#rwby as a narrative is very precise about the language it uses regarding character deaths

[bestworstcase]

I don't understand why it's an absence of critical thought to say Jaune killed Penny, it isn't tantamount to saying he did it maliciously or anything. His hand was forced by circumstance and Cinder had already dealt a deadly blow but Jaune drove his blade through Penny to bring her a speedier death and it was the right move but yes, that means he killed her. Mercy kill, whatever you wanna add to contextualize it, but he killed her. It's not a condemnation. It's explicitly in the text that he needed to kill her quicker than she could bleed out so she could make the maiden transfer to Winter.

in the technical sense he ended her life a minute or two earlier than she would have died had he done nothing, yeah.

(cinder punched a hole in her chest riiiight around where the aorta emerges from the heart, so, like. she was dead. even under ideal circumstances, it took jaune like fifteen minutes of continual boosting of weiss’s aura to heal the—much less immediately dire—impalement wound in weiss’s side. penny would have bled out faster than even her amped aura could heal her.)

but that’s not. what a lot of “jaune killed penny” discourse is about; there is a large slice of this fandom that legitimately reads jaune’s decision here as murder, blames him for penny’s death, theorycrafts about how he’s going to learn that killing isn’t the answer… etc. in the same way that a large slice of penny fans read her death as a suicide and talk about how it was selfish of her to throw her life away (often as a justification for why she “needs” to come back, to learn that what she did was bad.)

and that’s um. not what happened. and it is genuinely EXTREMELY weird that a major portion of the fandom completely ignores the crucial context that cinder rammed her entire hand through penny’s chest in order to reframe penny’s death as a pointless suicide that jaune facilitated because he lacks moral backbone or doesn’t know how to do battlefield triage, or whatever. and that myopia gets projected onto the other characters too (e.g. the handful of weird takes i’ve seen on why weiss said “jaune tried to help”, including one that explicitly framed that statement as a borderline lie).

as an example my favorite variant of this phenomenon is the bonkers take that cinder “bullied penny into suicide” fbwndhfk