#that doesn't mean they can't be there for ruby and try to understand her own sorrow and loneliness

[misstrashchan]

Mmmmm been having some thoughts on Ruby and Weiss rn

Ruby is set up to be foiled to Alyx, both in the opening, trying to retrace her footsteps in her story in the first couple of episodes, picking up Alyx's knife at the blacksmith's:

And in the latest episode, her lashing out being met with her intepreted as being cruel and selfish:

"Like Alyx, she wasn’t just a little petulant or inconsiderate. She was selfish, cruel. Like this whole word was simply make-believe and the rules didn’t apply to her."

"What about you? It's *all* about you!"

JWBY all seem to have different ideas of who and what Alyx was. She exists to teach a moral lesson, she's just a girl trying to survive and find her way back home, she was a mean little girl, she was the villain who rewrote the story.

But then we also have this line from the book said by Oscar in V8:

"She brushed off her bumps and bruises, for nothing hurt worse than the loneliness in her chest."

And... I'm reminded of Ruby's own loneliness, how distant she feels from her own teamates and friends right now, from the pressure of expectations to always be the one with a plan, with a smile and something positive to say to inspire everyone to Keep Moving Forward, put on her by both herself and the people around her. How Weiss is mourning her kingdom, Yang and Blake get to sort their feelings out, Jaune gets to have his breakdown, to the point his own over shadows Ruby's and her feelings are dismissed. And how the way she lashes out at them was both understandable and a long time coming, but also terribly cruel and messy. And that no one can be blamed for not seeing or reaching out to Ruby more when she refuses to let others know how much she's hurting and ask for their help. Ruby is still entitled to her own feelings. So is Jaune and WBY.

Which brings to mind a certain quote shown at the beginning of a certain someone's trailer:

"Everyone is entitled to their own sorrow, for the heart has no metrics or forms of measure. And all of it... irreplaceable"

Weiss's arc involves her looking outside of herself and learning to see and understand those around her, their own sorrows and burdens they carry with them. And of course, loneliness is a big reoccurring theme in Weiss's arc. Meeting her teammates and supporting them is what leads to her understanding their struggles, hence why Weiss develops from wanting to be the leader to instead dedicating herself to being the most supportive member in team RWBY, and thrives the most when she's fighting with them, but also emotionally supports them through their own struggles.

She's the one who notices something's off with Blake first in V2, and gets her to open up to the rest of her team so they can all work it out together:

"So, Blake Belladonna, what is wrong!?"

She supports Yang when she's confronting Raven and dealing with her abandonment issues

"It's okay if... you're not okay."

Her own sense of self and relationship to loneliness is a healthy one at present, and is something she can use to relate to others.

She understands other people’s loneliness, that Blake in V5 needed space and in time she’d come back, and Weiss would be ready to be there for her when she did. And she also understands Yang’s loneliness in the same volume and that she needed someone there to support her.

“But you’re right. I don’t know loneliness like you do. I have my own version. And, I bet Blake has her own version too.” 

"When she's ready, I'll be there for her. And I know we're not as close, but... I'm here for you too."

Weiss understands that no one's version of loneliness is the same, and every individual needs something different to have their feelings respected and understood. And now in V9 Weiss has to reckon and come to understand Ruby's own version of loneliness after seeing Ruby snap and how much everything has been weighing down on her, and what she needs from her as a friend and teammate.

All the way back in V1, Weiss grew to accept Ruby as leader and promised to support her:

"Ruby... I think you have what it takes to be a good leader. Just know, that I am going to be the best teammate you will ever have."

And I believe she'll try to hold true to that as best she can for Ruby going forward.

[calisources]

𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐐𝐔𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐒.

All sentences here were taken from different media about possessive love, the thrill of the chase, banter, and competition regarding one's affection. Some have foul language so please beware but most are fun, banter, possessive fun. All of these are made for roleplay purposes. Change names, pronouns, locations as you see fit.

I love you. You’re mine. I’ll kill any bastard who tries to take you from me.

I spend a quarter of every day inside you. 

I have never said this to anyone before.

But the idea of you with child is the most insanely arousing thing I’ve ever imagined.

Your belly all swollen, your breasts heavy, the funny little way you would walk … I would worship you. I would take care of your every need. And everyone would know that I’d made you that way, that you belonged to me.

You want to be free. You also want to be mine. You can't be both.

We can't possess one another.

Just because I can't have you right now, doesn't mean I'm okay with him having you.

I will be good to you, Myst. Please, I promise.

You are mine. And I protect what’s mine.

Of course I won't go alone. I shall take my maid.

No.You will take me.

The purpose of a knight is to protect. Why won’t you let him do his job to me?

I want you all to myself.

I can’t explain to you the joy I feel knowing it’s all mine. That you are all mine, that your body is all mine.

There is something in me that wakes up when I want something, a possession.

God knows he deserved you more than I do. 

Listen well, for you belong to me.

Good grief, you’re such an adorably greedy person.

And when you fall in love with her  just keep in mind that she’s mine. 

 She’s more than you could handle, anyway.

That almost sounds like a challenge.

I don’t need your permission to do anything.

Your hands will touch me and no one else, Meadow. That is final.

You chase off every man that’s ever been interested, and you do it without even trying.

You reject every suitor and yet, you keep entertaining me. I believe you want me too, and you are dying to be touched.

I don't own you, you just belong to me.

You’re my gold, your cunt is my liquid gold. 

I will have your mouth, you will give it to me. Then I will have your spirit, Circe. I will own it. Always.

By the gods you have never been more beautiful than you are right now, spread before me, wrapped in my wool.

Once I take you, you are mine. My woman. No other man can have you.

I do not belong to you, or to anyone else. I will talk to whomever I want, whenever I want.

Not if it’s some ass who thinks he can put his hands on you.

You didn’t have a problem with me acting like a caveman last night.

When it comes to you… I don’t like to share.

Most men prefer to do the eating.

Do you know what passion is?

Most people think it only means desire. Arousal. Wild abandon. But that’s not all. The word derives from the Latin. It means suffering. Submission. Pain and pleasure, Nikki. Passion.

You’re wearing my colors, love.

I’m going to put you on your knees, Ruby. You’re going to hate how much you love it.

He is my king, he is my warrior, he is my husband and I am proud to say above all… he is mine.

You have rare beauty the like I have never seen but you will be more beautiful heavy with my seed.

You are my golden queen. You are my tigress. You are my Circe. 

Never will I allow your gold to be taken from me. Never. Understand this, Circe, and never forget.

Maybe I fell in love with a version of him that didn't exist.

 I would have you right here if you would let me. Fear you? I exalt you. 

You could burn me a thousand times, and I would still want you for my own.

Everything has a price. The price, however, isn't always money.

You’re my scariest hell, You’re my perfect paradise.

Well, I admit my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.

I intend to the last. 

If I win, then you shall be mine. Tonight.

You are so sure of yourself.

The game is simple. The women run, the men chase. If you catch the one with your color. . .well, that’s up to you.

But women have been running all their lives, most men don’t catch that easily.

We are in a maze, lost, and your hand is up my skirt.

Aye, but I don’t hear any complaints. The maze will hide our secret.

[yanderes-galore]

Can I request a yandere Garnet (SU) concept? Thank you

Kept it mostly platonic as I just view her like that. I'll take feedback on this as she is... surprisingly hard to yandere properly.

Yandere! Garnet Concept

(Ruby + Sapphire)

Pairing: Platonic/Romantic

Possible Trigger Warnings: Gender-Neutral Darling, Obsession, Overprotective behavior, Controlling behavior, Jealousy, Manipulation, Violence implied, Isolation, Dubious companionship/relationship.

Considering the nature of Garnet already being a relationship, I feel she'd be more platonic to her obsession.

Not only that, but she'd be so stern and protective too.

Garnet isn't always emotive, although some aspects of Ruby and Sapphire show through separately at times.

She tries to think rationally like Sapphire, but sometimes loses her cool like Ruby.

Most of the time Garnet is calm with her obsession.

You could throw a fit at her and she'll take it... only to scold you later.

As long as you don't try to hit her, she can tolerate your outbursts.

The only time I can see Garnet as romantic is a very rare case where she likes another Gem.

In that case she'd want to try fusion with them if it meant she could keep you with her.

She'd wait until you're ready, however.

But let's be honest, based on what we've seen in the show, she isn't interested in that with many.

She'd be more likely to protect you platonically because she sees you as family or a close friend.

Garnet is an unnerving yandere as you can't read her all the time.

She's deadpan towards most around you... including you at times.

There's times you'll want to hang out with others, like friends or maybe a partner of your own, only for Garnet to step in with an unreadable expression just to say one thing.

"No."

That's it, nothing else.

She's really good at shutting down things she doesn't want you doing.

There's times you're allowed to be with other people, she wants you to have some other bonds.

But she doesn't want you to ignore her completely.

I have a feeling you can't really argue with her, either.

She'd want her obsession to respect her and her decisions.

Essentially, you listen to her or she makes you if she feels it's for the best.

She's the type of yandere who would "mom" her darling.

She's usually level-headed so most of what you do won't break her composure.

She isn't always stern and stoic, though.

Sometimes she's genuinely caring, wanting to let you know she does care for you.

That she loves you.

She does what she does because she wants to cherish the bond you have with her.

After all, Garnet knows quite a bit about bonds.

Most of her obsession is this protective guardian role.

She tries to be very understanding with her obsession.

Due to the nature of Garnet viewing relationships as sacred, she wouldn't want to rush anything with her obsession.

Doing so would lose your trust.

She is fine with acting like a guardian to you, as a Crystal Gem she's used to such a thing.

She may be protective and stern... but she would want her obsession to come to her when they were ready.

She knows getting you to love her by force will only hurt you both.

Ruby may be overly eager about having you accept them, but Sapphire is careful to keep them both calm.

If you're a Gem then they try to be even more patient... Unstable fusion will hurt you even more.

Garnet, out of most Gems, is one of the more patient yanderes.

Bonds take time to develop and locking you away certainly won't help.

Ruby is no doubt the half that feels the most jealousy when they see you interact so well with others.

Sapphire knows they shouldn't be jealous of you having other people you enjoy.

Sapphire knows you'll come to them at some point and see they care...

They just need patience.

Although... they do fear you'll never come to them...

I can see Ruby and Sapphire splitting because of their differing beliefs throwing them out of sync.

They have different obsession types, which means if they get impatient... they can't be Garnet.

Ruby's scared you'll never love them the same way they do you.

Ruby wants to show you how much they care, to the point she may be too reckless and scare you off.

Meanwhile Sapphire fully believes in waiting.

She wants Ruby to calm down, to give you time.

You may be confused when you see the two out of fusion, concerned even.

Completely unaware that you are the reason they're having a fight.

Eventually the two may make up, both loving you and wanting you happy.

Sapphire has to calm Ruby's jealousy... but soon they'll be Garnet again, ready to give it another shot... hopefully.

Garnet would stick by you regardless of how you feel.

It's really hard for me to view her as toxic as Garnet herself is a pretty healthy relationship in my eyes.

She believes in love being comfortable for both parties and would wait years for you.

Even when she's impatient or jealous, she can usually calm herself down.

She's been around for years as Garnet, she'd wait as long as she had to in order to gain the affection of her obsession.

When you finally think you can be there for her, Garnet would welcome you with open arms.

Her most toxic traits are a subtle jealousy towards others along with being overprotective.

Anything more toxic causes Ruby and Sapphire to split until something resolves the issue.

I am struggling to make her toxic while being in character....

She'd do just about anything if it meant you'd be protected.

Protecting you is her way of loving you.

Her obsession could hate her and she'd probably still try to be encouraging with them.

Garnet may be intimidating... but she's actually one of the better yanderes in my eyes.

She mellows out both Ruby and Sapphire's traits which makes her pleasant to be around.

She seems controlling and overbearing, but genuinely cares for your feelings.

She'll let you take your time.

If you aren't hers in the end, then she'll maybe nudge you in the right direction.

If you're a Gem, she may offer fusion to show she cares for you... that she wants to include you.

If you're human, she protects you in whatever way she can.

She'd do anything to have you happy and protected.

Even breaking her composure if she sees you get hurt.

Garnet can be ruthless when protecting those she cares about.

Imagine if you see her shatter a Gem to protect you... or maybe have blood on her gauntlets.

She sees her overprotective tendencies as caring for you.

You may be scared of her, or maybe even hate her, but she's willing to wait...

If you're in danger, she'll isolate you with the rest of the Crystal Gems.

Even if you aren't in danger, she may still isolate you to prevent any potential danger.

She'll still give you your space, She'll even say she loves you... but you can't go out on your own.

She feels bad that you aren't happy all the time with her... If at all...

She hopes it will change... but...

As long as she has you in the end... and you're safe...

Then she'll accept loving you from afar... until she can't take it anymore, that is.

[bestworstcase]

So, it should be obvious to anyone paying attention or taking this seriously by now that Whiterose isn't happening. And I mean, they wouldn't really fit with what the show is going for anyways, with romantic relationships, no Ozlem fractals and all that. But it does stick out like a sore thumb, that within RWBY and JNPR they're the only pair of partners where it's not a thing. And I'm curious if you make anything of it, from an out-of-universe perspective, on why that's the case?

well for one thing, i think the conceptual basis for any ship being "well the other three major character academic pairs developed into romantic interests" is a de facto admission of non-canonicity in itself, and betrays a fundamental disinterest in character and narrative. this is perhaps not surprising, as i'm given to understand people have been shipping wr literally since the color trailers, which is to say that the core appeal has always been aesthetics.

full disclosure, my personal feeling is that wr is "man and woman breathed near each other one time!?" for sapphics. it's gay ruby/jaune. the ship isn't sunk, it's dry-docked.

in that sense, the out-of-universe perspective i have to offer is: the difference between ruby/weiss and arkos / renora / the bees is that the latter three were written with romantic intent from the start whereas ruby and weiss were not. i'll grant the possibility that the academic pairings were an inelegant plot device motivated by that romantic intention, but i don't in fact believe that is the case because the one/two/four motif is such a thematic workhorse for the contortions and distortions of ozpin's psyche; i think pairing the romantic partners was at most a secondary consideration. in any case, there is no rule dictating that every academic pair must eventually kiss. that's nonsense.

now. in the more specific sense of "why do these two characters in particular not go together" i think there are two reasons.

first, it's narratively important for ruby to be isolated. she's two years younger and left all her friends behind to enroll in beacon early and her big sister isn't and can't be her mom anymore and she gets paired up with an academic overachiever who initially treats her like an idiot baby who doesn't deserve the responsibility she's been given. ruby surmounts each of these challenges by remaking herself into their serious, competent, trustworthy leader and crucially this does not address, but in fact reinforces, her alienation from the rest of the team.

second, both ruby and weiss are profoundly sheltered and lonely girls raised in environments, denied close relationships with anyone but their elder sisters whom they both grew to idolize, and became, in contrasting but fundamentally similar ways, really good at performing the "right" behaviors—ruby adopting a happy, carefree mask, weiss becoming an overachieving perfectionist obsessed with her family's honor.

the point is, a) neither have ever had a real, emotionally close friendship before, and b) both have a deeply-ingrained tendency to Perform To Expectation. in this i think it is instructive to compare the conflict and resolution between weiss and ruby vs weiss and blake:

blake directly and overtly challenges weiss on her awful behavior until the brick wall of regurgitated bigotry breaks down and weiss starts to talk about the real emotional pain behind that wall, and blake reveals her own secret and then flees in distress, with the result that weiss has to face and think about the pain she's caused to someone she cares about and actually reflect on things blake said to her for a while. and then when they come face-to-face again weiss stops blake from anxiously trying to apologize / explain / appease her and says no, i thought about it, i trust you, you don't owe me any of that. she doesn't say the words "i'm sorry" but her actions demonstrate real understanding and empathy for blake.

meanwhile her conflict with ruby tears down ruby's self-confidence, ultimately leaving ruby receptive to ozpin's extremely destructive advice, and ends because port dresses weiss down and lays out for her in plain terms that her envy and resentment reflect poorly on her, whereafter weiss commits to becoming "the best teammate [ruby will] ever have."

spot the difference. the conflict between weiss and blake fosters a deeper, lasting emotional connection between them chiefly because they're fighting with each other—there's this back-and-forth, give-and-take that drives a resolution from within. weiss has to reflect on herself and decide that what she believed about faunuskind is wrong. and the. she has to decide for herself how to make it right. but that's not what happens in the conflict between weiss and ruby! weiss is just being a bully and gets told by a teacher she respects to knock it off!

and then little miss overachieving perfectionist pivots to "i will be the perfect teammate!" while the lesson ruby takes from this experience, courtesy of ozpin, is that she deserved to be treated that way because she didn't take her duties as the team leader seriously enough. she puts on a happy face and pretends nothing hurts because that's who ruby is, but the resolution here is very much just papering over the cracks.

not to say that ruby and weiss aren't truly friends and don't care deeply for each other, because they are and they do, but the foundation of this friendship is very brittle. on the surface, they appear as virtually the platonic ideal of what huntsman academy partners are meant to be—an unlikely pair who overcame enormous personal differences to become inseparable comrades-in-arms—but that is in large part because ruby's skill in masking problems harmonizes so well with weiss's drive to be the perfect huntsman academy partner.

but they're really not that close! it's a meme at this point for wr shippers to bemoan the dearth of "moments" between ruby and weiss, but that is by design. these are two girls who've never had a really close friendship before performing close friendship with each other almost flawlessly until the wheels very suddenly and violently fall off in v9, whereupon weiss—who is otherwise an empathetic and emotionally insightful person—realizes this hollowness and reflects on her treatment of ruby just as she did with blake back in v1. her perfect partnership has been an emotional burden to ruby this whole time, and she has to face that head-on before it can be fixed.

i think they're probably headed for a serious "we're combat partners who fight well together and get along, but are we actually friends?" kind of reckoning that will undoubtedly resolve in the direction of building real closeness, because maybe they're not as close as they believed but they want to have that kind of friendship.

which is like. you know. interesting. the core problem i have with wr fanon and the general insistence in that contingent of the fandom is that the apparent ideal-partnership is Real and trust me, they're totally in love, we're just meant to understand that they're having heart-to-heart conversations and emotionally vulnerable moments with each other off-screen all the time, the complete absence of this in the text is only because the narrative doesn't have the time—as if the narrative hasn't carved out time for arkos and renora and the bees and ruby/oscar, as if it wasn't a deliberate choice to contrast weiss getting scolded for bullying ruby against weiss empathizing and sharing childhood traumas and deep fears and cherished aspirations with blake and yang. like. come on.

the point is that things were "resolved" between ruby and weiss by external pressures that did not foster any real understanding between them, and then nothing ever changed. weiss' friendships with blake and yang pushed her to grow, to mature, but until v9 she and ruby were coasting on that "good leader/perfect teammate" dynamic, stagnant for ruby and a blindspot for weiss.

and this is the narrative reason why ruby and weiss had to be paired during the initiation. looking at it through the lens of "pairing the romantic partners (and the sore thumb of ruby and weiss)" misses the forest for the shipper goggles tree: the academic pairings are the inciting incident for each main character arc. for jaune, it's the first stroke of the ozlem fractal and the tragedy that motivates the rest of his story. for ren and nora, it's the safety of a comfort zone they'll eventually need to leave. for blake and yang, it's finding each other for the first time. for weiss, it's the mistake that will fester until it comes back to bite her to put all her growth in the interim to the test. for ruby, it's the painful experience that pushes her to take on self-sacrificial heroism as her duty.

it's just a device for establishing character pairs that will facilitate long-term development. that three of the four can be grouped together loosely as romantic arcs doesn't inherently mean anything for the one that isn't; to suggest otherwise is to collapse the differences between arkos / renora / the bees (and also ignore the goliath in the room of arkos not being endgame) and imagine a rule where there just isn't one.

for the sake of completeness i will add that coco/velvet is canon and the CFVY novels make a point of them not being academic partners.

[hamliet]

thoughts on how oshi no ko has portrayed what happened to hikaru (thus far) and any ideas for what his motives/role in the story is?

Honestly? I think it's doing a pretty good job of portraying it. TW for discussions of childhood sexual abuse below.

When it's first introduced to us that Hikaru was raped by the adult actress, Aqua doesn't have much reaction. On an intellectual level, he gets it, but on an emotional level in terms of what this means for Hikaru, for his development and for his pain, he doesn't get it at all. It's only when we get to Akane's expressed horror ("that's sick!") that we get an actual reaction.

The previous chapter was honestly acting and a flashback as it actually happened, and I appreciated that they showed it as violent.

That's something so often missing from stories of older women who rape younger boys (see Mary Kay Letourneau). It's not a love story. He's not lucky. It's violence.

Like, I spoke about this with a friend after the chapter, but the wiki literally says he was "implied to have been raped." Implied? He was ELEVEN.

I don't think the wiki writers are intentionally being obtuse or dismissive, but there is a subconscious way in which a lot of the world, across cultures, reacts to female predators of young boys in a way that is incongruent with how we react to men who prey on young girls. And to be fair, the latter is a far more prevalent issue but still.

So anyways, I was grateful the final panel of the flashback showed Hikaru being dragged, violently, away from a girl his own age whom he likes by an older woman who won't even introduce his son as his son. Anything Hikaru has, he cannot have.

I've written about Hikaru before, but yeah, he's a scary serial killer at this point who is likely going to target Ruby and/or Kana. He's a final antagonist, obviously, and his past abuses don't excuse him. He's somewhat modeled after Lucifer, and not the Hazbin Hotel version.

But I don't think Aqua's final challenge is stopping Hikaru.

Aqua playing Hikaru in these scenes is challenging him to do what playing Ai has provoked Ruby to do: to empathize and further understand their parents. But, the problem is that Aqua can relate to Hikaru's anger and hatred already.

Again, as I wrote previously, Aqua already is very much like Hikaru (albeit at a far earlier stage): trying to reenact and kill the perceived causes of his trauma and not able to see that he's not going to be happy with such an ending because you can't kill your way to peace.

What Aqua actually needs to do is to come to understand Ai. Ruby, imo, is the one who will come to understand Hikaru, and probably forgive him (not excuse, but this is very likely where it's going).

Ai seemed to, after all. She reached out to Hikaru's proxy (the stalker) and definitely recognized the white roses and knew who had sent him.

Yet she still reached out to her stalker as a human being and empathized with him after he had stabbed her.

If it had been Hikaru standing there himself, she would have done the same.

And lest we think this is solely an example of her toxic wanting-to-please-people trait taking control, this was also the moment--the only moment in Ai's life--where she was finally able to express herself without a lie. It can be both an indictment of the entertainment industry prioritizing pleasing others over your own life and pain and Ai's moment of triumph even amidst tragedy.

Hence again why Aqua's challenge is to understand his mother, not to kill his father as justice for her. He needs to recognize her love for him as her son. She wanted him to live. She wanted him to love. She didn't want him to obsess over her in death.

Ruby, on the other hand, needs to understand Hikaru... and Aqua. Thus far, while she's had the best growth of everyone in this entire series, she is still idolizing Sensei and Aqua thereby.

She needs to see him as a person just as Aqua needs to see Ai as a person. Seeing Hikaru's anger and pain and seeing Aqua's go hand in hand for Ruby (again, not a coincidence Aqua is playing young Hikaru in the movie).

As for where Hikaru goes from there, I don't know. He might end his own life like the stalker proxy did, but I think the fact that that's already happened makes it less likely. He might find new life even if like, in prison, or he might die sacrificing himself for his kids. It's too early to make those exact predictions... but I think Ruby understanding him and empathizing is key.

[howlingday]

The Challenge

Weiss: Arc.

Jaune: W-Weiss! You're talking! To me! Without me starting the conversation!

Weiss: I'll keep this simple and only between us. You are not on my level.

Jaune: Huh?

Weiss: I fully intend to crush you, even if you do have Pyrrha's support.

Jaune: Huh?!

Weiss: Do you understand? So try to make this a challenge for me.

Jaune: ...

Weiss: ...

Ruby: Weiss! Don't be mean! We're all friends here!

Weiss: He is not my friend. (Walks away)

Jaune: ...Hold it, Weiss. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm not on your level. And maybe you will crush me. And maybe I won't be much of a challenge for you.

Ruby: J-Jaune, you don't have to put yourself down like that-

Jaune: No! Listen to me. Maybe Weiss really is on her own level and she is better than all of us, (Weiss turns) but that doesn't mean we can't try our best to prove her wrong.

Weiss: Oh no. I'm shaking. (Glares at him)

Jaune: (Glares at her)

[aspoonofsugar]

About You, About Me

Jaune: What about you?! It's all about you!

This line is what the episode is about in a nutshell. As a matter of fact it conveys 2 ideas central to the whole situation:

1 - The "you" Ruby is talking about is different than the "you" Jaune means.

Ruby is asking about herself as a person, while Jaune speaks about her as an ideal. This dychotomy is the crux of both their current situations. Ruby has been lving as the embodyment of an ideal, so now she struggles to express how she feels in a healthy way. Jaune is instead trying to hide who he is behind the ideal of a hero.

So, Ruby wants to be seen as a person, while Jaune as a hero. Interestingly, both fail, as WBY's reactions to them make clear:

WBY immediately understand Jaune's pain and can see through his very thin (paper-thin I would say) facade.

WBY fails to pick up on the many red flags Ruby has been showing throughout the whole volume. They try to address Penny's death and her frustration on a couple of occasions, but never really go deep.

2 - Jaune is lashing out at Ruby, but he is really projecting on her his own frustrations.

This is made clear by the rest of the conversation:

Jaune: On that bridge, I was the only one, who could do it... I was the only one! And I... And now I have to live with it forever, in here or back home.

It is all your fault! It is all my fault! Jaune just keeps swinging between these 2 extremes. It is exactly like when in Mistral he goes on a rampage against Cinder, but the one he really hates is himself. There he lashes out at the villain, here he lashes out at the hero. The villain is a monster, the hero just could not live up to her role.

Ruby on her part does exactly the same. To be specific, she lashes out on everybody, but I would say she does so in 2 distinctive ways.

BLAKE AND JAUNE - STOP BEING LIKE ME!

Ruby: Shut up... Don't do that... Just don't.

The fight ends with Ruby telling Blake to stop trying to be positive. This complements her previous outburst directed at her (and Yang):

Ruby: Gotta stay positive, right?! Smiles all around!

Ruby can't stand how Blake is behaving because it reminds her of how she is supposed to feel. And she doesn't feel it anymore.

Thematically, Blake has been stepping into Ruby's role since the beginning of the volume:

I would not say she has substituded Ruby as the leader. Still, she is being the optimistic one, the idealistic one, the hopeful one. She realizes they are in a fairy tale and is enthusiastic about it. She knows the right definition of what being a Huntress means. She is Ruby's past idealistic self and Ruby can't stand it. Ironically, our Black Beast is now more optimistic than our Little Red.

Which is why both moments Ruby shares with Blake and Yang past volume are now bittersweet:

Blake: I know you don’t always know what to do, but that’s never stopped you from doing something. I was like that as a girl, but time and… a lot of other things, took their toll on me. Then I wasn’t sure if that kind of girl could actually survive in the world… until I met you. It was a little strange at first because you were younger, but I’ve always looked up to you, Ruby. And I still do.

Yang: You were being optimistic. Look, blind optimism isn’t great, but no optimism means we already lost. We need hope. We need to take risks.

Sure, everybody loves Ruby because she is optimistic and pure and inspiring... but what when she can't be it anymore?

This episode addresses precisely this and takes Ruby and Blake's current foiling to its extreme conclusion:

Blake: Then we won't run this time.

Blake charges into battle to protect strangers, while Ruby runs away from her loved ones.

If Blake reminds Ruby of her past, Jaune is a spitting mirror image of Ruby's current self. This is why she doesn't even talk to him directly, but keeps mentioning him:

Ruby: What about me? No time, right? Gotta get home! Gotta help Jaune! Gotta find someone, who isn't just going to screw everything up!

Ruby: I'm sorry, is this a bad time? Are we supposed to be mourning Jaune's make believe friends?!

Notice the 2 references to time. Ruby, just like Jaune, feels she has no time. It is just, Jaune feels he has not enough time to save everyone, while Ruby feels she has not enough time for herself. No time for others to care and nurture her. This is what she is trying to convey.

Similarly, the remark about Jaune's make believe friends is cruel, but it has definately to do with Ruby's own very real lost friend:

The one she has yet to mourn. The one nobody is mentioning anymore because everybody is too focused on other things. So, yeah, why should they all be mourning a bunch of afterings they know nothing about? When Ruby herself did not even take the time to properly mourn Penny?

Throughout the whole episode,Jaune (unwillingly) steals Ruby's spotlight and caters everyone's attention on himself.

He's obviously been through a lot. We can be frustrated later. Right now, Jaune needs us. And we need him. We just can't count on him.

While Blake says so, the one in focus is Ruby because this phrase is actually about her. Except nobody realizes it. Nobody (or almost ;)) notices she is struggling.

This pattern keeps going throughout the whole episode:

Weiss and Jaune insist Ruby should just grab her weapon and fight like always

Weiss aka Ruby's partner chooses to assist Jaune instead of her. Symbolically, even the Walker that almost kills Ruby is the one Weiss and Jaune launch in the river while they are fighting

When Ruby lets Crescent Rose fall, Yang's question to her is cut off by the paper town being floaded, which leads to everybody comforting Jaune

Even Ruby's own outburst is overshadowed by Jaune's one, which leads to Ruby finally leaving

All Ruby wants is for someone to look at her properly and empathize with her. Still, everybody has been too focused on their own feelings and losses. At the same time, Ruby herself has been refusing to open up with her friends for several volumes now. Everybody believes she is alright because she has always repressed her negative feelings, so nobody really knows she has any.

Everybody thinks she is Blake, when she is actually Jaune.

WEISS AND YANG - LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!

You don't need me anymore No, you don't see me anymore I'm alone in this war I am a trap door

Ruby lashes out at Blake and Jaune because they are like her. When it comes to Yang and especially Weiss, instead, she is angry because they don't realize her pain.

Yang is too caught up in her new love life to notice her little sister needs help. Or at least, this is what Ruby thinks tbh because there is not that much evidence of this in the story. It is just that when you feel very low, you can end up resenting others for their own happiness. And this is what happens with Ruby and Bumbleby:

Ruby: Good for you, by the way. We are all soooo happy for you.

Weiss is too caught up in her own pain and grief to realize how much her partner needs help. Even in this episode, when she sees Ruby has not Crescent Rose, Weiss bitterly reprimands her. Just like she did at the market. Not only that, but after Ruby has made clear she is absolutely not okay by letting Crescent Rose fall... all Weiss has to tell her is to help support Jaune.

Weiss: It's what they wanted. Right Ruby? Ruby: Why are you asking me? Because I am the leader? Because I am just supposed to have something to say? Cause I don't.

Nobody looks at Ruby or notices her low spirits... well, actually someone does... a small soul ; )

RED HOOD AND LITTLE

Ruby leaves and the only one she has left is Little. Her new friend. Her Ever After's guide. Little is the only one this episode who notices Ruby is off. And they are also a lot how Ruby used to be when the series starts. Little is someone who sees her and also someone like her.

It is going to be interesting how Little will impact Ruby going forward. Especially because we might get some new Little Red Riding Hood's references this volume.

Ruby leaves her family/loved ones/home and enters a wood alone. Where is she going? Maybe she just wants to go back home:

Yang: Return home, eh?

And yet, the woods are dangerous and full of wolves, who want to eat our Little Red Riding Hood:

And just like with the Hound aka another representation of the Big Bad Wolf... the monster hides a person:

In general, the situation is the reversed one of volume 6:

There Ruby enters the woods, discovers dangerous things, but also meets a mentor figure who teaches her something about her Silver Eyes. She is able to inspire everyone to move on and steps in the role of leader.

Here Ruby enters in this strange new world and can't find an ounce of optimism. They are in a literal fairy tale and she doesn't give a crap. The same girl, who started volume 7 eager to explore Atlas after having crossed a whole continent on foot.

In any case, I am curious to see where we are going with Ruby. Especially because she might very soon have a meeting with the true Neo, aka her Shadow. Little as the Little of her Red Hood and Neo as her shadow and the wolf. Probably both ingredients are needed to see where Ruby is going in the future.

Speaking of Neo, there is this:

Yang: But that's... those were more than her usual tricks. They eat and growl and... how has she gotten so powerful?

Yang openly questioning Neo's new powers make me thing there is more than just a semblance evolution. The power-up happening in the Land of Darkness makes me thing it might have something to do with it. Darkness in Jungian psychology is the Shadow and the Repressed. What if this land lets you tap into your buried potential? For better or worse?

Scratched through the surface And you found a key Unlocking what you thought was safe inside a box But it's somehow been set free (Finally)

THE FALL OF ATLAS- ONCE AGAIN

So far, the protagonists have experienced the fall of Atlas twice now. The first time at the market. The second time at the paper town.

In general, the 2 episodes clearly parallel each other. To better say, the paper town is an escalation of the market.

Both times WBY and Jaune fight Neo's Jabberwalkers, while Ruby freezes up. Both times Ruby is reprimanded for apparently spacing out when she is experiencing psychological distress. Both times the protagonists feel as if they are living Atlas fall once again. And yet:

Neo's presence is made clearer, as if we are building a climax toward a final meeting with her. The real her.

Ruby consoles Weiss at the market, but refuses to console Jaune at paper town.

Ruby buries her feelings at the market, but explodes here.

The Rusted Knight is introduced as a dependable hero and a saviour at the market, but Jaune is revealed as a broken and grieving person here.

The most interesting thing is that when it comes to the Fall of Atlas specifically the 2 characters in focus are Weiss and Jaune:

This fits the foiling set up in the Ponder Storm mirror gallery. There we see how they both are still struggling over what happened in Atlas.

Weiss thinks about her Kingdom, her people and how they risked their homes without gaining anything.

Jaune thinks about Penny and his role in her death.

Both can't forgive themselves for failing to stop Cinder and to save Penny. This makes sense considering how they are the last 2 to fall and the ones who hold on the longest. They were both blooming in Atlas and were in very positive moments of their life. And yet, last volume's climax changed things. They were brought down when they were at their strongest... so what can they really accomplish?

And yet, even if they clearly blame themselves, they end up lashing out on others, as a coping mechanism (even if in different degrees). This volume both are shown particularly rude, sassy and cynical, in ways they usually are not. Or at least not anymore and not as often. The result is that they both enter into a conflict with Ruby. Weiss's insensitivity and ignorance of Ruby's feelings coupled with Jaune's exploding at her are among the reasons why Ruby leaves.

It is clear the dynamic among Weiss, Jaune and Ruby is going to be important for the resolution of this volume and for all 3 their character arcs. Especially, there is still something that hasn't been addressed:

I thought this episode was perfect for the reveal Jaune killed Penny. And yet, it doesn't happen. Which makes me wonder when this truth is gonna come out and how it will impact Ruby, Jaune and Weiss's dynamic. What is sure is that Jaune and Weiss clearly have a role to play in this volume's climax and in Ruby's arc.

WEISS - SNOWHITE, SNOW QUEEN, SNOW ANGEL

Weiss: Then, who does that leave us with? It's obvious we need someone to guide us or we can end up throw back in time or killed by the tree or worse.

Weiss keeps looking for someone to look up to, to guide her, to console her and to support her. This is not wrong per se, but hilariously Weiss is the one who is probably the most put together compared to the characters she wants to depend on.

She opens up to Ruby about her loss. There is nothing wrong in this, but we as viewers can really see it should be the other way around. She should be the one Ruby can lean on. Even in this episode, when it comes to support Jaune, she asks for Ruby's help. Now, she doesn't really need to. She can say something kind to Jaune by herself and neither Blake nor Yang ask Ruby to butt in. Weiss does and, as little as it is, this is what sets Ruby off. Because once again Ruby is asked to ignore what she feels for someone else's sake. Even if Weiss and the others can really handle the situation on their own.

This is why Ruby calls out Weiss specifically this episode:

Ruby: Gotta find someone, who doesn't screw everything up!

Something similar happens with Jaune, as well:

Yang: And when did you get so... Weiss: Mature...

This is both ship-teasing and a joke, but it hides an important truth. Notice that Weiss doesn't say "handsome" or "hot", but mature. Jaune is an adult, he is Weiss's childhood hero, so he must be dependable. And yet, he is not because he is still RWBY's old awkward friend and he has spent years alone with his guilt. Weiss should understand better than anyone else why Jaune isn't well. I mean, she was there when Penny died. She outloud states Penny sacrificed herself, so I think she knows what Jaune had to do. And yet, her reaction this episode to Jaune's predicament is this:

Weiss: But how? He's clearly not... all there.

Just like with Ruby, she makes a snappy remark, which is heard by Jaune and this starts a discussion and escalates an already difficult situation.

I don't say this because I think Weiss is a monster or a bad person, obviously. She is clearly suffering as well and really means no harm. Still, it is important Weiss stops looking only at herself. She failed to save Atlas, but she can still save her friends. She has the inner strength and the wisdom to succeed:

CC: I am talking about you, Wise Huntress.

It is through helping others that she will move forward from her loss. Just like Jaune did it in volume 5 by saving her.

JAUNE - HERO, VILLAIN, MAIDEN

Jaune is instead the opposite of Weiss. He tries to overcome his grief over Penny's death by trying to help other people. I mean, it worked with Pyrrha in Mistral, right? So, why shouldn't it work here? Sorry Jaune, but that coping mechanism is not functional anymore because your past self has been shattered:

And yet, Jaune refuses to let go of the heroic self-image he has worked so hard to built. Basically, he has regressed, as well and is stuck here:

Jaune: I don't want help! I don't want to be the damsel in distress! I want to be the hero!

Jaune's arc has always been about integrating with the anima, aka his most feminine parts. He refuses them, but it is through them that he will eventually become the hero he wants to be. He needs to accept he is a damsell in distress to be the hero. Even more so, to truly complete his journey he needs to become a symbolic maiden. Only in this way, he will be complete. He will truly be himself. After all, he alludes to the very famous Maid of Orleans ;)

So, right now Jaune is once again refusing his anima and this is why the once promising hero has turned into a toxic version of himself. He thinks he is protecting the paper pleasers, but he has actually trapped them. He is not the one saving them, but they are the ones saving him by offering him a coping mechanism to keep himself together:

Weiss: Then why do you care so much about this village? Jaune: Because I can actually protect these people!

They are pleasing him in a relationship, which is honestly detrimental for both parties. Jaune protects them, yes. Still, he also stops them from evolving. The same is true the other way around. The paper pleasers are keeping Jaune functional, but they are also stopping him from making any real progress.

This is why after years Jaune is still a prisoner of the Ever After. It is because (obviously) the way out one way or the other has to do with the tree. And yet, Jaune keeps avoiding it. Just like he is avoiding any real change.

This is because "changing" is a risk and a risk means you can't be sure if things are going well or badly:

A new me, I am ready, but who will I find?

And you know what else is a risk?

Weiss: Trust is a risk

Interesting...

Jaune: Afterlings are all either too clever, too stupid or too crazy to trust!

And who is the last person Jaune trusted exactly?

Penny: Trust me...

Jaune is clearly trying to "fix" what happened to Penny through the Afterlings, but he is wrong. There is no fixing the past this way and what he obtains is just that he is making people suffer for no reason. Not only that, but his stubborness puts the paper pleasers in real danger:

If the Jabberwalkers get them, Jaune's friends would never ascend. There is no escaping death, one way or the other.

Jaune needs to accept this and he is actually starting to accept it. Symbolically, the day after he finally reunites with RWBY, the time starts moving once again. After years of delusions, Jaune starts facing what he has done. His delicate stability, which is symbolically represented by a paper world evaporates and dissolves into water (this episode starts with fire and ends with water > 2 elements linked to alchemy and transformation).

He starts the episode claiming he is fine:

Jaune: This isn't crazy. I'm not crazy.

He ends the episode admitting he isn't:

Jaune: I'm sorry. I know I am not okay. I know I am not right.

And even asking himself the key question:

Jaune: What am I supposed to be?

What are you? Only by facing this question head on Jaune can hope to finally evolve. Only by letting fo of his armor, which is rusted already, he can hope to find his new more refined self. A hero, who is also a maiden.

GRIEF

It seems that after the first 5 episodes exploring the 5 stages of grief, we are getting calls out to them in different ways:

Ruby bargains her emblem in order to help her friends. Another way to run away from Summer, but also to sacrifice her pain for others. She failed to get the ingredients in time, so obviously now she has to sacrifice something so personal, like her mother's memento, right?

Ruby, Weiss and Jaune walk in a mirror gallery, which reflects their grief and fail to discuss it. They didn't even properly discuss Penny's death and how it happened. They are negating it on some level.

Ruby and Jaune explodes into anger this episode and in this way they can finally both start their self-actualizing journeys.

We'll see where it goes...

ASCENSION VS DEATH

Personally, I think we need an exploration of this dychotomy on a thematic level.

On the one hand ascension is clearly a metaphor for death. However, the Jabberwalker, which is clearly a creature of Darkness seems to be offering a different idea of death. More similar to the one the characters have. What is the difference? What is ascension really? And why does the Jabberwalker embody something different?

This a very interesting mystery thematically speaking and I am curious to see how it is solved.

Is it about introducing 2 different flavors of Destruction?

Cancellation (death)> negative

Transformation > positive

We'll see...

On another note, the reveal of Jaune's role in the paper pleasers' town gives more context to the Cat's dislike for our Knight. The CC's role is to lead the Afterlings to the Tree, but Jaune goes in the way of this. Symbolically, this makes them antagonists.

MISCELLANIA

Here come some miscellania thoughts:

The time motif is interesting. This episode specifically times keeps being mentioned by Jaune and Ruby. Jaune keeps saying they don't have time and that he is late. He also keeps asking what time is it. Ruby is annoyed there is no time and sarcastically asks if that is a bad time. In general, Jaune and Ruby are also opposites when it comes to time. Jaune is currently a man who has spent too much time alone with his trauma. Ruby is a child who has had not enough time to properly process hers.

Jaune's allusions just keep multiplying. He is the White Knight in Alice (also that character sings a song whose alternate title is litterally The Aged Man :P). He also fits the Hatter to an extent in how he killed time (aka spent years alone making no progress and broke the time fruit). And now he is also the White Rabbit.

Speaking of Jaune... meta-narratively the Rusted Knight is very interesting. Judging by the girls' enthusiasm and by Jaune's own excitement when he mentions realizing he was that character, the Rusted Knight is surely portrayed very positively... And yet, Alyx poisons him. I think @harostar suggested what we saw in this episode might offer us a glimps of why. Jaune might have been controlling to Alyx and Lewis and Alyx may have felt trapped by him. And yet, the story still portrays Jaune as a hero. If Alice wrote the story or if Jaune was really that terrible to her and her brother, then why isn't he portrayed as a villain? This question is interesting and seems to confirm Alyx might not be the writer of the story... At the same time, Jaune might have failed to leave up to a fairy tale- standard. However, if the writer still felt to write him as a hero, maybe he did better than what he thinks.

This is the third time Ruby hallucinates three people. The first one when she falls (Oscar, Yang and Penny), the second one in the Blacksmith's place (Penny, Alyx and Summer), the third one while fighting the Jabberwalker (Cinder, Penny and Salem). Clearly they relfect Ruby's deteriorating mental state. The first time, she isn't hallucinating, but seeing Neo's illusions. The second time she is subjected to the Ever After's strange magic. This time, though, she is having a straight out panic attack. In all this, Penny is fittingly present all three times. Ruby needs to properly mourn her or she will never move on.

WBY's discussion about the Tree this episode is interesting because we have: Blake (destruction) believing the Tree is rebirth, Weiss (creation) being wary of the dangerous power of the Tree and Yang (knowledge) wanting to know more. Fittingly, Ruby (choice) is silent and so they fail to reach a resolution.

I think this volume might introduce a key theme, which will probably keep going in later volumes. The idea of need vs wants in a reverse sense. Jaune and Ruby both want to be needed to the point Ruby fears that now she isn't needed anymore, she is going to be left behind. It is the same as Yang's conditional love idea (see the Auction)...I think the resolution is going to be that you don't love people because you need them, but because you want them in your life. It is the same concept expressed by Blake last volume... Others are just a part of you... you don't stay with them out of codependency or need, but because you are happy and wish to be with them.

[divinekangaroo]

In this moment, in this room, I love you - Did he really mean it?

I'm always slightly wary of this angle of query because it often feels like looking for a ship-war interpretation that makes certain relationships "right" when, well, relationships are not on a binary. XD

But, I also have no idea what people mean even IRL when they say 'do you love someone', because every time it's used it seems to me to mean 'do you sacrifice more of yourself for the other person's wellbeing than would be good for your own wellbeing and think this is the right and upstanding thing to do' and that's pretty destructive, to me. Even when people say it in relation to parents and children, or children and parents. I am wary as hell of the term love because it's a distorted word that appears to serve as a bucket for a whole gamut of cultural constructs regarding worth, gender and roleplay.

So, well, did Tommy mean what, exactly?

My interpretation of this monologue was that Lizzie meant enough to Tommy that he articulated that whole speech in an effort to give her recognition, to give her something that he thought would have meaning to her. So yeah, use of the word love aside, he was telling her she has deep meaning to him, or he wouldn't have endeavoured to say it. He wouldn't have arranged the hotel to try to connect with her.

His disclaimer's always been fascinating because that's where the sorrow is, some acknowledgment that either 1) he knows his feeling for her will never be enough to alter his actions or intensions in the way he thinks Lizzie wants/needs from him (meaning: she wants/needs him to change, to be someone different for her, and he can't) and 2) these sorts of deep emotions, he can only feel in a transitory, very broken way these days.

In S6, Ada uses the same "in this moment, in this room" phrasing when she describes herself to Mosley and Diana as holding the power, a momentary, fleeting and unstable thing in a world of complex dynamics. I do ponder significantly the use of power and love both bracketed by in this moment/room (but that's another analogy for another post), and in this context do think the 'in this moment in this room' phrasing as a minimum recalls that Tommy's offering to Lizzie has the same inherent instability as power.

And, terribly, because of that fleetingness, the temporary nature, the instability and inconstancy of his feeling, Tommy's monologue to Lizzie also creates some resonance in me of the scene where Tommy tells Charlie 'that's how horses are' when he describes how Ruby's horse will forget her. I cannot help but feel Tommy meant himself: yes, he was shattered by Ruby's death....but he'll forget. He can't feel the way he (thinks he) should feel. What is another cup of grief in an ocean of his grief, after all? It's not like he doesn't feel it, but...does it change anything? He went past threshold /capacity so many years ago that more of it's...well... *shrugs* And the whole scene with Lizzie feels the same. These people he loves need him to be someone else, and while he certainly gives of himself in so many ways, it's not ways that they want.

(I also think frequently on Lizzie's "What good will you become" - she's *never* actually asked Tommy to be a good man, or to change the gang life, only to separate/protect himself and his loved ones from it; she has a very close, personal view of morality, and while she doesn't want to hurt others, she also never really seems concerned about bigger impacts, social impacts, anything beyond the tight selfish/selfhood space. Lizzie certaintly never called on Tommy to become something so grand and great and making huge political moves for "the greater good." I can't picture her understanding his supposed & expressed motivation of the greater good/lasting legacy as *worth* what he's putting himself and those close to him through)

Did he mean it? Yes. He feels and hurts and then he doesn't change what he does.

[kafus]

i did some ridiculous technical BS in pokemon again

NOTE: not only is this post a very very long infodump from yours truly, it is also specifically an infodump involving a lot of pokemon glitches and exploits. even though i don't tamper with my games and everything achieved here can be done on original hardware with no hacking or what-have-you, some people still may consider this Cheating based on their own personal standards of legitimate gameplay. i ask that you please don't try to start arguments with me about pokemon legality and just take it all as an interesting technical infodump about gen 3 pokemon okay thank you <3

SO. i decided that before pokemon bank eventually shuts down one day in the probably-not-so-distant future and makes old gen transfer impossible, i need more ribbon master pokemon (AKA a pokemon with all the ribbons it can possibly receive from its gen of origin to the most recent gen it can transfer to) from gens 3 and 4. i've been meaning to ribbon master a pokemon from gen 3 based on my favorite singer, KAF (you don't need to know anything about kaf for this story whatsoever but you should check her out LMAO) and while musing over what pokemon would suit her best, it came to me.

FARIGIRAF IS JUST KAF'S FURSONA!! the monster teeth hoodie with the eyes. even has the dangly bits. like come on it's perfect. AND girafarig is obviously available in gen 3 so i could RM a kaf girafarig and then evolve her once i got to SV. Cool! Awesome! but here's the problem. I CAN'T SETTLE FOR JUST A NORMAL GIRAFARIG. I HAVE TO GO ALL OUT!!

i started brainstorming my ideal gen 3 kaf girafarig, and came to the following conclusions:

i obviously want the girafarig to be shiny. i mean come on

i want her to be a girl for obvious reasons, and gentle nature to match her personality. just because Armor Tail is better on Farigiraf i also want it to have girafarig's second ability, Early Bird. i'm not concerned with IVs because i think random IVs add flavor and that would add more tedium than i was already dealing with

i want her to be japanese language origin since kaf is a japanese singer (i can nickname her かふ that way too!)

i want the original trainer (OT) name to be PPさん (PP-san) in reference to the person who scouted out kaf's talent in the first place - he goes by Piedpiper online and my friends and i call him PP as a joke sometimes

i want the trainer ID to be 02018 because 2018 is kaf's debut year

since girafarig only spawns in gen 3 in the ruby/sapphire/emerald safari zone, i wanted to hatch a girafarig egg in firered/leafgreen for the kanto origin, which is impossible otherwise. FRLG are also really important games to me, leafgreen being the first pokemon game i ever owned or played, so that's a bonus

now you may be looking at this entire list and being like. What the fuck. how do you intend to shiny hunt girafarig with all of these hyperspecific parameters, especially in FRLG where the everstone passing nature doesn't exist and flame body doesn't even exist to hatch eggs faster. you will be doing that long after bank shuts down. and you're intending on doing this on original hardware too??? WELL. that's where ACE and RNG manipulation comes in babey. i am GOING to attempt to make this comprehensible even if you've never touched ACE or RNG manip in your life, even tangentially, but sorry if this is a bit of a mess it's pretty technical LOL. the rest of this post is going below a cut cause it Goes Places!!

ACE and RNG manipulation explained (kinda)

first off a quick overview of ACE, ACE stands for arbitrary code execution, which is the ability to run your own (arbitrary!) code within the game. this can be set up with a series of elaborate glitches, that break open the gen 3 pokemon games into letting you run your PC box names as code, enabling you to do pretty much anything you want. to be upfront, i'm not an expert on ACE - i understand it in an overarching conceptual sense and am able to follow ACE guides just fine, but i cannot write my own ACE code, which essentially requires you to know some GBA assembly. doesn't really matter for the purpose of this story though.

you can see an example of a tiny snippet of a larger ACE code with the PC box name below. it looks like gibberish but that's because every character used in the name corresponds to a specific internal value, which when all run together, is code!

i need ACE in FRLG because resetting for, or RNG manipulating (more on that in a moment), trainer ID (and secret ID, also more on that later) is pretty much impossible. ACE will allow me to change my TID to 02018 by essentially just telling the game to do so with my PC boxes. this requires me to set up ACE in emerald first since that's the only game with a viable entrypoint, and then use emerald ACE to make glitch pokemon that can activate ACE in FRLG when traded over.

as for RNG manipulation, that's a bit more straightforward, especially if you've ever watched a speedrun of... pretty much anything with random chance in it. games with random chance are not actually fully random because computers can't really be fully random, and in the older pokemon games with unencrypted and less advanced RNG (random number generator) algorithms, this is pretty easy to exploit.

this is a heavy simplification, but whenever you encounter a wild pokemon in RSE or FRLG, the amount of frames that have passed since the game was turned on are compared to a number that was generated upon boot, called the RNG seed. if you've ever played minecraft you can compare this to world seeds - the pokemon RNG seed determines all possible wild encounters in that play session in a similar fashion as minecraft determining the infinite terrain layout. this comparison determines every aspect of an encountered pokemon; its species, nature, IVs, and so on. so, if you were able to time your wild encounter (or any other type of pokemon encounter) down to the 1/60th of a second frame, you can get the game to spit out whatever pokemon you want at you! you just need a bit of typically invisible information first - the RNG seed, and if you're RNGing a shiny, your secret ID aka SID, which is like an invisible second trainer ID generated alongside your TID that is paired up with the TID and compared against any pokemon you encounter to determine if it should be shiny or not. both of these things can be figured out without hacking or tampering with games/save files.

the most common program used for all things RNG manipulation is called pokefinder and you can see an example of it spitting out what shinies are available on hoenn's first route in the first 100000 frames of the game being on with an RNG seed of 0 and my old TID/SID combo below. it's pretty damn cool to me tbh, i love RNG manipulation and i'm way more versed on it/experienced than i am with ACE

TLDR; rng manipulation is essentially a frame perfect, speedrunning-adjacent trick to get the game to roll the RNG in your favor, including for perfect IVs or shininess. for reasons that will become clear later, this is much easier to do in emerald than any other gen 3 game, so i will be using emerald for the RNG manipulation of the girafarig egg

with ALL of that context out of the way, this was the gameplan:

play through a fresh file of japanese firered (i don't own japanese leafgreen, RIP) all the way through the postgame to unlock trading with hoenn with the name PPさん, not worrying about TID for now. the guide i was following did not have a code for changing name with ACE in japanese FRLG specifically, so i figured playing the game again real quick would be a better alternative to trying to teach myself assembly in an afternoon LOL

set up ACE in my new emerald file i completed recently

use ACE in emerald to generate the glitch pokemon needed to run ACE in FRLG and trade them over. finalize the setup process over in FRLG too

look up possible gentle, ability 2, female, and shiny egg frames, and pick one that looks good to RNG manipulate in emerald, noting its PID (an encounter-specific ID number, pretty much)

figure out what SID, when combined with a TID of 02018, will cause that egg frame to be shiny - that way when the egg is traded over and hatched in firered, it will be shiny

do the RNG in emerald, trade over the to-be-shiny egg to firered, and hatch it after changing the TID/SID with ACE appropriately!! bam female, gentle, early bird, shiny, JP origin girafarig with an OT of PPさん and a visible TID of 02018. Pog!!

to execute that gameplan would take me an entire day, though...

step 1: play through firered

ok gonna be honest this is the ONE part of this entire process that i did not play on original hardware. i wanted to get to the Cool Parts of this process so i decided to play through firered on emulator. absolutely terrible picture sorry but i do actually own japanese firered, so i could dump the game legally to my computer to use speedup in mGBA with a little device called the Joey JR which connects the cart to my computer by USB like so

after that it was pretty much a relatively normal playthrough but obviously with emulator speedup. i used solely my starter blastoise to, well, blast through the rest of the game LMAO. after just a couple of hours or so i was right before the elite four, which i completed while in the car after moving the save file back to my cartridge with the same device, since i had to leave the house to go to a doctor appointment. i tried to take pictures of me beating the game but the sun was not doing the photos any favors lol. blastoise ended up being level 76 by the end. was easy with surf and an ice beam TM from the game corner (i just bought the coins)

unfortunately beating the game isn't the only requirement for trading with the hoenn games, so i also had to complete the whole sevii islands postgame quest... which required me to have 60 registered owned entries in the pokedex, which i wasn't really doing while speeding through the game initially, so i had a lot of mons to catch. i was still out of the house at this point (and playing at normal speed lol) so i wasn't really taking pictures, but i did make a stop at the power plant to look for an electabuzz despite it being an inefficient 5% since i needed a spare anyways for my leafgreen file unrelated to this story lmao. took a pic of it since it took a while to show up. anyway soon enough the dex had 60+ entries! i've played FRLG so many times that the encounter locations are memorized in my mind... i did all of this with no googling asdfkasfd

at this point i got home and was able to do the ruby/sapphire postgame quest on emulator with speedup again, so it was pretty easy. moved the save back to cart and i was done with step 1! obviously this didn't actually take me 21 hours of playtime, that was the emulator speedup's fault loool. from here on out i didn't touch any emulators again!

step 2: set up ACE in emerald

ACE time! i've actually set up ACE in an old emerald file before but i wanted to do it again fresh. i was following a guide pretty much to a T so i'm actually going to skip over the details of some of the steps since you can read about those more in depth over at the guide i was using if you want

TLDR; you have to trade for the NPC trade pokemon, DOTS the seedot and PLUSES the plusle, then EV train DOTS a specific way. these EV values cause DOTS to turn into a glitch pokemon egg 0x0611 when corrupted with the pomeg glitch (more on that in a bit), which, when hatched, runs the PC box names as code, aka ACE! why does it work? if you really want to know, there's plenty of stuff online about it, i'm not the best person to ask haha

it's worth noting that volbeat is really annoying to capture in emerald as it's literally only available as a 1% in one patch of grass, so i caught an illumise instead and bred them until a volbeat hatched lol. was much more efficient

also lol "Take good care of DOTS!" sorry i will be corrupting your son into demonspawn that lets me wield godlike control over your universe

after getting the necessary NPC trade pokemon all ready and moving them into a specific pattern in box 2 (i cloned them with the emerald tower cloning glitch) i had to perform the pomeg glitch. this involves using a pomeg berry to decrease a pokemon's health to 0 without causing a whiteout. this is achieved by getting a pokemon with at least 8 HP EVs to 1 HP and then using the pomeg berry on it, decreasing the EVs and taking off a point of health in the process (it's slightly more steps than this but whatever). i decided to use the camerupt i had during my playthrough of the game for this purpose. just took him to fiery path to get poisoned and walked until he was on 1 HP and healed him with an antidote lol

by doing the pomeg glitch and entering a wild battle, the game gets a bit confused since all the pokemon in your party are fainted and just sends out some sort of glitch decamark pokemon. in this situation, after viewing my camerupt's summary in battle and exiting back out of the summary screen, i was able to corrupt the DOTS and PLUSES sitting in my PC by scrolling up above the usual limit of the party menu, which reaches into data used by the first two PC boxes and fucks them up, ending up with, assuming that i EV trained correctly, a glitched egg that is about to hatch in a nest ball named DOTS with pokerus. this will run ACE when hatched! (if you want more info on this corruption pomeg stuff, check out the bulbapedia article for glitzer popping. yes that's what they named it)

step 3: use emerald ACE to set up firered ACE

so once again you can find a lot more detail on this process over at the guide i was using, but the TLDR of the matter was, i needed to put a bunch of codes into my PC box names to generate a few different glitch mons. specifically, i needed a egg that would hatch into a crobat (yes, fully evolved lol) with a singular glitched out move, that when used in battle in firered, would cause ACE to happen similar to how hatching the corrupted DOTS egg causes ACE to happen in emerald. i also needed a specific buggy shiny umbreon and a very strange glitchy egg.

even though this step was mostly a lot of tedious typing on the gen 3 keyboard (+ i had to redo things once because i made a typo at one point in the process LOL) it was so much fun! the game breaks in so many ways that you would just... never see during normal gameplay and it makes for some really good pictures and whatnot

first of all, when you hatch the 0x0611 egg, it hatches into a decamark of varying colors, in the case of the picture below it's almost imperceptible because the whole sprite is just a black circle, blending in with the background (sorry for the quality on this one, it's a screencap of a video clip i took).

additionally, trying to scroll over the hatched decamark in the PC or viewing its summary screen will crash the game, so to get rid of it, it has to be moved to the front of your party in the party menu, and then you go to the PC to release it through the deposit menu. since the cursor just defaults to the first position of the party and you don't have to scroll over to it, it's possible to release it from here.

oh yes and the umbreon/other glitch egg? similarly screwy - actually after generating them, their sprites are glitched out until you reset the game, so they look like this. behold their nonsense summaries:

after i had all i needed to trade to FRLG, i cloned an extra set of them with the emerald tower glitch again just in case i messed something up and got to trading! here's me receiving them on the firered side:

and last but not least, i'm a little obsessed with the way the glitch move looks in FRLG on the hatched crobat, absolute nonsense:

i finalized setting up the FRLG ACE (check out the guide i linked earlier for more info) and put everything into their proper positions, but before i could actually execute any code... i needed to know what SID i was going for!

step 4 + 5: look up potential egg frames in emerald and find an SID

soo now for looking at potential girafarig eggs. instead of using the program pokefinder which i mentioned earlier, i used a program called pokenav egg rng tool, which is exactly what it sounds like, a tool specialized for rng manipulating eggs with the pokenav in emerald. using it, i was quickly able to generate a whole list of gentle, female, ability 2 (early bird) eggs, and i picked one that was around 1300 frames in since that made for quick resetting attempts, but not so quick that i could barely make my inputs in time. the one i picked was frame 1381. with a TID of 02018, the PID D2C5EF55 would be shiny with an SID of 14962, so i noted that for later in firered. (i figured this out using an old program called RNG Reporter which is what i'm familiar with but i don't recommend using lmao. it's the "Pandora's Box" feature of that software though if you happen to look it up)

i won't make an entire guide on how to do emerald egg RNG here because it's a lot of steps, but i might at some point because the most up to date method isn't super well documented. anyways, here's a very paraphrased version of the process (this is also assuming that you aren't dealing with "redraws", which i wasn't... like i said very paraphrased):

get a pokemon with the ability lightningrod in the front of your party (i used electrike) to make pokenav calls happen more frequently, and a pokemon with flame body or magma armor (i used slugma) to make eggs hatch faster

get a male and a female of the pokemon you want to hatch, in my case girafarig. if you were RNGing IVs, the parent's IVs would be relevant, but i am not RNGing IVs so i didn't care and just caught the first girafarig i could in the safari zone

an egg is attempted to be generated every 255 steps after the parents are deposited in the daycare together, so by timing the usage of a max repel in such a way, it's easy to save the game exactly 10 steps before an egg is generated. do this

using a timer such as eontimer, soft reset and try to take that last 10th step on your target frame. this will also trigger a pokenav call (or lack thereof) and by looking for the phone call you got in the call column of the egg rng tool and whether or not an egg generated at the daycare, you can tell what frame you hit. didn't hit your target? just soft reset and try again, calibrating the timer for your own human error. this can take a while since the timing is precise to 1/60th of a second

once you hit your target frame, woohoo you did it just take the egg and hatch it! if you're RNGing IVs you would actually save before taking the egg and then RNG the IVs separately but that's a whole different thing i'm not explaining here since i wasn't RNGing IVs

i've avoided mentioning it this entire time till now, but emerald is particularly easy to do rng manipulation in because due to a programming error, the rng seed is always 0 - all encounters are predictable and you don't have to dedicate a frame perfect input to getting the right seed, making emerald rng a matter of one frame perfect input instead of two (there ARE ways to get emerald to generate a proper rng seed but that's unrelated here). additionally, its pokenav system means you can see if you got the right egg BEFORE taking it and hatching it... doing egg RNG in any other gen 3 game is basically a death sentence due to multiple untelegraphed frame perfect inputs that have to be executed in a row, plus really long wait times due to hatching eggs on a slower bike without flame body. there's a reason i was not doing this on four island in frlg.

but yeah now i knew what egg frame i was going for and was all prepared to do the RNG, so now it was onto actually executing it all:

step 6: getting kaf girafarig babey!!

before doing the RNG manipulation in emerald, i needed to change my SID and TID in firered finally! this required me to run two different codes, one for SID and one for TID. it was actually pretty painless since the code is nearly identical for both, you just swap out the values of each ID and one character changes in one box name to decide whether you're changing TID or SID. you can find the list of codes i was referencing here.

i was saving my one allotted video clip in this post for changing the TID with the glitched crobat move though because LMAO

^ shoutout to my qpp @/spikyearr for this one i fucking chokedSKFDDSFK

anyway, after doing that i went through the process of the egg rng in emerald (unfortunately no pictures because it's kind of hard to take pics mid-rng) and actually saved before taking the egg so that i'd be able to soft reset after hatching it - i just needed to check to make sure it was gentle and everything, and then i could soft reset, take the egg again, bike around to decrease the egg cycles in emerald since hatching in firered is super slow, and then trade it off before hatching it to go be hatched in firered. i knew it wouldn't be shiny in emerald, so i wasn't concerned with that. it only took 40 or so minutes of attempts before i got her!

and then AT LAST after spending my ENTIRE DAY ON THIS SHIT (like 10x the amount of time on the ACE stuff for the TID instead of the actual RNG itself LOOOL) i just had to trade the egg to firered and hatch it and i was golden!!!!! AAAGH here she is next to my kaf plushies!!!

also a picture of her summary screen after being traded to my english leafgreen!! i am assuming this will be easier to read for most of the people reading this post LOL

THAT'S IT. POST OVER THIS WAS SO LONG. IF YOU MADE IT THROUGH MY RAMBLING GOOD JOB. I HIT THE PHOTO LIMIT HELP ME

anyways yeah i'm gonna be ribbon mastering her and idk i might post about the process as i go. not immediately though i have a platinum playthrough to finish teehee. also if any of this was interesting to you i highly recommend trying out RNG manipulation, it's a really fun way to play pokemon games! gen 5, BW specifically and not their sequels, is REALLY beginner friendly for RNG manipulation as the timing is a lot less precise. check it out, there's plenty of guides online!!

[kaelidascope]

I think I should clarify that when I say OOC behavior in Toxic Bees AU, I mean like they're still their basic skeletal designs as a whole (I'm not THAT bad of a writer) but they're OOC compared to the versions of them we know today As in I banked hard on certain aspects of their personalities like Yang's self-sacrificing tendencies, Ruby's immaturity, Weiss's arrogance, and Blake's flakiness Pretty much all these attributes are just amplified to shit and there's like no character growth until the final chapters NFJGFNGKF

Yang literally only thinks she's worth what she can physically offer to someone in the form of service (sexually, financially, or emotionally). Her untreated depression and anxiety causes her to internalize her abandonment issues so bad she's creating scenarios in her life that are doomed to set her up for failure from the start, and yet she doesn't understand why people keep leaving her when she can't stop being this disingenuous version of herself

Blake pretends her actions aren't the direct cause of her consequences and therefor justifies her actions because of her consequences. She desperately doesn't want to give a shit about anything but that act's only gonna get her so far before it blows up in her face. She wants to think that she deserves to be mistreated and can't stand the idea of forgiveness or compromise, so she'll sabotage her own life to get a result that's familiar

Ruby's age shows painfully hard in this and reflects on her thought process and maturity. She's 20 and doesn't have a clue, and up until this point has had Yang or her Dad do literally everything for her. Her growth's been stunted just as much as she doesn't actively try to get off her ass and do something about it

Weiss may seem put together, but she's been miserably sheltered her whole life. Home-schooled first and then immediately living with a romantic partner she's far too young for second, who ends up infantizing her more and she doesn't have the tools or communication skills to speak up for herself. She's better about it now, but her bad habits manifest in her inability to get a grasp on reality and treats people like objects because not once did she have a normal human bond in her house

Now take those versions of team RWBY and throw them into a college setting with their very first taste of freedom, absolutely NO proper job or life experience, and nobody to actively vibe-check them on fucked up, ill-intended, and misguided decision-making. THAT'S what makes this an OOC RWBY fic. Because we all were stupid in our 20s living out of the house for the first time

[aihoshiino]

chapter 135 thoughts

Akasaka seems to have heard me bitching about other characters not getting involved last week because pretty much this entire chapter is focused on outsider perspectives on the RubyKana conflict, which I actually really appreciate. Not knowing how everyone else was responding to this felt really weird and while I ultimately am glad in hindsight Akasaka used the last chapter to focus exclusively on Ruby and her feelings about Ai, it did still feel really weird in the moment. And there's still no Miyako… girl where did you go…!!!

It's also really nice to get a bit of Aqua and Gotanda time, too — I feel like it's been forever since we've had any time focusing on that relationship and it's one of my quiet favourites in the series so revisiting it now was a nice surprise. We're still pretty locked out of Aqua's head but I feel like his dialogue here speaks for itself without us needing to peek in there. And whether or not he means to, I think Aqua says something really, really revealing here about how he's been dealing — or abjectly failing to deal — with Ai's death.

A running thread through OnK that Ruby is finally starting to come around from is the way the twins have both struggled with their idolization and objectification of Ai and ultimately failed to treat her like a human being. Here, Aqua doubles down on that dehumanization, rejecting the idea of Ai ever having complicated emotions about any of the things that happened to her. He flattens her into a caricature of herself, carefree and avoidant and specifically says that he personally never saw Ai crying. Not even once.

Except… of course he did. Because Ai cried as she told the twins that she loved them as she was dying. The anime even takes this a step further by having Ai break down into sobs during this moment and having her tears literally fall onto Aqua's face as he gazes into her eyes. In denying the existence of these tears, Aqua is also to some degree, erasing those words of pure love that Ai poured out with her last breaths. It feels like a confirmation of something I've been suspecting for a while: that in his fucked up attempts to 'grant her wish' Aqua is even willing to desecrate and erase the real Ai.

In a lot of ways, Aqua is deeply stunted in comparison to Ruby. Honestly I kind of get the feeling that Aqua… doesn't want to humanize Ai? Not out of cruelty but out of seemingly necessarily self defense; if Aqua lets himself love his mom as a human person, if he lets himself love her properly and with empathy then he will necessarily have to finally mourn and grieve for her as a human being and I think that would be the start of breaking him.

What's exciting about this talk as well is that it sets up Aqua and Ruby to be in opposition on something extremely central to the movie arc: Ai herself. This sets up the potential for them to come into conflict and maybe even for Ruby to really lay into him about the exploitative way 15YL is making use of Ai's image.

Final note before I move on: whether this was intended or not, I can't help but see a lot of parallels between Aqua's insistence that Ai would never cry over her treatment in B-Komachi and Nino's rant at the end of 45510 in which she reacts with revulsion at the idea of Ai wanting to connect with them. Aqua/Nino parallels aren't what I was expecting for Christmas but the implications are pretty (discord eyes emoji)

Gotanda's response is interesting, too. He claims that he wrote the script by 'listing the events that actually happened' when we know for a fact that there is a huge amount of dramatization and fictionalization at play just out of the necessity of recreating the events in the life of a person no longer here to give testimony. But he also betrays something here: his own lack of real care towards Ai herself. He dismisses the idea that it's worth trying to understand her feelings after her passing and admits that he isn't really making the movie out of empathy but out of a sense of wanting to capture something he failed to before. This movie is his revenge.

And like… fuck, man. It's just so miserable. There has always been this really ghoulish undercurrent to the entire idea of the Movie Arc, of digging up Ai's corpse again, slicing up her private and most personal self and her painful history that caused her so much shame and dressing it up into something pretty and consumable for the public to salivate over. Even in death, Ai can't rest in peace. Even in death, nobody can just leave her be. She has to be bought and sold and swapped and traded until all the value has been wrung out of her. Nobody making this movie really cares about understanding the real Ai at this point, apart from Ruby; not even the director who wants to be able to film her.

That said. man. the scene that followed was pretty sweet. The idea that Gotanda pulled Aqua into his project not just to give Kana a bit of a wake up call but because he was actually looking out for her and genuinely wanted her to have some friends is a really lovely idea and his sense of relief in seeing her having found a place in B-Komachi was also really good. In a lot of ways, the second generation of B-Komachi may be echoing the mistakes of their predecessors but they're also learning to correct them.

kana's face when she takes a bite out of ruby's parfait is like the hardest i've laughed all week btw god bless mengo yokoyari

The Gillian Cut of Gotanda talking so warmly about RubyKana's friendship to the two girls still being cold with each other is framed as a joke but I do think it's supposed to be read as a reassuring moment for the audience. While Aqua puts forth that his rose-tinted idea of fights making friendships stronger only happens in fiction… Oshi no Ko is fiction. Literally the very first words of the story are that verbatim and it constantly uses in-universe fiction as metatexual commentary on its own nature as a story. More than a joke, this feels like a sort of reassuring pat on the back for the reader that the girls will emerge from this rough spot stronger than before.

Aqua's sense of trust for both Kana and Ruby is really sweet, too. They're two of the people he cares about the most in the world — often to the point of him not being able to trust them, out of fear of the supposed repercussions — but here, he not only steps back to let them handle things themselves but reassures Gotanda that he can do the same. Aqua has been pretty cruel to both these girls in a lot of ways over the series so it was nice to see him express some warmth.

And that's the final chapter of this year…! Jesus I can't believe I only got back into the series back in April lol I really feel like I've been following the weekly chapters for longer. Admittedly, I'm starting to get really fatigued with the Movie Arc with how long it's been going but I'm hoping that we'll start to see some more progress on it when we return in 2024 and that Kamiki will do. Something maybe. can you even imagine.

[wishesofeternity]

okay I've seen posts like these going around for Yang and Blake but not for Weiss and it's bugging me a bit so I figured I'd make my own

Guys. Weiss is frustrated and impatient and she has every right to be. it's completely understandable. Remember when homegirl was the last member of her team standing and watched all three of her friends plummet to their presumed deaths? Remember when she's the only one of them who saw what happened to Penny? Remember when she lost not just her home, but a whole damn kingdom that LITERALLY WENT UP IN FLAMES? Atlas is literally another Beacon for her, the loss is incredibly personal and visceral. She's grieving. She lost her home that she desperately wanted to save. She's dealing with her own immense kingdom spanning guilt. "I am so tired of leaving places in ashes."

Not to mention the fact that Weiss was forcibly separated from her mother and brother who she only recently reconnected with (and who she clearly feels responsible for) and was forcibly wrenched away from her sister. Her losses are heart-wrenching, and it's important that the weight of it is acknowledged and brought up when discussing her. She's dealing with her own trauma as well, and she's clearly impatient with this new world and desperate to go back to Remnant.

She gets frustrated with Ruby one time about the grow-hurt (obviously, neither she nor any of the others knew why Ruby wasn't able to get it) and that's fine lol. It's normal. It happens to everyone, it's literally not a big deal whatsoever. It's bizarre that people are taking it to mean that she was inconsiderate of Ruby's feelings or too self-centered to even notice them, because the comment itself is literally nothing - what we're meant to see is Ruby's reaction, and how bad Ruby's own headspace is that such a small, irrelevant thing cements her own heartbreaking sense of inferiority and uselessness. It's just like Yang saying "you don't mean that" is taken as an invalidation of her trauma and Blake's attempts at reassurance are taken as dismissals of her trauma. Ruby's hurting so immensely that she doesn't understand how others can't see it - but how can they? It's impossible and unreasonable to expect them to magically understand and fix everything that she's going through, especially considering that so much of her trauma has been repressed even from herself since she was a child.

Her team loves her. They'll reach out to her, she'll reach out to them. There's no need to entirely blame one side, because there are no sides. It's a messy, heartbreaking, exhausting situation where nobody is wrong and everyone is sympathetic. It's good storytelling.

EDIT: sorry, I wasn't trying to compare their experiences and weigh them against each other, even tho I think that's how it might have come across. I just haven't seen lots of discussions on Weiss's state of mind (maybe it's just me and my dash lol) so I just wanted to emphasize that, though some stuff was wrongly worded. Sorry once again! I changed things slightly so if possible, reblog this version instead.

[groupalpha]

WARNING

This comic contains themes of death, specifically murder. If you are sensitive to such, please skip this comic.

if you wish to proceed, the comic is under the cut

RSbSS: ... Well.. this is what happened. I apologize if this could be disturbing to any of you.

Loading memory from Memory Conflux

Please stand by...

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TSA,FS: So she has been working well I presume?

LS,TBS: Of course. What about Endless Beyond?

TSA,FS: She's... okay. A bit distracted at her work, but she should get the hang of things soon.

LS,TBS: Perhaps that isn't the best course of action. Endless Beyond should be on task, after all, that's what we've created iterators for. A shutdown seems best, and to rework her code.

TSA,FS: ... Perhaps you are right. I need to dwell on such an idea though. I will consider such options.

LS,TBS: I understand. In my position, I would go through with such actions. She was rather rushed due to the recent creation of the Space Unit. This is quite evident with her... puppets design.

TSA,FS: Her puppet is unfinished due to us not getting the proper materials from Ethos. You know they're rather stubborn, and are quite against Endless Beyond's creation.

LS,TBS: To be blunt with it, her puppet is quite mismatched. It looks like you patched everything together as if it were putting together paper and glue.

TSA,FS: Well, Lost Spirit, Thirty Broken Shards, How about you try to fund Endless Beyond when everyone is against it? I'd certainly enjoy seeing her made with a complete puppet instead of being made up of spare parts.

LS,TBS: I suppose the mismatched puppet and the rushed creation speaks quite loudly on its own. If in your position, I would rethink about being her creator, and abandon a defect.

RSbSS: Take that back.

LS,TBS: Ah, give me just one moment Ten Stars Above, First Supernova.

Excuse me? Ruby Skies by Sapphire Shores, that was not addressed to you.

RSbSS: You can't talk about her like that. She's alive like the rest of us!

LS,TBS: Ruby Skies by Sapphire Shores, you will not raise your voice to your prime administrator, especially over something so trivial.

RSbSS: This isn't a trivial matter. This is a line a basic respect. This is someone who provides information that none of us could obtain otherwise.

LS,TBS: I didn't think I would be having a discussion with you about such, but my stance stays firm. Quite the few of your local group has issues as well, such as the problem with Atlantis. Eight Crashing Tides shouldn't have control over her citizens, and Fifteen Pearls, Setting Ocean Mist is an idiot for allowing such ridiculous ideals.

RSbSS: That doesn't mean anything, and maybe it would be better if you actually heard our wishes out.

LS,TBS: Ruby Skies by Sapphire Shores, you will not suggest such changes. I will not have it.

RSbSS: But-

LS,TBS: Ruby Skies by Sapphire Shores. I said enough of this nonsense. You-

RSbSS: I don't want to show what went down but uh...

RSbSS: it's not something I'm proud of. I... hurt them. They came back but... I shouldn't have done it.

RSbSS: Because of it, I had had my puppet's arms taken away, I was humiliated, and feared by my own ancients. ... I... messed up big time.

Part 1/2

[mizusswordtip]

Down The Rabbit Hole ⚝ Killian Jones x Reader (26)

find the story on wattpad

summary: Alice's plan to overthrow the Queen of Hearts is thwarted by a dashing pirate with a hook. Years later, after the curse is broken, they reunite once again.

masterlist

After Emma and Henry's tearful reunion, we ran straight to Gold's shop. We followed behind a frantic Snow, antsy to wake up her husband. When we got there there's already a group formed around David. I recognize some of them from the day the curse is broken. Leroy and the other dwarves that I never learned the names of along with Ruby.

Snow sits by David's side and leans down while everyone holds their breath in anticipation. Her lips press into his and a bright light fills the room almost instantly. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief when David's eyes open, filled with love at the sight of his wife. I feel a pang in my chest that I've grown used to over the years. Loneliness. It's especially alive in this room, filled with old friends and family. Myself being the only odd one out. Well, not exactly.

I look over to see Regina standing to the side and I can't help but sympathize with her. She's an outcast due to her own actions but the look in her eye is all too familiar. I had lumped Cora and Regina together without a second thought when I had discovered she's Cora's daughter. But I've never seen Cora show any emotion before. Just cruelty.

"How about dinner at Granny's? On me." Ruby's words break me out of my thoughts as she looks around the room.

"As long as it's not Chimera, I'm in." Emma jokes and I clench my jaw. I shift uncomfortably, unsure if the invite even extends to me. Me and Emma have become pretty close over the past couple of days along with Snow but everyone else doesn't know me.

"Alice, are you coming?" Emma's voice calls out and I look up in surprise, immediately feeling stupid for feeling the way I did.

"Oh, yeah, sure. I'll be there in a bit." I stutter out and she gives me a nod before putting her arm around Henry's shoulder and walking out. The rest follow after her joyfully catching up. I turn around once I can no longer hear the chatter to face Regina who looks as though she's barely holding it together.

"Let me guess, this is the part where you get your revenge." She spits out tearfully and I sigh heavily. I don't say anything for a good minute, considering.

"No. This is the part where I offer you forgiveness." I say softly. Her gaze shoots up so fast it was almost comical. She looks almost horrified, causing me to laugh a little.

"Why?" She asks suspiciously.

"I know your mother. She's hated me since I was a little girl. Before I could even manage to pick up a sword, let alone use one." I begin to explain. I trail off for a moment, lost in memories of Wonderland.

"Where are you going with this?" She asks lowly.

"Your mother would have closed that portal and never looked back." I say simply and she looks at me, starting to understand. "You're trying. I'm not going to treat someone who's trying like a villain. Especially when I now know you learned it all from her." I explain. I mean every word too, which is probably more shocking to me than it is to her.

"I..." She trails off, looking as though I had just stuck her. Still though, beneath it all, I can see she's truly affected by my words.

"You don't have to say anything. I just wanted you to know that I'm wiping the slate clean." I tell her with a nod. She takes a moment to compose herself, wiping her eyes discreetly.

"Thank you, Alice." She mutters under her breath but I hear her none the less.

"You wanna come to Granny's?" I ask awkwardly, extending another olive branch. She looks even more shocked but she hides it well with a faux smile.

"No, thank you. I don't think I'm welcome." She says, looking down at the ground with a rueful smile.

"I understand." Is all I say with an apologetic smile before turning to catch up with the others.

"Alice!" I stop dead in my tracks and turn around with furrowed brows. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out... a set of keys? She holds them out to me, urging me to grab them. I reach out hesitantly before doing so.

"What's this?" I ask dumbly.

"A key. To an apartment here in Storybrooke." Comes her simple reply. My eyes widen and I look up to see she has an apologetic look on her face.

"You're giving me an apartment?" I ask, dumbfounded.

"Consider it an apology." She says as an explanation and I feel tears start to form in my own eyes. Maybe she really has changed after all.

"I've never had a place of my own... I've always shared it with either my mother or husband...." I say to myself before grinning at her. "Thank you Regina. This is a good start."

[picturejasper20]

Peridot and Lapis Lazuli´s relationship in Steven Universe: An analysis

Lapis Lazuli and Peridot's relationship is, as many relationships from Steven Universe, quite messy and complex and changes throughout the series in more than one way going from somewhat enemies to friends and companions and even then, later gets explored how that dynamic wasn't in balance, showing there how doesn't always have the full idea of the nature of the relationship between two people.

To say that Lapis was upset with finding out that Peridot living in the old barn would be putting it lightly. Peridot was partially involved in keeping Lapis prisoner in the spaceship that brought them to Earth as well as interrogating her. She had more than one reason to not be fond of Peridot and want to avoid her.

In most of ¨Barn Mates¨ Peridot tries to be nice to her to make amends and Lapis turns down everyone of them. While it is understandable the reason of why Lapis acted this way, she went a little to out of the line when she destroyed Peridot's gift, which was a tape recorder, something that was personal for her.

Peridot gets frustrated with this and then goes off about how she gets why Lapis feels this way: She can't never go back to Homeworld, Earth doesn't feel like a home yet and she feels alone in this. ...But she later adds that this is one of the reasons of why she wants to make amends with Lapis, because she gets what Lapis is going through since she is going through the same issues.

Lapis demands for Peridot to leave, to which Peridot does, giving up on trying to make peace with Lapis. That's when even Steven gets tired of Lapis's behaviour and points out that she isn't giving Peridot a chance and is not right to be so mean to her.

Some minutes later Peridot comes back running, being chased by the Roaming Eye Homeworld spaceship that is, of course, looking for her. Lapis sees that Peridot is in danger and decides to help her by taking down the Roaming Eye using her water powers. While it isn't said, her actions indicate that she was trying to make up for how she was so mean to Peridot earlier. Some seconds later she asks to Peridot if she was okay, showing that she was willing to give her a chance now.

In the episode that followed, Hit the Diamond, Lapis helped by distracting the ruby squad to protect Peridot from being taken away. I wouldn't say they were friend at that point but that Lapis seemed to like Peridot at least enough to care about her well being.

For a while we didn't see too much of Lapis and Peridot until Amethyst's arc in the episode ¨Beta¨. In this episode we see them being friends and hanging around. They got into human things. They like watching shows together, they like playing music and making art things with junk they find lying around in the barn.

So for some time it seemed like everything was going more or less well between them. In ¨Gem Harvest¨ they are growing together crops. Peridot believes that they work like gems in the kindergartens but she is dissapointed to learn that crops work differently from that.

So Steven ends up bringing up a dog like pumpkin to life using his gem powers and Peridot and Lapis end up adopting her.

Some fans have described Peridot and Lapis Lazuli's relationship as a queerplatonic relationship, considering that Peridot was written with the intention to be aro-ace. This interpretation could apply as in some ways their dynamic can be read as a ¨old married couple¨ for the way they interact and are living with each other. Pumpkin could be seen somewhat as their daughter with Peridot and Lapis being her ¨parents¨.

Moving on, their relationship seemed to be going well until ¨Room for Ruby¨ showed that Lapis was still struggling a lot to adapt to Earth because of her own trauma. Most of the episode she felt really down, specially by seeing how Navy was supposely adapating so quickly to Earth, making Lapis feel jealous. At the end of the episode it was revealed that this wasn't the case and that Navy was faking it to get her spaceship back.

"Raising the Barn" acts a bit of followed up to ¨Room for Ruby¨ by revealing that well, Peridot often has to walk on eggshells around Lapis and there are things she avoids telling Lapis to not upset her. Peridot has been negleting her own feelings in the relationship, for the sake of ¨being there¨ for Lapis. She tells to Steven that she wants to stay on Earth, that she doesn't want to leave, but she still has ¨to go¨ with Lapis.

The thing with Lapis Lazuli is that while she isn't a bad person... she can be a lot to deal with. From what it was said by Peridot, she felt that she couldn't be fully honest with her more often than not and she was losing herself in their dynamic, having to sacrifice quite a lot to make it work.

So Steven suggests to Peridot to be honest with Lapis about wishing to stay on Earth. Peridot does this and Lapis gets in part upset that this was brought up in the last minute and hurt because Peridot hasn't been completely honest with her. The two have a bit of a fallout that ends up with Lapis abruptly leaving Earth out of fear of ¨getting caught up in another war¨ again and taking the barn along with her. Leaving Peridot and Pumpkin on Earth.

The consequences of this fallout get explored in the following episode ¨Back to the Kindergarten¨. In this episode Peridot, Steven and Amethyst try growing a garden in the Prime Kindergarten. The whole episode acts as a metaphor for Peridot and Lapis Lazuli's fallout in ¨Raising the Barn¨, how Peridot misses Lapis and the barn and how she has been feeling down lately. The story ends with the idea that while her relationship with Lapis didn't work out, she can still try making connections with other people and start new elsewhere, finally seeing the possibility of moving on from the events of ¨Raising the Barn¨.

On the other hand, from Lapis Lazuli's perspective there is the episode ¨Can't Go Back¨ which explores many aspects of her character but mainly the guilt she feels about having left Earth so abruptly and taken the barn with her, feeling that she can't go back after the way she left. There is also her huge anxiety and fear of getting caught up in a war again due to her own traumatic past. Lapis explains to Steven how she is scared of having to go through the same situation again, believing only bad things are going to happen, something that Steven answers with ¨what if something good happens?¨

Steven's words seemed to have some effect on Lapis because in ¨Reunited¨ Lapis shows up in the battle against Blue and Yellow Diamonds and drops the barn on Blue to distract her for some moments. She has a brief exchange with Peridot, who is glad to see that Lapis came back and is helping them to fight the Diamonds.

It isn't clear what happened between Peridot and Lapis Lazuli after the events of Reunited and during the time skip after Change Your Mind. However, based on some hints and their interactions in the Steven Universe Movie, they seem to be in better terms now.

It's very likely that they had some conversations about what happened in ¨Raising the Barn¨, Lapis apologized to Peridot for the way she left and eventually Peridot forgave her for that. In addition to this, they likely established some boundaries between them and found other social circles to be in during Era 3. In that way they stayed as friends but also avoided going back to their previous status of their relationship by being in more equal (and healthy) terms.

In all, i think what can be taken away from their dynamic is that relationships can be messy and how it is important to avoid losing yourself in a relationship if you are trying to help someone who is going through a lot of problems in their life. You can support someone while establishing boundaries for yourself and being able to be honest with them. And, in part is how about how things don't always work out and people can go through fallouts. That doesn't mean that the two parties have to hate each other and then can even remain friends, accepting that their previous relationship didn't work as they wished.

[lambilegs]

I was at the bus stop and started to think about the end of the movie and the thought of Lee being haunted by the devil jumped my mind,like,how would she be like after the movie?

Would she try to find other ways to end the whole doll cycle thing,Or If Satan would change her memories like in the whole movie,or would she resist Satan's manipulation until she became like Ruth.

What are your thoughts on Lee after the movie?

-👹

thoughts on lee post-longlegs

note: thank you SO much for this request!! it's such an interesting idea to explore, and I definitely felt it was the right timing to do it today, since I just finished rewatching it. just to warn, it's pretty sad and quite dark ;-; contains: mentions of anxiety, depression, trauma, survivor's guilt, the murders. also, wanna disclaim that I am, by no means, a professional or expert in mental health, so these explorations of what lee's psyche and social behaviours would be like are purely speculation, and I can't say they accurately or for sure reflect what a person in her situation would actually go through post-traumatic event

okay, so from what oz has said, it seems like the devil was done with his work after lee's mom died. like, the devil just wanted to push lee to do something SO fucked up like kill her own mother, and that was kind of the last thing that had to happen to satisfy me (the devil's an asshole tbh)

I think with her doll being destroyed, and her mom being dead, lee would no longer be plagued by the devil in the sense that her memories and senses are altered with certain pieces being hidden away from her. nor would she have her psychic abilities anymore, since the devil is essentially "done" with messing with her

but, in every other sense, I think she would be entirely haunted by him. she spent twenty years of her life not even knowing a third person lived in her basement, because she was that intensely manipulated in what she saw, heard and detected. even though she knows it's not happening anymore, I think she'd be constantly caught in a web of self-doubt. what if there's someone in her cottage, and she doesn't know? what if in a moment of weakness, the devil returns and seizes her life? what if there's someone watching her from outside, but she just can't see because of a higher power? thoughts like this would always be poisoning her mind, shattering any chance at peace and keeping her, at least psychologically, haunted

while destroying the doll would, of course, make ruby aware of all that occurred with her family, lee knows how much worse it is to live in that perpetual state of blocked memories and entrapped trauma. her mother hiding what happened did nothing but destroy herself, lee and their home. lee's torn between the decision at first, overcome with pained sympathy for ruby, ruby who is so much like herself. does she choose blissful ignorance where ruby lives her life detached from her own memories? or horrific self-awareness that it might take years, her entire life, to move on from? lee almost, just almost, leans for the first option, but no. the cycle has to end. she can't dictate ruby to the same fate she herself lived, she can't sequester ruby to a life of feeling lost

if upon arrival, her coworkers are able to destroy the doll, and ruby becomes aware of all that happened, lee, just as traumatized, would be far from being considered suitable enough to look after the girl. lee isn't even sure if she'd want to do that. she's completely shattered, devastated, enraged and filled with nauseating panic all the time now. she can't look after ruby, ruby who deserves so much better. but, at the same time, her and ruby now understand each other more than anyone. two people who were forced to passively exist amongst the horrors their families went through.

ruby would probably now live with relatives of anna or carter's, and at first, lee and her aren't allowed to see each other, the family worried that it would only cause memories of that day to resurface for ruby. but, ruby is just as insistent. lee saved her, and now that more details of the case have been exposed, she's aware that lee and her are two sides of the same coin. and so, lee starts visiting ruby once a month, and the two of them catch up in their awkward little way, go on a walk, sit in the living room and watch television. ruby sometimes asks lee about the cases, what happened to lee and her mom, and despite the way her throat tightens, lee forces herself to answer

however, if ruby's doll wasn't able to get destroyed, and the devil still had a hold on her, it would probably be harder for lee to visit. seeing ruby in the haze, not even aware of what's happened to her family, haunts lee, and she can't bear to see the girl in that state. one of the worst things is the immense guilt she feels -- for having woken up too late, for having reached carter's house too late, for having attempted to shoot the doll too late. she'd feel this guilt no matter what, but I feel it'd be even worsened by the mental image of ruby's blank face continuously flashing in her mind

she'd feel a pit of guilt about her mom, too. all of this was because ruth wanted to protect lee. if lee hadn't gone outside to search for kobble on jaunary thirteenth, maybe none of this would've happened. if she hadn't been so reckless to interact with him, maybe none of this would've happened. if her mom hadn't loved her so much, maybe none of this would've happened

for months, she's off from work. she's always either in a state of panic or numbness. she can't sleep, she can barely look after herself or be responsible for anything regarding. she's constantly on edge, plagued by visions of kobble, her mom, the carters, the case, and even when she's distracted, they're always there, at the back of her mind, following her. in addition to that, there've been rumours and talk about her at the bureau since she claimed that the longlegs' case was involved with the supernatural. to her, there was no use in lying. she held hope that someone, anyone would believe her, and after what happened with her mom, she no longer had it in her to lie. for any reason. so, yeah, because of all this, she self-isolates, takes a long period of time off from work, and heads into intensive therapy. honestly, after all this, she might resign from law enforcement completely, for I could definitely see her too traumatized by what happened to deal with more violence, more cases, more terrorized families

honestly her life post-longlegs is filled with trauma and the remnants of what happened, but I'd like to think she eventually heals, because lee really deserves it after everything :/