#sight and reflection are recurring symbols in weiss’s songs etc

[bestworstcase]

I saw your post on the V7 intro and YEAH. IT BOTHERS ME TOO.

I’m an avid listener of the rwby soundtracks. And it was just so weird to have Trust Love, something so up beat and fun be the opening to the volume that tail spins into oblivion.

The lyrics are clear tho.

“Trust love and open up your eyes. The truth is there but sometimes in disguise.”

“When we trust in love an open up our eyes.”

“Instead your counting on that second sight”

ITS ABOUT THE EYES. ITS ALWAYS ABOUT THE EYES with Rwby. And while the opening is significant to some degree for V7. It actually feels more like it’s Foreshadowing v9.

Maybe it’s too much of a stretch. But if you really pay attention to the lyrics. Trust love is about believing and trusting yourself. Trusting your gut. In order to do the right thing. There’s a lot of self reflection involved. Which is supposed to be 9s core theme. And sure maybe it’s coincidently but. There’s something about that song that’s just a little too whimsical. And little too on the nose for kids who were dragged into a seemingly endless war and want to be whisked away or written into a fairy tail so all their problems could disappear. And v9 comes in and subverts that

hgjfjbd i promise u i PROMISE “trust love is foreshadowing for team rwby v9 arcs that hasn’t come due yet” is far less of a stretch than mine (and also tbh, i think probably the take i would buy most out of the thoughts that have been shared so far on the grounds of it providing a reason for the tonal dissonance that makes sense to me). song abt rejecting fantasy and embracing, trusting what’s real being the only way forward followed by a volume where the kids get chucked into a literal fairytale world and have to escape is also, very rwby and the v8 opening sequence also pretty overtly gestures at v9 fairytale stuff (happy ever after/happy? never again) so like. . . yeah.

the thing is like?? i didn’t blink twice at trust love at first, because a) it was building from a pretty strong trend of openers getting more and more hopeful and upbeat from v4 onwards, and b) it came right on the heels of v6 ending on this triumphant beat of ruby intentionally activating her eyes for the first time by thinking about her loved ones, past and present. plus, as @habitual-shrimp summarized nicely in her rb, there’s a lot of “trust in love or give in to fear” arcs happening in v7, making trust love and fear logical bookends for the volume despite the…weird… tone thing.

BUT THEN

i made the mistake of paying attention to the lyrics a while back and my horrible gremlin brain zeroed in on this verse like a fucking shark detecting blood in the water: “if you could only open up a door/spread your wings and fly away from here/write yourself into a fairytale/all your problems would just disappear” and went oh that’s very specific imagery that evokes a very specific pair of characters doesn’t it AND THEN i was like wait a minute this is a song exhorting its subject to open their eyes, stop hiding, stop pretending, stop retreating into fantasy to cope with utter despair because no matter how dark it seems and no matter how many lies might obscure it the plain truth is that what they truly want is right in front of them staring them in the face if only they could stop burying themselves in fairytales and SEE CLEARLY for once—(at this point i went Oh No because this was a whole train wreck of a thought and yet)—it is. in short. a song in which the speaker urges the subject to let go of a metaphorical blindness so they can save themself by seeing their love aaand that is how i accidentally slammed myself face first into “turn love is a salem song playing conceptually with the blinding of rapunzel’s prince and eventual restoration of his sight by her tears” and now i CAN’T UNHEAR IT

it’s got coherent lyrical parallels to both sacrifice and until the end literally just kill me

it’s the opener for the volume in which ozpin is absent for 95% of the runtime because he’s sunk into the absolute depths of utter despair only to drag himself back up at the very end for a pensive, introspective, emotionally honest monologue on the subject of fear with until the end played under it in the exact moment of salem’s arrival in atlas!!!

hfghfns and like objectively this is Not What The Song Is (right?? it can’t be?) and if trust love weren’t so tonally perpendicular to its volume i probably wouldn’t be like “…UNLESS??” but it is and i am because it’s already weird why not?? read it as a deliberately discordant commentary on ozpin’s critical failures wrt salem and how the consequences of those failures have metastasized into retreating so far into denial and lies, insulating himself so thoroughly in the comforting simplicity of fairytales, that even he can’t really tell what’s true and what isn’t anymore, about her or about himself?? it’s NOT like his terrified refusal to engage with salem as a person which he passed down to the current generation as an inability to even conceive of brokering peace with the unbeatable enemy as a possibility at all is their biggest obstacle or anything except OH WAIT IT IS!!

😵‍💫

anyway when i’m not preoccupied with being completely out of my mind about this song i figure it’s probably? maybe?? meant as a complement to for every life—the thematic and emotional fulcrum of the atlas arc is the realization of the ideological struggle between hope and fear, so trust love exemplifies pure hope just as for every life exemplifies pure, bleak despair? which in fairness, i guess, to my deranged brain, WOULD make sense of salem and oz having this presence in them akin to the presence they have in this will be the day and when it falls; in that v1/v3 they were the narrators and in v7/v8 they are the symbolic harbingers of hope (ozpin’s return in 7.13 marks an abrupt emotional about-face towards courage in the face of dire circumstances) and fear (salem’s arrival—well, you know). but hhhhhhhhhHHHHH