Fanfic / "Or Something" Series

The 'Or Something' series are RWBY fanfics written by College Fool, all Alternate Universe Fics focusing on Jaune.

The basic premise of all of the stories is that a small change in Jaune's life brings about great changes, both in his life and the main characters of RWBY. The genre of the stories vary from Comedy to Drama.

• A Crossdresser or Something is a short comedic story based off the idea that Jaune is secretly a girl and has her friends' response to this discovery. Status: Complete
• A Farmer Or Something is a look at where Jaune never tries to go to Beacon and lives a normal life as a farmer. Without Jaune, Pyrrha's life ends up much darker than usual. Status: Complete
• A Common Criminal Or Something explores the possibility of Jaune being desperate enough to turn to a life of crime because he failed to fake his way into Beacon. His life as a criminal leads him to working for the people he fights in canon while trying to keep his morals. Status: Complete
• A Househusband Macho or Something shows Jaune's life if he became a father with the children of one of the women from Team RWBY and JNPR. Please note that this is not a harem, each chapter shows his life as a stay-at-home dad with the mother of his children changing. Status: Complete
• An Affair or Something tells about what would happen if Jaune, unhappy in his marriage to a Huntress, sought comfort in the arms of another. Status: Complete
• Dead Man Walking (Or Something) starts off with Jaune's death. Kind of. His semblance keeps his spirit around, using his body as a puppet. Contains plenty of morbid humor. Status: Dead
• The Writer Games ^note Unofficialy a part of the series, since the first chapter on contains the (Or Something) at the end of the title.: An anthology collaboration between College Fool and Coeur Al'Aran. The concept for the anthology started with the authors playing a game of producing stories under pressure in 15 minutes based on a prompt from each other (with a few guest authors), so the stories aren’t "stories" per se, but more of a summary of how such stories would go, with the authors giving their reviews on each other’s work and reflections on their own work in the author notes.
• The Knight of Lancaster or Something: A story of how Ruby's love for knightly imagery and Jaune's knightly motif lead to something more. This is not a "story" per se, but more of a summary of how such a story would go, similar to his past works Renegade Reinterpretations or Mass Effect 2 AU Lanius. It is complete, and at 84 chapters, is the longest of the "series" so far.
• A Hunter or Something: Jaune is an animal hunter who teams up with Ren to help rescue a missing student. This story is plotted by College Fool and written by Coeur Al'Aran. Status: On hiatus

This page needs some Troper Love.

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These fics contain examples of:

General

• Third-Act Misunderstanding: Like the romance flicks this trope is based off of, many of Coeur's romance-driven fics follow what he calls a "Beat System^note 1) The Hook; 2) The Meeting; 3) Conflict Point 1; 4) Raising the Stakes; 5) Conflict Point 2; 6) The Black Moment; 7) Resolution", with the relationship and plot building up until it hits Beat 6, "The Black Moment", which is then resolved (one way or another) in the following beat.

A Crossdresser

• All Just a Dream: In A Crossdresser, Jaune's reveal that he is actually a girl is just a dream of Yang's.
• Gender Flip: The idea of A Crossdresser is that Jaune is secretly a girl, except it was just Yang's dream.

A Common Criminal

• Becoming the Mask: Jaune, unable to deal with the guilt of what has happened during his time as a criminal, develops another personality: Just Jaune.
• Beneath the Mask: We get to see Jaune Arc's inner thoughts, and not just the persona (known as Just Jaune) he presents to others until the mask becomes its own identity.
• Redemption Equals Death: Just Jaune helps to stop the Breach that would have ended countless lives.
• Redemption Equals Life: Just Jaune redeems himself so does Jaune Arc. Before he can die, Qrow saves Jaune, giving him the chance to become a hero.
• Took a Level in Badass: Jaune starts off too weak to pose a threat. After his identity crisis and Mercury unlocks his aura, Jaune is feared by his peers and respected by his employers.

A Househusband Macho

• Babies Ever After: Inverted. A Househusband Macho is after the romance begins, showing Jaune's life as a father taking care of his kids.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: After Jaune drops out of school to care for the babies in Househusband Macho, Ren, shockingly enough, steps up to the plate as leader. And they do a pretty good job at it.
• Innocent Innuendo: Subverted in Weiss' chapter of Househusband Macho, where Jaune has taken to playfully trolling his wife. We get to see one such instance when explaining how a, ahem, "milk stain," got on the couch. And then Mother comes home...

An Affair

• All Amazons Want Hercules: Jaune is the only normal person in the story with the other characters being all huntsmen and huntresses, even his own children. This causes Jaune to worry that Ruby might leave him for someone who's actually strong, famous and capable like her. Someone like Cardin.
• Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage: Weiss, who married for politics and not love, attempts to give Jaune some marriage counseling. It goes as expected.
• Defenestrate and Berate: After Jaune and Ruby finally confront each other about their secrets, Jaune destroys the Rose Garden in a sudden burst of Aura and leaves his wife and children behind with the intention of ending the marriage for good.
• Destructive Romance: Jaune is clearly miserable at the beginning of the story and as it progresses it explains further and further his reasons for believing such.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Jaune is very sensitive of the fact that Ruby tends to look after him and fix all of his problems even at moments when he can handle it on his own.
• Grand Romantic Gesture: RWBY concludes that despite Jaune believed his children with Ruby were actually conceived with Cardin during an affair, he raised them anyway with the hope of beating Cardin and winning back Ruby's love and faithfulness.
• Meaningful Name: One of the options Jaune gives to Ruby before attempting to leave her is to allow him to change his last name from Rose to Arc symbolizing him taking his life back without breaking his marriage vows.
• Mistaken for Cheating: Imagine you're Jaune, Ruby's husband. See The Reveal below then ask yourself: Who is the father of her children?
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: The narrative, for the most part, focuses on Jaune's perspective, only dropping a few random mentions of how the other characters react to the events of the story. It's up to the reader to decide what is part of the narrative and what are Jaune's own biases. Subverted near the end when Ruby and co. are given A Day in the Limelight revealing that most of Jaune's worries are misunderstandings that resulted from her own lies and secrets toward him that Jaune himself allowed to escalate too far to the point the author implies in his notes that some of these were, in fact, hallucinations.
• Red Herring: The title leads the readers into thinking Jaune and Pyrrha are going to have an affair, which they never do. In reality, the title is referring to what truly set the stage of the story: Ruby's affair, when her children were consumated. However, because ultimately nobody had an affair (probably), it can't be truly referred to as such.
  College Fool: That's like an affair. Or something.
• Relationship Sabotage: Someone sends Ruby a Dear Jaune letter with evidence that Jaune has been cheating on her.
• Rescue Romance: How Ruby and Jaune got together.
• Spurned into Suicide: Jaune tries to burn himself alive alongside the Rose Garden. If it weren't for Pyrrha, the story would have ended there.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Jaune has no friends outside of Ruby's group and they only associate with him if it's beneficial for Ruby.
• The Reveal: Jaune is sterile.
• Think of the Children!: Blake's argument to convince Jaune into fixing his marriage ends with this line. It causes Jaune to snap and leave on the spot. We later learn why.
• Wham Line: Who is the father of her (Ruby) children?

The Knight of Lancaster

• Achievements in Ignorance: Ruby is furious that after all her hard work practicing and worrying and training to perform a Knight Strike attack on command (an all-or-nothing attack that channels Aura into the weapon, leaving none for defense but capable of vastly improving how strong and deadly the weapon is), Jaune's been doing it the whole time. By accident. It's at an amateur level, sure, but Ruby could barely get it to activate on command and Jaune didn't even know he was doing it.
• An Arm and a Leg: Averted from canon. While Yang does try to attack Adam in the same way she does in canon, Ruby's new skills (mid-air dodging and Knight Strike) combined with Blake's clones and Weiss' glyphs, mean that this time it's Adam who takes a fall. Yang's arms survive.
• Ascended Extra: Lisa Lavender showed up a few times in canon, but wasn't anything special. Here, she's a regular minor character who serves as the go-to "Media" person for Vale.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Ruby tries to stop Cardin from stealing Team JNPR's tokens, but she's nearly helpless without Crescent Rose. The same happens in the fight with Pyrrha.
• Death by Adaptation: Neo and Roman are executed by Mordred well before Roman's canonical death would have taken place.
• Demoted to Extra: While Team SSSN weren't really major players in the big scheme of things in canon, since the Blake-Weiss argument was moved to inside a museum and not triggered by the docks, Sun doesn't meet the main characters until just before the tournament, Neptune getting less success in his attempts to woo Weiss as a result of everything they've been through, and the rest barely making an appearance at all.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: In a combination of wounded pride, seeing how far he is behind everyone else, it being made clear that he's a "charity case," and Ruby's unintentional condescension, Jaune eventually snaps at Ruby for trying to help him get better. It's later revealed that his reaction to Ruby's coddling was because his own parents coddled him, not wanting him to be a Hunter or get hurt in any way- and it was stifling for him. Getting it from Ruby, on top of everything else, was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
• False Flag Operation: Tyrian tries one of these when he tries to kill off Melody Arc, Jaune's mother. He cries out "For the True King" and then tries to murder her. Since he's Faunus, one of two things will happen- Mordred's forces will assume that he was working for Jaune's faction (who has the support of the local Faunus community and includes Arc's Army, a largely faunus, pro-Jaune and very violent force that would love to get rid of the woman who denounced her son), while Jaune's forces will assume that the assassin was either working for Mordred directly, or through the White Fang, which seem to have connections to Mordred's faction. Even though it's unsuccessful in killing Melody, Tyrian's actions start a massive riot.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Team JNPR crashes as RWBY heads to Mountain Glenn, it turns out that there was no big thing that made the Bullhead go down- the engines simply exploded and they crashed into the Grimmlands for seemingly no reason, and the pilots were experienced enough to know that it wasn't normal. The following chapter reveals that there was a simultaneous crash of another air transport that killed many nobles, and that one of the escaped members of the White Fang murdered another noble at the same time. Given Jaune's Royal Blood, that makes three major events that either did (or nearly) ended the lives of nobles in a 24 hour period. This culminates in the Monarch's assassination, and Qrow revealing that there's been a very bloody underground battle where someone has been trying to kill off any people with Royal Blood. The Bullhead Crash of JNPR was an attempt on Jaune's life. Near the finale, it's revealed that it was Adam working with Mordred who conducted the assassination attempts.
  • When Team RWBY go to the museum, they pass an exhibit that talks about the Kings of Vale, and the narration notes that it's very specific on that- only Kings, no Queens. That's because "The King Of The Vale," is a title, and a gender-neutral one at that. There have been many female kings in the past. Ruby, however, never paid any attention to politics, which is why she's so surprised when it turns out that the nice old lady she talked to at both the previous charity gala and the one she's at when she finds this out is the King.
  • A nice bit of subversion- throughout the story, people have commented on Ruby's silver eyes (and, indirectly, their Grimm-killing power, until the Finale, when Ozpin looks her in the eyes, the narration commenting specifically about her silver eyes as he tells her he has a way to unlock her true potential (clearly building up to a reveal)... then gets a nice Mood Whiplash as Ruby tells him that she doesn't need any true potential, she already has a plan to deal with the Grimm Dragon. Ozpin even lets out a little "Eh?" in surprise.
• Lady and Knight: Gender-Inverted example in both Jaune/Ruby and Mordred/Garnet. The former are the White Lord and White Knight, while the latter are Black Lord and Black Knight, doubling as an Evil Counterpart to Jaune and Ruby's own relationship. The romantic Bodyguard Crush angle is there as well, with Garnet harbouring a long unfulfilled love for Mordred and while Ruby and Jaune's relationship slowly develops into a romantic one.
• Lampshade Hanging: Ruby notes that Bullheads crash all the time, so what's the big deal about another one? College Fool has complained about his own tendencies to write the ships crashing all the time. He even said that was hard for him to write "The window exploded," and not write "as a Bullhead crashed through it."
• Mythology Gag: The Genealogy Arc reveals that Jaune's earliest ancestor was Joan Arc. The creator's notes for Team JNPR revealed that they were gender-bent versions of semi-to-fully-mythological heroes- Lie Ren was based on Mulan, Nora on Thor, Pyrrha for Achilles, and Jaune was based on Joan of Arc.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Ruby's attempt to help Jaune with his Genealogy project reveal that he has royal blood... which means that he's the target of the Council for a puppet king and by another person who wants to kill off the royal family.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The attempt to assassinate Jaune and JNPR by crashing his bullhead not only fails, but it crashes him right outside a village of innocents that no one knew was there, had been uncontacted for the last several centuries, and now consider Jaune "Their Lord" (or at least their Mayor) because he and his team stood against the horde of Grimm that tried to kill them all. Jaune's notoriety goes through the roof.
• Oblivious to Love: Averted. Jaune noticed both Ruby and Pyrrha's crushes on him. When Pyrrha goes too far in reprimanding Ruby, he throws Pyrrha's own affections back in her face for calling Ruby's affections shallow while taking advantage of all the time Pyrrha and he are forced to spend together.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted with Malik. Despite being a family whose semblance- all of them- are shapeshifters with powers limited only by their imagination, it seems that they dropped the ball on the naming front because there are three generations of Maliks. One is dead, but that still leaves Malik (the founder of the White Fang and Faunus community leader) and his daughter, Malik the Third. Who is also just known as Malik. One of the more confusing scenes is when Malik III, disguised as Malik, claims that she wants to meet Jaune and Sun, and does so, only for Malik II to show up and ruin the disguise, then both Maliks have lunch with them.
• Red Herring: At different points, Pyrrha Nikos and Garnet are referred to as "Maidens." Pyrrha is the only one that Ozpin trusts with Jaune's safety, and it's mentioned that Ozpin made an offer to Pyrrha that was "Once in a lifetime." Garnet is referred to as Mordred's "Maiden Knight," and Ozpin and Ironwood look uncomfortable when it's revealed that she was the one who took down Cinder Fall, the implication being that it was fatal for the canon antagonist. In the end, neither has the Fall Maiden powers, as Amber, the pre-canon Fall Maiden, shows up fine and unharmed at the Battle of Beacon.
• Royal Blood: Jaune is the direct descendant of Joan Arc, a knight sworn to the Royal House of Vale, and the prince who lost Vale's civil war and went into exile. That said, Jaune notes that it's interesting trivia, but not really relevant- his ancestors and their houses were stripped of all noble status after the war ended and they went into exile, so he's not set to inherit anything, nor does he have claim on any titles... until the Council sees an opportunity to get a pawn on the throne.
• Running Gag: Ruby manages to get into an argument (on the scale of the Blake-Weiss one in canon) at least once a major arc.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Ruby's youth and great skills are given a bit of a deconstruction here, as her attempts to be cheerful at Jaune (coupled with her own social inexperience making her seem really condescending) are not played for laughs as they normally are, and in fact drive a wedge into their friendship. They hit her again in the following arc, when she loses a match to Pyrrha (over what is essentially "Who gets to be Jaune's friend,") and accuses her of cheating when she loses control of Crescent Rose. Pyrrha, not being in public, nor having to pretend to be nice for the media, is cool and curt towards her and it's clear that she's not in the "person I am friends with" category and in the "Spoiled brat who accuses me of cheating after losing a fight" category that she's dealt with so often in tournaments. As the author lampshades, "Only in fiction are the socially awkward the ones who you want to make the best friends with. In real life, they aren't necessarily all that endearing."
• Spared By Adaptation: Amber, the Fall Maiden, is alive, and participates in the Battle of Beacon.
• Stations of the Canon: Averted. Thanks to Jaune's presence in the episode one fight against Torchwick (by getting in his way and falling on the man), it leads to Torchwick being arrested and Cinder Fall being taken down. After that (and up until the Dance) the plot somewhat stays the same, hitting the basic points- Jaundice, Forever Fall, Docks, etc, but the circumstances behind them are different. Ultimately, the background plot is completely different from the canon one- one based on the Maidens, Relics, Gods, and Salem- in favor of one that is based around court intrigue and an attempt to seize power from the shadows. Or at least, it seems this way, until Tyrian Callows shows up to instigate a riot by trying to kill Jaune's mother. In the finale, there's an interesting case of the Battle of Beacon, which in canon was the finale of Season 3, being combined with the Breach, the finale of Season 2.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Jaune, when preparing for the Forever Fall Survival Trip, packs an absolutely massive pack full of supplies and gear to get him and his team through the trip. While he's made fun of by everyone else, it turns out that most teams don't know how to actually do camping, being by and large urban people who expected food to be handed to them by the teachers, meaning that Jaune's team passes every test before the first full day is out.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Jaune calls Pyrrha out for trying to pretend that Ruby's feelings for him, returned or not, are something to be belittled when he's noticed Pyrrha taking advantage of the times he and Pyrrha have been forced to be together in the public eye. Ruby might not be the one he's eyeing, but her feelings are real, and they should not be mocked and put down. He even goes as far as to call Pyrrha out for lying by omission, because at least Ruby told him how she feels, and wasn't just hiding behind the excuse of their job to get close to him (he noticed that Pyrrha, who notably hates crowds, stopped being upset at the public when she had to attend with Jaune). He ends it by telling her he thought she was better than what he just witnessed, and that she's supposed to be the best, and uninvites her to a future meeting.

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