#savage ruby

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.