Fanfic / Remnant’s Blonde Bard

Remnant's Blonde Bard is a What If? fanfic by Coeur Al'Aran where Jaune has a Sudden Game Interface for a Semblance.

...And hyper-focuses on Charisma.

Remnant's Blonde Bard contains the following tropes...

• The Ace: Juniper comes to view her son as this by chapter 4; he is incredibly attractive, does charity work, defused a robbery, and busks to raise money for children.
• Altar Diplomacy: Jacques' perspective on his marriage with Willow. The Schnee Dust Company, despite being a MegaCorp, is a family concern and so he had to marry into the family to become CEO. Meanwhile, the SDC needed a good businessman to pull it out of the dire financial straits it was in at the time. Having had three children with Willow and ensured the continuation of the Schnee lineage, he has no problems with Willow and Jaune having an affair as long as they are discreet about it. Something he tells Jaune to his face, much to the teen's horror.
• Anti-Grinding: While Charisma is certainly easier to grind for EXP, each feat involving Charisma nets him less EXP than a bout of combat would. Furthermore, as Jaune's level increases, he starts needing more and more EXP to level up, with even his Guitar Cutie videos no longer easily netting him the EXP needed to quickly get to the next level.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: Getting dressed up in a bunch of Nora's clothes and makeup instantly gets Jaune's videos viral success on the internet and makes Ren start to question his own sexuality. Of course, part of this is his Charisma making him more attractive in general and helping him pull off acts that wouldn't work objectively, but it's not unprecedented in the author's work for Jaune to be capable of pulling off crossdressing without logic-bending stats.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: When Saphron and Jaune work out a deal where he can provide Saphron money from being Guitar Cutie, he has concessions in mind (namely her and Terra managing his channel). Terra, however, initially has other ideas thanks to his Guitar Cutie appearance hitting her hard with Charisma.
  Terra: (a little too excitedly) I'm willing to make any sacrifice.
  Saphron: (dope-slapping Terra) What sacrifice do you think he's asking you to make? And stop drooling! He's a man.
• Blatant Lies: Jaune accidentally spills too many details he's not supposed to know when telling Qrow about his encounter with Raven. He's ready to pat himself on the back afterwards for successfully playing it off, only for the interface to reveal his failure. It also informs Jaune that not only did Qrow not fall for his lies, but that he's currently calling Ozpin to relay that something fishy is going on with Jaune.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • The Game is a cool superpower that could eventually make Jaune really strong, but the problem is, it represents Jaune's life as an HP bar. Like any RPG you've ever played, it starts as a very small integer, and if something does any damage then it takes away at least one point from that small integer. Early on, getting smacked by his sister deals ten damage to him, out of a health pool barely over a hundred, theoretically meaning he's fragile enough that someone could walk up to him and kill (or at least incapacitate) him with a dozen slaps. Investing in Constitution would probably give him more HP to mitigate this, but we don't know how much because he hasn't gained a single point in it.
  • Jaune believes Speak With Animals to be a good pick for his first perk because it doesn't depend on any stat. He quickly learns to regret his choice; not only do animals produce noise all the time on a normal day, but he can loudly and clearly hear their actual thoughts. The gentle chirping of the bird that lands outside his window every morning? A daily rant about the apocalyptic ball of fire that rises and falls once a day.
    • When Jaune becomes a full bard upon getting his own guitar, his Speak With Animals Perk turns him into a Pied Piper-like figure, which causes animals to swarm him as he plays.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Jaune prioritizes Charisma because he finds it easy to raise by doing things like talking to people and socializing, which are in turn made easier over time by said boosted Charisma. Chapter 3 sees him take to busking to both raise Charisma and practice music, earning three points over two hours.
  • While busking, Jaune sings old-fashioned songs that are popular for being classic and nostalgic, rather than ones that are actually impressive for their difficulty to sing and play.
• Brainless Beauty: Athena Nikos thinks Jaune is this when he fails to recognize Willow Schnee.
• Brown Note: One of Jaune's bardic skills is Discordant Song. It can frighten the enemy into screams and panic. Even if he plays on non-musicial instrument. Even if he plays a single note.
• Cats Are Mean: Jaune already didn't particularly like cats, but now that he has Speak With Animals and their vocalizations are translated as human language he can understand, he's fully aware that cats are arrogant enough to see humans as nothing but slaves and sadistic enough to kill other animals just to enjoy their death screams.
• Celibate Hero: A downplayed example, as Jaune does want a girlfriend (and is given a quest by The Game to lose his virginity on his travels), but is hesitant to pursue any romance over how his Charisma may impact a person's ability to give consent.
  • Winter explicitly describes Penny Polendina as asexual and aromantic.
• The Charmer:
  • As Jaune's Charisma stats rise, he finds himself getting more and more popular with girls his age. Even older women who would normally be dismissive or amused by a teen awkwardly attempting to flirt with them entertain Jaune's flirting to varying extents.
  • Said Charisma also works just as well when Jaune crossdresses for online performances thanks to Nora, to the point that Ren admits without shame that crossdressing Jaune makes him question his sexuality and Cardin subscribes to Jaune from day 1 of his online career and calls him his "angel."
• Compelling Voice: Chapter 3 is the first instance where Jaune's high Charisma really manifests beyond better social skills. A man robs the charity that Jaune raises money for and is obviously unstable, ignoring the owner's protests that charity shops don't tend to have much. When Jaune tells the robber the same thing, his Charisma pushes the unstable man to finally understand the logic and abandon the crime.
• Didn't Think This Through: The best idea Jaune and Nora come up with to get money from his music (and unbeknownst to the latter, to grind Charisma) is to start making videos on the internet. After a bit they figure out how to play the algorithm and get him viral success, but Jaune fails to anticipate one thing: everything he's done before to grind Charisma begins and ends with his own actions, meaning he must go out of his way to start doing it and after he stops, it stops. But people can watch videos and level his Charisma at any time, not just when it's convenient for him... so he gets an interface alert for a point of Charisma every few minutes, constantly, even in the middle of the night, ruining his sleep worse than the screaming birds ever did. The gains from that first video taper off over time, and he arranges for future uploads to go out in the morning to not repeat the mistake.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Once he reaches Level 8, Jaune recognizes there's no point putting the bulk of his level-up Stat Points into Charisma; he earns more Charisma points more quickly through his performances and Guitar Cutie videos than from allocations after level ups. After having been nearly killed by Blake in the White Fang attack on the Schnee gala, Jaune puts all 10 Stat Points from his recent level up into Constitution.
• Disney Creatures of the Farce: Jaune's first attempt to busk after fully becoming a Bard and gaining a buff to his affinity with animals that he initially ignores as unimportant results in a scene that makes Nora compare him out loud to a princess from kids' movies, all while he yells in frustration at getting swarmed with birds and other animals in the vicinity.
• Doomed Hometown: Jaune is worried he might be forced into some bog-standard tragic video game backstory where his village is destroyed. Sure enough, the first set of quest objectives The Game gives him is to respond to Raven Branwen scouting out Ansel for a potential raid, the explicit consequences of failure being capture and slavery. Jaune thankfully convinces Raven to raid elsewhere, succeeding in his first quest and averting the trope.
• Double Standard: Juniper is well aware that the way some of the women in Ansel are starting to talk about her teenage son would justifiably prompt law enforcement to get involved if it was a bunch of middle-aged men talking about a teenage girl, but as much as she doesn't like it, she doesn't have the power to make anyone take it that seriously.
• Dramatic Irony: Jaune thinks he is doing a poor job performing when no one reacts when he plays for a party. The next scene has Athena Nikos note that he is doing wonderfully but no one will react due to having a Stiff Upper Lip mindset.
• Empty Nest: Juniper Arc has this reaction to Saphron and Jaune announcing they are leaving. She reacts with hysterics even though she still has six kids living with her.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Played With. Jaune in his Guitarc persona is attractive to Terra even after she learns he is a guy.
• Fanservice: Invoked. Even with his Charisma, Jaune's first performance videos can't find an audience because he's not doing anything that impressive or noteworthy. After looking through other channels with the same feasible level of production, Nora gets an idea: make Jaune crossdress for his videos, because no matter how mundane the content is, there's a certain number of people who'll watch as long as it's being done by a girl showing off her appearance. Sure enough, starting a new channel posing as a pretty girl is all it takes to instantly get Jaune modest success online.
• Friendly, Playful Dolphin: Jaune makes friends with a pod of dolphins on his way to Argus. They are guiding the boat to avoid Grimm, they deeply enjoy talking to him when they realize he can understand them, and Jaune plays music and reads a storybook to them. The pod leader's daughter invites him to swim with them in the future.
• Friend to All Living Things: Okay, not friend, he actually hates it. But Jaune (through Speak With Animals) can effortlessly interact with critters with a level of communication that no one can possibly match — and that's communication between both parties, so animals gravitate towards him because they understand him and his Charisma better than any normal human. Once he properly takes the Bard spec and gets relevant bonuses, his next time busking ends up quickly summoning a flock of birds (plus one squirrel) to gather around and mob him.
• Glamour: Jaune's good looks and ability to disguise himself as a girl are due to his Charisma affecting the perception of others, assuming he is not just self-deprecating his own looks.
• Good Feels Good: Jaune notes that busking for charity feels nice beyond the points it gives him.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Pyrrha immediately goes into panic mode at even the implication of another woman or girl being interested in Jaune. She's afraid that someone else might snatch him up on his travels before they can meet again in Argus, she's keen to emphasize how "old" Willow is before his trip to Atlas, her attitude towards Weiss goes from wariness to veiled hostility when the latter inadvertently implies that she also is pursuing him, and she freaks out when it seems like Jaune has a crush on Guitar Cutie.
• Inhumanly Beautiful Race: A one-man case. Jaune is a being with magic explaining his good looks and Juniper notes that her son looks impossibly good for a teenager. His skin is flawless and he overall looks like the result of airbrushing a model's features.
• Insistent Terminology: Jaune stresses to anyone who will listen that his music account "guitarc" is not "Guitar C", with the C unanimously taken to stand for "Cutie". It's a combination of Guitar and Arc, as in Jaune Arc. For all his Charisma, his success at convincing people of this is limited.
• Instrumental Weapon: Jaune uses the strap of Gambol Shroud as an improvised string instrument to play a Discordant song.
• Instant Web Hit:
  • Candid recordings of Jaune busking in Ansel get enough reach that the townsfolk know about them and they get back to his family... but the hilarious video of him trying to busk only to get swarmed with birds becomes a minor sensation across the mainstream internet.
  • After failing to gain an audience as an online guitarist, Jaune instantly gets significant viewership after posting one video doing the same thing but pretending to be an attractive girl. That's one thing as it is... but after livestreaming while actively using his Magic Music power, he sends ripples all across the web, so much so that the hosting site breaks down from the unprecedented traffic. The clip is reported on by real news in every kingdom, and seen by well-established musicians, groups of terrorists living off the grid, and the ultimate evil residing hundreds of miles inside the uninhabited Grimmlands where there's normally no network reception.
• The Internet Is for Porn: Terra reveals that "Guitar Cutie" has porn of her drawn on the internet. The overall "The internet is full of perverts" aspect of this trope is why Jaune is having Terra and Saphron manage his account.
• Interface Spoiler: The Game provides Jaune with a bio on everyone he examines, filled with general information that he has no logical way of learning normally. When he approaches some kind of event, The Game will often open a quest laying out what's going on and what the consequences might be, even if Jaune himself hasn't noticed anything happening yet. Case in point, a robbery taking place inside a building that Jaune is about to enter. It also identifies Blake Belladonna as one of the White Fang terrorists that attack the gala at Schnee Manor and that Penny Polendina is a robot.
• Immune to Charm: Not so much immune as resistant, but Weiss, while finding Jaune handsome, is much less affected by his Charisma then many other women and girls are. Jaune suspects that it may be a combination of Weiss having the equivalent of a high level and her own Charisma stat.
• Irony: When playing RPG-style games as a kid, Jaune treated Charisma as a Dump Stat. Now it's almost literally all he has.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Weiss can be frosty and caustic towards Jaune, but she also arranges a performance with him partly to help build his reputation as a musician, writes a letter of recommendation for him, and insists on paying him for the entirety of his original term of employment at Schnee Manor despite it ending early.
• Jerkass to One: Pyrrha to Weiss due to her jealousy over Jaune. While she's too polite to be openly mean, Pyrrha steadfastly resists Weiss' attempts at bonding even as it becomes increasingly clear they have much in common (which is why Weiss is trying to befriend her in the first place, recognizing her as a potential kindred spirit) and (unsuccessfully) tries to intimidate the heiress in a brutal training duel.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Weiss and Jaune agree to never again bring up that Weiss thought Jaune was having sex with Willow, sealing it with a handshake.
• Logical Weakness: Jaune lets slip too much information about Raven and isn't able to bluff Qrow. No matter how convincing he can be, he still can't substitute Charisma for actual information and explanations.
• Loves My Alter Ego: Whitley gets off on the wrong foot with Jaune over the latter's interactions with Willow, but turns out to be one of the many viewers infatuated with Guitar Cutie.
• Magic Music: Choosing to specialize into a Bard gives Jaune this power, specifically letting him encourage allies by playing good music and demoralize/frighten enemies with crappy music. Just hearing him busk instantly improves Ren's mood and lets him start working through some of the stress and uncertainty he'd been dealing with internally. It even works indirectly over a transmission — Jaune activates his power while streaming and upon watching it, Cardin Winchester makes the decision to let go of his racism, Adam Taurus is able to put his resentment aside and recognize how much he should appreciate Blake, and Salem feels joy for the first time in thousands of years.
• Min-Maxing: Averted. Jaune can earn Stat Points by either performing a task that calls upon a certain attribute or by leveling up and receiving a lump sum of points. While he can simply power-level up only using Charisma and then allocate the Stat Points from levelling up to different attributes, including more combat-oriented ones, it wouldn't be very effective. To be a good fighter, Jaune realizes he would need to be skilled at Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity, and his level ups don't give him nearly enough Stat Points to appreciably increase his skill in those attributes, and as the speed at which he levels up through Charisma slowing due to greater EXP requirements, this strategy becomes even less viable.
• Mrs. Robinson:
  • Ansel has a not-insignificant population of middle-aged women who increasingly and openly become attracted to teenager Jaune as his Charisma improves his appearance and charm (and if another of the author's fics is any indication, many would absolutely go for it if he asked), to his mother's disgust.
  • Willow Schnee takes Jaune under her wing after hearing his music lifts her from her depression, and interacts with him in a way that's clearly inappropriate and reminiscent of grooming. Weiss initially assumes this trope is in play and is appalled at the thought. For what its worth, it truly is nothing more than an unhealthy obsession with his Magic Music rather than anything sexually predatory, though Jaune does wonder, had he stayed at the manor longer, if it could have developed into that.
• Must Not Die a Virgin: Weiss reveals her first kiss was with a boy in hospice. She still wonders if it was a waste of her first kiss.
• My Brother Is Off-Limits: Juniper notes that her daughter Sable had a falling out with her friend Becky when the latter, upon seeing the picture of Jaune with his Charisma-buffed hunkiness, straight-up asked the former if she could "help out" Jaune with his V-card.
  • Saphron is also outraged when she reads a lewd comment by "PuttingTheWinInWinchester" about Guitar Cutie and threatens to kill him.
• My Eyes Are Up Here: After Nora makes Jaune crossdress to help his attempts at earning money online music, Ren can't stop staring at his legs since Nora dressed him in a short skirt. Nora even says the words outright.
  Nora: (punching Ren's arm) His eyes are up there.
  Ren: (not flinching) His legs are down there.
• Mythology Gag: Athena mentions that Pyrrha had a best friend who stopped talking with her after taking a "nasty injury". Readers who've kept up with one of Couer's concurrent works, In Your Wildest Dreams, will know the full story behind this incident.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Discussed. Jaune doesn't know for sure what will happen if his HP hits zero, which has a distressingly high risk of happening considering the proportional damage he takes from injury at his low level. He's praying that it's only a case of being knocked unconscious and then waking up later in bed or something like that, instead of Permadeath.
• Not What It Looks Like: Jaune is flabbergasted that him spending hours alone with Willow in her bedroom makes Weiss 100% sure that something sexual is going on. In reality, all she has him do is play more of his Magic Music. He grows increasingly dismayed when as he learns most of the residents and staff of Schnee Manor, including Willow's husband Jacques Schnee, are convinced that Willow is having an affair.
• Oblivious to Love: Jaune is ignorant of Pyrrha's affections as in canon, but it's even more notable by virtue of the fact that Jaune's Charisma makes her fall for him even harder, and therefore has a much harder time obfuscating her feelings for him, to the point that almost anyone that spends a few minutes with them can cotton on that Pyrrha is down bad for Jaune.
• Obliviously Beautiful: Jaune himself is the only who doesn't see his own appearance filtered through the influence of his Charisma. From his perspective, he doesn't look much different than the scrawny, awkward youth he's always been, and there's no way he should be able to fool anyone with crossdressing. Weiss assumes it's just false modesty when he refuses to believe he looks like a playboy.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Jaune quickly discovers that Charisma is by far the easiest stat to grind. The Game then supplies Jaune with challenges, which he can only rely on Charisma to complete as his other stats are garbage, causing him to dump more into Charisma because that's what works. The story's description posits that Jaune is going to run into serious problems with Changing Gameplay Priorities because there is no option to re-spec.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: At level 73, General Ironwood is the strongest person Jaune's ever met.
• Saying Too Much: Jaune has to come up with plausible excuses to explain the knowledge his Semblance provides to throw off suspicion. He doesn't always succeed.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Even if Weiss's suspicions turn out correct that Willow is preying on Jaune sexually, she figures her mother will suffer no legal consequences because she has the full weight of the SDC's money and influence to bury the story. It's certainly working for her father and the rest of the company flagrantly dodging labor laws.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: As Jaune gains levels in Charisma, he essentially gains a passive buff that makes him look like, as his mother notes, an airbrushed male model straight out of a magazine. This results in him getting increasingly inappropriate attention from older women, some literally old enough to be his mother, much to Juniper's rising concern and anger at how predatory some of the attention has gotten. Notably, Jaune doesn't seem to mind, making it a case of this trope where another person feels this way with no envy or jealousy.
• So Proud of You: When the Arc family finds out through an online video that Jaune is raising money for charity, they all think more highly of him. His mother even cries tears of joy at her son's selflessness. By the next chapter, Juniper feels she literally couldn't be more proud of the boy.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Jaune can understand animals and vice versa. Aside from the usual drawback that bird calls are now translated into calls for sex, Jaune learns how stupid animals can be, that they can have serious misconceptions like what happens to the sun at night, and more. Dolphins can carry the best conversations due to their intellect but they still lack certain words, such as having no word for "nets" or "humans" and Jaune's semblance can't translate their names properly. The leader's daughter gives her name and Jaune notes that "Water's-Cooling-Touch" is the meaning of the name and significantly longer than whatever she actually said. Furthermore, he learns that the barking of puppies translates to them showering everyone that passes him by with love, while cats are usually full of themselves and sadistic monsters that love the dying sounds of the animals they kill.
• Squishy Wizard: He's not sporting a Robe and Wizard Hat and throwing fireballs, but the fact remains that Jaune ends up building himself as a Utility Party Member with magic buffs and charms cast through speech and music. That's literally all he has going for him, as his other stats are near rock-bottom and his Aura is still locked, meaning his health pool, physical ability and toughness are all far below what's expected to suffice in any kind of fight, even with civilians. A slap from his sister takes a decent chunk of his health. Two sloppy attacks from Blake takes most of it in just a couple seconds. Afterwards, he dumps every point he has available into Constitution so that at least he'll be able to survive five hits like that instead of maybe three.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Jaune encounters this when he plays for an event for the first time. The upper-class attendees refuse to show any actual enjoyment of his playing because of both the expected stoicism and the fact that Jaune is "the help".
• Super Natural Fear Inducer: Jaune's Bardic Skills can act as this to defend him. His "Discordant Song" causes Blake intense enough fear she runs away and his screaming for help causes a similar feeling. Before encountering him a second time, she even muses to herself that inducing fear or sharing his own with others is probably his Semblance.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Jaune's homeroom teacher Mrs. Greene finds herself flustered by Jaune's flirtations after he's leveled his Charisma. While neither of them have any intention of taking it beyond that, Jaune is not above using it to charm some special treatment from her.
• A Threesome Is Hot: Terra initially mistakes the presence of Guitar Cutie as an offer for a threesome, Saphron is terribly annoyed because she's really there to play music. It's implied only Jaune's Charisma managed to stop the misunderstanding from spiraling into a possibly relationship-breaking argument.
• Turing Test: Jaune infers that Winter and Pietro Polendina introducing him to Penny and having them hang out is meant to gauge how well Penny can interact normally with organic people, or at least provide Penny with data she can analyze to do so more effectively.
• Uncanny Valley: Downplayed. The Game immediately outs Penny as a robot thanks to its interface, and Jaune notes that Penny's introduction is not something a human would say and that her voice is subtly different from that of any human because she doesn't breath in order to produce it. However, without his Semblance's heads up, Jaune would have likely passed her greeting off as unusual and failed to notice the voice.
• Wham Line: The end of Chapter 21 has Blake try to restrain Jaune in order to get her weapon back, only to be attacked by birds when Jaune cried out for help... including a juvenile Grimm Nevermore.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: With his Charisma, Jaune could get any girl he wanted to date him. This is exactly why he's wary about pursuing a girlfriend.
• World Tour: Jaune's plan is travel around the Remnant and see the world.
• You Never Did That for Me: Weiss and Whitley don't like how Jaune got their mother's attention and love, something that they never had in their lives.