#taiyin

[ivycrowned]

You know those moments where your hands are guided by the art muse and everything aligns? I had to pause as I was drawing this to clap like an excited seal, I'm so happy with how it came out. This is a scene from last night's dnd game, where my PC, Rowan playfully threatened (and made good on it) to teach @flailingdoodle's Taiyin how to dance. It was an adorable moment and I love them.

[ngocngadotnet]

The Ji Yue Tong Liang constellation consists of the four stars #TianJi, #TaiYin, #TianTong, and #TianLiang aligned in the Destiny, Wealth, and Career palaces. All four stars must appear together.

Details at https://ngocnga.net/zi-wei-dou-shu-constellation-ji-yue-tong-liang/?utm_source=tumblr&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ziwei

[journeytothewestresearch]

Hey so I wanted to ask more about Taiyin Xing? Any time I try to find info about her there’s nothing. So if there’s any more info you can give, it will be greatly appreciated.

I only know a little bit about Taiyin xingjun (太陰星君, "Supreme Yin Star Lord; i.e. the Moon). In modern Chinese folk religion, she is commonly worshipped alongside Taiyang xingjun (太陽星君, "Supreme Yang Star Lord; i.e. the Sun).

Both are part of the “Eleven Luminaries” (Shiyi yao, 十一曜). These include the “Nine Planets” (Sk: Navagraha; Ch: Jiuyao, 九曜, “Nine Luminaries”) of Hindu astrology, namely the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and Rahu and Ketu, as well as two shadowy planets from East Asian astrology called Yuebei xing (月孛星, "Moon Comet Star") and Ziqi (紫��/紫炁, “Purple Mist”).

Here is a picture of Taiyin xingjun from the Ink Treasure of Wu Daozi (Daozi mobao, 道子墨寶, c. 13th-century). See this article for citations.

Some worshipers believe that she is the moon goddess Chang'e (嫦娥), but this is not universal. In fact, Journey to the West (Xiyouji, 西遊記, 1592) treats them as two different deities. They both appear during Monkey's battle with the rabbit spirit in chapter 95:

See volume four here.

At the end of the slightly later Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi, ��神演義, c. 1620), Empress Jiang, the dead wife of the evil Shang Emperor, is deified as Taiyin xing.

See volume four of the combined PDF here.

Here is a Xixia dynasty painting of Taiyin xingjun. I really like it.

Found on Chinese Wikipedia.

[mysticmonkie]

Busy design but she'd only ever appear in flashbacks cuz she's "dead"

[vermillioncourt-if]

Since you brought it up let’s get some facts about the other consorts and if not too much to ask a memory they favor with MC (in consort xings case a memory where MC outplayed her) ?

Hello! ❤️ I'd be happy to answer this! I'll only write the memory bit for Consort Xing, though, since she and Consort Huo have had a lot of attention so far!

Queen He Taiyin

- She's the King's childhood friend. Not in a similar sense as Consort Huo and the King, but more along the line of their families being allied together.

- Under her guidance, city infrastructure and policies for the poor have expanded rapidly. She is one of the few Queens ever to decide to be a part of helping/ruling the kingdom somehow! She has also taken Kutuo under her wing, as she (Kutuo) has expressed interest in city infrastructure and architecture.

- If she ever were to die early, somehow, and the King wishes to remarry one of his current consorts, Taiyin made it VERY clear that he's NOT allowed to make Consort Xing queen.

Memory with MC - One of her favored memories of MC is when they were little. She was walking down the halls of the palace when a little bump under a cloak came stumbling down the hall towards her. She helped them out of the giant cloak, but thought it was so cute how they just wandered around with a cloak on their head.

First Consort Dou Rizhe

- Rizhe is from a prominent noble family of the Xiatian Kingdom. Her family, more or less, "sold" her to the position. She never liked court environments nor did she ever want to be consort, but to get ahead, her family had her put as a Consort.

- She excels at art and poetry. Rizhe is a very good artist and poet, she just doesn't have enough courage to share her works publicly. Her palace has many of her works hung up or displayed.

- Rizhe has a suspicion that the "illness" she caught after having Tuojiu that left her barren/infertile wasn't an "illness" but something else. All of her efforts to figure this out lead nowhere, though.

Memory with MC - Rizhe's doesn't leave her palace very often, so her interactions with the other Consorts' children are fairly limited. One of her favored memories of MC is when they're a child and just discovered she knows how to paint. They would leave flowers (and a few weeds) for her in front of her palace so she would have something to paint. A decent amount of Rizhe's paintings have flowers as the subject.

Third Consort Re Hanshang

- Hanshang, like Consort Dou, is from a prominent noble family of the Xiatian Kingdom. Unlike Consort Dou, though, Hanshang willingly went into the palace, despite not really having any desire to be a consort or the queen.

- As mentioned before in a post about pets, Hanshang has a very old and very grumpy cat that has scratched/bit many palace workers and even some officials. There have been attempts made to get rid of the cat, but it always finds its way back or all methods have failed to get rid of it.

- Hanshang is a well-read and well-versed person. Her family encouraged all of her interests, whether they were traditionally "feminine" or not. This was practically unheard of at the time, but it has made her a very well-rounded person.

Memory with MC - One of her favored memories with MC is when she took them out to the city for their 13th birthday. Consort Huo was wrapped up with taking care of Liangxu so Hanshang helped her out. The two of them went shopping, watched some street performers and even caught a small firework show, since it was the beginning of a festival season. She thought it was such a nice day out.

Fourth Consort Xing Fangguo

Memory with MC - One time when MC outplayed her is at one of their sibling's birthdays when MC was younger and Fangguo was more direct with her tactics to try to get rid of competition. Fangguo had decided to poison one of the desserts for the celebration, MC didn't do it on purpose, but they did end up breaking the vial of poison, as they were rushing around the palace and bumped into her, causing her to trip and fall.

[imkarkalicious]

mooore (semi-)recent rp art !! i love using purple in panels

[thatoneaspect]

liberty was invited to the party but they lost the invitation.

[chonggen]

I’m sorry for the information error, cuz I didn’t play the Black Myth Wukong and I’m lazy to do the research. She is Taiyin Star Lord, not Chang’e, thanks for @unstuckmusturd’s tip.

Chang’e is sooo beautiful :) I’m Zhu Bajie now

So I draw her fan art XD

[the-monkey-ruler]

Do you know all of Sun Wukong's children? I understand that King Paramita is Lady Iron Fan's son with Wukong(?). and that Yuebei Xing and her brothers are maybe children of Taiyin xing (the theory). Obviously I understand that they are not like something canon, however, it is interesting to know about them.

I can’t say that I do know every iteration that Wukong has kids but I can try to make a list of what I got at least! There are the non-canon kids of Sun Wukong that I know of at least right now. I'm sure there is more but these are the ones I know from media at the moment.

A Supplement to the Journey to the West (1640) 西遊補 (this is just a dream) Paramita 4 other unnamed sons

Journey to the South (1570) 南遊記 (unnamed partner) Jidu Luohou Yuebei Xing

Later Journey to the West (17th-century) 後西遊記 Sun Luzhen (adopted)

Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (2000) マーヴル VS. カプコン 2 Sonson

Westward Journey Online II (2002) 大话西游2经典版 Mind Monkey (unintentionally contributed to new Rock Monkey)

High School DxD (2008) ハイスクールD×D Bikou

The Monkey King's Daughter (2009) Meilin Cheng

New Journey to the West: Unexpected Jingxi (2017) 新西游之意外晶喜 Unborn child (with White Bone spirit) (also might not be his)

Adventure in Journey to the West (2018)大闹西游 Sun Wuyuan (disciple, but like it's obvious he adopted)

God of High School (2020) 갓 오브 하이 스쿨 Park Taejin (adopted)

DC Festival of Heroes: The Asian Superhero Celebration #1 (2021) Sun Marcus (hair clone treated as child)

The Chronicles of the Ranger (2021) 游侠战纪 Hou Mo (stone monkey, hard to say if direct descendant)

Monkey King (2022) 悟·空 Sun Xiaosheng (disciple, might be adopted)

American Born Chinese(2023) Sun Wei-Chen

Honorary mentions:

Monkey King: Hero Is Back (2015) 西遊記之大聖歸來 Jiang Liu'er Anan

My Dad is Monkey King (2021) 我的爸爸是齐天大圣 Li Yiyi (this is more symbolic than real dad)

Lego Monkie Kid (2021) 悟空小侠 Qi Xiaotian / MK (stone monkey, possibly related)

So this is NOT ALL of the children I'm sure but I'm sure as I keep posting media that the list with increase!

[jttwconfessions]

The whole Taiyin Xing x Wukong theory is little funny in a way, like, she looked at him and possibly thought he was dad material…. She was right though.

[ivycrowned]

Aymeric Lucien and Taiyin having roof-time emotions

[ngocngadotnet]

Q: Does your #natalchart favor #dating older women? 👵❤️👨

A: Men with #TaiYin in the Destiny Palace often don't resist active signals of love from women and are likely to be courted by cougars.

Details and other #majorstars at https://ngocnga.net/zi-wei-dou-shu-qa-does-your-natal-chart-favor-dating-older-women/?utm_source=tumblr&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ziwei

[timeturner-jay]

The Mother of Sun Wukong’s Children in Journey to the South

In my previous articles “The Monkey King’s Children” and “Yuebei xing, Daughter of the Monkey King”, I revealed that Sun Wukong has three children in Journey to the South (Nanyouji, 南遊記, 17th-century). These include sons Jidu (奇都) and Luohou (羅猴) and daughter Yuebei Xing (月孛星). The novel never explains who the mother is, but an educated guess can be made for the purposes of fan fiction.

Each child is based on one of three lunar deities appearing among the “Eleven Luminaries” (Shiyi yao, 十一曜), which comprises planetary gods from both South and East Asian astrology. The specific deities are:

Jidu (奇都, “Ketu”) = Represents the southern (descending) lunar node, or the point where the moon crosses the earth’s orbit around the sun. Associated with eclipses.

Luohou (羅睺, “Rahu”) = Represents the northern (ascending) lunar node. Also associated with eclipses.

Yuebei Xing (月孛星, “Moon Comet Star”) = Represents the lunar apogee, or the furthest point in the moon’s orbit.

Given their close connection to the night time celestial body, it would make sense for the mother to be Taiyin xing (太陰星, “Great Yin Star”), goddess of the moon from the Eleven Luminaries.

A detail of Taiyin xing from a Chinese depiction of the Eleven Luminaries (larger version). A full version of the drawing appears in the Ink Treasure of Wu Daozi (Daozi mobao, 道子墨寶, c. 13th-century) (larger version). She is the fourth person from the left on the top row.

[quitealotofsodapop]

The hilarious thing is Wukong and Macaque probably don't know what to expect with MK's birth either since A) born were born in relative isolation with no one there (i mean, Wukong had the monkeys and Macaque had Chang'e but presumably neither party knew there was gonna be a baby stone monkey in that rock) and B) MK is weird even by stone monkey standards due to the complications of his 'conception'

Referencing: a very confused midwife Sandy.

In theory they really did expect MK/Xiaotian aka "The Egg" to have arrived as a Stone Egg. But the major difference is that he's only cooking for the standard few months (exact number unknow cus shorter wild monkey gestation vs longer demonic), while the more "natural" Stone Monkeys were born from eggs that sat around for hundreds, if not thousands of years absorbing the life energy around them. In Jttw Sun Wukong's egg is even mentioned to have sat within a "boulder womb" for that whole time.

Macaque is far more happy to have a "gross mortal" birth than to carry a literal boulder in his stomach for the next milennia. XD

MK/Xiaotian *started out* as a Stone Egg but ofc in the Au; his "shell" was damaged upon hitting Earth, necessitating the need for a new "boulder womb". Macaque and Wukong, being the only other of his kind present, we're the only candidates available for harboring him.

Not only that, but (in my au/hcs at least) Wukong was made by a creation goddess infamous for making beings out of rock/clay when she repaired Earth and the Heavens. Macaque in constrast was made by Taiyin Xingjun as she created the moon from the remnants of Theia. Very symbolic. MK/Xiaotian gets created by shadowpeach in a similar accident XD.

Also, Wukong would only really know that he came out of a rock unless somebody told him. Or he just saw the remnants of his shell and did the math. Chang'e def teases that Macaque is her "little moon omelet" even after so many years.

[vermillioncourt-if]

I want Huo to adopt Kutuo, she need a full therapy of maternal love

slfjskdjfk Kutuo probably does need therapy! Consort Xing isn't the best mother to her.

However, I will posit that Consort Huo isn't the only good mom of the group.

Consort Re and Queen He are also pretty good moms! Queen He is Kutuo's mentor, actually.

A decent amount of info on the Nan family can be found on the Side Characters page, so I do implore all of you guys to go read and look at that, if you haven't already!

No one's asked about the other wives yet, so they've flown under the radar. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[etruatcaelum]

On Summer Being a Faunus.

[Hat tip to @onlyheartaches, whose wolf Ruby headcanon is what got me thinking about this.]

Eglantine Vermeil, Summer’s father (and only grandson of the last King of Vale through his illegitimate daughter Sharon Vermeil), was a human with silver eyes. Her mother, Ginger Rose, was a Vacuan faunus whose parents, once slaves in the Mistrali occupation, had become crucial informants within Sharon’s network of spies during the Great War and became close personal friends to her afterward.

As was common practice under the occupation, both Ginger’s parents had been forcibly subjected to amputation of their ‘bestial’ traits by their Mistrali master; Ginger belonged to the first generation of fauni born into a world in which this vile practice was outlawed, not just in the newly-sovereign state of Vacuo, but in every country that ratified the Vytal Accords. For faunuskind, it was a period of both searing hope and the aftershocks of profound cultural trauma, and although many fauni chose to celebrate their newfound freedom and proudly display their true selves, many others felt safe only if they could pass for human.

The Rose family belonged to the latter category. Ginger’s most pronounced trait were the ears of a tanuki, the raccoon-dogs of Kuchinashi: possible to hide under a carefully-draped headscarf, and of a dusty auburn color close enough to her hair to blend in from a distance.

(While fauni generally have features corresponding to the local wildlife, this pattern is less pronounced in Vacuo—where an unusual proportion of native-born fauni instead have the features of Animan fauna, particularly animals endemic to the Palash region and the Taiyin Steppe. This is due in part to Mistrali settlers having brought their slaves with them to the Vacuan colonies, but mainly a result of the Ruakhian diaspora. Similarly, Menagerian-born fauni more often bear the features of wildlife found in the region whence their parents emigrated.)

Few people knew that Ginger Rose was a faunus, and throughout her life, she worked very hard to keep it that way. Eglantine and his mother were two of the only humans she ever trusted enough to show her ears, and she appears human in her only surviving photograph—a grainy group picture of the miners of Visage, taken just two years before the calamity.

Her daughter’s trait is even subtler: Summer’s eyes have a tapetum lucidum, visible in photos and when light hits her eyes at the right angle but otherwise almost impossible to discern. Indeed the only reason Summer knows she’s a faunus at all is because a medic happened to remark upon it during a routine check up, about a year after Visage collapsed: the month-long coma she suffered after that calamity had left her with almost no memories of her parents, and none of the other survivors had known Ginger to be anything but human.

Summer, nine years old at the time and a ward of the state—which in practice meant being a ward of Shade Academy, raised with minimal oversight by a medley of huntsmen and huntresses who largely treated her as they would have a trainee twice her real age—didn’t have any idea how to respond to this discovery and hated her eyes in any case, so for three more years, she simply shoved it to the back of her mind and tried not to think about it.

Then she enrolled at Oscuro Academy, twelve years old, and met Silvester Kellas: the stealth and infiltration instructor; a tall, severe black man with the striking honey-brown eyes of a desert cat. Summer had seen plenty of fauni living openly before, of course, but she’d never met another who bore animal eyes. His were more obvious than hers—the irises larger than a human��s, little of the whites visible, though humans who didn’t expect to see a faunus often took him to be one of their kind—and for that alone Summer felt drawn to him.

Sil noticed her eyes right away. (He’s always liked to say that infiltration begins with the art of noticing, and stealth is the ability to see what others do not.) He took a special interest in her, becoming her personal mentor—really, the closest thing Summer had to a parent.

Together, they pieced together a little of Summer’s family history. Identifying her fraternal grandmother as the late Sharon Vermeil was straightforward. Her maternal grandparents were trickier to find, and turned out to be deceased: Canton Rose had died only a few years after his daughter’s birth after a long struggle with illness, and his wife—a woman who’d renounced her Mistrali name after the Great War and called herself only Sorrel—had lived to be eighty-two before she passed away just six years earlier.

In the course of this investigation, Summer learnt what her mother’s animal had been; and hence, that she is, in all likelihood, canine herself too. Of course, with a trait as subtle as hers, there is no way to be certain what animal she takes after; and if not for Sil, she might have left it at that. Sil, however, encouraged her to choose an animal anyway. It was an important aspect of fauni culture, he told her, knowing what animal had marked one’s soul, and it didn’t really matter if she couldn’t empirically prove her answer, if it felt right.

After giving it some very serious philosophical consideration (as fourteen-year-olds do), Summer decided she had the eyes of a golden jackal, because she saw packs of them loping along the wadis during the wet season sometimes, and they were pretty. She’s a bit tongue-in-cheek about this identification nowadays, but she’s never changed her mind.

Unlike the Roses, Sil’s parents had never been enslaved; during the first conquest of Vacuo, centuries ago, their ancestors had fled north, crossing the Paludéen Strait to settle in the grimm-infested swamps of southern Alukah. Life in this wilderness was harsh, rife with constant danger—although (unbeknownst to the people desperate enough to call such a difficult land home) it would have been far worse for them had Salem not chosen to regard them as refugees seeking asylum and let them be—but they were free, and the grimm stymied Mistrali expansion into the region.

Though centuries passed, these scattered, stateless settlements never stopped considering themselves Vacuan, and when the Vacuans living under occupation on the mainland gathered themselves for rebellion and threw in their lot with Vale during the great war, the Alukite Vacuans leapt into the fray too.

(In the ‘World of Remnant’ spots, these were the settlements marked in red on the unnamed continent and the reason for the battles implied to have been fought on that continent during the Great War; all were ultimately lost to that conflict, but the people who’d lived there survived, returning to their ancestral homeland after Vacuo reclaimed its sovereignty.)

This had, naturally, given Sil a rather different outlook than those fauni whose parents and grandparents had been enslaved or survived the brutal persecution of Mistrali rule. He felt there was a time and a place for trumpeting pride in one’s non-human features, and a time and a place for being discreet, and of course it was important to know which was which; but the most important thing was not to define oneself by the perception of others.

He did his level best to impress that lesson upon Summer, with only marginal success: against his lone voice urging her to be curious about herself and make her own choices was an overwhelming tide of everyone else who saw a only a young warrior with silver eyes.

In the short term, the only thing Sil did manage to impart was his faith. He was a devout Faunalian: monotheistic worship of the God of Animals influenced by orthodox Draconism, with whose Light the Faunalian God had become heavily syncretized over the centuries. (The ‘Judgment of Faunus’ creation myth is a Faunalian tale.) Summer is more of a feast-days-and-the-Vigil type of Faunalian, not all that spiritual, but she keeps the tenets.

Going to Beacon ended up being tougher than Summer expected. There were way fewer fauni living in Vale than in Vacuo, and the culture was quite different: the faunus she’d known in Vacuo never kicked up any fuss about her being passing, but that was suddenly a problem. Didn’t matter that she could see in the dark or smell a grimm upwind from miles off. Didn’t matter how her pupils glowed in every photograph. Didn’t matter what god she worshipped. The type of human who went around snickering behind their hands at a little girl’s antlers or ‘accidentally’ grabbing tails left her alone, and in the eyes of a lot of Valean fauni, that made her materially not much different from a human faker.

Which struck Summer as really unfair, because it wasn’t like she didn’t collect uncomfortable looks and rude comments from humans when they noticed—half the time there’d be dark grumbling about her ‘tricking’ people—and it wasn’t like humans didn’t also get weird about it when she disclosed upfront, or else just outright start treating her worse than they did other humans. Even the headmaster had given her an odd, evaluating look that she did not like at all, the first time he caught the eyeshine.

Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. She felt isolated, stuck in between two kinds of people who didn’t want her… and it didn’t take her long to decide she’d keep the faunus thing to herself and go all in on silver-eyed warrior. That, at least, no one could argue didn’t really count. Summer had been honing her mastery over the light since she was ten, and she was pretty damn good at it.

Even that was an imperfect solution, because it didn’t fix anything with her team.

First problem: Summer had mortally offended the Branwen twins on day one by getting in the way of their scheme to partner up with each other during initiation. Raven’s semblance was a lot weaker, back then; her bond to Qrow let her know where he was and helped her find the fastest possible route to get to him, but she didn’t have her portals yet. The twins had planned for Qrow to find a hiding place and sit tight while Raven slipped unseen through the forest. Both of them had been scouting for the tribe for years—avoiding their classmates in the forest was a cakewalk.

Except for little miss Blinding Mirror, who just had to be using her semblance to make herself completely imperceptible until Raven walked straight into her. So, Summer hadn’t gotten off on a good foot with the twins to begin with… and then about two weeks after the initiation ended, they’d realized she was a faunus.

Neither of them were exactly okay with that, as it turned out. Tight-lipped though they were about where they’d come from beyond “rural” and “west of Mistral,” Summer figured out pretty quick that they were from the Animan heartland: a vast agricultural region dotted with free towns and family farms, notorious for being the kind of place where faunuskind was violently unwelcome.

Qrow could’ve been worse. He didn’t get outright hostile, at least, just kept his distance and didn’t talk to her much—not that he’d been all that chatty before, either. But Raven.

Raven didn’t speak a single word to Summer for the remainder of that semester and half the next, just alternated between staring her down with simmering disdain and acting like she didn’t even exist. If she had to communicate with Summer, she addressed Taiyang instead—even going as far as leaving the room to fetch him if he wasn’t around, sometimes—and flatly pretended not to hear anything Summer said to her until he repeated it.

Summer could’ve handled that. It was degrading and infuriating and hurtful, sure, but, whatever—the twins couldn’t help how they were raised, and she thought Qrow seemed kind of uncomfortable with way his sister was acting, once he’d had some time to process the initial shock of “wait, you’re one of those animals!?”—at first, Summer figured she’d tough it out for a couple weeks, maybe catch Qrow alone for a serious talk about how not okay this was. Clobber them in training a few times if she had to. She wasn’t about to let it get under her skin.

Only.

Second problem: Taiyang actually went along with it.

He had… not made a great first impression, even before the faunus thing became an issue. Taiyang Xiao Long was a Vale kid from the affluent part of town who’d attended the prestigious (and pricey) Pharos Academy, and it showed; Summer, who had never in her life met someone who owned so much stuff, felt herself bristling from the jump out of pure knee-jerk Vacuan dislike of Foreigners With Money. (Not that Taiyang was rich-rich, but like—his dad owned a car.)

Then there was the weird prank he’d pulled on the twins for their first day of classes, mixing up their uniforms. Summer hadn’t thought much of it when Raven skulked into the classroom wearing trousers—lots of girls preferred pants, whatever, who cared—but she had seen the flicker of discomfort on Qrow’s face when Tai and the rest of the Pharos boys started laughing at him in his skirt, before he’d thrown on a mask of cool indifference and slid into a desk beside his sister.

But still—Tai wasn’t some bully. He was friendly enough, an easy go-with-the-flow type of guy, just… kind of stupid sometimes. Finding out Summer was a faunus hadn’t fazed him a bit; he thought her flashy eyes were cool, and when he made a dumb comment about his semblance all she’d had to do was give him a withering look before he coughed and went okay, yeah, I hear myself—not cool, sorry.

So Summer could not understand why he didn’t get that playing interpreter for Raven was also a fucking problem. He just wanted to help, he said. It was less annoying than the alternative, he said. He felt bad for her when Raven ignored her, he said. After the fourth conversation that went nowhere and changed nothing, Summer gave up and resolved to just grin and bear it until Raven got the fuck over it—because surely, surely Raven wouldn’t keep it up once they got out in the field for the first time, come next semester.

Raven kept it up once they got out in the field.

Their first mission as a team would have been uneventful had Summer not, after asking who wanted to take first watch while they camped for the night and hearing Taiyang dutifully repeat it to Raven, gone ballistic.

Most people, in the heat of the moment, probably would have turned around and started shouting. But the Branwens weren’t the only ones on Team STRQ who spent their childhoods at war—Summer did, too. She’d been trained, not parented, and the first time her notional guardians put her up against real grimm in the wasteland, she was only ten years old. The real difference between her and Raven was what they’d been taught to kill.

So when she lost her temper then, she just drew her axe and lunged.

Raven really did not expect her to do that. In her estimation, Summer was a pathetic, freakish little weakling who whined about people not being nice enough to her and had probably never been in a real fight before in her life—pitiful creatures like that weren’t supposed to just go for the kill with no warning.

The first blow ruptured her aura and knocked her on her ass. The second would’ve taken her head clean off if her own battle instincts hadn’t kicked in fast enough to deflect it with her gauntlet, and that was the moment Raven knew that she had, to put it lightly, made a critical miscalculation; because she looked Summer Rose in the eye and felt the force of that blow break her wrist through the gauntlet and understood, beyond any doubt, that this girl was either going to kill her or die trying.

Of course, Raven wasn’t about to make that easy for her; Qrow wasn’t about to sit idly by and let his sister get hacked to death either. Taiyang tried for about half a second to pull Summer away from Raven and de-escalate the situation before finding that his options were to get out of the way or get minced.

Being the only normal person on the team, he panicked briefly, then bolted to get their supervising huntsman, who’d gone a way ahead of them to establish an outer perimeter.

It took him perhaps one minute to reach their huntsman, half another to babble out an explanation, and a minute more for both to race back to where Summer was now furiously holding her own against both twins.

The huntsman waded into the fray and broke up the fight with relative ease… and it was right about then that the grimm turned up.

Quite a lot of grimm.

Whether because of the intensity of the fight or simple bad luck, they’d lured in a pack almost a hundred strong—way more than one huntsman and a quartet of first-year students could’ve dealt with even if three of them hadn’t just spent the last few minutes doing their level best to kill each other. If they’d been any other team except Summer’s, the night would have come to a tragic end.

As it was, Summer glanced over her shoulder, snarled, and evaporated every single grimm in her sight with a single glare.

Their supervising huntsman hauled them back to Beacon after that and marched them straight up to the headmaster’s office. Taiyang was fuming, sure they were all going to get kicked out; Raven quietly nursing a broken wrist and, mainly, trying to work out what the fuck Summer had done with her eyes, and how, and if that was some sort of Faunus Thing or if their team leader had two semblances somehow or what; Summer was cool as a cucumber.

She’d met Ozpin personally, the night before the initiation. He had wanted to know about her eyes, if she knew how to use them. Summer knew a man in search of a weapon when she saw one; she had a feeling that she, at least, wouldn’t get worse than a slap on the wrist.

She was right.

Ozpin asked her to explain. She did, sparing no detail in describing the semester-and-a-half of abysmal treatment that had pushed her until she snapped. The other three received a lengthy dressing down, gentle in tone but merciless in taking each of them to task for behaving in such a disappointing manner (Ozpin was unnervingly good at that, Summer thought, way better than any of the teachers at Oscuro), and—as she anticipated—a symbolic slap on the wrist for her, for not going to a professor for help long since.

Then Ozpin sent them all to bed, with a steely warning that he expected better of them all from now on, and that was that.

Raven cut the bullshit (whether because she was a little bit scared of Summer now, or because she genuinely respected that Summer had tried to kill her, Summer wasn’t… entirely sure, but, whatever); both twins seemed to act as though Summer had passed some sort trial proving that she was alright, actually. Taiyang made it his singular mission to teach his three clearly deranged teammates how to Be Normal, with mixed results. Nobody apologized to anyone for anything, but they did crush it at the Vytal Festival a few months later, so really, it all worked out fine.

The Faunus Rebellion broke out in Mistral during their second year at Beacon, and raged for the next four years; by their final year, Team STRQ had been inducted into Ozpin’s inner circle, and he sent them off to Kuchinashi the minute they graduated to bolster the counter-insurgency.

Summer did not… feel great about that, but at the time, she trusted Ozpin’s suspicion that Salem had stirred up the rebellion to advance some nefarious end.

After that war ended, they went back to Vale. Summer still didn’t feel at home there, but thinking of going back to Vacuo just made her feel bad, for reasons she couldn’t yet articulate. Finding community with other fauni in Vale didn’t appeal, not after the way she’d been treated by the handful of other fauni at Beacon; and human attitudes sure hadn’t gotten any better in reaction to the rebellion on the other side of the world. So she stuck with her team, who’d become her family, and the rest of Ozpin’s most trusted colleagues, and the Vale Huntsman Guild, where her silver eyes had enough heft for her peers—even the ones who never failed to find a polite reason not to like any other faunus—to pretend they didn’t see the eyeshine.

None of it felt great, but what can you do?

In the present,

Summer’s a lot more comfortable in her skin than she was in her early twenties, working for Ozpin, and that includes her eyes. It took her a long time and a lot of work to get herself to a point of feeling like ‘silver eyes’ and ‘faunus eyes’ are features that can coexist without being in competition, or as if one negates the other, but she did get there. She doesn’t bother telling people she’s a faunus these days, and has zero patience for people who make a thing of it if they notice.

She’s aware of most of the particulars of Salem’s historical relationship to the faunus. The God of Animals Summer worships, at least notionally, as a mostly-secular Faunalian holds very little resemblance to Salem and no relation to her in Summer’s view. She has referred to Salem as ‘her goddess’ exactly once, as a joke, and Salem was so sarcastic about it that Summer felt obliged to promise never to do that again.

Unless otherwise discussed (and obviously, not applicable to Ann’s Ruby), I’ll default to Ruby having been born apparently human with no obvious visible trait and leave it at that—in the case of Ruby not being visibly a faunus, Tai would not tell her that she is or might be, and he’d ask Qrow to do the same.

In his mind this is a way to protect her from the discrimination she’d face if she identified herself as a faunus: after all, hey, if she doesn’t know and nobody can tell by looking at her, that’s basically the same thing as being human… right? Practically speaking?

(<- how to get defenestrated by your ex wife in one easy step!)

Otherwise, if Ruby has a visible trait, obviously that can’t be hidden from her, but Tai would be kind of… uncomfortable. Not in a bigoted way exactly—he is legitimately supportive of faunus rights and gets along fine with fauni in general, and while he might make an out of pocket jokey remark now and then, there’s not anything deeper there than him being just… the type of guy who means well but doesn’t spend a lot of time reflecting or thinking about what he says, and grew up in a pretty homogenous environment. But… because of that, he’d feel way, way out of his depth as the single parent to a faunus child. Knowing she’ll be discriminated against for what she is, and there’s all this cultural stuff Summer could have shared with her that he doesn’t really know anything about… he’d find that overwhelming even under the best circumstances, and pretty much impossible in the midst of his depression after Summer disappeared.

So he’d tend to be just… awkward about it, and a bit reluctant to acknowledge her trait unless she specifically brought it up.

(Summer and Raven did end up becoming really close after Summer beat the shit out of her, and Raven’s long since left the vile attitudes about faunuskind in the past—for whatever ‘the bandits who raided your town are equal opportunity killers and thieves!’ is worth, which isn’t much. Details pertaining to Qrow here are all flexible, obviously, since I don’t write him.)