#this show.

ok so a montage that makes me giggle and twirl my hair and then curbstomp my heart within 30 min. i see the pattern now. Won't help me one lick, but i see it

the most unrealistic thing about this show is the number of stanley cups being won all over the place

everybody going crazy popping bottles and shane is clinging to his slippery iphone3 like his life depends on it for a soggy one word text from his boy

"wait do i have all the kids?" felt.

i see you jacob tierney spouting directions from behind every ridiculous commercial funded camera

NO, NO you do not keep your shoes on in a russian household, ilya, baby, what are you doing

the 'lazy' comment... i think i heard all the slavs worldwide sigh in synchronized sympathy

he's calling his dad 'papa' now...............

microbiotic who? (takes a happy sip of ginger ale)

the LET ME TAKE CARE OF YOU of it all. here wear my shirt let me cook for you got your favourite boring drink cuddle up to me let me play with your hair you're staying i am actively keeping you

...followed by the Fumble of olympic proportions. these gays.

shane crashing out so hard he's stumbled into yoda speak

'i keep a lot of things private' cool cool cool. cooool.

my boy ilya going through lesson 53 of his Vulnerability Will Cost Ya masterclass

hayden and sveta (refuse to call her svetlana) raking in bff points one scene at a time, please be good friends to these silly stupid gays they really really need it

i really hoped Sophie Nélisse would be playing a québecoise but still 🫶 heeeey giiiirl 🫶

YES. they're humping the ice, my favourite

harrison browne look so tiny next to marlee it's adorable

........t.A.T.u. In the club. Are You Fucking Kidding Me. had to pause and process and perhaps squeal aggressively and astral visit 12 year-old-me real quick, and no imma have to do a whole separate post about this

but. but. russian version? 🥺 gimme one russian song before this is over, ☝️ one, cmon, just one

most polite boi at the bar, this ex-bartender wants to pat him on the head.

oh. [Hold My Vodka Mode activated]

our gorgeous boy Miles instant-clocking both those twinks despite their hetero-performative bullshit but they snubbing his advances left and right, heads full, gay angst only

psychological warfare on the dancefloor

shane hyping himself to go up the stairs we saw him tumble up in a tangle with ilya like a pair of excited tongue-wrestling puppies, now lookin like he's headed for Worst Hockey Player Awards

'these are objectively fantastic buttcheeks, i know this, but lemme imagine another pair real quick, and they may be wet' oh honey.

icons of some stranger things CBCs/designs I own!! 2 made by my epic friend bvgbytez on insta and 3rd (which murrays is made by MY AWESOME FRIEND @serpenndragon 💖

Og images under cut!

the brothers were made to cultivate the ever after. first, the blacksmith says, they were given the power to destroy, so as to clear the wilderness; and what we’re shown is baby dark eating the overgrowth while baby light kicks a tree to shake down some acorns into a basket.

first observation: baby light doesn’t really participate in the destructive stage. his brother eats weeds, he weaves a basket.

second observation: the destructive act is eating. baby light let his brother do all the hard work, which in practice meant his brother ate and he did not. so from a symbolic/thematic standpoint not partaking in the destruction is fundamentally an act of self-denial—it is the choice to go hungry—it’s asceticism.

third observation: the thorny vines baby dark has been eating are still visible behind baby light and appear to be encroaching on the tree; baby light ignores them entirely. given the overt allusion to the elm and the vine in V8 and the interpersonal dynamic between the brothers in 6.3 it’s hard not to draw a connection with the imagery here to the fir and the bramble, the oak and the reed, and similar tales on the arrogant tree/wise bramble theme. ‘the oak and the reed’ in particular is salient to the brothers: it’s a cautionary fable about how things that cannot bend, break.

carrying on:

after clearing the wilderness, the brothers were given “creativity, to imagine what, and who, could replace the wilderness.” this sequence begins with baby light planting an acorn, which sprouts and blooms into a butterfly. “the brothers built homes for them,” the blacksmith says, and the butterfly’s wings become a mirror: on the right, baby light raises houses; and on the left, baby dark grazes on the weeds. they are facing each other and moving toward the center—reflections of each other.

first observation: there’s a common fantasy trope that ‘evil’ (or darkness or what have you) cannot create, only corrupt, and what rwby is doing with the brothers is a deliberate inversion of that. baby light doesn’t create the butterfly; he plants a seed he was able to harvest only because of his brother having cleared most of the overgrowth, and waits anxiously to see what it will become. then that butterfly becomes the frame for the mirrored images of baby dark eating while his brother builds homes. the portrayal of these different acts as reflections implies that they’re actually the same in some way, and as noted the destructive act is the act of nourishing oneself. so the implication being made here is that baby light cannot create without the nourishment baby dark provides. that it is baby dark who harvests the raw materials and shares the fuel baby light needs to do his work. in rwby’s schema, darkness is not limited to mere corruption, it is what makes creation possible.

second observation: on baby light’s side of the mirror, after he builds a house, we see a tove sprout and blossom from the ground behind him. i do find it sort of interesting that we get this visual contrast between baby light’s houses, which he sort of conjures into being out of thin air, and the organic growth of the tove—and then it’s juxtaposed with baby dark eating the weeds out of an orchard. there’s a degree of this apparent during the destruction, too (grazing/basket). baby light seems to hold himself a little apart from the world around him. he doesn’t eat, he harvests. he doesn’t garden, he constructs. baby dark engages with his world by eating it—digesting it—it’s more primal. he’s part of the ecosystem. baby light shapes the ecosystem but doesn’t partake in it, which is probably the root of his misconception of his role and the nature of balance; he’s trying to garden without ever having tasted fruit.

and skipping ahead just a tad:

eventually the brothers grew curious and decided to test the limits of what they could do by creating new beings on their own, separate from the tree, and this is where it gets really interesting because they’re depicted as breathing life into their creations, and dark breathes fire but light breathes smoke.

first observation: dark is the greater power. without fire, there is no smoke, and smoke is merely particulate released by burning matter. putting this in terms of hellenistic philosophy and the classical elements, refer to the thematic symmetry between rwby and fragments of heraclitus’ writings on the soul, flux, and the harmony of opposites; heraclitus considered fire to be arche (“this world […] ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures” B30) and in what survives of his writings spoke very little of air, although in B76 he describes it as being born from the “death of fire” and this seems at least notionally congruent with the later aristotelean identification of air with smoke. (notionally as in ‘good enough for the elastic way rwby vamps on this stuff’)

extrapolation: this comes right on the heels of our being shown that baby dark ate and baby light did not, and implicitly that baby dark ate to sustain or fuel baby light’s creativity. dark spent their childhood immersed in their world—living in it and with it—while light observed and cultivated it. and upon reaching young adulthood, dark breathes fire, but light only breathes smoke. the math seems… pretty straightforward; if dark is (or was) the greater power it is because his integration with the ever after enriched him, and likewise light’s choice to hold himself at a remove diminished him.

second observation: light makes the cat by breathing life into an ember he plucks from dark’s campfire; whether dark played a direct role and if so to what degree is somewhat unclear, although the cat’s earlier use of “maker” in the singular would suggest that he did not. in contrast, the jabberwalker is unambiguously a joint creation, begun by dark and finished by light, which makes him the prototypal human. the cat is the product of light’s curiosity (thus, hunger for knowledge); jabber, the product of the brothers’ choice to make something together.

third observation: the brothers had the cat take over one portion of their role (“finding the broken parts of the ever after”) and made jabber to take over another (“finish what the cat started.”) the intention was for the cat to tag things for the jabberwalker to eat. note the tove comforted by the cat is then attacked by the jabberwalker and presumably eaten.

extrapolation: destruction as practiced by dark was neither violent nor annihilative; he merely grazed on thorny brambles that would otherwise grow out of control, and this in turn sustained light’s creativity. almost certainly the brothers expected the jabberwalker’s destruction to be the same—they meant to make a gardener, not an executioner. humans prove that the brothers can make destructive beings that are not annihilative, so it follows that jabber’s annihilative nature was not inevitable. it’s the consequence of a mistake, something that could have been avoided. so: how and why did this happen?

fourth observation: after he kills the toves, jabber breaks a wooden structure—presumably a house?—with a swipe of his claws. this same motion and manner of destruction is then repeated by light, killing jabber with a swiping blow. this is suggestive, to say the least.

hypothesis: the bifurcation of their roles (dark eating/light making) and light’s perception of himself as the custodian of a planned balance rather than one part of an organic ecosystem was the problem. dark intimately understands the destructive side of the cycle; he knows that destruction feeds creation, because he has been feeding his brother all along. (see also, “you may bask in the powers of creation, but you do not own them” and his portrayal in ‘the two brothers’ as a god of cyclical destruction-and-creation. by no means is dark precious about this false dichotomy; and in fact in both the lost fable and the two brothers, dark is explicitly upset when light tries to shove him into the ‘destructive, hateful malice’ box.)

in contrast, we’ve seen that light did not participate in clearing the wilderness even in the very beginning; and if the cat assumed his role in the same way jabber was meant to take over dark’s, that would suggest the closest light ever came to engaging in destruction was pointing his brother at the weeds.

how well did he really understand his brother’s role, when he breathed life into the creature dark designed to replace himself? dark ate the wild and dangerous things and digested them and, through light, gave them new life; inside jabber there’s nothing but void. jabber eats the broken things and… the end. the circle breaks. jabber is destruction as imagined by a god whose hatred of the very concept has blinded him to his fundamental need for it.

fifth observation: oh. oh i see.

THAT’S FINE.

“this woman came to you only after i denied her pleas; pleas that would have disrupted the balance that you and i created, together.”/“then it seems i owe you an apology; allow me to correct my mistake.”

“one brother believed they had disrupted the balance, while the other refused to condemn their creations for their mistakes.”

fuck.

extrapolation: dark didn’t revoke his favor to salem in a fit of pique; he realized that they were having the exact same conflict they’d had over jabber in the exact same way and i think he also recognized that if he didn’t capitulate, they would tear remnant apart exactly like they almost tore the ever after apart. inasmuch as dark ‘won’ that fight, he won it because the tree implicitly sided with him on the matter of jabber getting to live and then kicked both of them out until such time as they achieved a stable equilibrium. the whole point of remnant is to solve the jabber argument. one of them—it probably doesn’t matter which, but my money’s on light for reasons i will lay out in a moment—proposed permadeath as a compromise.

making death fundamentally permanent does not in any way address the underlying problem, but it sidesteps the conflict by flattening the distinction between ‘ascension’ and ‘death.’ the jabber argument hinged on light’s conviction that they had disrupted the natural balance (ascension) by creating death. dark did not disagree with this premise—he agreed that they made a mistake with jabber—his position was that the consequences for that mistake shouldn’t fall on jabber’s shoulders, because jabber was innocent. reading between the lines of the blacksmith’s philosophical conclusion a little, it seems likely to me that dark wanted to let the disruption run its course and settle into a new equilibrium (“the patience to see things through to the end”).

i think—and this is why my money’s on the permadeath compromise being light’s idea—the nuance of dark’s position was probably lost on light, because light isn’t familiar or comfortable with destruction; he fears it and disdains it as the enemy of creation rather than the force which inspires it. in trying to make sense of his brother’s acceptance of jabber i think he probably would have come to the conclusion that dark wanted things to die and enjoyed jabber’s brutality; and if he viewed the conflict as being, in essence, about order vs malice, then building a new system from scratch with death as a keystone is a fairly reasonable compromise. the problem is that dark does not actually have any investment in making things die, and in fact made not condemning jabber to death his hill to die on, and very much seems to have chafed at being perceived this way.

add in however many thousands of years of humans extolling light while hating and fearing dark. then introduce a grieving young woman who pours out her sorrows to him and asks him to reunite her with her dead lover—in one stroke answering his loneliness and providing a chance for him to gently reopen the jabber argument with an act of kindness. if they’ve been at an impasse all this time because light thinks dark insisted on keeping jabber around because he liked jabber’s brutality, then perhaps dark can get the ball rolling again by bringing this anguished woman’s pure-hearted noble hero of a lover back from the dead, no strings attached. he could not have arranged a more perfect demonstration of his willingness to embrace life and creation if he’d tried.

except light isn’t all that fussed about death vs rebirth either, he cares about preserving the original balance unchanged forever and thus makes no distinction between introducing death into a system of eternal rebirth and introducing rebirth into a system of permanent death. both are disruptive and disruption is not allowed.

the instant light accuses salem of “com[ing] here with the aim to control you” and “disrupt[ing] the balance we created,” dark backs the fuck off and lowers his head—he doesn’t look at salem, although the angle of the shot when she looks up at him kind of makes it seem that way; she and ozma are pretty well off to his left and he looks straight down, and while his eye sockets are set into the sides of his skull he’s animated as if he has binocular vision throughout the scene—and then. “i owe you an apology. allow me to correct my mistake.”

he returns ozma to death to appease his brother, but he refutes light’s accusation of salem by taking the blame for the disruption fully onto himself, and he spares salem.

“the other refused to condemn their creation for their mistakes.”

sixth observation: dark’s capitulation is not enough. light decides (unilaterally—dark is entirely cut out of the frame) to punish salem, continuing the blow-by-blow repetition of the conflict dark tried to avert:

and then it cuts to black. salem wakes up falling from the sky into the fountain of life and creation—she sinks, and drowns—and wakes up hitting the surface of the water again, now a reflecting pool only an inch or two deep. something weird happened here—the sequence is deliberately and conspicuously disjointed and salem’s fall into the fountain is the only time in nine volumes rwby has used this technique, so it’s meant to really stand out and that is probably because it’s important.

seventh observation: we do not see jabber get put back together again after light bites him. the blacksmith says her piece about balance, and from there the tale jumps forward to the brothers standing on the threshold, leaving the ever after because it “could no longer bear [their] experiments.” dark is standing in almost the exact same posture as in the scene where he and light explain salem’s immortality—the sole difference is that in 9.10 he has his elbows tucked in.

eighth observation: i’m going insane. i give up.