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bestworstcase · 4 months ago

Note

Do you have thoughts you’d like to air on the Raven is actually Ruby’s dad theory? No prob if you’ve answered this before but could you link?

my general feeling on secret-biological-relation theories is that they’re usually something that arises from a misreading of narrative foiling (in that a bona fide narrative connection between two characters is taken to be foreshadowing for a literal material connection between the characters in-universe, rather than parsed as a narrative device that services theme; this also plays a role in why shipping narrative foils is so popular, because it follows from the textual thematic relationship) and in the case of secret parentage in particular, it is also often motivated at least in part by shipping (this is absolutely the case with summer/raven – and summer/qrow for that matter).

with rwby and the question of ruby’s parentage, such as it is, the fundamental issue i find in theories that taiyang isn’t ruby’s biological father, irrespective of Who the proposed alternative is, is that in practice each one boils down to two options:

#1, summer had an extramarital affair with raven that nobody else but the two of them knows about (in which case the only person who could reasonably reveal the truth is summer, because ruby is so much the spitting image of summer but for the fluffier hair she could’ve just as easily gotten from tai as from raven or qrow that no one would question she’s tai’s – especially given that we know now summer is a skilled liar!)

#2, everything was aboveboard (whether poly triad or open relationship or summer and tai actually having a platonic partnership or what-have-you), ruby’s true parentage is known to TRQ (and their friends/colleagues may have some general awareness of whatever the real situation was) and… nobody ever told ruby for Some Reason.

now personally i think – if we’re doing a theory in this vein – option #1 is both more interesting and more narratively plausible (because again: 9.10 flashback establishes that summer is a good liar and puts that trait squarely in focus), but the preference among the rosebird conspiracy crowd seems to overwhelmingly be for option #2, so we’ll focus on that one.

ON ITS FACE, i don’t think it’s crazy to speculate that the keeping secrets family might be keeping this secret, given e.g. yang wasn’t told about raven until summer’s disappearance (and may not really have been told so much as discovered, depending upon what “found out” means). why not hide effectively the same information from ruby?well.

for one thing, it then becomes narratively awkward to explain “yang knows raven is her mom, ruby knows raven is yang’s mom, and raven expressly claims yang as her daughter (and has a bond to her); but neither ruby nor yang know that raven is also ruby’s mom*, raven has evinced exactly zero of her i-don’t-care-she-said-caringly behavior toward ruby, nor used “bet your daddy and uncle didn’t tell you that ruby is also my daughter, did they?” as the mother of all trump cards in her “here’s why you shouldn’t blindly trust whatever you’re told QUESTION EVERYTHING” gambit, and when qrow called raven out for being a deadbeat mom to yang he said sweet fuck all to her about ruby.”

[*we do not do the insistently referring to the non-carrying parent as The Dad thing in this household, thank you.]

if the presumption is that raven being ruby’s parent is not secret-secret—as in, this is known information to TRQ—then it becomes untenable as a surprise twist once you reach v4 and have qrow and raven, in a private conversation, discussing her abandonment of only one of her two daughters. even if raven felt (for some reason) that ruby didn’t really ‘count’ as her daughter, qrow has zero. reason. to let that fly, and no reason at all to uphold a charade when it’s just himself and raven.

rwby is better than butchering his characterization in this one scene for the sake of a dramatic reveal down the line; there are ways you could write qrow’s dialogue there to include both girls while being vague about the specific biological relationship, and then it becomes punchy foreshadowing instead of a retroactive “…why does qrow not give a damn about raven abandoning ruby too?” moment.

and foreshadowing like that is one of rwby’s greatest strengths! they do this sort of dialogue sleight of hand all the time!

but say they did fumble that one moment—it happens, it’s not impossible—well… as a narrative secret this becomes really untenable after v5. even if raven flat out did not consider ruby to be her daughter whatsoever for her own labyrinthine raven branwen reasons, if she is aware of a direct biological relation between herself and yang’s sister of which yang has clearly been kept in the dark, and her goal is to shock yang with information that will break her trust in taiyang and qrow—which it is, that’s exactly why she does the whole shapeshifting song and dance—then why wouldn’t she drop that bomb?

you could not possibly design a more flawless QUESTION EVERYTHING ALSO NEVER TRUST DAD OR UNCLE ABOUT ANYTHING EVER AGAIN kick in the face for yang than “oh by the way, your sister? i’m her mother too. the only reason you know about me is because you went looking; if you hadn’t… well, they would have happily kept you in the dark your whole life, too.”

and if raven didn’t drop that bomb because she has her signature Complicated Feelings about ruby, then shouldn’t we expect to see a glimmer of that in her response to ruby, as opposed to what we plainly get—which is “hm. you sure are summer’s daughter. fireball in the face for you for one thousand years!!!”

in the reverse direction, we have the question of whether such a reveal really serves the narrative, and i don’t think it does.

the general thrust of the “for” argument here is that the revelation of such a frankly pointless lie about something that is only a big deal because the adults conspired to hide it would tie off all the existing threads about team strq being generally dysfunctional in a tidy little bow and highlight it by virtue of that dysfunction being emphatically Not Salem’s Fault. to an extent this is a line of thinking that i find not unreasonable because it is quite clear that team strq’s dysfunction was indeed Not Salem’s Fault – the shadow war was a significant stressor of course, but there is an awful lot of small interpersonal messiness simmering inside that pressure cooker.

HOWEVER,

rwby has spent Nine Whole Volumes meticulously slow-boiling “what happened the night summer rose met salem?” as THE central mystery – that is the question haunting this entire narrative, the missing piece of the puzzle, the answer that must be found and resolved before the story can end. and i promise. I PROMISE. that the answer to this question will not, in any configuration, principally concern the intra-team romantic fuck ups of team strq. LOWER THE FILTER SETTING ON YOUR SHIPPER GOGGLES THAT IS A SIDE DISH OR PERHAPS A GARNISH.

the problem for rosebird parents (and other ruby parentage theories) is that it’s very difficult to fit a reveal like that into the margins of The Most Important Narrative Reveal. (which is: summer joined salem.) narratively you put yourself into a corner where you have to balance exploding ruby and yang’s relationships with all of team strq at once against… resolving the actual central conflict of the story and dealing with the fallout of “OUR MOM JOINED YOU?!” and the end result is going to be either:

the parentage reveal just kind of falls flat and gets skimmed over quickly in a not very satisfying way because everyone has a bigger, unfortunately immortal fish to fry

the parentage reveal turns into a narrative black hole that eats up way too much runtime proportionate to its actual narrative importance and salem is like “…so should i come back when you kids are done yelling at your parents or…?”

neither one is a great idea. again, the optimal time for a ruby parentage reveal was v4/5, with raven’s entry proper into the story. doing this in v10, with everything else that is going to be going on in vacuo as the story enters its final arc, would not go well.

a secondary issue is the impact such a reveal would have on 1. the nascent dad’s chickens come home to roost arc, and 2. resolving matters between raven and yang in vacuo, however that shakes out.

for the first, any kind of “actually tai isn’t the dad” reveal inherently moves the focus of his character arc, from “tai neglected his kids and favored ruby, also why is he still in vale” to, you know, the lying. it dilutes the payoff for all the development with regard to neglect/favoritism by veering off at a wild angle right before the punch. there is a time and a place for narrative velociraptors in the bushes, but swerving like that isn’t it.

and for the second… there is no way to do a reveal that raven is secretly also ruby’s mom, at the point in the narrative where yang is meeting raven again after their confrontation now that raven is committed to trying, without drop-kicking yang and yang’s finding-her-mother storyline off the stage. sorry. you can’t do this without making it all about ruby and how ruby feels and how raven feels about ruby and summer and how yang feels about ruby having the same moms. like lol they are not going to do that, in the same way they’re not going to suddenly drop ruby’s summer rose identity disturbance storyline in favor of going “aaaaactually yang is raven’s and summer’s baby so let’s focus on how yang feels about learning summer is her biological mother for real.”

tertiary problem with the rosebird parents theory, and this isn’t a narrative issue but rather to do with the “explaining how two women made a baby” exercises, wearily taps the sign. Intersex Conditions Do Not Work That Way.

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