#reverse cinder

[strqyr]

salem's father kept her locked in a tower out of fear that he would lose her too after having lost his wife—"i am protecting you from anything or anyone that might hurt you. you are the most precious thing in the world to me. i could not bear to lose you."—, but eventually she came to realize that her father did not love her like a parent loves a child, but rather he thought of her as just one of his treasures that he had started to hoard over the years.

and when his worst nightmares became reality, and many warriors came and attempted to rescue salem, failing and perishing, he barely batted an eye, his sole focus defending the castle and thus keeping his daughter safe.

(that is, as far as the fairy tale goes. who knows how it really happened.)

then, upon her father's death and salem finding freedom not in the outside world but in being with ozma, she unfairly loses him, not in a battle like one might imagine, but to an illness.

is it any wonder salem might find it difficult to empathize with others, let alone care about them beyond how useful they are for achieving her goals, when her father was basically the only example she had to follow from her childhood? when the first person she loved and cared about died in a way she didn't find fair?

it's a tragedy, yo.

[lucydoodlessometimes]

Reverse au cinder as inspired by @healing-winston-pratt 's reverse au and including her design for her! more to come, maybe :-)

design elements borrowed from @cosmicnovaflare 's sun themed Cinder art and the turtle doves mentioned in the book

Kai | Cress | Thorne | Scarlet | Ze'ev | Jacin | Winter

[leafpool-loves-ashfur]

see my issue is that i literally have an entire Warrior Cats OC universe where the entire purpose is to "give every single character a backstory however small"

and there's already about 500 characters give or take yknow. and like. i already have the stories all plotted out and yet

and yet i keep sitting here and thinking to myself "well but what motivates this character? why are they doing this? what was their story?"

and like YES that's the entire POINT but i NEED TO STOP I CANT KEEP WRITING MORE AND MORE THE *TIMELINE DOCUMENT* IS ALREADY 84 PAGES LONG AND IM STILL IN THE REVERSE (prequel and DOTC-esque) GENERATIONS

[bestworstcase]

anyway its time for our irregularly scheduled reminder that destruction in rwby has always, with remarkable consistency, been associated with change and want, culminating in v9 with the entirely predictable revelation that the primordial cosmic force of destruction is… [checks notes] hunger.

so when the narrative says that salem is destruction incarnate or the writers reiterate that the pool of grimm imbued her with a destructive nature, Something That Has Been Stated In The Story so i don’t really know why we’re acting like this is new information, you do need to take that into context with

what

destruction

means

in this story. likewise the reality that salem is grimm must be considered in context with how grimm are described and shown to behave. (hint: they feel pain, have a survival instinct, learn from experience, live in packs, and die in captivity.)

salem’s affect is blunted (because she grew up in near-total isolation with an angry, violent father, and then spent most of her millions of years of existence completely alone; of course she struggles to express emotion) but she is an intensely emotional character; if her delivery in soliloquy didn’t make that clear then her abrupt mood swings—which start happening in volume four—should have gotten the point across. it didn’t, because fandom and because if you don’t perform emotion correctly nobody fucking believes you have them, but it should have.

the point is, salem has always been emotional—distraught outbursts at the gods, and everything—AND THEN she spent a few hundred million years going insane in isolation AND THEN she remade herself in the pool of grimm… grimm are drawn to, respond to, emotion. when a person becomes grimm, the grimm influence—such as it is—is not to corrupt, it’s to amplify. the mirror becomes a magnifying glass.

salem is the way she is because her feelings are SO BIG ALL THE TIME and she has no way to regulate or cope with them because she’s a flayed screaming bundle of trauma who kept getting brutally punished every time she shows emotion or lets her guard down so she just doesn’t anymore.

back someone into a corner and flay them alive for long enough and yeah, they’ll decide that Killing You is the answer. obviously. being grimm doesn’t -make her- violent or cruel or apathetic to the collateral damage, it intensifies the pain and desperation she is feeling all the time. possibly, it also absorbs the hatred and fear that others feel toward her. and that’s where the violence and the cruelty and the singleminded ruthlessness arises from.

the way to stop salem from Doing This is to help her. it’s the same, in principle, as the solution to the grimm problem in general; culling them while sweeping societal problems under the rug to fester forever does not in fact fix anything, and it is at best putting a bandaid on a hemorrhage. grimm attacks are just a symptom of deeply-entrenched suffering—hence, menagerie. the kingdom built by civil rights activists. doesn’t have a huntsmen academy and also doesn’t have a grimm problem. lol.

[coldgoldlazarus]

I want a RWBY Volume 9 AU where everything is the same except they have social media, and somehow still get scroll signals in the Ever After because of some arbitrary magic shenanigans. So everyone in Vacuo at least knows RWBY+JN are still alive, but have no idea what's going on with them, and they're too mentally caught up in the Ever After shenanigans (or in Ruby's case her depression arc) to think to give context for all the patently batshit stuff they're posting about.

[healing-winston-pratt]

girl I'm such a fan of your tlc reversed art omgggg I CANT LIKE CINDER???? NOW A SASSY EMPRESS WHO CRUSHES OVER KAI??? THE MECHANIC WHO FIGHTS LIKE STARS TO SAVE THE PRINCESS???? we. need. more. reversed. kaider. PLS IM BEGGING YOU ASFJSFHIWHH

Sorry for the long wait!!! I saw your ask some days ago but I've been busy catching up with life 🥹🥹 but AÑDNALSKAL I'm always down to go back to the Reverse Rol AU so I'm so glad u found it and liked it this much!! Thank youuu 🥺🥺✨💖✨💖✨💖✨💖✨

[rookflower]

i am a hypocrite when it comes to warrior cats shipping because I will gripe and moan about even unrequited cinderfire from dawn til dusk because i think it is weird and boring and makes cinderpelt's character worse, however, i will clap and cheer for unrequited cindersand despite it being literally just the exact same thing except gay and less direct and they never interact in canon

[wtch-and-the-warlock]

Guess who dusted off this au and drew the team again? With all that is going on with RT I rewatched all of RWBY again, started legit writing this au on AO3, and decided to use this channel as an art dump/ask space for the au. I edited their designs a tad bit, and am deciding to stick with this for their V1-3 designs.

[onewomancitadel]

hmm I'm not sure if I can say this with clarity, but I think one of the reasons I love Cinder as aggressor-perpetrator-victim-villain-would-be-heroine, and maybe related archetypes that most generally, is that she's an unforgiving, undeniable wound bleeding ripe in the story, most of all with narrative agency (in the sense that she enacts events and forces things to happen, not necessarily in terms of agency beneath her masters/captors - symbolically this is also rich because she's a source of narrative renewal and forcible change, much like Ruby, which also works Jungian-wise). She's not a passive character, and more specifically a passive victim; I often wonder why it is that I like Cinder more than I like Pyrrha, even though tragedy marks both their stories, and though you can never really logically query such a question, Pyrrha's tragedy is one that signals necessary change (Cinder must be stopped; the Academy collapses; Ozpin dies) but in itself is a dead-end, literally. There's nowhere to go with that status quo, or a basically pure Huntress, and honestly - Pyrrha didn't want the Fall Maiden power. And centrally, I think one of the more subtle and interesting and evolving threads is what the characters choose to do with the Maiden power - how they hide, deny, lie, sequester, imprison, kill for it - how it could signify the opportunity of redemption, for that power, for the Maiden.

You can't deny what happened to Cinder - her villainy is the mark of that - and you can't deny what Cinder is - her villainy, again, is the mark of that - and what excites the story, what shakes it up, is the inability of the story to repress it. People love having a villain to root against, and I love them for that villainy; maybe more specifically with wounded villains, what I love is that they're allowed to be imperfect, they're allowed to be bad, and the thing that keeps hurting everyone is the denial of it. "The healer has the bloodiest hands." You cannot heal a wound without finding first where it starts. And it's very, very exciting to me, that a story literally about an eternal, unceasing, stale and unchanging feud, has a character who has been denied a fairytale and denied a hero and become a villain is responsible, in part, for an upheaval. This is why I critically enjoy her foiling with I/ronwood, and I suppose it's very appropriate that she destroys the city and Ruby and co. save the people.

I like characters who do things... I like characters who disturb, whose presence and ideology you can't deny... maybe that's why one of my favourite moments is when I/ronwood finds the glass Queen chesspiece. It's her, the mark of her, when Salem would name her a pawn, and yet in this tiny, small, symbolic way, she upsets and disturbs and causes panic with a gesture.

To me, her redemption would be upsetting and disturbing for the same reasons, including a romance with Jaune. If you killed her, this, would be the denial of upheaval, the denial of what happened to her and the failures of the Huntress ideology, and wouldn't challenge anybody's worldview - Salem trains Cinder, she doesn't protect her; Salem's watched everybody die, even her own daughters by her own hand. A symbolic surrogate daugther's death would just be inevitable. Cinder is already symbolically dead. Once the last Relic is loosed she would not be of strategic importance. It's hard to imagine a story that is about exciting change, really, literally, we even interrogate a team just like Ruby's who fell to the cycle, a ghostly shroud hanging over the story, accepting its status quo. The good guy kills the bad guy; the bad guys are always bad. The reason I return to this, and one of the reasons I return to R/WBY, is that storytelling is about change, yet it seems like so many stories in recent time are terrified of lasting change and answering the theses of their own stories. It challenges the brand, archetypal expectations, "what the fans want" - comfort, familiarity.

This knits back into the idea that she serves a necessary narrative function, that the story needs to be upset by her and then she needs to have that upset come into her own life and be integrated into the heroic cast in order to heal the Ozlem wound and to heal her own wound. That the obvious answer was there all along, but couldn't be seen because it has been written in binary terms: kill Salem, or fail, and one day Ruby's daughter will take up the scythe instead.

Maybe I really am fucked in the head for cheering when she comes onscreen and wrecks everything... but I would cheer at the moment she is disrupted and maybe her mind is changed, and she redirects these ambitions. It'd be quite an impossible task. You'd need somebody who's willing to see past all of this, see the bigger picture, see deeper into her, and care, and maybe be struck and disturbed by it himself... that sounds so romantic... hate transformed to love... resurrected from symbolic death... a story renewed and redeemed.

[bridgyrose]

Ruby x Weiss x Neo

(Took the time to start a different kind of au)

Neo slowly made her way into the abandoned warehouse, her breath heavy as she held her bladed parasol at the ready, scroll in hand to shine a light through the darkness. Each step carefully placed as she tried to be quiet, wishing Cinder or even Emerald had been able to join her. Though, if she was right-

“Coming alone this time? Bold.” 

The hair on the back of Neo’s neck stood up as she heard the familiar voice of her prey, catching a glimpse of the red cloak and petals as someone ran behind a few crates. She moved the light of her scroll to the crates, fingers shaking as she tried to keep steady. She tapped her parasol against a crate three times. 

Another three taps came from the other end of the warehouse as Ruby made her way out of hiding. “A huntress like you shouldnt come alone.” 

“And a criminal like you should be?” she signed. 

Ruby grinned and folded up her scythe. “Weiss will be here shortly. Something about needing to lead a couple huntresses onto a different trail.” 

Neo frowned a bit, keeping her parasol pointed at Ruby. “You know I have to arrest you.” 

“That would be the nature of things, wouldnt it?” Ruby sighed and sat down, looking at the window on the far end of the warehouse. “But that does make me ask, why stay with Weiss and I if you know you’ll have to put us away? Do you really think you can change us? Make us better?” She paused for a moment and looked down at Neo. “Or is it because you know that we’ll keep feeding you pieces of information that you can use to make your team look good?” 

“Because I know you want better!” Neo signed as she lowered her parasol. “Why else do you keep meeting with me?” 

Ruby dropped down from the crate she was sitting on and made her way to Neo. “Because I want you to be safe. Things are a lot more complicated than you think and I dont want to risk losing you. There’s still time for you to join us-” 

Neo raised the blade of her parasol to Ruby’s neck, her arms shaking as she stared at the woman she loved. She didnt want to hurt Ruby, didnt want to keep fighting like this, drifting apart while the love they had stayed strong. And yet, she still couldnt convince Ruby to be by her side, to leave Roman like they both should’ve when they were younger. Slowly, she lowered her blade and looked away. “Can you please explain what you’re doing?” 

“If… after my next mission. Just promise me you wont interfere.” 

“You know I cant make that promise.” 

“I know but I-” 

“We need to leave!” Weiss said as she came in through the warehouse window, blocking a few arrows with a glyph before using ice dust to seal it. “The rest of Neo’s team figured out what I was doing and started to make their way back. We have maybe three minutes before they come storming in and looking through the crates.” 

Ruby nodded and gently took Neo’s hand. “Its not too late.” 

Neo pulled away, taking a few steps back as she looked at Weiss and Ruby. Ruby, her childhood friend, and Weiss, the exiled heiress who was thrown away to the White Fang. Both girls she grew to know and love, only to part ways after a job went wrong and Neo was offered a chance to do better. ”You could come with me too, you know.” Neo signed. “Ozpin is still looking for more huntsmen. You could help people and we can clear your name. Start a new life.” 

Weiss gently pulled Ruby back. “We dont have a choice, we have to go!” 

“I’ll catch up,” Ruby said as she pulled away from Weiss. 

Neo watched as Weiss used her dust to create a fog and rush out of the warehouse with her glyphs. Her eyes then went to Ruby’s silver eyes, almost pleading for her to come back. 

“I love you, Neo. And when I’m finished, we’ll be able to be together again. I promise.” 

Neo slowly nodded as she watched Ruby turn around and race off with her semblance. The sound of the wooden door of the warehouse cracking open sounded behind her as she heard the footsteps of her teammates finally join her. 

“Damn it, they got away,” Cinder said as she lowered her bow. “At least we stopped them from getting whatever it was they were after.” 

Emerald nodded. “We should get something to eat before getting back to Ozpin. That noodle stand with the spicy noodles you like isnt too far away.” 

Neo slowly put her parasol away and turned to look at her teammates. “I’ll join you two later. I need to talk to Ozpin first.” 

“What for?” Cinder asked. “Our job’s done and we’ve sent in the report. We’re free until he needs us again.” 

“It was Ruby again. There’s something she knows that we dont. Something Ozpin is hiding.” 

“We can go talk to him after we eat,” Emerald said as she put a hand on Neo’s shoulder. “You’ve spent days trying to find them when you should be taking care of yourself. Whatever answers Ozpin has, we can find out tomorrow.” 

Neo stopped herself from signing anymore more to argue, knowing Emerald was right. She needed to rest and if Ruby was asking her to stay out of it, then she’d be able to find her again. A smile crossed her lips as she nodded. “Tomorrow.”

[rescuehumans-runtotherescue]

What My Personal Reverse AU Would Look Like:

-

Human Chase

Name: Chase

Race: Korean

Appearance: He is pale, has blue eyes and short black neatly combed hair.

Sexuality: Bi

Age: 22

He has OCD and autism. He is lactose intolerant. Due to his hyperfixation on law, he moved up classes quickly. He is not the chief of police, because of his age and inexperience, but just below that in rank. In this AU, the actual Chief of Police isn’t very helpful, mainly just doing paperwork and attending meetings.

How he reacts to people flirting with him: Painfully oblivious.

What he drinks in the morning: Coffee that is half coffee, half dairy-free coffee creamer.

-

Human Blades

Name: Blaise

Race: White

Appearance: He has fluffy ginger hair (longer than all the others but still a short hairstyle) and hazel eyes.

Sexuality: Omnisexual

Age: 22 (younger than Chase by a couple months)

He is autistic and has generalized anxiety. He willingly wanted to become a pilot. He’s fine as long as he’s familiarized with the aircraft and in complete control of it. When he flew in Dagger (Dani) the first time, she just >ZOOM< Took off! His screams could be heard from a mile away and it took A LOT of encouraging and bribery to get him to fly her the second time.

How he reacts to people flirting with him: Panics and makes an excuse to leave. It’s not that he wouldn’t want to have a romantic relationship, he just doesn’t know how to handle one right now.

What he drinks in the morning: Orange juice.

-

Human Boulder

Name: Bou

Race: Hispanic

Appearance: He has tan skin and short brown hair and beard. He has dark brown eyes.

Sexuality: Pan + Ace spectrum

Age: 24

He has ADHD. He is a hopeless romantic. He has a small greenhouse behind the fire station, which used to just be a garden until the bots (the Burns) kept accidentally falling on it/stepping in it, so he made the greenhouse for the high visibility and to protect his plants.

How he reacts to people flirting with him: While a hopeless romantic who dreams of gushy dates, when faced with someone actually taking an interest in him, it’s like he forgets how to speak english. Poor guy gets so tongue-tied!

What he drinks in the morning: Tea.

-

Human Heatwave

Name: Heath

Race: Black

Appearance: he has dark brown eyes and short crew cut dark brown hair.

Sexuality: Demiromantic + Bi

Age: 26

He is dyslexic but hides this from others if he can. He is the leader of their team.

How he reacts to people flirting with him: Depending on who it is and how they’re flirting, he’ll either ignore them or flirt right back with them. However, he is noncommittal and when they start persuading an actual romantic relationship, he stops altogether.

What he drinks in the morning: Coffee, black.

-

Chase and Bou grew up on Griffin Rock, but on opposite ends of the island. Chase was also homeschooled, which made him miss out on social opportunities, so there was no chance of them meeting in school. Bou was in lad pioneers when he was younger, Chase was not.

Heath and Blaise grew up elsewhere (not in the same place as each other) and were assigned to Griffin Rock. Blaise attended Boy Scouts when he was younger where he grew up.

They all met each other in training.

-

The Burns’ as Bots:

Charlie —> Cinder. The leader of the Rescue Bots.

Kade —> Kascade. Cascade with a K! He will not let you forget that.

Dani —> Dagger.

Graham —> Gram.

Cody —> Code.

Cinder, Kascade, Dagger, and Gram make up the bot rescue team. Code is not officially part of it, but visits Griffin Rock frequently and has tagged along to some missions. He has abilities like Servo does in the show, being a living toolbox of sorts. He also has a vehicle form- A tow truck. Not his idea, but Optimus’, and you don’t argue with Optimus. His vehicle form is mainly for his cover up, as it would be seen as odd if all the other ‘robots’ had vehicle forms and he didn’t. However, his vehicle form has came in handy. Code is set to attend the academy when it’s ready.

Servo in this AU is an actual dog that they petsit occasionally, who is legally owned by Captain Tide.

[emcapi-gaming]

ok but actually I need to start keeping track of how many times I try for Cinder Surprise. i've had an amazing stupid idea for a joke. and the longer it takes to catch, the funnier it will be.

[dunhoof]

trying to figure out how to draw these thangs. ft an obligatory fandragon design bc Its Me so i have to

[bestworstcase]

anyway. something interesting about how the thematic narrative unfolds with regard to the opening narration (and ozpin’s rejoinder)

in her v1 soliloquy salem invokes strength twice—once as an intrinsic quality of mankind and once as a characteristic that emerged "in the shadow’s absence"—and the context in which she goes on to say that "there will be no victory in strength" makes it clear that she means the latter kind of strength; she’s referring to ozpin’s "guardians" and "monuments" and this is reiterated again in her v3 soliloquy and in divide and in her strategic approach to the war generally, in that she strikes at ozpin’s isolated guardians and symbolic monuments because she understands them to be false projections of strength masking his true weakness, which is that he lacks faith in mankind’s intrinsic strength—what salem defines as wisdom, passion, resourcefulness, ingenuity, hope.

ozpin’s retort that victory is found in the "simpler things that [she’s] long forgotten" which "require a smaller, more honest soul" misses her point altogether and is revealed very quickly as a statement of belief in the importance of finding the (correct) chosen one; his "smaller soul" is merely the rhetorical distillation of his guardians, a single heroic figure who achieves true perfection and so inspires the whole world to follow.

salem is correct on all counts—there is nothing special or unique about ruby herself that makes her capable of doing the impossible; she succeeds by banding the world together against a common enemy, which is precisely what salem mocks ozpin for refusing to do—not just in the sense of understanding the story’s themes but also in the more practical strategic sense. you cannot win a real war with symbols and martyrs.

gestures at v7-8.

"victory is in a simple soul" (this will be the day) -> "but through a simple soul, we lie complacent" (until the end).

"strength will not bring victory" (divide) -> "strength’s not victory" (for every life).

the "smaller soul" idea is given the appearance of being the narratively correct position by its inclusion in the first opener, while "no victory in strength" is the villainous—and therefore presumptively wrong—retort. the common trope of evil cannot comprehend good predisposes the audience not to think deeply about this or pay close attention to the specifics of what the villain is really saying.

then in atlas the narrative throws this reversal down like a gauntlet; suddenly we have the heroic voice in agreement that the "smaller soul" engenders complacency and that strength is not victory. how can this be? the villain understood all along that ozpin’s "smaller soul" was nothing more than a belief in salvation through the strength of a single heroic paragon obfuscated by poetic language. "there will be no victory in strength" and "when [your guardians] fail and you turn to your smaller soul, know that you send her to the same pitiful demise" are the same statement, spoken first in salem’s own words and later repeated in ozpin’s.

i’ve made this point before but taken into context with the whole soliloquy, "there will be no victory in strength" implies its own converse: there will be victory in the virtues salem sees innate in mankind, wisdom and passion and resourcefulness and ingenuity and above all, hope.

she reiterates this again more overtly in her v3 soliloquy, naming hope as mankind’s greatest strength and mocking ozpin for his failure to put his money where his mouth is and ACT on his professed faith in mankind. "your faith in mankind was not misplaced," she says, dripping sarcasm. if only you had given the people a common enemy rather than sowing doubt and distrust among even your inner circle by keeping them in the dark.

and on the foundation of this reversal: “balance is not two forces locked in never-ending battle. balance is an ecosystem, an organism, a living, breathing thing; thus, balance cannot be restored by force or calculation. true balance finds its own equilibrium. it only requires love, and the patience to see things through to the end.”

NOW this is where the recontextualization of the "victory in a smaller soul"/"no victory in strength" conceit starts to become really interesting: there is no victory at all.

there is only the state of being in equilibrium, or not. this is a story about balance.

as with salem, the specific language the blacksmith uses here is important (and it helps to have some familiarity with hellenistic philosophy, heraclitus and plato in particular, because that strongly influences rwby’s metaphysics): she doesn’t mean that opposition or strife is antithetical to balance. the first emanations of the tree were darkness and light, given destruction and creation. the central conceit is chiaroscuro. one cannot be without the other.

equilibrium is found in the tension between weight and counterweight and lost whenever these two opposites become unequal, such as (for example) if light decides that darkness should obey him rather than seek compromise with him when they disagree.

that in turn is passed down from the gods to ozlem through ozma’s belief in light’s (false) conception of balance as a state of perfection without strife. within this framework "unity" demands the complete absence of conflict or disagreement and becomes synonymous with obedient submission, and thus salem—who wants nothing but to be free—is rendered as the great evil who must be destroyed.

there is no question that salem understands the narrative themes with respect to humanity and the injustice of the divine narrative; she does. it is absurd and unserious to argue that she does not fundamentally believe the things she says in soliloquy just as it would be absurd and unserious to suggest that ozma doesn’t believe what he says in his.

what is in question and what does have crucial implications for the story’s resolution is whether salem herself seeks victory (to defeat the gods) or equilibrium (to remove herself as the blade held to remnant’s throat by ending the divine mandate); does she intend to win the war or to end it?

and that is a more difficult question. the fact of her commitment to war does not in and of itself provide an answer because ozma has existed in a perpetual state of (imaginary) war with her for thousands of years, with or without her participation. if she comes into the open and tells people the truth about his mandate and what the huntsmen academies are for, there will be a war. he already knows why she rejected the divine mandate and she has no reason to believe that he will react any differently this time if she appeals to him again, not when he’s had thousands of years to think about it and reaffirmed his commitment to the mandate over and over again.

or she can cut him down and strike at the academies one after the other in quick succession to claim the relics and be done with it before he returned—remember that neither the siege of atlas nor razing vale were part of her original plan, and she intended to leave atlas for last. it is likely that her plans for shade and atlas resembled her minimally-destructive plan for haven.

and even when she panics and commits to open warfare, she exercises a great deal of restraint; it remains to be seen what the exact situation is in vale but razing vale mere weeks after oz decimated hundreds of thousands of not millions of her grimm is in and of itself a demonstration that she’s fully capable of burning the whole world down to get what she wants by brute force. perhaps she felt emboldened once she’d claimed two of the relics but even then the sheer disparity in power between herself and ozpin is so vast that it is becoming absurd to believe that her restraint is motivated by "caution" alone.

she rips a continent open and uses the liquid core of the planet as a siege weapon. oz explodes every grimm for miles around with a blast of magical energy that took lifetimes to accumulate and that slows her down for maybe two hours. salem knows that humanity is strong when banded together in common cause but she also knows that didn’t stop the gods from wiping them out in the blink of an eye, and the difference in power between herself and modern humans is in that ballpark.

"in pursuit of a new world, no cost is too great," she says… in praise of cinder’s restraint. i couldn’t stop them from evacuating the city, i couldn’t stop them from using the last question, i couldn’t stop the maiden from escaping without putting the relics in jeopardy—you’ve done well.

so in salem’s view, for the sake of a new world, allowing thousands of innocents to evacuate to safety and laying aside personal grudges or ambitions is worthwhile. conceding a partial victory to one’s opponents is a fair price to pay in pursuit of a new world. what does this tell us about how salem thinks?

gestures, also, at witch. what does it say about salem that upon learning one of her five hostages is her general’s daughter, she gave up on recovering the lamp and lost a fight on purpose to let all of them go?

"there will be no victory in strength," she says. the rest of her soliloquy implies the converse that victory is found in human virtue and hope. in her second soliloquy she gloats about dedicating all her power to extinguishing ozpin’s hope; two volumes later she cautions cinder against relying on power to "take what [she] wants by force" because power comes with a cost but the "usefulness of others" cannot be overstated; three volumes after that she’s all smiles when ruby reveals her to the world as a rallying cry for hope and tells cinder that sparing lives is a worthy price for a new world. she intends to gather the four relics—that is her game to win, as she puts it to cinder—but what’s her plan?

is it to summon the gods for another confrontation? because there any number of things that salem could do, or try to do, with the relics in hand in pursuit of a new world: destroy the relics, end ozma’s curse to prevent him from coming back, release the imprisoned spirits, use the relics to carve open a doorway to a literal new world where the brothers can’t follow—she’s had millions of years to research and thousands to consider a way to escape the final judgment—use the crown to force ozma to stop, if it works like the golden cap. or even tell the world what will happen if anyone brings the relics together and use the implied threat of her having all four as leverage in negotiations, much as ozma did after the great war.

if salem believes she can beat the brothers and is dead set upon using the rest of the world as bait to lure them back, that makes her more dangerous and more difficult to persuade to talk—it’s what i’ve been anticipating on the grounds that it is the most straightforward way to keep the narrative stakes high.

but the other way ’round is also compelling—salem having a specific minimal-risk plan to dispose of the relics and/or ozma or otherwise end the mandate by making it impossible to summon the gods, and team rwby hitting upon the idea of bringing the relics together in the ever after to persuade the god of light to ascend—and seems more in line with salem’s characterization whenever she isn’t venting her rage at ozma; risk-averse, restrained, pragmatic, willing to compromise. if her most important priority is to end the eternal crusade against her and she doesn’t care about the brothers as long as they don’t ever come back, and these children get it into their heads to confront the brothers face to face… well it makes the negotiations crunchier, that’s for sure.

[ikosburneraccount]

the lunar chronicles shouldve been like eight books we didnt get enough down time moments with these characters

[angstandhappiness]

NEAT

Can you do team WTCH in Atlas clothes?

All of them braced for the weather….except Cinder who insists her maiden powers keep her warm and Tyrian, who is absolutely unequipped for the cold, can’t stand it.