#returning to my natural state (deranged posting about the salem / cinder / summer trifecta)

[bestworstcase]

do you think there's any merit to a little prince-and-the-rose metaphor in which Spring is the rose and Ozpin is the prince? and including the poem, Raven is the one who "scatters the petals of the rose" (mercy kills the rose that couldn't protect itself)

the one killing the rose would be the sheep in any case (<- that sound you hear is me bodily wrestling the unhinged SHEEP SUMMER ROSE WHITE QUEEN tangent away from myself. some other time)

but no i’m not convinced there’s any configuration in which it’s sensible to interpret ozpin (or ozma) as the prince to anyone’s rose, if only for the obvious problem of him being jaded and symbolically blind. he is, of course, the stranded pilot to oscar’s prince (<- the prince’s childlike love and wonder clear the eyes of the weary man’s heart, reawakening him to the magic of the world; he’s the blind man lost and searching for his love in the wasteland twice over) and insofar as ozma could be retrofitted to the little prince given his alienness to remnant, the immediate problem that emerges is that salem would in that case have to be his rose and there is no plausible way to argue that because it’s nonsense. 

with ozpin and any maiden the core issue is that he… doesn’t love the maidens and certainly at no point does he seem to have taken care of them (indeed in the fairytale he made of the first four it is they who took care of him); they are, ultimately, quasi-replacement-daughters whom he weaponizes in his war with salem—deeply deeply cynical way to (not) handle his grief. he is retreading the final duel over and over again at global scale.

(if “dancing and fighting aren’t so different; two partners interlocked…” delivered in the gooiest tone ozpin has ever used doesn’t make you SCREAM LAUGH every time you hear it…)

summer is likewise thorny (snrk) in that there is no evidence to suggest ozpin was ever especially close to her or had any kind of parental bond with her (and the distrust evinced by her secret shenanigans with raven would suggest that she didn’t feel especially close to him, as would her decision to jump ship to salem’s cause—see also general jinjur).

generally my thinking as of now on the basis of what we glimpsed in V9 and the temporal dovetailing of spring running away / gretchen rainart dying as a student / raven having some unknown involvement in spring’s death for which she clearly feels guilty is that A) spring was in fact gretchen rainart and B) all of this is about her, and her death, and whatever the fuck happened when she and summer and raven and salem all collided that night. 

it is vaguely interesting to mark that there were four and all of them have significant associations with knowledge (salem: the only character who knows her secrets + hatred of deception + keen interest in the lamp; summer: silver eyes [truth will rise/revealed by mirrored eyes] + the mystery of her disappearance; raven: alludes to the woggle-bug + spy + became maiden of knowledge; gretchen: died as a student + probable spring maiden + symbol of ozpin’s deceit). so on the one hand, it seems… obvious that SOMETHING BIG came out that night; obvious, specifically, that salem decided to talk. the question is to whom and what her audience did with that information. it is also at least notionally possible, if the fourth person was spring, that they used the lamp’s first question (<- i do not think it likely however because ozpin kept her name a secret and habitually swore that the lamp had no questions left.)

on the other rwby doesn’t often pile up singular qualities like that; in the narrative sense it seems inevitable that this ended in calamity because… knowledge/knowledge/knowledge/knowledge is not a balanced configuration. but you know what is? salem offering knowledge, summer making a choice, and gretchen’s death making raven the new maiden: knowledge/choice/destruction/creation. 

everything adds up so strongly to summer joining salem that the missing piece does really feel like it’s actually… what happened to number four. gretchen or whoever else the spring maiden might have been. is it that raven mercy-killed the proverbial first rose of spring? the only things we know FOR SURE are that raven was involved enough to feel like the killer and that she was the one the spring maiden thought of; circumstantially, salem and/or summer were probably there too. tenuously, there is the possible parallelism with jaune and penny (in which case summer probably struck the killing blow, as the proto-cinder).

in… all of this ozpin is fairly irrelevant except insofar as he presumes summer to be dead and spring to be alive (but missing) and is wrong on both counts; which if put into the little prince framing would again make him the pilot, forever wondering and guessing. the prince seeks out the rose, one way or another; for summer that tracks with ruby as the prince, and if the last spring maiden is anyone’s rose—well, gretchen, hazel. obv. though i think that’s tentative at best and the presumptive broadening of allusion is generally not very speculatively sound (<- unless you’re me in V9 hitting 9.8 and going insane but THAT came down to rwby being unusually direct.)

and with the rainart twins there is the much more straightforward allusion to hansel and gretel; gretel outwits the witch, gretchen presumably did not (and in that case bequeathed the maiden of knowledge to a different twin who does outwit the witch—jot that down as another point in favor of summer being the proto-cinder who cut gretchen/spring down.)

rubs head

this is the problem with rwby really it’s too fucking well put together