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[bestworstcase]

just thinking abt oz passive voice “i am changed” again

he is changed. he doesn’t get to choose who he becomes; he’s bound to someone else and forced to conform to the mold he’s cast into, destroying the other in the process. (ruby, so afraid: do they choose? what their next life will be like?)—he didn’t know. he didn’t ask for this. he never agreed to this. he is changed, over and over and over again, into someone who resigns himself to his fate.

salem leapt into the pool of grimm and recreated herself. infinite life and pure destruction—change incarnate. she writes her own story, ozpin says of the girl in the tower. she chooses how the story goes and she’ll choose her own ending. he is changed; he puts himself in her tower. the girl writes herself out of danger, says the man who keeps writing his fairytales over and over again.

even as he enforces her exile and goes through the motions of being her jailer—in the heart of it all the idea she represents in his mind is freedom. the girl couldn’t save herself and neither can he, but he saved her, and she can save him, if he finds a way to reach her.

[bestworstcase]

the tldr version of that last post is: while ozpin wrote fairytales, salem studied the art of war

[bestworstcase]

i mean. i wouldn’t call sending her protégée to orchestrate multiple terrorist attacks and deliver a manifesto live on international television subtle in any sense. salem exploits the secrecy ozpin enshrouds her in, certainly, but i do not for a second believe that cinder did what she did at beacon without salem’s complete approval.

salem does make a concerted effort to obscure her operations from oz and his circle—because she’s playing to win—but that is a different ballgame altogether from ozpin’s strategic obsession with conducting the shadow war in such a way that the general public doesn’t even know there’s a war happening at all. his attitude toward ironwood’s fleet is flatly irrational unless he feels certain that salem plans to attack in a manner that can be repelled, discreetly, with a single maiden and a small handful of others in the know.

whereas salem’s first strike—discounting the premature train attack—is more or less to announce her intentions by hijacking the most widely-televised sporting event in the world. she takes great care to slip under ozpin’s radar, but she wants the rest of the world to know there’s a storm happening. it took her like a year to force her opponents to tell the world about her and she is visibly pleased listening to that broadcast. after atlas falls she turns right around and razes vale.

haven’s the outlier here, and her strategic approach to haven is less about secrecy than minimizing risk: with the headmaster under her thumb, quietly walking in and walking out with the relic is all but a guaranteed success, and then she lets adam blow up the empty campus to keep him happy. oz’s man was in the city with a gaggle of students who fought at beacon, all of them on high alert; turning the operation at haven into a battle without adequate preparation skyrocketed the odds of failure, and salem pretty clearly intended to hit the remaining three academies in quick succession, necessitating strategic agility rather than strength.

but beacon and atlas follow the exact same playbook of infiltration/sabotage for several months to soften the target in preparation for a sudden strike with overwhelming force.

So it just occured to me. The Huntsmen Academies are to protect the Relics instead of train students. Putting aside the fact that guardians who are not told they're needed to stand firm/guard aren't going to do so, Haven and Shade are within major population centers. And Atlas/Mantle were proven to be entirely in the collateral damage field.

And Relics attract Grimm.

Priority of the populace or the relic stated right there. Something something, Huntsmen as an institution has the look of protectors but not the substance.

and beacon—the only academy that is not in the middle of its kingdom—is also the only school whose vault probably isn’t on campus.

to be a little fair to ozpin, he professes to be under the impression that the attraction is “faint,” and might be lost in the noise of an urban center. to be less fair, the leviathan BEELINES to ruby and completely ignores 1. the city full of terrified people behind her and 2. the ship full of likes dozen panicky huntsmen actively trying to get its attention, because ruby has the relic on her hip, so the attraction is clearly a lot stronger than “faint but undeniable” and ozpin has a very well-established habit of downplaying and hiding information, and if he’s been carrying these relics around for years he ought to know better.

yeah just put the grimm bait where all the civilians are. and then keep it secret. the funny part is that as a strategic choice to protect the relics, it makes the most sense if oz assumed—whether consciously or not—that the risk of thousands of civilian casualties would actually deter salem from going after the relics. which. given how long she kept her distance…

[bestworstcase]

Is there any place you've organized your analysis'/theories? Don't get me wrong, I love reading them and can find them easily enough, I was just wondering if you had them sorted anywhere.

Thanks in advance.

😬

unfortunately . no ghfrfk sorry. i know my frequent linking of old posts may give the impression otherwise but my secret is i just have all the First Sentences and Post Types of various important posts memorized so i can find them in the archive really fast 😭

[bestworstcase]

+ tags: #like I agree that its 100% in character for ozpin to downplay the danger#but this man thinks Salem is the craftiest most omnipresent force in the world#he wouldn't take the risk of putting relics in the cities unless really believed that the signal would be drowned out right?#...unless. as has just hit me. what if the vaults being outside Remnant entirely is a factor?#like the relics just for all intents and purposes arent /anywhere/ while in a closed vault?

ozpin is also really, really sure before the fall of beacon that salem’s greatest priority is to remain in the shadows, to such an extent that his entire strategic approach in v1-3 is predicated on his certainty that she won’t mount an open assault against the school. it isn’t until the premature attack on downtown vale that he prepares to take meaningful action, and even then he is obviously anticipating intrigue and subtle sabotage, not an imminent assault. similarly in v5 he guesses that salem will hit the school before the start of term, although in that instance he’s correct.

so i think the reasoning behind the location of the vaults/relics is less to prevent salem from figuring out where they are or dilute the attraction for grimm in general than to make it possible for salem to GET to them without catastrophic destruction that would surely—and indeed did—reveal her existence to the whole world.

on that level i think it’s notable that the one relic that isn’t surrounded by a large population center is also the one that has unique extra protections. that makes strategic sense if ozpin believed that the large population centers surrounding the other three vaults would act as a deterrent.

re: the vaults themselves, i’ve been theorizing for a while that they’re sort of powered by the relics—hence the haven vault apparently collapsing(?) soon after the lamp is removed from it:

as if the vault was an archway and the relic was its keystone. remove the relic, the vault is destabilized and eventually just disappears. in which case i wouldn’t think the relics being in the vaults would block the signal necessarily? but then again we know so little about the vaults that i could be way off base.

IF dark ascended and divided himself into the spirits his brother chained to the relics AND the grimm are drawn to the relics because they know the spirits inside (which, if ozpin is telling the truth when he says he doesn’t know why but believes it’s “something to do with their origin,” would track)… hm. in the WOR episode salem mentions that grimm in captivity either die or break free to kill their captors; when bartleby lured two apathy away from the pack and into the tunnels, the pack reunited with its missing members rather than attack the settlement (and consequently they all ended up trapped down there).

so. grimm a) regularly die in captivity and b) seem to prioritize coming to the aid of captured grimm over hunting. if the grimm are drawn to the relics because they sense some kinship with the beings inside, and they can understand that those beings are trapped…?

So it just occured to me. The Huntsmen Academies are to protect the Relics instead of train students. Putting aside the fact that guardians who are not told they're needed to stand firm/guard aren't going to do so, Haven and Shade are within major population centers. And Atlas/Mantle were proven to be entirely in the collateral damage field.

And Relics attract Grimm.

Priority of the populace or the relic stated right there. Something something, Huntsmen as an institution has the look of protectors but not the substance.

and beacon—the only academy that is not in the middle of its kingdom—is also the only school whose vault probably isn’t on campus.

to be a little fair to ozpin, he professes to be under the impression that the attraction is “faint,” and might be lost in the noise of an urban center. to be less fair, the leviathan BEELINES to ruby and completely ignores 1. the city full of terrified people behind her and 2. the ship full of likes dozen panicky huntsmen actively trying to get its attention, because ruby has the relic on her hip, so the attraction is clearly a lot stronger than “faint but undeniable” and ozpin has a very well-established habit of downplaying and hiding information, and if he’s been carrying these relics around for years he ought to know better.

yeah just put the grimm bait where all the civilians are. and then keep it secret. the funny part is that as a strategic choice to protect the relics, it makes the most sense if oz assumed—whether consciously or not—that the risk of thousands of civilian casualties would actually deter salem from going after the relics. which. given how long she kept her distance…

[bestworstcase]

imo, the framing of the leviathan scene really strongly suggest that it’s the lamp:

ruby sees the leviathan turn its head away from her (the distraction plan is working), closes her eyes, takes a deep breath to calm and center herself. at this point she isn’t feeling any acute distress or grief—she’s calm. then she hears yang through her earpiece: “ruby? ruby, hurry—something’s [wrong]–”

we don’t see what yang is so alarmed about right away, because the POV stays with ruby and her frustration as she tosses the earpiece. but something is wrong—the plan is so dead simple that the only thing that reasonably could go wrong is the leviathan losing interest in the ship / not chasing the ship / moving closer to ruby. and that begins to happen well before ruby becomes distressed.

then ruby sees the leviathan is RIGHT THERE, ruby goes “what?!” and there’s a cut away to yang going “why’d it turn away?”—cut back to ruby having a moment of horrified realization…

…and looking down at the lamp as it hits her that she’s carrying a relic that attracts grimm. so the narrative implicitly answers yang’s question by drawing attention to the lamp. (this is also not the moment when ruby figures out she can use the lamp to buy herself more time: she has those panicky seconds of “no no no!!” before the flash of desperate inspiration).

what does interest me is it seems like the leviathan must have turned back to ruby almost as soon as she closed her eyes—hence yang’s warning—but it didn’t growl or attack her until she got upset and then panicked, respectively. so my read is that the grimm was specifically interested in the lamp, not ruby. we’ve seen with ren’s semblance that grimm don’t seem to be able to perceive people at all if the emotions are suppressed; i’m not sure the leviathan actually registered ruby as prey until she felt that spike of distress.

So it just occured to me. The Huntsmen Academies are to protect the Relics instead of train students. Putting aside the fact that guardians who are not told they're needed to stand firm/guard aren't going to do so, Haven and Shade are within major population centers. And Atlas/Mantle were proven to be entirely in the collateral damage field.

And Relics attract Grimm.

Priority of the populace or the relic stated right there. Something something, Huntsmen as an institution has the look of protectors but not the substance.

and beacon—the only academy that is not in the middle of its kingdom—is also the only school whose vault probably isn’t on campus.

to be a little fair to ozpin, he professes to be under the impression that the attraction is “faint,” and might be lost in the noise of an urban center. to be less fair, the leviathan BEELINES to ruby and completely ignores 1. the city full of terrified people behind her and 2. the ship full of likes dozen panicky huntsmen actively trying to get its attention, because ruby has the relic on her hip, so the attraction is clearly a lot stronger than “faint but undeniable” and ozpin has a very well-established habit of downplaying and hiding information, and if he’s been carrying these relics around for years he ought to know better.

yeah just put the grimm bait where all the civilians are. and then keep it secret. the funny part is that as a strategic choice to protect the relics, it makes the most sense if oz assumed—whether consciously or not—that the risk of thousands of civilian casualties would actually deter salem from going after the relics. which. given how long she kept her distance…

[bestworstcase]

TUMBLR RLY BANISHED YOUR FIRST RB INTO THE VOID HUH. and abt my favorite windmill too. shakes fist

um in re

I’m really curious about Salem implying silver eyes can be resisted as you allude to. What conversation is that?

it’s both 4.1 (“make no mistake cinder, you hold the key to our victory, but your newfound strength brings with it a crippling weakness, which is why you will remain at my side while we continue your treatment”) and 5.2 (“if ruby rose has learned to master her gift, you must take care to protect yours; there’s only so much i can do to aid you.”), cue cinder:

picking up the implication that the grimm arm is what salem could do to aid her.

presuming that i’m right about cinder being mutilated by the beacon glare Because She Killed Pyrrha. the grimm arm is interesting because it theoretically enables cinder to take the maidens without killing (by siphoning aura) but is also intrinsically vulnerable to the glare itself (but less harmful to cinder if it’s vaporized bc it can just grow back). so the grimm arm is akin to crumple zones on a car, i think, meant to soak the damage done by the glare so that cinder won’t be maimed.

BUT the point salem makes in the later conversation is that cinder should consider the grimm arm a last line of defense, implying that cinder can actively do something to protect herself that is perhaps more effective than what salem could do for her.

that, combined with the fact that this:

hurts the grimm arm (note the smoke—it’s “bleeding”) but doesn’t destroy it:

is what leads me to believe that the glare can be resisted, because when cinder throws up both arms to shield her head as the glare hits in 7.13, we can very clearly see that the grimm arm remains intact, whereas for example with the lower-intensity glare in 6.6 we can see that the apathy begin to disintegrate before the light even hits its peak magnitude.

& we know this one is of lesser intensity because there isn’t a full white-out or the sketchy contour effect we see with full-power glares:

cinder simply being a person isn’t enough to explain why her grimm arm remains intact; the hound is a person and the full-intensity glare ruby hits him with in 8.8 completely destroys the head and neck of the hound and seems to degrade the rest of the body given his staggering gait and the arm hanging limply on the ground. the glares in 7.13 and 8.8 appear to be of the same magnitude, but cinder’s grimm arm only suffers superficial (albeit evidently quite painful) injury.

what gives?

i think the key is be self-preservation. the glare is empowered by the desire to preserve and protect life -> “if ruby rose has mastered [her silver eyes], you must take care to protect [yourself + your gifts]” -> the difference between cinder in 7.13 and the hound in 8.8 is that cinder, upon seeing the light gather behind ruby’s eyes, banishes the fire she’d conjured and shields herself, then uses the blinding light to cover her escape; whereas the hound is caught off guard because he’s intent upon capturing penny.

which… i think may also be why the glare outright kills smaller/younger grimm but only petrifies larger/older grimm; all grimm have a self-preservation instinct, but younger grimm are noted to be impetuous and reckless whereas older grimm are both more experienced and more cautious. the stone casing is perhaps an interaction between the glare (which seeks to protect the lives of people by destroying grimm) and the grimm’s own will to survive.

and that has interesting implications for salem, who—because she can’t die—seems to have no instinctive sense of self-preservation left; she literally watches yang punch sticky bombs into her chest and then detonate them without lifting a finger to protect herself. so if defending oneself against the glare involves like… countering the silver-eyed person’s desire to protect someone from you with your own desire to protect yourself, then salem is at a severe disadvantage bc the only thing she seems to flinch at is Being Set On Fire (and THAT is probably reliving moonfall trauma moreso than physical pain).

so i wouldn’t be surprised if this possibility was fairly new to her. (and i also wouldn’t be surprised if the glare could just straight up evaporate salem—she’d just. reconstitute. but if the petrification is caused by the grimm’s self-preservation and salem doesn’t have that…)

@cryptidblues tumblr Ate this ask for some reason so copying text from the email notif

See I’ve always thought that the mechanism through which cinder stole the maiden powers (bug) from Amber made her a Grimm hybrid. And THATS why Ruby’s silver eyes worked on her at the top of beacon tower; regardless of the presence of the wvyern. Because underneath her skin she was Grimm (and still fully human). “Your newfound strength brings with it a crippling weakness”/“You said the light only reacts to Grimm but…it reacted to Cinder”/“perhaps there was something that you just weren’t seeing?” Leading from that the implicit threat of “Oz can’t defeat [Salem]”/“but maybe someone else can?” to Salem is not that Salem could be eradicated by silver eyes (go poof like other Grimm) but rather be put back in The Tower by silver eyes. By being turned to stone. Still immortal but frozen. Trapped. Her Freedom completely sundered. “You thought there was no greater punishment we could bestow upon you?”/“Your light comes from his brother”/“The god of light…his eyes”. There’s an assumption that Salem is invulnerable, no personal skin in the game, “she’ll come back”, nothing effects her, nothing sticks; but her running this risk of being petrified by silver eyes gives depth and high stakes to any interaction she has with Ruby face to face (and her possible complex relationship to a hypothetical favorite silver eyed lieutenant). ᓚᘏᗢ

the reason i Don’t believe the grimm beetle made cinder vulnerable to the glare atop beacon tower is that ruby hits her with a second full-blown glare in atlas towards the end of v7 and—even though cinder by that point has a whole grimm arm—cinder flies away from that one unscathed. either:

a) the implication salem makes in v5 that cinder can learn to resist the glare is true,

b) there is an additional, unknown but more important factor besides “grimm” involved here, or

c) both.

i think the answer is probably both, although more b than a. (maria sees the flash coming from the god of light’s eyes and concludes this power came from him; but she couldn’t see that ruby’s eyes were silver until she saw their light go off, and she missed those two silver-eyed children of ozma’s. “maybe there’s something you’re not seeing” is true of her, too)

(the silver light evokes the pure white of the void between realms, where the dead travel from life to death and the souls of the living and the dead can meet in between. ozma passes through this liminal space every time he dies and reincarnates, and his children with a mortal woman have silver eyes. after ruby witnesses pyrrha’s death and her light erupts, the hand cinder used to kill pyrrha is destroyed and ruby spends months hearing echoes of pyrrha’s final words—which she wasn’t there to see—haunting her dreams. there are butterflies, classic symbols of reincarnation and in certain cultures historically identified as psychopomps, all over the scene where maria discusses her theory. maria is also philosophically wrong in her conception of creation/life as “enemies” of destruction; destruction feedslife and exists in balance with creation, and the glare itself is definitionally destructive. silver eyes have something to do with death.)

the kids at least, per nora and “maybe someone else can [destroy salem]?” do seem to be thinking in terms of ruby’s eyes being the silver bullet that can stop salem if not destroy her outright, and ruby has the wyvern example to look to to be thinking about trapping salem in stone forever. but then the leviathan is there to raise the possibility that petrification is not necessarily forever, and salem herself seems unconcerned when ruby’s eyes start to flash in ironwood’s office. plus again the implication salem makes that the glare can be resisted: if that is something she taught cinder to do, it’s something salem must be able to do too.

i do think the glare is probably capable of hurting her somehow—i have my own specific headcanons as to how for Fic Purposes but in terms of textual speculation, what happens if you take a grimm woman who can’t die and blast her with the grimm-killing light from the threshold between life and death? it sounds painful, if nothing else.

but if the leviathan could break free after being petrified, and salem is both immortal and human and thus able to, like cinder in v7, resist the glare in some way, i think being turned to stone or encased in stone is not likely to slow her down for very long. although i can’t imagine she would enjoy the experience.

the other factor to consider is that—well, quite a lot of the fandom assumes the point of silver eyes is to “purify” the grimm out of people, for example saving cinder from her grimm arm, and on the basis of maria’s theory that is an easy extrapolation to make; which is to say, after the experience in the ever after, i wouldn’t be surprised if the idea of “purge the grimm out of salem to make her herself again?” was broached on the heroes side. the reality though is that being grimm is not what’s wrong with salem and becoming grimm is something she chose, or at least accepted as a possible consequence of what she attempted to do when she jumped into the pool of grimm, and using silver eyes to try to Force Her to go backwards is probably not a good idea and not something that will work. she is change incarnate—that’s what destruction means.

so there is a thematic challenge here that might be explored; seen through the lens of maria’s theory, silver eyes are anti-change (preservation) and therefore anti-theme (destruction is part of life, not the enemy of life) so her theory is incomplete and the most obvious way to fill in the gaps and arrive at the whole truth is to test the glare against salem herself, because she is change. 

and because rwby is so thematically driven i’d anticipate this happening concurrently with salem turning in a new direction, which intersects in very interesting ways with what is being set up vis-a-vis needing cinder to open the vaults vs wanting cinder to be alive, safe, and free. (i think the momentum there is toward salem being forced to choose between getting the crown and protecting cinder, and she’ll sacrifice the crown for cinder’s sake; the… possibility of silver eyes being involved in that scenario is obvious.)

[bestworstcase]

What do you think Salems goal is, exactly? It's obviously not ending the world to kill herself, but honestly I feel like she has ulterior motives than just "overthrow the gods".

I personally wouldn't be surprised if she wants to rule in the Gods stead after overthrowing them. She's already brought up replacing the gods, and seems to believe that humanity "needs" gods/guidance, but specifically Not The Brothers. I only say this because she was the one who said that humanity was more divided than ever without the gods and that they need guidance (and essentially replacement gods), not Oz.

It's hard to say whether she Still believes this, but since she parallels Darkness (to an extent) and destruction is essentially taking out the old to make way for the new, I definitely wouldn't be surprised. The Brothers are the old, Salem is the new n all.

I just find it hard to believe that all she wants is to overthrow the gods and do... nothing afterwards. I believe characters like Cinder have stated that they're going to be high up in her new world?? I'm not sure tbh.

Plus, I think her goal being that she wants to rule the world after killing(?) The Brothers would be an interesting dilemma for the main characters. Overthrowing the gods? A good idea even Oz would agree with. Salem ruling? ...Well that might not be such a good idea (she *did* immediately go to "let's spread our word and destroy anyone who goes against it" in the Lost Fable, but I have different opinions on whether or not it's reliable so it likely doesn't matter to you). Either way, it'd make things interesting for our heroes. At least, that's how I'd write it.

Thoughts?

to be clear. my stance on the reliability of the lost fable is that jinn answered with absolute honesty exactly the question ruby asked, which was “what is ozpin hiding from us?”—i think she obeys the same rule ambrosius does. you get EXACTLY what you ask for.

so ‘the lost fable’ includes:

information ozpin knows or sincerely believes to be true, AND

actively chose to hide from team rwby, oscar, and qrow.

the reason jinn frames it as a fairytale (“once upon a time…”) is because she is conveying specifically ozpin’s perspective, and fairytales, stories, are fundamental to how he sees the world. she is telling his story in his words, because that’s what ruby asked her to do!

but the lost fable doesn’t include:

anything ozpin doesn’t know

anything salem told ozma that ozpin believes to be false, except when a synopsis is necessary to provide context

anything that ozpin knows but wasn’t actively keeping a secret (for example, the story omits her answers to his questions about the other relics because neither their original locations nor their powers were something ozpin was hiding; he told them what the lamp could do, when they asked, and if they’d asked about the others he would have told them that too).

so jinn herself is not an unreliable narrator per se, but the question ruby asked necessitated that jinn tell only ozpin’s side of the story, without filling in any gaps in his knowledge or correcting his misunderstandings and mistaken assumptions. the lost fable is therefore honest (in the sense that no part of it is a deliberate lie) but biased and limited (because ozpin is fallible and doesn’t know everything.)

which is something ozpin himself points out in his commentaries in the fairytale anthology—on the infinite man: “no one who wasn’t there could know what really happened. and even then, they would only have a small part of the story,” for example.

all of which is the long way around to saying that i do trust the dialogue in the lost fable to be accurate to what the characters actually said, and the scenes to be accurate depictions of events as they happened (if he was there) or as ozma imagined them happening based on what salem told him (if he wasn’t). the parts i don’t trust are the narration, because that’s the part colored by ozpin’s perspective, and the elisions of ozma’s dialogue in the key ozlem scenes, because things salem says in response to ozma lack the context of what ozma said.

(think about what listening to someone make a phone call is like; if the conversation is about a complex subject, it’s difficult to follow along and easy to misunderstand what the person you can hear is really trying to express.)

and on the topic of those elisions: if salem wanted to rule the world herself, i think she would have made an effort to do so before ozma returned. she is demonstrably capable of both merciless conquest (razing vale) and inspiring awe (slaying the nevermore). she’s immortal. she cannot be killed. before ozma returned there was absolutely no one who could have prevented her from, like, taking over a kingdom and expanding it into an empire with herself as the eternal god-queen.

but she didn’t. she lived alone in the woods, in a miserable hovel. given the well-maintained path leading to her doorstep, she had to have been visited on a regular enough basis for whatever community lived outside the woods to go to the effort of paving the way to her shack. which says… village witch.

left to her own devices, that’s what she did with her life: found some village or town at the edge of a forest and built herself a little house in the woods, just close enough that the townspeople could find her when they needed her but otherwise isolated.

and then once ozma found her, they fixed up her house together and lived happily for… apparently quite some time before ozma brought up “humanity seems more divided than ever” as a problem.

there’s nothing in the lost fable to suggest that salem wanted anything more than the life she had with ozma in that cottage. everything she says about bringing humanity together is specifically in response to OZMA telling her he wasn’t satisfied. she’s supporting HIS stated ambitions.

and like… she’s not… wrong? her phrasing is extremely blunt, but… you can’t bring people together without giving them something to believe in—a cause, a creed, a faith, a purpose—no one is going to unite for the sake of being united. ozma despairs that “humanity seems more divided than ever,” and salem goes… well yeah. the gods killed everyone and fucked off. people just need help. we could help. we have the will and the means to change the world, make it better than before.

but.

the problem is.

the task ozma was given isn’t to help people or make the world a better place; it’s to prepare for the final judgment by uniting the whole world—the god of light instructed him to end conflict full stop. ozma needs everyone to unite in submission to the brothers.

and salem is absolutely correct that you cannot achieve that except by conquest. you cannot, you cannot, you cannot unite the whole world under one creed without genocide. it is impossible.

this is why i say the divine mandate is a fundamentally genocidal ideology: the premise is that humans as they are now do not deserve to exist and must be ‘redeemed,’ and the only way to achieve ‘redemption’ is through genocide. the logical end of any ideology that requires universal adoption or universal acceptance of a certain belief or creed is genocide.

salem understands this intuitively; when ozma asks her “are we sure that this is right?” she spells it out to him in plain terms that it’s what is necessary to achieve his goal. her implication is that if the end does not justify the means, he needs to reconsider the end. i don’t think she cared either way as long as ozma was happy, until she learned the truth about what he wanted to do and why.

as i’ve said before, i believe her final statement—why spend our lives trying to redeem these humans when we can replace them with what they could never be?—a) reiterates her longstanding dream of humankind overthrowing their “old masters” and claiming the power of creation for themselves to “perfect their own design” and b) quotes/paraphrases the closing lines of ‘the shallow sea’ to express this idea because she’s trying to communicate in ozma’s language, through stories.

and i think ozma understood her perfectly well, he just doesn’t think her third option of rejecting the mandate is possible. in the present, oz only suggests salem is out to destroy the world when he’s trying to scare hazel into turning against her; what he tells his inner circle is that salem’s after the relics because she wants to “change the world.” he believes she’s doomed to fail.

anyway, as to the question of what salem wants now: it’s revolution.

pretty… overtly. “your so-called free world.” her protégée was an enslaved child who grew up wearing a shock collar in the gilded heart of ozpin’s crowning achievement some sixty years after the vytal accords abolished slavery, and the huntsman who found her in that situation used her suffering to groom her for the huntsman academy instead of using his authority to help her by enforcing the laws against slavery.

watch WOR: kingdoms. compare the almost tender tone with which salem talks about the democratic councils that represent the people to the utter disdain she has for the huntsmen academies that exist solely to train “the next generation of defenders who will fight and die to protect the lifestyle that they’ve become so accustomed to.”

she wants to defeat the god of light, yes—or at least prevent him from ever returning, i do think Plan A might be “destroy the relics”—but she also wants to tear down the systems ozma built to uphold the divine mandate, systems that turned a blind eye to slavery and injustice and abuse. she wants the whole world to know the truth.

i think she also probably wants humans to coexist in peace with the grimm, and i suspect that will be the biggest sticking point; but salem clearly feels affection for the grimm, and—gestures at menagerie’s lack of a grimm problem—coexistence between people and grimm is possible, and because salem herself is grimm she’s never going to have peace or freedom until the existential war between humans and grimm is ended.

and i think she does intend to make good on her promises to her inner circle, in some form. hazel believes she’s planning to create a “new world order” (which, definitionally, a world with no huntsmen academies and no everlasting war is) and mercury says she’s “promised [them] everything,” which he takes to mean that they’ll be “top dogs in her new world.” but the one thing we know for certain about what salem offers to her followers is very vague; all of them project their own desires to fill in the gaps and come away with wildly disparate ideas about what this ‘new world’ will look like.

what salem has always wanted is freedom. she’s never shown any personal ambition to rule—even her rebellion, she isn’t the one who leads the charge, she walks among them. before ozma returned, she was… just the village witch somewhere. i do think it’s really quite likely that her plan is to tear down everything ozma built, destroy the relics or defeat the god of light, participate in rebuilding from the ashes to ensure that the new world isn’t founded upon lies or subjugation or eternal war against her existence, and then just… find a place where she can live. all she ever wanted was to leave the tower. i don’t think that’s changed.

[bestworstcase]

So! That new rwby beyond episode huh?

I can't do intros for shit. Do you think Ozcar's answer to Jaune's question of "Do you think we're gonna make it?" was, in part, them dodging the question? Not revealing how unsure they feel and instead choosing to comfort Jaune with "Around those campfires, did it really matter?" Do you think of that answer as a cop-out, or as a legitimate answer? Both perhaps?

oh oz absolutely thinks they’re not gonna make it. i am so sure about that.

bc the thing is, ozpin thought he’d been at war with salem for centuries, he thought he’d managed to keep her out and whittle away her influence down to almost nothing. right. his whole reason for handling the situation the way he did in v1-3 is he believed that salem wouldn’t leave the shadows, wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize her secrecy. the thing about his paranoia in seeing salem’s hand behind every grimm attack and every period of unrest or war is he had no idea what salem was capable of or how far she would go, but he believed that he did.

within the space of, like, maybe a year and a half, salem has. knocked down beacon academy, forced haven academy to close by assassinating most of its faculty, laid siege to atlas with a fleet of millions of grimm and directly caused atlas to fall, and within a few weeks of that razed vale to the ground. three of his four academies are either destroyed or defunct; two whole countries are just. Gone. it’s been a year and a half!

he. underestimated. really really badly, he underestimated salem and for him this past year has been a harrowing journey of discovering exactly how badly he underestimated her. a year and a half and they’ve gone from “unprecedented era of peaceful prosperity” to desperate last stand. oz hasn’t been in such dire straits since the final battle of the great war when he resorted to using two relics to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and now one of those is within salem’s reach, and if they take the sword out of its vault that’s just one step closer to salem getting her hands on it.

like, oscar annihilated her millions of grimm in atlas and a few weeks later she turned around and flattened vale.

this is not a fight they can win. and i think oz is painfully aware of that. (the whole point is that the only way out is through negotiation. they have to stop fighting her and start talking to her.)

but i also think he meant “around that campfire, did it matter?” very genuinely because he found his hope again when he returned in atlas, and the situation being hopeless has no bearing on how he chooses to look at it or how he chooses to act. so things are very very bad but oz is, emotionally, in a much better place now than he was at the beginning of the story when things appeared to be okay. it’s the next step from “fear isn’t worthy of our concern”

[bestworstcase]

Over the past week I was reminded of the fact that Ruby can just straight up hear dead people (and how barely anyone really talks about considering how fucking wild that is in of itself). And I'm now imagining a scenario where, upon fully realizing this, coupled with just finding out Raven's side of the story regarding what happened that night with Summer and Salem, Ruby puts two-and-two together and it goes from she can hear her deceased loves from beyond the grave -> why hasn't she heard Summer than??? -> holy shit is Raven right???? idek lol. I mostly just thought of this because I wonder if/when this will even come into play in the story at all

cackles

i’m thinking it might be specifically dead people whom she’s used her eyes to protect and whose deaths she’s witnessed—after beacon fell, it was only pyrrha, and then ruby uses her glare twice in atlas to protect penny after having seen her die at beacon and wakes up in the ever after hearing penny. or else penny technically wasn’t dead, just dormant.

she also seems to mainly hear the dead person crying out for a loved one, and only when she’s asleep or unconscious; the only reason we know there’s more to it than dreams is she also has that flashback to pyrrha’s last words, which ruby wasn’t present for, but ruby has no way of knowing that.

so i wonder how it’s going to come up again. it’s only been two days since penny died; she kept hearing pyrrha for months, and if she starts hearing penny’s final moments too…

it does seem like an obvious way to lead in to the answers about what’s up with silver eyes. which, sidebar, salem and summer are also an obvious potential source of answers; salem certainly seems to know or at least suspect more than maria knows, and fourteen years of being a silver-eyed warrior on salem’s side is plenty of time for summer to have figured out a thing or two other than deleting grimm

[bestworstcase]

Does/Will tdt Cinder practice Khime?

no. although hellebore’s crossing itself is a very mixed community—like a third or so of its full-time population are fauni, many of whom practice khimerism—so cinder is a lot more familiar with what khimancy is than the average human. (one of the people in her contact list in burnt roses ch1 is a turnskin.) which isn’t to say she knows very much in detail, ’cause it’s a closed tradition, but she could define it accurately.

this is also why she recognizes the white fang safety mark on roin’s truck in ch5, since sable rescued her from the glass unicorn situation she’s grown up in an environment where it’s safe for fauni and specifically khimeric culture to just exist openly around their human neighbors. which translates into knowing how to signal that she’s a Safe Person.

lonán is a practicing khimancer (albeit one with no formal training); roscoe march and raymond altansarnai are as well (both formally trained); rue has khime for religious rite-of-passage reason, but she’s secular and not really interested in pursuing the art itself. the other fauni students in the spring class (bella marshal, garth saille, scar tybalt) don’t have khime. roscoe is REALLY GOOD bc he learned from his mom, who’s a turnskin.

cinder’s religious Situation is smth called strigism by like. religious scholars. it doesn’t have a name though, the people who practice it just refer to it as ‘our way’ or similar turns of phrase—it originated in the vitrine peninsula (where hellebore’s crossing is) and is more or less only practiced there.

and then oak is a kairoist—which is the dominant religion in anima, although a plurality of mistral’s urban population are draconites in some form, kairoism is Much Older (as in, predates ozma’s first reincarnation by a couple thousand years). [pyrrha is not in burnt roses because she is eleven but kairoism is conceptually just an elaborate riff on the mantra she uses to unlock jaune’s aura in canon, to give a sense of the vibe]

gretchen’s religion is folk draconism (<- the brother-cult) pejoratively called sanctimony by normative draconites because it is WILDLY HERETICAL and revolves around worship of various ‘saints,’ largely regional folk heroes syncretized into draconism as sacred heroes who inherited or otherwise obtained slivers of divine power after the dragon-brothers, who became mortal through the act of creating the world, died. (WILDLY. HERETICAL.) (fretting abt folk draconism keeps ozpin up at night.)

larkspur and rani both grew up reform draconites (<- aka the lucent church. reforms happened under king osiander and mainly involved imposing a separation between the valean aristocracy and the church and pushing a much greater theological emphasis on peace and inclusion. this got him briefly excommunicated but proved so popular with the common people that the church had to walk that back to save face. orthodox draconism is the radiant church. the vermeils were the only noble family to support the reforms and that was partly a political move to empower themselves over rivals and partly because the winter maiden at the time was a vermeil.)

filemot is an indifferent madagian (<- worship of the four maidens) which means he attends services on the equinoxes and solstices and that’s basically it.

and sacnicte practices ixtuan ancestor worship, which is very funny for her for reasons that we’ll get to Later. :)

[bestworstcase]

that would be my second guess

my first is the ruins in the grimm-infested forest where ozpin sends initiates to [checks notes] …choose a “relic” that will determine their fate for the next four years. bfrgdk

So it just occured to me. The Huntsmen Academies are to protect the Relics instead of train students. Putting aside the fact that guardians who are not told they're needed to stand firm/guard aren't going to do so, Haven and Shade are within major population centers. And Atlas/Mantle were proven to be entirely in the collateral damage field.

And Relics attract Grimm.

Priority of the populace or the relic stated right there. Something something, Huntsmen as an institution has the look of protectors but not the substance.

and beacon—the only academy that is not in the middle of its kingdom—is also the only school whose vault probably isn’t on campus.

to be a little fair to ozpin, he professes to be under the impression that the attraction is “faint,” and might be lost in the noise of an urban center. to be less fair, the leviathan BEELINES to ruby and completely ignores 1. the city full of terrified people behind her and 2. the ship full of likes dozen panicky huntsmen actively trying to get its attention, because ruby has the relic on her hip, so the attraction is clearly a lot stronger than “faint but undeniable” and ozpin has a very well-established habit of downplaying and hiding information, and if he’s been carrying these relics around for years he ought to know better.

yeah just put the grimm bait where all the civilians are. and then keep it secret. the funny part is that as a strategic choice to protect the relics, it makes the most sense if oz assumed—whether consciously or not—that the risk of thousands of civilian casualties would actually deter salem from going after the relics. which. given how long she kept her distance…

[bestworstcase]

So it just occured to me. The Huntsmen Academies are to protect the Relics instead of train students. Putting aside the fact that guardians who are not told they're needed to stand firm/guard aren't going to do so, Haven and Shade are within major population centers. And Atlas/Mantle were proven to be entirely in the collateral damage field.

And Relics attract Grimm.

Priority of the populace or the relic stated right there. Something something, Huntsmen as an institution has the look of protectors but not the substance.

and beacon—the only academy that is not in the middle of its kingdom—is also the only school whose vault probably isn’t on campus.

to be a little fair to ozpin, he professes to be under the impression that the attraction is “faint,” and might be lost in the noise of an urban center. to be less fair, the leviathan BEELINES to ruby and completely ignores 1. the city full of terrified people behind her and 2. the ship full of likes dozen panicky huntsmen actively trying to get its attention, because ruby has the relic on her hip, so the attraction is clearly a lot stronger than “faint but undeniable” and ozpin has a very well-established habit of downplaying and hiding information, and if he’s been carrying these relics around for years he ought to know better.

yeah just put the grimm bait where all the civilians are. and then keep it secret. the funny part is that as a strategic choice to protect the relics, it makes the most sense if oz assumed—whether consciously or not—that the risk of thousands of civilian casualties would actually deter salem from going after the relics. which. given how long she kept her distance…

[bestworstcase]

Is tdt available to read?

tdt is the au name, all the ash burnt roses leave is the name of the fic 👍

[bestworstcase]

ALSO. there are a lot of religions in TDT, but these twelve and the two brothers and salem and ozma are the only quote-unquote real gods, as in Entities Who Exist For Real. (although there are also a multitude of deified culture heroes and the like whose mythic origins mostly do not trace back to salem or ozma; maidens and silver-eyed warriors and turnskins and a grab-bag of historical figures who just happened to become the face of some extraordinary event or another.) so if you read or plan on reading TDT and you would like to play a fun game called “guess who, if anyone, became the basis for this mythical deity.” here you go.

the spiritual boundaries between remnant and the ever after are porous, so while the reaper is the only aspect who can manifest physically on remnant and people from remnant only very seldom find the gate, it’s not uncommon for the tree’s aspects to appear to people in dreams, thus their cultural influence.

The Chandler, called the Seed Enkindled and the Fires-at-Night and the Cinereous Waxwing, appears as a elderly man with snow-white hair, the face of a songbird, and glowing cinders in place of his eyes. His ashen robes are streaked and stained with the red wax-drippings of memories shed by the dead, which he collects and uses to make his candles. In this way, all things are kept, and all things renewed. His season is Spring.

The Vagrant, called the Rootless Shell and the Marcher Lord and the Midnight Diviner, appears in many forms and many faces; he was once what he seemed to be, but no longer. His lamentations can be heard in the hush of surf upon sand and rain upon soil. He sees only what is hidden. He knows only what has been forgotten. The words written on the underside of his skin contain portents, for those who know how to read them. His season is Autumn. 

The Courser, called the Nacreous Pulse and the Light-Through-the-Mist and the Salt-and-Snow, appears as a unicorn—but only when it cannot be seen. In the mist, in the blade of moonlight piercing the canopy, in the foam on the wave, the Courser glints beyond the eye. Give chase, and it will lead to something, but only once. It likes pearls, and plum-cakes. Its season is Winter.

The Parabola, called the Wayward Rootstalk and the Thread Unspun and the Improbable Loom, appears as a ewe with opalescent wool, the curling horns of a ram, and helical horns of a markhor. She is enigmatic; she is found most often inside mirrors; she knows every secret backwards, and story from end to beginning. Her season is Summer.

The Dreamer, called the Crown Conflagrant and the King-in-Red and the Infernal Abscission, appears only in the mind. He takes the form of a skeletal bird wearing vestments of fire and smoke, sometimes a candle-flame, sometimes an inferno, always ablaze. Will he ever wake? Has he? His season is Autumn.

The Walker, called the Deep-Root and the Coiled Serpent and the Stillness-in-Motion, appears as a vast serpent in the abyssal depths beneath the world. His jaws are mountains; his throat is the black nothing between the stars. He cannot be seen, only felt. The darkness before dawn is his, and deep water, and still unquiet things. His season is Winter.

The Artisan, called the Germinating Seed and the Mouth That Opens and the Circle Drawn By Itself, appears as a giant woman of wicker and painted clay and rusted metal, clad in patchwork. She is the shaping hands of what is becoming and may yet become, although she does not know what will be. Her season is Summer.

The Singer, called the Flowering Branch and the Thing With Feathers and the Rhyme in the Rime, appears as a winged serpent whose feathers whisper secrets; it gives voice, phantomwise, to a hollow keening song. Its season is Spring.

The Herald, called the Unyielding Heart and the Seed-in-the-Char and the Agrestal Pathfinder, appears as a pale rabbit with bleeding eyes, her ashen fur begrimed with soot. She may be found in the ravages of wildfire; she may be seen leaping and dancing in the jaws of flame. All things strive. Her season is Summer. 

The Reaper, called the Sitient Thorn and the Black Vulture and the Flower-Maker and the Goat-With-One-Thousand-Teeth and the Lady-of-Wilds and the King-of-Beasts—for she has been known by many names in many places—appears however she pleases, and it pleases her to change. Her fur and feathers are oil-dark; she crowns herself with the coal-black horns of a ram; her eyes glitter green; she reeks of vegetable rot and brine. Her true name, if she has one, might be the Wrathful Sky. All things want. Her season is Spring.

The Poet, called the Red-Within and That-Which-Bleeds and the Eloquent Magpie, appears as a black-and-white bird. Her keel opens, a red mouth fringed in glistening fangs. The heart is a tongue, and the tongue is a heart. All things grasp for what they lack. Her season is Autumn.

The Ever, called the Call and the Question and the Unspoken Word, is present in all things and all times, yet never appears. It is the gloom in the inkwell and the desolation of the empty page and the red behind the eyelids shut by the blinding sun. Ever may it shine, unseen and unheard. All things rest by changing. Its season is Winter.

are you willing to share the details on tdt! zhan tiri

behold my incomprehensible diagram!

um. after v9 i lost all sense of restraint, on the grounds that the blacksmith is an aspect of the tree and therefore the tree reasonably might have other aspects, and then there were four, and then there were twelve. lmao. (the artisan is the blacksmith—she’s depicted as a wood carver and lewis called her ‘the lively carpenter,’ so i figured she’d give herself a more nonspecific name.)

because i am also shaking heraclitus between my teeth like a terrier with a rat, Only One ever exists at a time; the tree is always becoming itself and its aspects shift and flow and transform into each other. in various directions and by varied means. ANYWAY,

those quartets (was/is/will-be) are not temporal categories but rather (copying straight from my lore notes here):

Presiding over forethought and remembrance, the Was concerns itself with what may be known: prophesy before, and memory after, for Time is the circle which remembers itself. It would be a mistake to say that the Is presides over, because the Is does not rule; but it might preside at the choosings, the turnings, the changings, and so the Is circumnavigates the Soul. Some things do not change—some things can never be changed—and over what is unchanging and unchangeable, the Will-Be presides: over strife, over hunger, over graspings, over flux.

was is about the flow of time and knowledge, is concerns action and choice, and will-be are manifestations of inevitability—things that Always Are. if you are uh. familiar with bitter snow zhan tiri i’m sure you can guess where she Goes…

The Reaper, called the Sitient Thorn and the Black Vulture and the Flower-Maker and the Goat-With-One-Thousand-Teeth and the Lady-of-Wilds and the King-of-Beasts—for she has been known by many names in many places—appears however she pleases, and it pleases her to change. Her fur and feathers are oil-dark; she crowns herself with the coal-black horns of a ram; her eyes glitter green; she reeks of vegetable rot and brine. Her true name, if she has one, might be the Wrathful Sky. All things want. Her season is Spring.

she is—as in bitter snow lmao—a little unusual in that she’s not a quote-unquote true aspect of the tree but rather something hungry that came from somewhere else, from the dark country which is nowhere. it is ESSENTIAL FOR HER CHARACTER that she’s a strangler fig. always. so she is kind of a quasi-parasitic trespasser into this Situation but also, in the same way that real stranglers protect their living host trees from being uprooted by storms, not an adversarial one necessarily.

what that means in practical terms is the reaper is the exception to a lot of the, for lack of a better word, “rules” that define the tree’s nature. in her aspect as an aspect of the tree, she takes on its nature; when she isn’t manifest within the tree, though, she exists outside and independent of it. so she can, for example, go for walkies in the backyard

by which i mean remnant. lmao

on remnant, the reaper is the god of animals. she didn’t make the fauni but once they came to be she decided she liked them Best and has favored them ever since. many, but not all, fauni receive her blessing, which (like that of the brothers) confers a magical gift, specifically a form of shapeshifting.

NOT like what the branwens can do—more in the vein of ‘cultivating’ the animal-like traits you already have as a faunus, so if (for example) you were born with shark teeth you might learn to rearrange your respiratory anatomy and grow gills, or give yourself sharklike skin. this can be done in a way that is permanent (this is called ‘ripening’) or not (‘borrowing’). most fauni who learn mix and match a bit (and there are different formal ‘paths’ that combine techniques in different proportions and intensities).

the gift itself is called khime and the practice is khimancy; humans often misunderstand khimancy as sort of a fauni tradition combining auralerie and konurgy (dust-magic) into a single art, but that is. um. Wrong.

(it is possible for master khimancers to fully turn themselves into an animal, but it takes a lot of dedication and many years of training to get there. the ones who get there are called turnskins and they’re rare, like on the level of silver-eyes rare.)

anyway the Reason not every fauni in the world receives khime is she only gives it to the ones who ask. asking is Really Simple—just a small ritual to get her attention, though the specifics vary a lot between different sects—and in many fauni cultures it’s seen as a rite of passage marking the end of one’s childhood. but because it’s a religious practice specific to khimerism, obviously not everyone Does It.

conversely, it isn’t Just For Fauni in the sense that a human could petition the reaper for her gift if they so chose, and she might say yes. for all intents and purposes this is Converting To Khimerism and under khimeric law makes you a faunus—although it won’t cause a physical alteration right away, there is a process for revealing your true form.

this is PRETTY RARE but not unheard of. there’s a handful of fauni folk heroes who are said to have been born human and either left in the wilderness as infants and being saved by fauni parents or outcast from human society and turning to the god of animals for solace; mythically speaking, the idea is that, just as the god of animals offered their gift to some humans who refused, perhaps there might be a very few humans whom they missed, or who weren’t born at the right time, and such people will find their own path to where they truly belong.

(IN CASE IT ISN’T OBVIOUS i’ve chosen to veer off the ‘racism allegory’ angle by leaning into the religious aspect of fauni identity; the narrative in ‘the shallow sea’ is essentially “we are our god’s chosen people and through this covenant we were changed” so—in the context of TDT where the god of animals and their shape-changing magic is real—if one chooses to convert and accept that covenant one can become a faunus. the reverse however isn’t true: one can leave the religion and relinquish the gift, but that doesn’t get rid of the fauni traits. nothing is erased, nothing forgotten.)

salem knows about her. (her opinion is chiefly “stop. trying. to eat. my. grimm.” they have tea sometimes it’s complicated.) ozpin thinks the god of animals is a myth, if a curiously persistent one. and the reaper is also like… at least half of remnant’s cryptids because when she’s out for walkies in the backyard most of the time she does it as a horrible mishmash Creature. when fauni characters say the Lady or the King they’re talking about her. she is both the Lady and the King because she doesn’t know what a gender is (and at this point she’s too afraid to ask) and she picks her pronouns on the basis of “i’ll have what my friend is having :)”

the god of light. HATES HER. she crawled in through the jabberwalker (no relation to the walker) (theophoric name) and latched onto the tree before the brothers could Get Rid of her and then made herself part of the tree Somehow!!! (you are what you eat) so now she just exists outside of his power.

(the brothers were both actually far more powerful than the tree when they left the ever after, because the tree is a passive force, it cannot act outside of itself, but the brothers had no power over the tree. so the reaper can’t overrule the god of light on his ultimatum—although she’d like to—but he can’t do anything to stop her from going for walkies. he just seethes impotently.)

[bestworstcase]

I owe you my life 🌱🌱🌱🌱 I heard the last 2 rwby beyond’s are dropping this Saturday, any inclination on the stories they’ll tell or what you’re hoping to see?

welcome back from The Void! 🥳

on the one hand i have no idea because i don’t know. what the VA situation is like or to what extent that was/is a deciding factor in which of the planned spots they could Do. IDEALLY i would like to glimpse some characters whom we haven’t already seen in the 9.11 animatic or B1-2 (the exception being ozpin and oscar—i promise i will be on my very best unhinged behavior if one of of the remaining two focuses on them), and i would love to get even the smallest peek at what is happening somewhere else besides vacuo (even if in the form of characters Showing Up in vacuo with News From Elsewhere).

but idk what the logistical limitations are for this little series. grbfhdck oz being in B2 gives me hope that an oscar+oz focused spot is within the realm of possibility so MAYBE… maybe… my shoot-for-the-moon wish is of course salem but i am not holding my breath for that. given. The Situation.

[bestworstcase]

are you willing to share the details on tdt! zhan tiri

behold my incomprehensible diagram!

um. after v9 i lost all sense of restraint, on the grounds that the blacksmith is an aspect of the tree and therefore the tree reasonably might have other aspects, and then there were four, and then there were twelve. lmao. (the artisan is the blacksmith—she’s depicted as a wood carver and lewis called her ‘the lively carpenter,’ so i figured she’d give herself a more nonspecific name.)

because i am also shaking heraclitus between my teeth like a terrier with a rat, Only One ever exists at a time; the tree is always becoming itself and its aspects shift and flow and transform into each other. in various directions and by varied means. ANYWAY,

those quartets (was/is/will-be) are not temporal categories but rather (copying straight from my lore notes here):

Presiding over forethought and remembrance, the Was concerns itself with what may be known: prophesy before, and memory after, for Time is the circle which remembers itself. It would be a mistake to say that the Is presides over, because the Is does not rule; but it might preside at the choosings, the turnings, the changings, and so the Is circumnavigates the Soul. Some things do not change—some things can never be changed—and over what is unchanging and unchangeable, the Will-Be presides: over strife, over hunger, over graspings, over flux.

was is about the flow of time and knowledge, is concerns action and choice, and will-be are manifestations of inevitability—things that Always Are. if you are uh. familiar with bitter snow zhan tiri i’m sure you can guess where she Goes…

The Reaper, called the Sitient Thorn and the Black Vulture and the Flower-Maker and the Goat-With-One-Thousand-Teeth and the Lady-of-Wilds and the King-of-Beasts—for she has been known by many names in many places—appears however she pleases, and it pleases her to change. Her fur and feathers are oil-dark; she crowns herself with the coal-black horns of a ram; her eyes glitter green; she reeks of vegetable rot and brine. Her true name, if she has one, might be the Wrathful Sky. All things want. Her season is Spring.

she is—as in bitter snow lmao—a little unusual in that she’s not a quote-unquote true aspect of the tree but rather something hungry that came from somewhere else, from the dark country which is nowhere. it is ESSENTIAL FOR HER CHARACTER that she’s a strangler fig. always. so she is kind of a quasi-parasitic trespasser into this Situation but also, in the same way that real stranglers protect their living host trees from being uprooted by storms, not an adversarial one necessarily.

what that means in practical terms is the reaper is the exception to a lot of the, for lack of a better word, “rules” that define the tree’s nature. in her aspect as an aspect of the tree, she takes on its nature; when she isn’t manifest within the tree, though, she exists outside and independent of it. so she can, for example, go for walkies in the backyard

by which i mean remnant. lmao

on remnant, the reaper is the god of animals. she didn’t make the fauni but once they came to be she decided she liked them Best and has favored them ever since. many, but not all, fauni receive her blessing, which (like that of the brothers) confers a magical gift, specifically a form of shapeshifting.

NOT like what the branwens can do—more in the vein of ‘cultivating’ the animal-like traits you already have as a faunus, so if (for example) you were born with shark teeth you might learn to rearrange your respiratory anatomy and grow gills, or give yourself sharklike skin. this can be done in a way that is permanent (this is called ‘ripening’) or not (‘borrowing’). most fauni who learn mix and match a bit (and there are different formal ‘paths’ that combine techniques in different proportions and intensities).

the gift itself is called khime and the practice is khimancy; humans often misunderstand khimancy as sort of a fauni tradition combining auralerie and konurgy (dust-magic) into a single art, but that is. um. Wrong.

(it is possible for master khimancers to fully turn themselves into an animal, but it takes a lot of dedication and many years of training to get there. the ones who get there are called turnskins and they’re rare, like on the level of silver-eyes rare.)

anyway the Reason not every fauni in the world receives khime is she only gives it to the ones who ask. asking is Really Simple—just a small ritual to get her attention, though the specifics vary a lot between different sects—and in many fauni cultures it’s seen as a rite of passage marking the end of one’s childhood. but because it’s a religious practice specific to khimerism, obviously not everyone Does It.

conversely, it isn’t Just For Fauni in the sense that a human could petition the reaper for her gift if they so chose, and she might say yes. for all intents and purposes this is Converting To Khimerism and under khimeric law makes you a faunus—although it won’t cause a physical alteration right away, there is a process for revealing your true form.

this is PRETTY RARE but not unheard of. there’s a handful of fauni folk heroes who are said to have been born human and either left in the wilderness as infants and being saved by fauni parents or outcast from human society and turning to the god of animals for solace; mythically speaking, the idea is that, just as the god of animals offered their gift to some humans who refused, perhaps there might be a very few humans whom they missed, or who weren’t born at the right time, and such people will find their own path to where they truly belong.

(IN CASE IT ISN’T OBVIOUS i’ve chosen to veer off the ‘racism allegory’ angle by leaning into the religious aspect of fauni identity; the narrative in ‘the shallow sea’ is essentially “we are our god’s chosen people and through this covenant we were changed” so—in the context of TDT where the god of animals and their shape-changing magic is real—if one chooses to convert and accept that covenant one can become a faunus. the reverse however isn’t true: one can leave the religion and relinquish the gift, but that doesn’t get rid of the fauni traits. nothing is erased, nothing forgotten.)

salem knows about her. (her opinion is chiefly “stop. trying. to eat. my. grimm.” they have tea sometimes it’s complicated.) ozpin thinks the god of animals is a myth, if a curiously persistent one. and the reaper is also like… at least half of remnant’s cryptids because when she’s out for walkies in the backyard most of the time she does it as a horrible mishmash Creature. when fauni characters say the Lady or the King they’re talking about her. she is both the Lady and the King because she doesn’t know what a gender is (and at this point she’s too afraid to ask) and she picks her pronouns on the basis of “i’ll have what my friend is having :)”

the god of light. HATES HER. she crawled in through the jabberwalker (no relation to the walker) (theophoric name) and latched onto the tree before the brothers could Get Rid of her and then made herself part of the tree Somehow!!! (you are what you eat) so now she just exists outside of his power.

(the brothers were both actually far more powerful than the tree when they left the ever after, because the tree is a passive force, it cannot act outside of itself, but the brothers had no power over the tree. so the reaper can’t overrule the god of light on his ultimatum—although she’d like to—but he can’t do anything to stop her from going for walkies. he just seethes impotently.)