#rwby v4 rewatch

[rwby-is-the-best]

you gotta love the action replay on this block

[starredfishing]

check out how many painful memories of their beloved teammate i can make these guys carry

[yangsbandana]

anotha one

[thatringboy]

[image id: the “Say the line, Bart!” meme where instead of Bart, it says “Uncle Qrow”. The middle panel has a screenshot of Qrow Branwen from RWBY pasted over Bart’s face and he is saying “What’s your favorite fairytale?”]

[morglien]

...do u think “you do interest me” by tyrian in v4 was in reference to jaune being the brave knight in the ever after/girl who fell through the world. be honest.

[pixelwishess]

The shockwave that happened when Armed and Ready dropped at the end of V4. Casey Lee Williams really gave the gays the crumbs they needed to pull through.

[mettywiththenotes]

I haven't finished my rewatch yet so forgive me if it's been brought up and I just don't remember, but V9 trailer showing Ruby talking to her younger self who says "What are you gonna be?" and V2 specifically having Oobleck ask Team RWBY why they want to be huntresses EXCEPT for Ruby is 👀

It's got me thinking V9 is going to focus on why Ruby wanted to become a huntress, her reason for why she does it, along with the question as to how long she can keep going

[d0d0-b0i]

AUGHH I AM INCAPABLE OF BEING NORMAL ABOUT THEM

[pinkseas]

[parasocial bestie] i actually watched rwby like 38298483 years ago and stopped midway through v4 WHAT DO YOU MEAN JAUNE IS OLDER LIKE OLDER OLDER

I HOPE UR HAVING A GOOD NIGHT BESTIE <3333 UMMMM well. long story short v9 they're in a very magical fucked up place where time works very differently and so jaune is MUCH older and the others are mostly the same it's like a Whole Thing from what ive gathered but idk if itll still be that way by the end of the volume ? anyone's guess at this point honestly i have NO idea how much time will have passed in the real world or what'll happen when the story they're living is done

[peixotizando]

It kinda makes me laugh when Salem is helping Cinder to "evolve" her grimm arm. If you close your eyes it almost makes it a p*rn scene.

[technicallyblakebelladonna]

going from ilia's first introduction in v4 with her first interaction with blake ending with ilia saying in THE MOST devastating, heartbroken voice (god bless cherami leigh) "you shouldn't have come back" to v5 episode 1 with blake and ilia's next interaction having ilia plead with blake to leave menagerie and ending with blake saying "you're going to have to make me" ....

LITERALLY the gayest fucking shit. i LOVE bumbleby, i love the story they told (and will CONTINUE to tell, shoutout to VIZmedia), but if bumbleby wasn't going to be canon, i would've put money on catmeleon. the HISTORY between those two, and the narrative foils of ilia and adam. and that doesn't even count the v5 blake character short that gives us even MORE context of their previous relationship.

i love what they did with ilia's character, i honestly would not change it at all, because i love how they twisted the trope of the whole "psycho lesbian" when they revealed ilia's feelings for blake, but not at all having that be her driving force for revenge/her motivation, it's just SO GOOD. and then on top of that, having her confession on screen revealing that, yeah, this is the first canon confirmed lesbian. and just to have her character treated with SUCH respect is just wonderful.

anyway i just love ilia amitola SO much and rewatching rwby has reminded me so very loudly of this fact that i just have to blab about it again at length. i will probably be blabbing about ilia and catmeleon as i continue my rewatch, ESPECIALLY now that im back into v5, aka the ilia/catmeleon show XD

[rwby-is-the-best]

still cool how ren was able to sense tyrian way before anyone else! maybe he sensed his aura? fox is able to do that (which coco thought was a very advanced technique)

also we still don't know why jaune interests tyrian! he said that after looking closely into jaune's eyes. jaune has a big family; what if tyrian has run into some of them before?

[bestworstcase]

Hi again. I've continued to read through... well, whatever the almighty algorithim feels like suggesting (searching here is hard even when you have an idea where to start, which I don't), and my mental state can be best represented by this little gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZWK5IBuVMM&t=298s (Is this necessary? No. Do I think it's funny and worth sharing? Yes, and to an extent that's kinda what this site is all about)

Anyway, a pretty common thread I've noticed in your theories is "Summer is an up-to-now-offscreen agent of Salem by choice." While you definitely make a good case even from the limited amount I've seen, I have to ask: when and where did these thoughts originate from in the first place? I mean, I can *kinda* see where you connected some of the dots, but it's still a huge leap compared to the initially perfectly sensible conclusion of her being dead or otherwise incapacitated.

(Oh, and if this could be answered similarly to my last question, then I can at least say that I have loose plans for a thorough notepad-and-magnifying-glass rewatch of the whole series over the imminent summer after a warmup with Spirited Away, so we'll see how that goes. Maybe I'll look back at myself a few months from now and laugh at my relatively foolish ways; wouldn't be the first time, anyway)

i’d joke that it’s about the Vibes TM but what it comes down to really is the way rwby handles foreshadowing. as for the "when and where" part i couldn’t remember so i went looking.

let me take you on a little journey

these messages on 7/27 are my first direct reference to the idea of summer joining salem but i think (based on my phrasing) that i must have had it in mind for a while prior, which given that this was eight whole days after i’d finished watching the show at all. well. if i had to guess i’d say i probably went "okay so yes but also no" after ruby went "that’s what happened to mom" in 8.11

and the reason for that is pretty simple:

there is a lot of build up in v1-8 to summer’s fate being a Big Fucking Deal; this, in combination with the careful phrasing the narrative always uses regarding her disappearance—she "never came back” or she was "taken," it’s never said that she died—means she’s still alive.

salem met summer rose 12-14 years ago. the hound is a novelty to everyone, including salem’s own inner circle, and salem herself describes him as an "experiment." ruby jumps to a conclusion that doesn’t add up with information the audience knows that she doesn’t.

but, it’s unlikely that ruby is entirely wrong: think about tyrian waxing poetic about his "goddess" and ruby with no hesitation saying "cinder." she was both incorrect (his "goddess" is salem) but partially right (cinder is salem’s protégée and tyrian is here at all because cinder asked salem to deal with ruby).

in v4 we get a look at salem’s evil boardroom (there are two seats conspicuously left empty) and then see salem receiving a seer call from someone stationed at beacon, after it’s been firmly established that none of the agents we know about is there. we don’t see who is on the other end of this call, and we only hear salem’s side (note the incongruity with how seer calls are depicted in every other case; the identity of the beacon agent is withheld from the audience deliberately).

in v5 raven is so scornful of summer rose that she decides "you sound just like your mother" deserves an immediate fireball from cinder fall to the face. in v9 she was big goofy grins at summer. SOMETHING REALLY BAD HAPPENED. and i don’t think this dramatic change is explicable by raven simply watching summer fail and die or be captured; else she’d just be calling summer a fool the same way she does qrow and tai. that says betrayal.

so we know that summer met salem. we know that she did not die and cannot have been made into a hound-like creature (because he’s a new experiment). summer being alive probably rules out her being a ‘failed’ experiment, since that would undoubtedly have been fatal. ruby’s assumption that summer was twisted into a grimm-thrall by salem is incorrect but likely not too far off from the truth, and we know SOMETHING happened during that last mission that shattered raven’s trust in summer, and the simplest answer there is that summer is with salem but willingly.

and salem has a Mystery Lieutenant who’s been stationed at beacon since it fell. math! to my mind the only real questions are why and if summer might have been partially grimmed a la cinder, because in v8 the narrative starts telegraphing "summer is with salem in some not-enslaved-or-imprisoned capacity" without any subtlety at all.

now if we add in to the mix certain things v9 did ("an invincible monster who took your mother!" OH BOY) ("she lied, she left with raven! why would she–?" OH BOY!!!), there’s a clear narrative trajectory developing in the direction of summer rose not having been the Perfect Martyred Fairytale Paragon that everyone has put on a pedestal for the last 12-14 years; like anyone else she was a real person with flaws, and narratively the strongest way to drive that point home is to present to us (and to the characters who’ve been mythologizing summer as a flawless hero for more than a decade) a summer rose who decided that siding with salem was the right thing to do and then exploring why she did it.

summer being with salem of her own volition also makes it a lot easier to get to the narrative turning point of negotiating with salem; summer is the bridge, someone who has people she cares about on both sides. it is much harder to form a truce with salem if she tortured two of the main characters’ mother to death and/or enslaved and/or imprisoned her (because then you need to have an arc about saving the mother and that pushes further down the dead-end road of trying to defeat salem, who can’t be meaningfully defeated). but if summer chose to side with salem she can open that door to "maybe we can reason with salem."

so thinking about it just from a writer perspective… if i were the one writing this story and making these creative decisions with regard to the summer rose mystery, the reason i would set things up in this specific way is to develop toward a twist that summer freely chose to join salem with the intention that this precipitates the negotiation. that was true in v1-8 and then v9 ticked off literally every box on my mental checklist of things i would expect v9 to do if this was the direction they were headed—another hint about salem "taking" summer in conjunction with a reminder that salem is "invincible," surfacing ruby’s self-identification with The Idea of summer rose and how very harmful this is, a peek through the looking glass at The Person summer rose who is flawed in ways that shock and distress ruby, and an explicitly-stated "who knows why?" in reference to summer’s flaws and her final mission.

shrug. it’s just the explanation that makes the most sense taking into account all the clues that we have.

as a further point of interest, neither summer nor tai have an obvious ozian allusion (in contrast to qrow and raven who are the scareqrow and the woggle bug respectively)… which by process of elimination with the cast of marvelous land of oz, probably makes them general jinjur and jellia jamb. jinjur conquers the emerald city and occupies it for most of the story; jellia is a serving girl in the emerald city’s palace who remains with jinjur until very near the end when she gets roped into mombi’s schemes. which tracks with the idea that summer is holding beacon on salem’s behalf and tai is…there.

and i am kicking myself for not clocking tai-as-jellia until B4 dropped because it’s so. obvious. in hindsight. lol

(bonus first time reaction to 7.2

because it made me snort)

[citadelofmythoughts]

I’m sorry for making so many posts about this but I’ve been rewatching RWBY before my CR sub craps out so Sun and his relationship with Blake has been on my mind.

I’m surprised I’ve never asked this question before....

What were people expecting out of it? Sun being a tag-along from V4 onward and abandoning his team? Blake pining over him during V6-9? Blake leaving Team RWBY to hang around with him? 

What? What exactly did they expect out of a romance with one of the four main characters?

[n1blakelover]

rewatching rwby and on v4 rn and yang’s storyline here has always been my favorite. even seeing her in the worst state we’ve ever seen her, i can’t help but smile every time she’s on screen bc it’s just… SUCH a good storyline. her arm storyline? her talk with tai, port, and oobleck? her pining for blake? her curiosity about raven? overcoming her fear of adam? finally going after ruby? her finally putting on the prosthetic arm and training with it? literally all of it is so so good and in my opinion, the most interesting storyline of the volume.

[moonsandstar-s]

i’m going through my annual rwby re-obsession

do i start my rewatch with the trailers or do i skip straight to where shit gets real? (v4 for me)