Team RWBY and the Very Long Day
Or maybe... not as long as you’d expect?
When the team reaches Atlas Academy and are brought on a tour, they’re dead tired. Now, as someone who’s gone on a number of college tours myself, I totally can relate. And plus, the team has had a really long day -- Volume 6 Chapter 10 through Volume 7 Chapter 2 have all been the same day.
However, it feels a lot longer for us than it should, since we saw it over a nine-month period, and they only experienced it in a day. But how long was that day specifically?
There’s a couple factors we need to consider: time zones, hour of sunset, flight hours, and actual in-show events. By evaluating this, we will determine: How long of a day were the past 6 chapters of RWBY? Is their exhaustion justified by canon events?
Spoilers, math, and lots of pointless reading below.
I) Time Zone
According to this map (the fifth image) from the second “World of Remnant” short, we get a pretty good approximation of the location of Atlas. Argus is on the U-shaped peninsula a third of the way from Mistral to Atlas. Ideally, time zones would work in 24 hour-wide increments, so assuming there is NOT a huge Pacific-like ocean around Remnant’s back half, there is approximately a two-hour time difference between Argus and Atlas. This means the sun sets on Argus earlier than Atlas -- however, Atlas is further North, so sunset may be earlier for them relative to someone at a lower latitude in their timezone. Additionally, it also means the team may experience around two hours of jet lag upon arrival.
II) Sunset
When the gang arrives in Atlas, it is night time. In Volume 6 Chapter 7, they arrive at Argus in mid-afternoon. Because the next episode’s scenes with Cordovin at the base and Maria in the garden do not have the same warm lighting, we can infer that those took place the next day, sometime during the middle of the day. They receive news that Oscar is missing and begin their search -- however, unless they were searching for him like in Volume 1 Chapter 16 (if you recall, that was 12 hours), it’s likely they were out of the house for no more than 4 hours. From the end of Volume 6 Chapter 8 to the end of Volume 6 Chapter 9 might have been from, call it, 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM -- meaning sunset was sometime within those hours. It is wintertime in the Northern hemisphere of Remnant (quick summary, it’s been about a year since the end of Volume 3 Chapter 12), so assuming they don’t have daylight savings time, this is a pretty reasonable estimate for when the sun would set in a city whose latitude is comparable to that of Paris. If we take a quick look back at Atlas, it is MUCH farther North than Argus, and is pretty much in the Arctic. If we compare map distances, Atlas might as well be in Iceland, as Paris and Reykjavik are 1,396 air miles away from each other. In December in Iceland, the sun sets at around 3:00 to 4:00 PM. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable that people would still be up and about when it appears to be night time in Atlas.
III) Flight Hours
What this means is that the team, in order to leave Argus during daytime (earlier than 5:30 PM) and to arrive in Atlas during nighttime (later than 4:00 PM) when there is a two-hour time difference between them, it works out to assume that the minimum time a flight on an Atlesian dropship would take from Argus to Atlas would be 4 hours. Even more generous would be to allow them 5 hours, considering the pace of the vehicle.
IV) Events
I’d like to start with the evidence we see in Atlas and work backwards to make a fair assumption about when they arrive in Atlas. The amount of people on the streets and the fact that Dr. Polendina’s pharmacy is open makes me want to believe it’s before 6:00 PM. The Faunus miners we see on the passing vehicle makes me wonder if this is accurate, however, because I would assume the miners would work more unreasonable hours than that. I will chalk this up to be a case of world details being more important to show punctually than consistently. Anyways, if we say it’s 5:30 PM in Atlas when they arrive, then it’s likely 3:30 PM in Argus when they depart (accounting for a 4 hour flight and 2 hour time zone difference.)
Now, for the real numbers:
Ruby’s role in the heist takes place more or less in real time, while Blake and Yang’s excursion with Adam is punctuated by breaks of which we cannot know the duration. Therefore, knowing that Blake and Yang rejoin the group in Volume 6 Chapter 13, I will only recount the “cliff-side” events, as it were, to calculate the duration of the heist itself.
Volume 6 Chapter 10
We have no idea when the heist begins. Cordovin, being a military officer, would probably want Weiss to arrive at a sharp hour, so let’s call that hour “X:00″ o’clock. Based off of our previous calculations, the end of the heist must occur at around 3:30, so depending on their length, this hour could be 3:00 PM. (Spoiler: it totally will be.)
The episode begins on the Rooster Teeth website at 2:08 minutes, and from there it pretty much goes in real time until 4:50, which is the moment when Weiss loses scroll signal with Ruby. Ruby loses signal with Weiss at 6:02, so we can deduce that those next 1:12 minutes of Ruby’s timeline are occurring simultaneously with what we see of Weiss. From the beginning of the heist to when Ruby loses signal is 2:42 minutes in real time (how efficient of Weiss!). From 6:02 to 11:02 is the next realtime sequence, at which point we cut to Blake and Adam, but again, we’ll be ignoring them for now. Now, the heist has been in progress for 7:42 minutes; it is X:07.
Volume 6 Chapter 11
The episode officially begins at 2:08 again. The first scene of them talking lasts until 4:01, when it cuts away from them planning to attack. Let’s be generous and give them 30 unspoken seconds where some offscreen planning occurs, making that first sequence about 2:37 minutes. Then, the sequence continues from 4:01 to 9:44 (no, I’m not counting slow motion because that’s dumb). Then, we cut away again. This episode’s total real-time stacks up to 8:20 minutes. Therefore, the heist has now been occurring for 16:02 minutes, so it’s about X:16 o’clock.
Volume 6 Chapter 12
This episode actually starts at 1:57 -- wow, wild. It runs continuously to 7:25 (no, cutting back and forth between dialogue doesn’t fucking count), making this section 5:28 minutes. We cut away to Bees, but we return to Cordovin at 11:42, pretty much exactly where it left off, and that carries on to the end of the episode at 12:54. The total of the episode comes out to be 6:40 minutes, since the Bees got a lot of murder screentime. We are also now 22:42 minutes into the heist, and it is X:22 o’clock.
Volume 6 Chapter 13
Cinder and Neo take up the first few minutes of screentime, so the episode starts for our main heroes at 3:33. It kind of carries over from the previous episode, but there’s enough fighters in the air that I’ll give them 90 seconds of cushion time to compensate for realism. I will also add 30 seconds between when Weiss says they destroyed the mech to when they’re all in the airship taking flight at 4:21. Since they like skipping time so much for dramatic effect, I’ll add ANOTHER 30 seconds between when Ruby realizes she has to face it alone and they hatch their second plan at 8:39. I’m going to stop the clock at 9:55 because Ruby yells for Jinn and stops time in-universe until her Silver Eyes moment at 11:16, which, while awesome, is the first event that occurs once time speeds back up to normal. So that whole first section, including padding, was 8:52 minutes. Then, from Silver Eyes to the end of this time section when they time skip to their arrival at 13:14 is 1:58. Finally, the episode cuts to credits at 16:51, the last line being “welcome home,” making the total for the episode 14:27.
I’d like to note that the episode was 10:50 minutes before they timeskipped to their arrival, so it was 33:32 minutes into the heist and X:33 when they left for Atlas. We said earlier it would be best if they left at around 3:30 PM, and what do you know: the number works out! We can therefore pretty confidently say the heist began at 3:00 PM, which will be important later.
Volume 7 Chapter 1
That’s right folks, we’re not done! Now in Atlas, it is 5:33 PM, just like we predicted it would be. The line “welcome home” is said at 0:38, where I’ll be starting the clock for this episode, but I’ll add the 3:37 of dialogue that occurred the previous episode. They cut away to some pretty Atlas shots while they descend into the city, so I’ll provide 60 seconds of offscreen time. From there, we stay in real time until they put the ship down, which I’ll again provide another 60 seconds for. After their encounter with the MAGA (Make Atlas Great Again, obvs) hecklers, let’s say they walk for another 60 seconds before reaching Piedro’s pharmacy. Continuing to the end of the episode, it’s pretty continuous, except for the extra 90 seconds I’ll provide for them being loaded into the airship. The realtime total for this episode is 18:24 minutes, so it’s been 4 hours and 51:56 minutes since they began the heist, and it’s now 5:51 PM in Atlas.
Volume 7 Chapter 2
The episode starts at 1:46. Let’s be generous and say they’ve been in the air for 2 minutes so far. The episode plays out pretty much in real time until 15:18 where we enter Penny’s montage, so I’ll add about 3 more minutes of travel time to and from Ironwood’s office within Atlas Academy and account the Ironqrow moment for the time it took offscreen for the rest of the group to start Penny’s tour. Then, because I’ve been on many a college tour myself, I expect they’ll be walking for about 10 minutes before they start to feel like they need to collapse. So, in total, this episode takes 29:02 minutes of real time, bringing the amount of time since the start of the heist to 5 hours and 20:58 minutes, making it now approximately 6:21 PM.
In that time, various members of the team have singlehandedly overwhelmed two Argus soldiers, taken control of an airship, fought brutally with their archnemesis, battled a giant mech, flown into the barrel of a cannon, murdered a man, entered a maelstrom of Grimm, obliterated a behemoth of a Final Boss, taken a 4 hour flight, fought an onslaught of new Grimm, reunited with former besties, sisters, and colleagues alike, been arrested, and worst of all gone on a college campus tour.
V) Conclusions
I don’t think the team is suffering from that much jetlag, but I’d definitely be exhausted with that much happening even if it was only 8:21 PM in “my time.” (International travel takes a lot out of you, man.) Additionally, they probably got up earlier in the day (maybe around 9:00 AM, Argus time, if it was a lazy morning), so at this point, they’ve been awake for 11 hours, assuming no one took a nap on the airship.
However, I was surprised to find that even though all 6 of these episodes happened in one day, the actual heist part took only 33 minutes, and their first day in Atlas was about 47 minutes, maybe actually longer. That means that a LOT of the bullshit I listed above was packed into 33 minutes, and the remaining time stretched out over a leisurely hour or so. This post also was made on 11/09, so it might even happen that the next episode CONTINUES this exhausting day, in which case, expect an update.
TLDR: In conclusion, the team deserves to be tired AF because of all the crazy stuff that’s happened to them today. However, they were not awake for an exceptionally long time, nor did the events in Argus actually take up much of their day, much to my surprise.
What was the point of this again?
