#badass ruby

10º Day: Pick

[ENGLISH]

Choose your Ruby.

[PORTUGUÊS]

So a lot of people like to freak out about the all the potential angst that could come out of ‘Eyepatch Ruby’, ie: Ruby loses an eye (likely to Cinder) and it’s all very dramatic/traumatic and is probably the moment where Ruby has her long-brewing mental and emotional breakdown. Basically, lots of that good ‘rip your heart out and show it to you’ emotional angst we’ve come to expect from RT.

But consider this: That’s not (exactly) what happens.

The thing is, we’ve already gotten an arc wherein a Main Character suffers a horrific, debilitating injury that permanently scars her both physically and mentally, leaving her an emotionally broken wreck. And likewise, followed (and are still following) that character on her long road of recovery. With all the focus RT has put into Yang’s recovery from loosing her arm, I think it’s strange to think that they would simply do the exact same thing again with Ruby.

So, what if that isn’t what happens? What if loosing her eye doesn’t break Ruby?

Now of course I don’t mean something cheap like Ruby just brushes off this horrible injury like nothing happened. Rather, Ruby handles losing her eye in a different way than Yang, and in turn serves as a contrast to what we saw with Yang.

Simply put, what if Ruby just does not break? Sure, she goes through the initial pain and shock, and the lose of her eye is shown to have a clear effect on her. But whereas Yang was completely emotionally and mentally destroyed by what happened to her during the fall of Beacon, which is the reaction we would reasonably expect from any normal person who went through something that horrific, Ruby simply… isn’t. She copes. She recovers. She gets a nifty cybernetic eyepatch from Pietro. And she gets right back into the fight.

I think this would be a perfect way to display just how truly indomitable Ruby’s spirit is. Show her go through the sort of experience that would break just about anyone and leave them permanently scarred and diminished. And show that this is just not enough to break this girl.

Ever since I saw the first fanart depictions of Ruby with an eyepatch back in 2013/2014 (that was back when we were still on Volume 1 BTW. This theory’s been around for a while), I’ve always loved that image. Not just because Ruby had an eyepatch and that looked cool, but because so many of those pieces of fanart also showed a Ruby who still had that bright, friendly, optimistic smile.

You see, a character having an eyepatch is almost always a visual shorthand for ‘this person has seen some serious shit’. People with eyepatches are almost ALWAYS the gruff, dower, edgy and cynical types. And how often have we seen that an eyepatch-wearing gruff badass used to be all bright and optimistic, but then the bad shit happened, they got their eyepatch and now they ‘see the world how it really is’ and ‘aren’t that naïve idiot anymore’?

So think about what it says to have a heroine with an eyepatch, that universal symbol of ‘I’ve been through some bad shit’, who still has a bright, optimistic, friendly, even goofy or adorkable smile. It means she has faced down the kind of horrible events that have broken so many before her.

13º Day: Roof

[ENGLISH]

Dude, this month is so hard. But anyway, here is another art of our dear Little Red Riding Hood.

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Ruby on the other hand is a precious, adorkable cinnamon roll..

“They see you as small and helpless. They see you as just a child.”

“Surprised when they find out that a Warrior will soon run wild!”

So, after rewatching the series, does anyone else get the sense that Ruby has been… holding back all this time?

Not in the standard shounen hero ‘I’ve got this one super-special-awesome technique/style/move/toaster I’ve never had the confidence to use until my friends are really in trouble’ kind of holding back, and more the ‘I am fully capable of utterly slaughtering my enemies but I choose not to because I’m not some murderous psychopath.’

And what makes Ruby special, is that we’ve kind of already seen Ruby ‘not hold back’ against her enemies. Just look at any time she’s fighting Grimm. When she’s not fighting people, Ruby is an absolute savage. Whereas her teammates just punch, slash or stab Grimm to death, Ruby is basically a walking Grimm blender. Go back to anytime Ruby is fighting Grimm and she is constantly hacking off tails, limbs, heads and bisecting Grimm left and right.

Now imagine her doing the same thing to people.

Of course, there’s always the ‘Aura’ excuse. That every non-monster in the series has their own magic energy shield and that’s why our heroines don’t have a body-count in the dozens by the start of Volume 3. And even then, obviously all of the good guys in this show are usually pulling their punches to some degree or another. It’s not like anyone from RWBY, JNPR or their friends and allies are usually looking to flat-out kill their enemies, though that’s not to say they won’t go for a kill if some whiny edgelord asshole with a murder-boner can’t take a hint and leave them alone.

But with Ruby in particular, the holding back feels more… deliberate. Admittedly, I’ve yet to go back through all her fights with a fine-tooth comb, but it seems like whenever she fights people, Ruby pointedly avoids using the more slashing/stabbing/human-blender fighting style she employs against the Grimm. For a good example, see her first fight against Roman’s mooks in Episode 1, where she’s mostly just smacking them around with the back-end of Crescent Rose rather than using the blade.

It seems that Ruby, more so than any of her friends, has been deliberately modifying her fighting style to avoid outright killing the people she fights. And really, this mentality makes total sense for Ruby. After all, she signed up to slay monsters, not people.

But that just begs the question; If Ruby has been making a very conscious decision to not turn any fight against non-Grimm into a bloodbath, what happens if/when she opts to just cut loose, very literally?

The thing is, we’ve already seen hints that Ruby is not at all squeamish about inflicting some real brutality on an enemy if push comes to shove. Like the time she flat out cut off a man’s limb.

And in Volume 6, we see Ruby pushed more and more to a point where she’s looking like she’s just about done messing around and putting up with the bullshit around her. Remember the time where she opened up the fight against Cordovin by trying to headshot her?

And now that we’re going into Volume 7, it and the Atlas arc in general are almost certain to push Ruby psychologically and emotionally more than anything before. Between helping Weiss deal with her asshole father and brother, the general lack of empathy and basic human decency found among the Atlas elite, whatever political squabbles Ironwood is going to be putting the heroes through, and no doubt having to face some very heavy stuff relating to Penny, I’m almost certain that the Atlas arc will see Ruby pushed to her breaking point.