#Ruby being paralleled to Alyx was obvious because 'this is the story of a girl'

[sir-adamus]

throwing out a guess here that Neo’s semblance + the Ever After’s weirdness lets her create full proxies of people and she’s using that as a way to not process her trauma at all

[bestworstcase]

don’t think ozma was alyx OR the boy who fell from the sky. i feel as dead certain about this as i was about the ever after not being an afterlife (<- pun intended), for a similarly intuitive but difficult-to-articulate reason; i don’t think either character CAN have been ozma without hamstringing the narrative itself. we are not in the ever after to learn about ozma.

no, what strikes me about ozpin’s relation to the girl who fell through the world is his interpretation of what the story is ABOUT: a young girl flees the consequences of a choice to a magical place but, never having learned from her initial failure, only succeeds in spreading it. his fatalistic philosophy on choice is in evidence here, but the piece that most interests me is the juxtaposition between what ozpin (and others) SAY of alyx and the singular line we have been given from the story itself, which is “she brushed off her bumps and bruises, for nothing hurt worse than the loneliness in her chest.”

alyx is a mean person who lies and cheats her way through the ever after, says yang. she started a war out of ignorance, says blake. or else she was just trying to survive and the simplistic moral of the story is reductive, says weiss. alyx had a marvelous adventure, so why was she so sad (unless the adventure changed her into someone else?), says oscar. she ran away from the consequences of a choice and spread her failure to learn from her mistakes everywhere she went, says ozpin.

i’m lonely, says the girl who fell through the world. i’m so lonely and it hurts.

the girl who fell through the world is a mirror. the things the other characters see in this narrative, the interpretations of alyx’s character that they present to each other and argue about? they’re responding to their own feelings and fears and moral beliefs as much as they are to the story itself. and rwby provides the key to understanding this by directly quoting a single line that reveals in no uncertain terms that the girl who fell through the world is a story about loneliness so acute that no other pain could compare.

the girl who fell through the world is salem and i would bet quite a lot that salem is going to turn out to be the person who wrote the story, although she may or may not be alyx in the literal sense. (it is yet unclear whether the ever after is a place that meaningfully exists independent of the story—and if the relics are what i think they are the possibility that the kids quite literally fell through creation into a STORY seems entirely plausible, although i’m reserving judgment until we get a better sense of how or if the brothers are in play here.)

rwby is a story about stories and V9 is already shaping up to be a volume about how stories are read. there is not a single character more central to the storytelling theme than salem and moreover we know definitively that she does connect to the ever after arc somehow because she is in the trailer, despite almost certainly not being physically in the ever after. (ntm that the penny-ozma/ruby-salem paralleling has gone into overdrive; the grief arc precipitates the recontextualization of the lost fable.) it just… seems blisteringly obvious how the pieces fit together.

also i think the twist here might be that the girl who fell through the world isn’t a fairytale that recounts as myth a literal historical event—hence my thinking that salem is likely the author without being alyx herself. ozma uses fairytale to preserve fragments of the truth while hiding the things he wants to keep secret but there is literally no reason to think that salem would do the same, and there is more than one way for a story to be “true.”

[bestworstcase]

It's somewhat annoying that a lot of the discourse surrounding the Ever After fixates so much on the idea of Ozma, but barely talks about how it relates to Salem.

It's like everyone has done the same thing that Ozma has done to her: Consign her to being the obvious big bad who the fairy tales will prove wrong.

On a different note; how do you figure things will turn out for Neo?

I'll be honest, I've kinda floated the idea that maybe RWBY will try to help Neo out from whatever she's gonna go through as part of their epiphany on the situation in the Ever After and with the Ozma/Salem War, partly because I think there'd be a bit of a parallel to the whole thing. I just can't quite figure out how it'd work out.

it’s very silly because like… this is explicitly the point in the narrative where the question of how to stop salem is materially tackled, if there was any doubt of that prior to july it should have been laid to rest by the synopsis that dropped with the teaser trailer. moreover she spent v8 undergoing dynamic character development in tandem with cinder while ironwood stepped up as the arc villain, which is the first stroke of narrative delivery of things that were promised in the lost fable, namely that she cannot be forced to stop and so must be persuaded, by engaging with her as a person rather than a monster; not to mention that ‘the girl who fell through the world’ itself is brought into the story in close proximity to salem herself, in both the physical and metaphorical senses. rwby, as i keep saying, is not subtle about any of this.

anyway.

9.3 actually crystallized a lot of my thinking vis-a-vis what the ever after is and where the connection back to the broader narrative lies, particularly as it pertains to neo; i am still on this train with the singular difference that i’m now thinking that neo’s alice might actually be the jabberwalker rather than team rwby, and increasingly i am doubtful that neo is going to become an arc villain simply because so much of the narrative tension now hinges on the danger that team rwby, like alyx, might ruin this world by mistake. with the narrative arc structured so precisely around the trepidation of warriors in a peaceful world i don’t think we properly have room for an arc villain in the typical sense, and neo’s antagonism is thus likely to be restricted to discrete episodic encounters a la the jabberwalker.

one thought rattling around in my head is that the first thing neo does upon landing in the ever after is turn herself into ruby; she has, in essence, been consumed so thoroughly by the desire for vengeance that her own sense of self has been whittled away almost to nothing. when the jabberwalker first gets her attention, she refashions herself into cinder (in neo’s estimation a symbol of power, fearlessness, untouchability); but when this fails to frighten him away, she becomes herself again and her semblance spontaneously pours into the ground beneath her and makes more of her. in… the symbolic sense the jabberwalker’s threat forces neo to rediscover herself, to remember her own strength, shedding the facile illusions of other (in her estimation, better) people she has increasingly been hiding behind. that she and the jabberwalker are quite similar and that the jabberwalker has good reason to be hostile to yang in particular and rwb by association creates a fairly straightforward foundation of mutual interest to be discovered after the mutual startle is worked out (as i am relatively certain it will be, if only because neo does not actually have the means to catch him and the near-universal assumption that she succeeds in beating him up here doesn’t make sense given his demonstrable ability to run away); at the same time, the jabberwalker is far more timid and non-confrontational and his apparent reaction to injury or devastation leans toward healing (“fix!”), not vengeance. that combined ability to empathize with neo’s anger and contrasting constructive orientation strikes me as precisely what she really needs in order to get better, and also completes the rule of three as far as ever after animal companions go.

her interest in fairytales and her personal identification with both ‘the girl who fell through the world’ AND ‘the girl in the tower’ also feel like one of the more obvious doors through which salem might be brought into the ever after’s narrative. i’ve been pondering since last week that the arc narrative might bifurcate such that team rwby gets the ‘identity crisis’ journey while neo and jaune get the ‘learning about salem’ journey and neither question can be wholly answered until the two intersect and everyone comes back together (i would imagine in the rusted knight’s acre, perhaps episode 6 or 7?).

it’s not completely out of the question that neo will instead end up on the more standard v->h track of being offered a compassionate second chance by the heroes, but 1. that’s not particularly rwby’s style and 2. the setup here, with neo having fallen into a different acre altogether hours after team rwby got their bearings and headed out, strikes me more as set up for neo to have her own arc separate from the heroes before she next encounters them.