Just A Wayfarer

I love the format of how the kids in Undertale each have unique items that connect to the theming of their soul and I really like imagining what other fun combinations you could make with this system. So, I wanted to design some new soul kids for fun with some new combinations!

Coco the lavender/light purple soul with a cap and a camera,

Lee the pink soul with a baseball helmet and a baseball bat,

Pea the mint(?? green? turqoise? seafoam?) soul with pink slippers and a teddy bear,

and Sunny the gold(?) soul with a pair of gardening gloves and a shovel.

I have NO idea what traits their souls are or how I'd connect them to their items but I'm open to ideas HAHA

Coco: Remembrance - A mix of Perseverance and Integrity, this trait is associated with the truth. But unlike Justice, which seeks truth as a means, Remembrance places value on the preservation of the truth as an end in and of itself; Many things are otherwise lost or distorted by time, after all.

Lee: Passion - A mix of Bravery and Perseverance, this trait is stubbornly proud and protective of what they consider important, whether that be an ideal or a pastime.

Pea: Thoughtfulness - A mix of Patience and Kindness. Not everyone runs on the same wavelength. Each individual has their own natures and sorrows. This trait is well aware of that, and does their best to be understanding to everyone.

she looks so wrong 😭

i also go back and forth because it’s weird and this is the only instance but on the other hand, this is a 3d model and color data is—afaik—stored on the faces and how likely is it, really, that a material failed to render in just this one scene ONLY for this specific set of polygons to make it look like her sclera were white instead of black. or else there’s something white clipping perfectly through her eyeballs for the whole shot. it just seems improbable? it’s not like every frame is colored manually. it’s also like that in the next shot too

<- very zoomed in

and the other thing is, there’s weird color stuff going on with ozma’s first reincarnation’s eyes in the lost fable too; they’re brown but there’s this sort of misty-green film that appears in them once they’re ruling their kingdom.

and the white sclera make her eyes look human, right. in a world where bright red eyes are within the spectrum of regular human eye colors (raven, emerald). from… a symbolic perspective it’s interesting to give salem human eyes specifically and only when she says “you said we needed to bring humanity together; in order to do that, we have to spread our word, and crush those who would deny it.” like. if eyes are windows to the soul then what does it mean for salem’s eyes to be wrong—not her own, not grimm but human—in this moment when she says that?

if nothing else, it does fit with reading the line as salem making a rhetorical point (this is what’s necessary, and if the end doesn’t justify the means, you must reconsider your end) rather than stating what she herself truly wants or feels, because. wrong eyes.

in which case it probably isn’t meant to be a diegetic change. the lost fable’s flashbacks are constructed and there are other instances where jinn adjusts details to make a point (like the wash of red light when salem talks to ozma outside her cabin).

salem deliberately traps thousands of people in mountain glenn with the intention of forcing their hand—she has a city’s worth of hostages under her thumb and she is looking at the vacuo coalition guarding the vault with the only weapon in the world that might be able to stop her like: your move.

things are so bad in vacuo that the coalition is barely treading water for months, and because everyone assumes salem just revels in the slaughter on her way to destroying the world, by the time things stabilize enough to think about a counteroffensive, nobody believes there might still be anyone left in vale to rescue

a brief, awkward stalemate ensues.

salem now has to communicate that she has been keeping thousands of people trapped under mountain glenn, alive, for months, and IN FOR A PENNY IN FOR A POUND this is a hostage negotiation now. hand over the sword and she’ll let them go free.

why the fuck should we believe you, answers the vacuo coalition.

salem:

salem: well, since you asked—

Notice the use of “when” instead of “if”

But look at what I just found:

salem has one more person working for her whose existence has been confirmed (seer call in v4 from beacon after establishing that all known agents are not there) but identity never revealed.

none of her other agents have had their identities obscured: even lionheart is revealed to be her spy upfront. the mystery surrounding the identity of this character is unique—ergo, narratively consequential.

“what happened to summer rose?” is a central narrative mystery which has thus far been partially answered in this order: a) she met salem, b) salem perhaps did something other than killing her, c) raven was involved and whatever happened turned her past admiration for summer into the scorn on display at haven.

the timeline on summer being made into a hound does not add up (the hound is “an experiment” and a novelty to both salem’s enemies and her inner circle now—salem met summer approx. fourteen years ago) but it’s deeply unlikely that the narrative would have flagged the possibility of fate-other-than-death if she were actually dead.

the conclusion that salem turned summer into a hound is offered by ruby, on minimal evidence; in v4, ruby hears tyrian waxing poetic about his “goddess” and with no hesitation goes “cinder,” which is to say ruby has a demonstrable tendency of jumping to conclusions based on incomplete information that are close but nevertheless very wrong.

so the narrative has given us these pieces:

summer met salem.

salem probably did not kill her.

summer can’t have been grimmed.

summer broke raven’s trust, badly.

salem has had an anonymous agent holding beacon, we have known this since v4, and we have yet to find out who this person is.

what happened to summer rose?

the anonymity of the person on the other end of that seer call is the keystone holding everything together. the facts pertaining to summer rose alone don’t necessarily add up to “turncoat,” only “not dead and not a hound,” but when taken into account with the open question of who salem has at beacon, then the simplest, most straightforward answer is that summer joined her.

Uhhh, I'll be the first to admit that I don't agree with most, if not all of your takes, but regardless I find your train of thought pretty interesting cause you do make a few points I agree with.

One thing I wanna ask is- why do you see Ozpin as someone who's a needlessly paranoid religious zealot that doesn't understand Salems point of view and is demonizing her for basically no reason?

I've probably bastardized your opinion somewhere in my attempt to paraphrase it, but I'm really curious since your opinion is pretty much the exact opposite of mine lol.

Feel free to ignore the tangent I'm gonna go on, I just want to share my opinions and debate a little (I need a little mental stimulation lol).

Personally, I honestly don't see Oz as a religious zealot, or as someone who follows the GoL unquestionably. His first reaction to the GoL offering him his task is to say- "No." Oz, thinking Salem is dead, does not care about what the GoL wants or needs from him. And when Oz takes his task (which imo he was manipulated into by the GoL) and reincarnates, he immediately ignores the GoL's incredibly vague warning and goes looking for Salem. Not only that, but when he's asked by Ruby if he has a plan to defeat Salem/unite humanity, he says he doesn't. Plus, he actively refers to his immortality as a curse, despite the GoL not framing it that way. Oz deems his task impossible, and has thus given up on it. Imho, none of this says that he unquestionably follows the Gods. Maybe he had more faith in the beginning, but by referring to his immortality a curse, he's basically insulting the GoL's task. Oz isn't as vindictive or as hateful towards them as Salem is (at least not yet, with v9 and all), but imo he's definitely not fond of them, or at least doesn't hold them in such high regard anymore. The only reason why he continued with his task in the first place is because he was already there with Salem. He doesn't exactly have a choice now, and now he's given up with it, just trying to keep the peace. And, if Jinn is as unreliable as a narrator as you say and the lost fable is from Oz's perspective, it paints the Brothers as petty and manipulative and changing their mind at the drop of a hat. The same is true in the fairytales (which I need to read in full, I currently only know a wiki summary so my knowledge is limited, I won't lie), which Ozpin helps create. I really don't think these things would exist if Oz worshipped them so thoroughly and unquestionably. It's very likely he sees them as petty and manipulative brothers whose fights result in needless death.

I'd talk more, but I don't want to make this ask too long 😅 I think your perspective is interesting, even though I don't agree with it. If/when you answer this, is it okay if I reblog so I can share my own perspective more? It's fine if not, I just like debating (in a friendly, respectful way ofc) different points like this. I really enjoy Oz as a character. He's far from perfect but I think he gets a bad rep, some of it just being different perspectives and others being completely unfair. No one can agree on him so I have fun reading lol

you’re fine—& if you want to rb with your own thoughts feel free.

to start with ozpin’s paranoia, aside from the obvious factor that he explicitly does not trust anyone in his own inner circle and justifies keeping secrets on the grounds that every ally is a betrayal waiting to happen: there is zero evidence that salem has been waging a sustained campaign against him ever since the collapse of the ozlem kingdom. 

in the lost fable, ozma sees two beowolves attacking his settlement and assumes that salem must have sent them: jinn implies that he sees her hand behind every grimm, hence “her presence was always felt.” 

but… not every grimm in the world is under salem’s control. we know this. the grimm that attack the argus express are not hers—they’re wild grimm drawn to the relic. salem had no knowledge of where the relic was or that oz had reincarnated until hazel told her. similarly, the leviathan that attacks argus later is attracted by cordovin (the WOR episode on grimm implies that grimm are drawn to violence and violent emotion specifically). she didn’t send the grimm of mountain glenn to vale; she sent cinder to kill a child on international television to incite mass hysteria that attracted grimm in huge numbers. and during her siege of atlas, it’s noted repeatedly that salem’s forces have not advanced, but wild stragglers are trickling into mantle, drawn by the fear in the crater.

so ozma, in assuming that salem is the mastermind orchestrating every grimm attack in the world, wildly overestimates her actual influence and blames her for the natural behavior of the grimm. 

at the same time, over this period of time between their kingdom collapsing and the beginning of the story, ozma has been phenomenally successful in hiding salem’s existence from the world and erasing her from history. there used to be legends about her everywhere—the witch in the woods who commanded dark powers among the beasts and monsters—and those are gone. before ruby revealed her existence to the world, no one had the slightest idea that she existed. 

the only way for ozma to bury her like that is if salem herself did not do anything to draw attention to herself and stayed very far away from civilization. ozma is just one person, and there are significant gaps in his presence and influence whenever he dies and reincarnates. there is no way he could have kept salem a secret if she periodically razed his cities to the ground or made overtures to groups like the white fang on a regular basis. what she’s done in the story isn’t a pattern of behavior: salem calls the fall of beacon her first move.

and then in v9? this happens:

SUMMER: You know how Ozpin gets. Mystery after mystery… TAIYANG: And when it turns out to be yet another run-of-the-mill patrol, it’ll be— BOTH: “I always preferred discretion!”

during summer’s time as a huntress, ozpin regularly sent her and her teammates on Urgent Top Secret Missions on short notice in the dead of night only for them to turn out to be… nothing. yet another run-of-the-mill patrol. ozpin was fighting a war that salem didn’t start to dignify with her participation until she met summer rose.

<- paranoid behavior.

but the real uh, meat of this is the zealotry.

to be clear, i think that before all the tragedy, both salem and ozma were religious and had faith in the brothers—i’ve written plenty about salem’s religiosity in the lost fable so i won’t belabor that point, but she believed in the gods until they shattered her faith by, you know, condemning her to eternal suffering because she worshipped both of them. and i see no reason to think that ozma didn’t have the same faith. the same flowers that salem brings as an offering to the god of light are hung up on the walls of their home; this was a religious household. 

so. when the god of light wakes him up, ozma believes what light tells him without question—by which i mean, he literally does not ask questions. light says that humankind will rise again, a mere fraction of what their predecessors were, and that they if they are not changed when the brothers return, they will be judged irredeemable and obliterated. ozma does not question the truth or rightness of this premise. he’s frightened and sorrowful, but he doesn’t question the god of light’s implication that humankind, as it is now, does not deserve to exist and needs redemption. 

his refusal is not predicated on a rejection of the mandate itself, and he’s very polite and respectful about it: “i’m sorry, but that world just isn’t as dear to me without her. if i may, i’d like to return to the afterlife to see salem.” ozma does not want to be the one to do this—but he accepts without question the idea that someone must, and he deliberately leaves the door open for the god of light to command him to do it (“if i may”). he’s a religious man; he’s prepared to do what his god asks of him, even as he hopes he that he won’t have to.

(the god of light absolutely manipulated him—and he used ozma’s faith, ozma’s belief in light’s benevolence and just nature, to do it.)

and once ozma reincarnates, he actually does heed the warning the god of light gave him: jinn notes that he travels for years, hearing rumors about “the witch” wherever he goes, before he gives in and decides that “he needed to see what she had become.” the god of light told him that the woman he loved was gone, and what was left of her would only bring him pain, and he believed that because, again, he had no reason not to…

…until he reunited with salem. that is when ozma began to experience doubts, because while salem had physically transformed, she was still herself. still the woman he loved. she still loved him. she hadn’t changed; they rebuilt her cottage together and lived happily. and that made him uncomfortable, because it cast doubt onto everything else the god of light had said to him. if light was wrong (or lying) about salem, what else did he lie about?

“though time passed and all seemed well, ozma’s conversation with the god of light still lingered in his mind. he had found happiness, but humanity seemed more divided than ever…”

the stakes could not be higher; the fate of the entire world is on ozma’s shoulders. in his heart of hearts, he knows salem, he wants to believe salem, but… if he trusts her and he’s wrong, the world will be condemned to annihilation. so he’s torn. he can’t stop worrying about it. how could the god of light be wrong? why would his god lie to him? but he’s happy with salem. but the world seems more divided than ever and it’s his responsibility to fix it. what’s the truth?

ozma is an intensely anxious person. he thinks fear is the one truly universal experience because he himself is afraid all the time. in the lost fable, he’s scared of the happiness he finds with salem because he cannot. stop. thinking. about the god of light saying “man will be found irredeemable and your world will be wiped from existence.” but he’s also too scared to tell salem the truth, or ask her for help, because the god of light also implicitly warned him that she was damned. he can’t bring himself to leave her, but he also can’t bring himself to believe her, and if she is damned then he wants to save her, too, not just the world.

so he carefully raises “humanity is divided” as a problem he would like to solve, without giving her any context, and when she answers “we can do that!” he decides to just… go along with her first suggestion in the hope that he can eventually ease her into accepting the rest of the divine mandate. because he loves her. because he’s terrified of losing her, and his faith in the god of light is in conflict with his love, and he tries desperately to square that circle by redeeming her.

which fails, because salem’s faith in the brothers shattered long ago and she sees them clearly as the monstrous tyrants they truly were—so she rejects the mandate entirely and asks ozma to reject it with her.

here is the part where my interpretation of ozma depends heavily on my interpretation of salem, because:

i do not think salem was proposing genocide; i think by “replace them” she meant “replace the gods who demand redemption,” in accordance with her longstanding ambition of overthrowing the brothers, and

i think ozma knew that.

frankly, in my opinion, this is the most charitable possible interpretation of what ozma does when salem holds out her hand because HE HESITATES. he looks at her hand, frowning, and then his eyes flick downward and to the side as his expression crumbles into indecision. ozma wants to take her hand. he wants to stay with her. so either salem said “let’s kill everyone!” and ozma a) seriously considered it for a moment and b) did not challenge that idea or demand an explanation from her, or… salem made her point clumsily but both she and ozma understood what she meant, and what she meant was “nothing the god of light told you matters anymore, the brothers aren’t here, why should we spend our lives trying to redeem these humans when we could make a paradise without the gods, like we planned?”

(since you’ve not read the fairytale anthology, i’ll note that “what they could never be” is a paraphrase of the closing lines of the shallow sea: “And the descendants of the Humans who turned away from our god’s great gift have always carried envy in their hearts. To this day, they resent us for reminding them of what they are not and what they never can be.” just as ozpin uses fairytales to make sense of his life and ease people into his conspiracy, i think salem quoted from this old oral tradition to express her opinion of the brothers; like the faunus in the story, she chose to leap into magical waters and was transformed into something new, and she believes that remnant has the potential to be the paradise the “old gods” failed to achieve. she’s implying that the brothers are envious of remnant and resent these humans—and her—for reminding them of their failures.) 

then… you know, they murder each other and kill their children and raze their own kingdom to the ground. and ozma wakes up behind somebody else’s eyes, again. he sacrificed everything and it shattered him and now he has nothing left except the mandate.

was it worth it?

the answer is no. the answer is that this world isn’t as dear to him without salem, and if the only way to save the world is to lose her, he can’t do it. he doesn’t want to. until the end is his song. “to live free or die, it’s all the same/the enemy was right, there’s no reclaiming/in waves of shame/we’re desperate to make amends/but through a simple soul we lie complacent”—like. he knows salem is a person. he knows she’s right about the brothers. he wants to make amends, but he doesn’t believe he can, because the man fucking despises himself. 

in his commentary on ‘the infinite man,’ ozpin describes the man—himself—as both a hero and a fool who made such grievous mistakes that to some he is a villain, and suggests that he may not be worthy of forgiveness. in ‘the girl in the tower,’ the character of ozma is simply called “the hero,” and in ozpin’s commentary he says that “if you look far enough ahead […] heroes may turn out to be villains.” he isn’t talking about salem. he’s talking about himself. he sees himself as the villain in her story, and taken as a whole ‘fairytales of remnant’ reads like a tortured apology to her more than anything; he closes with a story about humans breaking the sun and creating the moon, and in his commentary: “[people] not only replaced the sun, a celestial gift from the all-powerful god of light, but also improved upon it through their own ingenuity.”

he thinks it’s too late. if he could go back and do it again, he would take her hand, but the truth is that he didn’t, and he doesn’t believe she will ever forgive him. no second chances. nothing he can do to make amends. ozma’s mindset is that he made his choice and now he has to live with that forever.

and it’s unbearable. it’s torture. 

after everything that happened, ozma clings to zealotry as a coping mechanism. in his heart of hearts, he has no real commitment to the mandate: he’s distorted it to be about salem. ozma sought the relics so he could use them to “destroy salem.” jinn told him he couldn’t; he proceeded to devote countless lifetimes to fighting an (imaginary) war against salem. he has No Plan. beacon academy is modeled after her father’s castle and ozma put his office in her tower! in her prison!!

his inner circle is a cult dedicated to the god of light and he built the academies as fortresses to safeguard his reliquaries forever and ever while he fights to protect the people of remnant from enemies like “panic” and “division” whom he represents with her face, her name, and the way he truly feels about All Of This is trapped. it’s been so long that he’s convinced himself that his lies are true—that she’s an inhuman monster who craves only death and revels in destruction—but he built her tower and locked himself inside.

ozpin lies to everyone. even himself. especially himself. the intensity of his guilt and regret drove him to weave an elaborate fantasy casting salem as the villain and himself as the fool destined to be her enemy, and he clings to it desperately because he has to believe that. he has to believe that she lied to him, too. he has to believe she’s the one who manipulated him. if it isn’t all her fault, if she isn’t the Great Evil, then his own choices have no justification.

the lying becomes so habitual, so ingrained that he lies without even thinking. why didn’t he tell the kids that the lamp might attract grimm? when they demand an answer on the train, ozpin freezes. he doesn’t have a real answer. he just… withheld vital information because that’s what he always does. a reflex.

the zealotry is of a piece with the lying. he had faith in the god of light—and he still believes that the gods will condemn and destroy the world if they’re summoned, and i think he believes it’s futile to fight them and that if salem tries they’ll crush her again, so he truly does not want her to try and he’s not lying when he claims she’ll bring about the end, because he believes that’s the only possible outcome of rebellion—and he believes himself to be beyond forgiveness. this is all he has, and the only way he can cope with that is… the fairytales. palliative fantasy. a story about a monster and the man destined to fight her. lifetime after lifetime until the lies seemed almost true.

ozma’s trauma is religious in nature. he’s a religious man who lost his faith a long time ago because his god is using him to punish salem and he hates himself because he fell for it, and now he thinks it’s too late. she’ll never forgive him. he can’t see a way out, so he clings ever harder to the mandate because it’s all he has and it gives him a shred of purpose in being her fated enemy. all he wants, all he’s everwanted, is to be with her, and if he hadn’t believed in his god when all of this began, they would have lived happily in her cottage forever.

all of which is to say, yeah, ozma does not hold the gods in high regard. his obedience does not come from reverence or love—he’s fucking terrified of them. the main difference between him and salem in their view of the gods is that she believes they can be resisted and beaten, and he does not. zealotry doesn’t require that he think the god of light is good or just, only that he obey. he’s still under light’s thumb even as it kills him inside, and he can’t escape until he stops lying to himself about what salem is.

bc she’s… not a monster. she didn’t lie to him, and she certainly didn’t manipulate by not… being able to read his mind when he hid things from her. she made it clear from the start that she wanted to replace the brothers and create a new, better world without them, and in the present all of her rage is directed at his deception and his cowardice in obeying the gods. what he did is not unforgivable. he can make amends, if he finds the courage to try. there is a door he can open to leave the tower. the first step is letting himself believe it’s possible. 

Which led me thinking, Yang has a lot of parallels with the villains, notably, Adam, Cinder, and Salem. What do you think is the ideal route of Yang during volume 4?

well that’s the thing about salem, isn’t it? she wasn’t anyone special. her father was a lord in a world ruled by kings and queens, and he abused and isolated her so viciously that whatever notional privilege she might have had by virtue of noble birth was stripped away from her; after she and ozma murdered her father and escaped, she was a commoner. the raw magical power that sets her apart on remnant was commonplace then. there was nothing extraordinary about her at all.

but she was brave. passionate. determined. angry. she walked into the domain of gods and refused to flinch.

who does that sound like?

anyway, yang’s core allusion is goldilocks. too hot, too cold, too hard, too soft, just right. balance. compromise. scathing eyes ask that we be symmetrical, one-sided and easily processed. rwby is a story about complexity and nuance. every dichotomy is false. yang is a good person—good to the bone—but she’s also strong-willed and not inclined to be forgiving. who would she have become if, say, ruby died on one of those occasions they were left home alone as children? what would it have done to her if she watched adam kill blake during the battle for beacon?

it took millions and millions of years for salem to break. she tried so hard not to become a monster. cinder bowed her head and endured years of torture because rhodes told her it was the right thing to do. before adam lost his way, he fought to protect others; the first time he killed, it was in defense of his leader.

the difference isn’t as simple as a choice to be good or bad. yang has always had ruby and now she has blake and weiss, too, and—bluntly, her trauma is of a lesser order of magnitude than her villainous foils. yang has endured a lot of suffering—parental abandonment, childhood neglect, the vytal tournament and the battle that followed, losing her arm, being left behind by her sister and friends—but she wasn’t enslaved and tortured as a child. she isn’t the sole survivor of a genocide. she did not spend millions of years alone.

if you put yang in salem’s or cinder’s or adam’s shoes, would she have turned out different than they did? would she make better choices? would she still be a good person?

would she even know how?

and if you put salem or cinder or adam in her shoes, would it make a difference? if salem wasn’t alone, if cinder had even the smallest taste of genuine love, if sienna had seen adam’s increasing anger for what it was years earlier—would they still have become what they are now?

yang’s gone through her own personal hell and back, but she wasn’t alone. she had role models and a loving sister and a father who provided for them and at least made some effort to be involved—he read bedtime stories and trained yang, tai is far from the worst parent in the story. it was bad. it could have been so much worse. how much of a difference did it make for yang that she had these crumbs of support?

as the blacksmith says, even the smallest act kindness can change a life. no one is an island. everyone is responsible for their own choices, but sometimes our choices are limited by forces beyond our control. sometimes there is no right thing to do.

everyone has breaking points.

everyone has a limit.

yang… in addition to having all these villainous character foils, is also the heroic character most inclined to ask why. why did raven leave her? why did ozpin lie? why did he make the branwen twins into birds? why did raven sell them out to salem? why is she the spring maiden? why did blake run away? why did ozpin think it was okay to hide so much from everyone? why shouldn’t she and blake think critically and follow their consciences instead of blindly obeying orders? why is salem waging this war? why why why

yang isn’t the most empathetic character—she can get too tangled up in her own feelings to see clearly where other people are coming from. she isn’t the most compassionate, either—she can, in fact, be rather ruthless. but yang does care, a lot, about why people make the choices they do.

and i think that is because yang knows her own darkness. she sees herself clearly; she knows she’s capable of cruelty, of being vindictive, of hurting people in anger. the reason yang isn’t an angry person is she works fucking hard not to be. i think yang is self-aware of these similarities between herself and adam, or raven, and maybe even cinder and salem too, and the question of why she didn’t end up like them bothers her. what made her different? what saved her? if she could have been like them, then doesn’t that mean they could have been like her? why aren’t they? what made the difference?

so she keeps asking. why. why.

weiss helped her understand why blake ran, but yang has never gotten a satisfying explanation from anyone else. the resolution of ruby’s arc in v9 leaves her asking why summer chose to leave; the natural trajectory is toward answers. why did summer leave, and why didn’t she come back? why did raven keep her secrets? why has salem gone to war? why did ozpin hide so much? it’s all tangled together. it all needs to be answered together. i think, if the olive branch comes from the heroes, it’ll be yang who plants the seed—what if we just ask salem what she wants? it’s not like we have any better ideas. and if salem’s the one to make the first move, it wouldn’t surprise me for yang to be the most open to hearing her side of the story.

when i say a character is anti-theme what i mean is they either don’t know or don’t believe the narrative themes. this is a broad / high-level way of thinking about character arcs in terms of a character’s relation to theme. for example, a lot of fantasy protagonists have character arcs about learning and embracing the story’s themes; think “hero discovers the true power of friendship” type of stories. 

one of the characteristics that makes rwby so interesting is that this theme/anti-theme paradigm is decoupled from narrative role, most notably in the case of salem and ozpin. 

salem understands the narrative themes. in fact, she articulates them at the beginning of the story with such precision that fans regularly describe what rwby is thematically about by quoting or paraphrasing her: “even the smallest spark of hope is enough to ignite change,”  “there will be no victory in strength,” and “your faith in mankind was not misplaced: when banded together, unified by a common enemy, they are a noticeable threat.” salem also describes mankind as “strong, wise, and resourceful” and praises humanity’s “passion, resourcefulness, and ingenuity.” these are ideas that salem truly believes. 

meanwhile ozpin professes to have faith in mankind, but in reality he is beholden to a god who explicitly views modern humans as inferior shadows of their predecessors and has commanded ozma to “redeem” them before the gods lest they be found unworthy of existence and destroyed. ozpin himself is also paranoid, deceitful, manipulative, and distrustful, because he has no real faith in people. 

and, if you listen to what salem actually says to and about him (including in ‘sacrifice’ and ‘divide’) it’s obvious that most of her fury is motivated by this: salem believes that humanity is worthy and that the divine mandate should be refused, and ozma’s dedication to his task of “redeeming” humanity enrages her. she’s angry both for herself and on humanity’s behalf.

her belief in the themes is also evident in her strategy and the scope of her war: she is very narrowly focused on the huntsmen academies and seems to be making an effort to minimize collateral damage, i.e. pulling grimm out of vale quickly while holding beacon, the surgical strike planned on haven, not attacking mantle (and having the hound send wild grimm out of the city), leaving menagerie in peace. salem is both desperate and ruthless, but her faith in remnant’s ability to survive and rebuild after she knocks the academies down is ironclad.

so, with that laid out, before discussing gillian i want to first elaborate on jaune being anti-theme salem. 

salem’s own story is defined by striving for freedom and justice: she escapes her tyrannical father’s tower; challenges the brothers, who are unjust; leads a rebellion; possibly brings humankind back and may have created the faunus through her transformation in the pool of grimm; rejects the divine mandate; and now she seeks to topple the huntsmen academies and create a ‘new world’ free from the divine threat of annihilation. 

connected to that, one of the central thematic conceits of her character is the power that storytellers wield over their audiences: ozpin explicitly uses fairytales as propaganda to control the narrative about her, framing her as an inhuman monster who cannot be trusted and desires only annihilation. fairytalesare not real, and the truth is hard to come by. salem is well aware of this and remarks upon it in her V1 soliloquy (“legends, stories scattered through time” that obscure “the forgotten past”). she does not, particularly, seem to like fairytales. 

as with hope and faith in mankind, this is another case of salem knowing the theme versus ozma believing the anti-theme. rwby values fairytales because they can express emotional truths, but the whole truth—the reality—is always more complex, and fairytales can also be weaponized as propaganda or tools of condemnation. it is important to understand that fairytales aren’t real, and treating real life like a fairytale only leads to pain. 

yes? okay.

jaune and pyrrha reflect salem and ozma; she’s the renowned celebrity athlete with a heart of gold, he’s the self-described “damsel in distress” and “lovable idiot stuck in the tree.” she helps him down from the tree and trains him to a level of competence, and like the original ozma, she dies tragically young. simple. 

but,

unlike salem, jaune is not motivated by a longing for freedom or anger at injustice. he comes from a line of soldiers and he wants to prove to his doubtful family that he’s good enough to uphold that legacy. he doesn’t want to be the damsel in distress; he wants to be the hero. he doesn’t want to be saved; he wants to be the one saving others. so he fraudulently enrolls in beacon academy and pretends to be something he isn’t. the tree is his tower—“i’m tired of being the lovable idiot stuck in the tree while his friends fight for their lives,” he says, pointing wildly at beacon tower—but the thing is, he put himself there. during his character arc in V1, jaune is trapped in a cage of his own making, one he built out of childish fantasies about being the fairytale hero. 

further, if we compare jaune’s reason for wanting to be a huntsman against the rest of the kids:

ruby wants to help people and feel closer to her mother by being like the heroes in the stories summer read to her when she was small

weiss wants to atone for what her father has done in her family’s name and make things right

blake wants to make a stand against corruption and inequality for her people, even though she’s not sure how to fix it

yang craves adventure and self-discovery, and she wants to pursue it in a manner that will make the world a better place

pyrrha believes it’s her destiny to be a huntress in order to protect the world

nora doesn’t have a clear idea of what she wants, but she’s an intensely compassionate person who, like blake, stands up to injustice and advocates for people in need. 

ren wants to become the huntsman his village needed, someone who could have saved his parents and his home, and he’s following his father’s final advice to take action

jaune wants to prove to his family that he is good enough to become a warrior like his forefathers. 

jaune is the odd one out. he’s fiercely loyal to and protective of his friends, but he’s the only one who came to beacon for purely self-centered reasons. his arc in V1 is about jaune learning not to be craven and self-serving, to shelve his pride, let go of his cowardice, and do the right thing. 

all of this is anti-theme—or at least, the absence of belief in the themes. 

and that comes to a head when he’s stranded in the ever after in V9. see, salem’s belief in the themes—in the power of hope, the worth of mankind, and the importance of truth—is not just an abstraction. these beliefs are what drives her. for salem, emotionally, hope and righteous anger are one and the same. when she loses her hope, she remembers her anger; anger motivates her to act, and so reignites her hope. she has never given up because she has taken every horrific hope-shattering experience as a reason to get back up and keep fighting. every cruelty the gods inflicted upon her strengthened her conviction that resistance to their design was worthwhile. 

so

what happens if salem lacks that conviction?

salem believes heart and soul that change is possible and that these humans—this world—are better off without the brothers. in the present, she is hopeless and wrathful, and her desperation drives her to catastrophic extremes, but she is not stagnating: she’s fighting to change the world, freeing herself from exile and everyone else from the threat of annihilation. 

in contrast, jaune does not really believe in anything. not in the way salem does—he believes in his friends and he believes in doing his job as a huntsmen, sure. but where is his faith? where, after he’s stranded in the ever after, is his reason to act? after the moonfall, salem curses the gods and wanders the face of remnant alone until she reaches the pool of grimm, then throws herself into the darkness with the hope that it will change something; rather than fall into despair, she holds onto her conviction and searches for a way to keep moving forward. 

jaune… sits on a beach for years, passively waiting for something to happen. when alyx and lewis find him, he tries to be the storybook hero and his obsession with making sure that the story happens as it’s “supposed” to freaks alyx out so much that she poisons him. then he lives with the paper pleasers for years, playing pretend as their hero while he runs in circles. he’s trapped. he has no real purpose or direction. the tree is, once again, his tower—that tree is death! it erases you!—and just as before, it’s a tower of his own making. 

tellingly, his stagnation in the ever after transforms him into a resemblance of ozpin: paranoid, distrustful, manipulative, controlling of the very people to whom he has appointed himself a guardian. he finds himself in a world completely unfamiliar to him, convinces himself that it’s cursed and bad because it isn’t like the world he remembers, and rots. 

so, he’s anti-theme salem: a fractal repetition of her unmoored from her unshakable belief in the themes, who stagnates and is corrupted like ozpin because of his lack of faith. 

the natural converse of anti-theme salem is an ozma who does believe in the themes, because that’s the reversal of ozma’s relation to the theme.

presuming that i am generally anticipating gillian’s presence and role in the vacuo arc correctly, there are a few solid reasons to think that her thematic ties to ozma will mirror jaune’s to salem.

first, as the summer maiden—the maiden of destruction—her “moral” (per the fairytale) is “don’t view the world at a distance; take an active part in it,” and destruction itself has been consistently portrayed as a catalyst and agent of change. ozpin fears destruction and views it as the enemy of life itself—anti-theme. being the summer maiden, gillian would embody the thematic refutation to that idea.

second, the crown repeats the ozlem kingdom: both authoritarian cults founded and led by a pair of leaders claiming divine right to rule (ozlem on the strength of their magic, the asturias twins through their claim of royal blood), and both collapse when ozma / gillian are forced to choose between love and their cause. but they choose in opposite directions; ozma sacrifices salem and their daughters for the sake of the divine mandate, but gillian turns against jax at the last minute to save  his life (and her own) once it’s clear that he intends to go down fighting. unlike ozma, when the chips were down, gillian sacrificed her cause to save her brother.

third, the whole backstory between gillian and jax—as i’ve pointed out before—revolves around gillian’s absolute rejection of the idea that her brother’s frailty made him inferior. everyone else, even jax himself, sees jax as a parasitic weakling, pitiable at best and repellant at worst, but gillian is glad to share her aura with him and not only treats him like her equal but comfortably follows his lead. 

gillian’s semblance makes her terrifically powerful, with or without the maiden powers, and she was raised in a culture that worships power and abhors “weakness”—and yet. she mainly uses her power to support her brother and at one point during the climactic battle she even reflects that the power she grants her forces also leads them to be overconfident and reckless, to their detriment. her attitude toward power is very reminiscent of salem’s—and quite unlike ozma, who seeks out the relics in the hope of using them to overpower salem and goes to extreme lengths to try to keep the maidens and their power under his control. 

so while she clearly repeats ozma, gillian does not put her faith in power and chooses to follow her heart rather than let herself and her brother die for a doomed cause, and she might be the maiden who embodies destruction as a force of active change. all of this puts her thematically opposite to ozma in much the same way that jaune is thematically opposite to salem. 

and,