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In your rewrite, is Raven the type of person who has the "suffering makes you stronger" mindset and would enable her daughter get traumatized as a punishment for turning down her warning (during the fall of beacon), so she would learn from it?
I'd say Raven is very willing to have people go through specific experiences, but there are limits to what she'd allow people she cares about to go through.
I do not think Raven wanted Yang to get traumatized. It's why I had inserted Yang and Raven's V2 end scene into having happened just before Yang found Blake and Adam during the Fall. If anything, Raven could have taken Yang away right then—had Yang not chosen to chase after Blake instead.
But! At the same time, for Raven, Yang's survival of that experience is what matters—she sees potential in Yang, but she also thinks of Yang's mindset till now as weak/disgusting, and whether Yang can bounce back defines her worth as a person for Raven.
There are multiple angles on why Raven decided to contact her, but Raven is clearly willing to provide Yang with what she thinks are the means to improve—Raven has waited a while to see whether the alternative (staying home) is helpful or not.
However, a lot of that help also seems two-sided. Raven, to me, feels like a multitasker, juggling multiple agendas at once. So while she has provided tools for Yang to rebuild herself after a tragedy, there's also an aspect to that help that benefits her.
At the same time, I think Raven can empathize with where Yang is in her life right now—not knowing who to trust, not knowing what to do with her life, or which path to take as she feels like everything has been pointless and led her nowhere. Raven has been there, done that—and if her daughter can stand back up, then she's worthy of her attention.
That said, Raven does seem willing to push Yang through dangerous experiences, as indicated by what we know of portal side effects in the rewrite—meaning she is willing to test Yang in ways that could have been extremely harmful to her and would make her allies like Clair frown.
#rwby#rwby au#rwby rewrite#yang xiao long#rwbyr stuff mine#rwbyr asks#Raven Branwen#rwbyr meta stuff mine
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One of many things I have been figuring out is how different Kingdoms might handle their legends about monsters, since Grimm would be intrinsically linked to concepts like folklore and fairytales of this land, having been there for as long as humanity remembers.
Would creatures of Grimm replace the traditional monsters in the stories? Would there be cryptid creatures of Grimm whose existence hasn't been confirmed but lone Huntsmen would swear they exist?
One thing I've decided is that this version of Remnant would contain many sightings and stories of Grimm that could be considered apocryphal—types of creatures never scientifically confirmed to even exist. Over the years, Huntsmen and civilians alike would have shared rumors, written entire books, etc, about the experiences that nobody can confirm having happened.
The important aspect, however, is how contradictory and ambiguous legends and rumors can be.
For example, one such piece of literature is "Die Wilde Jagd" (The Wild Hunt)—an autobiographical book by one of Vale's Huntsmen centuries ago, where he chronicles his journeys chasing after a folk legend, gathering tales, as well as chronicling encounters that he claims have happened. As the book is old old, it's impossible to confirm or deny the authenticity of what the author wrote about—he could have actually faced those creatures, he could have embellished confrontations with "usual" Grimm, or he could have thought all of the stories up while drunk in some wayside tavern.
Let's say characters come upon something they do not understand—more literature-focused ones would know the stories they would have read or at least heard about, but how do they know any of that information is "useful" or fit? They can only guess.
One of my pet peeves with the show will always be how MilesWBY era handled one of its better ideas, The Apathy—it's just too neat of a conclusion that takes away any mystique of this creepy and unique and weird type of creature of Grimm—they are built up as a threat, and then Ruby plot-eyes them, and it's all solved without any doubt. Meanwhile, for me, that threat was always something that felt like it shouldn't have neatly "concluded"—a threat where the characters should have been left guessing if they had defeated the Apathy or if these things are still out there and that maybe there's no real way to "defeat" them, that some things in this world just are and should be avoided at all costs. And then the show doubled down on that by having Ruby randomly be able to defeat one of the Goliaths.
Neatly concluding creatures of Grimm as a threat doesn't work. Some of the STRONGEST moments of the early RWBY that are stuck in my mind are when Ruby first sees the Goliaths and then in V3 when that thing bursts out of the mountain. The show pulls back a curtain and shows just how much unknown there is in the world and how out of their depth humanity might be.
It's important to leave ambiguity AND uncertainty in the concept behind The Creatures of Grimm. It's supposed to be an endless, eternal, ever-changing, ever-evolving threat that has always been there and will likely always be there.
And tying that into the bigger theme of how ambiguous, twisted, and incomplete myths and legends of the world are just makes sense. Even in the show, it would have made more sense to do that if Salem's very existence was supposed to be this big secret that would have thrown the population into chaos when revealed.
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I have got a few asks regarding the Crown and whether I would use them in the rewrite. I answered a few before, but since I don't want to keep doing that, I thought I would put out an answer that I can sort of link to any time it comes up.
Short answer: I am not going to use the Crown. I don't like the concept; I don't like what I've seen of the novel it comes from, and it clashes with the set-up for Vacuo I am using.
Long answer: I am not going to use the Crown, specifically.
It doesn't mean that the concept of something similar won't be there in the story where it makes sense.
Since I'm not doing anything like the brother gods nonsense, what fills that space is the dynamics between the Kingdoms and the clashing viewpoints of various characters and groups. There won't be a clean break point to place characters into groups of "The Good Guys" and "The Salem Team," because Salem's motivations differ too.
One of the bigger inspirations for the rewrite for me has been the Divide song, which I always felt perfectly lays out Salem's motivations and MO, which the show never quite made use of.
So one of the questions I asked myself when starting putting together world-building for this years ago was—how would Fall of Beacon affect the Kingdoms, and how would various forces standing together fracture, now that the unifying force that kept the world order together (Ozpin) is out of the picture and what happened at Vale serves as an inciting incident for so many things?
Figuring out the conflicts that could flare up because of what happened was the first step to take.
Long story short: it doesn't make sense to use the Crown when there's already factions and interests that feel akin to that.
There's already some of the setup for that with Mistral's writing focus in the Rewrite being the lingering contempt for post-Great-War times and nostalgia for the monarchy.
But even beyond Mistral, the way I see Fall of Beacon is as sort of a green light for all powers that be to move towards their goals—the kind of mentality where various people in power might go, "Maybe the old order doesn't work?" and begin to act.
And in turn that works as a vehicle to tell the story about humanity's nature and how it ties to the debate that's going on between Ozpin and Salem.
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One of the hardest parts is figuring out how to make locations in each Kingdom differ from each other.
With Mistral, I decided to define each place via specific ideas.
The City of Argus is synonymous with change - construction sites and abandoned run-down districts, streets crowded with people, mismatched architecture, and dozens of little shops, bars, businesses, and warehouses.
The City of Nemea has a strict district structure, with everything leading to its center. Gates, gates, gates. There's still an intentional similarity to Argus, though, as Nemea holds plenty of influence in its creation.
Rain permeates the City of Youdu - pouring upon layers filled with buildings down to the intricate sewer system that goes deeper into the Old City.
Kulhara is lots of dirt. Everyone knows everybody to the point that it's more like a really oversized village.
Everything in-between the notable locations is either swamps, forests, a few shacks of terrified people, or outright ruins of abandoned cities/villages that were never rebuilt.
Vale is mainly City of Vale and then everything beyond it.
The City of Vale is a mess - with the thing atop the tower being visible from almost any point of the city. It's also divided but in a different way than Nemea - each remaining district has its own community and power structure and rules.
The mainland locations beyond are damp, shrouded by fog and a sense of stillness (so basically Maine).
Patch is basically rural countryside intermixed with forests.
Then, from that, places in Atlas and Vacuo (and Menagerie) also have to feel different enough.
And there are other locations - mentioned and unmentioned -that I will eventually get into.
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