YMMV / Relic of the Future

• Ass Pull:
  • In chapter 92, Helena insists that her father Alexander used to be a loving and caring father who let fame go to his head after spending a lifetime of trying to make something of the Nikos name. However, every single mention of the man before that moment portrays him as a lifelong Jerkass with hinted longstanding ties to organized crime.
    • Alleviated, at least in part, as of chapter 95. Any fear for his own safety is immediately overridden by fear for Pyrrha's, and in the aftermath of the (faked) attempt on her life he immediately accepts Ozpin's offer to let her stay in Beacon.
  • Lionheart's motivation as The Mole is inconsistent at best. At first, he seems to be a standard traitor, in that he just doesn't like Ozpin and is therefore perfectly willing to kill him, but then Watts and Tyrian say that in exchange for his help they promised him power and influence, as though he was just in it for his own power. Then the next chapter claims that he just lost his mind when he thought Salem could never be stopped and made a deal with her that involved leaving Mistral alone, as though he thought he was being heroic and sparing Mistral from Salem's wrath.
  • Summer tries to argue that Cinder could potentially be redeemed if Jaune gave it an honest try, using Blake's Adaptational Villainy and Jaune's attempts to protect her to argue that Jaune is too set in what he wants the future to be to try it. Jaune's lack of a valid response would verify this idea if it didn't completely ignore the fact that Blake was manipulated by the leaders of a cause she honestly believed in, that Jaune's interference in the timeline accidentally caused her father's murder at the hands of a racist Atlas general (justifying her much darker path), and that without Jaune's interference Blake was completely heroic and thus she has the potential to get there again, while Cinder is the exact same power-craving psychopath that she was in canon.
• Base-Breaking Character: Blake. Specifically her still attending Beacon as in canon. Unlike in canon she doesn't regret being a part of the White Fang and still agrees with their violent methods. Some think it's simply a darker take on the character while others are unhappy at the blatant Karma Houdini.
• Complete Monster:
  • Dr. Arthur Watts, one of Salem's top lieutenants, is a petty and narcissistic sociopath who cares for nothing but his own ego. Joining Salem's cause over a nonexistent slight against him, Watts is willing to do anything required of him with no qualms or regrets, including personally kidnapping two 10-year-old children and leading another kidnapping of a teenager. When Jaune offers to cut him in on a deal for a new energy source, Watts takes offense, believing that Jaune is implying that he is smarter by declaring him a "partner". In response, Watts steals Winter's soul and leaves her an empty and comatose shell, taking glee in the fact that he's too valuable to Salem's cause to be punished. When Jaune follows him to Argus, Watts takes the entire city's power grid hostage, declaring that if Jaune attempts to catch him, he'll throw the entire city back into the Stone Age, starting with the city's hospital. Believing himself akin to a God because of his computer skills, Watts spreads nothing but terror and death wherever he goes.
  • Jax Asturias is the leader of the Crown, a Human Trafficking organization working to install him as King of Vacuo. With his Semblance of Mind Control, Jax enslaves anyone who crosses his path to recruit them for his "army", including winners of the fight club he manages and even children as young as eight; their minds and personality are left intact, yet they can do nothing to stop him. Desperate for others to feed his ego, he also makes a plan to enslave Rashem, force him to run Vacuo's economy into the ground, and then kill him; if it had succeeded, Rashem's pregnant wife would have been killed as well. Jax's ego has him override his sister and Carmine and attack Jaune Ashari and Qrow Branwen, using his enslaved army of unarmed and untrained civilians to ensure he doesn't have to get his hands dirty himself, all out of a childish belief that Vacuo is all his.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Jacques Schnee demanding that his oldest daughter enter into an Arranged Marriage with her former teacher for political connections and wealth? Terrible. Arranging the marriage with the teacher that he knows damn well she's 100% into and then teasing her over it? Hilarious.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Adam is shown to have a scarred face a few months before the same thing was revealed in canon. Not only that, it also retroactively gave further justification to Adam's Adaptational Heroism: he wasn't scarred by humans, but by someone else in the White Fang, so what is assumed to be a major personal reason for his canon extremism is pointed in the opposite direction.
  • Darkly hilarious in hindsight. In the Bad Future of this fic, which started writing as a continuation of where the series' story was at at the time, the Kingdom of Atlas is stated to be the sole kingdom that's still functioning in any form by the time before Jaune goes back in time, whereas the others have all been wiped out or collapsed into anarchy. As of the end of Volume 8 of RWBY, the Kingdom of Atlas is officially destroyed while the other three recognized kingdoms are still functioning, albeit two of them have had their huntsman defences crippled and decimated.
  • Somehow, Jaune Ashai's physical appearance ended up being a dead ringer for the appearance of Rusted Knight Jaune — who is also a time-traveling Jaune who went back in time and subsequently ended up decades older than his old friends — in Volume 9 of the show.
• Iron Woobie:
  • Jaune Ashari fought through the end of the world as we know it and the deaths of just about everyone he ever loved in the Bad Future, which made him grief-wracked and desperate enough to agree to a deal with a dying Salem to rewind the game by sending him back in time, hoping that he could use it to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Although he makes many meaningful friends and family in the past timeline, it is not all sunshine and rainbows for Jaune. More than being faced with younger alternate iterations of his friends and loved ones whom are now over a decade younger and don't know him the same way they knew him in the old timeline, some of the changes Jaune makes to history are for the worse instead of the better, and those changes often hit very close to home for him. For examples, he saves a child Ruby's life but in the process traumatizes her to the point where his first friend's alternate self can't so much as be near him without feeling afraid, he feels responsible for his presence driving Salem to radicalize the White Fang several years early and for Blake's new timeline self going down a darker path where she essentially swaps roles with Adam, and Pyrrha's counterpart — who is a living, breathing reminder of Jaune's partner and first love who he lost — ends up being adverse and alienated towards Jaune Ashari in the past. Jaune is also deeply shaken by knowing that there's living versions of his parents and sisters in the past whom he feels he can never ingratiate himself with because they have their own Jaune with them without all the timey-wimey complications, after his family in the original timeline were slaughtered by Tyrian. Still, for every pain and loss in the new timeline, Jaune has a connection he didn't have before to keep living and fighting for, and he presses on, undeterred in his goal of stopping Salem while preventing the deaths of his friends at any cost.
  • Adam Taurus, part of the White Fang from a young age, was inspired by Jaune's actions to achieve equal rights for the Faunus without having to resort to using actual violence (merely the threat of it) against their opponents, which prevented his worst impulses from growing out of control. When Hazel and Tyrian take over the White Fang, Adam is dismayed as they and Sienna turn the organization into a bloodthirsty terrorist network that he feels spits in the eye of the organization's original cause, and he can't do anything to stop a grieving Blake from being radicalized away from being his former childhood Morality Pet into becoming the same kind of unrepentant murderer that he could have been, with the White Fang holding her life in front of Adam as a bargaining chip to keep him under heel. All of this drives Adam to ruthlessly ally with Jaune Ashari and Winter Schnee to help them brutally take down the White Fang once and for all, on the absolute condition that Blake be spared at the end of it. Adam succeeds in those goals, but his victory comes at the cost of the woman he loved and saved disowning him forever. Still, Adam goes on to rule Menagerie and strengthen its ties to the four recognized kingdoms, bringing human-Faunus relations closer to achieving equality.
• It Was His Sled: Team STRQ features prominently in the artwork on the story, including Summer, making it incredibly obvious that they all have big parts to play. This spoils both the fact that Jaune travelled farther in the past than intended as well as Summer's survival.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Jaune Ashari, determined to prevent the Bad Future no matter the cost, becomes far more intelligent and ruthless than in the original timeline. Originally wandering the planet trying to bide his time for the future, Jaune begins taking active steps against Salem and proves himself her greatest opponent, not only taking out her forces one by one but sabotaging her future plans to prevent her from getting a foothold on Remnant. From uniting Vale's gangs under his own banner, destroying the White Fang in a single evening, using Hazel Rainart's death to pose as a mole for Salem's organization, converting Cinder to his side through promises of power, and even creating a new energy source out of Aura along the way, Jaune's resolve carries him for years, even when he learns that defeating Salem will kill him as well. Managing to steal and unite the Relics, Jaune defeats Salem once again despite her attempts to subvert Emerald, returning to the timeline he once abandoned and resolving to continue fixing the world once more.
  • Raven Branwen, after confronting her cowardice and throwing her lot in with Jaune, proves to be just as intelligent as her partner. After using Jaune's mission to render the Relic of Knowledge inert to learn just who he is, Raven begins working both with him and independently to subvert Salem's plans, primarily by training his younger self in her brutal method of combat. Saving Jaune's life multiple times with her portals, Raven consistently plays her part in Jaune's plans to perfection and adds her own ideas, such as giving herself and Jaune alibis for Hazel's death, convincing Ozpin's forces that Nora Valkyrie is the Spring Maiden, using the Maiden powers on Atlas soldiers to provide cover for Watts' kidnapping, and summoning Summer to kill Oscar. Despite her emotional struggles and original cowardly nature, Raven is Jaune's most useful ally and contributes just as much to their partnership as he does.
  • Adam Taurus is the Only Sane Man of the White Fang who genuinely believes in the cause he's fighting for. After witnessing Jaune protect them from a mob with the threat of violence, Adam is inspired and helps radicalize the Fang, yet when he sees how far they've fallen, he refuses to sink to their level. Becoming the Fang's most useful operative despite his distaste for killing, Adam sees the writing on the wall and concludes the Fang will collapse on itself, seeking a way out for himself. After psychoanalyzing Jaune and attempting to save him in Menagerie, Adam later conspires with Winter Schnee to wipe out the Fang, preemptively betraying his soldiers before they can kill him and intending to lure the Atlas military to the Fang. Though Jaune kills them first, Adam gets out alive and un-captured with Blake, becoming Chieftan of Menagerie and working with Ironwood to make equality the law.
• Older Than They Think: This isn't exactly the first story Couer wrote of a Jaune from After the End that gets sent to the past a little earlier than he expected and even adopted a younger version of someone he knows. He wrote a summary for a similar story in The Writer Games based on a prompt from co-author College Fool.
• One True Threesome:
  • After getting rescued by young Jaune, Nora agrees to go on a date with him as long as Ren is involved as well. Many readers approved of the scenario.
  • There are small but noticeable part of fandom who ship Jaune (Ashari), Raven, and Winter all together.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The narration calls out some of Jaune Ashari's hypocrisy and flaws fairly, but when other characters get in on it this effect is often present:
  • The narration treats Hazel's comments towards Jaune as forcing him to confront his inner darkness, seemingly expecting us to believe that Hazel's words can be trusted as facts.
  • Raven may be justified when she complains that Jaune keeps her in the dark and expects her to help at his beck and call, but her blaming him for the state of the timeline is just laughable after how much she screwed up the original timeline (and at this point, she's aware of that, so she has no leg to stand on).
  • Helena getting angry at Jaune after Pyrrha announces she'll continue fighting because he forced her into a position to agree with her father or agree with the outsider, after both of them have made it clear they despise their father and are looking for the first chance to drop him and run, makes next to no sense, and yet Jaune blames the entire thing on himself by the end of it.
  • When Raven says that Jaune only reset the future to save his friends out of selfishness (which he ends up agreeing to), they both seem to forget that at the end of the last timeline, Jacques had Atlas, the last Kingdom remaining, under his complete control and besides him only Raven and Jaune were still alive.
  • Summer calls Jaune out for putting Emerald and Young Jaune in danger by having them spy on Cinder and says that he should've had her or Ozpin do it instead. While calling him out for putting the children in danger is fair, saying he should've come to her is downright ridiculous considering that both her and Ozpin didn't trust him a single ounce before this moment. Also, trying to say that he's just too set in his ways to try to redeem Cinder by using Blake's Adaptational Villainy to argue for it falls completely flat when Blake became the way she is due to Jaune's timeline interferences while Cinder is exactly the same as canon.
  • After Jaune accepts Salem's mark, Raven lectures Jaune on how he could have run away and made an escape with her portals instead of letting Salem mark him. Jaune doesn't try to defend himself during this conversation, implying we're meant to think she's right, but this argument disregards the fact that Salem was three feet away from him in the entire conversation, the castle was surrounded by Grimm, Tyrian was still inside, and Cinder was right next to him, so even if he had wanted to decline he truly didn't have any way he could escape.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Many readers feel that the narrative treats Raven far more kindly than she deserves to. Jaune considers her to be something of a friend and an ally worth trusting, despite the fact that she has, in the previous timeline, allied with Salem's servants and directly attacked Jaune's group. In contrast, Ozpin gets little trust or sympathy from Jaune, despite being portrayed far more sympathetically than Raven in canon, as he always tries his best to protect the people around him and to make the best out of a bad situation - though that is largely a result of Canon Marches On. Chapter 113 helped to alleviate this, with Raven still being an remorseless bandit and calling Jaune out for deluding himself into believing she's a good person at heart.
  • Some feel Pyrrha forfeited her right to sympathy in chapter 91. After insisting several times that she wanted to stop fighting in tournaments, especially once she started attending a Huntsman Academy, Pyrrha is pressured into entering another tournament but Helena helps her by announcing it's Pyrrha's final tournament before she retires. Despite finally having the perfect out to give up tournament fighting for good, Pyrrha still confirms in a press conference that she's not retiring and will continue fighting. Made worse by the fact one of Pyrrha's opponents in the tournament vastly outclassed her and offered the girl the chance to forfeit, but Pyrrha insisted on fighting on anyway rather than bowing out, and then she and Helena put all the blame on Jaune for “escalating the situation” when he continued to provide her an out.
  • Based on how the story is framed, the audience is supposed to accept the idea that Cinder could be swayed to the side of good if Jaune gave it a try, but Jaune is too set in his ways to try that. It's an interesting idea that Jaune doesn't seem to argue against, but the fact that Cinder is the exact same power hungry psychopath that she was in canon despite all of Jaune's changes to the timeline really seems to suggest that Cinder is completely irredeemable.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: After Young Jaune discovers Raven's identity as Yang's mother, he very clearly loses his respect for her and is left in tears by this betrayal from his "fairy godmother". He even decides that he needs to explain his relationship with her to Yang because she deserves to know the truth. Since this was at the same time that Jaune Ashari needed him for a ritual, this had the potential to be a massive Spanner in the Works and could've been used to tie up Raven and Yang's emotional issues towards each other. By the next time we see them interact again, Young Jaune has no problem trusting Raven's word about a complete stranger and willingly goes on a mission with her across the planet and, completely off-page, he apparently decided not to talk to Yang about it.
• The Woobie: Emerald. She is introduced into the story as a street urchin who struggles avoid starvation and she gets her arm broken immediately upon introduction. She does get better with time, but her traumatic early childhood left her with some major mental scars, some of which are yet to be fully healed.

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