Big Boop!

When Yang talks about their childhood, the period after Summer’s disappearance, she talks about how Ruby was too young to talk in Volume 5 and how Ruby was torn up, but that she thinks that Ruby was too young to understand what was going on in Volume 2.

The lyrics of Red Like Roses Part 2 seem to directly contradict this idea.

“I wasn’t dreaming when they told me you were gone, I was wide awake and feeling that they had to be wrong.”

Amongst other lyrics, that is such a vivid description of a memory for a toddler. Even if Ruby doesn’t remember Summer all that much, she definitely knows the devastation Summer’s absence left on the people around her who loved her and on herself.

She grows up with some resentment towards Summer while mourning her as her family thinks Ruby just didn’t really understand what was going on, but the idea of talking about that resentment when everyone talks about how great Summer was makes Ruby bite her tongue.

Throw in the theory of Summer being one of Salem’s lieutenants in Vale and you’ve got a whole recipe for a painful disaster between Ruby and Summer.

I think of little Ruby at first being a mischievous little thing like Yang, but trying to be the cheerful and easygoing kid that’s just so easy to look after so she can cheer her family up after Summer’s disappearance. That change morphing over time into her being avoidant about her own problems and having difficulty with properly comforting others when they’re upset (side eyes Oscar and Ruby’s talk in the dojo in Volume 5).