Fanfic / Null

Art by Serox

'"A Semblance so powerful Kingdoms will kill to acquire it. A family stolen away to try and replicate its effects. A conspiracy that threatens to tear Atlas in two. A young man who wants his sisters back, and a General caught between doing the right thing and his duty. Will Jaune manage to rescue his family, and can James Ironwood prevent him falling to darkness in the process?"'

— Official plot summary

Null is a RWBY fanfic by Coeur Al'Aran with the basic premise of Jaune unlocking a Semblance with such potential that it gets him kidnapped by the government.

The story was concluded on December 21, 2020 at 44 chapters.

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Null contains examples of...

A-D

• Abandonment-Induced Animosity: Jaune becomes pissed at one of his former allies for abandoning him in a pretty vile way during the fic. Blake, who is one of Jaune's closer comrades while he's allied with the White Fang against Chivalric Arms, all but throws him to the wolves in the middle of Vale, expecting him to be killed or recaptured by the conspiracy (though she doesn't voice it since that would involve admitting she ironically did wrong when she was trying to make a Heel–Face Turn). Needless to say, Jaune is utterly pissed when he and Blake cross paths again following the formation of Team RWBY. Throughout Jaune's later Enemy Mine with Team RWBY, he's resisting the strong temptation to put a bullet through Blake's skull, and he doesn't miss an opportunity to needle Blake on her moral hypocrisy.
• Accomplice by Inaction: Ironwood accuses Pietro Polendina of this, telling him that by not informing him of the massive security risk involved in Penny's creation, he is directly responsible for all of the carnage Penny (and Jaune as a result) unleashed in Vale.
• Achilles' Heel: Neopolitan's Semblance is a perfect counter to Jaune's Semblance, which is why the conspiracy wants it. When she uses her Semblance, Jaune can't see her, forcing him to use his own - which then removes his own aura, allowing her to strike.
• Adaptational Friendship:
  • Whereas the canon version of Adam Taurus was an enemy to Jaune's friends and he never even shared a single scene with Jaune; in this fic, Adam is responsible for rescuing Jaune from Chivalric Arms' human experimentation and helping him to rescue his remaining sisters. Due to which, Jaune considers Adam a friend and a brother-in-arms who he'll always feel gratitude towards, and the feeling is quite mutual on Adam's end.
  • Likewise, Neopolitan, who was also never a friend to Jaune canonically, is in this fic a fellow victim of Chivalric Arms' experiments who bonded with Jaune's mother, and in turn she becomes a combat ally to Jaune and remains partnered with him at the fic's end. Due to
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Compared both to canon and the author's other works, Ironwood is practically the patron saint of kindness. While his other works almost always have him becoming the Inspector Javert towards Jaune for one reason or another and canon sees him Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, this Ironwood is the only person who realizes that Jaune really is the victim in this situation and does everything he can to help him from behind the scenes no matter how bad everything looks for Jaune.
  • Adam Taurus, though still a ruthless terrorist, is saner and more honorable than the rabid beast that was his canon counterpart. He has multiple standards and self-restraint, he's implied to be more genuinely conflicted about Blake's betrayal, he has just enough far-sightedness to admit he doesn't intend to spend the rest of his life being nothing but a human-killing weapon if he lives long enough to achieve his goals, and he has a genuine comradery with and a mutual sense of gratitude towards Jaune to the point of considering them friends.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Instead of his canonical Healing Hands Semblance, Jaune is a Power Nullifier.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Ozpin gets hit with this hard, even in comparison to the author's other works. He captured Amber Arc (Jaune's sister) and has been keeping her sedated and unconscious against her will, intending to use her for his own purposes. When finally confronted by Ironwood over this, he admits to it without an iota of remorse, even smiling as he confesses.
  • As opposed to his unambiguously heroic canon counterpart, Pietro Polendina is a member of the conspiracy and forced his innocent daughter Penny into it. How much it was his own choice versus how much of it is forced is never made clear, but at a minimum, he's far more callous about the civilian casualties tied to his actions than he ever would be in canon.
• Adaptational Wimp: Ironwood has much less political power here than he does in canon. This is due to the Atlesian council being much larger than it is in canon, with fifteen seats instead of five. This results in his attempts to investigate Chilavric Arms being roadblocked and him being effectively forced to eliminate Jaune despite his grievances, in sharp contrast to Volume 7 when he manages to effectively single-handedly declare martial law across the entire Kingdom.
• Adaptation Origin Connection:
  • The Paladin here was developed by the Government Conspiracy as a countermeasure to Jaune and his Semblance.
  • Neo was yet another experiment of the same Government Conspiracy that ruined Jaune's life. Here, it was the torture they inflicted on her, which included a particularly-violent brain surgery, that rendered her mute and made her (understandably) vengefully sadistic.
• All for Nothing:
  • At the docks, while trying to exfiltrate his mother, Jaune attempts to spare everyone present since they're just doing their jobs. One of the guards doesn't care and shoots at him, which catches Team RW_Y and Penny's attention. During the resulting fight, not only does Penny shoot down Juniper's bullhead and kill her, but the resulting debris kills all of the hostages as well, leaving the docks heist a complete failure on all accounts.
  • Fields claims that all of Jaune's efforts will mean nothing as he's dying. Ultimately, there are hundreds of scientists willing to pick up his mantle, and with how many average citizens die on a daily basis in a world like Remnant, no one will ever care about Jaune or his family even as people mourn Fields' death. Luckily, Jaune and Ironwood prove him wrong by keeping their mission going after his death, killing all of Fields' co-conspirators in secret to prevent them from restarting his work.
  • Cinder's plans to get Amber's Maiden Powers fail when Ozpin out-gambits her in the vault. When she kills Amber Autumn within the range of Amber Arc's Semblance, the power disappears forever.
• All Your Powers Combined: As a result of his research, Fields has access to dozens of Semblances.
• Alternate Universe Fic: Roughly a year before he would've attended Beacon as in canon, Jaune unlocks a Semblance very different from his canon Healing Hands. This results in an evil Government Conspiracy targeting him and his family, murdering Jaune's father and kidnapping Jaune, his mother and most of his sisters to be experimented on, before Jaune is freed by the White Fang (of all people) and forced on the run by the conspiracy's efforts to get him back.
• Ambiguously Evil: General Sol, an original character seen in Ironwood's side of the story. By all appearances, he's a genuinely good and moral person, but he sides with the Council in matters that he really shouldn't and often gets on Ironwood's case about the investigation. It's ultimately unclear if he's a member of the Government Conspiracy or if he's just a Jerkass. He's later confirmed to have been part of the conspiracy from the very beginning, and he gets killed by Ironwood and Jaune for it in the last scene of the story.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • It's never outright confirmed or denied that Juniper was raped during her imprisonment. Coral confirms that one of the scientists that was holding them mentioned the idea, but she was transferred away from that scientist before the idea could come into fruition. At one point, Jaune almost asks her, but decides not to out of fear that the answer would be yes, meaning the answer eventually dies with her at the docks. In his mental rants against Chivalric Arms, Jaune assumes that she was raped, but there's no longer any way to know.
  • As he's dying, Ozpin seems to believe that his death will be final thanks to Amber's Semblance. The story ends two months later, but it took him at least that much time to manifest within Oscar in canon, so while Ozpin and Ironwood seem to believe he's gone forever, it's never confirmed by the story's end.
• And the Adventure Continues: The final chapter of the story shows that Jaune faked his death with help from Ironwood and Neo, knowing that even if he couldn't live a normal life anymore, he could at least help Ironwood continue to take down Chivalric Arms and root out corruption in Atlas.
• And Then What?: Blake asks Jaune what he intends to do after saving his family since he's now a wanted man. He doesn't have an answer.
• Anti-Villain:
  • Pietro can be seen as this. While what he's doing is bad, immoral, and compromising his own ethics, he does this for his daughter Penny to keep her safe. While by no means does this mean he's justified, as he did order Penny to kill Ruby so they had no witnesses, like Jaune, he does whatever it takes to keep her safe.
  • Ozpin is this. While what he has done to Amber is morally compromising, he isn't nearly as bad as Chivalric Arms and simply wishes to just use her to kill Salem once and for all.
• Appropriated Appellation: Roman names Neopolitan because they don't have their own name yet. While Jaune finds it stupid (since he got it from the ice cream she's eating at the moment), Neo herself takes a liking to it.
• Ascended Extra: James Ironwood, a supporting character in canon, is upgraded to Deuteragonist thanks to being the main viewpoint for the Atlas storyline.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Matthew Fields. By the time he's gone, the only sad thing about it is that it couldn't have happened sooner.
  • Cinder Fall was a megalomaniacal sociopath willing to do anything she had to to get more power and survive Salem's wrath, even if it meant murdering an innocent 12-year-old child. Even her own allies (except for Emerald) couldn't care less that she's dead; Adam says it's "a shame" while making it perfectly clear that it really isn't.
  • Professor Ozpin took a flying leap off the slippery slope long ago, becoming willing to sacrifice innocent lives if it meant stopping Salem once and for all. Ironwood doesn't even mourn his death, just the man that he used to be.
• At Least I Admit It:
  • Adam says this to Jaune during a Scroll call in Chapter 21. Like everyone else, the White Fang wants Jaune for his Semblance. Unlike everyone else, the White Fang are upfront about it and are at least trying to help him get his family back.
  • Jaune comes to believe that this is what separates him from other criminals. While he is guilty of many crimes, he knows exactly what he has done and refuses to deny responsibility for the crimes he has committed, in sharp contrast with many criminals refusing to take responsibility for their actions.
  • Ozpin freely admits what he's doing to Amber Arc is totally wrong. However, considering she may be the only person to end Salem, he'll gladly turn her into a human weapon if it means he can end his eternal war and die in peace.
• Badass on Paper: A lot of public focus is put on the fact that Jaune managed to kill two huntsmen that were trying to capture him, but only he and Blake realize that it was pretty much by accident and without his Semblance he would've been completely screwed.
• Bad Boss: Matthew Fields. Towards the end of his Establishing Character Moment, he tricks one of his employees into drinking a poison designed to only kill Faunus in order to test its effectiveness.
• Bait-and-Switch: After Penny accidentally kills his mother, Jaune tells Yang "you win". At first, she assumes he's surrendering, but that's actually the last thing on his mind.
  Jaune: You win. I'll do it. I'll kill you.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Two in quick succession. In an attempt to talk Jaune down, Ironwood tells him to just go ahead and kill Winter, since if he's just a mindless soldier as Jaune claims then he will have no problem watching Winter die. Jaune calls his bluff and points his gun at Winter's head getting ready to pull the trigger, at which point switches gears and begs him to stop, giving Jaune the upper hand and allowing him to escape. In short, Ironwood's fails, but Jaune's works.
  • Matthew Fields' death is ultimately orchestrated by Ironwood despite his noninvolvement. By informing Blake that Ozpin is not looking for Ruby, she and her team get desperate enough to go to Jaune, who then proceeds to storm CA's rented warehouse and kill him. Winter notes that he has a smug smile on his face when he learns of Jaune's attack, implying that this was his plan all along.
  • Ironwood correctly predicts that the conspiracy would attempt to hack his airship and fire on civilians to frame Ironwood for mass murder and responds accordingly - before the hack, he has Clover empty out every single one of the ship's guns without telling anyone else, so when the hack occurs and the ship tries to fire, it instead looks like a massive misfire without causing any damage or civilian death.
  • Ozpin quietly pulls one on Jaune and Cinder; when they enter the Vault to find the Ambers, he focuses on protecting Amber Autumn to trick Cinder into thinking he's worried about her getting the Fall Maiden's powers. She eventually takes the bait and kills her, only for them all to realize that Amber Arc's Semblance completely erased her powers, meaning the Relic of Choice is locked away forever.
• Beyond Redemption: Ozpin believes Jaune to be past the point of reason when he all but slaughters Ruby, Weiss, and Yang. Ironwood tries to counter that his horrifying reaction is more sensible when one considers that they're accidentally responsible for his mother's death, but Ozpin refuses to even entertain the idea. It's implied that he is bitter over how Jaune may have crippled his Silver-Eyed Warrior and indavertently threw a massive monkey wrench into his plans for fighting Salem. Although it’s later revealed that Ozpin’s real reason is because he has custody of Amber Arc, who has an even more comprehensive version of Jaune’s Null Semblance, which Ozpin believes can even be used to nullify Salem’s immortality, enabling him to bring their war to an end. Because of that, he deems Jaune’s Semblance to be superfluous, and decides that killing Jaune is the best option to keep Jaune from rescuing Amber, and using his death as a means of manipulating Amber after he allows her to regain consciousness.
  • Even though Penny managed to overcome some heavy brainwashing to save Ruby in chapter 39, it wasn't enough for redemption in Jaune's eyes.
• Bittersweet Ending: The final chapter of the story goes into detail about where everyone is now. Ultimately, Jaune succeeded in his goal - his sisters are safe and will be cared for by the Belladonnas, Adam, and Ilia for the rest of their lives, with Ironwood having forged records claiming that they all had water-based Semblances to ensure they'll never be hunted again. Additionally, Team RWBY appears to be doing very well at Shade Academy, with Ruby herself quickly overcoming her trauma from the kidnapping. However, Juniper and Penny are still dead, Salem is still around (and this time there's no Ozpin to fight back), and Jaune himself had to fake his death to ensure that no one would continue to look for Null anymore, meaning he never will get to settle down and stop fighting like he wished he could.
• Black-and-Grey Morality:
  • On the bad guys' side, the conspiracy in Atlas is completely evil, considering they kidnapped an entire family, murdered the father, and then subjected the rest to human experimentation the likes of which you'd expect to occur in Auschwitz (and they've been doing the latter to hundreds of other people offscreen). Ozpin is a lighter shade than the conspiracy, considering he's just trying to bring a milennia-long eternal war for the fate of the world to a permanent and decisive victory, but unlike all of the good guys below; he's completely willing to deliberately ensure that the Arcs' suffering continues for his own benefit even while knowing full well what the family have been through, and he'll throw anyone he's close to on the bonfire if he deems it a necessary sacrifice.
  • On the good guys' side: although Jaune is out to save his family from them whatever it takes, he's sacrificing more and more of his moral integrity as the stress and setbacks mount, plus he allies with the likes of Torchwick, Neopolitan and the White Fang along the way. Ironwood, the closest Jaune has to a lawful ally, is willing and forced to play dirty politics to combat the villains. Even Team RWBY, though they exit stage looking a lighter shade of gray than what Jaune has become by the end, they certainly don't smell of roses; with Blake abandoning Jaune for dead amidst her defection, with the team's manslaughter of Juniper, and with the scathing callout Jaune gives them over their shameless willingness to compromise the very moral principles that they hold everyone else to when it's to their own benefit instead of somebody else's.
• Blatant Lies:
  • When Jaune sees Blake at the docks heist, he asks her if she left him to die so that she could get off easy for the crimes she committed with the White Fang. She swears that's not why, but the fact that she says it "weakly" implies that he is spot on.
  • After being rebuilt, Penny asks Pietro if she did anything wrong. He swears she didn’t, but he’s so easy to see through that even Penny realizes that he’s lying to her.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: In the vault, Cinder blames Jaune and Amber for the destruction of the Maiden powers and decides to take revenge on her. She does so in the middle of the battle with Jaune standing right behind her, leading to the rather predictable result of Jaune stabbing her in the back.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Jaune has a habit of getting into these kinds of arguments.
  • On the way to Mistral, Blake and Jaune discuss the scientist that Adam executed in Atlas. Blake argues that killing someone for just planning to do something is a very slippery slope, and soon enough there'll be justifications to kill anyone they please. Jaune agrees, then fires back that he's not in the mood to show sympathy when the crime the scientist was planning was raping his mother and sister.
  • During the raid on CA's compound, Jaune and Yang get into an argument about Blake. Yang says that she was right to leave the Fang after it became militaristic, and that people are allowed to change their minds over time. Jaune agrees, but retorts that it took her years to decide to leave, invalidating her claims that it was Adam and the Fang that changed, and that the way she chose to go about it (namely convince her partners that she could still be trusted then abandon them to die at a crucial moment) is nothing but cowardice.
  • In Chapter 42, Jaune and Qrow Branwen get into a brief argument before Jaune moves to attack Ozpin. Qrow says that, as someone who knew Nicholas personally, he can safely say that he wouldn't want Jaune to have become the vengeance-fueled man that he currently is, and he counters Jaune's rage by saying that violence shouldn't begat violence. Jaune responds that his father most likely didn't want to be murdered in front of his family either, and that he only killed the two huntsmen in legitimate self-defense. Despite the simplistic nature of the argument, Qrow can't bring himself to fight and lets Jaune move on.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Despite knowing Blake is uncharacteristically terrified by the mere topic of Jaune Arc, Ruby, Weiss and Yang still assume that the notorious "serial killer" isn't anything special without the White Fang's numbers backing him in a fight, and that they can take him should they catch him out in the open. When RW_Y accidentally drive Jaune to his breaking point due to their gung-ho conduct's collateral, Jaune uses Null to show them just why he's so deadly; curb-stomping, scarring, hospitalizing and traumatizing them all. Afterwards, Weiss recognizes and eats her Humble Pie quickly, while Yang is initially driven to wild anger due to the blow to her confidence. Ultimately, Team RWBY opt out of the final battle entirely, partly because they realize that they'll only be throwing their lives away if they put themselves in Jaune' warpath again.
  • Even when hospitalized during the above, Yang still has the nerve to insist that what happened with Juniper's death wasn't their fault, and worse yet that Jaune deserved to lose her. Then Chivalric Arms kidnap Ruby to become their latest guinea-pig like Jaune's family did, and WBY are forced to turn to Jaune of all people to save her. Yang is further scarred for life, if only psychologically, when Jaune forces her to deliberately kill someone for the first time in the name of saving her sister. After Ruby is saved, Yang is just as disgusted as the rest of her team that they're being celebrated as heroes while Jaune's name still isn't being cleared by anyone.
• Broken Pedestal: Ozpin becomes this to many people over the course of the story:
  • Starts with James when he agrees with the council to have Jaune killed on sight claiming he's Beyond Redemption, ignoring any evidence to the contrary. Gets worse when it turns out he captured Amber Arc.
  • Qrow, who had been one of his most loyal followers walks out on him when Ozpin forgoes trying to rescue the kidnapped Ruby in favor of using Amber Arc as a weapon. Later chapters make it clear that Glynda has officially turned against him as a result of this plan as well.
  • And in chapter 40, team RWBY now plan to sit out the Vytal Festival and transfer to Shade Academy after Ozpin all but abandoned Ruby to the wolves.
• The Cameo: Raven makes a brief appearance during the docks heist, as Jaune forces her to use Yang's "one save". She engages him and Neo in combat briefly, yet flees the scene before the fight is over.
• Career-Ending Injury: Chapter 29 heavily implies that Jaune paralyzed Ruby from the waist down when he shot her, ending her career as a huntress. Chapter 32 later confirms this by saying that the victim will recover and walk again, but they'll never regain enough mobility to become a huntress.
• Central Theme: It's All About Me. Every major contributor in the story is unaware of or ignores the damage they cause reaching for their goals. They also dismiss the reasoning of others to make their own decisions seem more justified.
  • Jaune started very sympathetic, but becomes more and more jaded and uncaring of the lives of others, only caring about his own family. He has also become open to petty revenge that ruins other's lives. He is aware of this, it is just that everything that has happened has destroyed his ability to care.
  • The Atlas council only cares about what is best for Atlas and refuse to accept their part in Jaune's crimes, leading to them blaming everything on him and officially ordering him to be killed on sight.
  • It is Blake's own selfishness that leads to her abandoning Jaune to die in Vale, which is what triggers Jaune's sanity to begin rapidly falling.
  • Yang and Weiss refuse to acknowledge the horrible pain and loss they have inflicted on Jaune, only focusing on the injuries they sustained in their fight with Yang even believing he deserved what has happened to him.
  • Matthew Fields wants what he thinks is best for Atlas, but is willing to do very unethical things to do so.
  • Ozpin started out wanting to redeem Jaune, but after the young man crippled Ruby in retaliation for her role in his mother's death, and inadvertently shot his plans for Salem to hell, he views him as Beyond Redemption and has agreed to Atlas' demands for him to be killed on sight. However, it’s later revealed that Ozpin’s real reason is Amber Arc’s Semblance, and even more-powerful nullification Semblance, which prompts Ozpin to drop all pretense of caring about anyone else to cling to the opportunity Amber represents to bring his eternal war with Salem to an end.
• Cliffhanger: Chapter 27 ends with Jaune taking Ruby hostage, then shooting her twice at point-blank range with clear intent to kill. Since the fic is updated weekly, that's how long the audience had to wait to learn that despite his intent, Jaune doesn't actually know how to shoot to kill, meaning Ruby survived those shots, though she may be permanently disabled.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Faunus sterilisation compound is initially featured within the first POV segment from the boss of Chivalric Arms - and doesn't show up until chapter 38, during a raid on one of their facilities. Jaune and three-quarters of team RWBY encounter a scientist willing to talk about the Faunus sterilisation compound, along with printed evidence of it. At that point, Jaune realises that freeing Ruby and adding her testimony to the pile of evidence he already has could actually be enough to destroy Chivalric Arms utterly; the following chapter reveals that the remainder of the conspiracy was arrested and the compound dealt with for good as a result.
• Commonality Connection: Very, very downplayed. Yang at first has no sympathy for Jaune, even after learning what he's trying to accomplish and why. But after she finds herself in a similar position to him when Ruby is kidnapped by Chivalric Arms to be a labrat, and she's forced to intentionally kill people in order to save her sister, Yang starts seeing herself in Jaune and realizes she could become just like him if she'd been pushed even further like he has, although that's the full extent of her pathy for him. Jaune meanwhile takes a little catharsis in Yang's aforementioned Laser-Guided Karma.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Jaune gradually becomes more and more accepting of violence and murder, eventually resorting to it as a first solution instead of a last. This gets discussed when Yang cries after killing one of CA's soldiers - his first reaction is that he doesn't understand why she's crying, and his second reaction is realizing that he doesn't know why he isn't crying.
• Continuity Nod: Raven ends up having to use Yang's one "free pass" at the docks heist instead of on the White Fang's train.
• Cornered Rattlesnake: What several characters believe of Jaune, thinking that with his single-minded focus on saving his family and lack of restraints make him just as dangerous as his Semblance. Roman and Junior discuss this in Chapter 21, referring to such people as the most dangerous of all. It's part of why Ironwood doesn't want to bring excessive force against Jaune because he is afraid of what the boy will do if they push him too far. Hell, even Cinder holds this view of him.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Look no further than Matthew Fields, CEO of Chivalric Arms. He is responsible for the whole conspiracy involving the Arc family, and professes that it's all an attempt to reverse-engineer Jaune's Semblance, so he can aid law enforcement against Aura-using criminals with Aura-nullifying armaments. If that weren't enough, he also plans to sterilise the Faunus population by planting a genetically-engineered poison in Remnant's water supplies.
• Create Your Own Villain: Before he was captured, Jaune was a Wide-Eyed Idealist who wanted to become a Huntsman and be a hero. After Atlas and Beacon's actions, however, he has now become a vengeful and angry man who will kill everyone in his way if it means saving his sisters.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Jaune admits that Null won't be any good against genuinely skilled enemies if he doesn't train himself, to which Adam agrees.
  • Yang is so reliant on her Semblance that she has little to no defensive capability in terms of dodging or proper deflection. She also cannot use Ember Celica properly without her aura and if her hands are damaged in some way, such as with a knife, they actively hurt her instead. She is so used to being near invulnerable thanks to her aura that she doesn't try to disarm Jaune even when she is physically holding him. It gets her stabbed in the elbow.
    • Related to the above, Huntsmen are so dependent on aura to minimize damage that RW_Y get creamed by Jaune when he turns off their aura. Yang monologues in her head that Jaune is too good, but it is more that she and the others can't handle fighting as Muggles. When Raven shows up, her first instinct when Jaune turns on Null is to leap away from him frantically, even though she could probably disarm him.
  • Matthew Fields has access to dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Semblances, but he has had them for such little time and knows so little about them that he doesn't understand the multiple glaring weaknesses they each have. Additionally, no matter how much research he has put into Aura, he ultimately can't use multiple Semblances at once.
• Cruel Mercy: The conclusion of Chapter 27 has Jaune mortally injuring Ruby and leaving Yang alive, with him remarking that letting Yang live would likely be far worse than death.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Two in rapid succession. At the docks heist, Yang takes Jaune on directly. With Jaune trying not to kill her, he refuses to use his semblance, resulting in her easily and relentlessly beating him to the ground. However, after Juniper is killed, Jaune decides to go all out, and the resulting battle can't even be called a fight; by the end of it, Weiss and Ruby are knocked out in seconds, Penny is destroyed without getting a single hit in, and Yang is given multiple stab wounds and a hand that's literally split in half.
  • Ozpin gives one to Jaune. After taking away Jaune's gun and having his magic, Jaune is no more than a barely trained fighter who, as Ozpin points out, had gotten to used to Null doing the work for him. Jaune himself admits he was utterly outmatched and only won because Ozpin got distracted.
• Cyanide Pill: Quite a few members of the Government Conspiracy who get caught end up killing themselves to avoid interrogation, and/or possible punishment from the rest.
• Darker and Edgier: This fic is far and away the darkest one Coeur has ever written (with the only possible exception being The Unseen Hunt), and considering that all of his works fall into this category to some degree, this only emphasizes how much darker it is than canon.
• Deal with the Devil: Played with; Cinder makes an offer to Jaune that if she and her crew find and/or rescue Amber, the last of his sisters in captivity, then he'll need to do one or two odd jobs for her to get her to safety. As Chapter 29 reveals, Mercury managed to discover that Beacon were keeping Amber sedated and locked away, much to Jaune's ire.
• Deconstruction Fic:
  • The docks sequence is confirmed to have been one to the What Measure Is a Mook? seen in the show's Volume 1 finale, pointing out that Penny definitely killed lots of White Fang soldiers when she blew up their bullhead, all of whom have loved ones of their own, and yet nobody seems to ever point that out. It's specifically noted later that Penny killed twenty people by shooting down those bullheads, including an innocent woman, and that the debris then killed all of the White Fang's hostages as well.
  • A large amount of chapter 38 is dedicated to deconstructing Blake's character circa-Volume 1, having Jaune explain to her partner Yang that her claim that Adam and the White Fang changed means nothing; despite her apparent misgivings, she only left the Fang a month before Beacon while the Fang has been a terrorist organization for at least multiple years, meaning that the only thing that changed was Blake herself. When Yang tries to counter that people can change, Jaune agrees, then fires back that the proper response to that is to talk to them about it and quietly exit, not abandon them to die at the worst possible moment after convincing them she could still be trusted.
  • The author's note for chapter 39 implies that Team RWBY getting off Scot-free after attacking Chivalric Arms while Jaune is still labeled a mass murderer is a shot at how canon glosses over RWBY's many, many actions that most likely led to other people's deaths, both innocent and Mook. The specific incidents he names are Blake causing insane amounts of property damage in the docks fight, the Paladin fight on the highway, kicking the White Fang off the Mountain Glenn train, and outright staging a coup against Ironwood in Volume 7.
• Deconstructor Fleet: This fic essentially takes all of the tropes often seen in a Clear My Name story and twists them completely on their heads. For a start, Jaune is genuinely guilty of several of the crimes he's accused of, he just has a sympathetic motive. His attempts to be nice to people mean nothing once they recognize him and become sobbing, terrified messes. He has more allies than he knows about (Ironwood being the biggest example), but he has no reason to trust anyone except Adam Taurus (of all people) because there's no way for him to trust anyone in the government. Tons of Good Versus Good conflicts leave everyone involved worse than before in some way or another, and all of this is without mentioning the fact that Jaune's sanity only continues to fall as time goes on.
• Deus ex Machina:
  • Yang keeps having these save her life at the docks once Jaune tries to kill her - Weiss, Ruby, Penny, her mother, Blake, and the Atlas army itself all arrive in order to try to save her life no matter what he tries. Unlike most examples, this is actually acknowledged, with Jaune loudly wondering just what it is that makes this girl so special when no one could care less about his own family; he even refers to Raven as "Ms. Deus Ex Machina".
  • When Ozpin is fighting Jaune, Jaune admits he is outmatched; Ozpin is his superior in every way possible in the fight and is fully ready to kill him. Suddenly, Amber Arc, who had been drugged for weeks with no signs of tampering with her restraints, suddenly gets up, sees Ozpin attacking Jaune, and wounds him, giving Jaune the chance to kill him.
• Deuteragonist: Alongside Jaune trying to protect his family is General Ironwood desperately trying to control the situation from behind the scenes in whatever way he can, sharing control of the narrative with him equally despite not even directly interacting with Jaune until chapter 31.
• Did Not Think This Through: Yang activates Ember Celica while Jaune's knife is still in her hand. The sliding plates catch the knife and push it fully through her hand lengthwise, and a later mental comment implies that her hand is literally split in half.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Jaune is ultimately able to kill Ozpin and Cinder with some help from his sister Amber; Ozpin even seems to believe that this death will be permanent compared to his others.
• Disappeared Dad: The Arc family patriarch, Nicholas, was killed when his wife and children were taken away for experimentation.
• Disaster Dominoes: Once Blake abandons Jaune to die in Vale, things only continue to get worse and worse from there, culminating in the disaster of the docks heist when Juniper is killed by Penny.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Despite being the Big Bad responsible for dragging the entire cast into a violent conspiracy, Matthew Fields is killed at the conclusion of Ruby's kidnapping arc, even before Jaune has rescued all of his sisters. Ozpin, Amber's captor, then becomes the main villain of the story until Amber is rescued.
• Dissonant Serenity:
  • A discussed trope; Roman isn't terrified of Jaune because he kills people easily (although that's certainly part of it), it's because Jaune doesn't show any emotion while doing it.
  Roman: You look like Junior when he's mopping down the bar – like you're just going through the motions and can't be arsed either way. Like it's just a thing you do, like taking a leak or drawing breath. It's fucking terrifying if I can be honest with you. You're terrifying.
  • Ozpin is disturbingly calm and even smiles when he admits to Ironwood that he has been keeping Amber prisoner at Beacon for his own purposes. When he takes his group to the Vault to show her to them, Ironwood notes that he seems more spry than ever, not even pretending to use his cane.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • After 40 chapters of Ironwood being stonewalled and controlled by the Council to do whatever they want, when they try to blame him for Jaune killing Fields, he quickly turns the tables back on them, blaming them for the entire situation and telling them that Atlas now look like incompetent idiots thanks to them. He then petitions to get his full powers back, which the Council quickly grants.
  • After 43 chapters of captivity, Amber Arc manages to get some semblance of revenge against her captors by stabbing Ozpin in the back with the same arrow used to kill Amber Autumn, giving Jaune the distraction he needs to kill him for good.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Team RWBY is confident that Jaune wouldn't be an issue for them because they could use their Semblances to run away if they had to, completely unaware that the reason why he's such a threat is because he can cancel their Semblances.
  • Jaune and Cinder plan to extricate Jaune's remaining sisters from Ironwood's captivity once they have Amber, completely unaware that Ironwood is actually on his side and would likely hand them over if he knew Jaune's plan.
  • Clover doesn't realize that the civilians he encounters in the hotel are Roman, Emerald, and Winter even though it's obvious to the audience as soon as an "orange walking stick" gets mentioned.
  • When Team RWBY opt to transfer out of Beacon for good, they have two academies to choose as their new school, with Atlas Academy being firmly off the table for obvious reasons: Haven or Shade. They choose Shade, and they have no idea that they dodged a bullet because Haven's headmaster Lionheart is presumably still a traitor who's in Salem's pocket, and surely would've delivered the Silver-Eyed Ruby straight to Salem's forces if Team RWBY had fallen under his care.
  • In their argument, Qrow tries to tell Jaune that killing the two huntsmen was wrong; no matter the circumstances, violence shouldn't lead to more violence. The audience knows that out of all of the people Jaune has killed, the two huntsmen were legitimately done in self-defense, and it's pretty much the only scenario in which Jaune was attacked first and truly had no choice if he wanted to live.
• The Dreaded: Jaune very quickly becomes the most terrifying person on Remnant once Atlas starts a smear campaign against him. He actually begins to exploit this as time goes on, gradually realizing that trying to be kind to people means absolutely nothing when they're terrified at the sight of him.

E-N

• Easily Forgiven: Downplayed. Qrow is one of the people sympathetic to Jaune's plight and thanks him for his part in rescuing his niece, even though Jaune also psychologically tortured Qrow's other niece and horribly maimed both nieces earlier (Jaune did so because the girls at the time had just contributed directly to the manslaughter of his mom, but still).
• Enemy Mine:
  • Implied to have happened between Jaune and Ironwood in chapter 33. After some discussion, Jaune angrily demands a deal with Ironwood, and speculates out loud if Winter's worth Ironwood going against orders for. Despite trying to bluff otherwise, Ironwood proves Jaune right when he stops him from killing Winter, and supposedly lets him escape.
  • Happens again from the end of chapter 34 to the middle of chapter 39, this time between Jaune and Ruby's teammates after Chivalric Arms kidnapped Ruby - but only after Weiss mentions to Jaune that Matthew Fields is in Vale and can be dealt with.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Neither Jaune nor Adam take Blake's betrayal of them well. Jaune especially, since she allowed him to believe that he could trust her with his life when he was barely-trained and constantly on the run, and then she intentionally abandoned him to the wolves knowing full-well how bad things could get for him or his family if he wasn't lucky enough or resourceful enough to still find a way to survive.
• Establishing Character Moment: The villainous OC, Chivalric Arms' CEO Matthew Fields, gets one in chapter 29; during a meeting with a Faunus clerk, he goes on a long speech about how all of his work is for the betterment of Atlas, and while his actions may seem immoral on the surface they're for a truly noble goal. He also swears that his research on the "Faunus gene" is simply to help combat the White Fang, not because of prejudice. He offers the clerk a drink, and after the clerk leaves he gets a phone call from the front desk revealing the clerk had a heart attack in the lobby, meaning that Fields used the poison on him. It covers everything about him in one scene - he's surprisingly charming and knows he's the villain of the story, but covers up his ulterior motives with false good intentions that come undone with the innocent people he's willing to kill.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Adam proves himself to have a stronger moral code than his canon counterpart when he allows the Atlas pilot to be spared. While the scientist who wanted to rape Jaune's mother and sister is killed on the spot, the pilot, who genuinely didn't know what was happening, is given a pistol and allowed to walk back to the Kingdom.
  • Roman is a thief with a body count, but he draws the line at killing innocent civilians. Aside from claiming that everyone he has purposefully killed was worse than him, he mentions one specific instance where a woman had a heart attack during one of his robberies and he actually tried to save her life. He's also horrified by what Jaune does to Yang and Ruby and tries his best to get him to stop; some of this can be traced back to pragmatism, but the look on his face suggests genuine disgust.
  • Cinder tells Roman that she's upset by the news of Juniper's death and that Emerald and Mercury will similarly be saddened by her death. Roman is shocked that she sounds surprisingly genuine as she says it.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Even Adam, who hates humans, shows genuine sympathy towards Jaune for the experiments done to him. The same goes with Ilia, Yuma, and Trifa, who followed him in canon over similar views.
  • Even though it means that Ironwood has to negotiate with Jaune, he still refuses to let Jaune kill Winter and begs him to not go through with it. Based on Jaune's reaction, he was counting on that exact scenario happening.
  • Qrow, Glynda, and Ironwood are all disgusted by Ozpin keeping Amber Arc hostage and implying that he no longer values Ruby's life now that he sees her as inconsequential to defeating Salem. Qrow outright quits on the spot, and Ironwood ends up going behind Ozpin's back to get word of the situation to Blake.
  • Even at his absolute worst, Jaune still feels uncomfortable going along with Cinder's plan to bring the Grimm into Beacon Academy's campus. He still goes along with it because the students are Huntsmen anyway, so they should be fine, but it's the thought that counts. He also ends up horrified when he realizes that Ozpin is willing to bring Beacon Academy down on their heads and sees just how insane he has become, and he's also disgusted by the "monster" that Ironwood becomes under the usage of his Semblance.
• Evil All Along: As revealed in the last scene, Admiral Sol, seemingly the councilor most supportive of Ironwood's investigation was in on the whole plot from the start.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Chivalric Arms is riddled with scientists that fit the description, and Matthew Fields, the company's leader, also qualifies. Amongst other things, they aim to aid law enforcement against Aura-using criminals by reverse-engineering Jaune's Semblance, have developed a compound that sterilises Faunus and are also looking into a way of manufacturing injectable Semblances to improve survival rates for civilians and augmenting Huntsmen's capabilities by combining Semblances.
• Exact Words: When handing over Juniper Arc, Cinder disagrees with using the word "trade" because it implies they'll hold her prisoner until they receive the Paladin. Instead, she's willingly handing her over and hoping that Jaune will return the favor.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Ironwood notes that if Adam left the conspiracy's base untouched to test how Ironwood publicly reacts, then he's screwed either way. If he goes public, the Atlas Council will bring the hammer down on him and it might cost him his job. If he stays silent, the Fang will think he's trying to cover it up and consider him an enemy. He ends up staying silent, and that silence kills Jaune's trust in him for the rest of the story.
• Faking the Dead: Knowing that he's gone way too far and there's no way he can return to civilization, Jaune, Neo, and Ironwood fake Jaune's death so they can work together to continue working on destroying Chivalric Arms from behind the scenes while ensuring that no one knows that Null is still around.
• Family of Choice: Jaune comes to consider Neopolitan as an honorary eighth sister due to their shared love for his mother.
• Fan Disservice: While raiding a Chivalric Arms base, Jaune and Roman open a cell to find a naked woman. However, considering that the woman was clearly tortured by CA and that this woman is Neo, who looks like a teenager at the oldest, both of them are more disgusted than anything; in fact, the first thing that Roman does is cover her with his jacket.
• Faux Affably Evil: Matthew Fields. He talks like he genuinely believes what he's doing is right (and his inner monologues reflect this) and talks to a recently captured Ruby as an equal, all while leading a conspiracy that has led to hundreds of deaths, the destruction of a completely innocent family, and the extinction of an entire race had he gotten his way.
• Final Battle: Chapter 43 ends just before the start of a fight to the death between Jaune and Ironwood.
• Foreshadowing: Given how ruthless Jaune is in this continuity, it's rather noticeable that in his battle with James Ironwood, he never goes for kill shots despite having multiple opportunities. That's because he's faking the fight for the cameras that are present, and is simply waiting for the right moment to activate his own Semblance, return James to his normal self, and execute their plan to fake his death.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • When Blake disappears with Jaune in tow, Adam and the Fang spend a few extra days trying to find him. As a result, Cinder doesn't recruit him as early as she did in canon, leaving her in Mistral when Ruby and Goodwitch confront (and subsequently arrest) Roman Torchwick.
  • The drastically different circumstances of the docks heist means that Sun Wukong doesn't get involved at all.
• Frame-Up: Happens to Jaune throughout the story, with regards to murders. While he does kill numerous people, most of the deaths he's been blamed for were actually committed by Chivalric Arms to fuel their smear campaign against him. Eventually, Cinder alters her plan for Beacon, by making Chivalric Arms attack the school, then having her allies attack them and break Amber Arc free in the chaos.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Deconstructed. A major theme is how Jaune is genuinely guilty of many crimes, but there are deep underlying reasons that the good guys are unaware of or ignore.
• The Ghost: Salem never makes a physical appearance, but once Ozpin enters the narrative, her influence begins to spread itself as he willingly sacrifices his morality in order to turn Amber into a Child Soldier to kill her once and for all.
• Good Versus Good: Thanks to Jaune's Hero with Bad Publicity status, he's often confronted with others who genuinely believe that he's a monster that needs to be stopped without knowing that he's a victim. For various reasons, these encounters only continue to make the situation worse for everyone.
  • The two huntsmen who try to arrest him and Blake get themselves killed because Atlas refuses to publicly reveal what Jaune's Semblance is. Qrow and Winter take this pretty badly (respectively because Qrow was trying to help him and Atlas is partially at fault), but no one takes it worse than Jaune himself, who tried everything in his power to get the situation to resolve peacefully and only resorted to murder when they wouldn't back down.
  • Glynda leads with threats of arrest from her bullhead, leading to him dropping a crane on her ship to make it crash. By the end, Glynda is hospitalized, Ozpin and Qrow are forced to go on the warpath against him, and Jaune is just so tired of all of it that he genuinely considers killing the next hostage he takes just to cover his own tracks.
  • The harshest example of this is the battle at the docks, when Team RW_Y and Penny face him during the dust heist. They may be genuinely trying to arrest who they believe to be a serial killer, but in the end their lack of planning leads to them refusing to hear Jaune out, beating him up, and then killing his mother before they realize what they're doing. In response to this Jaune knocks out Weiss, destroys Penny, brutalizes Yang and attempts to execute Ruby.
  • Then in chapter 43's last scene, we see Jaune and Ironwood squaring off after the attack on Beacon gets called off.
• Government Conspiracy: The ones who kidnapped Jaune and his family are deeply entrenched in the Atlas government, even being able to get under Ironwood's watch.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Even though Matthew Fields takes the Big Bad centerstage for the fic, the shadow of Salem still looms over all of it, especially once Ozpin enters the narrative.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Part of the reason why Jaune goes ballistic during his fight with Yang is that he's jealous of how probability itself seems to bend over backwards to keep her alive while everything he does to save his family only makes his situation worse.
  • It happens again in Chapter 39. Jaune is happy at first for avenging his mother and father, but when the news mentions him as still on the loose and dangerous, while RWBY is celebrated as heroes, he becomes angered that he's still seen as a monster, despite the fact that he did this for his revenge, not to be praised. Cinder uses this to her advantage to manipulate him before the attack on Beacon.
• Gut Punch:
  • Chapter 26 ends with Juniper Arc being murdered when her bullhead is shot down during the docks heist. Even worse, Penny, Ruby, Yang, and Weiss, four of the show's heroes, are the ones responsible for it.
  • The following chapter manages to top that; after a berserk Jaune destroys Penny and beats Yang to an inch of her life, he then shoots Ruby despite Blake, Yang and even Roman all pleading for him not to.
  • Chapter 29 then reveals that Amber was captured by Beacon Academy after her ship crashed, and all of the evidence points to them keeping her in a coma for reasons unknown.
  • Chapter 35 reveals that not only is Penny functioning again, but she's still under CA's control, meaning that she's still being brainwashed to help the conspiracy and Pietro is most likely a part of it.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: After Penny turns on Chivalric and saves Ruby, Jaune unceremoniously kills her again for the sake of revenge for his murdered mother.
• Hero Antagonist: Ironwood wants to help Jaune, and his actions prove it. He rescues one of the Arc sisters and places another (Saphron, along with her wife Terra and son Adrian) under his protection. He is one of the few on the right side of the law who sees him as a victim of circumstance, capable of being saved and redeemed. Unfortunately, Jaune sees no reason to trust anyone from Atlas after what he's been through.
• He Who Fights Monsters: What Jaune is ultimately becoming as he constantly faces morally bad decisions to Chivalric Arms to the point where he willingly joins Cinder's plans to attack Beacon to save his sister. He's aware Cinder is a bad person, yet joins her under the excuse of saving his sister. It's pointed out that Jaune is becoming no better than the very people he fought.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Jaune becomes this after security footage of him assisting the White Fang is shown to the public.
• Hidden Depths: Roman shows surprising expertise in the way people emotionally handle stressful situations, using this knowledge to explain why Jaune's mother would be able to find comfort in protecting Neo while they were both imprisoned.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Ironwood gets resisted at every turn in his investigations against Chivalric Arms by the Council throughout the work, eventually getting banned from doing it. So his hands are oh-so-conveniently tied when Jaune attacks CA and manages to kill Matthew Fields with team RWBY's help, and Winter's instructed to tell the Council as much.
  • Ozpin is so obsessed with Amber Arc's power to kill Salem that it has effecitvly cost him all his allies, his friends, and Ruby and her eyes; everyone who knows what's going on has abandoned him out of disgust, leaving him all but completely alone.
  • At the end of the story, Sol gloats that the Council was complicit in plotting Ironwood's murder ... right before he shoots an illusion of Ironwood, then gets mortally wounded by Jaune. As a result, Ironwood tells a dying Sol that he and Jaune will kill the rest of the Council for their crimes.
• Hope Spot: By Chapter 26, only Amber remains in captivity, and Jaune had made a plan to expatriate his mother to Menagerie during the dock heist. Then Penny and three fourths of team RWBY show up, and the former destroys the Bullhead that Jaune's mother was on, killing her instantly. Needless to say, it all goes to hell from there.
• Horrifying the Horror:
  • As chapter 36 reveals, Matthew Fields managed to inject himself with hundreds of Semblances, using's Jaune's own to help balance them and prevent him from being torn apart. Jaune is appropriately shocked to discover this.
  • Ironwood notes in chapter 44 that Ozpin's final death might've actually managed to spook Salem into ceasing her activities.
• Hypocrite:
  • Blake constantly preaches Thou Shall Not Kill and the value of taking responsibility for your actions, but she also abandons Jaune to die in Vale the first chance she gets and tries to blame the White Fang for it. She also gets hit with this after she teams back up with Jaune, who notes that she's perfectly fine killing someone to save her leader while denouncing him killing to protect his sisters.
  • Ozpin tells Ironwood that violence shouldn't be met with violence, then turns around and supports the official motion that Jaune be killed on sight.
  • Matthew Fields genuinely believes that human-Faunus racism is nothing more than a pathetic waste of time that needs to be solved, and his solution to this is to exterminate the Faunus race.
  • Emerald mentally draws a distinction in her mind between Jaune and Cinder by saying that Cinder only kills those she has to while Jaune kills "everyone", seemingly not knowing or not caring that Cinder's plan is literally to kill everyone.
• Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress: Jaune cancels Ruby's Semblance as she's using it, causing her to pitch forward and collide with the ground face and chest first. The impact is so bad it instantly takes her out of the fight.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • Blake still leaves the Fang during the train heist, taking Jaune with her.
  • Despite the large amounts of changes to Blake's backstory and Jaune's absence from the Beacon Initiation, Team RWBY's lineup remains unaffected. Word of God also confirmed that Pyrrha, Nora, and Ren are still on the same team.
  • Blake's teammates discovering her secret as both a Faunus and a White Fang defector is still intrinsically linked to a stand-off at the docks involving Team RWBY, Torchwick and the White Fang.
  • Beacon is still attacked by Adam's and Cinder's forces, and though the circumstances end up very different, Ozpin and Amber Autumn (the Fall Maiden) still die in Beacon's basement during the attack.
• In the Back: How Cinder gets taken out, courtesy of Jaune.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Chapter 32 has Ironwood and Matthew Fields both learning that Ozpin is holding Amber Arc hostage. Chapter 33 then has Glynda and Qrow hearing it from Ozpin's own mouth, and then Chapter 34 has Weiss, Yang, and Blake hearing it from Jaune.
  • Chapter 42 has Jaune, and Cinder learning what Amber Arc's semblance is while trying to rescue her and gain the powers of the fall maiden respectively.
• Ironic Name: An arms company calling itself "Chivalric" kidnaps and murders hundreds of innocent civilians, including children, while committing human rights violations on par with the worst concentration camps of 20th century Earth.
• Irony:
  • Because people who have Null used on them don't lose any aura, just access to it, those hurt by Jaune when affected recover faster if they survive the actual fight.
  • After what happened at the docks, Ruby, the one Jaune directly harmed the most, is the only one to show him any sympathy.
  • At the end of Chapter 32, Ruby gets captured by Chivalric Arms in order for them to experiment on her, meaning that Yang, the person who refused to show Jaune any sympathy for his plight or the pain of his sisters, is now in the exact same position as him.
• It's All My Fault: Deconstructed. When Blake begins to blame herself for Jaune hospitalizing the rest of her team at the docks, Ironwood tells her that not only is it not her fault, but to somehow turn the situation around in her head to make it her own fault is selfish; if she truly feels guilty, she should spend her time helping her team get better instead of wallowing in self-pity and forcing her team to pick her up instead.
• It's Personal:
  • Ironwood and Clover notice that Ozpin reacts to Ruby's hospitalization (not the rest of her team, just her) with a distressingly personal worry.
  • With Beacon having trained the team that killed his mother, kidnapped his sister, and put her back into a coma, Jaune's enmity with them has now become very personal.
  • Notably averted with Winter. Despite Jaune hospitalizing Weiss and nearly killing the rest of her team, Winter refuses to let this cloud her judgement and still advocates for him to be brought in peacefully.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Adam is an unrepentant murderer, but when he advocates killing the Atlas soldiers they capture, he has a solid leg to stand on; leaving them in the woods would get them killed anyway, there's no nearby villages to leave them in, and delivering them to Atlas would just get the Fang killed instead (and it's not as though they're just going to renounce their ways as soon as they're safe). When Blake tries to bring up the fact that Fang prisoners Atlas has would be mistreated if they killed them, Adam counters that they already mistreat their Faunus prisoners and points to his branded eye. He ends up accepting a compromise - while the scientist who was planning on raping Juniper and Coral is executed, the pilot who genuinely didn't know what was happening is given a pistol and allowed to walk back to Atlas.
  • Winter notes that, even though Weiss was being entitled when she complained about Ruby being the team leader, her complaints were still valid; Ruby missed two years of her education, meaning that she would have a large amount of material to catch up on in addition to not having the full leadership training she would've received in that time. Ironwood himself then comes to realize that when she already had two full years of extra material to do, adding that much extra stress onto her reeks of manipulation.
  • Sol is unnecessarily rude when he says that Sable is a rambling and traumatized girl, but beneath the jerkass personality his points are still accurate; of course Sable is always going to side with her brother over the government (even if his assertion that they're "working" together isn't accurate), and if Ironwood is correct that she's so traumatized that she shouldn't be in court, then no one will take anything she has to say seriously.
  • Jaune may be predisposed to despise everything that Blake does during their team-up, but that doesn't change the fact that he's objectively correct in everything he says about them. It gets to the point where even her own partner Yang can't outright disagree with him. Additionally, as harsh as his Kill on Sight methods are, he is also correct that just leaving the enemies unconscious allows them to ambush them or call for backup as soon as they wake back up.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope:
  • Blake, ironically, takes a major dive off the slope when she's trying to scramble back up from the slope amidst her defection. After leaving Adam, Blake takes Jaune's scroll and she deliberately abandons Jaune (who's had no experience fending for himself and is the target of an active international manhunt) to the wolves in the middle of Vale before he's cottoned on to her defection. She does this despite Jaune trusting her; knowing full well who he is and what fate he, his mother and his still-missing sisters will be consigned to if he's arrested and delivered back to Chivalric Arms. Unsurprisingly, Jaune has absolutely no intention of reconciling with Blake, much less forgiving her.
  • Following his mother's death by manslaughter due to Team RWBY and a brainwashed Penny's actions, Jaune decides that he might as well become the monster everyone seems to want him to be. He starts by all but killing Yang, destroying Penny, and upon learning that Ruby is Yang's sister, he makes Yang watch as he shoots her multiple times just so she will understand the pain that they've caused him.
  • The Post-Final Boss Ozpin, of all people, has taken a major dive off the slope after they clandestinely captured one of Jaune's missing sisters, Amber Arc. Seeing the potential in Amber's Semblance to cancel out Salem's immortality and bring the eternal war against her to a final end, Ozpin kidnapped Amber and kept her in an induced coma, and he's become so obsessively hyper-focused on this new recourse that he stops giving two shits about everyone else who trusted him and called him friend — not even lifting a finger to save Ruby from a lifetime of unspeakable torture at Chivalric Arms' hands — and he's willing to let Jaune Arc die unavenged so he can manipulate Amber's grief and mold her into a weapon against Salem.
• Kangaroo Court:
  • A rare inverted example. When Chivalric Arms' CEO is called in for an inquiry, it's obvious from the very beginning that no one has any intention of even pretending to be serious about it. Ironwood is the only person in the room who attempts to ask hard-hitting questions, while everyone else simply let him walk out unimpeded.
  • After Jaune's rampage at the docks, the council decides to ignore every single piece of evidence suggesting that Penny initiated the conflict and instead decide that it was all a freak accident, laying the blame entirely at Jaune's feet and sentencing him to death. Rather distressingly, Ozpin himself agrees with the decision.
• Kick the Dog: After all of the effort that Jaune put in to exposing Chivalric Arms and killing Matthew Fields, which includes having to work with Team RWBY (the team that killed his mother), the Atlas Council deliberately suppresses his involvement and gives Team RWBY full credit for exposing the Conspiracy.
• Kidnapped for Experimentation: The inciting incident of the plot is that Jaune, his mother, and all his sisters are kidnapped by a malignant Atlesian conspiracy and inhumanely experimented on with the aim of replicating Jaune's Power Nullifier Semblance, with the conspiracy intending to terminate Jaune and each of his relatives the second they're no longer useful. It's also made clear that the conspiracy has already inflicted the same fate on other innocent people who had Semblances that caught their interest, racking up a body count in the hundreds.
• Kill Me Now, or Forever Stay Your Hand: A rare example where "me" isn't the one in danger - fed up with Yang and her team complaining about his ruthless methods, Jaune finally gives Yang one of the still-living CA soldiers and tells her that if she really is dedicated to saving her sister, then she has to be willing to kill this man. It takes some time and she cries afterwards, but she ultimately snaps the soldier's neck.
• Kill the God: In this case, an evil witch, as Ozpin plans on using Amber Arc for.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • Juniper Arc. The author preemptively stepped in to confirm that they truly were dead, with no kinds of tricks or Semblances keeping them alive. Just to rub it in, in the next chapter, Jaune asks Neo if she somehow managed to survive, only for Neo to sadly confirm that she did not.
  • Penny's second death at Jaune's hands will be her last - Ironwood confirms to Ruby that, with Pietro having gone mad with grief and regret, unable to use his Semblance, and enraged at her betrayal, she will all but certainly never be rebuilt.
  • In chapter 43, both Cinder and Ozpin bite the dust, courtesy of Jaune. Ozpin even seems to think that Amber's Semblance will make it permanent this time.
• Knight Templar: Chivalric Arms and the Atlesian Government Conspiracy believe that promoting their own interpretation of Atlesian ideals and enforcing their idea of world security is worth committing any and all ethics and human rights violations under the sun: kidnapping, inhumanely caging and brutally experimenting on hundreds of civilians to further their research into Semblances before they murder them, planning to sterilize the Faunus population into extinction, and killing anyone else who's in the wrong place at the wrong time to cover their tracks.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • After Ruby, Yang, and Penny all contribute to his mother's death at the docks (Yang by holding him down, Ruby by ordering it, and Penny by pulling the trigger), Jaune destroys Penny outright, absolutely brutalizes Yang, and forces Yang to helplessly watch as he shoots Ruby multiple times with full intent to kill the latter. By contrast, Weiss, whose biggest crime was being present and on the same team as Yang and Ruby, gets off comparatively easy, simply getting taken out of the battle with burns and throat injuries.
  • In Chapter 32, Blake explains to team RW_Y about her past and how they rescued Jaune from a lab experimenting on him. Yang and Weiss still deny any sympathy for him and Yang doesn't express any remorse for his mother and sisters getting experimented on. By the end of the chapter, Chivalric Arms has captured Ruby to experiment on her, meaning Yang is now in the exact same position Jaune is in.
• Laughing Mad: After everything he has been through, Blake showing up out of nowhere to save Yang's life makes Jaune so angry that he starts laughing instead. Additionally, Blake, Yang, and Weiss coming to him for an alliance makes him laugh his ass off, even when he takes a moment to get a shot off and stop them from getting closer.
  Jaune: This is so fucking stupid that it's funny.
• The Law of Diminishing Defensive Effort: Deconstructed. Yang's reliance on her Semblance taking damage for her allows Jaune to stab her in the hand when she tries to deflect it with aura. How easily she is injured afterwards also shows how it has degraded her defensive fighting capability.
• Line-of-Sight Name: When Neo refuses to give herself a name, Roman takes one look at the ice cream she's eating and names her Neopolitan. Jaune finds it stupid, but Neo herself accepts it immediately.
• Logical Weakness: Jaune's Semblance may be incredibly powerful, but it's used with a refreshing degree of realism.
  • Since Jaune's Semblance only effects people with souls and Aura, the conspiracy sends robots, which are unaffected by it, after him.
  • Jaune's Semblance nullifies all aura around him. This includes his own, which people who know about this weakness take advantage of every chance they can.
  • Penny's mind and personality, and with it her skills and greater motor control, comes from her aura, meaning that when Jaune activates his Semblance near her, she's left as a machine with no combat skill.
  • Null nullifies aura, but doesn't harm it. Team RW_Y are noted by a doctor to be more likely to survive because most who receive injuries like theirs have had their aura drained, but RW_Y were given their aura and its healing back when Null stopped. So, people injured by Jaune using Null on them are actually more likely to survive if they can just survive the actual fight.
• Manchurian Agent: Penny is revealed to have been programmed by Chivalric Arms to attempt to apprehend Jaune on sight as shown when she sees him in person. It is implied by how the programming completely takes over her mind that she is closer to a machine than a true person like in canon.
• Master of None: Despite having access to myriad Semblances, Fields has much less experience and expertise with them than the original owners.
• May It Never Happen Again: Steps are taken in the fic's ending to prevent the Government Conspiracy's atrocities from restarting. After Matthew Fields, who has been spearheading Atlas' evil Government Conspiracy and set off the entire plot, is killed, the final chapter reveals that Ironwood is now working from the shadows with Neo and Jaune to kill off and purge all the surviving elements of the conspiracy who have escaped exposure, explicitly preventing Fields' co-conspirators from promptly reviving his work and picking up where he left off.
• Meaningful Rename: After Blake abandons him, Jaune begins referring to himself as Null to others.
• Mook Horror Show: Jaune causes one at the hotel with Chivalric Arms' special forces that apparently manages to leave blood all over the walls and horrifies Roman and Emerald. She explicitly compares it to a horror movie.
• Morality Pet: Juniper serves as one for Jaune. While he's fighting to protect his whole family, the idea that his mother will be disappointed in him for what he's done to rescue them terrifies him to his core and helps keep him on the straight and narrow path (as much as is possible for him, that is). This backfires in the worst possible way when Juniper's killed at the docks; her death all but erases his moral center and he goes on a vengeance fueled torture spree.
• Moral Myopia:
  • Ironwood notes that Ozpin is hugely skewing the events at the docks in RWBY's favor in order to protect his "pet project", even going so far as to wonder if he'd care as much if it was any other team. To summarize: Ruby, Weiss, and Yang helping Penny kill over 20 innocent people? Accidents happen. The son of one of those innocent people wanting revenge and taking it? Jaune is clearly Beyond Redemption.
  • Yang, as part of her Never My Fault attitude, does award-winning mental gymnastics to deflect the blame from herself. Jaune shooting Ruby and potentially crippling her? He is a monster and needs to die. The fact that she beat him up and then held him down as Penny murdered his mother in front of him (which is why he went so crazy in the first place)? He deserved to lose her because of what he did to Ruby.
  • Subverted when Ozpin reveals that he has Amber Arc and what her Semblance is. He views his cause as just enough to justify what he is doing, but does nothing to claim that his direct actions are anything other than unforgivable.
  • Team RWBY as a whole then fall into this after Jaune kills Penny. They're outraged at him for killing her, calling him a monster and saying that she redeemed herself, but he incredulously points out that she murdered his mother right in front of him; no matter how much good she could do to them, that doesn't make her "redeemed".
  • Cinder, as per usual, manages to somehow pin the blame on Jaune when the Maiden powers are destroyed, as though either Amber Arc or Jaune himself have any control over the current situation. Ozpin, of all people, ends up calling her out on this.
• Mundane Solution:
  • The quasi-immortal Professor Ozpin is finally killed once and for all by having his body shoved into a nest of broken glass.
  • Ironwood very quickly turns the tables on Jaune in a very simple manner; as soon as Jaune's weapons are gone, Ironwood just grabs him by the throat and shoots him repeatedly at point blank range.
• The Needs of the Many: Atlas pushes this in attempt to curtail Ironwood's investigation, claiming justice for a single family isn't worth alienating one of their top weapons manufacturers and the huge scandal, loss of face and rise in negativity should the existence of the experiments ever be made public.
• Never My Fault: Seems to be something of a theme for multiple characters.
  • Jaune refuses to accept any culpability for the multiple murders he has either committed or helped to commit, putting all of the blame at Atlas's feet. Unlike most examples, his reasoning is legitimate (the two huntsmen wouldn't have gone after him if they knew his semblance and the rest of the victims genuinely deserve it) but it's still 100% clear that he's trying to justify his actions in his own head more than anything else.
  • Blake tries to blame the White Fang for her abandoning Jaune in Vale, to which she gets called out at length for her hypocrisy and selfishness.
  • Yang tries to justify Penny blowing up the bullhead at the docks by swearing that they didn't know what was on it, even though she didn't care who was on it until Jaune started kicking her ass. She even internally blames Penny for rushing into the situation even though they all could have easily left it alone. While recovering from the damage, Yang blames literally everyone but herself for what happened, going so far as to be glad that Penny and Juniper are dead. To her credit, Weiss repeatedly shouts Yang down when she takes shots at Blake, and admits the team should never have broken the curfew in the first place - she even shoulders some of the blame for getting worked up over the curfew.
  • Pietro Polendina, despite knowing of both Chivalric Arms' involvement in the Penny Project and their intentions regarding Jaune, does not inform Ironwood of this massive security breach, allowing Penny free access to Vale. This ultimately gets her hijacked by them later on at the docks, resulting in the death of Juniper Arc and 20 other people. He tries to justify himself by saying that Jaune and his mother were technically criminals and that he had to protect Penny. Ironwood counters that he would have restrained Penny to the ship, not decommission her, and that he turned his innocent daughter into a murderer who nearly got her friends killed.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The actions of Team RWBY, Penny, and Ozpin's group have effectively destroyed any chance of Jaune joining them and have instead pushed him into allying with their enemies, like Roman Torchwick and Cinder Fall:
  • First, Blake abandons him in Vale while he is one of the most wanted men on Remnant, effectively leaving him to die.
  • Second, Glynda attempts to outright arrest him from a bullhead instead of talking him down, leading to him taking her ship down and further sinking in morality.
  • Third, Team RW_Y and Penny unwittingly caused the death of his mother, and when the entire kingdom seems to stop him from getting his vengeance he completely snaps.
  • Meanwhile, Ironwood taking Saphron and her family into custody have convinced Jaune that he is a member of the conspiracy, so he has no reason to trust one of his only allies (and their affiliation with Atlas means that both Ironwood and Winter seem guilty to him no matter what they try).
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Cinder's attack on Beacon Academy ends up completely complicating Salem's current plans due to Ozpin's machinations - by trying to claim the Fall Maiden's powers within the range of Amber Arc's Semblance, the powers disappear into nothingness, meaning there's no way to access the Relic of Choice and ensuring that the Brother Gods will never return to Remnant.
• Nice Mean And In Between:
  • Ironwood's three strongest allies, Qrow, Glynda, and Ozpin. In an interesting twist, by Chapter 34 the roles are completely reversed from how they would've started:
    • Nice: Qrow. While he is abrasive and never gets along with James, he has an incredibly strong moral compass that even James can't deny, and when he learns that Ozpin has Amber hostage, he outright quits, going rogue to ensure that he can find and rescue his niece.
    • Mean: Ozpin. The normally very genial man turns out to be so desperate to defeat Salem that he's willing to tear the Arc family apart to do it, openly calling for Jaune's death just to ensure that no one else can have Amber. Knowing full well that Ruby has been captured for her eyes and will be tortured in the process, he makes it clear that he doesn't care as long as he keeps Amber.
    • In-between: Glynda. While she's disgusted by what Ozpin did, she still tries to justify and understand it instead of condemning it, even comparing his actions to Ironwood fighting wars with soldiers and reasoning that Ozpin's plan would stop Remnant from having to train children from the age of ten to fight Grimm. It's clear that she's grasping at straws, but she seems to be genuinely attempting to rationalize it.
  • Additionally, there's Ironwood himself:
    • Nice: Ironwood without his Semblance. Without Mettle clouding his thoughts, Ironwood is a resolute yet ultimately compassionate man, willing to do what's right regardless of what the laws say.
    • Mean: Ironwood with his Semblance. With Mettle turned on, Ironwood becomes a cold, unfeeling monster (in his own words) who cares for nothing but his own self-advancement and power. Willing to do absolutely anything in the name of Atlas, Ironwood is always deeply scared of what he could've done when his Semblance deactivates.
    • In-between: Ironwood with Jaune by his side. With his Semblance giving him ideas but Jaune being present to stop it from going too far, James is able to strike a balance between his compassion and ruthlessness to make him the most balance leader possible.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Deconstructed. Jaune continues to try to resolve things peacefully whenever he can, and all of these efforts coming back to make things worse for him is a large contributor to his Sanity Slippage.
  • Jaune tries his absolute best to get the two huntsmen to leave him alone, swearing up and down that he's innocent, but when they not only refuse to believe him but inform him that they're taking him back to Atlas, he's forced to shoot them both dead. It's the first time he kills someone who isn't associated with the conspiracy.
  • Jaune spares the first hostage he takes in Vale, to which the man repays him by reporting him to the police and starting a manhunt against him. After this incident, it takes some severe thinking for him to not murder every hostage he takes when he's done with them.
  • During his second hostage situation, Jaune does everything he can to get the hostage to get him what he wants without killing the innocent man. The second he's out of Jaune's sight, Chivalric Arms' men arrive and execute him instead.
  • Jaune attempts to hold back during his battle with Yang at the docks. He's repaid for this mercy by getting the absolute shit beat out of him and then Yang prevents him from stopping Penny from murdering his mother. It's also mentioned later that the hostages he and the White Fang took were killed by the debris when Penny destroyed the bullheads, meaning his attempt to spare everyone ended up meaning nothing anyway.
  • At the hotel, Jaune attempts to spare the hotelier, even swearing that as soon as Jaune's out of the elevator then he can go home alive. As soon as the elevator doors open, CA's forces gun him down, making Jaune snap and brutally murder all of them.
• Nominal Hero: Jaune just wants to rescue his sisters and get everyone to safety - he couldn't care less about Chivalric Arms' conspiracy (at first), nor about anyone else he comes across.
• No Sympathy:
  • Jaune has absolutely no sympathy for the receptionist at the hotel after she starts crying, primarily because he's just so damn tired of everything but also because after having to listen to his sisters crying after learning about their mother's death, her crying means nothing to him.
  • Neither Weiss nor Yang have any sympathy for Jaune, even after discovering the truth about his and his family's horrible plight. Though after they're forced to join forces with Jaune to save Ruby from the same people who have kidnapped, tortured and hunted the Arcs, Yang at least comes to realize after killing someone to that end that she could become just like Jaune if she'd had as much extra push as he's already had.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Chapter 35 has Jaune realizing that Yang, Weiss, and Blake could easily be pushed to become just like the monster they think he is, just as he used to be as innocent and idealistic as they are.
  • Played with in Chapter 41; Jaune reflects on when he forced Yang to kill someone, realizing now that he was just trying to make himself feel better by brining her down to his level and expressing his confusion that she can just go home after killing someone. Adam comforts him by telling him that, as long as he steps back from this life once he's finally done, he can do the same thing she did, and even says that he has thought about becoming a Huntsman once he has achieved his goal.
  • In chapter 43, Ironwood ends up describing himself as very similar to both Fields and Ozpin, describing how he used his own Semblance to climb up the ranks without considering the lives he was destroying in the process. He goes so far as to say that while Fields and Ozpin were horrible, they at least had good goals for the whole of Remnant, while James himself had nothing but self-advancement on his mind; in his eyes, that makes him even worse than the others.
• Not So Similar: In Chapter 34, Glynda tries to compare Ironwood and Ozpin by noting that they're both fighting a war and need soldiers for that war. Considering that Ozpin has just revealed to them that he has taken a fifteen year old girl hostage and has no intention of releasing her (even in exchange for Ruby's life), Ironwood takes offense to the comparison:
  Ironwood: The difference is that I do not force anyone to fight. I do not steal them away from their families, orchestrate the death of their siblings and then try to bend them to my will. I do not see people as weapons, Glynda.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Chivalric Arms and the attached Government Conspiracy insist that their crimes — which include kidnappings and human rights-violating experimentation — are aimed towards making the world more secure against threats from the Grimm and criminals, by making the most useful and specialized Semblances as transferable as weaponry for the appropriate authorities' usage. In practice, however, they've only shown themselves to be interested in applying their Semblance augmentations to those among their own conspirators who happen to be elite Atlesians. Chivalric CEO Matthew Fields seems to honestly believe to himself that the human-Faunus Fantastic Racism is both a stupid way of thinking, and a serious problem in its own right that needs to be addressed... and his solution is to wipe Faunus off the face of Remnant via forced sterilization with a hidden drug. All in all, the conspiracy's actions are geared less towards genuinely benefitting the world at large, and more towards perpetuating the less savory sides of Atlesian ideals^note scientific progress to the point of technological singularity, elitism, chauvinistic nationalism and supremacy, and anti-Faunus rhetoric on the entire world to their most logical extreme. Even Ozpin, who reveals himself to be a much viler Well-Intentioned Extremist than in canon, subsequently expresses disgust at the sheer lengths that the conspiracy went to for a very warped vision.
• Not What I Signed Up For:
  • The pilot of the Bullhead that attempted to take Coral away surrenders quietly and reveals that he had been enlisted very recently under the assumption of the facility doing proper medical research. Seeing Coral dashed that deception so he surrendered. Jaune vouches for him to be spared because of this.
    • This gets brought up again when the scientist in CA's compound swears she and many others were forced into the conspiracy. While Blake is inclined to believe her on principle, Jaune reminds her that they have no evidence that she's telling the truth, and that if anything she'd be inclined to lie in an attempt to get them to spare her life. They spare her anyway, but only because she agrees to testify if they can keep her alive.
  • Qrow quits Ozpin's group after he realizes that Ozpin has no intention of finding his niece, saying that he joined him to get away from the tribe and now realizes that Ozpin is actually worse.

O-Y

• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Atlas Council stonewall Ironwood's investigation, ignore any of his findings in favor of a more convenient narrative, and drag their heels on helping out all the while dumping the blame on Ironwood's feet. This blows up spectacularly in the Council's face when Jaune manages to kill Matthew Fields, and Ironwood's been prevented from so much as monitoring the situation, let alone actually try to capture Jaune.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • The Atlas pilot that Jaune and Adam spare manages to make it back to the kingdom with only a pistol to fight off the Grimm.
  • Cinder, Mercury, and Emerald manage to find and secure Juniper Arc from Chivalric Arms without Atlas or Jaune finding out about it. They also manage to find Amber's location within a day, something that Ironwood has yet to manage in a much longer amount of time.
  • At the hotel that Chivalric Arms is staying at, Jaune survives their ambush and kills everyone inside without any injury to himself.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • The first sign that Junior gets of how terrifying Jaune is is the fact that Roman's clothes are wrinkled and he has bags under his eyes. The second is when the normally dapper and calm Roman says "fuck" four times in rapid succession.
  • Qrow backs away from Ironwood when instead of getting in a fight with Qrow like he usually does, he simply puts a hand on Qrow's shoulder and gently pushes him out of the way.
• Outgambitted: This happens to Cinder in chapter 42, courtesy of Ozpin using Amber's Semblance to negate all of the Autumn Maiden powers, permanently destroying any chance of the Brother Gods coming to Remnant.
• Out-of-Character Alert: After Fields is killed, Pietro orders Penny (who is claiming she can't harm Ruby due to Fields' orders) to take Ruby hostage and run. Ruby is initially scared, but she notices that Penny, who previously claimed to not know who she was, calls her "friend Ruby" like she did before.
• Papa Wolf: Taiyang wants to hunt down Jaune himself for hurting Ruby. She has to make him promise not to out of fear for his own life.
• Parental Substitute: Juniper served as one to Neo while they were both imprisoned by Chivalric Arms. Roman notes that not only was it probably intentional for the two to grow attached to each other, but that it would have helped Juniper just as much as it would've helped Neo.
• Pet the Dog:
  • The story is kicked off when Adam's White Fang unit conducts a raid on an Atlas facility, find Jaune and Lavender being tortured, and take the time to rescue them despite them being humans.
  • Cinder and co. treat Juniper Arc with as much care as they possibly can - they feed her, clothe her as best they can, and end up turning her over to Jaune with no promise of compensation. A large amount of this is due to pragmatism, but even Jaune notes that if they truly wanted to they could've held her hostage instead.
  • Blake attempts to comfort Jaune after his mother's death, telling him that she was probably just happy to get to spend more time with him before she died. Considering who this is coming from, it gets her a warning shot and a lecture instead of anything positive.
  • Downplayed. When Jaune and Ironwood finally meet face to face, Jaune genuinely thanks him for everything he has attempted to do behind the scenes to protect him, but simultaneously admits that he has no reason to believe anything Ironwood says.
  • When Adam and Jaune see each other again following Chivalric Arms' destruction, Adam quickly realizes that Jaune did not willingly leave the Fang and gives his sincere condolences for his mother's death, even saying that he wishes he could've met her. Jaune is actually moved to tears by this.
  • As revealed in chapter 40, team RWBY actually tried to clear Jaune's name when they spoke to the press after he helped them rescue Ruby, and are just as pissed as Jaune is over how he's being treated by the media. As for team RWBY themselves, Winter's providing Tai a stipend to help fund their stay and Ruby's recovery in his house, and both she and Qrow are protecting them constantly until they take up residence there.
  • In chapter 43, once Jaune recovers Amber after killing Cinder and Ozpin, Ironwood allows Adam to escort Amber to safety.
• Plot Armor: Deconstructed. Jaune manages to even further slip into insanity thanks to all the Dei Ex Machina that keep showing up to save Yang at the docks, showing how unfair and infuriating it is to be a normal person that truly terrible things and loss can happen to while someone else seems outright shielded by the cosmos. He shoots Ruby in order to force Yang to feel loss like he does.
• Power Nullifier:
  • Jaune's Semblance, Null, stops anyone within a certain distance of him from using aura. Because all Huntsmen use Aura to enhance their defenses, the power renders them much more vulnerable.
  • Amber's Semblance negates Dust, the Grimm and even the Brother Gods' magic.
• Pragmatic Hero:
  • When Jaune is confronted by Glynda in a bullhead, he quickly realizes that he has no way of fighting her head on and instead leads her to a nearby construction crane, blows up the foundation, and lets it fall on her bullhead.
  • When Ironwood is backed into a corner and Ozpin proves to be no help, he goes behind the headmaster's back and tells Blake what's going on, allowing her to get in contact with Jaune. Later on, when Jaune invades CA's compound and kills Fields, Ironwood takes advantage of the Council ordering him to not interfere by doing exactly that and refusing to get involved.
  • As of chapter 41, Ironwood plans to let Jaune enter Beacon unchallenged, have Qrow guide him to Amber's location, and let Jaune kill Ozpin and free his sister. Qrow goes along with this plan because at least in this plan, the only likely casualty is Ozpin, who will just come back anyway. It's also confirmed at the end of chapter 43 that Ironwood managed to arrange this with Jaune when the latter was holding Winter hostage.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Roman is not happy about all the murder and bloodshed that ensues while working with Jaune. Mostly because a huge and undeniable bodycount means more scrutiny, and a harsher sentence when caught.
  • Junior mentions that he refuses to enter into the loan shark business because a job like that means everyone you ever screw over wants to stab you in the back as soon as possible.
  • Cinder refuses to try and manipulate Jaune or use his family against him not out of any moral quandaries, but because she doesn't want to risk him turning on her and losing an invaluable ally to her cause.
  • Despite hating their guts, Jaune lets team RWBY walk away unscathed after the team-up with evidence of CA's many wrongdoings in one last attempt to bury the matter.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: This story is essentially taking Jaune from a completely innocent victim who wants his sisters back to a remorseless killer who will do absolutely anything he has to to get what he wants.
• Rage Breaking Point: After continuing to watch the situation deteriorate before his very eyes, all while having the Council threatening to fire him for daring to question them, Ironwood finally snaps when he realizes that Ozpin truly did take Amber hostage, and then has a hostile meeting with the Council that ends with one of his more "supportive" allies threatening to remove Saphron and Sable from his custody unless Jaune is killed. After the meeting finishes, he barges into Ozpin's office, throws his desk to the side of the room, picks the man up by his throat, and then slams him against a wall forcing him to confess.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: As soon as it's revealed that the scientist Adam captures wanted to rape Juniper and Coral to see if the Null semblance could be genetically passed, Jaune orders his execution.

• Reasonable Authority Figure: James Ironwood is the only person in either Atlas or Vale's governments who realizes (or cares) that Jaune is a victim, continually doing whatever he can from behind the scenes to help him bring down Chivalric Arms. As of Chapter 29, he and Ozpin are now on opposite sides of the conflict, with Ozpin suddenly deciding that Jaune needs to die while Ironwood still realizes that, while his actions are unjustifiable, they're still the result of a traumatized victim lashing out in rage instead of a sadistic criminal.
• Redemption Equals Death: Deconstructed: Penny overcomes her bad coding and rescues Ruby, only to be killed by Jaune again when he sees her. Team RWBY declares him a monster and states that she redeemed herself, but Jaune points out that she only redeemed herself to them, not him. To him, she still murdered his mother, and no amount of good could ever wash that away.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • When Jaune realizes he needs a way to contact Vale's White Fang branch, he simply walks into the Vale police station, has the single officer there open Roman's cell, and then walks right back out with him. Ozpin realizes that the police were so focused on capturing him that no one was expecting him to actually go to the police station.
  • When Jaune and Roman stumble on Neopolitan in one of CA's bases, her and Jaune get into a fight; when Neo is about to win, Roman throws his jacket on top of her to cover her up. The act is so random that it confuses them long enough for Jaune to calm them down and stop the fight.
• The Reveal: Chapter 29 reveals that Beacon took Amber after her bullhead crashed.
  • Chapter 34 reveals why; Amber's Semblance not only negates Aura as Jaune's does, but also Dust, the Grimm and even magic. As Ozpin notes, Amber nullifies the powers of the Twin Gods, and is likely the only being on Remnant capable of killing Salem.
• Revenge Before Reason: Rather than take Ruby as a hostage to prevent any authorities from going after them as Roman suggests, Jaune shoots Ruby to get revenge on Yang for killing his mother.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Blake's suspicious behavior combined with Ironwood and Winter taking personal interest in her leads Team RWBY to decide that she must have witnessed one of Jaune's crimes and is traumatized by the experience. She definitely witnessed several of Jaune's crimes - in fact, she was his partner for a lot of them - and she's terrified of him because she knows that he'll kill her if they see each other again.
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: Blake and Adam serve as this for Jaune. While also being foils to one another, they also serve as Jaune's guide through the story.
  • Blake beseeches Jaune to forgive his enemies, even if it possibly leads to his families harm.
  • Adam encourages Jaune to show no mercy to his enemies, and do whatever it takes to complete his 'mission.'
• Sanity Slippage: Jaune's mentality takes a sharp turn downwards after Blake abandons him in Vale. His progressive fall can be seen in how he treats his hostages: the first one he tries not to threaten until he's recognized, the second he leads with the threats, and the third one he genuinely considers killing just to cover his own tracks. After his mother's death, he slips even further, taking a flying leap off the slippery slope and deliberately becoming just as monstrous as the conspiracy's propaganda paints him as.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Roman reveals to Jaune that Raven fled the battle with Neo not long after they separated, unwilling to continue the fight while suffering from a gunshot wound.
  • Having enough of Ozpin and when he refused to even help them at their time of need, Team RWBY decide to leave Beacon and go to Shade Academy; this doubles as a way to avoid Jaune, who's coming to the school for his sister soon. Ozpin himself is surprised when Ironwood tells him this, but very quickly doesn't care.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Averted. After the incident at the docks, Ironwood does not blame Penny, who was hijacked by Chivalric Arms. Instead, he blames Pietro, her creator, for creating the circumstances that resulted in Juniper Arc's death despite knowing better.
• Slave to PR: Combined with Realpolitik is part of why Atlas gives so little interest in uncovering the Government Conspiracy. The negativity and loss of face at Null being exposed would ruin Atlas' reputation, which they see as more important than serving justice for one family. Ironwood disagrees.
• Skyward Scream: Jaune does this when his mother's killed in front of him by Penny.
• Sole Survivor: Saphron Arc is the only member of the family who hasn't been abducted.
• Something Only They Would Say: Ruby notices that Penny calls her "friend Ruby" as she's taking her prisoner even though Penny previously claimed she doesn't remember them meeting.
• The Speechless: Neo is still mute as she is in canon, but in this story it's due to the torture she endured causing brain damage that left her mute. As Juniper Arc puts it:
  They wanted to destroy her mind, and they weren't kind about it. Torture. Electrocution. Suffocation. I remember hearing her screams, Jaune, until one day… one day she didn't scream anymore.
• Spotting the Thread: Chapter 32 shows Blake discovering that not only was Ruby not meant to lose the use of her body apart from her legs (and even then, only temporarily instead of permanently), but her doctor didn't order another X-ray. Unfortunately, Blake is too late to prevent Chivalric Arms from kidnapping Ruby (presumably with the aim of harnessing the power of her eyes).
• Story-Breaker Power: Jaune’s power to nullify Aura is the impetus for the entire conflict, as it’s perceived as an enormous game-changer in a world where people empowered by Aura are a dime a dozen, and the possibility of one or more of them going bad presents a serious problem, hence why Chivalric Arms goes to such length to weaponize his Semblance.
  • Later on, it’s revealed that Amber Arc has an even more dramatic version of the same Semblance, able to nullify, not only Aura, but Dust and even magic. This revelation prompts Ozpin to completely shift his position on how to deal with Jaune, because he now sees in Amber the promise of being able to finally kill Salem off for good.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: The very first scene of the story is Jaune being operated on.
• Super Breeding Program: A file Blake found during a lab raid shows that some of the scientists theorize that Null can be inherited or recreated and consider starting one of these. Coral confirms one of the scientists mentioned the possibility.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Deconstructed. Ironwood himself points out how grossly irresponsible it is that Penny has such weapon capabilities to blast down a bullhead. She was allowed to travel around Vale unsupervised and she was meant to fight in the Vytal festival against normal students. She ends up killing more than twenty people due to how overpowered she is.
• Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Ironwood genuinely realizes that Jaune and the Arc family are the victims of this entire situation and does everything in his power to help them, first by searching for the kidnapped women and then by keeping Saphron Arc in protective custody once he finds her. The problem is that the kingdom is shackling him as much as possible due to the sheer amount of backlash they'd receive if the conspiracy went public, so he can't publicly defend Jaune or get a message to him to confirm he's an ally. By Chapter 29, he is the only one from the "right side" of the law that still wants to save Jaune with everyone else — even Ozpin — now aiming to kill him on sight.
• Sympathetic Murderer: The first time that Jaune purposefully kills someone not associated with the conspiracy is when he kills the two huntsmen that try to arrest him. They may have been trying to do their jobs and just get a paycheck, but if they had taken Jaune he would've been sent straight back into the conspiracy's arms, so when he kills them it's clear that there really was no other choice.
• Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: Jaune Arc, in his quest to save all of his missing family members, overall faces off against two very powerful conspiracy leaders who have a lot of sway and influence across Remnant: Matthew Fields (who kidnapped Jaune and his family to be experimented on, and still ruthlessly uses his influence to hunt Jaune in the hopes of recapturing him), and Ozpin (who re-kidnaps Jaune's youngest sister Amber Arc for his own ends, seeks Jaune's death so that the latter can't reclaim her, and turns his back on his allies and his own student when the latter is in nightmarish peril).
  • Fields (Despicable) is a Corrupt Corporate Executive without any real empathy, running a Government Conspiracy that kidnaps hundreds of people, mercilessly uses them like livestock and lab rats while experimenting on them to replicate their Semblances or Silver Eyes, and then kills them or uses them as breeding stock for child experiments. Furthermore, Fields is planning to "solve" the socio-political problems of Faunus racism and the White Fang by covertly committing total genocide against the Faunus via Remnant-wide forced sterilization.
  • Ozpin (Sympathetic), though he's easily one of the most callous and despicable incarnations of the character that author Coeur Al'Aran has ever written; is ultimately acting because he's desperate beyond human comprehension to bring his Endless War against Salem, which he's fought for millennia in the defence of all humanity, to a permanent end, and he's discovered that Amber has a unique Semblance which he believes can accomplish that by nullifying Salem's Complete Immortality. Ozpin also knows that Jaune will never join him nor allow Ozpin to groom Amber into a weapon, so he figures that Jaune has to die.
• Tautological Templar: Deconstructed. Legally, Team RWBY get away with everything they do, from public endangerment to manslaughter, murder and domestic terrorism, while Jaune is chronically screwed over and constantly vilified as a monster, outright infuriating Jaune after him and WBY rescue Ruby together during the latter crime. The team, Yang and Blake in particular, have hypocrisy issues and trouble admitting that they were in the wrong, for which the story's events utterly savage them (even if it pales in comparison to the hell that Jaune and his family endure). To RWBY's credit, after being forced to walk half a mile in Jaune's shoes, they become as disgusted as he is at the continued injustice against the Arcs.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Jaune teams up with Blake, Weiss, and Yang in an attempt to kill Matthew Fields once and for all. This in no way makes them friends, with Jaune noting that he's spending the entire time trying not to just shoot them and be done with it. He also had no intention of honoring their deal to begin with - if they happen to find and rescue Ruby then it's a nice bonus, but the partnership is done as soon as he gets what he wants. The only reason why he ends up going against this idea is that Ruby's survival would significantly increase their odds of taking down Chivalric Arms once and for all.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: After his mother is killed, Jaune decides to forgo all semblance of sanity and morality and absolutely butchers Yang and Ruby, even telling Yang "I'll be the monster you always wanted me to be!" Following this, he has given up any attempts to take the moral high ground after realizing that nothing he does will every make him look anything less like a murderous psychopath, so he simply plays into the image to get people to do what he wants.
• These Hands Have Killed: Jaune is shocked when he makes his first kill, and later on vomits after using his Semblance to let White Fang troopers kill Atlesian soldiers. He handles it better over time.
• They Would Cut You Up: The organization working out of Atlas takes this approach to studying Null. Not only do they torture Jaune to test his limits, they experiment on his sisters and mother to see if they unlock similarly-useful Semblances of their own.
• Three Lines, Some Waiting: Each chapter is told from three perspectives, though the only two constants are Jaune and Ironwood. The third perspective depends on each specific chapter, with the most common being Ozpin, Team RWBY, and Winter.
• Tragic Villain: As monstrous and horrible as Ozpin is in this adaption, he is also shown to have just been tired of an eternity of fighting and actually thanks Jaune when he dies, believing this may be his permanent death and goes out with a smile.
• Trapped in Villainy: A downplayed example with Roman; while he is a criminal and thief willingly, it's clear that the only reason why he is still working with Jaune is because he is scared shitless of him. Jaune's actions continuously disgust and terrify him, culminating in the docks heist, where he genuinely tries to talk him down from his revenge against Yang and Ruby and reacts with horror after Jaune shoots Ruby just to prove a point.
• Uncertain Doom: The last we see of the pilot Jaune and Adam spare is when Ironwood interrogates him. It's not clear if Ironwood managed to get him to safety or if he was eventually killed by the rest of the conspiracy.
• Underestimating Badassery: During their battle at the docks, Yang assumes that Jaune is just grandstanding when he says that he refuses to kill her, unaware that it's taking every fiber of his being to not kill her on the spot.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Jaune's Semblance can turn the tide with a single bullet, but only if he can properly control it first. Jaune admits that Null won't be any good against genuinely skilled enemies if he doesn't train himself, to which Adam agrees.
  • Jaune's lack of experience with combat shows with the injuries he inflicted on team RW_Y. An accomplished doctor notes how all the injuries he inflicted were not immediately fatal even though Jaune was trying to kill them. The injuries he gave Ruby Rose were done at point blank while holding the target and he still missed anything vital, with the doctor noting one shot was so bad it looks intentionally non-lethal.
  • Matthew Fields has access to hundreds of Semblances, but he ultimately has very little practice with any of them and so Jaune, Neo, and WBY are able to find creative counters to all of them. Weiss herself notes that Fields is a Master of None who doesn't realize the glaring weaknesses each Semblance has like the Semblances' owners would.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The only thing that Ruby, Weiss, Yang, and Penny manage to accomplish by getting involved in the dock heist is murdering an innocent woman without realizing what they were doing.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • Cinder has a valid point when she mentions that all it really takes to change from hero to villain in the eyes of society is the people backing them. This may be Cinder talking, but with Team RWBY getting away with the same crimes Jaune is vilified for right at that moment, it's hard to deny she has a point.
  • Qrow admits in Chapter 40 that he now thinks his sister Raven had a legitimate point when she ran, not in abandoning their family but in her belief that people putting their trust and faith in Ozpin is a mistake. This is coming after Ozpin has revealed to his inner circle that he's planning to kill Jaune Arc and then manipulate his kidnapped sister's grief to make her his weapon, and moreso after Ozpin has confirmed the suspicion that he doesn't care what happens to RWBY or any of his other allies anymore now that he considers them obsolete; facts which have turned almost every ally in the know against Ozpin.
  • Ozpin may have gone far off of the deep end by kidnapping Amber and attempting to kill Jaune to cover it up, but it's hard to deny his plan to use Amber to defeat Salem forever has merit when it has literally already succeeded - the Fall Maiden's powers are completely destroyed thanks to her, so Salem's plans to get the Relic has taken a large detour.
• Villain Protagonist: Jaune is technically this by joining the White Fang.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Pietro has an epic one when Penny breaks free from the coding and no longer obeys him. When she states that, while she will forever love him, she won't help him any longer, all the decisions he recalls making and the guilt sends him into a giggling mess.
  • Cinder freaks out at the climax when she realizes that Ozpin has tricked her into unwittingly destroyed the Fall Maiden power forever; knowing that this means the Relic of Choice can never be extracted from its vault, Cinder is terrified of the reprisals she'll face from Salem for this. She drops the perpetual affability she's shown Jaune throughout the story and spitefully hisses that it's all the Arcs' fault, although she retains enough composure to continue feigning supporting Jaune against Ozpin; then Cinder attempts to kill Amber in a desperate bid to retroactively earn Salem's mercy, with a manic look on her face.
• Villainous Rescue: When the White Fang attack an Atlas facility, they end up rescuing Jaune and his sister Lavender by accident.
• Walking Techbane: Jaune's sister Amber's Semblance allows her to shut down Dust, thus rendering any and all technology and weapons around her useless. It's later revealed that not all machinery is affected, as ones with electricity or alternative non-Dust power can work fine, though Ironwood points out that nearly every technology uses Dust so it may as well be all tech.
• I Want My Mommy!: After Jaune shoots her multiple times, Ruby calls out for Yang, her dad, and her mommy while bleeding out. Not only is it already played horrifically seriously, since she's desperately trying to stop her bleeding and is barely conscious, but it's even worse for her since her mother has been dead since she was a child.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapters 26 and 27 function as one together: Jaune is moments away from extracting his mother from the docks when Penny and Team RW_Y show up. During the resulting fight, Penny shoots down her bullhead, killing her instantly. In response, Jaune goes completely insane and tortures Yang, destroys Penny, and attempts to murder Ruby just so Yang can understand what he's feeling because of her.
  • Chapter 32: Blake explains Jaune's backstory to Weiss and Yang (who express no sympathy) just before Chivalric Arms manage to kidnap Ruby from her bed while she's healing. On Jaune's end, he gets in a fight with Winter Schnee, wins thanks to Roman and Emerald, comes face to face with Ironwood for the first time, and confirms to Ironwood that Ozpin has Amber hostage, all while Matthew Fields is listening in on a recording device.
  • Chapter 42: Jaune and Cinder attack Beacon Academy to locate the two Ambers. Upon doing so, Ozpin and Jaune get into a fight that Jaune quickly loses, but he still manages to distract Ozpin for long enough that Cinder can still kill Amber Autumn and claim the rest of the Fall Maiden's powers... except that doesn't happen, because Amber Arc's Semblance destroyed the Maiden powers for good, ensuring that the Relic of Choice is forever sealed away and the Brother Gods will never return.
• Wham Line:
  • After Blake abandons him in Vale and steals his scroll, Jaune manages to get someone else's scroll and call his number. When Blake picks up, she accidentally reveals that she left him to die.
  Blake: Hello? I think you have the wrong number.
  • When Ironwood goes to Ozpin's office after the hotel incident, he grabs Ozpin by the throat and forces him to explain why he took Amber Arc. Qrow and Glynda go to defend him, until Ozpin finally speaks and confirms not only the accusation, but just how far he has mentally gone.
  Ozpin: Because that girl has the potential to change everything.
  • And in chapter 42, Cinder's machinations hit a little snag when she murders the previous Fall Maiden and wonders where her power went off to.
  Ozpin: ... the Relic of Choice is forever sealed away. As there is no Fall Maiden who can open its Vault.
• Wham Shot: In chapter 35, Matthew Fields has just met a recently captured Ruby and told his life story. As he leaves, someone approaches him with red hair and freckles, confirming that not only is Penny functioning again but she is still under CA's control.
• What Is One Man's Life In Comparison?: The Atlas Council uses this, saying the tragedy of the Arc Family isn't worth destabilizing the Kingdom over. Ozpin later on uses this same justification for abducting and sedating Amber to use her as a weapon against Salem while leaving her brother to die as a wanted criminal.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Jaune gets the chance to call out Blake for leaving him to die in Vale when the two meet up again.
  I don't give a shit about the White Fang! You. Betrayed. Me! You brought me here, tricked me, lied to me, stole my scroll and cut me adrift when you knew Chivalric Arms were hunting me! You left me to die, Blake!
  • Ironwood gives a scathing rebuke to Pietro Polendina when he learns that Pietro knew about the security breach in Penny's computers but chose to send her to Vale anyway.
  The Penny Project may well have cost us any hope of stopping Arc before he turns into a confirmed killer. It may have cost that team their careers. It did cost several people their lives, including an innocent woman whose greatest crime was becoming a test subject for Chivalric Arms. I have to go and explain to Sable and Saphron Arc that their mother is dead because of a failure within my chain of command! I would have never allowed Penny down into the city had I known she was a risk! Your data has cost people their lives, Pietro!
  • Then Ironwood gives one to Ozpin for agreeing with the Council's kill on sight order on Jaune, and an even bigger one when he finds out that Ozpin has Jaune's sister Amber imprisoned.
  • When Jaune has to team up with Blake, Weiss, and Yang he makes a point to remind them that they murdered his mother every single chance he possibly can.
  • Once Penny overcomes her programming, she gives a Breaking Speech to her father, clarifying that despite his claims that he was doing everything for CA for her life, in reality he was only doing it to protect his research, not her. Pietro is left Laughing Mad by the time she's done.
  • Ironwood gets an epic one in chapter 40 against the rest of the Council for hampering his investigation to cover their knowledge of the conspiracy, and consequently making all of Atlas look too incompetent to capture Jaune before he killed Matthew Fields with RWBY's help and rescued most of his family.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Jaune Arc, full stop. The entire world seems determined to screw him over in any way it can, starting by having his family kidnapped and father murdered before he's shipped off to be experimented on. While trying to rescue his sisters, Blake betrays him and leaves him to die, and this kicks off a long line of Disaster Dominoes that gives him severe Sanity Slippage. When this is topped off with having to watch his innocent mother murdered by a team of vigilante huntresses, it's little wonder that he completely snaps, mercilessly tortures the ones responsible, and willingly sacrifices his remaining morality to bring down Chivalric Arms once and for all.
• Would Hurt a Child: By Chapter 40, Jaune has fallen to the point where he will invade Beacon Academy to save his sister, working alongside two terrorists. Qrow and Ironwood, the closest thing he has to allies in Ozpin's inner circle, admit he's fallen to the point that he may well kill the students to get what he wants.
• You Are in Command Now: When Jaune ends up in Vale, Adam places him in charge of the local White Fang branch until he can get there himself.
• You Are Number 6: The members of the Government Conspiracy labeled Jaune and his sisters as test subjects. When one of the Huntsmen on their pay intentionally calls Jaune Subject 000, to punctuate that they own him, Jaune loses it.
• You Monster!: After Jaune kills Penny, Yang outright declares him to be a monster who murdered a redeemed woman. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, the monster in question gets to respond and make genuinely good points.
• Your Head A-Splode: This is how Penny ultimately dies, courtesy of Jaune.

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