Red like Roses fills my dreams...

Ok.

So.

Music in RWBY is something that I don't think I need to explain. Nearly everyone I've met in this fandom loves the music in this show, and I agree! Jeff, Casey, Alex, and everyone else have made some really amazing stuff.

But there's one part of the music I don't really see anyone talk about: the score. The lyricized songs in the soundtrack get the most attention, and understandably so. But the score, the(usually) more orchestral songs that don't have a singer to go with them don't get talked about nearly as much. There's so many cool details hidden in this show's score, and it's honestly a shame.

Now I'm gonna preface the actually important bit of this by saying that I am *very* new to this show. I only started watching a few months after V8 ended, so I haven't had time to actually listen to *every single piece of music* that's come out of this show. I also know absolutely nothing about how to actually *make* music, just that the funny notes give me the happy chemical. But one thing I do know a bit about, from younger me being obsessed with Undertale, is leitmotifs!

So after I had binged through the entire series, I did what I'm pretty sure everyone did: I started listening to the music. And while I was binging through the soundtrack at a possibly unhealthy pace, I stumbled on a Youtuber by the name of Changyuraptor, whose entire channel is dedicated to all the leitmotifs used in the show. They even have a google doc that not only lists all of them, but even keeps track of *when* they play in each episode!

Now Penny is quite possibly my favorite character in the show, and so naturally one the first one of their videos I watched was of Penny's leitmotif, which anyone who's listened to Friend for any extended period of time is familiar with, I'm sure.

And then I saw THIS video. And immediately red flags started going off in my head. Because this clearly was a song that was very clearly associated with Penny, but it was *different* from Penny's leitmotif. Now my very first reaction(mainly because the first scene Changyuraptor chose to show the motif playing in was the Fireflies scene from Chibi, but also that nearly every other scene they showed was one where both Ruby and Penny were together) was that it was a Nuts and Dolts leitmotif and I freaked out a bit, but after a while I calmed down and started disregarding that thought, thinking instead that perhaps this was perhaps just Penny's "old" leitmotif, and they just gave her a new one for her revival.

But then, after a few weeks, and seeing other people list reasons why they thought NnD might actually be canon, those thoughts started to come back and chew away at my sanity. And after a few more weeks I was back to thinking about it actually being a NnD motif, but I also didn't want to jump the gun and say it was. And, because this mystery song played during Penny's reintroduction in V7 before we heard her actual motif for the first time, there was still a part of me that was sceptical. So I decided to do some research.

I decided that I was gonna go back and listen to the score of some of scenes where Penny wasn't with Ruby in Volumes 1-3, and see if I could find this "old" leitmotif in any of them. Now I *could* have gone over *every single scene she's in*, but I instead just chose to go over what I felt were the most emotional scenes where Penny was involved, both because I didn't want to spend too much of my time researching how of two fictional characters are gay for each other, and also because, if this was actually her "old" leitmotif, then it would play during the scenes where she is being important.

So I decided on three scenes in particular. Her introduction in The Stray, her part in the fight against Roman and The White Fang in Black and White, and her fight with Pyrrha in PvP. I decided not to do any of her scenes in V2, since Changyuraptor covered pretty much all the important ones(and also because Penny was pretty much always with Ruby in V2).

In Penny's introduction, we hear... Nothing, actually. Because there's literally no music when we meet Penny for the first time, which is odd since this is literally our first time meeting her.

In the fight with Roman in Black and White, we also don't seem to hear anything matching that song(unless I just didn't catch it, of course), which is also odd since almost always in these fight scenes you'll hear the leitmotif of whatever character is the focus at that time.

In PvP, we also do not hear anything that seems to match with that "old" motif, which is odd both for the above reason of "fight scene", but also because this is where Penny literally DIES! If any leitmotif is meant to represent a particular character, it's practically a REQUIREMENT that that motif should be used when that character meets their end!

So now I feel pretty confident in saying that this is, at the very least, a "Penny and Ruby" leitmotif. It plays in nearly every scene where these two are together, and having some sort of meaningful interaction with each other, including the pretty much explicitly romantic Fireflies scene in RWBY Chibi.

And this is REALLY SIGNIFICANT because, from my admittedly brief time with this show and it's score, it is EXTREMELY RARE for two characters in this show to have a wholly unique leitmotif SPECIFICALLY for their relationship. It's quite common for two characters to *share* a leitmotif (both Blake and Adam's motifs are based off From Shadows), or to have leitmotifs that sound very similar to one another (Raven's leitmotif is nearly identical to Yang's, and Pietro's has the exact same notes as Penny's, just rearranged slightly), but to have a completely separate motif is much less common.

AND, not only is it rare for this to happen, it's also(as far as I know) ONLY been done for characters who either canonically have(or had) romantic feelings for each other, or are family. And on top of that, they actually don't get used very often! These are usually just feel less like a regular part of the score, and more like a reference to the more popular lyrical songs by Jeff and Casey about those relationships (songs like Boop, or All That Matters, for example, have been used so little that Changyuraptor's videos about them are less than two minutes long).

There are really only two other instances(That I know of) where two characters have a unique leitmotif specifically for their relationship that gets used regularly throughout the show. One of which being Blacksun, which, even though they decided to just be friends in the end, was still absolutely a romantic pairing for a while...

And Arkos. The very first canonically confirmed romance we ever saw in this show. A romance that is still important to the story of RWBY, despite the fact that one of them's been dead for years.