History Fanfic / InYourWildestDreams

* AndIMustScream: As seen in a nightmare, [[spoiler:Tyrian suffered constant abuse as a child for his unusual but benign mental condition, culminating in a forced lobotomy which seems to have turned him into the man he is today. It seems the sweet, scared boy is still in there somewhere in his subconscious, but the physical and psychological damage has caused his mind to fragment

** Tyrian's parents are revealed to have been ''gruesomely'' abusive. [[spoiler:Tyrian's mother was more well-meaning than his father, but they both excessively and counter-productively drugged and locked up their [[UsedToBeASweetKid once-benign little boy]] for years in an effort to "cure" his prosopagnosia and attention-deficit neurology. Evventually, Tyrian's father subjected him to a back-street forced lobotomy which permanently ruined Tyrian's mind and caused his present day [[AxCrazy homicidal brand of insanity]]]].

** [[TheBully Cardin]]'s dream [[ImpliedTrope implies]] that he used to be a fairly gentle kid [[spoiler:before the constant bullying by his peers in his pre-teen years made him snap and decide to become exactly what they all assumed him to be]].
** Tyrian. [[spoiler:He used to be a gentle neurodivergent kid who liked coloring and liked his mother, but after suffering years of constant abuse, mistreatment and neglect, a botched back-street lobotomy locked him inside his own mind and turned him into the AxCrazy {{serial killer}} he is today]].

** Hazel's reasons for blaming Ozpin for Gretchen's death by Grimm and siding with Salem against him are fleshed out, and the siblings' relationship and [[AdaptationalBackstoryChange backstory]] is changed, as Creator/CoeurAlAran has long been critical of Hazel's canon motivations as "non-sensical" in their execution. [[spoiler:Instead of being Hazel's younger twin, Gretchen is Hazel's older sibling and parental substitute, who went above and beyond to maintain custody of him and avoid being separated from him by the adoption circuit after their parents died, despite the financial straits. The "training accident" which killed Gretchen in canon wasn't really a training accident at all, but a secret mission from Ozpin's inner circle which Ozpin covered up as a training accident, and she died alone without her student teammates or any back-up (which is against normal huntress-in-training protocol); Hazel was aware of this from the get-go, but found himself helpless to get the truth of why Ozpin had done this or to expose Ozpin, due to the latter's connections and high standing. In this version, it was this that Salem and her faction took advantage of to turn a grieving Hazel over to their side, rather than Salem driving him to nihilism]].

** Whereas the canon version of Salem showed no immediate remorse when she killed her and Ozma's daughters in the crossfire of their falling out, and any remorse she had afterwards is at best only hinted at; Ozpin states in this fic that Salem broke down as soon as she realized she'd killed them and that this was the final straw which drove her into madness and made her the genocidal monster that she is in the present.

** As per usual for Creator/CoeurAlAran[='s=] works, Salem is treated more sympathetically in her StartOfDarkness than her canon self. It's pointed out that she was never explicitly forbade from going to the God of Darkness to get her wish granted after the God of Light turned her down, the event which led Light to curse her with immortality. Ozma's canon reasons for falling out with Salem -- she'd gained an appetite for total warfare and was plotting a FinalSolution of all magic-less humans -- are retconned, and her and Ozma's falling out was a slow affair which took centuries to boil over and which Ozma is portrayed as sharing fault for. Finally, unlike her canon self, whose possible remorse for OffingTheOffspring when they were caught in the crossfire of her lashing out at Ozma is ''at best'' only hinted at; in this fic, Salem explicitly broke down the moment she noticed what she'd done, and Ozpin believes that the trauma completely broke her and caused her present day self's evil.

** The God of Light is hit with this as well. In the canon, he ''explicitly'' told Salem to let Ozma rest after his death. In this fic, he simply tells Salem he won't resurrect Ozma; she didn't realize that this meant he was ordering her to drop her quest to revive Ozma. Therefore, his subsequent anger at Salem and his undoing Ozma's resurrection by his brother seems more petty.

** Cardin's father Alabaster was previously characterized in ''Fanfic/{{Relic of the Future}}'' as a racist braggart. In this fic, Alabaster is portrayed in Cardin's nightmare as a much more complex man. Jaune discovers that Alabaster is an unpunished war criminal (a Faunus teacher in the nightmare accuses Alabaster of murdering his brother), and he is fully aware why the local Faunus absolutely despise him and his family. Alabaster was haunted by what he'd seen and done during the Faunus Wars, and he explicitly wanted Cardin to grow up to be a better man than himself. Alabaster enrolled Cardin in a school whose student body was mostly Faunus in hopes that it would make his son an accepting, tolerant person. Unfortunately, this backfired when the students [[SinsofOurFathers bullied and ostracized Cardin for his father's actions]].

* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: [[spoiler:While watching Professor Port's dream in Chapter 37, Jaune wishes he could understand how his stories are supposed to relate to killing Grimm. He even notes that Ren once spent hours analyzing Port's stories in search of some kind of hidden meaning behind them. By the end of the dream, he learns that rather than secretly explaining how to kill Grimm, the stories are traumatic anecdotes about his failed missions. He's forbidden by the Council to properly prepare students for the horrifying reality of being a huntsman, because telling people that they're more likely to perform a MercyKill on a dying child than heroically save a village would hurt recruitment rates. So he tells grandiose versions of these stories with happy endings in hopes that, eventually, a student will be able to figure out the {{Hard Truth Aesop}}s behind his boring stories ''before'' graduating. The following day, Jaune is finally able to decode another story about Port valiantly protecting a "puppy" from a Grimm horde; in reality, the "puppy" was a child and the last survivor of a village, but despite Port's best efforts to protect him, the child got scared, ran away, and was killed by the Grimm. When class ends and Jaune sees Professor Port sitting on his chair staring at the ceiling, he realizes that Ren was right that their teacher's stories had hidden meanings - and he wishes he never knew about them.]]

* HeelRealization: After his time in Weiss' dream, Jaune realizes just how stressed his constant asking her out on a date is, due to a combination of him not taking "no" for an answer, Weiss not enjoying having to break someone's heart, and how it makes ''her'' look like the bad guy when he's the one provoking these rejections. This revelation fills Jaune with shame and remorse.

* SkewedPriorities: After Ironwood's second attempt to arrest Jaune goes pear-shaped thanks to his teammates' intervention, Ozpin [[spoiler:furiously exiles James and his forces from Beacon until further notice, saying that it's time he go into Vale to search for the missing active terrorist instead of pick a fight with one of the lowest performing first years on campus]].

** Chapter 47: [[spoiler:Nora now has blond hair and is possibly related to Jaune as his daughter.]]

--> '''Glynda''': Please stop. You sound awful.\\

--> ''"He still didn't know what to do about that since, good reasons or not, Cardin was still a racist bully. He was just a racist bully with a slightly more sympathetic story behind it.''"

--> '''Ren''': [Pyrrha's] right, Jaune. You're a wreck.\\

* TookALevelInJerkass: Ozpin, after [[spoiler:Jaune de-ages him back into his original body, during its prime in young adulthood no less. One of the first things he does when alerting Jaune about this is to happily make the teenager have a panic attack. After establishing his new persona, the new combat teacher Oswald, he continues to behave like a sardonic prick who happily works every student to the brink of exhaustion, with the only silver lining for both staff and faculty being that Glynda's semblance is still powerful enough to keep him line. The only person who remotely likes the "new" teacher is Pyrrha, who relishes being so thoroughly outmatched for once.]]

* SecretKeeper: Jaune resolves to keep what deeply personal information he learns about those whose dreams he inadvertently invades to himself as much as possible, a sentiment echoed by Oobleck who also requests Jaune to minimize the details of the dreams in their already private sessions as he has no desire to learn about his students' personal secrets as well.
* SecretSecretKeeper: Oobleck reveals to Ironwood that [[spoiler:he figured out Penny was a robot the first time she answered a question in one of his classes. He specifically reveals this when Ironwood tries to have Jaune arrested so as to call Ironwood out for bringing Penny onto campus without warning them]].

* YourMindMakesItReal: Jaune's semblance quickly evolves to have this effect. [[spoiler:While in a dream of Amber's killer, Jaune conjures a weapon of pure Aura and hurls it towards the killer before they wake up. Cinder jolts awake with a real injury corresponding to the one in the dream, and she realizes that Jaune needs to be taken care of. Later on, when a vision of Cinder slashes Jaune's neck during one of Neo's nightmares, he wakes up with a real injury as well. On the flipside, healing Nora in one of her nightmares heals a real injury she got earlier in the week from sparring and later manages to even regrow Ironwood's arm]].