#obsequies

Occupations that center around art, entertainment, and mental health:

One of the things that makes RWBY’s inherent premise (a world where people are confined to heavily-fortified city-states because of monsters) so interesting is that it creates unique problems: How do you prevent waste and pollution buildup if your sedentary society can’t disperse across the globe? How are resources like food, medicine, and shelter allocated given their disproportionate scarcity to our world? Would these constraints push society toward a more socialist government where wealth distribution is fairer, in order to mitigate poverty, crime, and disease?

And, of course, if everyone’s basic needs were met, labor was automized through advanced technology, and people’s time was freed up to spend it on recreation, would a society like theirs inherently value art?

Hypothetically, that answer would be yes.

But, given that one of the Redux’s core themes is deconstructing capitalistic exploitation and its negative impacts, that sadly isn’t the case here.

Because, in an ideal version of the world that the Redux is set within, then there should logically be greater emphasis placed on careers based in the arts. Same goes for things like healthcare, public sanitation, and education, because all of these things aren’t just necessary for survival, but fundamental for enriching and improving one’s overall quality of life.

The way the kingdoms in the Redux are set up is very much a parallel for real-life countries, where arts are seen as a luxury often made inaccessible by paywalls. Similarly, socialized healthcare doesn’t exist, save for in a few outlying places that have semi-socialized or integrated healthcare (like Menagerie and a few cities in Vacuo). The blame can be partly attributed to a rise in klepto-plutocracy after the Great War ended, due to the intersection of racism, rapid technological acceleration post-Great War, capitalism, and the restructuring of the world’s governments.

The few exceptions made for healthcare are Huntsmen, council members, and the Atlesian military. Those are the three groups that have what basically counts as socialized healthcare, and it’s a direct and unforeseen consequence of the Great War.

All of this is to say that while people in this universe care about art, and understand the importance of good physical and mental health, those things aren’t always feasibly attainable. So, yes, therapists and artisans are hailed as pillars of society, but the reality is that their services and crafts aren’t available for everyone. That disparity in access both creates problems and exacerbates already-existing ones. And while sanitation workers are extremely important in this setting, the work itself is often seen as demeaning because of bourgeoisie propaganda. It also doesn’t help that those jobs are frequently given to Faunus, which results in sanitation workers being underpaid (it basically creates a positive feedback loop: sanitation work is menial > give those jobs to the Faunus > Faunus work those jobs, therefore sanitation work is menial).

The intersection of body disposal methods, and cultural values surrounding death:

Before I answer your question about graveyards theoretically being negativity hotspots, I first want to address two underlying assumptions here: that graveyards exist in this universe, and that death is perceived as something negative.

Now, seeing as I’m from the US, I’ll be using Western (as in, Judeo-Christian) cultural standards as my frame of reference, since that’s what’s most prevalent stateside (and what I grew up surrounded by, despite being a vocal atheist).

Life and death are traditionally regarded as a linear path—as in, you’re born, you exist, you die, and then your existence is allegedly transcended to an afterlife. It therefore makes sense for people to grieve and mourn, because from that perspective, anyone around you who dies is permanently gone, and whether or not you’re reunited is contingent on which part of the afterlife you’ve earned the right to reside in.

And, given the many tragic and painful ways a person can die—cancer, drowning, electrocution, starvation, hypothermia, gunshot, car crash, burns—it’s no wonder people view death as this terrible thing.

But—and I cannot stress this enough—when worldbuilding, you have to be careful to not default to your own cultural background and just slap it onto your story, without any alteration whatsoever. It’s perfectly fine to gravitate toward things that are familiar, but there are inherent pitfalls that need to be taken into consideration when doing so, and you have to be mindful of them.

Such is the case here, when talking about how a fictional society might perceive death, or how they might handle the disposal of human remains.

Remember how I said that RWBY’s cities are incredibly restricted in terms of dispersal and expansion, because of the pushback from the surrounding Grimm? That creates another dilemma in the form of land area usage. If there’s only so much space available for things like agriculture or housing, then a society has to choose what it’s willing to prioritize that space for. Cemeteries can and frequently do run into expansion problems because, over time, the bodies add up. It’s inevitable.

Now transpose that issue into RWBY’s setting, and you can see why a graveyard might not be the most viable option out there.

Of course, that’s operating under the assumption that a graveyard in their universe would look or function anything like the ones in ours. But what if they don’t? If burials are indeed a preferred form of body disposal, maybe it’s the norm for plots to be shared or reused. Maybe holes aren’t 6 feet deep, but rather consist of 20-foot-long vertical pits, and at every 5-foot interval, a body is added and then interred with soil (and then, 5 feet above them, someone else’s body is added). Or, once a body has decomposed, the bones are excavated and transferred to an ossuary. Maybe graveyards consist of selective burials, with only the skull being buried because it houses the brain (and is therefore the center of consciousness/personhood), while the rest of the body parts are trashed.

Maybe graveyards do exist, but they’re reserved for royalty or religious figures. Perhaps being buried is an honor granted only to a select few, based on merit or significant/noteworthy accomplishments.

Of course, who’s to say interring the dead necessarily has to be a good thing? Maybe the people of your fictional society see decay as a form of earthly damnation, and they therefore reserve the practice as a form of punishment for convicted and executed criminals. The rejection of burial could be entirely cultural rather than anything practical. In Ashley Cope’s Unsounded, the Ssaelit cremate the dead because decomposition is a humiliation created by the gods, and burning the bodies is the only way to circumvent it.

And that’s just ideas for burials. We haven’t even gotten into all of the methods of body disposal that are out there—cremation, immurement, cannibalism, sea burials, sky burials, composting, mummification.

In the Redux, for example, Menagerie’s population mainly practices burials at sea. The bodies of the deceased are affixed to an anchor, or a similarly-weighted object, and allowed to drop to the ocean floor from within either the neritic or the epipelagic zone (within a designated “drop site”). In the neritic zone, the bodies are meant to contribute to reefs by providing a substrate for coral attachment (the anchor), and food for marine organisms. Bodies dropped within the epipelagic zone are meant to emulate whalefalls, and provide nutrients for deep-dwelling organisms. From a pragmatic standpoint, sea burials were chosen because land in Menagerie is already scarce, making inhuming ill-advised. From a philosophical standpoint, sea burials are viewed as a way of nourishing the ocean and “returning the energy” to the ecosystem that sustains the people living there.

By contrast, Mistral regards sea burials (and noyades) as blasphemous, because their primary religion places creation with water. To allow the taint of rot to come into contact with water is to defile it. Therefore, their deceased are cremated, and their ashes traditionally scattered to the wind. As you can imagine, these cultural differences put the two countries at odds. In fact, there was a point in Mistrali history (within the last 60 years) where the council passed a law that made sea burials illegal under the guise of “environmental concerns.” Really, it was just a pretense for discriminating against any Faunus living in Mistral that adhered to the practice. The law was later repealed, but its existence was yet more fuel for the fire that eventually gave rise to some ugly international strife.

On the topic of negative emotions, it’s also worth pointing out that death (and any related funerary customs) might not always be culturally perceived as a somber thing. If, say, a culture believes in reincarnation, then death might not necessarily be seen as the end, but rather as a waypoint between their last life and the next. In which case, depending on the circumstances, the friends of the deceased might actually spend their time celebrating the life lived rather than mourning the life lost. It could be a tradition for those in attendance to place bets on where their departed friend might reincarnate in the world, or what they’ll reincarnate as. Perhaps there’s a cultural precedent not to openly grieve in public, because if they do, their tears might attract the attention of the spirit, and cause them to linger rather than move on to the next life.

Perhaps there’s a religion in which a god of death holds each soul in limbo for a brief period of time, so that they can purify the soul and strip them of all sin in preparation for their next life. In which case, it might be tradition for friends and family to participate in cleansing rituals, in which they pray to help their god expedite the purification process. The cleansing ritual might require a clear mind free of distraction, so it might be cultural stigma for anyone participating to show signs of distress or fear while doing so, in case they mess it up.

I hope you’ll forgive just how lengthy my reply’s been thus far, but I really wanted to stress all the ways that body disposal and perceptions of death could vary across cultures. In the Redux, graveyards are sort of nonexistent, so I needed to give some elaboration as to why they wouldn’t be negativity hotspots.

That being said, negativity hotspots do exist in the Redux, and they have very specific criteria for forming. Being a graveyard isn’t a prerequisite.

I’ve mentioned the term psychometric imprint in passing a few times (and its synonym, “locational memory”) but I haven’t gone fully in-depth on what they are, exactly, and how they emerge. A graveyard wouldn’t qualify because simply being a place culturally associated with death, or having human remains deposited there, isn’t enough to induce the phenomenon.

What creates a psychometric imprint is sudden, mass trauma experienced by the immediate living, which forms a metaphysical impression or “memory” upon the site where it occurred. A town swallowed up by an earthquake, a battlefield where many soldiers fell, a settlement consumed by the outbreak of disease, a village set to the torch by bandits, a community wiped out by Grimm in a single night—all of these scenarios can, and have, given rise to psychometric imprints. You’ve got places like Chamenos, Redsand Altar, Suicide Valley…

…and, of course, Mountain Glenn.

But that’s a post for another day.