The Lost Princess comes home; but as the summer dies, an ancient grudge blossoms into violence, mysterious black rocks ravage the kingdom of Corona, and her happily ever after has never felt further out of reach.
Rapunzel dreams of freedom beyond the shining palace walls.
Cassandra fights to escape the shadow of a poisoned legacy.
Varian chases answers, desperate to save his dying village.
And Lady Caine just wants to watch Corona burn.
PART TWO: Blind and Blackening in the Moonless Air
The halcyon celebrations of the Lost Princess’s return lie dead and forgotten. Her usurper uncle sits upon the throne in the rubble of Corona’s capital city; black rocks have sundered the countryside, and the conspiracies of summertime have flowered and borne the poisoned fruit of civil war. Exhausted by the past six months, and with nothing but an ancient book and a cryptic mentor to guide her way, Rapunzel flees Corona, chasing the black rocks east: to Aphelion, where the moonstone lies yearning for the sun.
Her path has been laid out, and she knows, now, that there is no turning aside.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Completely respect your decision to leave tumblr. Whatever happens, I enjoyed our interactions and reading your self-titled “screeds”.
I have been poking around on pillowfort and I’m wary that it is the solution to the problem tumblr created with its rescinded update.
The problem with tumblr now being that their decision makers still seem intent on rolling out this change again - regardless of overwhelming dissenting feedback - at a later date + coupled with how faulty the first failed roll out was. And all the worrying red flags we can infer from those two points.
The reason I’m on tumblr and not elsewhere is the nature of interactions here. Pillowfort doesn’t seem to have the same cultivated, thriving, second order interaction culture. Asking earnestly: What do you see in pillowfort vs. other alternatives?
i think the high volume of asks/reblogs/replies i get here sort of disguises this because i do engage with people frequently--but i am the op of the vast majority of posts on my blog. i very rarely reblog from anyone unless it's my post. i have almost exactly nine hundred followers but--not counting a couple of dead blogs that haven't posted in over a year--only follow ten people, which is almost too much for me. the vast majority of the posts i see on tumblr are in tags i have bookmarked on a set of blogs that i peruse when i feel like it.
all of this makes me a very atypical tumblr user, but it's a usage pattern that is fairly normal on pillowfort by design.
further, the core issue i had personally with the proposed reblog chain changes wasn't losing second order interactions, it was losing ownership of my own posts. i don't want my posts to lie to me about how many notes they have. i don't want to lose the ability to turn off reblogs on my post if someone else responds to me. in the hypothetical timeline where the reblog chain update is not rolled back and i stay on tumblr, every single post i make has reblogs turned off forever. this happens to be an area where pillowfort is objectively just better than tumblr--reblogs over there are referenced to the original post instead of being copies of it, so if i fix a typo in a post it's fixed in every reblog too, and pf has much more robust post-level privacy/access controls too.
(i will add also that while obviously pf has a smaller user base by an order of magnitude, proportionate to the number of users i don't think there's really any less second-order interaction over there. comment culture is pretty strong and people absolutely do have discussions with other people who aren't op in the comments of posts. it's just that these conversations aren't immediately visible from the dashboard, you have to click through to the notes. but we do that on tumblr anyway, to see replies and other reblogs.)
as for other alternatives—i would sooner put my head through a plate glass window than be on twitter or a twitter clone or mastodon or other federated platforms or instagram or threads or whatever the hell else exists these days, because i don't use tumblr as a social media platform, i use it for blogging. the only other alternative i might consider is dreamwidth, but i like pillowfort's UX better. really simple as that.
Are you still gonna answer the asks? Sorry, it's just that you're one of my fave people here in tumblr (╥﹏╥)
there are a lot of things sitting in my inbox that i want to respond to and i do really like answering asks, so i'm thinking i'll answer asks from here over on pf. if you don't have an account there you can add this atom feed to any rss reader to still get notified when i post.
in light of you leaving the platform, can I have your blessing to make an archive of your posts off-site (probably just for personal use)? to be clear I’m a RWBY fan so it’d mostly be those posts but I could save the others I just couldn’t organize them as I don’t know enough about TTS etc
for posterity i am planning to set up an archive myself (and also no plans to *delete* this blog at any point) but yeah go for it if you want to
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
congrats on the reblog chain rollback everybody. in the interest of clarity though i personally am still getting off tumblr because ->
1 - the quantity of major, obvious, easily-reproducible bugs introduced by the rollout is alarming—one thing to change a fundamental component of the platform's core functions arbitrarily and without warning, but to do that and have it... break multiple related functions and also not even work right as described?
i know tumblr has a reputation for being riddled with bugs but this is not normal for tumblr.
disregard the screaming crying throwing up histrionics that happen every time the UI changes. when it comes to new feature rollouts, tumblr has a pretty good recent track record--comments? badges? patio? advanced search? all rolled out smoothly. patio had a limited initial rollout specifically to collect user feedback, i remember that because mine was one of the accounts to get it early.
going further back to the last time a core function received a major update, the NPF rollout caused its share of upheaval and bugs but spanned years and the new editor was initially introduced to the web app through an opt-in beta testing phase. (it was also actually like. necessary)
that is tumblr-normal. it has been years since "the new update Broke Everything again" was the normal state of affairs here. the sense of betrayal i'm feeling is only half about the update itself--what the fuckhappened here? why was this major update rolled out site-wide so rapidly without a beta testing phase in a clearly unfinished state? more to the point, given that the official communications on the matter have said sweet fuck all about anything other than user outrage, why aren't we being offered any assurances that this won't happen again?
(frankly: this was such an egregious mess compared to the level of care and professionalism i have come to expect from tumblr's dev team that my chief concern right now is whether vibe coding was involved.)
2 - official communications seem pretty clear that they're going to continue fiddling with the reblog chain which, sure, i don't particularly care to track note distribution across reblog trees but i think it's a feature with a lot of obvious use cases provided all notes still aggregate to the root post like god intended, jesus fucking christ, but
a) it does not bode well that this promise to keep iterating changes to one of the platform's core functions is paired with a complete lack of acknowledgment that even if everyone had absolutely loved the update, it was not ready to go live and should have at least been rolled out as an opt-in beta first.
b) on reflection i think the most charitable interpretation of this debacle is that the changes weren't intended to hide notes the way they did--"silent" reblogs appeared to behave the same way reblogs with commentary did, contra the intended behavior described in the release notes, so something clearly wasn't working right. if that was the case, though, i would expect that to be communicated--if only because "guys we fucked up and the thing you all hated the most about this was, in fact! a massive bug" would be reassuring to hear--so i'm left with the assumption that it was intended.
i can't for the life of me fathom why anyone would deliberately design that or think it was a good idea, but taken into consideration with the ultimate stated intention of "giving contributors the recognition they deserve" (??) rather than any like... real... use-case for this functionality (such as: giving artists access to more robust information about how their art is found and shared, or letting users filter reblogs-with-commentary by reblog trail for ease of reading on posts with multiple discrete conversations happening at once) does not inspire me with a great deal of trust.
i happen to agree that reblog chains could be improved upon! no system is perfect or inviolable. but if the problem being solved here is "users who add things to the posts of other users don't get Enough Credit" then the solution is going to be about giving more notes to rebloggers. that tumblr's Powers That Be think this is the problem with reblog chains feels to me very suggestive of the platform's probable direction from this point and i'm just not very interested in, well. That.
anyway. i'll be lurking around but as of Right Now my plan is still -> find me here
to all the concerned anons beginning to pile up (sorry 😭 you are all very sweet): yes i'm fine im just a) busy irl b) learning C# For Fun c) trying to get writing done, and d) Working On A Post Of.. Considerable. Length
when applied to drinks, "dry" means "without sugar". therefore it follows that sugary drinks can be called "wet". the meanings of the terms "hot" and "cold" when applied to drinks are obvious. thus the aspect of any drink can be determined.
for instance, green tea, freshly steeped and served without additives, is hot and dry, and therefore has an aspect of fire.
a mocha, on the other hand, while hot, is sweet, and therefore wet, and thus has an an aspect of air.
lemonade, which is wet and cold, has a water aspect.
finally, the drink which most epitomizes the earth aspect, being both cold and dry, is vodka
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Why do houses still have fireplaces? They jack up your insurance, make your stuff smell like smoke, and aren't even all that good at destroying evidence. The only rationale is that us human beings really love looking at fires, and we want to have a fire in our houses that we can look at.
Throughout human history, the fire has been synonymous with civilization. It kept us safe from the wolves and the not-humans that preyed upon us, and it kept us warm on those dark nights. Our existence is almost solely thanks to it. And we haven't forgotten.
Let's be honest. The last time you passed a car fire on the motorway, you slowed way down, right? Probably rubbernecked a bit too long. Backed up traffic. Why did you do that? You don't want to be late for wherever you were going, and it's not like the million different aromatic hydrocarbons getting pulled into your nostrils is going to be a healthy experience for your not-dying system. No, you really liked looking at that fire.
Sure, some folks take it a little far. Pyromaniacs. Firefighters. That guy who works at the Japanese teppanyaki place and puts way too much oil on the shrimp pyramid (my aunt's eyebrows will grow back one day.) You're different, though. You can keep it restrained, admire the fire for its aesthetic merits without staring into it so long that you lose your inhibitions. That's why you put it in your house, in a little box, surrounded by all of your cool stuff: so you won't be tempted to make it any bigger.
So, the next time you're burning evidence in your fireplace, remember to say "thank you" to the fire. And, for the love of all that is holy, print off the evidence before you burn it. Don't throw an entire laptop in there. Lithium batteries don't make nearly as pretty of a fire.
I remember you saying once that Mistral has sundown towns- do you mind sourcing that and/or talking about it? not that i don't believe it loll i just want to know where it comes from so i can reference it myself
-🌙
v6 adam short--the first part is set in mistral, as we can see from the architecture at the start:
the second scene entails a shootout between human assailants and a white fang convoy; it takes place in a wooded area with no visible buildings, but this dialogue:
GHIRA: Please, we're just trying to pass through!
SHOOTER 1: Well you animals passed through the wrong town!
indicates that this is either happening on the outskirts of a town or else the assailants are residents who chose to follow and ambush the convoy after it left their town.
this is likely somewhere in rural mistral, based on the look of the trees--i think the set might even be outright reused from yang's altercation with the bandits in 5.4, but if not it was definitely built using the same assets:
vale has similar environments, too (e.g. as seen in the v5 yang short), but the initial scene in adam's short is clearly in mistral and we know the white fang is headquartered there, plus mistral is (per the CFVY novels) notoriously a very racist kingdom, so it makes the most sense to presume that the shootout occurs in mistral.
also, we know that within the city of mistral, either segregation is fully legal or else laws against it are not enforced, as we see in 5.6:
thus in rural parts of the kingdom, it's wholly plausible for there to be towns where segregation is enforced by local law, if not outright then by way of policies like racial profiling and police harassment combined with anti-faunus vigilantism.
it is clear from the adam short that violent hatred of faunus is so entrenched in rural parts of mistral that in certain areas, just passing through town while being visibly a faunus is enough to provoke mob killings, and it's profoundly unlikely for bigotry that extreme to be present without any legal or political force behind it. the human shooters attack in broad daylight and don't even bother to conceal their faces; they are very, very confident that they can get away with this.
Do you think there would be people that would side with the GoL if they found about the mandate/divine genocide? I have this idea of some ppl deciding that humans/faunus suck and need to be ruled by a divine power forever or ppl that would rather die than live alongside Salem. Maybe it’s my cynicism but I do think there would be ppl like that in a setting like Remmant.
people already know. the divine mandate isn't a secret. it's mainstream brother-cult doctrine, and worship of the two brothers appears to be a hegemony worldwide, except in menagerie.
this is how the tale of the two brothers ends in the anthology of tales ozpin published as headmaster and made a cornerstone of beacon's curriculum:
“We must take back our gifts,” the God of Darkness said. “Reclaim our power and wipe this experiment from existence.”
“I disagree,” the God of Light said. “And we promised to share in the fate of our joint creation.” He gave a mighty yawn. “Let us rest, and when the time comes, we will see what Humanity has become in our absence. At that point, we will judge them. If they are worthy, we will take their forms and walk among them as equals. If not, we will take back our gifts and start over elsewhere. What do you say?”
“Who will decide whether they are worthy?” the God of Darkness said.
“Humanity will make it plain. If they come together in unity and find a way to destroy the evil in the world and within themselves, then they are worthy. If not … we will let them burn,” the God of Light said.
“So shall it be.” The two brothers agreed. But even in rest, they needed some distance from each other. Each dragon transformed himself into a new continent at one end of their world.
And there the dragons still sleep, until the day that the gods will waken, rise, and judge.
and this is how he annotates it:
Whether or not you believe in the Brothers, or in this story in particular, the underlying message still holds value: We are burdened with responsibility for our world, and we share a common destiny. Like the twin gods, we are intricately connected with one another, and if we can learn to work and live together, we can create things greater than the sum of their parts.
Remnant survived the Great War, but while the four kingdoms now cooperate and coexist, our bond seems tenuous. We have a fragile peace, and in some ways, we are more divided than ever. Even if the gods aren’t real, even if they don’t return to judge us for our deeds, we should act each day as though they are arriving tomorrow. In the end, we will be the arbiters of our fates. We will either create a beautiful, peaceful world and live in harmony together or destroy ourselves and our planet, and the gods will judge what we have chosen.
rwby fandom largely doesn't notice this because people tend to have a certain idea of what an eschatological religion looks like that is fantastical and sensationalized.
but rwby is written by people who have a pretty good grasp of how religion actually works. which i've talked about here before, and that post goes more into detail on the brother-cult hegemony so i won't belabor that here.
the brother-cult is modeled after evangelical christianity, which is also an eschatological religion deeply preoccupied with the end times. surprise!
like
i think it's important not to project our outside perspective of the brothers into characters who have grown up their whole lives surrounded by brother-cult doctrine, because while it's obvious to the audience that the divine mandate is essentially a genocidal temper tantrum by a god who's terrified of change, the idea that one day the gods will return to judge humanity and then either destroy the world or live among men is so normal to the heroic characters that not a single one of them has so much as paused to consider whether salem might… have a point.
and that's probably broadly true of most of remnant's human population as well as a considerable chunk of faunuskind.
the divine mandate is common knowledge and completely normalized. it's not a question of "if" there will be people who agree with it and embrace it when they learn.
like. the kids SAW darkness vaporize humanity and light calmly state they would do it again with their own eyes, and none of them are worried about that. they're worried about salem summoning the day of judgment before mankind is "ready."
because they haven't yet started to question the divine plan. it's what they all grew up with. agreement with the divine mandate is a cultural norm. it's the air everybody is breathing. it's remnant's equivalent to the christian rapture. it's not a secret. and it's the mainstream doctrine of the dominant religion worldwide.
People tend to assume this meant Raven was the first eye. Do you agree with that and if so, what's your thoughts on Salem's views regarding Raven?
well...no. hrgbdvxbm
(in fact i think interpreting raven as the "first eye" is a little bananas. SALEM ISNT THAT HARD TO UNDERSTAND YOU JUST. YOU JSUT GOTTA KNOW HOW SALEM THINKS...)
FIRST. salem is legitimately a good strategist. this is not just an informed trait where we're told that salem is clever and then what actually happens is she has these elaborate rube goldberg plans that just kind of succeed by narrative fiat--which is what happens in a lot of stories with this sort of "grand strategist" character archetype, because many writers utilize complexity to create the illusion of brilliant planning--no. salem is for real competent.
[sidebar: i actually think this is a major contributing factor to why people have such a hard time figuring her out and in particular so many people kind of fall back on assuming that she's not really very smart,just sort of brutishly cunning. she's such a realistic strategist that compared to the more fantastic rube goldberg plans fictional chess-master, salem does feel lackluster! her plans just aren't very complicated. and i think to a lot of people who don't have any grounding in real military theory, whose predominant exposure to strategy is fantasy/sci-fi tropes, the simplicity and flexibility of her plans seems like poor planning instead of realistic competence.]
this matters because in order to follow what salem says in this part of 4.11, we need to understand why she's so mad.
(you might be thinking "what? she doesn't seem particularly mad," but bear with me. it'll make more sense if we outline the strategic reasoning first.)
what is the strategic principle guiding all of salem's plans? the correct answer is not "divide and conquer," although that is a tactic salem uses to great effect. if you step back, ignore everything her enemies think about her strategy, and just assess her actions and the actions of her agents, it becomes very clear that the foundation of salem's strategic philosophy is… best articulated by this precept from 'the art of war,' on the use of spies:
thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE.
mankind, salem says, is strong, wise, and resourceful. it was mankind's passion, ingenuity, and resourcefulness which allowed them to prevail against fate itself and survive. there will be no victory in strength, she says.
by implication, then, in salem's thinking, victory lies in wisdom, ingenuity, and resourcefulness. in having the experience and creativity to make use of whatever one has to work with. in knowledge.
and if we assess how salem prosecutes her war against the huntsmen academies through a lens of basic military theory, what we'll find is that nearly every move salem and her agents make is about either 1. gathering intelligence needed to advance her strategic ends, and/or 2. confusing her enemies and crippling their intelligence.
for the beacon operation: cinder recruits emerald for her illusions, and torchwick for his knowledge of and contacts in vale ("if you want to know a city, ask the rats"). they infiltrate beacon, posing as students, in order to collect information on the real competitors and infect beacon's network with an aggressive spyware. the black queen virus doesn't just give them control over the system; it harvests data. watts works behind the scenes to sift that stolen information, alerting cinder when he discovers things she can make use of (and doubtless relaying any items of interest to salem, as well). cinder uses this gathered intelligence to fine-tune and adjust her plans on the fly and manipulate the tournament to her intended outcome.
salem's decisive victory at beacon is achieved through the superiority of her intelligence, in the military sense, over ozpin's.
then cinder destroys the global communications system and salem distributes the seers, creating a lopsided information environment wherein her side is the only one with real-time long-distance communication.
in mistral, salem leverages lionheart's position as haven's headmaster to manipulate the mistral council, expose and eliminate qrow's spy network, and insure a swift return to normalcy for the civilian population--that being the ideal condition for her covert operation to capture the lamp. (i'll loop back to this at the end of the post because it's a long tangent and not very relevant, but: no, salem did not have tyrian and hazel kill literally every single huntsman in the kingdom and i think reading qrow's lines in that extreme literal sense borders on deliberately obtuse.)
had cinder known vernal was a decoy when she descended to the vault, even with all other things being equal, she probably would have won: her defeat is a consequence of inadequate foreknowledge.
upon defeat at haven, both hazel and cinder promptly employ local spies (the spider) to gain intelligence on the enemy's movements; hazel brings this information to salem, who promptly sends watts and tyrian to atlas to pollute the information environment and again infect enemy systems with spyware. cinder recruits neo and likewise follows the trail to atlas, where she spends months spying on ironwood and his inner circle. watts quietly disables all the proximity alarms that would have given early warning of salem's advance; salem spends quite a long time eavesdropping through the seer in his briefcase before she interrupts.
and, of course, the instant salem gets her hands on the lamp, her top priority in the short term becomes learning how to use it; and cinder makes terrifically effective use of the lamp's final question to gain perfect foreknowledge of the enemy's plans.
now. there is a pretty strong implication that salem didn't want ozpin killed at beacon, most likely because she preferred to be able to keep eyes on him: where he is, what he's doing, what he's planning. salem values strategic intelligence more highly than she does killing her enemies.
this brings us to qrow. both watts and tyrian are explicitly under the impression that salem would very much like qrow branwen dead. they are mistaken.
qrow is ozpin's scout and spy. one of his primary duties for the inner circle is tracking down unknown maidens, and at the top of v4, neither ozpin's circle nor salem know where the spring maiden is.
tyrian has been searching for an indeterminate amount of time (salem instructs him to "continue" his hunt for the spring maiden in 4.1). if salem can't locate the spring maiden before the fall semester begins at haven, she will need to either indefinitely postpone the white fang's strike on the academy or arrange for it to be caught and foiled by leo; the latter option is safer in that it makes lionheart look loyal to ozpin after all, but both are inconvenient. nevertheless, she pulls tyrian off the search to do cinder a favor.
why?
because qrow, the man ozpin tasked with finding the spring maiden, is en route to report in with her double agent. for all intents and purposes, salem still has someone searching for the maiden--qrow is an unwitting asset. it would be beyond stupid to kill him at this juncture.
tyrian did a spectacularly stupid thing when he stung qrow. i think this gets widely overlooked because most people share tyrian's perspective: qrow is a strong enemy combatant, so killing him is a good thing for salem. right? that is the natural, intuitive, seemingly obvious way to look at it unless!☝️you take the strategic calculation salem made when she pulled tyrian off the hunt for the spring maiden into consideration, under which, as i've just outlined, qrow is a highly valuable asset.
SECOND. i submit that salem is furious with tyrian, not for his failure to capture ruby, but because he may have just blown the whole plan for haven by poisoning qrow and then crawling home with an injury so severe that she can't possibly send him back out to search for the spring maiden in the time remaining before the fall semester begins.
we all know her soft "you disappoint me" is a psychological knife twist that sends him into a sobbing emotional breakdown, yes. we all know salem either sets a beowolf on him or just can't be bothered to rein it in, yes. but think about this: when tyrian returns to evernight in 4.11, cinder is still struggling with the grimm arm and has yet to recover her voice. qrow nearly dies in the wilderness and spends an unknown period recuperating in mistral before he's well enough to meet with lionheart; by the time he does so, cinder has achieved full control over the grimm arm and her voice is completely healed. salem does not inform watts of tyrian's injury or call him back to evernight to provide medical treatment for at minimum several days, but more plausibly a couple weeks skipped between the end of v4 and beginning of v5.
when tyrian returns, he tells salem that he didn't capture ruby, "but hope is not lost! my tail… my stinger! i poisoned him! qrow!" and he is, of course, visibly mutilated. salem could and undoubtedly did infer, correctly, that:
qrow was traveling with his niece.
someone (qrow or an ally) chopped off tyrian's stinger during or right after the sting, forcing tyrian to flee.
qrow was therefore envenomated but still alive when tyrian fled, and qrow had at least one person who loves him on hand to administer first aid and get help.
there is a good chance he survived.
salem quietly tells tyrian she's disappointed and walks away as a beowolf attacks him, then withholds medical treatment for his very serious injury for days or, quite possibly, weeks until she receives confirmation that qrow did in fact survive, and did in fact bring the information she needed on the spring maiden to her double agent.
this is the harshest punishment salem has inflicted on anyone in her inner circle by a significant margin, and it's also quiet. understated. practical. it lacks the theatricality of her disciplinary scenes in 6.4, 8.1, 8.4, 8.6, and 8.9. i've made this point before, but there is a stark difference between salem performing in a certain way to intimidate or manipulate someone, and what she does when she wants to hurt somebody.
"you disappoint me," followed by either tacitly permitting a grimm to attack or actively setting a grimm on him, looks to me a lot more like salem turning around after oscar tells a lie to blast him with zero warning for a solid ten seconds and then saying the cruelest thing she could think of in the most psychologically devastating way possible. this is not a calculated manipulative cruelty meant to achieve a particular outcome.
she is simply coldly, quietly furious because her entire plan for haven is now hanging by a single thread of possibility that qrow will survive and find the spring maiden within the next 2-3 months. AND THIS INCOMPETENT LUNATIC EXPECTS HER TO PAT HIM ON THE HEAD AND CALL HIM A GOOD BOY FOR POISONING HER ASSET.
the last thing she tells cinder in 5.2 is to send tyrian is so she can "have a word with him." her tone is perfectly malevolent and theatrical, pause for dramatic effect and all. the minute salem determines that qrow survived (and found spring), she summons watts back to treat tyrian's injury and turns on a dimeinto that performative affect, because now the mess he made has cleaned itself up she is going to do a little song and dance to make sure tyrian understands what he did wrong and how very fortunate he is that qrow did survive.
THIRD. with 5.2 helping to provide context regarding what salem is thinking when she receives tyrian in 4.11, what she meant by "the last eye is blinded" becomes much more clear. she isn't talking about ozpin's eyes--she is talking about hers.
she means tyrian and qrow. her eyes for seeking the spring maiden. "the last eye is blinded" and "you disappoint me" aren't discrete statements. salem is telling him WHY she's disappointed.
and i think she's also jabbing at tyrian over something he said to cinder Months Ago that irritated her. remember this?
TYRIAN: If I were you, I'd hunt her down. Find her and… well, she took your eye, didn't she?
remember tyrian tauntingly muttering "eye for an eye" at cinder at the end of that meeting and then laughing maniacally?
<- salem does not want cinder to take this leaf out of tyrian's book. salem has been, as we see in 5.2, advising cinder to be cautious and focus on protecting herself rather than pursuing vengeance.
cinder is standing right there, in 4.11.
salem sent tyrian after ruby as a favor to cinder. tyrian failed to capture her and stung qrow during the altercation. one of them chopped off his stinger.
sting for a sting. eye for an eye...
...leaves the whole world blind, right?
the last eye is blinded.
cinder is quite intelligent enough to make the same inferences salem does, and in 5.2 she seems quick on the uptake when salem brings up tyrian apropos nothing. if salem's reception of tyrian in 4.11 is performative at all, it's a performance for cinder's sake. this is what becomes of those who lash out with no restraint. this is where uncontrolled aggression and brutality lead. this is why you must act with caution and consider your weaknesses and how to guard them. do not be like tyrian; he is a disappointment whose lack of discipline may well cost you the spring maiden and me the relic.
whether cinder receives that message as intended is a different question. i don't think she does, fully, until salem elaborates in 5.2.
BONUS ROUND. on the huntsmen salem had killed in mistral.
exhibit a: lionheart's cover story.
"You could feel the dread in the air. With all that negativity, you can imagine what it was like when the grimm came for us... Mistral's territory is the widest reaching in the world, you know, and that makes it infinitely harder to protect. We lost so many great huntsmen, teachers from this very institution. And it's only gotten worse..."
[...]
"We may have dealt with the grimm, but the Mistral council's still at odds with representatives from Atlas. First it was the dust embargo, now it's the closing of borders..."
[...]
"This kingdom is in shambles. 'As soon as possible' does not mean tomorrow; It means as soon as I can convince the council that I need huntsmen more than they do. Unfortunately, bandit tribes aren't very high on their list of priorities when the threat of war is just on the horizon."
note… two things.
first, the exact nature of the problems leo is talking about when he says mistral is in shambles. not the grimm. the grimm came in a devastating wave in the immediate aftermath of beacon's fall, and many huntsmen were killed holding the line. but they did hold the line, and the grimm have now been "dealt with." they are no longer a pressing concern.
however, what with confused reports of atlesian forces attacking vale, the dust embargo, and now atlas closing its borders and withdrawing all its troops from mistral, the mistral council believes atlas may be planning to invade. they're scrambling to get prepare for an imminent war of aggression initiated by their onetime ally, which has just reneged on its defense agreements and left the kingdom vulnerable due to its reliance on atlesian troops to defend its borders.
and second, neither qrow nor ozpin doubt leo's assertion that the mistral council has effectively commandeered most of the kingdom's huntsmen. indeed, this is the one part of his cover story that they accept as fact without question. as qrow says, "then damn the council, we'll do it ourselves." what makes them suspicious is leo's apparent reluctance to work around the council to get things done.
it follows that the council must legitimately have the authority to do this and that it's a predictable action for the council to take under the circumstances and that it would probably be quite easy to verify.
exhibit b: qrow's contacts.
OZPIN: Now, we have two steps ahead of us. The first is enlisting the aid of more huntsmen.
REN: But the Mistral council--
QROW: Doesn't own every huntsman in the kingdom, and I've been here enough times to know where we can find some more.
OZPIN: So long as they're trustworthy.
QROW: You can trust them to put up a good fight. I'll throw together a list tonight.
so, qrow is explicitly only looking for independent huntsmen not employed by the mistral council; and--given he descends to the slums at the base of mistral to look for these people, one of them had wracked up a considerable debt at a noodle place, and another lived with her family in a derelict house with boarded-up windows--we can infer that this group of huntsmen who live in mistral but don't work on retainer for the council are poor. in other words, if you're a huntsman in mistral, not a criminal, and not ultimately working for the government, you're probably struggling to make ends meet. this is not an attractive situation to be in, and most huntsmen in the kingdom probably do not fall into this category.
furthermore, qrow doesn't put out a general call for aid; he puts together a list of huntsmen and huntresses he knows and trusts enough to ask them to help him force raven to "give up her most prized possession"--so, to capture the spring maiden, essentially.
we can infer that qrow is looking for people he knows well, people he has worked with closely in the past, perhaps people he considers friends. he's ozpin's spy. these are his assets.
exhibit c: the mission boards.
the contracts we see on the mission board have three statuses: "terminated," "in progress," and "on hold."
the purpose of the mission boards is for huntsmen to pick up new contracts, so it makes little sense for them to display completed jobs. "terminated" is therefore most likely a status indicating that the assigned huntsman or huntress has been confirmed dead, incapacitated, or perhaps fired by the client but remains open and available. "in-progress" status indicates the time since the contract was claimed or last updated.
so what does "on hold" mean?
i think that is what leo alludes to in his cover story: most huntsmen in mistral work on retainer for the council, and the council can place holds on freelance contracts held by these huntsmen in order to reassign them elsewhere. this would allow the council to distribute the majority of the kingdom's huntsmen evenly and efficiently to handle major crises when necessary, although--mistral being mistral--corrupt use of this power is probably rampant.
now, of the thirty unique and fully-legible records shown on the mission board, 10 are terminated, 7 in progress, and 13 on hold. the ones on hold are distributed evenly across a period of ten weeks at a rate of 1-2 per week, whereas all of the terminated contracts were marked as such within the past week.
what this says to me is that either salem held off on giving the kill order until qrow turned up alive and hazel's been on a killing spree for the past week... or else there are still enough huntsmen active in the city that terminated contracts are picked up again usually within a week.
of the in-progress contracts, two were last updated within the past month, 1 week and 3 weeks. two of the oldest, both eight weeks old, are "village security" jobs--which are presumably long-term contracts. now, we know there are air patrols around mistral keeping watch for signs of trouble, because one of these patrols saw the plume from the dying knuckelavee and came to investigate. if a settlement within the kingdom's territories were overrun by grimm and destroyed, these patrols would notice it fairly quickly; and if a village contracted a huntsman for defense and the huntsman died without the village being destroyed, the contract would be marked terminated and become available for pick up promptly. it makes no sense to assume that the huntsmen assigned to these eight week old in-progress village security contracts are anything but alive.*
[*one of them might be brunswick farms, but in that case the deaths would have occurred about two weeks ago based on the stage of decomposition the corpses will be in when the kids discover them in approximately five weeks, in which case that strengthens my point that it's likely normal for village security contracts to go 6+ weeks without a status update]
so that is 4 out of 7 huntsmen on in-progress contracts that i think are more plausibly alive than dead; the others are all a search-and-destroy, and we know from what oobleck says in 2.9 that it isn't unheard of for S&Ds to take weeks. shiro wan is assigned to an S&D last updated five weeks ago, which qrow seems to presume means he's dead, so we'll assume the other two even older S&Ds are dead too.
qrow, again, is not looking for just any huntsman who happens to be available right now. he's looking for his trusted contacts, and not finding any of them. but what the state of the mission boards suggests is that qrow's contact list is such a small group relative to how many huntsman there are in mistral overall that their deaths and disappearances get completely lost in the noise. the only person who notices is qrow, solely because he's going down his list of personal contacts and slowly realizing that every single one of them is either dead or missing.
AND THEN he checks the mission boards, which tell him that in the aggregate, things look pretty much as you'd expect for business as usual during a period when the mistral council needs a lot of huntsmen to handle a national security problem. all of qrow's close contacts getting wiped out is statistically anomalous only in the context of them being his assets. that is what tells qrow something is very wrong.
exhibit d: qrow's accusation.
QROW: It was you… You sit on the Mistral council! You had information on every huntsman and huntress in the kingdom, and you gave it all to her.
LIONHEART: I…
QROW: I couldn't find any of them--because you let her kill them!
it bears repeating here that qrow was looking for his close contacts--people he almost certainly considered friends, or at the very least trustworthy colleagues--and in this moment he's realizing that a man he thought was his friend sold these people out to salem. he's shocked, horrified, outraged--not in a state of mind to speak with absolute precision! it's weird to take this to mean literally every single huntsman in mistral is dead now rather than qrow saying, essentially, "you bastard, you're the reason my friends are dead."
particularly when killing every single huntsman in mistral would have been counterproductive to salem's plans. her advantage at haven is that she can have her people just walk in and take the relic, quietly, without anyone the wiser. it behooves her to arrange matters in mistral so that nobody is paying attention to haven academy…
…and the most effective way to accomplish that is by ensuring the kingdom absorbs the shock of beacon falling and makes a swift, smooth return to normalcy. her double agent is the headmaster of haven academy and sits in the council; he has orders from ozpin to act against the kingdom's best interest by keeping haven heavily guarded even while school is not in session. instead of doing that, salem has him send his faculty to join the defense on the front lines and use his authority as headmaster to encourage the council to keep siphoning more and more huntsmen and huntresses to shore up those border defenses.
that removes all of haven's potential defenders from the city just as effectively as killing them, and it makes leo look to the general public and the council like he's taking this crisis very seriously and doing a good job (eliminating the risk that the council might dismiss him if he seems fumbling or incompetent), and it's a genuinely effective crisis response that enables life in the city to return to normal quickly. we don't see much of mistral in v5-6, but every glimpse we do get suggests that things are okay for ordinary people. there are bustling crowds in the markets and transit hubs, trains are running on time, there's a documentary on the fall of beacon coming out and a huge memorial for pyrrha getting built up in argus, and so on. things are rough out in the fringes of the kingdom, sure, but in the urban centers, life has gone back to normal. people aren't afraid.
no one outside of ozpin's inner circle is worrying haven might be next. nobody is thinking about haven much at all.
that would not be the case if all or most of the huntsman in the kingdom were dead. because people would notice that. the kingdom's authorities are obviously going to be on high alert for anything that looks like it might be an escalating pattern of threats. if the kingdom was running out of huntsmen,nobody would feel safe and the police would be watching haven like hawks.
salem can get away with eliminating qrow's trusted contacts because they're impoverished nobodies who live in the slums and represent just a tiny sliver of the kingdom's huntsmen. even qrow doesn't notice anything wrong until he goes down the whole list. there's no discernible pattern in the data until he applies the hyper-specific filter of independent huntsmen he has strong working relationships with.
it isn't about overpowering the enemy. it's about turning the enemy's strengths to her own advantage.
i don't think anything compares to the sensation of dawning horror as u read through some rando's deeply mid rwby analysis and it slowly becomes clear that they've based all their argumentation on the fandom wiki, and possibly also tvtropes page, which they read and cite as canonical texts. the walls between the sane world and that unplumbed dimension of delirium are tenuously thin here...
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
unlike ozma (vaults), salem has never revealed any kind of innate power to access other realms in any capacity,
You know, I wonder where did Ozma get that power from. The gods/tech/exploiting natural resource/dumb luck?
Also, why doesn't Salem have a similar power in the years she lived, especially if the theory that Salem knows about the Blacksmith is true?
i tend to think that
the vaults were/are sustained by the relics inside them, like a keystone supporting an archway. we see with the haven vault that it collapses after the lamp is removed, leaving just the doorframe embedded in solid rock.
the reason the vaults can only be opened by a specific maiden is because the maidens are actually connected in some metaphysical way to the correlating relic. i think ozma made the maidens by sacrificing his divine blessings, which were creation/destruction/choice/knowledge, and the "seasons" thing is obfuscation.
salem could probably do the same, i.e. carving out a small pocket dimension and using it as a vault, if she had a magical artifact strong enough to use as an anchor or keystone; she just… doesn't have anything else worth guarding like that except for the relics, and she can't vault the relics unless she wants to maiden-lock them again.
just because cinder has never seen salem do something like this doesn't mean salem isn't actually capable of doing it, were she so inclined.
of course, i also--as i implied--don't think the relic vaults are actual portals to other realms, i think they're small boltholes ozma carved into the white liminal void in between realms. so salem also might not know about the white void, because it's the threshold between life and death and she's never crossed it.
and ozma's ability to do this might depend not on ancient magic (which i think salem may not have any more, being cursed, but can match with the power she gained from the pools) but on his reincarnation curse, which presumably connects him to that threshold in an unusual way. in that case, salem wouldn't be able to replicate the technique because she lacks the connection to the liminal non-realm.
actual travel from one realm to another entails passage through the liminal void. we see this with the staff's portals--there's a very clearly-depicted impression of movement through a formless white space between entering from remnant and emerging onto the bridges. similarly, a white flash after ruby enters the blacksmith's portal in 9.10. this doesn't happen when characters enter or leave the vaults, which is one of the reasons i think the vaults are different.
now, we know there is a door somewhere on remnant that is always open. i think it is almost certainly not a physical door with a fixed location, but instead a.. possibility that opens when it's needed and which a person must choose to take, since that seems to be how the tree works in general. i think salem would certainly have gone through this door if she found it, and in the event that she did it follows that she chose to come back, and thus stays in remnant because remnant is where she wants to be.
i won't be surprised if salem turns out to have the ability to traverse realms. she has the combined power of the primordial wellsprings of creation and destruction; i think she certainly might have the raw power to do it, so it's a question of whether she has the knowledge.
but i don't think she wants to leave remnant. i don't think she would choose to escape to another realm, if she had the opportunity. she might do so temporarily to seek knowledge or some other advantage, but--we've seen that salem is just not a person who runs away. she stood her ground against even the gods and fought back. i don't think the idea of escape would appeal to her unless she had literally NO other option.
What are your takes on the character parallels some people have noticed between Team RWBY and Team WTCH?
this isn't a topic on which i've Seen Posts so idk what arguments are being made, but i can say aside from cinder and yang obviously being narrative foils i don't… see it…
like, there are loose connections that can be drawn (weiss and watts are both, in a sense, disgraced atlesian elites; tyrian and blake are both faunus who are or were entangled in a cultlike abusive relationship; ruby and hazel are both defined to their core by the years-ago loss of a loved one) but not very substantive ones. i think there's an impulse in the fandom generally to presuppose that any given set of four characters must have direct 1:1 parallelism with team RWBY--i've seen people do this with STRQ too, like trying to figure out which character is the "weiss-equivalent" of STRQ etc--i don't find it especially persuasive.
i maintain that WTCH primarily embody the failures of the post-war world order--watts exposes the hubris and inhumanity of the atlesian military, tyrian was likely shattered into what he is now by the trauma of growing up as a faunus with a venomous stinger in mistral, cinder was enslaved as a child and the huntsman who should have helped her instead coerced her into enduring five more years of abuse until she snapped, hazel reifies the harm ozpin's conspiracy and child soldier fortresses does to ordinary people.
team RWBY are a counterpoint to that in that they're on a journey of discovering that this system is broken and unfair as they learn empathy and critical thinking skills that will allow them to Make Something Better, but i don't think reading direct 1:1 parallelism into it really... works...
aside from cinder and yang, who as i said are narrative foils.
i am inhabited by a cry @bestworstcase - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook