#there's also the matter of penny being heavily relatable to autistic ppl

[aknolan]

Okay so, here's how I read into the Nuts and Dolts dynamic:

Ruby: "I love Penny but I don't know if she feels the same way and everything is so chaotic and I don't want to make her uncomfortable so I'll just keep this to myself and focus on other things!"

Penny: "Ruby is such a good friend! I want to make out with her! That is TOTALLY a thing good friends do, right? I'm pretty sure Blake and Yang make out, and they ALSO seem like very good friends! Weiss, are you okay? You look like you are trying to ease a headache."

I feel like that really doesn't give enough credit to Penny tbh. I get that it's funny to treat her as super naive on how everything works, but especially in v7 and v8 she's just... not.

Penny not realizing her feelings for Ruby are romantic? Sure. Penny not realizing that making out is a romantic thing? That just seems a bit infantilizing to me. And I'm not really blaming you because it's a common thing in the fandom, but I'm also not gonna gloss over it. That reduces Penny to a joke about how she has 0 social understanding, when v7 very clearly moves waaaaaaay beyond that.

Anyways, the way I read them is that up to v3, Ruby may have had a bit of a crush on Penny, but never really thought about her feelings long enough to notice. Then after v3, she thought Penny was dead and it didn't matter what exactly those feelings were, it just hurt. Then v7 happens, and she's between "too much work to think about feelings" and "no clear time limit to figure this out so whatever" again with regard to her feelings. In v8 she of course has even less time to think about it, but a lot of opportunity to notice how important Penny is. How much the thought of losing her again hurts. That leaves her in v9 with a very clear understanding of how deeply important Penny is, with it only being a matter of time before the quarter drops and she has her realization that the feeling is love.

Penny I think has the very specific problem of not having a reference point. This especially goes for v3. The people she's close to are her dad and Ruby, and so the difference between the feelings is easy to think of as family vs friend. And that's how things stay. Sure, Winter becomes a friend of sorts, but that's still... different. It's only really in v8 that she ends up briefly surrounded by friends, as everyone tries to save her. Everyone is willing to take risks for her. This is when she gains a reference point for how the feelings she has for Ruby are different from friend-feelings.

I also think either of them may have noticed much sooner if the concept of kissing was on their minds, but it's not, and that's fine.