiny is synonymous with stagnation and by extension with corruption and eventual loss of the self. this is the same thesis put forward with ozma’s character and elements of it appear every time a character tangles with destiny and submits, but the abstracted nature of the ever after allows for a more literal illustration.

however. door one relies on two presuppositions, first that the true events of ‘the girl who fell through the world’ happened the way jaune experienced them, and second that either alyx or lewis left the ever after and wrote a dramatically altered account thereof. with the facts we have to hand, i find this unbelievable on its face: presuming that jaune’s memory is accurate (<- which it very well might not be; he did get poisoned), then neither sibling has a clear motivation for writing the story as we know it. why would alyx, who poisoned the rusted knight because she thought he was trying to trap her in the ever after, portray him as a heroic figure? but conversely, why would lewis erase himself from the story? something doesn’t add up here. there are huge gaps in the story, and while filling them in might clarify why the book was written the way it was, right now, i think the simpler explanation is that jaune did not experience the events that inspired the book.

which brings us to,

door two: jaune’s desolate wish for a second chance manifested in the ever after as the clock tree, and jaune ‘stole’ the part of the original rusted knight.

an open time loop still dovetails neatly with the anti-destiny narrative (jaune stagnates in any case) while sidestepping all the logistical narrative headaches involved in stitching the book together with jaune’s account of what happened. in the book, alyx doesn’t encounter the rusted knight until after she’s passed into her second or possibly third acre; she gets her knife back from the peddler, beats the red king at his game, and meets the cat before crossing paths with the knight. jaune, however, meets alyx and her brother on the beach and attempts to escort them through the story by rote with disastrous results. if we allow that jaune was not there when alyx fell into the ever after before jaune fell backwards in time, then it follows there must have been someone else in the ever after at the time who wore rusted armor and became a genuine friend to alyx—hence their heroic portrayal in the book.

…it occurs to me that the ‘true’ rusted knight could in fact be the herbalist; alyx doesn’t meet the herbalist in the book, but in jaune’s account she appears to visit him at the approximate point when she ‘should’ be encountering the knight—after meeting the cat—and that is the approximate point when team rwby visit him as well. furthermore, the herbalist’s chosen purpose is to ‘help others on their journeys’ and he does so by brewing remedies (“the heart very rarely forgets,” and “the rusted knight drinks the poison in her stead”). if jaune’s account is accurate, whatever the herbalist revealed to alyx led her to see jaune as an immediate danger to herself—step outside jaune’s perspective for a moment and think about how terrified an eight- or nine-year-old child would have to be to resort to poisoning her onetime protector and guide. and, we know the herbalist’s magic can peer backwards in time; he brought team rwby face-to-face with their younger selves. if jaune initiated an open time loop, it is hardly inconceivable that the herbalist might have been able to show alyx her past in relation to him, the true rusted knight she met and befriended once before, which naturally would shatter whatever remaining trust she had in the imposter knight who intercepted her and her brother on the beach.

(if events in the ever after can influence events in remnant, then jaune’s accidental usurpation of the rusted knight and the original knight’s—possible—ascension into the herbalist might also be indirectly responsible, through butterfly ripples, for lewis falling into the ever after along with alyx this time; but that strikes me as overly convoluted unless rwby is about to commit to a bifurcated and minutely altered timeline for the rest of the show, which seems doubtful given how much additional complexity it would pile onto an already very complex story.)

in any case, the difficulty with door two is that ‘the girl who fell through the world’ itself seems unchanged by jaune’s changes, as both jaune and team rwby remember the book based on the correct, original time loop. there are, however, some potential ways to resolve this:

A - this is the correct timeline; when jaune fell through time, he branched off backwards into the corrupted timeline, which then became less corrupt as he moved forward towards the point of convergence, akin to the shadow cast by an object being fuzzy at its most distant point and clearly defined where it ‘connects.’ (if the herbalist was the original rusted knight, then he must have ascended after he drank the poison to save alyx; this would also explain the circumstance which led to alyx witnessing an ascension, as per the cat.)

B - there is no ‘correct’ or ‘corrupted’ timeline; both versions of the story happened simultaneously and the missing pieces and discrepancies between jaune’s memories and the book are a temporal interference pattern caused by the ever after contorting to make this possible. lewis and the alyx who fell by herself both made it back home and wrote ‘the boy who fell from the sky’ and ‘the girl who fell through the world’ respectively, and the dagger in the blacksmith’s forge belongs to the alyx who fell with lewis—it not being possible for two of alyx to exist at one time in remnant, one of them had to stay.

C - this is the corrupted timeline, and the only ones who remember the correct timeline are jaune and the cat, albeit only in disjointed fragments; neither of them knows exactly what happened because whatever happened when the cat took alyx and lewis to the tree caused time in the ever after to spiral back to the point when alyx and lewis fell in—with differences, like neither jaune nor lewis being there.

D - jaune broke time itself by breaking the watch and has been in teatime purgatory the entire time, experiencing fractured, cyclical echoes of the same story over and over again. the gaps and discrepancies are because his brain is trying to remember an incomprehensible number of atemporal repetitions as a single linear series of events; this is also why he hesitates and asks for reassurance from team rwby that it’s really them—he experienced disconnected fragments of their reunion, too. now that team rwby are here, time has begun to move more or less in a direction again (as it does for the hatter once alice leaves the table), providing an opportunity for reprieve and escape.

i think, if this is an open time loop, 2A is the likeliest explanation (as it’s the cleanest to deal with narratively, and this volume does love its mirror-imagery!) but i’m also partial to 2B, as it’s a very wonderlandish solution to the problem, and 2D likewise on hatter’s-atemporality-but-make-it-horror grounds.

next up,

door three: ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is legitimately a work of fiction and jaune didn’t fall backwards in time so much as he rolled back into a rough draft. this body of theories um. Compels Me enough that it’s going to be pried out of my hands by brute force if it’s taken away at all, primarily because i think reading the ever after as a fictional story that became real is really narratively interesting both for how it contextualizes the ever after and for how it inverts the fictionalization of remnant’s real history. if the ever after is a made-up story that was, in some way, made true—by belief, by imagination, by magic, what have you—then the world itself is a mirror image of the ‘legends and fairytales scattered in time’ motif, of ozma’s manipulation of myth and folktale to obfuscate reality. yes?

and the core rules of the ever after make a great deal of sense as abstract storytelling concepts realized literally: afterans conceive of identity as narrative role, ascension is functionally indistinguishable from an author removing a bit player here or repurposing an old character concept there except for the fact of ascension being self-directed by the characters themselves, the only way to truly die is to be eaten by manifested incoherency (<- the only dead story is one that cannot be told!), even the hodge-podge nature of the world itself suggests the tendency for incomplete and fragmentary ideas to pile against each other in the creative imagination and the blank void underneath is the parts of a story that do not matter and therefore do not, in any meaningful sense, exist.

applying this lens to jaune’s account of what happened is, i think, really fun… because if the story jaune remembers was a rough draft, then he spent a not-insignificant amount of time not only interacting but trying to interfere with the imagination of the person who wrote the story (😐)—and it follows that he remembers alyx being cruel and becoming ever more paranoid because jaune literally was changing the story, in the most literal sense, and the story’s author kept resisting those changes. (insert the common joke here about characters writing themselves; sometimes it really does feel like that and sometimes it’s really annoying.) eventually alyx poisons him and in this version of the story the rusted knight lays there dying for an indeterminate amount of time while the cat and the siblings wander vaguely onwards to an uncertain ending. possibly lewis ceases to exist at some point in between the departure from the herbalist and arrival at the tree—he isn’t present for the poisoning, jaune recalls alyx saying that she won’t let anyone prevent “her” (not “us”) from getting home, the cat has never mentioned lewis directly and when asked “what happened when you took alyx and lewis to the tree?” they answer that they don’t know, alyx promised to take them through the door with her, but she tricked them; lewis is conspicuous for being the one subject the cat point blank will not give information about, not even posed as riddles. the cat has shown willing to answer plenty of uncomfortable questions—if sometimes in twisty ways—and to say so when they don’t know the answer. that they utterly ignore the question of what happened to lewis might suggest a guilty conscience, but is also explained by the story’s author deciding, in frustration, that the one-naughty-one-nice deuteragonist thing isn’t working and maybe combining them into just alyx would be better.

(points at lewis being portrayed in the OP as alyx’s reflection. points at how lewis is a complete non-entity in jaune’s telling of the story; he does nothing except trail along silently and passively in alyx’s wake. his sole relevancy to the story prior to his mysterious disappearance is to dramatize alyx’s nastiness—“lewis was the kind one, the clever one,” jaune says, as a contrast to alyx’s cruelty and selfishness. later jaune tells ruby that he thinks alyx killed lewis and then wrote him out of the story, but for all jaune’s angst about this kid lewis has such vanishingly little presence in the story as jaune told it that you could delete him without changing a single thing about the story. like the cat’s reticence, it’s possible that jaune is flinching away from talking about lewis because he feels guilty, but based on the information we have and the way jaune and the cat both talk (or rather don’t talk) about lewis, lewis reads to me exactly like the sort of superfluous appendage-character that you’d cut after transplanting any interesting dongles over into the protagonist who actually Does Stuff—and voila!, lewis vanishes from the story without a trace.)

(points also at the cat calling people from remnant ‘characters’ and stating that they saw people as mere sources for knowledge and entertainment. points at jaune becoming the rusted knight and then disliking alyx for treating the world like a story even as he obsessively tried to get her story “back on track.” the line between fictional character and real person has been very deliberately blurred in this volume.)

door four: the ever after is fictional, but ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is not. or to put it another way, the ever after is a story that alyx and lewis, real people, fell into a la rwbyjn. this would account for the apparent fuzziness of the timeline: is ‘the girl who fell through the world’ an classic fairytale or a popular children’s story written within the last few decades? perhaps ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is in fact a novel published thirty-odd years ago that stitched together and popularized a much older constellation of folktales about a place called the ever after—a reversal of wonderland’s proliferation into pop culture in the century-and-a-half or so since the original book’s publication. where and how these tales may have originated and whether they came first or the ever after did remains mysterious—i do still think the ever after makes too much sense as a fictional world both in terms of how it works and narratively as an inverse of remnant for it to not be that, especially because even 3/5 of the way through the volume i have yet to read a really convincing argument for reading the ever after as a construction of one or both brothers (or the god of animals, or the theoretical third and fourth brothers who super duper don’t exist)—i include my own argumentation for ‘dark made it’ here, because while i find that most plausible out of the divine-origin theories it feels pretty textually shaky by now.

(if the ever after isn’t explicitly fictional, my next guesses would be 1. that it just is, unexplained and needing no explanation, a la wonderland, or 2. it was created by humans through the act of telling stories, not a fictional world per se but something like the idea of a fictional world, populated by the idea of characters.)

theoretically door four is compatible with doors one and two, and using an explicitly non-real, fictional setting to explore those themes of rejecting destiny in a deterministic world opens up a lot of fun possibilities for playing with abstract concepts like predestination in a literal way—which we’ve already seen a bit of with the clock tree and ascension and this nascent question of whether the cat guides or manipulates, whether ascension is rebirth or death, etc. but with four episodes left to go and ‘what if you could leave ruby rose behind?’ still looming, it looks like a pretty safe bet that we’re going to get more. (if ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is also fictional, there exist all the same possibilities but more so and hand-in-hand with exploration of rwby’s storytelling themes, which is one of many reasons why i’m camping outside door three until and unless the story firmly shoos me away with a definitive answer.)

or,

door five: the basic outline of ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is actually the ever after’s equivalent to ascension for non-afterans—more precisely, it’s a framework similar to but far more comprehensive than a ponderstorm which seeks to guide visitors who break or get worn out through a journey to meant to fix them up. (hence the cat’s role as both the guide through the story and the guide to ascension; it’s the same role adapted to suit two groups of people with different needs.)

perhaps when a person from remnant falls into the ever after, the ever after tries to give them what they most want or need: ruby finds a kind, supportive new friend whose biggest problem is needing a hand tugging cheesy potatoes out of the sand and who eagerly tries to help her in return; weiss and blake find their families (and blake finds yang especially); yang initially loses her arm and sinks into exhausted self-destruction, but once her friends are there to support her that burden melts off her shoulders and she finds the chance to reclaim her arm on her own terms, thus healing some of the wounds inflicted in V4; neo, consumed by vengeance, finds an adversary to fight (or perhaps ally with—we still don’t know quite what happened); and jaune gets the second chance and the extra time he wanted and then some. (i will note here that the ever after is an indelicate instrument. if this is what’s going on then its ability to do so successfully is notably restricted to the four who had each other to lean on, and the ever after is… less… deft when presented with a solitary visitor. which is only natural, because rwby as a narrative takes the stance that healing in isolation is impossible.)

the specific role in the framework that a visitor gets slotted into seems to be driven, as with ascension, by what the visitor wants to be: neo wants ruby dead, so she’s given the opportunity to become the jabberwalker; jaune’s desire to be a hero is reawakened as crushing guilt and desperation for a second chance, so he’s relocated in time and allowed to grow into the rusted knight. ruby wants to escape herself and her choices, so she becomes alyx (and her friends, by rallying around her, become alyxes in their own way too.) with the all the pieces laid out and everyone in their starting positions, the story begins to move forward.

if door five is what’s really going on, then jaune isn’t just learning the wrong lessons (although he certainly has done that!)—he sat down on a beach for years waiting for something to happen, and although he wasn’t literally at the shoreline the whole time, his mind was always there. he rejected the journey he was offered out of hand because he didn’t want to move until he’d caught up to the present. (<- there’s a metaphor there aye)

so, clearly this calls for drastic measures.

i see three main possibilities through this door:

A - with jaune stagnating, the ever after shuffled two other visitors from a different time forward until they coincided with jaune’s vigil over the beach. this was a conscious attempt on the ever after’s part to ameliorate his loneliness (the ever after knows that no one can make the journey alone—see also the blacksmith’s concern that ruby is ‘doing this all alone’ and how she waits for little’s confirmation that they’re ruby’s friend and trying to help her before presenting ruby with any choices) and give him a task, in guiding two young children, that could heal the wound of having failed to save penny. however, jaune has already become jaded and calloused enough that he can’t see through alyx’s brattiness to make the connection between her need for guidance and his desire to protect innocent life, although he does do so with lewis; his unspoken (but no doubt perceptible—kids are smart!) favoritism and his anxiety about letting the story ‘get off track’ creates friction between him and alyx and deepens the implied schism between alyx and lewis until the ever after intervenes, via the herbalist. the knight becomes a villain for alyx to defeat before she and lewis can continue their journeys (while jaune is kept in stasis until the cat is able to return to him), and whichever one or both of them completed that journey made the decision to write the book as it is for some reason or another that doesn’t actually matter, because what’s really important is how jaune reacts to this setback in his journey.

B - a similar scenario, but the alyx and lewis jaune met were merely echoes conjured up by the ever after using the emotional ‘footprints’ left behind by other visitors long since returned home. (“nothing and no one is ever truly lost,” says the blacksmith, and “the heart very rarely forgets,” says the cat—who’s to say the ever after couldn’t remember old friends fondly or try to help new ones by sharing what it remembers of those who came before?). whether they were siblings in reality or even together in the ever after at the same time doesn’t matter; what matters is that the ever after recounts them to jaune that way (perhaps it makes a better story if they’re a brother and sister who fell together—perhaps it makes the stakes feel more real, if jaune can see them both home safely). but here again, things start to go wrong because of jaune’s rigidity. he doesn’t grasp that this is his story, not alyx’s, and this is a problem because the ever after responds, has no choice but to respond, to what he sees as his purpose; it can’t tell him what to become, only help him get to where he’s going. the harder he fights to keep the story on track, the tighter he clings to the terror that he’s messing up the story, the more real that terror and that struggle becomes until his own self-loathing and guilt-stricken anxiety poisons him and eats away the memories the ever after tried to share with him, and in the end there’s nothing left but a mean, spiteful little girl who murdered her gentle brother and wrote him out of the story afterwards because jaune wasn’t good enough to save either of them.

[corollary: if 5B turns out to be the case, i would half expect for juniper to turn out to be a manifestation of lewis, or different memories similar to lewis, adjusted to provide jaune with a friend he can rely on rather than a vulnerable child he feels driven to protect. note that juniper is absent from jaune’s tale!]

C - none of this process is organized or directed by a conscious entity; the ever after is not alive or sapient in any sense, and the ‘girl who fell through the world’ narrative is an emergent phenomenon arising from the ever after’s essential nature as an emotional mirror and influenced by the actions of individual afterans who try to do what they can to help visitors who need it. jaune doesn’t participate in the real alyx’s story in any capacity, but as he grows older and his armor begins to rust for lack of care he begins to subconsciously identify himself as the character of the rusted knight. as that idea begins to take hold, the ever after begins to reflect it back at him. a self-reinforcing cycle develops to the point that jaune is shepherding around figments of his own imagination, formed half out of what he remembers of a favorite childhood story and half from the abscessed distrust and cynicism towards “fairytales” injected into his mind by learning the truth about ozpin’s fairytales: he knows this story but he also knows that the truth behind the story is always so much worse than you could imagine. the cat takes an interest and guides jaune and the figments to the herbalist, where it isn’t alyx the herbalist really speaks to—it’s jaune. but jaune can’t cope with the realization that he’s flat out hallucinating a pair of children (and he isn’t, really, the ever after made them real-ish, but the cat’s playful riddle-answers do NOT put his mind at ease), so he spirals, clinging harder to the conviction that they have to be real, which makes them realer but also pours his paranoia into them and bounces it back on him. the knight drinks the poison in alyx’s stead—very literally, in this case, because the alyx who hands him the poison is conjured out of his imagination—and after that things go sort of funny. nobody’s really sure what happened, except that alyx and lewis were here and now they’re not. jaune eventually scrapes himself back to a semblance of functional by becoming resolutely certain that this place is evil and rotten to the core and he wants nothing to do with it (his repulsion repulses the ever after, allowing for a mostly-stable situation to develop), the cat decides that they did not enjoy being caught in the middle of jaune’s mental breakdown and keeps their distance for an indeterminate amount of time, and the whole incident festers unresolved forever until team rwby shows up to crash into the wobbly jenga tower of jaune’s psyche. (<- probably not this one because that’s a lot to even start unraveling in four episodes, but it would make an interesting fic i bet.)

in any case the end result is that jaune makes three critical mistakes: first losing himself entirely to the role he believes he needs to play in alyx’s story, second taking the consequent setbacks he experienced as a permanent and irrevocable failure, and third imagining the absolute worst case scenario he could think of and holding it as truth in order to torture himself and justify his intense hatred for the ever after itself.

like ascension, the story of ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is meant to be a journey of self-discovery, growth, and healing. total egocentrism is an obstacle to self-knowledge (this is one lesson the alyx of the book seems to learn), but total self-sacrifice is an even greater threat; in its worst excesses it becomes self-destruction, as we’re seeing with ruby presently. without mistakes, without accepting loss as a fact of life, growth becomes impossible. and rejection of complexity is a betrayal of the self, because selfhood is necessarily complex and complexity gives life its richness. as easy as it is to retreat into simple modes of thought, to close off and demand easy, perfect, clear-cut answers, doing so cuts off pathways to growth and then turns the blades inwards as self-hatred. jaune accomplishes a hat trick (pun INTENDED!) of exactly the wrong lessons learnt because he never grasps that he wasn’t supposed to be the make-believe hero, the guide, the teacher—he was supposed to be the wandering, broken, lonely child who healed by letting others guide him across this unfamiliar world.

as with door four, this one is loosely compatible with doors one and two and three, with room for fudging around the details as needed; and, removed from the specific question of what the ever after is (door number three! everyone has a hill to die on and door number three is mine!), i think this one is probably the closest to how jaune’s arc will shake out emotionally; in the most basic of terms he functions as the cautionary tale against both passivity (in his decision to mostly just sit on a beach long enough to rust into his armor) and active refusal to learn or grow (in his rabid paranoia and conviction that change is death and healing is manipulation). thus some narrative exploration of the lessons he didn’t learn (and the poisoned ones that he did) will necessarily be a part of ruby’s story, as she’s standing at the same crossroads that led him to becoming this and poised to continue repeating his first mistake if something doesn’t draw her out of the self-loathing self-annihilating fog.