Fridge Brilliance / RWBY

Warning: Spoilers Off applies to this page. Proceed at your own risk.

---

General

• Team RWBY and Fairytale motifs:
  • Yang and Blake become partners in Episode 6 (later becoming a full team when they join with Ruby and Weiss). Going by the lyrics of 'Red Like Roses', that makes them the Beauty and the Beast. This is reinforced by their personalities, but for the opposite character: Yang is the tank of the team and occasionally goes berserk, reminiscent of a Beast. Meanwhile, Blake's book-loving and introverted nature references Belle, the Beauty of the titular fairytale.
  • While Blake is the beauty, she is also the beast to Yang's beauty, a cat specifically. Why a cat? Well, Blake is a cat Faunus with black hair, the equivalent of a black cat which are fabled in certain countries for being bad luck (which given the poor girl's own luck which makes her life a misery just like Qrow's). But what is the other cat that's fairytale famous? Puss in Boots, a feline that masquerades as a human just like Blake does.
  • The brilliance of Roman being Ruby's first fight: Roman's name be used to associate him with the Roman Empire. The Empire's cultural center was Rome. The brilliance comes in when you recall who founded Rome in mythology: Romulus and Remus, two brothers who were... wait for it... feral children raised by wolves. Ruby, meet Roman.
  • Roman being based off Lampwick/Candlewick from Pinocchio make sense when you consider that they are both drawn into a situation they don't fully understand by a less than trustworthy person who indulges their negative desires for their own benefit. The person also allows them to be imprisoned by another and they both die despite coming close to escaping.
  • Raven, with her Grimm-like mask, represents another fairy-tale element that shows up a lot in old stories. She's the mother ogre who has somehow (it's never really explained in the fairy tales despite being an element that appears a lot) marries the king and gives birth to a normal-looking, even beautiful, child. In these stories, it's even odds whether the mother ogre is abusive to towards her child or just overprotective and possessive, which pretty much describes Raven's relationship with Yang.
• Yang's symbol is a burning heart, and two of her outfits have undershirts which, combined with the tops layered over them, form a heart shape. What is one of her major character traits? Her open love and devotion to Ruby, of course.
• Back in the Yellow Trailer, when Yang punched the floor of Junior's club, it uncharacteristically bent around the impact, rather than being shattered upon impact. How? Perhaps the answer lies with Dust - it's been explained in the first World of Remnant that Dust can be woven within cloth, as well as directly fused with human bodies as well. Perhaps it could do the general same with metal/glass/other materials, giving them unique effects. Alternately she could've been channeling her aura directly into the floor. Similar ripple effects take place when both Lie Ren and Fox have used this technique against Grimm.
• Although there's an in-universe reason for the colour-naming and it's confirmed Monty wanted the colour theme because of its importance to art, there's also some fairy tale fridge: some of Western literature's most famous and varied fairy-tales were recorded in Andrew Lang's "Colored" Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colors.
• When in fighting stance, Blake often holds her hand near the holstered Gambol Shroud but doesn’t draw it until the last possible moment. It’s because she wants to confuse her enemy about which of her Swiss-Army Weapon options she’ll take.
• The 4 Kingdoms are good representations of the types of countries that exist in real life.
  • Vale: the isolationist country that takes advantage of its natural borders to shun outside wars, with peace as its primary objective... on the surface at any rate, as its crafty leaders realize that they cannot stay isolated (Ozpin's talk about how all of Remnant is connected), and realize their fate is connected with the outside world, so they take quieter measures (Ozpin sending Qrow and other Huntsmen to investigate) to get a head start on potential threats. Parallels: The United States prior to WW1, WW2, and the military industrial complex (Natural Borders: the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Crafty Leader subtly influencing foreign affairs: FDR sending aid to the Allies through a legal loophole long before the US officially joined the war).
  • Atlas: The militarily oriented kingdom that is at the forefront of science and technology in the world, but is particularly well known for its massive army, and is derided for indoctrinating their citizens to believe in their kingdom first (See: World of Remnant video on Atlas). Tends to deal with problems with excessive firepower. Parallels:
    • Again, the United States after WW1, WW2, and the military industrial complex. Forefront of science and technology: Silicon Valley alone is probably responsible for more of 21st century technology than any other group/region on the planet. Massive army: the US spends more on its military than the next 6 countries combined. Derided for brainwashing: Many (particularly in areas that have low approval ratings of the US) believe that the United States' exports of movies and pop-culture is a way of exerting influence over foreign cultures, and American patriotism is much higher than many other countries. Tends to deal with problems with excessive firepower: Again, how people view this depends on the person's views of the US, but the US does have a lot of drones, really really big bombs, and is thus far the only country to use a nuclear weapon in war.
    • The British Empire at its height. Forefront of science and technology: Britain was at the heart of the industrial revolution and one of the reasons for its dominance was because of sheer amount of goods Britain churned out. Massive army: Britain spent so much on their navy that the taxes to its citizenry were astronomically high. The Empire even had to extend taxes over to their colonies, though that admittedly didn't go well. Derided for brainwashing: a common tactic for colonizing an area would be to create schools to indoctrinate the local students. Tends to deal with problems with excessive firepower: The British Empire's page on our site refers to the main principles as "Divide and Conquer and argumentum ad baculum", and the rest reads like, well, a colonial empire that didn't give 2 #$%^'s about the people it slaughtered.
    • Another connection to both, Britain was known for its control of the seas, and America has had complete air dominance for 30 years. What is Atlas most well known for? Its massive fleet of flying ships.
    • Atlas's newfound reliance on robots to protect the populace can be a mirror to the US's increasing use of drone strikes. Similarly, the fact that their technology could be turned against their own troops could be a complement to criticisms of the US drone programs, that they endanger civilian lives.
  • Mistral: A massive empire that is too large to govern itself, but is united by a common culture. Parallels:
    • The Roman Empire during its decline. Massive empire that is too large to govern: Rome was under constant attacks by the Gauls, and (please forgive the oversimplification) after Rome stopped expanding and no longer had a unifying force of conquest, it fell apart. United by a Common Culture: after Christianity spread throughout Rome's borders, the people all worshiped the same God. Whether or not they agreed about the interpretation...
    • The Chinese Dynasties: Massive empire that is too large to govern: This is not that great of a parallel, as Chinese dynasties were generally pretty stable, but the Mongol empire which conquered China essentially was this after Genghis Khan died. United by a Common Culture: Chinese Dynasties used the concept of the "Mandate of Heaven", which basically gave justification for overthrowing dynasties, and keeping them in power. As such, the idea was very popular for rulers and revolutionaries, and even has some influence on modern day politics in China. Then there's Confucianism, which is like a religion and a philosophy on life, and has influenced a lot of Asia and even Western thought.
  • Vacuo: a prosperous area that is isolated to the point where they don't have as advanced technology as the outside world, but has massive natural resources (Dust) that are being taken advantage of by foreign invaders. Due to this foreign intervention, it's almost a lawless wasteland, with multiple factions vying for control. While there may be a central power in the area (Shade Academy), it is in no way in control. Parallels:
    • The Middle East, Syria in particular: Doesn't have as advanced technology as other countries: A lot of Syria's weapons are from the US or Russia, and militarily the Middle East as a whole is nothing compared to the US, Russia, or probably even China. Massive Natural Resources: Oil, according to Wikipedia, the Middle east has almost 50% of the world's oil reserves. Foreign intervention: The US, Russia, and multiple other countries have invaded the Middle East at some point in history, and for the sake of brevity and sanity, let's just say it went badly for everyone involved. Lawless Wasteland/Central Power with dubious control: While not true of the whole region, Syria in particular (as of winter 2016) is a very dangerous place to be, with rebel groups fighting the government. The US Government has a travel warning for Syria, purely because of the fighting. While not benevolent by any means, the Syrian government is technically a central power, though with the Islamic State, and the other rebel groups, it is not in control.
    • Congo: Doesn't have as advanced technology as other countries: A lot of Congo's weapons are also from the US or Russia, and again, militarily the country is not as powerful as others near it. Massive Natural Resources: Gold, diamonds, oil, cobalt, uranium, but in this modern era, with coltan being one of the most important^note Basically, you may have never heard of it, but it is used in making tantalum capacitors. In case you don't know what that is, odds are, you're reading this from something that uses it; basically any electronic device needs coltan to work, it's an essential part of making a computer and Congo is estimated to have 64% of the world's supply. Foreign intervention: It probably doesn't make as many headlines as it should, but foreign money is financing the illegal mining and smuggling of resources out of Congo. Lawless Wasteland/Central Power with dubious control: Again, while not true of the whole region, there are numerous groups that are fighting in the region, and Congo's government is not been completely in control, and has been criticized for human rights abuses. The US also has a travel warning for Congo. Congo is also rated one of the most dangerous places in the world for women, with disturbing numbers of sexual assaults.
• The villains, when looking at everyone, fall under four groups, with each of them reflecting a theme for each RWBY member. It's also worth noting that the trailers show each villain faction in their matching member.
  • The Grimm, and by extension Salem and her associates, resemble how this is akin to a fairy tale, something that inspired Ruby to be a Huntress in the first place. Though what she didn't read on was that there would be curves. Obviously the Beowolves are the Big Bad Wolves that are featured in Little Red Riding Hood, with Qrow being the woodsman that bailed her out when she took a trip to her relative's house.
  • The SDC mirror Weiss' fairy tale origins but for a more modern age, namely princess-hood, and all the intrigue and backstabbing that comes with it. Hell, if you interpret him as such, James also qualifies, as his militaristic extremes could count as the war part of keeping a kingdom.
  • The White Fang naturally involve Blake, the Beauty to their Beasts. Adam being an example of a Beast without a Beauty to hold him back or even a straight example of how the relationship between Beauty and the Beast is interpreted as abusive. Blake's response could be how someone might actually respond to such a Beast.
  • Criminals like Roman, Junior, and even Raven's tribe might not match Yang, but her fairy tale origin involves her counterpart pretty much performing a B&E, something criminals do.
  • Roman, the first villain encountered in show (not counting the trailers), has connections to all four. A criminal who used the White Fang to steal Dust (which SDC has huge dealings in) as part of Cinder's plan.
• The Nevermores, befitting their namesake, have a symbolic connection to the loss of loved ones.
  • The first time Team RWBY fights a Giant Nevermore, Red Like Roses, Pt. II plays. This song is about Ruby grieving over the death of her mother.
  • When Penny is killed in the Vytal Festival Tournament, Ruby is brought to tears. A Giant Nevermore shows up almost immediately afterward.
  • During the destruction of Kuroyuri, although the Nuckelavee was the primary threat, there was also a significant Nevermore. This is when Ren's parents (as well as most of the other citizens) were killed, forcing Ren into such a stressed state that his Semblance unlocked; seconds after it unlocks, a Nevermore trying to locate the terrified Nora triggers him into rushing out from his hiding spot to save her with his newly discovered Semblance.
  • While not about the loss of a loved one and more of loss in general, Maria Calavera fought and defeated a Giant Nevermore before being attacked by Tock, which led to the loss of her eyes.
• Every team leader has another team leader who is their foil. To wit:
  • Ruby and Jaune: Ruby has a lot of self confidence (moreso early on), and has been training to be a fighter since she was young. However, she will often rush into battle without taking the time to think things through. Jaune, on the other hand, is more doubtful in himself (again, moreso early on), and is not as good of a fighter, to the point he thought he had to fake his transcripts to get into Beacon. He is, however, a very good strategist in battles. They also both are trying to live up to their family names.
  • Cardin and Coco: Cardin is an asshole who often makes fun of others. Coco is much more mellow and is generally a nice person to her allies. Their weapons are even foils: Cardin uses an exclusively melee weapon, while Coco's is better suited to range.
  • Sun and Penny: Sun is a Faunus who loves fun and is very outgoing, and has no qualms being a Faunus despite the racism he experiences. Penny is more introverted and wants to desperately make friends, and wants to no longer be just a machine, but be a full human. Sun is also more emotional, while Penny is very logical.
• Jaune Arc:
  • Jaune being the only true novice fighter in his class is simply the writers being true to his inspiration. Joan of Arc was a peasant girl with visions from God. She was a leader and an inspiration but on the battlefield, she most likely served as a banner bearer to raise morale. As a fighter she would have been sub-par, especially compared with the other inspirations for Team JNPR (Achilles, Thor and Mulan) who were all recorded as accomplished warriors. So Jaune being The Heart and The Leader makes sense.
• The Volume 5 Weiss Character short:
  • The short is preparation/training for the White Trailer, and during her training, Weiss would likely be learning how dangerous the world is outside of Schnee Manor, and the extent of her father's control and abuse.
  • Winter says that she won't always be around to save Weiss. That's partially a reference to her literally not showing up for two volumes, but it's also a reference to her being an Atlesian specialist. It's a high risk job, and good as Winter is, she could easily fall in the line of duty. She's giving Weiss advice about not relying on her while warning Weiss that she probably won't live forever.
• Atlas is on the Northernmost continent in Remnant, where it's cold year-round. Well no wonder Weiss and Winter are so crabby when they go to Vale at first, they're wearing the exact same things they do in Atlas during winter, but it's much warmer in Vale. They must be overheating continuously.
• Pyrrha from RWBY and Carolina in Red vs. Blue share a lot of similarities (red hair, being the best fighters on their respective teams, having a reputation for never being tagged in fights), but the biggest is a subtle one. Pyrrha's based off of the legendary Greek hero Achilles, and Carolina is based off of the Halo series. Specifically, Carolina is based off of the legendary warriors in Halo known as the Spartans...
• Jacques allowing Weiss to go to Beacon makes a lot more sense when you realize that he was upset at Winter for joining the military, and Weiss' comment that the Atlas government, academy, and military are all unified under one overarching authority. Jacques probably thought that Weiss going to the Atlas Academy might influence her to follow Winter's footsteps, but a more civilian-oriented Huntsman academy such as Beacon would be less likely to result in her becoming like Winter and rebelling, despite the geographic distance. The RWBY manga shows that Weiss wanted to go Beacon to escape her dad's influence, and had to earn permission, which was the fight we saw in her original trailer. Of course, Jacques even offering Weiss the chance could've been to reduce the chance of her rebelling.
• Ruby is based on Red Riding Hood and the show's Dorothy character has been stated to be a different character entirely. However, Ruby can still be compared to Dorothy. Think about it: both are adorable young girls with pet dogs, who go on journeys through new worlds (Dorothy in the literal fantasyland of Oz, and Ruby through the metaphorical world of Huntsmen). Not just that, but in keeping with the main cast's other motifs, the theme of a house is also present. Only, where the other stories involved reaching a house only to find a possible danger within, Dorothy's is about venturing out of her house in order to explore the world and find answers: which Ruby does at the end of Volume 3.
• Several characteristics about Dorothy's story overlap with Ruby's own, leading many other characters to have extra motifs:
  • In the beginning, Dorothy meets the "good witch" Glynda And so does Ruby, in the form of Glynda Goodwitch. But Ruby already had a fair-haired protector in her life long before meeting Glynda. Who, you ask? Her sister, Yang! A woman who's more than a little protective Ruby, and takes on the role of her unofficial guardian.
  • General Ironwood's motif in Ozpin's entourage is that of the Tin Man. Problem is, before Ruby even encountered him in Volume 2, she'd met a much more literal Tin Man - in Penny. A robot who wants to be a human, much like the Tin Man wanting a heart.
  • In Volume 4 Ruby and the remnants of team JNPR are trekking across Mistral to meet with Professor Lionheart, whose very name is a blatant allusion to the Cowardly Lion in Ozpin's group. However, Ruby's known a Cowardly Lion from the beginning - Jaune. A good-natured man capable of great feats, but is (initially) limited by his poor self confidence.
  • Aside from the above, the entire RWBY team can fit; Weiss is the Tin Man, coming across as cold and uncaring, but underneath the outward frost is a very caring young woman. Blake fits the Cowardly Lion; she's brave for the sake of others like he was in the books and her struggle revolves around rising above her fears to truly be courageous. Yang can also work as the Scarecrow, being essentially "brainless" in that her temper overtakes her mind, but develops into a more thoughtful person when it comes to conflict, culminating in her confrontation with Raven where she beats her with words.
• As much as Qrow's character alludes to the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, he alludes even more to a character from Tales of the Magic Land, its Soviet adaptation by Alexander Volkov. Namely, to Kaggi-Karr, an old, cynical and harsh, but gold-hearted talking crow who gave the Scarecrow the idea of getting brains and who serves as the chief of Magic Land's intelligence and communications ^note she established the land-spanning "bird relay" where birds serve as scouts and messengers during peaceful times, takes over as the de-facto leader if the Scarecrow and Iron Woodman are captured, and frequently accompanies Ellie or Annie (Dorothy's equivalents) in their travels.
• Recoil movement:
  • How can Yang go flying from shooting her gauntlets one-second and not move an inch when firing them the next? It's her semblance. She can absorb damage/kinetic energy, so she's absorbing the recoil when she doesn't want to move, but taking the hit if she does. She can choose to get a power-up from the KE, or she can move more quickly. This also explains why most of the other characters never really use their weapon's recoil to move around, they can't control their speed and energy as easily as Yang can. Ruby's semblance of speed probably also allows her more control over her kinetic energy. That and she's Yang's sister, where do you think she got the idea from?
• Chess metaphors:
  • Cinder consistently uses the black Queen Virus in the second and third volumes to infiltrate Atlas's computers, which foreshadows her role in the story.
    • Cinder is one of Salem's most powerful allies, because of her being the Fall maiden. In chess, the Queen is the most powerful piece, by virtue of having the abilities of a rook and a bishop.
    • In chess, the board starts with two Queens, but more can be made if a Pawn gets into the heart of the enemy's territory (getting to the end of the board). By extension, Cinder only gained such a high position by getting to the heart of Beacon.
    • Generally a pawn is replaced by a queen piece that has already been eliminated, (for easy understanding of the piece's role) so the queen's power can be viewed as shifting not unlike Cinder stealing the maiden's powers
    • This also implies that in the grand scheme Cinder can be replaced. A player could lose as many Queens as they could and still win as long as they eliminate the other player's king. Salem's not so veiled threats to Cinder make that abundantly clear.
  • The metaphor can even be continued on to include others in Remnant even if they are not referred to as such:
  • Pawns aren't really powerful, but if you don't pay enough attention to your foe's pawns then they will turn into a threat as big as the Queen, and if you let them get close, they're just as dangerous as any other piece
    • For Ozpin's faction: Ruby Rose was just a quirky young girl admitted into Beacon early, but she has (as of Volume 5) crippled two of Salem's top Lieutenants. Not bad for an awkward weapons nerd. Oh, and both of said cripplings occurred because they allowed her to get too close to them. Tyrian let his guard down thinking Qrow was the bigger threat, so Ruby got her scythe around his tail, and Cinder didn't even notice that Ruby got close before she used her silver eyes. Jaune Arc could also be considered a pawn as well, as he was the weakest character at the beginning of the show. However, pawns can only move forward, and they're the only pieces in chess that can change to become more powerful (if they reach the other side of the board they can become any piece). This definitely fits Jaune, the nobody who wants to be a hero and is making great progress to become a valued and adequate fighter. Furthermore, the symbolism of him having 7 sisters could also relate to pawn imagery, as there are 8 pawns on each side in Chess. It can be pushed further and put all students that want to be Huntsmen and Huntresses as pawns; they currently aren't strong enough to handle the foes that Salem can bring to a fight, but they have the potential to really deal massive blows later on.
    • For Salem's faction: This was covered a bit earlier, but to reiterate, Cinder was powerful, however she only became a queen after years of waiting, and getting far enough into enemy territory to gain that power, up to that point she was just a pawn. The White Fang, Roman, and all of her minions can also play this part; the White Fang and Roman in particular are not particularly powerful but provide useful services and man power for her plans. While every single recruit, like Cinder, starts off as a pawn before growing powerful enough to take a stronger role in Salem's plans.
  • Rooks can travel straight along rows and columns, which makes them powerful, since they can reach anywhere, but have the disadvantage of being predictable
    • For Oz: James Ironwood and Atlas's military could crush any Grimm incursion or White Fang attack, but their reliance on technology, while the source of their power, was also their greatest weakness at the Fall of Beacon.
    • For Salem: The Grimm are extremely powerful as well, due to their overwhelming numbers and sheer strength, but Grimm can't utilize strategy, and instead attack in predictable ways.
  • Bishops as less predictable and slightly more unusual in their attacks which can catch enemies off guard. They also have a large range, generally being able to travel across the board. But they have drawbacks, such as the fact that they can't strike on half of the tiles on the board
    • For Oz: Qrow Branwen, his semblance of bad luck means that he is an extremely powerful huntsman, and his crow form means that he can get to places others can't more quickly. But, his semblance means he can't really be part of long term missions with anyone.
    • For Salem: Tyrian, also a powerful huntsmen, but he's also completely insane. While he does follow orders, he's so unstable, there's no telling how uncontrollable he could become in the long term in the field. Also, Roman Torchwick, he would attack Vale and Beacon in out of the box ways via his criminal enterprises, but he wasn't great at combat. He could manipulate people and things into his favor, but he was never a powerful huntsmen when attacked head on, as evidenced by multiple Huntsmen and women in training beating him.
  • Knights are even less predictable and have a move set that makes using them extremely difficult to use for first time players, and they have the third smallest range in the game. However, knights have one extremely interesting use. Their L-shaped attack, if placed correctly, is perfectly in the blind spot of a queen. In short, knights are made to kill Queens.
    • For Salem: Emerald, and to a lesser extent, Mercury, are not that physically powerful, and their allegiance was difficult for Cinder to earn, but they, due to their craftiness, unusual approach to fighting, and semblances, were able to cripple Amber, the first Fall Maiden, and the metaphorical Queen that Cinder replaced.
    • For Oz: Yang and Jaune end up fitting this in different ways; Yang is the most obvious as her connection to Raven allows her to "beat" her through her words. While Jaune's Semblance unlocks at a key point that lets him counter Cinder and her plans by empowering Weiss so she heals and is able to pull off a stronger than usual summon. Both Yang and Jaune's Semblances actually would aid in tearing apart Cinder or another Maiden; Yang's gets stronger the more she's hit and with her improved patience she is better able to use it. While Jaune's Semblance would allow another's Semblance to be able to better match the firepower that a Maiden can bring to a fight.
  • Kings aren't physically powerful, but they're the most important pieces in the game, so they are usually heavily protected
    • For Salem: Salem herself. Although she's officially the Black Queen, she can be regarded as a Black King instead. At this point (mid-Vol 5) she has not once involved herself directly in a plot, and has stayed in a castle in the middle of the Grimmlands, presumably for protection. She only speaks from the safety of the shadows, like a good King should. As of Volume 8, however, this takes on a slightly different meaning. In Chess, while the Queen is definitely the most powerful piece, a lot can be said for the King when it comes to the endgame. Because many/all the other pieces could have been removed from the board by that point, the king will have to start moving to escort the remaining pieces. Through most of the last chapters, although she's still inside Monstra, she starts actively taking a role in her assault on Atlas.
    • For Oz: Ozpin. While he did attack Cinder at the end of Vol 3 and appeared to be powerful, he died in the attempt, and now is one of the weakest main characters now that he inhabits the form of Oscar. However, his knowledge and insight is invaluable, just like a real King.
• Adam's theme has him refer to the Faunus using animal-like terms ("Afraid to leave the nest", "satisfied to gnaw on scraps", etc.). Not only does it showcase his refusal to accept that he's wrong and dismissing naysayers as weaklings, but it demonstrates a crucial point of his character; Adam doesn't care even a little bit about the White Fang, or the Faunus in general. Him using animal terms to describe them? He sees them just like the humans do, and just like he sees humans, i.e. inferior to himself for what he perceives as weakness and cowardice. He's even racist to his own people, despite maintaining that all he does is for their benefit.
• "Die" isn't about anything from the season it's from. But listen to the lyrics: it's about hate swallowing love, chaos and destruction being the price of life, and the moon being shattered. How do all these things happen? The Gods wipe out humanity, and challenge Ozma to re-unite them. It's about the Gods!
• The titles of the opening songs for each Volume, when placed in order, seem to be making the lyrics to another song entirely:
  • This will be the day, when it's time to say goodbye.
  • And when it falls, let's just live.
  • And the triumph will be ours.
  • Rising like the moon,
  • We’ll trust in love for every life.
• Word of God states that Ozpin's preferred beverage is hot chocolate, rather than coffee. Chocolate contains amino acids encouraging the production of dopamine, a chemical that, to put it simply, makes you happier. It's a known anti-depressant. Given the reveal of his backstory, it makes quite a bit of sense why Ozpin would have that to drink. Becomes depressing when you realize that most scenes before his death, Ozpin always had his mug on hand, meaning he couldn't even appear in public without the stuff lest he come across as depressed. Also explains why he acted off during The First Step, he didn't have his mug with him in that scene, meaning he hadn't had any hot chocolate yet. Also explains why he's more agitated while in Oscar, he hasn't had the stuff since Volume 3 and more stressful things keep happening to them.
• Rooster Teeth has said that Remnant is LGBT friendly, and what we've seen supports that (no one bats an eye when Saphron introduces Terra as her wife). But then, of course Remnant would be accepting of LGBT people: Closeted people would be stressed-out, walking Grimm magnets.
• Look at Adam's targets throughout the series, particularly his shorts. There is a common theme: The SDC. Knowing what happened to him, him constantly targeting the corporation makes a lot of sense. It further drives in how he doesn't really care about Faunus rights; even his attacks "for Faunus rights" are just petty revenge!
• While it may seem unusual that Adam mentions the entire human race when his primary target is the SDC, there's a perfectly logical explanation for this line of thinking besides the usual guilt by association. The SDC is Remnant's largest Dust supplier, and is virtually THE place to buy Dust on the planet. It also runs on a monopoly (after Jacques Schnee bought his competitors or ran them out of business), and its Dust products are used for ammo, fuel for cars and airships, power grids, heating, and so on. In short, by controlling the very resource most people need to function in modern civilization, the SDC now has a virtual stranglehold on nearly everyone. But if the SDC is targeted, they lose said control. Now, let's say someone is buying Dust. Their Lien ultimately goes to the SDC, which is used to finance their operation, built off the backs of essentially slave labor from their Faunus workers in the quarries. Since this Lien is now blood money, and that the overwhelming majority of people today buy Dust from the SDC, Adam's loathing of the human race suddenly makes more sense because every last person is now part of the system that props up slavery and institutionalized Faunophobia in all but name - and that's not counting the organizations that have already made deals with the SDC, such as the Atlesian military when manufacturing the Paladins. Even if they were informed, the negativity would affect the world and screw over the economy due to the scandals that would ensue. Additionally, given the SDC's too-big-to fail status potentially affecting the lives of nearly every person on the planet, there would be even less incentive to speak out against the SDC. In effect, this means that Adam sees practically every human as an enemy supporting the SDC.
• Throughout the series, James Ironwood has shown to be an incredibly poor leader, both in military tactics and politics, with an Appeal to Force being his hammer. He is also self-absorbed and callous. However, considering his background and the nature of the series, this makes sense.
  • First off, Ozpin. As Raven strongly implies in "Known By It's Song", Ozpin prepares people to join his Secret War by showing them preferential treatment, essentially buying their loyalty. And since the requisite for becoming an Headmaster is "loyalty", Ozpin merely had to pull the strings to ensure someone who put a show of dedication in the seat of power. Constantly being shielded from his mistakes and blunders, along with being given special favors during his formative years has no doubt given Ironwood a giant ego.
  • And then there's the fact that the last large-scale war Remnant had was at least 80 years ago in-universe, the Great War. While there was the Faunus Revolution, it's unclear when that happened or how big it was, we only know how the last battle of that conflict ended. While there have no doubt been Grimm encroachments, there's a big difference between wild beasts and thinking opponents.
• All the show's villains are antithetical to the main themes (as well as views of the show's creator) of constantly moving forward, improving, achieving one's goals through work and willpower, and seeking not to live forever, but to make something that will:
  • Adam is stuck in the past and unable to move on from past slights or injuries done to him by others, lashing out at anyone who he feels hurt him, including those who were not responsible for his injuries or setbacks. He never attempts to address his physical or mental trauma, instead hiding both in a literal and metaphorical mask of a monster. Even with several outs provided, he remained trapped in his same denial and delusion until the bitter end.
  • Hazel was unable to move on or process his sister's accidental death in a positive manner, instead blaming Ozpin for something he isn't directly responsible for and devoting himself to a much worse evil for fundamentally pointless revenge; Hazel's obsessed with killing a perpetually reincarnating being that will outlive him, no matter how successful Hazel is. Pursuing this goal means that he tears other families apart since he's fully prepared to kill anyone that lets him take another shot at Ozpin (the Huntsmen in Mistral being an example), and he rationalizes killing Ozpin's current host as saving them from the immortal's "evil". His inability to process grief directly leads to his being an antagonist. This is reflected in his Semblance and how its only function is to let him ignore his own pain, and how he mutilates himself with Dust crystals to attain more power. He's impressive in battle, but he is destroying families to hypocritically avenge his own being (accidentally) ended, and he's mangling his body with every fight.
  • At the start of the story, Mercury and Emerald both have ideas in their head that they have yet to move on from. For Emerald, those are the ideas that Cinder legitimately cares about her and that Cinder's the only good in her life; and for Mercury it's the idea that all he's good for is killing and violence, instilled in him by a violently abusive father that permanently damaged him. Later for Emerald, whatever loyalty she has to Cinder is nothing compared to the horror at learning Salem's true goal during the Atlas invasion, causing Emerald to defect from her service to both in favor of the heroes. Mercury initially rejects Emerald's pleas to get away from Salem out of hand, as he sees no life for himself beyond what his father chose for him, remaining in Salem's group regardless of what he learns. By the time he realises Ozpin told the truth, Tyrian has control of him, leaving him without the escape option Emerald has.
  • Cinder was made a household slave by her cruel adoptive "family", to the point she's driven over the edge and kills her abusers out of revenge. She then takes out her desires for power and freedom on the innocents of Remnant, leading to mass murders and destruction just to flaunt her power and get back at a world she feels owes her. After Ruby's Silver Eyes knock her down a peg, she slowly loses her sanity and continuously ignores orders/logic just to get any shot at revenge on those who've wronged her or another set of Maiden Powers. It reaches a head when Watts brutally dissects her attitude and constant string of failures. While it seemed like she finally learned her lesson, Cinder then throws away two extremely useful allies for Salem the first chance she gets just to cover her own tracks. It's also heavily implied she did this moreso because she wanted to get back at them for threatening and insulting her. Cinder traps herself in a cycle dictated by revenge, her need for power, using everyone like tools to satisfy her ego and belief that she should have everything she wants while putting everyone she hates down.
  • Likewise, Neo is stuck in her desire to avenge Roman. Everyone thought she was dead, giving her a perfect opportunity to move on from her criminal past; out of the whole cast, Neo would have the easiest time assuming a new identity thanks to her disappearance during the Fall of Beacon along with her Semblance. The skills she learned while working with Roman could have allowed her to make a new life for herself (criminal or otherwise) anywhere, but instead she decides to antagonize one of the most dangerous women alive to get revenge for him, with no support or allies of any kind and no goal beyond her vengeance. She's so caught up in trying to avenge Roman that she willingly falls in with Cinder (just for giving her a person to blame for Roman's death), then aids Salem in the invasion of Atlas, in spite of her own doubts of what she's gotten into. In the end all it rewards her is being used as a disposable tool with no respect, and Cinder pushing her off into the Void Between the Worlds once the latter decided she didn't need Neo anymore. Eventually when she finally gets the vengeance she wanted against Ruby, she finally realized that Vengeance Feels Empty and that she didn't have anything else left besides it.
  • This also includes antagonists such as Caroline Cordovin, even though they aren't villains, they still remain attached to the past. Argus is supposed to be a peaceful fusion of Atlas and Mistral, but throughout most of her appearances, Cordovin makes it very clear that she sees Atlas as superior and that anyone hailing from the other kingdoms are less than people, whether human or Faunus. She views the world outside Atlas and the city outside her base that she's ostensibly defending as full of circling enemies. When Ruby snipes the cannon of her mecha, she refuses to accept responsibility for her actions, repeatedly saying that 'it's all [their] fault' and struggling to free the arm from its frozen/rock dead weight. She can't move forward as she is too attached to the past - similar to how she can't accept that the kingdoms were in an era of peace for 80 years, and that co-operation is achieving greater things than fighting each other ever did. It is only when she sacrifices the arm that she manages to free her mech and use it to defeat the leviathan attacking the city. She moved forward by jettisoning the dead weight, literally and figuratively.
  • Her commanding officer, Ironwood is similar; his actions drive him to oppose the heroes because even though he is genuinely trying to learn from what happened in Vale, his paranoia and fear of Salem cause him to tighten his grip on the kingdom he is supposed to protect. While Oscar tries to help him, ultimately Ironwood is unable to overcome the trauma his past defeats have given him. His paranoia grows as the battle with Salem drags on, chipping away at his sanity and he lets his fear rule his judgement. His need to be right and control the situation reaches a head when he destroys SDC freighters trying to save innocent lives just so he can leverage the city of Mantle to get the Winter Maiden powers for his plans. Eventually, all of his remaining allies decided to turn on him and he ends up Dying Alone on Atlas after being left there with both Cinder and Salem not even acknowledging his presence.
  • Winter and the Ace Ops are a downplayed example. As they have been trained to be Atlesian military soldiers for their huntsmen careers, they have been trained to put their loyalty in Ironwood first and follow his orders without question. They're professionally required to put their personal feelings on the back burner, and refuse to befriend one another. When Salem arrives in Altas at its most vulnerable, the Ace Ops prioritize increasingly inhumane orders from Ironwood to raise Atlus into space and ignore their duties as Huntsmen to save people in Mantle as well. Additionally, suppressing their emotions to unhealthy degrees prevents them from working together under stress; they ignore Ren's emotional insight to continue their orders despite their obvious misgivings. They cannot move on from their military regimen or their duty to follow Ironwood, and it is making them all miserable and endangering the lives of those they're meant to protect.
  • Like Ironwood, Raven deals with a similar pattern of past fears. She cannot move past her bitterness towards Ozpin revealing the earth-shattering truth about Salem and the Grimm, and is constantly afraid of getting dragged into the war between the two sides. Her strategy for surviving the conflict between Ozpin and Salem is to essentially hide in the middle of nowhere, flying beneath either side's attention, and subsist off of raiding isolated communities weaker than her clan. The Volume 9 finale heavily implies this fearful attitude stems from something that happened to Summer Rose when she left to confront Salem years ago, whom Raven left on a secret mission with. Instead of accepting that past trauma and fighting on like her daughter does, Raven clings to it to justify her warped ideology of "survival of the fittest" as an excuse to keep running away from a fight she privately thinks that she could never win. Even after she attains more power than most on Remnant would ever have, her fear holds her back from utilizing it and causes her to flee from both the fight and her clan.
  • Dr. Watts was a brilliant scientist responsible for giving Atlas some of its technological superiority, but it's implied both Pietro upstaging him with creating Penny and Ironwood disgracing him led him to throw in his lot with Salem purely out of spite. He now plays an active part in tearing down Atlas, his former home, using the gifts he created for his people. When he finally gets his revenge on the Kingdom and claims to Cinder that he finally got what he deserved, Cinder later leaves him locked in the Command Center as Atlas crashes and uses the Staff of Creation to create fires and burn him to death.
  • Tyrian's a bit sketchier, but his worship of Salem as a goddess harkens back to when Salem was posing as a goddess thousands of years ago. The world has long since moved on from that, and even Salem herself isn't bothering with her God Guise any more, but Tyrian still believes it.
  • Even characters in the Ever After aren't exempt from this. The Curious Cat's duty is to help their fellow Ever Afterans return to the Tree and ascend once they complete or lose their purpose, but the Cat themselves is incapable of ascending because of their own nature. Trapped by insatiable curiosity, they seek to escape the Ever After in hopes of being free from this perpetual state, and they're willing to manipulate and kill anyone for this goal.
  • Of course Salem, as the show's main antagonist, embodies all this more than anyone. She, an actual being of infinite life, could do literally anything, learn anything, create anything humanly possible, bring world peace, who could save countless lives and prevent countless tragedies like her own. Instead, she managed to waste said infinite life on pursuing petty revenge against the Gods, spending the overwhelming majority of it alone and miserable, and bringing nothing but grief to herself and humanity (both versions), just because she couldn't move on from a loved one's death and kept making the wrong choices. Highlighted best by her end goal: She wants to find peace by dying and she would rather drag Remnant and it's innocent people down with her by destroying the whole world instead of simply admitting her faults and accepting the cycle of life and death.
  • Even the Brother Gods, Light and Dark, fall into the same cycle of being trapped by the past and have a very corrupted philosophy about moving forward. As revealed in Volume 9, the brothers were beings from the Ever After who happily helped the Tree create a land for all of it's creations and clear away the wilderness. But when they discovered that they could create beings to do their job for them (the Curious Cat and the Jabberwalker), they slowly became corrupted by laziness, greed, and pride; losing sight of their original purposes and fighting over whether creation or destruction should prevail. They chose to abandon the Ever After to go make new worlds, leaving the denizens of their home living in constant fear of dying to the Jabberwalker and the Cat eventually being driven insane because the Gods did not give them a way to ascend if they needed help. The Brothers then proceed to repeat their mistakes with Salem, serving the "antagonist" role in her backstory, which ultimately lead to humanity rising against them. Instead of trying to resolve the issue, they decide to invoke a Final Solution, abandoned Remnant just like the Ever After, then shouldered Ozma with the responsibility of fixing all of the long term issues they caused for the world since the beginning, and all of the new ones that would follow with the introduction of the four Relics. Their idea of "moving on" consists of creating something new before abandoning it because it was not perfect in their eyes. This allows whatever they leave behind to wreak havoc on the world and put innocent beings in danger, while the Brothers continue enforcing the cycle of flawed creation and destruction through their False Dichotomy. The Brothers ultimately started the war between Ozpin and Salem that is dooming Remnant because the duo failed to learn that balance must be achieved naturally, and that they were responsible for mending their mistakes, not just leaving them behind so they don't have to deal with them.
• Related to the above, all the heroes, their allies and redeemed antagonists have goals rooted in the past, but they aren't obsessed with them like the villains are, and learn to keep moving forward and to make things better for the people around them:
  • Ruby revered her lost mother, viewing her as the perfect Huntsman and wanted to live up to her legacy. This inspired her to be a hero like the ones she’s heard about in stories, and this blind optimism helps her teammates and friends through the hardest times. But when she learns about her mother's confrontation with Salem, the losses from fighting in the Forever War and The Chains of Commanding drag Ruby down into a deep depression that culminates in her choosing ascension in the Ever After because she sees herself as a failure who cannot live up to her ideals. However, she instead goes through a spiritual rebirth where she realizes she doesn’t need to be perfect or exactly like her mother. She overcomes her depression by accepting that she as Ruby Rose is enough.
  • Weiss wanted to restore the SDC by bringing back the glory days of when her grandfather was in charge, to the point that she even trained to become a huntress like he was a huntsman. But when her father disowned her, she put that all aside for the moment and decided to return to her Family of Choice where she can do some immediate good. Her goal was still on her mind, but she decided that helping others was more important than getting revenge on her father. When she finally returned to Atlas, she took down her father by exposing his crimes and later focused on making amends for the damage Jacque has caused: Choosing to protect Mantle from the Grimm/Ironwood and healing the broken relationships with her brother and mother.
  • Blake wanted to redeem the White Fang and find equality for Faunus, but was reluctant to let others in due to Faunus discrimination, her shame of being a criminal and Adam's emotional abuse. Her time with her friends, especially Yang and Sun, helped her accept people's companionship and slowly heal from past wounds. She knew killing Adam and taking over the White Fang wouldn't do any good, so she instead convinced the Faunus of Menagerie to stand up and fight to stop the terrorism from reaching Haven Academy. She is able to finally stop Adam tormenting her for good with Yang's help, and begins a new, healthier romantic relationship with Yang in the Ever After.
  • Yang was an adrenaline junkie thrill-seeker who didn't think before she acted, and spent her life looking for the mother who abandoned her. Her first flaw got her in serious trouble when it kickstarted the villain's plans, which lead to a massive Trauma Conga Line culminating in her loosing her arm when she tried protecting Blake from Adam. Yang is left with severe PTSD for months and reluctant to get back in the fight. But her learning about Ruby's departure to Haven made Yang realize she needs to be there for her little sister, leading to working out her flaws with Taiyang. En route to Haven, she finally finds Raven, but chooses to focus on getting to Ruby instead to fixating on the latter, and cuts ties with her when she realizes her mother was a self-serving coward. She confronts her PTSD by helping Blake take down Adam for good, and moves forward with a mature moderation of seeking thrills and thinking logically.
  • Jaune clearly still feels the loss of Pyrrha, but he pushes past his brief Death Seeker stage and stops obsessing over getting revenge on Cinder for what she did. Using Pyrrha's weapons and armor to upgrade his own is a very literal way of using the lessons of the past to move forward. When he is set back by being forced to Mercy Kill Penny, stranded back in time in the Ever After and betrayed by Alyx, the trauma reemerges and starts to chip away at his sanity. He can only keep it together by “protecting” the Paper Pleasers but is forced to accept that he did it to feel the rush of rescuing others. Admitting his faults helps him realize he doesn't need to be the "hero" and conversing with Alyx's spirit convinces him to focus on becoming the kind of man he truly wants to be instead. These revelations allow him and Team RWBY to get out of the Ever After, and Jaune is rewarded with his youth restored thanks to Alyx's dying wish to fix what she had broken.
  • Nora had a horrible childhood, but you'd never know it from her personality. She focuses completely on the here and now, and her relationship with Ren, rather than dwelling on the past. After being physically and emotionally separated from Ren, she does some self-reflection on her sense of worthlessness, deciding she needs to move forward from being "Ren and Nora" and find out who "just Nora" is.
  • Ren almost got the team killed due to his rage against the monster that killed his parents, but soon calms down and focuses on what's important; acting strategically to destroy a dangerous monster, not getting revenge. Later in Atlas, when he has an emotional breakdown from the Ozpin reveal and becoming fugitives, Harriet's ranting about replacing teammates snaps him out of his funk and makes him realize how unhealthy bottling up his feelings over the years has been. His semblance evolves and he gains a new emotional perspective on life.
  • Qrow's Undying Loyalty to Ozpin was based around Ozpin being the first person to treat him as something more than a curse. In the wake of his Broken Pedestal experience, he puts aside his flask after realizing he's more beneficial to Ruby and the heroes without it; he constantly gets peps talks from Clover that he's got more worth to Ruby and the heroes than he thinks. When he realizes that Clover is making the same Undying Loyalty mistakes with James that he made with Ozpin, it threatens to sends him backwards. However, it's Robyn pointing out that he's a proper Huntsmen because he fights for what's right, that puts him back on track. His journey is about finding his own self-worth instead of seeking it through the eyes of others.
  • Oscar is terrified at the prospect of his identity being washed away and just ending up another Ozpin, but he still decides to stand by his friends, helping them of his own free will. He later shows so much promise in bringing out the better qualities of Ironwood, Hazel and Emerald that Ozpin concludes Oscar is doing a better job without his interference than with it.
    • And partially thanks to him, two of the villains listed above manage to see what Salem's path will truly bring and choose to oppose it: Hazel looks past his hatred of Ozpin, remembers what his beloved sister Gretchen believed in and puts his life on the line for the sake of others, while Emerald helps Oscar escape and (reluctantly) joins the heroes. She also tries to convince Mercury what's really at stake, though Tyrian intervenes.
  • Penny hadn't forgotten that Cinder was responsible for her first "death", but instead of just pressing on the attack against her murderer, she chooses to be by Fria's side when she passes. This earns her the power of the Winter Maiden. Unlike Winter or the Ace Ops, who all blindly followed Ironwood's orders, she decided to join Ruby and their friends in an effort to find another way to save Atlas. Later, when Cinder disrupts the Solitas evacuation plan to steal the Relic of Creation, Penny chose to stay behind and protect her friends and people, but at the cost of Cinder fatally stabbing her to try and steal the Winter Maiden powers. Instead of fixating on the latter and trying to stay alive in vain, she asked Jaune to Mercy Kill her in order to pass the Maiden power to someone she trusts and loves: Winter. Even though it meant she would be gone forever, Penny accepted that her time had come to an end and never stopped trying to fulfill her duty: being a protector of the innocents of Remnant. She knew that a part of her would live on in Winter as the succeeding Maiden, and that was enough for her.
  • Ilia lost hope in peace between humanity and the Faunus when her parents died, joining the White Fang to get revenge because she didn't know what else to do. Once Blake talks sense into her and Ilia's shown an option other than terrorism, she turns against the White Fang and finds hope again by supporting Ghira's new peaceful Faunus rights movement to make a true change in the world.
  • Maria was a powerful Silver-Eyed Warrior and huntress whose career was cut short when her eyes were slashed out and went into hiding. Despite her self-loathing for her cowardice, she found a new purpose training Ruby and watching over the next generation of huntsmen. She goes from a bystander stuck with the group by circumstance to a mentor actively helping them to stop Salem and save Remnant; her past no longer holding her down.
  • Whitley was initially an antagonist who went along with his father's agenda to cope with his abusive home life, believing he'd be safe if he acted like his corrupt father and use SDC for his own gain. But once Jacque's toxic influence is removed and he hears about May Marigold's family situation, he takes steps to make amends with his sister and save the people of Mantle and Atlas using the company's resources. He begins to grow as his own person and uses the Schnee Dust Company to help to save lives, just as his grandfather Nicholas once did.
  • Willow Schnee fell into despairing depression when her husband confirmed her long held fear that he used her to take over the company she was implicitly supposed to inherit. She used alcohol to cope, isolating herself from her children and neglecting them when they needed her. Despite this, she still had the drive to watch over them, secretly installing cameras to catch proof if Jacque abused them, and this proved essential in finding evidence of his crimes. Later when her family is in danger from the Hound, she gains the courage to stay sober in order to protect Weiss and Whitley, to the point she uses her Glyph summons to save Whitley from death. Afterwards, she stays by her son's side at all times and plays a supporting role in getting Team RWBY to the Winter Maiden Vault, focusing on caring for her children once again in their efforts to save the Kingdom's people.
  • Robyn Hill resented Atlas for neglecting Mantle, and wanted payback on Ironwood for abandoning them all after he declared martial law. But when she learns about his plan to nuke Mantle and sees how revenge-obsessed Qrow is, she focuses on helping her new ally through his grief and prioritizing the safety of the citizens over her anger. This allows them to run into Marrow and Winter as they are defecting, and set in motion the Solitas evacuation plan.
  • As mentioned above, Winter and the five Ace-Ops are held back by their duty to Ironwood by prioritizing his orders and ignoring both their personal feelings and the needs of Solitas citizens. What leads them to defect is being reminded that the they became Huntsmen to protect humanity, and accept their conflicting emotions instead of denying them.
    • Clover realizes after Tyrian fatally stabs him that he let his faith in Ironwood cloud his judgement and allow the ship to crash. He asks Qrow to stop his superior from doing more damage as he passes on.
    • Marrow and Winter are next when they learn Ironwood is actually going to bomb Mantle. Marrow furiously rejects his title and leader's order, stating that he believed in Ironwood to make things better for everyone, and he intends to do that with or without the military. Meanwhile, Winter finally acknowledges her true feelings about the situation, first by saving Marrow from being shot and reconnecting with Weiss. When she and Ironwood fight, Winter reaffirms her duty as a Huntress by declaring she'll always protect Altas from its enemies, even if that enemy is her General. It's part of her defying Ironwood that convinces a dying Penny to gift Winter her Maiden powers.
    • Elm and Vine switch sides after Robyn reminds them that a city is not the landmass, but the people instead. The duo then work together with Robyn and Qrow to stop a rogue Harriet from dropping the nuke. Vine manages to hold off Harriet by appealing to logic and sacrifices himself to save everyone he can, while Elm is the one to reach her by declaring the Ace Ops are friends.
    • Harriet stubbornly tries to go through with the threat out of grief for Clover's death. She falters once she's told by Elm that they indeed are friends, not just co-workers. This makes Harriet realize that there are people who care for her here and now, and that obsessing over Ironwood's orders is only hurting everyone.
  • Little the mouse was a being with no purpose and content to live their life until they found one. Moved by Ruby's kindness, they chose to leave their village to help her team get home, staying by Ruby's side even when it gets them killed. When they ascend, they use their admiration of Ruby to become the heroic Somewhat, having several new purposes and promising to look after Juniper when Jaune has to leave the Ever After. Little/Somewhat made their own purpose by joining the adventure, and used those experiences when they were reborn to continue doing good.
  • Although she never truly becomes an ally, Neo helps Team RWBY and Jaune stop the Curious Cat, and with the help of the Tree's leaves makes peace with Roman's death. She chooses to ascend through the Tree to find a new purpose and move forward with a better life.
  • The entire way Ozma's immortality works is directly counter to the way Salem's works. Instead of being one single, static person, he merges with a new (though similar) person every time he reincarnates, slowly changing and moving forward. In contrast, Salem remains the same person and has thoroughly stagnated in her hatred of Ozpin and the Gods.
  • The Ever After Tree and the Blacksmith are the positive counterparts to the Brother Gods in regards to the show's theme. Unlike their two first creations, the Tree is extremely compassionate and patient to the Ever After's denizens and the descendants of Light and Dark's creations. They help their citizens through Ascension to find new paths in life so they can always move forward while using what they learned in their past lives to try becoming something better. The Tree also tried to peacefully resolve the Brothers' squabbling by giving them the freedom to create and destroy new worlds to learn the importance of balance (which sadly did not pan out). The Blacksmith helped Ruby deconstruct her unhealthy fixation on perfection, guided the Heroes back to Remnant, and restored Jaune's youth with Alyx's wish/dagger by waiting as long as was necessary. The Tree and Blacksmith symbolize the importance of creating new goals for oneself, acknowledging failures and reconstructing them into something new. Their compassion, patience, understanding of balance and hands-off approach allows them and the people they help to thrive, whereas the Brothers only leave paths of misery and ruin because they try to enforce their flawed beliefs and egos on their creations without truly caring for them.
• Qrow and Raven were both sent to Beacon for the same mission by the Branwen Tribe and both connected with their teammates. Yet it's Qrow who chose them over the tribe, not Raven, who started a family with Tai. This is probably because Qrow wasn't treated as well as Raven was once their semblances were known, as his caused trouble whereas Raven's gave them an escape route provided they had someone she cared about away from trouble.
• Ironwood's Semblance is revealed to be a passive one that strengthens his willpower and helps with decision-making. At first, it sounds rather redundant, but is actually a strong asset in its own right. As a high-ranking officer in a public position of power, Ironwood has to make difficult choices on a regular basis without much chance to second-guess himself. Therefore, an ability that reinforces his resolve helps him be decisive in times of a crisis and carry on with decisions he believes are right.
  • Of course, the progression of his character arc shows the negative side of such a Semblance: it makes him rigid in thinking and less willing to compromise or consider other viewpoints. This is no doubt why Ozpin and later Ruby and her team have to put so much effort into trying to talk sense into Ironwood, because with his own power constantly active, he's firm in his beliefs that his ideas are the ones that should be followed. So Ironwood goes on to replace Oz in control over security for the Vytal Festival and barely registers the criticism of Nora or Oscar on how to deal with Mantle.
• So far, it's implied every three volumes take place during a certain season, which also corresponds with the Kingdom and the Maiden who is the central focus: Vale/Fall, Mistral/Spring, Atlas/Winter. The theme of the seasons seems to influence the tone of the three volumes in each Kingdom:
  • Fall is a season symbolized by change, mystery, and letting things go. It’s also fresh off the heels of the warm and inviting summer before the harsh, colder temperatures sink in. Volumes 1 - 3 focused on the protagonists letting go of their childhoods to move into the grim reality of being huntsmen, but also mature into adulthood. For the mystery aspect, the audience learns more about Ozpin's conspiracy group and that world of Remnant isn't as straightforward as everyone thinks it is. The seasonal theme also highlights the dark side of loss and changes that are painful, such as the kingdom of Vale falling to the Grimm, the deaths of Amber and Pyrrha, and the total loss of innocence as they learn the truth of the Salem-Ozpin war. The final episode ending in a winter scene reinforces the harsh truth of life as we know it ending.
  • Spring is a season that illustrates new beginnings, progress, a sense of peace, and happiness. From the get go in Volume 4, things aren't the same as before, but some new developments are ultimately positive. The main characters slowly heal from the fall of Beacon (Ruby and Jaune), make corrections to destructive attitudes (Yang, Blake and Ren), and obtaining new goals for the future (Weiss and Team RNJR). The group gained new allies with Oscar and Maria, Qrow found a new set of companions to travel with, and things were looking up for the first time in a while. Volume 5, which didn't have as much combat, can be seen as an interval of peace for the heroes. But, the transition from Mistral to Argus in Volume 6 also began an early transition to the next season, and with it the season's symbolism.
  • Winter is a bleaker season, represented by cold, detachment, depression and death, but has a silver lining as the season of introspection and rebirth. Things took a turn for the worse when the truth of Ozpin is revealed, everyone's hope and trust is shaken, and Ironwood declares the heroes public enemies for refusing to obey him. The Atlas arc has some of the darkest moments of the RWBY series, with the truth behind the Hound, Ironwood's descent into villainy, the Kingdom of Solitas is destroyed, Ruby is Driven to Suicide through ascension when her trauma comes to a head, and Jaune experiences serious Sanity Slippage when he is forced to Mercy Kill Penny then flung back in time in the Ever After. Despite the sorrow, hope is not lost: the heroes evolve into greater fighters with their semblances and training, while many resolve their inner conflicts with self-reflection. Ren and Nora, followed by Yang and Blake, confess their love for each other and the heroes reconcile with Ozpin after repeating his mistakes. They gain new allies, Penny is reborn as human for a short while, Ruby and Jaune are able to make peace their failings, and the heroes return from the Ever After with renewed hope and determination. Despite losing the Solitas cities, most of the people are safe, the heroes believe that the kingdom can be rebuilt again in the future, and the final shot shows that all the Kingdoms heard Ruby's message and have united in Vacuo to fight against Salem.
• The main colors of the Grimm are their black bodies, white bones, red eyes/markings, and yellow irises. In other words, they're Red, White, Black, and Yellow
• Over the course of the series, the antagonists who are killed off die in ways darkly ironic to their motivations in life, and are ultimately brought down by their own actions:
  • Roman Torchwick declared that he would survive by lying, stealing, and cheating, saying that nothing good came out of fighting for justice and peace. He teams up with Cinder Fall to bring Beacon down because he believes in fighting for the "winning side". Cinder's attack brings in hordes of Grimm to Beacon, and Roman's virulent negativity during his rant towards Ruby attracts a Griffon that swallows him whole, while Ruby lives on because she held on to her optimism and drove away the creatures.
  • Leo Lionheart was not a bad man, but his fear of Salem drove him to betray humanity. When his aura broke in the Battle of Haven, Lionheart's first instinct was to bail, and flee to his office to avoid retribution. Unfortunately, being alone meant Salem could quietly kill him for his failure. If he had remained at the Battle, he would have been simply arrested, but alive. By fleeing for his life, Lionheart ended up losing it.
  • Adam Taurus wanted to divide the world by enslaving humanity and making the Faunus the rulers of Remnant out of revenge for the discrimination he faced. His extremist actions allow Ghira to start a new, peaceful Faunus movement with a huge PR boost from the Menagerie Faunus stopping Adam's attack on Haven Academy; both Ghira and the Menagerie Faunus are content to remain in their home until news of Adam's involvement in the Fall of Beacon are brought to them by Blake. His obsessive and self-destructive pursuit of her turns his loyal followers against him. He is killed by his ex-lover (a Faunus) and her new partner (a human) working together in synchronized harmony and teamwork, the very thing he wanted to destroy using the White Fang.
  • Clover Ebi was supposed to be huntsman defending both of Solitas' cities, but his determination to support Ironwood drove him down the wrong path. Despite his misgivings, he kept obeying Ironwood and ignored helping Mantle until it was too late to be saved. In "With Friends Like These", his focus on Qrow over Tyrian gets him killed when Tyrian stabs him in the back. Ironically, this happened just after Clover declared that he would trust Ironwood with his life.
  • Hazel Rainart joined Salem's faction to avenge his huntress-wannabe sister who died in an unfortunate accident during her training; his leader used this motivation to turn him into an enforcer and murderer by promising he'd eventually destroy the target of his anger, Ozpin. Ozpin's latest incarnation, Oscar, convinces Hazel to reflect on his actions and choose a different path. This leads to the latter dying trying to protect Oscar and Emerald from Salem because that's "what Gretchen would have done", and his sacrifice buys the heroes time to escape and ultimately save the people of Atlas. Hazel's case is unique because unlike the others, his death was entirely his own choice, dying while fighting Salem to make amends for his villainy.
  • Jacques Schnee was a man who corrupted the Schnee Dust Company from the top down and remorselessly abused his family to elevate himself above them, even when he was already one of the most powerful men in Remnant. His desire for more power leads him to cut a deal with Watts to destroy Ironwood, leading to the Schnee patriarch's arrest for treason. He's reduced to a pathetic coward with no power or family to help him, and is unceremoniously killed off by Ironwood with no one knowing his fate. Despite Jacques' initial control over them, he was brought down by his wife's hidden security cameras and his two daughters' authorities as huntresses. Meanwhile his son began to reverse his father's damage by using the SDC as a source of hope and help when Mantle was abandoned by Ironwood.
  • Since his debut, Arthur Watts was a smug genius who belittled Cinder Fall every chance he could, regardless of her success. His main reason for siding with Salem to destroy Atlas was to spite Ironwood because he was passed over and disgraced by the man. Implicitly out of revenge for his earlier speech and to hide her actions to Salem, Cinder uses Watts to help her stop the heroes' efforts and retrieve the Staff of Creation, then uses it to set the command center on fire where Watts is working, killing the man the first chance she gets. The doctor who is (initially) not afraid of dying at Cinder's hands in "Worthy" is last seen desperately trying to get out alive as he dies with the kingdom he hated so much. Watts unintentionally gave Cinder the means and the motivation to finally take one of her tormentors out of the picture.
  • General James Ironwood was initially a respected commander and huntsman with several allies across Remnant, and wanted to unite the world to stop Salem. When Beacon falls, he withdraws to Atlas to regroup, and is ostensibly planning to rescue Remnant before Atlas is besieged by Salem directly. Once Cinder excites his paranoia, he abandons this plan to just save Atlas and use the Staff of Creation raise the city into the atmosphere. When Penny becomes the new Winter Maiden and his plans keep falling apart, he is slowly driven to desperate insanity that pushes all of his allies away, including the staunchly-loyal Winter and Marrow. When Winter is gifted the Winter Maiden powers by a dying Penny, she weakens Ironwood enough to leave him powerless to escape. Atlas, the kingdom that he betrayed everyone for and wanted to raise into the sky, kills him when it crashes into the very city he left to die, while he is all alone... as the people he swore to defend have fled, half because the situation is hopeless, and half to get away from him entirely.
  • The Curious Cat was driven to violence and insanity in their determination to discover why the Brother Gods left the Ever After. They try to achieve this by wearing Ruby down mentally to take over her body, and when that fails, possessing Neo to escape to Remnant. Their actions of hurting Ruby lead to ascension where she is able to make peace with her inner demons, and WBY and Jaune catch up to the Cat because they cannot leave the Ever After through Neo. The renewed and reborn Ruby helps her team take down the Cat in their One-Winged Angel form, and a freed Neo delivers the final blow with her Jabberwalker clones. The Curious Cat is doomed to never ascend, after they made it their life's mission to answer one unsolvable question.
  • Neopolitan revolved her entire life around Roman Torchwick, and vowed to avenge him by killing who she believed was his assailant: Ruby Rose. She decides to force Ruby through Ascension to erase her completely. But after succeeding, she realizes she has nothing left to live for and gets possessed by the Curious Cat. Thanks to the efforts of Heroes, she is freed, delivers the final blow to the Cat via her Jabberwalker clones and is able to make peace with Roman's death. She then chooses ascension for herself, in hopes of finding a new purpose. Like Hazel, Neo chose her own "death", and redeemed herself by helping the heroes stop a greater antagonist.
• Ambrosius can only create things if he receives the proper explanation and references for what is asked of him. This is likely because the God of Light made him with the intent to aid humanity in its development, and being able to make anything out of thin air would be a cakewalk. Similarly, Jinn cannot answer knowledge of things or events yet to transpire. Their purpose is to assist and/or guide.

Volume One

• In "The Shining Beacon" Jaune is walking kind of funny while he's talking with Ruby. Like he's slightly unbalanced. Almost like... he's not comfortable with the weight of his sword and shield yet.
• Pyrrha didn't use any recoil from her weapon to slow her descent, and just smashed through everything until she stopped. While this in itself is a viable strategy, it makes more sense given that she was intending to help Jaune all along. Since he was just falling, with nothing stopping him, she couldn't slow herself down and still land in time.
• When Nora and Ren are introduced, a joke is made of Nora's motormouth nature by having her constantly gabble over the duo's morning activities. Note how she seems to continue talking about the same subject over each time-skip. Impossible, yes? This could be seen as just a weird mistake... or it could imply that Nora is so scatterbrained, that she keeps looping the monologue back around to the same subjects over and over and over again.
• In The First Step Part 1, shortly after Ozpin comments that partners are determined by eye contact, Yang is seen putting on mirrored sunglasses and winking at Ruby. She didn't want to meet anyone else's eyes until she could make sure they would be a good partner to her.
• During the Initiation into Beacon, Yang uses her gauntlets to prolong her flight. At first it appears that she is just having fun but considering how she wanted Ruby to team up with someone else, so she can mature a bit, maybe she was ensuring that Ruby won't be able to reach her before running into someone else. Her looking for Ruby later was likely just to make sure her little sister was alright, along with seeing who ended up as Ruby's partner.
• At the very end of "Players and Pieces", Ozpin appoints Jaune as leader of Team JNPR, to his surprise while Pyrrha grins. Obviously she's proud of him, but there might be another element at work as well: as we later learn, Pyrrha rather dislikes being put on a pedestal, even as she does the best she can with it. As a result, Pyrrha could've been relieved that she wasn't made leader... because it's the kind of position that could've reinforced said pedestal, with the team looking to her to make decisions, among other things.
• Jaune's potential is foreshadowed very early on; aside from being the one of his group to have a plan and get everyone to follow (as the Awesome page notes) he manages to block a blow from the Deathstalker with his shield. This isn't much, until you remember he only just unlocked his Aura, had none of the physical conditioning the other recruits had, and yet was able to tank a blow from a large and powerful Grimm for a key period of time without falling. He does, in fact, earn his way into Beacon.
• Pyrrha's Semblance:
  • In Forever Fall Part 2, Pyrrha explains that she can control magnetism. This explains her absurd accuracy with a thrown spear, and her shield (there's a Freeze-Frame Bonus in Players and Pieces where her spear hovers up to her hand with the magnetic sound effect when she gets launched over the Death Stalker). Magnetism would give her a large advantage over most opponents, as most of the characters we've seen so far use metallic weapons. Magnetism is one of the most versatile powers in fiction, reinforcing Pyrrha's position as the "strongest fighter" in Beacon.
  • It also explains how she's able to shield-bounce with skill comparable to Captain America: She's quite literally controlling the direction the shield will move in after she smashes it into someone, as in her one-on-four battle with Team CRDL in Volume 2.
• The lyric "And victory is in a simple soul" takes on an additionally optimistic tone after having learned that the Grimm are The Soulless, lacking even the simplest of souls and, consequently, victory. And given Episode 1's narration which ends with Ozpin commenting that perhaps the answer lies with a simpler, more innocent soul. Aura, used in combat, draws power from your soul. Victory in this universe is LITERALLY dependent on your soul, not just metaphorically. This was echoed later by Ozpin: But perhaps victory is in the simpler things that you've long forgotten... things that require a smaller, more honest soul. It also is now revealed to be a reference to Ozpin's belief in a simpler, smaller soul being key. And in particular, Ruby is implied to be said soul.
• The white flash whenever a human character is struck by one of the powerful blows being thrown around in the Yellow trailer is, in retrospect, clearly their aura defending them from lethal damage.
• Jaune faked his way into Beacon, explaining his initial incompetence, his Boring, but Practical sword and shield as opposed to the Crazy mix-and-match weapons of the rest of Beacon's student body (and his surprise at Ruby's Crescent Rose being custom-made, and how she said everyone's weapons were also custom), his extremely casual clothing (underneath his armor, he's just wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers), and the fact that he didn't recognize famous Huntress-to-be Pyrrha except by a cereal box advertisement.
• When Blake gets tired of everyone bickering around her while she's trying to read, she gets everyone to shut up by blowing out her candle, seemingly surrendering her book for some peace and quiet. However, we later find out that she's a Faunus, and that means she can see in the dark, so she likely wasn't losing any reading time at all.
• How do cats act towards new people? Cold, stand-offish... but once they realize you're family; they warm up to you. Exactly how Blake acted.
• Weiss's refusal to acknowledge that not all Faunus are bad news and Blake's refusal to acknowledge that the White Fang really is showing their black and white views of the issue, matching their color themes.
• After Blake explains the backstory of the White Fang, it becomes apparent that the song "From Shadows" isn't about Blake, but about the fall of the White Fang into extremism.
  When it started, all we wanted was a chance to live our lives / Now in darkness, taking anything we want and we will rise...
• So we know that Ruby associates better with weapons than with people, and what's her gun's last name again? That's right, she named Crescent Rose like a family member.
• The RWBY "White" trailer was released on February 14, 2013, otherwise known as Valentine's Day. The song featured in the trailer, "Mirror Mirror", makes constant references to being alone. February 14 is also known as Singles Awareness Day.
• Jaune's gross incompetence when it comes to the supernatural elements make sense when you think about who he was based on. All the members of Team JNPR are based on ancient heroes who cross-dressed, and JNPR's genders correspond to the reversed genders (Nora = Thor who put on a dress to get Mjolnir back once, Pyrrha = Achilles who dressed as a woman to get out of the Trojan war, Ren = Mulan who dressed as a man to fight), except Jaune's person he is based on is Joane of Arc, who fought the English and is a legit saint. Of the four, Jaune is the only one who is based off of a real person, so of course he would be terrible at the supernatural elements, all of his friends are based on myths so they'd naturally be very well versed in it, but as he is based on someone real, he wouldn't know about any of this.

Volume Two

• Why is it in the intro that several characters who seem to be aligned with Cinder ultimately turn out to just be extra bit characters in the actual volume? Because the intro is heavily symbolic of the fact that they're a Red Herring. The enemies of Team RWBY and of Ozpin's inner circle ARE indeed gathering, but not in the explicit way that they expect. Instead, it becomes clear that the obvious villains are a diversion used to keep the good guys in the dark, while the actual enemy is undermining them from the shadows.
• The hilariously over-the-top Food Fight in "Best Day Ever", between Teams RWBY and JNPR has a very familiar colour symbolism: Rubies are red, juniper berries are blue. In other words...Red vs. Blue.
• Also from the Food Fight, why were Team RWBY and Team JNPR able to use leeks, sausages, turkeys, baguettes and watermelons as weapons? Back in Season One, Pyrrha mentions that Aura can be used to strengthen weapons, among other things, to Jaune. Apparently in the hands of a skilled Aura user, even a broom is as tough as a sword. Or a piece of bread. Or a swordfish. This fridge interpretation is now so well-established in the fandom it has become fanon. Likewise, who doesn't make an improvised version of their weapons? Jaune and Ruby. Jaune doesn't get a chance because he's knocked out early, but Ruby doesn't have that excuse. It's foreshadowing for her inability to fight without Crescent Rose.
• Why did Penny sound unnaturally cheery and exceedingly strict in her diction at the end of Volume 1 but is more natural in Volume 2? Because she's a robot, as revealed in Volume 2, Episode 3, where she also admits that the people who created her aren't sure if she's "ready" yet. It is likely that her personality hadn't developed much beyond that of a basic AI at the time of first meeting the gang, and in the few weeks between the fight and meeting Ruby again, it could have developed, and is now much more subtle and more natural.
• Painting The Town...: Penny observes that Ruby is taking the news of her true nature surprisingly well. All the way back in Shining Beacon, however, Ruby mentions that meeting new weapons is just like meeting new people, only better. Penny, a weapon in the form of a person, is probably one of the coolest things Ruby can think of. No wonder she takes the news so well.
• Yang's Semblance absorbs damage and sends it back at her opponent. Her Ember Celica are two shotguns strapped onto her arms, the recoil would cause some force against her arms when she fires them. So basically she absorbs the recoil from her Ember Celica and gets stronger with every shot, without taking the damage that a solid blow would cause to her Aura. One suggestion floated on Tumblr is that her action of punching her fists together is a self power-up.
• Pyrrha takes on team CRDL in 4 on 1 fight. Who wants to bet she agreed to that because she still had a grudge for how they treated Jaune? Throw in the brutal way she finished off Cardin and it looks pretty likely. Given Glynda's protests when Mercury requested to fight Pyrrha, it even possible that fighting Team CRDL was Pyrrha's idea. Sadly, she didn't make good on her threat to break his legs.
• Yang, whose motif is Goldilocks, once traveled to a house inhabited by dangerous animals when she was a child. And Ruby, who has the Little Red Riding Hood motif, went along with her. The sisters are saved from the Beowolves thanks to their uncle, who happens to be a Huntsman.
• In Vol. 2 Episode 6, we learn that Yang took Ruby when she was a toddler to follow a hint about Yang's mother, when they were attacked by Beowolves, and saved by Qrow. Ruby was asleep for most of the trip, judging from the flashback art and Yang's narration. However, if she wasn't woken up by snarling Grimm, she must have woken up when Qrow saved them with his ballistic scythe; this might have instilled Ruby with the desire to learn such a difficult weapon: watching her uncle save her life.
• With Yang's explanation of hers and Ruby's mothers in Vol.2 Episode 6 (who both disappeared in similar circumstances), Red Like Roses Part II could easily apply to her and her mum as much as it does to Ruby and Summer. Might also even apply to Yang and Summer Rose, considering that by the way she described her, she did (and does) see her as her mother too.
• In "Field Trip", Weiss takes to the puppy Zwei quite quickly after the initial impression. Remember 'I always wanted bunkbeds as a kid'? She's quite ecstatic about something else she likely wanted to have, but couldn't.
• What if Ozpin was reserving that mission for RWBY in Field Trip?
• Episode 9 of volume 2: Doctor Oobleck asked team RWBY why they had chosen to be Huntresses, that is, all except Ruby herself. He was probably briefed on why she joined up by Ozpin. Plus, he didn't need to. Ruby has always had the goal in life to be a huntress to protect people. She knows why she chose that career. The others had never really thought about it themselves.
• Of course Coco can easily dispatch Grimm with a fully functional minigun. The weapons of Teams RWBY + JNPR, with the exception of Nora's grenade launcher, have mostly the power of standard guns, which proved ineffective against these armored opponents. A minigun however propels rounds with a lot more force than all of them, and thus was able to pierce them relatively easily, by comparison.
• A song about having difficulty letting go of a lost loved one seems out of place in the epic battle in Players and Pieces, but then remember the Nevermore's namesake and it makes a whole lot more sense. Following this train of thought, when was the next time a Giant Nevermore posed a major threat to Ruby? Right after Penny's death.
• Wearing high heels in battle seems like a terrible idea, but for some characters there's a reason for it. Pyrrha is based on Achilles, whose only weakness was his heel. Blake is a catgirl. Cats are digitigrade, which means they walk on their toes.
• In her tirade against the White Fang, Weiss treats theft on par with murder. Why? Because the thing in question that was stolen just before Weiss' and Blake's argument was a huge Dust shipment—and Dust is most prominently used as a weapon. Revolutionaries like the White Fang would have no other use for it, and the amount they stole would allow them to kill a lot of people. In addition, Dust stolen from the Schnee Dust Company is Dust that isn't being used to fuel weapons and vehicles which would be used to fight the Grimm. Not only are the White Fang using Dust to hurt humans, but they're denying supplies to those who would further protect humanity, indirectly hurting and killing more innocent people. So yes, Weiss is correct to argue that stealing is on par with murder in this case.
• Weiss's color is white. White light is made of all the colors in the visible spectrum. What is Weiss's weapon? A Multi-Action Dust Rapier which can contain any color of Dust for her to use. What is more interesting is that you separate light with a prism. A prism needs at least two mirrors to separate light into the different colors. What is Weiss's song in the White Trailer? Mirror, Mirror. Alternatively, in all art when every color comes together you get the opposite, black. Chapter 11 of Volume 2 shows us Blake using dust shades.
• The Grimm attack on Vale being instantly cleaned up by Glynda does make sense; Glynda's an experienced Huntress with lots of power, so a clean-up would be easy enough in the first place. Plus, the attack was supposed to instigate panic in the people. Her cleaning it up so quickly and easily could be a way to put the people at ease, since that's the job of Huntsmen and Huntresses. They're supposed to protect civilians, and if they can't act quickly in a serious situation, then what hope do people have?
• Neo's weapon is a parasol, an item used to protect oneself from the sun. Who is the character Neo fights? Yang, one of the characters representing the Sun.
• How did an illegal activist like Blake support herself between leaving the White Fang and applying to Beacon? Well, the train car she was left on at the end of the Black Trailer was visibly carrying packages of Dust. She probably sold them on the black market.
• "From Shadows" actually has the robotic voice saying "Intruder: Identify yourself." as part of the vocals. The entire remainder of the song is the response: the White Fang identifying who and what they are by saying what they fight for and against.
• When the Grimm attacked through the breach, Emerald mentions that the attack "was still days away". But what's happening right at that point in time? All of Beacon's Huntsmen-in-training are getting ready to head out on training missions with professional Huntsman. While some are staying in Vale's walls, many are heading out of the kingdom into the wilds. If the attack had hit on schedule, most of Beacon's Huntsmen and students would have been away from the city when the Grimm came through. RWBY and Oobleck forcing Roman to start early probably saved countless lives just because a lot of Vale's defenders were still at Beacon getting ready to leave and were able to respond to the Grimm attack.
• As much flak as Ozpin got for the Breach, Ironwood's alternate suggestion wasn't much better; in fact, it was even worse. The General wanted to send a massive attack force (IE, his army) down to Mountain Glenn to destroy the White Fang forces there. But given how Torchwick reacted to seeing just a small team of students poking around (immediately pull out and put the White Fang on high alert), he likely would have launched the train the minute that the very large army touched down in the city above him. Given how instrumental the army was at repelling the Grimm invasion in the show proper, the force being stuck in Mountain Glenn would have resulted in more of Vale being decimated.
• At first, Weiss and Yang being asked to plan the Dance seems a bit odd, or at least a coincidence. However, consider their personalities. Yang clearly knows how to have fun, and is probably a party girl; she would know what people would want to have at the "party" part of the Dance. Weiss was raised to be a "proper lady"; she would know how the formal "school dance" part of the School Dance is supposed to be organized. Together, they probably could plan a "perfect night".
• While Ruby calling Jaune to help with the Grimm invasion in "No Brakes" was mainly because he's her first friend at Beacon, a little thought reveals that team JNPR is actually one of the best anti-army teams available:
  • Jaune has a lot of Aura, and doesn't know what his Semblance is; this means that he can just use all of his Aura for defense, making him one of the best endurance fighters of his year. Combine this with his shield letting him block hits without using his Aura, and him being the best out of the first-years at fighting without using Aura or Semblance, and he can theoretically keep going longer than anyone else on teams RWBY and JNPR.
  • Nora is basically an Splash Damage specialist, considering she wields a combination war hammer/grenade launcher. This makes her especially suited to taking out large groups of Grimm.
  • Pyrrha can use her Semblance to compensate for any of the group getting sloppy as the fight drags on, and she can keep her Aura up a long time against the Grimm (they don't have any metal weapons for her to use her Semblance on, and she can block hits with her shield). Not only that, her Semblance is perfectly suited to fighting in an urban environment, and she can weaponize literally the entire city if push comes to shove.
  • Ren will likely become more dangerous as the fight drags on, once he runs out of ammo. Considering that he seems to be the best out of the first-years at weaponizing his Aura, he can just switch to tearing Grimm apart with his bare hands when his weapons are dry.
• Jaune was able to get a dress remarkably quick. While this was probably more Rule of Funny than anything else, he does have seven sisters and a rocket-powered locker.

Volume Three

• In the Volume Three opening, when it shows Teams RWBY and JNPR falling in a circle, both teams are positioned in a way that they're in order - counterclockwise for RWBY, clockwise for JNPR.
• At first there didn't seem to be a reason in the food fight in Volume 2 (this is breakfast time, remember) for entire watermelons, turkeys, and swordfish other than Rule of Funny. Then during Round One, we see the bowls given to teams RWBY and JNPR at the food stand are HUGE. Several of them eat the entire bowl without getting sick. Athletes tend to eat a lot more then others due to the high levels of physical exertion they do. Huntsmen would have to be constantly training in order to stay in fighting shape, meaning they would be eating much more heavily to provide the extra energy.
• When Nora starts babbling about the horrible fates they all have to look forward to if they lose the tournament, her color scheme slowly desaturates for comedic effect. Or was it just a gag? In volume 4, Ren's semblance, which blocks negative emotion, is shown to drain the color out of whoever it touches.
• Neptune and water:
  • If his round-ending move against NDGO is any indication, he's not afraid of water per se, but only afraid of water when fighting. Chances are, he's gotten himself badly electrified while fighting in water before, given his weapon's nature. His twinkle-toe step just before sticking his trident into the water could be just comedy, or him being really careful about not shocking himself again.
  • Alternatively, if he had the fear of water before he developed his weapon (assuming it's not related to his Semblance), he likely developed his weapon as an elemental counter to anything aquatic.
• At first, Qrow's reaction to the fights might just seem like a drunk guy complaining. However, the fights did have problems (mainly lack of teamwork); most viewers (in- and out-of-universe) would just be too awed by the fight itself to notice the technical details. Qrow not only notices them, he calls the fight "a mess". Kind of puts just how powerful and experienced a full-fledged Huntsman (one that is also a teacher) is in perspective. To wit, the problems with JNPR and SSSN's fights (that we can assume Qrow watched):
  • JNPR's fight: it was a stupid decision to have a tactical meeting mid-fight, even stupider decision on the opposing team's part to let their opponents stand there and have a discussion anyway, but the ultimate stupidity is having yourselves be standing right in a bunch, for the better part of a minute, politely waiting for your opponents to launch another big attack. BRNZ only had themselves to blame for getting all of them knocked out at once.
  • SSSN's fight: comic relief from one teammate who's scared of water to the point of obviously displaying that fear and running from the fight entirely (and this behavior probably being highly unbecoming of a Huntsman), letting the opposition get a 3 versus 4 matchup in their favor just by staying in the aquatic zone, getting your own teammate knocked out (although in fairness, Sun is to blame only as far as he threw the coconuts and his opponent dodged them), stupidly standing in the middle of tornadoes waiting to get thrown out, among others. The remaining members of Team NDGO also make the mistake of all gathering in the water, allowing them to be eliminated in one fell swoop.
  • Cinder also has access to the match-ups, controlling the fights to have the best outcome for her team. Qrow probably picked up on that as well.
• RWBY's choice for who to send forward for the 2v2 round. We have Weiss and Yang. The two complement each other by picking up each others' weaknesses.
  • Yang is the ultimate Tank/Damage Dealer of RWBY; Not only can can she get the hell beaten out of her and keep going, she gets stronger as she takes hits. Her weakness? She's the slowest member of a team of high speed fighters and lacks long range options. She struggles against people who are fast enough to dodge her and her gunshots are rather slow, meaning she has to get close to hit somebody.
  • Weiss is the team's support expert. She's not as fast as Ruby, but still capable of moving quickly. Her Dust knowledge and Semblance allows her to hinder her opponents or help her allies. Moreover, she also is quite capable of long range combat. Her flaw is that she is rather fragile and doesn't hit as hard. Going up against a tank is bad for her because they can handle her attacks and wait for an opening to counter, and she'll get taken out quickly.
  • They flow well because Yang can take the lead, keeping their opponents focused on fighting her while Weiss supports from behind. Weiss doesn't risk getting taken out, as most opponents would prioritize the fiery brawler being right in their face. Yang gets Weiss manipulating the battlefield, creating barriers to minimize the room to dodge in. Yang's most telling weakness is her speed, and Weiss has an ability that makes her teammates faster. Yang's flaw? No more.
• Weiss and Yang are representing Team RWBY in the doubles round, while Emerald and Mercury are representing their team. When it shows RWBY fighting the bad guys in the intro, Weiss is fighting Emerald, while Yang is fighting Mercury.
• Professor Port mentions Nora as one of his favorite students during the tournament - of course she would be, as he sees a lot of himself in her: they both have a love for battle, like telling over-boasted stories, and generally have a cheerful facade that also covers some Hidden Depths.
• Qrow still being able to fight Winter effectively while drunk has a brilliance to it. If Glynda was telling the truth and Qrow being drunk is normal, he's probably had to fight drunk before, meaning he's used to the handicap. And it lets him surprise anyone who thinks that the gruff drunkard stumbling around will be a pushover.
  • The Volume 4 reveal that his Semblance passively causes bad luck means he had an edge regardless.
• For whatever devious reason, Cinder has been directly manipulating the tournament's supposedly random match generator. If you thought it was suspiciously convenient that Weiss got to fight in an ice-filled arena, and Nora in a lightning-themed one, that's because it wasn't random at all. With the revelations given to us in Fall, it'd make sense if she was trying to rig the match against Team SSSN; boys can't inherit the Maidens' power anyways, so there's no point in keeping an eye on them over a team made up entirely of girls. It also makes sense if she was narrowing down the possible vessels for the Maiden's power by having as many girls lose as possible.
• Ozpin has been stated to be the only character whose name is not based on a color. However, he is based on the Wizard of Oz, and therefore over the rainbow in more ways than one.
• The wizard ruled over an Emerald City where everyone wore green-tinted spectacles. Ozpin wears them too.
• Qrow's comment about Atlas's military being 'sell outs' takes a new light with the World of Remnant: Huntsmen episode. Huntsmen are an ancient lifestyle and hold standings equal to those in the police and even the military. In three of the four kingdoms, fully trained huntsmen were encouraged to act outside the realm of kingdom politics and choose their own allegiances provided they serve humanity as a whole. But Atlas' school are imposing a military life-style on its Huntsmen-in-training, heavily pressuring them into military special services. His comment wasn't towards Winter, but towards the Atlesian Huntsmen in general for abandoning their ways and conforming to military service.
• Huntsmen:
  • The World of Remnant reveals that Huntsmen have a lot of free rein after they are commissioned.
    Once finished with their training, Huntsmen and Huntresses are free to choose who they work for, as well as what kind of work they will do through the use of mission boards. Allying with a particular Kingdom or village is entirely up to the individual.
  • To reiterate, they choose their employers and their jobs. They are glorified mercenaries. This explains why there are criminals with the skills to fight full-fledged Huntsmen; the criminals are Huntsmen.
  • Sure enough, "Lessons Learned" has Qrow specifically mention seeing Huntsmen that had been hired by less than savory people.
  • And Roman's anti-Huntsmen rant comes right after he sees Neo possibly die, so it would make sense, as he has likely just seen his best friend, a former Huntress, defeated by a simple trick.
  • On a similar note, the World of Remnant features two characters with unique designs, but they also don't correspond with anyone else from the series. Who are they? Come "Fall", and we're revealed to the story of the Four Maidens, with Summer and Winter looking very similar to them...
• The volume openings have been getting progressively darker, obviously, but take a look at the knowledge we receive each volume on Huntsmen and see how it correlates.
  • Volume 1- This Will Be The Day- become the hero you dream to be./ We are given just enough information to know that Huntsmen are celebrated heroes.
  • Volume 2- Time to Say Goodbye- Being a hero isn't fun and games./ Some Huntsmen have selfish reasons for being one, but they are fighting for good... right?
  • Volume 3- When it Falls- There is no hope. Good will fail./ Huntsmen are revealed to have a very mercenary-like organization, and the morality of their client doesn't exactly matter.
  • If you noticed a trend, as the songs have gotten darker, the Huntsmen stop seeming to be purely good and more gray shows up.
• Atlas' policy of military indoctrination of its Huntresses and Huntsmen makes more sense considering both the World of Remnant episode Huntsmen and Qrow's reference to Huntsmen working for dubious employers. As CFVY, Qrow and Winter all demonstrated, Huntresses and Huntsmen are insanely powerful fighters, able to level buildings when push comes to shove. Atlas, being a relatively new country, would obviously want that sort of power completely loyal to it, rather than their wallets.
• In "Lessons Learned", Coco wasn't shaking due to Emerald. The biggest thing we know about CVFY as a group is that they're extremely close. Coco didn't start shaking until after she learned that her opponents could mimic Yatsuhashi. She isn't afraid of them, she's afraid because she knows that if she sees Yatsuhashi again, she'll have to shoot at him.
• Coco and Yatsuhashi are defeated rather easily by Emerald and Mercury but there's a couple reasons why this is. One, Cinder more than likely rigged the stage so that the environment is set up to an advantage for fighters like Mercury and Emerald. Secondly, both Yatsuhashi and Coco use rather large weapons and fight by overwhelming their opponents with their strength but both Mercury and Emerald fight almost like how Neo dealt with Yang. By using their speed, finesse, and smaller weapons to use their opponent's strength against them until they end it with one decisive move. What's more, the cheating is now much more obvious now that Fall has come out. Someone was there, making Coco and Yatsuhashi see things other than they are. Mercury and Emerald vanish into high grass, but when it's mowed down, they aren't there anymore. Before, that could've been passed off as skill—not now. Later, when Coco is dealing with Emerald, Emerald literally vanishes into thin air, despite Coco having had her sights right on her. Then, Yatsuhashi comes up behind Coco and speaks her name, only to disappear after Yatsuhashi is revealed to be across the arena, and eliminated. Again with Emerald, we're shown a shot from afar, with Coco alone. A second later, Emerald is right behind her, with no indication of how she got there.
• Team FNKI:
  • Weiss in the doubles round told Yang to expect extremely disciplined fighters with strong tactics and advanced technology. She was then rather shocked to get Team FNKI instead. However, when you look back at it, her first guess was entirely right; both Flynt and Neon had advanced dust weaponry, and they did act tactically, splitting up their opponents and then putting them in situations where they had the disadvantage (Yang against an opponent she couldn't hit easily, and Weiss in open fiery ground against a tough opponent wielding a powerful offensive weapon). And Neon, for all her apparent silliness, is fighting to a strict rhythm, constantly repeating "never miss a beat" to keep her sense of timing.
  • How utterly different they are from the rest of Atlas: with a military 'rule', everything tries to be orderly, organized, and conformed to some extent. One way of rebelling against conformity is to be as outrageous as possible - Neon provides this in spades, while Flynt has a personal grudge against the Schnee family (who is a big thing in Atlas), giving him reason to do the same.
  • Their defeat wasn't just because of Weiss and Yang's efforts, but also because their biggest advantage was also their biggest weakness. Flynt's sentinel-like style of combat, along with Neon's frenetic pace, and finally their over-reliance on controlling the pace of the fight led to their downfall. Flynt's wasn't expecting to be overpowered by Yang and failed to avoid her retaliation, leading to Neon losing her rhythm and moving too fast for her own good.
  • One little thing that becomes obvious after watching episode 6: Cinder put them against Yang and Weiss because of Neon's personality. She wanted everyone to see Yang's temper so the Deliberate Injury Gambit would be more believable.
  • Neon Katt's entire character is a reference to the Nyan Cat meme, from the rainbow trail she leaves while skating to being a cat Faunus. But there's the fact that she keeps endlessly taunting Yang. This seems like an original idea or just a reference to how annoying Nyan Cat is, until you realize what the lyrics to the Nyan Cat song are. It's just saying "Nyan, Nyan, Nyan, Nyan" over and over again. Alternatively, it could be heard as saying "Nya, nya, nya nya nya," a common childish taunt. Both Nyan Cat and Neon Katt almost never say anything but taunts.
  • Assuming that Atlas names their teams like Beacon does, the one who named them FNKI is none other than strait-laced, humorless James Ironwood.
  • FNKI could be both a rebuttal of the World of Remnant analysis of Atlas and Atlesian military doctrine. While it's implied that Atlas is monochromatic with how Winter and Ironwood (the most prominent Atlesian Huntsmen at time) wear matching uniforms, FNKI is proof that Atlas does have some diversity of personalities and races (with a real world minority in Flynt, a Remnant minority in the Faunus Neon, and personalities for both of them that are decidedly un-militaristic). However, this is also a rebuke of Atlas's methods as well. FNKI is supposedly the best team in Atlas, which is why Yang and Weiss are pitted against them. Which means that Atlas's best are those who are the most unique and expressive, which explains why people are so concerned about Atlas's indoctrination, it isn't just bad for the students, it makes them worse Huntsmen.
• In the opening of Volume 2, we see Pyrrha fade in with an effect shaped like autumn leaves. Fast forward to Volume 3, and we find out that Pyrrha was selected to be the Fall Maiden.
• Pyrrha's entire character comes full circle with that of her legendary namesake Achilles. His name literally means "grief of the people," and Achilles' name dressed as a girl was PYRRHA. The point of the Iliad is the death of men. Achilles is foretold to choose between glory and life. Upon his shield is the symbol of his sacrifice. He gives up the life he could have led. On Pyrrha's shield is an arrow, which the FNDM has interpreted foreshadowing her death (she is killed by an arrow.) Pyrrha faces the same theme of sacrifice and choice in season 3. Like Achilles' sacrifice was foretold on his shield, Pyrrha's choice was alluded to from the beginning. Her selection as Fall Maiden further seals her fate that an old generation of heroes must before the next may come into bloom.
  • Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away. -Homer, the Iliad
  • On a lighter note when it comes to the topic Pyrrha's name, the name "Pyrrha" actually shows up multiple times in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. The most famous one was the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora and wife of Deucalion. The stories are slightly different between the Greeks and the Romans, but the synopsis is that she and her husband were spared from great floods and were left to repopulate the earth by throwing rocks which spawned people. The part that relates to Pyrrha from RWBY is that the Roman version of the story says that Pyrrha and Deucalion were spared because they were the most devout worshippers. In RWBY, Pyrrha is so far the most religious person in the series, not believing in a specific religion, but putting her faith in destiny.
  • Oh, and on the mythological Pyrrha's name, according to Wikipedia : "In Latin the word pyrrhus means red from the Greek adjective πυρρός, purrhos, i.e. "flame colored", "the color of fire" or simply "red" or "reddish".[2] Pyrrha was evidently named after her red hair." Evidently, so was RWBY's Pyrrha.
  • Fridge sadness, she dies fighting a Maiden who wields fire, and disintegrates into fiery flakes.
• When Pyrrha asks why the existence of the maidens isn't common knowledge, it's revealed that it was until power-mad people tried to kill them and steal their powers. Which means that the power the maidens possess doesn't protect them any more than their own aura. Which explains how Amber was injured to begin with.
• Winter's weapon:
  • Compared to Weiss, the design for Winter's weapon is surprisingly simple and, more importantly, her fighting style hardly seems to rely on Dust at all. This makes sense when, in Lessons Learned, we learn that Winter also defied their father and got cut off from the Schnee family's financial resources, which presumably includes their Dust supply, so she's learned to fight without relying on it. It also seems to foreshadow that things might get difficult for Weiss in the future, as she'll either have to adopt a new style of fighting or be careful of just how much Dust she uses in battle. No wonder Winter emphasized how important it was for Weiss to learn how to summon, since that doesn't rely on Dust at all.
  • Also, if you were watching the show up to that point, you could've assumed that Weiss's environment shifting... circles(?) were her semblance, but if she is cut off completely from her family's dust supply, then it makes sense for her to have a secondary semblance. Most of the other character's weapons have a primary and secondary function, usually based off each other, the obvious one (like the Ruby's scythe, and Yang's gauntlet) and a secondary ability that stretches the imagination (Ruby's sniper rifle, and Yang's shotgun blast). The other characters also usually have only one semblance ability as well, though those can be used in multiple ways (Ruby's rocket jump, and Yang's kinetic energy absorption and redirection). Weiss's sword has a primary ability (sharp stick used to stab people), and a secondary ability (elemental powers). Weiss only had one semblance ability, the environmental alteration ability. Her being cut off coincides with her getting a secondary semblance so she is on an equal power footing with the other students.
• If you look closely, Qrow wears shiny silver rings and necklaces. Crows are well known for hoarding shiny things, so it makes sense that Qrow would wear silver.
• Cinder's choice of using Yang as the scapegoat would not only demoralize team RWBY - having come face to face with Ruby twice, Cinder knows what she is capable of - but would also demoralize another major threat; Qrow, whose niece is now arrested. Not to mention demoralizing his own teammates in case they suddenly get involved in her schemes. It has an extra layer to it—even if there were people who wouldn't have doubted her before, there's the fight that Qrow, her uncle, had with a Schnee just a couple days before, whom he attacked for basically shits and giggles in front of a crowd of student onlookers. Qrow's own arrogant love of fighting is one more strike against Yang now, and with Ruby's well-known love of weapons, everyone's going to think they're a family of violent thugs now. Even worse, Yang does have a history of flying off the handle for relatively minor reasons (i.e. losing a strand of her hair) and doing massive damage in her fury. Remember her trailer? Junior can come in and legitimately say that Yang assaulted him, his staff, and trashed his club for the incredibly petty reason of him calling her "blondie".
• In Fall, Mercury doesn't even look injured from getting shot in the leg, despite having no aura and thus probably bleeding. The reveal that Mercury has prosthetic legs explains both this and how Mercury would go along with a plan that involved getting shot in the knee.
• Even if it's revealed Mercury's legs were robotic, it wouldn't change much. Atlas has been making robots and other advanced technology, so for them, it wouldn't matter if his legs were flesh or not. It still wouldn't change the fact that Yang (to the audience) attacked him unprovoked and broke his leg. Of course, part of the plan involved a Wounded Gazelle Gambit. If Mercury is seen without any major injuries, it turns on its head whether or not Yang is telling the truth and leaning into saying she was actually telling the truth. Which means Mercury and his team sabotaged an opponent team.
• There is actually a really big reason why Atlas is looked down upon for pressing their students to join the military besides simply "selling out". It was explained that the academies were formed after the Great War 80 years prior. That war was fought for individuality and the academies were built to commemorate that. Atlas instead breaks tradition and encourages conformity.
• Back in Lessons Learned, a quick shot reveals that Mercury did take damage to his Aura, but not nearly what would be thought by tanking a giant strike by Yatsuhashi. Moreover, look at the actual tanking of said strike. The reason Mercury's aura took so little damage is because his legs are robotic, made of metal and thus much stronger than human flesh and not needing as much aura protection to begin with. Clashing weapons is noticeably more easy if they're your entire leg down from the thigh rather than just plating on the heels and ankles, as was previously thought.
• In "Destiny", Ruby manages to see Emerald from across the entire arena - well, her weapon of choice is part 'customizable high-impact sniper rifle', so she must have some experience seeing from far distances. And while at first you may think there's no visible scope, "Mountain Glenn" briefly showcased her tracking a Grimm through such a lens, revealed to be the small part attached to its gun form, just under the handle's length.
• "Extracurricular" has a lot of significant foreshadowing for Volume 3:
  • Mercury is able to deduce Pyrrha's Semblance so quickly because his legs are metal prosthetics.
  • Cinder might have well have sent Mercury (and possibly Emerald) to scout out the brightest students because she knew Ozpin and his conspiracy would be looking for someone to replace Amber as the Fall Maiden. They put Pyrrha on their radar, and sure enough that's exactly who Ozpin and company chose.
  • When discussing Pyrrha's Semblance and how she uses it, Cinder remarks that "people assume she's fated for victory, when she's really taking fate into her own hands." This matches Pyrrha's belief that destiny is something you work toward, not something that happens to you.
  • And finally, Cinder ends the conversation by stating that they don't have to overpower the enemy, just take whatever power they have. Which is exactly what she did to poor Amber.
• May Zedong sounds very similar to Mao Zedong, a Chinese leader who started the Cultural Revolution... That happened to start in May.
• Penny and Pyrrha:
  • It seems strange that Penny's wires should be able to shred herself. She fought excellently and took nary a hit from Pyrrha, keeping her on the defensive much of the time. And Emerald's illusions don't seem to be able to affect tangibility or reality, only what people see and hear. But recall that Penny is an android and that Cinder was able to hack her. She might've ended the fight prematurely by shutting off Penny's Aura, making sure her redirected attack destroyed her.
  • Alternatively, Penny can be seen reacting in pain to Pyrrha's magnetic pulse even before the wires get wrapped around her body, visibly affected by the black magnetic aura, and looking like she's having a heart attack. Being a machine, it's quite possible the pulse caused some of her systems to fail.
  • Having Pyrrha take down Penny has the added bonus of eliminating what is possibly the single greatest threat to the plan: Penny herself. She put Pyrrha on the ropes - if they had teamed up against Cinder, she would never have won. Beyond this, Penny could have been a Maiden candidate if Pyrrha died, due to her robotic nature and preexisting power.
  • In other works a character like Penny would be the one to defeat the Big Bad or someone like Emerald. Cinder pits Pyrrha against Penny because it takes a character who could No-Sell psychic attacks off the chessboard. Discrediting Pyrrha and causing her grief was a huge bonus.
• Mercury's decision to spare Ruby could actually be explained rather pragmatically. Mercury only begins attacking her once the fight in the stadium begins and draws everyone's attention to it, and when both of them are indoors. But by the time he catches up to Ruby, she's already outside, and the fight has already ended, leaving the entire stadium stunned with shock and disbelief. Attacking Ruby at this stage risks drawing attention to himself from anyone within hearing range. Also, Ruby's emotions are helping to fuel the Grimm, so letting her live benefits the plan more than hurts it.
• Part of the reason Team FNKI lose to Yang and Weiss is the fact that Flynt keeps repeating the same tactic. In other words... He's a one-hit wonder.
• Way back in Volume One, Ruby explains to Blake that she's always wanted to be a Huntress, helping people and asking nothing in return (with Yang clarifying some of this later). Blake thinks this is admirable, but the real world isn't the same as a fairytale, to which Ruby assuredly replies "Well, that's why we're here: to make it better." This is exactly the same reasoning behind the Four Maidens helping out the old man in their fairytale; that they help out because they are able, and do not expect anything in return... for which they were granted his power. And by all indications, this trend continues with the equally kind Summer + Ruby Rose, who wield an equally ancient-and-powerful ability - it was practically foreshadowing.
• When Cinder, Mercury, and Emerald overlook the destruction they caused, Cinder looks satisfied, Mercury is gleeful, but Emerald is unnerved. Now remember Cinder was the mastermind of the plan, Mercury is an assassin, and Emerald is merely a thief. While she has had some exposure to the horrors they caused, she would be the least prepared to take in what they have just done.
• There's a Funny Background Event in the tenth episode of the third volume, with Neon roller skating away followed by a Boarbatusk. Except when you think about it, it's completely serious: it would only make sense to lead the Grimm away from where the threat of destruction is greatest and would take some pressure off of the defense.
• According to Qrow, part of the point of the Benevolent Conspiracy is that nobody knows what they're doing. Presumably, one of the secrets they were hiding is the Grimm Dragon. Given the nature of the Grimm, this makes perfect sense. The Dragon is gigantic, summons more Grimm, can fly, and presumably can't be permanently put down (or it would have been already). But by making it an Unperson, they can make sure it stays dormant and can't do any harm. Crosses into Fridge Horror, as now that the secret is out they're going to have to find a way to kill it once and for all; as long as people know about it, they will fear it, and it will keep coming back.
• When Ruby jumped off the airbus, we all thought she's gonna go rescue Ironwood, but ultimately decided to board the battleship instead. The answer will be clear if you remember Ironwood's words back in Volume 2 Episode 8: Ruby realized what is the threat, and took action like a true leader. The battleship denied the Atlas's army's air superiority. The robots are being controlled, causing mayhem everywhere. Between taking down the ship to give Vale a fighting chance or saving an old guy who's obviously won't die easily, it's easy to understand what would Ruby choose. Ironically, Ruby doesn't save Ironwood because she's busy doing what he taught her.
• When Weiss and Blake are fighting at Beacon, Weiss focuses on the Atlas droids, while Blake fights the White Fang grunts. It was referenced in Volume Two that the Schnee Dust Company helps fund the Atlas military. By having Weiss fight the droids, it helps cement how, like Blake, she has chosen to not let her past bind her. It also refers to how she and her sister were angered earlier in the Volume when Qrow destroys Atlesian property. Once the robots turn bad they're perfectly cool with destroying the threats as heroes should be.
• The Grimm exist only to viciously kill humans, so why does the Nevermore stay in the Colosseum to attack Ruby and Pyrrha when hundreds of people have just fled the arena? Simple: Grimm feed on negativity. Ruby and Pyrrha were feeling ten times more despair than anyone in the country at that moment. This also extends to the opening scene of Blake and Weiss in the middle of a crisis, but while they stand there for more than a full minute, the Grimm completely ignore them - because, while the two of them are sad and shaken, the panic of everyone else around them is much stronger than those two, so they have no interest (or if they do, they're going after the strongest sources first, and will only go after them after those are exhausted).
• Roman's rant and his resulting death In Heroes and Monsters:
  • Roman getting eaten seems to come right out of nowhere, but again; Grimm are attracted to negative emotions. Ruby, Torchwick and Neo have been battling on an airship surrounded by Grimm that, for some reason, don't actually interfere with their fight. It's only when Neo gets blown off and Torchwick physically starts beating Ruby with his cane that one pops up to gobble him up. This makes perfect sense as Torchwick's glaringly obvious fear, worry and rage over Neo's fate would make him the perfect meal for the circling Grimm. Roman just watched Neo be sent flying off the ship and forced to fall through the airborne horde of Grimm, and then he begins ranting to Ruby how the world is going to change and he has no choice but to go along with it in order to survive like he always has. It's likely that Roman was remembering some very unpleasant experiences at that moment. Additionally, Ruby had just affirmed her sincere belief that she and the other Huntsmen and Huntresses will stop their plans. Her hope and earnestness made sure that she wouldn't have been an immediate target by comparison to Roman's sheer negativity.
  • Much more significantly, this proves a thematic point: Roman approaches the situation from the point of view of a common criminal, focusing on the short-term and individual threats to him personally, ignoring the big picture and even mocking those who care about it. He literally got involved with the organization whose goal is to destroy humanity for the purpose of survival. His death shows that Ruby, despite all of his ranting, is actually the less naive of the two, and understands the nature of the conflict much better than he does. Did. Before getting eaten. Presumably his last thought before getting chewed / vaporized / whatever Grimm do to swallowed humans, was 'I literally brought this on myself'. Because he did.
  • Another possibility based on Jaune and Pyrrha's conversation about aura in Volume 1: Aura has to consciously activated for it to work, and some people can have more than others. Either Roman was so enraged that he dropped it on accident, or he just didn't have very much in the first place.
  • It did seem anti-climactic on the surface in the heat of that particular moment (he was giving a very angry, emotion-driven rant to Ruby after fighting her intensely and was about to deliver a presuming final blow only to be eaten by a Griffon), but it was likely done deliberately. One of the main characteristics about Grimm is that they're drawn to negativity, which is why they started attacking Beacon at the end of "PvP" after Penny's death, since there was already brooding emotions that were taken and stirred further by Cinder with her hate speech that really catalyzed the attack as a whole. So it looks like Torchwick's death was more of a somewhat cruel reminder.
  • It's even foreshadowed - several times actually. Earlier in the fight, when things are looking bad for Ruby and she's clearly afraid, she starts to get targeted by several passing Grimm, albeit smaller ones she's able to swat away. After Neo is removed from the battle, the Grimm begin to ignore Ruby and circle Torchwick, a sign that they've begun to target him instead due to the negative emotions. What happens after is only a surprise if you didn't pay attention to the Grimm.
  • A part of Torchwick's speech to Ruby seems almost like a meta prediction at the fan's reactions to his, Penny and Pyrrha's deaths; especially Pyrrha's as fans even went so far as to make a petition to bring her back because she had so much to live for.
    Torchwick: But this is the real world! The real world is COLD! The real world, doesn't care about spirit!
• Qrow and Ironwood:
  • Why would Qrow Stab the Scorpion by rushing at Ironwood weapon drawn and cutting it in half instead of letting Ironwood deal with it by screaming something to the effect of "Grimm behind you!"? Ironwood should be more than capable of dealing with it, and it wouldn't have made him believe for the split second before the attack connected that Qrow was attacking him... Well, it's because of Qrow's Semblance: Qrow is The Jinx and could have caused any number of incidents such as a misfire or a plain missed point blank shot that could have ended with Ironwood taking a severe injury, and because of that Qrow dealt with the Grimm personally.
  • Also, his first instinct upon Qrow almost attacking is flipping his gun so he's holding the barrel of the gun, which is nonthreatening, until you realize that that is the exact same way he held the gun when he broke the last robot, with the butt of the gun up for maximum bashing. Given that he was out of ammo, he was probably thinking that he should calm Qrow down, or be in the best position to fight back just in case.
• Velvet's camera:
  • At first, it seems that Velvet's poor photography skills are just some quirk of hers, and the picture of Sun that she shows to Ruby is just a one-off gag to help lighten the mood. However, notice how the picture is centered on Sun's nunchucks rather than his face. Ultimately, the weapon is what's important to her, and come "Heroes and Monsters," we get to see why.
  • The fact that Velvet's camera is kept inside of the box that's been hyped up, her hobby of taking photos, and the (somewhat) retro style of the camera. Since photography's beginnings, there was a superstition created by those who didn't understand the science of how a photo is produced, and presumed it was magic. The superstition in question? If someone's picture is taken, the camera traps a person's soul, either a portion or its entirety. What's Velvet's weapon/semblance? Power Copying, she can briefly create a perfect Hard Light copy of another person's weapons and copy their fighting style, if she's photographed them. Lending further credibility to this is Velvet's personal symbol and lens cover, a black/hollow heart with yellow stitching across it. What's also often associated with someone's soul, or where it resides in the body? Their heart. In other words, she captures the "essence" of someone's fighting style with her photos, and releases them for her attacks.
• Three things regarding Volume 3's opening theme:
  • The name of the song is When it Falls. In Volume 3, the Four Maidens are revealed, and the most important and relevant to the story is the Fall Maiden.
  • When Velvet fights the Atlesian Paladins in Heroes and Monsters, I May Fall is played. This song perfectly counters the opening theme. When it Falls is essentially saying "Evil will win and you can't do anything to stop it." On the other hand, I May Fall is saying "I won't let that happen. As long as I can fight, and as long as there's hope, I won't give up." This also mirrors Ruby and Torchwick's conflicting points of view in the same episode.
  • In the Volume 3 Opening, set to When it Falls, the forces of Atlas led by Ironwood are cut to when the line "Crushed by the weight of the world" plays. Now, just what is Atlas commonly remembered for in Greek Mythology?
• Yang's intro caption has always come off as ironic.^{Read it here}Scathing eyes ask that we be symmetrical, one-sided and easily processed. Yet every misshapen spark's unseen beauty is greater than its would-be judgement. This is obviously supposed to refer to Yang, what with her wild, boisterous ways, her lawlessness, and her excitable personality. Yet despite the words speaking of symmetry and misshapen-ness, Yang has easily the most symmetrical character design of all four RWBY characters. Ruby has her massive scythe and her magazine clip, Weiss has her rapier, her scar, and her side-swung ponytail, and Blake's entire design speak to asymmetry, with one sleeve and especially the design of her Mix-and-Match Weapon. Yet Yang's outfit is almost entirely symmetrical save for the barely-noticeable stocking and skirt differences. Even her weapons are identical and dual-wielded. But Now that Yang's arm has been slashed off, she really is the most asymmetrical and misshapen of all.
• At the end of the "The End of the Beginning", Ruby is setting off to Haven with Jaune, Nora, and Ren. Put them together, and you have JRRN - journey, or perhaps RNJR - ranger. There's also RRNJ - orange (to keep with the color scheming), and JNRR - junior, which can be seen as a reference to the "young soul" Ozpin and Salem have mentioned.
• Beyond the actual narrative reasons for Ruby joining what's left of team JNPR it also makes sense on the thematic level, since they just lost their "red" team member.
• People are questioning just how close Team RWBY really is given they split up while their leader was comatose but factor in these things: they are all teenagers, one of them has had their arm cut off and is still dealing with all the trauma from that, the other just found out their ex is a psychotic terrorist willing to destroy everything she holds dear and has run off, and the last one was forced to leave with her father and had little choice in the matter.
  • Yang's extreme reaction to Blake's running away makes perfect sense. Ever since Raven left home, Yang has had severe abandonment issues. She very nearly caused Ruby's death when taking a stroll in the Grimm-infested woods, pursuing a lead on her missing mother. She lashed out at Junior for not giving her the information for her search. And now, someone else who was close to her, her partner, has up and abandoned her. It is entirely in character. Yang also knows how terrible abandonment feels like, which is why she took Ruby with her when she went looking for her mother, despite the fact that she, as a child, had to pull a wagon with her sister in it until she literally collapsed from exhaustion.
• Watch the Volume 3 opening again: Jaune is the furthest away from Pyrrha, while Ruby and Weiss are holding her hands. This gets reflected in the finale when Pyrrha sends Jaune to Vale while Ruby and Weiss go to help her. Unfortunately, just as Pyrrha is the first to fall away from the circle, and with her flying away it begins the desolation of both Team RWBY and Team JNPR.
• Some characters have eye colors that match their seeming love interests.
  • Weiss has blue eyes, which refer to Neptune. Blake has yellow eyes, which refer to Sun (or Yang, if you want), and Sun has eyes that are either black, to refer to Blake, or blue, depending on what scene you're in. Ren has pink eyes, which refers to Nora, while Nora has green eyes, which refer to Ren.
  • Blake and Yang fit into this as well. Blake's eyes are yellow, which is Yang's thematic color, and Yang's eyes are normally violet- not necessarily Blake's main color, but a color closely associated with her through her outfit's leggings and the color her attacks usually take, among other things. Also, while not romantic love, the other color Yang's eyes take on is red, alluding to her sister, whom she definitely deeply cares for.
• Salem is clearly set up to be Ozpin's arch-nemesis, to the extent that her name itself is an opposite The wizard of Oz was a man pretending to be a wizard and worshiped for it, whereas Salem alludes to people being falsely accused of being witches, and then being killed for it. Even better, her symbol has some similarities to Glynda's one. She's The Wicked Witch of the West to Glynda's Good Witch of the South.
• Salem's speech towards Ozpin hits some pretty high notes when it cuts to what's going on with the other people dealing with the situation in Beacon.
  • "When banded together, unified by a common enemy, they are a noticeable threat.", paired with Glynda failing to put even a simple door together with her telekinesis. This relates to her effortlessly fixing the area after the Breach in Volume 2, as everyone was banded together against a common enemy: the Grimm.
  • "But divide them, place doubt into their minds...", paired with Blake running away, relates to how she has doubts in her mind regarding whether being a part of a team is a good idea or if it'd hinder them.
  • "Any semblance of power they once had will wash away." Paired with Weiss being sent away to Atlas by her father. She attended Beacon, against her father's wishes, thus establishing just a semblance of power she had over her father. She immediately loses it when he personally brings her back to Atlas.
  • "Of course, they won't realize it at first. Like you, they'll cling to their fleeting hope, their aspirations, but this is merely the first move." Paired with Ruby going with JN_R after visiting her mother's grave. Ruby's clinging onto her fleeting hope: a lead on Cinder, and is walking with her aspirations, Team JN_R.
• The song Divide, used in the credits after her appearance, at first seem to be sung in grief of the heroes lost in the past few episodes and in anger at their killers... but it's actually from Salem and her faction's point of view, against Ozpin.
  • It was you. Who. Ended their lives. Made them to dig their own graves! With your dark. Sick. Cruel design, convinced them their world could be saved. Have? You? No? Shame? Signing them up for your war? Trained them to fight what they can't beat, your sins are what they'll pay for!
  • Which is even more horrible. The entire song is about the good people that have been lost combating Salem's designs, throwing them in Ozpin's face, and the faces of anyone else who believed in their cause and fought for it. It's a song about Victim-Blaming.
  • The theme of the song is even more brilliant since during the Salem Witch Trials the accused witches were blamed for daring to do witchcraft by the "good-hearted" Puritan citizens.
  • And after "A Much Needed Talk", this could also apply to Jaune calling out Qrow as well.
• Ruby's eyes in connection to her new power makes a lot of sense when you take into account that supernatural monsters are weak against silver. Most particularly werewolves. Ruby has had wolf symbolism since the very beginning. This gets even more brilliant when you remember how much Ruby is based off Little Red Riding Hood.
• The fact that Ozpin took such an interest in Ruby is both fridge horror and brilliance with the reveal that her silver eyes signify great power and combat prowess. On the brilliance end, it explains why he would pull her ahead two years and put her in a position to grow as both a person and a warrior just for beating up four men who showed no Aura ability. However, this could be seen as him helping a little girl destined for greatness along, or molding her into, on the Fridge Horror part, into a super-weapon to use against Salem and the Grimm.
• Where was Pyrrha shot with an arrow, ultimately leading to her demise? In the heel. Just like the Greek hero she was based on.
• Cinder killing Pyrrha could be a very smart move. Not only was Pyrrha one of the best Huntresses in Training, but people idolized her, possibly even to the extent of being humanity's champion. Can you imagine what killing such a person could do for morale, both in the ranks and that of citizens?
  • As it turns out, all it did was make Pyrrha a martyr who inspires her surviving peers and the populace around her to carry on the fight, much like how the pantheon Pyrrha was based off of tended to have a history of dying, only to inspire others around them to rise up in their name.
• Ozpin and Co and The Wizard of Oz:
  • Ozpin's name is clearly a reference to the titular wizard, the "-pin" derived from the initials of The Wizard of Oz's name (which spelt out PINHEAD). He is also portrayed as the mastermind of the group, fitting considering that Oz was a man who operated in the shadows: after all, Oz did run everything through an alter ego. The fact that Ozpin gets stuff done through Qrow, Ironwood and presumably Glynda makes a lot of sense, too: in the story, Oz did manipulate Dorothy and Co to get rid of The Wicked Witch of the West.
  • Glynda shares her name with the Good Witch of the South, and fights with "magic" (her semblance of telekinesis, but still!) that she seems to direct using her riding crop in a way reminiscent of a wand - just like a witch/female wizard.
  • Qrow is less obvious, but all the same an allusion to the Scarecrow. He acts like Ozpin's eyes and ears, keeping tabs on things and informing him of goings-on, like how a scarecrow watches over a field. Qrow also fights with a scythe, a weapon traditionally used to harvest plants like grain. This also connects to scarecrows, considering that scarecrows are used on farms to frighten off birds from eating crops. Qrow being an alcoholic could also be a reference: the Scarecrow had no brain, which alcohol impairs. Qrow taking over from Ozpin after the Volume 3 finale could be a deliberate allusion to the way the Scarecrow took over Oz after the Wizard left. What kind of alcohol does most booze have in it? Grain alcohol!
  • Ironwood is strongly associated with The Tin Man. His name references him, "iron-" referring to the tin man being made of metal while "-wood" referencing the Tin Man being found while cutting down trees. Ironwood has a stoic, emotionless demeanor, an allusion to the Tin Man's lack of a heart, which is often associated with emotion. He also is heavily involved with robots, or "metal men", and later on we learn that Ironwood himself is partly metal. His nation even treats his flesh and blood soldiers like faceless automatons.
  • Leo Lionheart, Haven's headmaster, is based off of the Cowardly Lion; both his name and what we've seen of his color scheme matches the animal part (tan and white), and the cowardly part is reflected in the heavy implication that he's an informant for Salem.
  • And that leaves Shade's headmaster, who is still unknown at this point; however, they're likely the stand-in for Dorothy.
    • Another theory for Dorothy: who do we know who's an innocent girl - that is, a simple soul - with a dog? Obviously, the answer is Ruby. Alternatively, as Ruby is already Red Riding Hood, it's Summer Rose who was Dorothy. After all, Summer also sported Silver Eyes, much like Dorothy had those silver slippers.
  • Additionally, some theories have suggested that Team RWBY themselves are the stand-ins for the protagonists of the Wizard of Oz. Ruby is the obvious Dorothy, as an innocent girl with a cute dog companion. Yang could be the Scarecrow, as her Character Development seems to be projected towards not being such a temperamental Leeroy Jenkins, i.e, getting a brain. Weiss could be the Tin Man, as she's a cold and distant girl who is gradually learning to be kind, i.e, getting a heart. Blake could be the Cowardly Lion, as her character arc seems to be learning to stand and face her Dark and Troubled Past and her problems head-on rather than run away from them, i.e, getting courage.
  • And even Ruby's current team could work with the Wizard of Oz theme: Jaune is a talented strategist, but hasn't realized it, much like how the Scarecrow never realized he had a brain all along. The stoic Ren is the Tin Man who cares more than lets on. Nora, for all her bravado, appears to be something of a Stepford Smiler who hides her anxieties, much like the Cowardly Lion.
• The fact that Qrow was shadowing Autumn when she was attacked, and that Ozpin knows that the Four Maiden's story is true and Autumn's own name could mean that Autumn and Ozpin were, at the very least, acquainted. If she knew what was happening in her final moments, imagine how she must feel that she is being sacrificed by someone she knew to be replaced like a defective weapon?
• Considering all of this, the character of Salem makes a lot of sense. Clearly, it would fit for Ozpin's archenemy to be a reference to The Wicked Witch of the West, and considering that Salem's name references the infamous Salem Witch Trials, it's not too hard to guess that's exactly who Salem is based on.
• Why does Cinder have influence over Grimm? Cinderella was great with animals!
• The Narrator being a villain was actually hinted at throughout her narrations. In "Ruby Rose", she states "But even the most brilliant lights eventually flicker and die. And when they are gone... darkness will return" and "there will be no victory in strength". In the World Of Remnant episode "Grimm", she says "And in the end... killing is all that matters." Her seeking to divide the kingdoms is foreshadowed in "Kingdom" when she says "But the four kingdoms stand as beacons of hope. As safe havens from the darkness that surrounds them. They are the key to mankind's survival, as long as they stand united..." Furthermore, the World of Remnants narrated by Ozpin? It's Ozpin trying to convince Salem of humanity's value.
• Torchwick not bothering to kill Tukson makes a lot more sense knowing that Torchwick is on Cinder's side to ensure he survives whatever happens, if Tukson had managed to escape, it's likely that Torchwick would've done the same.
• "Do you believe in destiny?" Pyrrha was ultimately not destined to be a hero, and Cinder was not destined to be victorious, but Ruby's silver eye powers meant she was destined to be a great warrior. Cinder's undoing was not Pyrrha's destiny, but Ruby's. Following on this, for anyone following her actual role in the story, it's not surprising that Pyrrha's ultimate destiny is not to BE the hero, but to empower them.
• Ren and Nora's concern that Jaune and Pyrrha are still missing probably isn't just worry over their teammates. Beacon, the only place they have to call home, is effectively destroyed and they have to flee. Jaune and Pyrrha (plus Team RWBY) are basically the only family they have left, and they have no way of knowing if they're safe.
• Take another look at the Season 3 intro. Notice how the camera zooms in on Ruby's eyes as she fights Cinder. And how Pyrrha is the first one to go flying off when they're in the falling circle.
• Right at the beginning of the show, the opening narration very plainly states that there will be no victory in strength. Come the end of volume 3, the strongest fighters Beacon had to offer by the end of the Tournament, Pyrrha and Yang, whose strengths, of body and character, have been a major part of their characterizations from the beginning, are dead and broken with no will to continue, respectively. Meanwhile, Ruby's smaller, more honest soul turned the tide and ruined Cinder's plans at the last second, even if the cost was too great, and she's still maintaining hope for a brighter future, mirroring Ozpin's reply from the first episode.
• Weiss and Blake. While they didn't end up doing as well as Ruby, nonetheless they ended the fight developing a new level of their Semblances when they rescued Velvet and Yang respectively. Weiss and Blake who said their motivations to be Huntresses was to help people, particularly so Weiss can make up for the Schnee family's mistakes and Blake can redeem herself for her past as a White Fang terrorist. While they aren't quite honest/simple motivations like Ruby who simply wants to help people for the sake of helping people, those are still selfless goals. Yang by contrast just wanted excitement, and viewed helping people as a convenient bonus... and during the fall of Beacon, she was completely crushed and permanently maimed during the battle, didn't learn anything new, and was of no help to anyone. Yang is also the only one of the team completely confident she was one of the most badass people around, compared to Weiss who's well aware she's lacking compared to Winter, and Ruby and Blake who voluntarily sat out after round one because they believed their teammates stronger than them. Yang was the most self centered of the team, and was ineffective as a result.
• Volumes 1 & 2's openings end with the title RWBY with the four letters grouping close together, while Volume 3's RWBY title has each letter noticeably placed further away from each other. Makes more sense considering that at the end of Volume 3, the whole Team RWBY has broken up and each member goes their separate ways. Not to mention how Ruby's the only one conscious or active in the final shot of the opening where the camera spins around the sitting girls. Each of them becomes inactive, save for Ruby.
• Just as Team SSSN is pronounced Team Sun, Ruby joining and leading the remains of Team JNPR becomes Team RNJR, or Team Ranger.
• Part of the chorus for Die says "Shattering the moon and bloodying the sky." I May Fall also has the lyrics "As the skies rain blood" and later on "When the moon is gone." In the place where Salem is first shown, the sky is colored blood-red, and there's a clear view of the shattered moon. The moon is also partially shrouded in clouds, which makes it look as though it's fading into nothingness.
• The opening animation for Volume 2 shows each member of Team RWBY facing off against one of the villains: Ruby vs. Cinder, Weiss vs. Emerald, Blake vs. Torchwick, and Yang vs. Mercury. The same is true for Volume 3's opening, expect it has Blake fighting Adam instead. This foreshadows the Volume 3 episode Heroes and Monsters, where Torchwick dies and Adam starts to become a more prominent antagonist.
• The narration at the end of Volume 3 is a continuation of the opening narration from Volume 1. You can hear it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd9F2ghwOw8
• If Cinder hadn't had Roman attack that particular Dust shop on that night back in volume 1, it's possible Ruby would never have met Glynda and Ozpin and wouldn't have been pushed ahead two years to go to Beacon, and she would never have been in a position to unlock her Silver Eyes power. Cinder had written Ruby off as more or less a non-threat from that point, but it's ultimately her own fault that something she could never have expected blindsided her because it came from someone whose presence she was more or less directly responsible for.
• During Cinder's fight with Pyrrha, her dress does not light up as it usually does even though she attacks mainly with fire. At first this may just seem to be an animation error, but then one realizes that she has the Fall Maiden's powers and thus no longer needs the Dust in normal fights. In contrast, during her fight with Ozpin, she uses both Dust and the Maiden's powers in tandem as her opponent is a much more powerful threat than who she faces afterward. This combination of Dust and Maiden's powers also allows for much more excessive use of fire and heat. She outright melts the floor into lava with her hand while sliding to a stop after she's pushed backward, and she lights her swords on fire for the added offensive power. Alternatively, she used up all her Dust during her first fight and had none left for her second.
• Qrow is dismissive of RWBY's heroics in Vol 1 and 2 saying it's cute but they really can't make a serious dent in the crime of Vale. He's also dismissive of the Academies in general, claiming they're a decent start but only that, and even after finishing it's not until you're a Huntsmen out in the world that you really start to grow, saying you can grow more in a few days out there than you can in weeks of academy training. And sure enough he's right. The students despite being able to take Grimm and mooks are utterly no match for their older, more experienced opponents. Emerald was on her own surviving for years, while Mercury was trained by an angry alcoholic abusive father who forcibly beat into his son far greater skills than the ones taught by supportive teachers like Glynda or Taiyang. Torchwick, as a criminal had to "lie, cheat and survive." They were out in the world, and thus they walked all over the students. As fun and cool as Beacon seemed to be, it was actually holding RWBY back as far as giving them the skills needed to stop Salem.
• Yet another Torchwick related one; him being Faux Affably Evil makes sense, as Grimm are drawn to negativity. So how does he dodge that little problem? Simple! He and Neo always seem happy, despite Roman's extreme cynicism. Because if he lets all that negativity under the surface loose, he gets killed. So, his statements about relieving stress while hurting Ruby makes sense. That is literally what he is doing.
• When Yang is talking to Ruby at the end of Volume 3, she never directly mentions her arm. There's a few glances and she's clearly depressed about it, but it's not on the Long List of problems she gives Ruby. Depending on how optimistic you think Yang is, this could either be Brilliance or Horror. The brilliance version is that Yang is pretty damn strong, in body and in spirit. Both have been hurt, but given how she never mentions the arm it could be a hint that she'll jump back into action the moment her team needs her, arm or no arm. The horror version is that she's trying to ignore or avoid the problem, to little effect. This adds another dimension to her anger at Blake, as Yang might be envious of how Blake really did run away from everything; even if Yang ran away too, it's not like she can get away from her injury.
• Due to Remnant's apparent cultural emphasis on individuality and self expression, up to and including allowing young soldiers to design their own weapons, it's not a stretch to assume things like minor body modification, changing your own name, and designing your own outfit are all also standard. Thus, we can assume that every character presents oneself in the way they feel makes them look coolest. From Pyrrha's 24-Hour Armor to Ruby's Elegant Gothic Lolita, everyone is dressed to look cool. This also helps explain why many of the characters have a strong color motif - most people in real life have a favorite color to wear, or are otherwise strongly attached to their favorite color. This also might help explain the existence of battle skirts and people who fight in high-heels, as well as other highly combat-impractical outfits; there's money in making clothes that are both fashionable and combat ready.
  • Alternatively, self-expression could reinforce Aura and Semblances, so the benefits of Awesome, but Impractical looks and weapons could outweigh the negatives.
• While we haven't actually SEEN the other schools yet, the names do give a hint as to their nature: Beacon - A light that guides people to a predetermined destination. Shade - A place to hide. Haven - A safe place. Atlas - A map to the destination. Each of the schools probably operates in a manner similar to the name they carry, meaning that where Beacon seeks to guide people, Shade seeks to hide them, Haven seeks to protect them, and Atlas seeks to lead them. It would be a fitting theme for the academies, and leaves open the question: "Are there any schools that seek to empower the people, or do they all seek some form of control?"
• Minor one, but Blake's new outfit in the concept art for volume 4 shares many similarities with Yang's (former) outfit, what with the bared midriffs and all. At least Blake hasn't forgotten about her partner. In return, Yang's concept art has a bumblebee on her pants. The fact that it isn't on her shirt (which can be hidden by her jacket) or her jacket (which can be taken off) means that in some way, they will always be partners despite the distance between them.
• When you look at Pyrrha's weapon, Milo, in its sword form, it seems like an odd design for a blade. Its edge is golden, but the rest of the blade is red including the base, even though it's a solid piece of metal. But it resembles a compass needle.
• Qrow's ability to turn into a crow, while excellent for reconnaissance or escape, is the only one shown that has no applications in combat. Since he wouldn't have used it publicly (like at the Vytal Tournament or in fights while at Beacon), it's possible that it's a complete secret known only to few, which would explain why he's such an effective spy for Ozpin.
• Pyrrha's name is probably a reference to Pyrrhus (Pyrrhus is the masculine form, Pyrrha is the feminine), the king which the term "Pyrrhic Victory" is named for. It means a victory where the person technically wins, but the cost of the win is so high that it's ultimately self-defeating. So when Pyrrha dies, what happens? Ruby technically wins over Cinder, by freezing the giant Grimm, but Vale is overrun, the intercontinental network is down, the maiden of Fall's powers are now in Cinder's hands, Yang's arm is cut off, and Pyrrha herself is dead, in other words, Pyrrha died for Ruby's Pyrrhic Victory.
  • Alternatively, it was a Pyrrhic victory for Salem/Cinder. Yes, they achieved their goal of destroying Beacon, sowing fear and mistrust throughout the other Kingdoms and eliminated a major enemy in Ozpin. But Pyrrha's death was not the grand slam they think, as it has only caused her remaining teammates and friends to band together more closely than ever before, setting out to hunt down her murderers and further galvanized them to the causes of protecting the world. Having Ruby witness Pyrrha's death directly also jump started her Silver-Eyed powers, possibly making her the single greatest threat to Salem's plans. The battle may be won for Salem's side, but the war is not over and Ruby and her allies still have everything to fight for.
• Pyrrha wears surprisingly little armor given that she has ferrokinetic powers, but then again, she only has it in important places. The legs (which don't need much freedom of movement), the neck (which weirdly enough bends around despite being metal, which could make sense if she was altering it to move with her powers, and if she's knocked out, it would freeze in place, possibly keeping her from getting spinal injuries), the torso (the vital organs that can't dodge like her head can) and her left forearm (which, if she's right handed, is probably her less powerful arm that she is trying to compensate for).
• During Yang's 1v1 tournament fight, she and Mercury don't talk at all, which makes sense because they don't have anyone to talk to. She pretty much only grunts and yells the whole time, and it sounds suspiciously like Ruby's voice. This makes sense as Ruby and Yang both have really distinctive voices, but that's mostly because of the age difference making Ruby's voice higher, they're half sisters, and if they were the same age they would probably sound really similar, which is reflected by Yang's higher pitch (which usually comes out only when she is fighting, and usually only when she is hit) sounding similar to Ruby.
• The revelation that Ironwood is a cyborg, with most of his body being metal, is foreshadowed an episode earlier, he manages to stop a Grimm's hand dead in its tracks with one hand. Of course, that could be explained as his semblance, super strength, or kinetic energy absorption that's similar to Yang, but he has a white glove over that particular hand, which can be inferred as a Luke Skywalker situation, covering up a roboarm, except the biggest physics issue with roboarms is that no matter how tough his arm is, if the force is enough to knock someone off of their feet, it doesn't matter how tough the arm is, it will get ripped off at the point where there's fragile human flesh intersecting metal. Him stopping a Grimm's swipe cold meant that whatever he had enhanced his entire body, or at least enough to take the force that was pushing into him by the Grimm's swipe, and the force pushing him into the floor.
• In the 3rd chapter, Weiss hits Ruby when she is embarrassing her in front of her sister, Ruby seems to flip out and looks shocked for several seconds until she recovers. At first Weiss seems really strong, but then you realize that Weiss hit her in the Standard Female Grab Area. Maybe one of the creators reads TV Tropes?
• Listen to the lyrics of "I May Fall", and you may realize that it's not about Velvet's fight. It's about Ruby and Roman, making the song a massive Shut Up, Hannibal!.
• Pyrrha being based on Achilles makes sense. During the battle where she died, she was doing pretty well and staging a comeback, up to when she gets shot in the heel with an arrow.
• Ironwood's soldiers:
  • Ironwood's soldiers were hacked apart so easily because he never expected to be fighting other humans, to the point that his robots are designed from the ground up to fight Grimm. Notice how the soldiers aren't designed to be fast or quick? They are meant to be cheap, and be able to point and shoot at (usually) mindless animals that aren't capable (usually) of tactics and strategy. If they were designed to fight humans, they would've been programmed to get behind cover, or other useful moves, but as very few Grimm are shown with projectile/ranged attacks, Ironwood probably thought he didn't need it. They also only seem capable of handling very low-level Grimm, which would free up Huntsmen to deal with the greater threats; they were built to increase the efficiency of current Huntsmen and reduce casualties.
  • These robots were probably designed to protect Huntsmen and give them the best chance at survival. Now ask, who would benefit the most from expendable backup that he doesn't have to worry about and can distract people while he completes dangerous missions? Answer: Qrow, Ironwood is just trying to look out for his old friend, and presumably, all those other Huntsmen as well.
• When Ironwood finally reveals his signature weapon, the viewer may be surprised that it's literally just a gun instead of the Mix-and-Match Weapon that the rest of Remnant uses, but if the viewer pays attention, you notice all is not as it seems...
  • First, it is incredibly powerful, and can take out low level Grimm with ease.
  • Second, it shoots 7 shots instead of the traditional 6.
  • Third, one of those shots is a secondary fire function that apparently fires red dust capsules that explode, which mean's he's got a freaking grenade launcher on his pistol.
  • Fourth, the gun is really big. If it were in real life it would be up there as one of the largest mass manufactured pistols on the planet. It's easiest to see when he's holding it by the barrel, but it's really just massive.
  • Basically the gun is like Ironwood. On the outside, it's cold, practical, and dangerous, but in reality, it's just as crazy as the rest of the world, and you would do well to not get within its firing line.
• Ironwood's fighting style is parroted by his military doctrine:
  • The fight, broken down step by step.
    • He runs at the Grimm, yelling out while running at it.
    • Shots from a distance to the body of the Grimm, which continue even though they don't appear that effective. The Grimm rushes him, and takes some swipes at him.
    • Ironwood feigns getting hurt, but then grabs the Grimm, catches it off balance, flips it over his head to body-slam it against the ground and then blows its brains (or whatever the Grimm equivalent is) out
  • How it relates
    • The first part, involving yelling while rushing the Grimm, is a little weird given that he is generally more reserved, until the Fridge Brilliance sinks in, he was trying to get the Grimm's full attention away from civilians, earlier the Grimm makes a point to perk its abnormally large ears up which indicates it has heightened hearing. This is similar to how the Atlesian knights don't really attack with any specialized attacks, and instead just shoots any enemies, which is likely for the purpose of drawing attention away from civilians and Huntsmen during Grimm attacks. It also is similar to how Ironwood basically parked his ships in the middle of the sky as gigantic targets, assuming that any attacks would be repelled and would redirect attention from the more vulnerable city.
    • The shots actually serve a purpose, they're not completely useless, as the Grimm has to shake off the pain of being shot. They're also meant to test the Grimm's capabilities, probing it for weakpoints. Not to mention that this enrages the Grimm, enraging it to attack Ironwood even more, but the shots also lull the Grimm into a false sense of security, believing that these conventional weapons, while dangerous, are useless enough that it's safe enough to attack Ironwood with its claws in close quarters. This mirrors how Ironwood wanted to send in top squads to assess White Fang's involvement in Season 2, he's trying to provoke the White Fang into a full on attack by supposedly showing his best cards.
    • The Grimm finally attacks Ironwood with its claws in close quarters, which is pretty much exactly what he wants, as the Grimm doesn't know how powerful he is. This is when he finally shows all of his cards, controlling the Grimm's position, and using the weakpoint that he was able to suss out from the earlier shots. This is essentially what happened at the end of Season 2 with the Breach, Ozpin is able to draw out the terrorists into a full on confrontation which is what Atlas does best, and Ironwood's and Ozpin's forces are able to defeat Cinder's Grimm.
  • Of course, this also shows the negatives of his approach. His style relies on the opponent responding quickly, instinctively, and once. This works very well with Grimm, but doesn't work against Cinder and human strategists. After the Breach, or possibly even before, Cinder realized that Atlesian forces are unstoppable on their own, so she learned from the Breach incident and turned Atlas's might against itself.
• The Grimm are supposed to represent humanity's greatest fears right? The bigger the fear, the bigger/more powerful the Grimm. Bears are feared, but very well known, so Ursa are numerous, but not that powerful. Scorpions are more feared because they're rarer in most parts of the world, and very dangerous, so Deathstalkers are rarer, but even more dangerous. Crows/ravens/flying black birds aren't actually that dangerous, but the fact that most of them are scavengers made early humans associate them with death, and thanks to somebody they're still associated with such death and bad luck. Thus, Nevermores are serious threats to Huntsmen. So, it makes sense that the single largest, most powerful, and most dangerous Grimm is a dragon, because they were one of humanity's original collective nightmares, created when we found gigantic bones of ancient lizards that were turned into stories of flying beasts who can breath fire. Also, the dragon creates more Grimm in its path, symbolizing how myths like those about dragons can spawn similar stories that also generate fear.
• When Qrow's scythe is fully extended, the handle is red and black, and bears a striking resemblance to the colors of his sister. Probably some symbolism about how when he is most dangerous, he is most similar to his sister...
• Cinder's fight with Amber makes more sense when your consider that Word of God is that Cinder's Semblance doesn't manipulate glass so much as she manipulates fine dust or sand particles. Sand and dust manipulation, while useful, doesn't have much application in a fight against a demigod like Amber, but when Amber hit the dirt road around Cinder with a fire attack that began melting that dirt into molten glass.... well, Cinder could do something with that, by using her Semblance to shape that molten glass into hardened glass (by essentially taking the molten glass particles and simply freezing them in place, forcing a crystalline structure on them). She did something similar in her fight with Glynda in Volume One, only doing the opposite: shattering the crystalline structure of the glass back into individual particles.
• When Weiss and Blake are fighting the hacked Atlesian Knights, they are briefly knocked off their feet and thrown to the ground. rather than shoot them, the Knights move up and surround them with their guns pointing at them. That's not the behavior one would expect from robots switched to Kill All Humans mode. However, keep in mind that the Knights were previously on security duty, and this behavior is exactly the behavior of police moving to arrest armed but surrendering or incapacitated criminals. This indicates that all Cinder's virus did was adjust what their internal logic considers to be a criminal, with the virus making the Knights think that any armed human is a criminal to be arrested or neutralized.
• It seemed that almost everything that turned up in Cinder's direction, such as getting into the basement of a secret facility deep underneath Beacon, but keep in mind that Cinder's based off Cinderella. As in the fairy tale about a girl who becomes a princess through the law of attraction, as in believing things will turn up her way and then they magically do.
• Pyrrha's entire arc in Volume Three revolves around choice, both her own to become the Maiden and her feeling that she didn't have a choice to begin with. In the ending fight, she shoves Jaune into a locker and flings him away, taking away his own choice. This gains another layer when we learn that Jaune's Semblance is Aura Amplification, and thus letting him go into battle could have turned the tide or at the very least saved her life. By taking away another's choice, she sealed her own fate.

Volume Four

• In the first trailer for Volume 4, Ruby splits into three pieces, seems to teleport in mid-air and is completely invisible when she makes her way to the top of the clock tower. This may be a reference to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the faster an object goes, the less possible it is to find its location.
• Ruby's expressions in Volume 4 trailer also shows how Ruby is affected from events of Volume 3, when she is shown fighting in Red Trailer she had a stern but calm face but in Volume 4 trailer she is clearly raging against Grimm. She's not forgiving the actions of Salem's faction.
• In the opening, the lines "And it seems we weren't prepared/For a game that wasn't fair" are heard when Yang is on-screen. Notice anything? The Vytal Festival Tournament was essentially just a game roughly until Yang's fight with Mercury, which, as we recall, wasn't fair.
• Volume 4 Episode 1 is called "The Next Step". Swap the numbers around to Volume 1 Episode 4, and you have the episode titled "The First Step".
• Doubles as a Tearjerker. In Volume 4, Jaune can be seen wearing a red sash on his waist. Seems like just a random detail...until you realize who else wore a red sash on their waist. Going off of this, the reveal that Jaune wears a Pumpkin Pete hoodie under his armor is funny until one remembers that Jaune's introduction to Pyrrha involved him recognizing her because she appeared on the cereal box. And he's been wearing this long before he even got the sash.
• Doubles as Stealth Pun: Salem's four main subordinates are Dr. Watts, Tyrian, Cinder and Hazel. Going by Huntsman team naming conventions, they are none other than team WTCH. Pronounced "Witch".
  • Fittingly, all four of Salem's subordinates (and Salem herself) also have something to do with the theme of witches. For example, Watts is a doctor (as in Witch doctor), Tyrian is a shade of purple, a color most associated with witches, Cinder, having the powers of the Fall Maiden, can cast magic without the use of dust, Hazel is presumably named after Witch Hazel, and Salem's name is evocative of the Salem Witch Trials.
  • On a somewhat more funny note, the outer four members of Salem's circle - Adam Taurus, Emerald Sustrai, Mercury Black, and Leo Lionheart - can be called Team LAME (both an insult and evoking a color - in this case, lamé fabric).
• Cinder, who has acted domineering and arrogant to her underlings in the first three volumes (i.e. threatening Roman and Adam, ignoring Emerald) are explained with her appearance with Salem's subordinates. Given that she is treated with a lack of respect and berated for her failure by Watts (and no one else bothers to defend her except Salem herself) it's easy to see why she feels the need to be superior: when she's surrounded by those on her level of power, she's the runt of the group. Compare Salem's demeanor and behavior to that of Cinder's when she was running things in Vale. The smooth, silky tone, the undercurrent of "don't-cross-me" danger used to keep underlings in check, the aura of regal confidence and authority... Cinder was trying to emulate her master.
• In the first battle of Volume 4, we see Team RNJR battle a Geist. This actually isn't the first time we've seen this Grimm. Think back to the White Trailer. There's a very strong chance that this is actually what Weiss fought.
  • The manga makes this explicit. Not only was it a Geist, it's a Geist her father deliberately had set on her to try to hurt her badly enough that she'd give up on the idea she could handle herself. He sent a soul-sapping murder-monster specifically to brutalize his teenage daughter into handing over her agency to him.
• More Wizard of Oz symbolism. Tyrian might seem at first like a generic and uninteresting psychopath, but look at his primal stance, his wild demeanor. He's a flying monkey to Salem's Wicked Witch.
• The new upgrades of Crocea Mors are implied to be forged out of metal from Pyrrha's armor. In the first episode of Volume 4, the weaponsmith remarks on how good the metal was and wondered where on Earth (sorry, Remnant) he got it from. This makes a lot of sense because Pyrrha controlled magnetism, and since she spent so much time with her weapons, she probably altered their molecular structures subconsciously to her advantage, to be more malleable, more susceptible to magnetism, stronger, lighter, etc. When she was forging it, she was also probably able to purify the metals in it, to get the exact concentrations for the best alloy for her weapons. Or she just bought high quality metal.

  • Both might be the correct answer; high quality metal that is then altered and made even more pure by Pyrrha's Semblance subconsciously.

• In the first episode of Volume 4, when Jaune takes off his armor to reveal that his hoodie had a bunny on it, Ruby laughs so hard she keels over. This can probably be chalked up to needing a really good laugh, but there is a bit of brilliance in the fact that Ren and Nora don't laugh with her (besides the fact that it kind of was a stupid joke). Ren and Nora both were on Jaune's team back at Beacon, and shared a room with him, so they probably had already known what was under his armor. Ruby wasn't as close to Jaune at Beacon, so she probably only saw him in armor in class, and since they were traveling through the Grimm infested countryside with only backpacks, they probably didn't have any changes of clothes (yes Huntsmen liberally uses Hammerspace, but those backpacks can only carry so much, and besides, everyone except Jaune has a gun hybrid weapon, most of that space is probably devoted to ammo, Nora's pink rockets are pretty large). This was probably the first time that Ruby had actually seen Jaune only in his hoodie, and honestly, she probably needed an excuse to laugh.
• Doctor Watts says he's not fond of failures. While this establishes him to be a Jerkass who likes to mock people, if he's really a doctor as his title implies, it makes sense for him to have low tolerance for failure. It comes with the profession, morally ambiguous or not.
• The people, Grimm, Maidens, and silver-eyed warriors have a rather interesting relationship if you consider them as Remnant's system of checks and balances.
  • Maidens are granted enhanced power and control over aspects of nature itself. They are incredibly dangerous against the Grimm, which helps keep humanity safe. However, Cinder shows they can be corrupt and turn against humanity.
  • Silver-eyed warriors can defeat Grimm with a glance, and can severely harm a Maiden. They keep both of them in check and check THEMSELVES - Silver-eyed warriors don't manifest their powers until they suffer from severe emotional trauma... Which is when they are most likely to be needed in the first place.
  • The regular people, believe it or not, check the Silver-eyed warriors. The Silver-eyed warriors' powers are not meant to work on regular people, and lose their potency as a result.
• In Episode 2, when Ruby's team comes across the dying Huntsman, Jaune says that he and Ren will take turns carrying him to the next town. Some fans began complaining that Nora should be strong enough to carry him on her own, likely not understanding what a center of mass is. It's not a matter of "Could Nora carry him", it's a matter of "Could Nora (who is one of the shorter characters) carry a much taller person (that is heavily injured) without his weight causing her to fall over", as opposed to having Jaune and Ren (who are closer to the Huntsman's height) take turns carrying him.
• On her way to meet her father, Weiss walks past a very prominent statue of a King Taijitu. Considering that Weiss' father is a horribly abusive but charismatic Corrupt Corporate Executive, it's certainly not the only soulless, two-faced monster in that house.
• Episode 4:
  • Oscar (the farm boy) notices his reflection in the mirror, slowly looking at it as if there's something wrong, though there doesn't seem to be... except there is if you look really closely. Notice the Fashionable Asymmetry bits on Oscar's left side? On his mirror image, his right side (Oscar's left) is bare, but the left side (Oscar's right) has them instead. Oscar may not be consciously aware of the problem, but the subconscious wrongness he felt was certainly on-point (even before the unexpected voice). The only question is what it all means.
  • What's weirder is that in the first shot, when we see an over the shoulder shot it's correct, it's only when the camera switches to have the mirror in full screen (from Oscar's perspective) that it changes. Maybe that means that it's a change in his perspective and not something wrong with the mirror?
  • Also, when Ozpin talks to him, he doesn't turn away from the mirror, if Ozpin was physically in the barn Oscar would at least acknowledge it, instead, he keeps his eyes on the mirror the whole time, even when he is falling back, this implies that Oz is somehow communicating through the mirror.
• Blake's Volume 1 remark that she was basically "born into" the White Fang makes a lot more sense when we find out in Episode 5 that the previous, peaceful leader was her father.
  • Additionally, Blake tells Ozpin in Volume 2 that she was raised "outside the kingdoms". With the reveal that she was raised in Menagerie, we learn that she was telling the truth all along, rather than merely lying to protect herself.
• The first major battle with Nora in it had her defeating the Deathstalker with an overhead strike in midair, and she tries to use the same move on Tyrian. It looks like it works until Tyrian is revealed to have blocked it with his scorpion tail.
• The Belladonna Family has a clear Japanese influence, while the two White Fang brothers who speak with Ghira are Fox Faunus. Nobody should be surprised that the brothers are lying.
• When Ren stops the others, he focuses for a moment before looking up in surprise. Given that he'd just revealed some sad things about his backstory (that he was likely thinking about at that moment), it's not farfetched for him to think that he might have actually attracted Grimm toward them. His look of surprise is probably the realization that the approaching enemy was a human or rather, a Faunus.
• When Jacques Schnee claims at the charity ball that the Schnee Dust Company offers the same wages to Faunus workers as humans, it's easy to assume it's Blatant Lies. However, after watching World of Remnant: Schnee Dust Company, when Qrow is scathingly deriding Jacques' labor policies, he does not specifically mention Faunus; he mentions the more general term "cheap labor," thus implying human workers don't get better treatment than their Faunus counterparts. So, when Jacques states he gives equal pay to human and Faunus workers, he is likely telling the truth.
• Weiss becoming a Huntress to restore her family's honor makes even more sense when you learn that her grandfather, who ran the company with compassion and integrity, used his own combat training to lead expeditions personally. He also learned as much as he could about everything in order to make the SDC as trusted and high-quality as it was, which might also be the reason Weiss is so serious when it comes to studying.
• Qrow's proficiency in unarmed combat. In "It's Brawl in the Family", he was shown drinking at a bar, and then getting into a fight with Winter. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that he got into a lot of bar brawls. In addition, he also studied at Beacon with a brawler on his team, it wouldn't be hard to imagine Taiyang may have taught him a thing or two as well.
• And why was Tyrian utterly blindsided by a simple set of punches and a very basic kick? Because this is the world of Remnant, where two things are constant: first, that weapons are a deeply significant possession that reflect a person's inner self, and even competent fighters have been shown to be helpless when disarmed. Second is that whenever anyone performs even the tiniest action in a fight, it has to be done with unnecessary amounts of style and flair. No wonder Qrow throwing a few normal, mundane punches had Tyrian briefly staggered.
• Tyrian tried to stab Ruby with his stinger, which at first doesn't make sense since Salem told him to bring her alive. However, a bit of research proves most scorpion venoms' are not lethal and are used to weaken prey. So it makes sense he was trying to sting her: It's to make capturing her easier.
  • Even when Qwow's life ends up in danger because of the poison, it's mainly due to no one having the antidote/antivenom and needing to seek an actual town to get to a doctor. Salem does have a doctor who has spent more than enough time with Tyrian to know exactly how to counter the poison he produces.
• Tyrian is defeated when Ruby chops off his stinger. A scorpion's stinger is attached to its anus. In other words, Ruby literally ripped Tyrian a new one! No wonder he was in so much pain! Doubles as Squick, considering his facial expression when blocking Ruby's gunfire from Crescent Rose with his stinger...
• In "Punished", Qrow warns Ruby not to get into the fight. She barks back that it's her fight too. Qrow tries to warn her of something. "It's not that! It's-!" But he's cut off because a piece of the roof he and Tyrian fell through came down and nearly struck Ruby. In "A Much Needed Talk", Qrow explains that his semblance creates bad luck. It's good in a fight against an enemy, but "bad for friends and family". After his explanation, a log in a fire Qrow happened to poke with a stick outright tumbles out of the fire pit. Qrow was trying to warn Ruby about his bad luck semblance in that fight. Since he and Tyrian went through the unfinished building's roof, it was under the effects of his semblance and could cause any kind of bad luck, like it did when that one wooden plank nearly struck Ruby without her Aura to stop a head injury at a very bad time.
  • Related to his bad luck semblance is a minor event in Volume 3 Episode 2. The bartender drops and breaks the glass Qrow just used.
  • Expanding on the above, the real reason behind Taiyang's glare at the end of Volume 3 may have been less angry about having to leave Ruby's side and more about Qrow never being around because of his Semblance.
  • On a more humorous note, the Semblance likely caused Ruby and Yang to lose the videogame against Qrow in "Lessons Learned".
• In the World of Remnant episode on the Schnee Dust Company, we learn that Jacques Schnee's maiden name was Jacques Gelé. French for Jack Frost.
• Ghira's private study is essentially a library, with bookshelves lining every wall. Guess that's where Blake got her love for books from.
• In their training session, Taiyang is using many kicking techniques against Yang. While this could just be his fighting style, keep in mind that he addresses the issue with Yang's fighting style right after. Yang was shown (and confirmed through Word of God) to be weak against kick-based fighting styles, so Taiyang was pointing out her weaknesses both verbally and physically.
• The first lines we get out of Qrow while poisoned is of him calling out and attempting to comfort Taiyang, which doesn't make much sense at first...until you realize he's comforting the father after losing either Summer or Raven. He's on death door and is vainly trying to comfort his last teammate over his possible demise.
• In the opening, when Ruby is fighting Tyrian, he bends a leg over his back, even though he probably won't have the reach to hit that way. It's possible he was going to flip himself towards he but look at how his leg is position - similar to how people portray scorpions arching their tails over their back.
• In "Punished", Ozpin tells Oscar that he founded the Huntsman Academies personally. In WOR: The Great War, we learn that it was the last King of Vale who actually founded them. Given that the Fusion Dance of Ozpin and Oscar was preceded with one between Ozpin and someone else ... then that someone else must have been the King of Vale.
  • Alternatively, Ozpin could've also simply been Fusion Dance with one of the King of Vale's most trusted followers who were put in charge of the Huntsmen Academies.
• Nora being unusually short compared to most of her friends makes sense after learning that she was a Street Urchin who had to go through the trash to find her next meal. She was likely very malnourished as a child, also explaining her enormous appetite and unwillingness to let food go to waste. Doubles as Fridge Horror.
• Ren as a child goes from weeping and panicked to completely calm when his Semblance activates. Nora stops hyperventilating when he shares it with her and even though he was terrified of the Nuckelavee earlier he simply watches it as it goes past. It's meant to hide him from the Grimm and Grimm can sense fear and distress.
• When Ren gives Nora a toy hammer and tells her they'll keep each other safe, an instrumental version of the song "Boop" is playing in the background. One line of the lyrics is "when did I start to fall for you?" Well, this moment is the spark that caused Nora to fall for Ren, the boy who came to help her and comfort her during the darkest moment of her life.
• At first, Sun and Kali falling through the door while eavesdropping seems like a running gag. But remember: This is the door to the Chieftain's office, essentially the ruler of Menagerie. If a legitimate spy was attempting to listen in to an actual political meeting and fell through, they would be identified immediately. The door is functioning exactly as designed.
• Suddenly the reason Cinder and her team disguised themselves as Haven students during the Vytal Festival makes sense with the revelation of the Volume 4 finale. Professor Lionheart, headmaster of Haven Academy, is in league with Salem. It'd be painfully easy for him to forge the data to pass the four of them off as his students.
  • The Professor's Fairytale Motif gives us a likely explanation for his defection. Given how Cinder and her cohorts intimidated Adam Taurus's faction of the White Fang, it's likely that Lionheart was too scared by Salem's power to even consider resisting her.
  • Adding to that, the fact that Nuckelavee looks so terrifying to Team RNJR at first is because of their fears. Before the finale, we're only shown how the Nuckelavee is like from Ren and Nora's POVs when they were terrified, helpless young children, portraying it as a terror capable of massacring entire villages. For Ruby and Jaune, the Nuckelavee is a new type of Grimm that they haven't encountered before, so it's fear of the unknown. Once all four members get their acts together they finally realize that, like all the other Grimms, the Nuckelavee has a weakness that they can exploit. From that point on, the Nuckelavee is much less scary and starts to become vulnerable as Team RNJR starts working together more effectively without their negative feelings hindering them.
  • Also, the Nuckelavee's lair is intimidating with tons of weapons in it, but upon closer inspection, none of the weapons actually look like they're Huntsmen-caliber. There appear to be no secondary fire functions on any of the weapons (i.e. none of the weapons are also grenade launchers or guns), and admittedly, some Huntsmen/women don't have weapons that look like they have secondary fire functions (Yatsuhashi, Arslan, Brawnz, and, of course, Jaune all come to mind), so theoretically a Huntsman/woman could have used a medieval weapon, but the vast majority of the Huntsmen/women seen in the show have some secondary fire function (the unofficial tagline for RWBY is "it's also a gun!"), so it's unlikely such a high proportions of Huntsmen and women would've chosen such weapons. Furthermore, the weapons in the cave are stylistically generic, with simple shapes and features (unlike most of the Huntsmen/women' weapons, which are usually very distinctive, with markings or some aspect that is more unusual to set it apart from the others), which could imply that the Nuckelavee isn't actually regularly fighting trained Grimm killers, but instead the militias of local villages (since smaller settlements likely wouldn't be able to make guns or more complex weapons, they would mass produce swords or simpler weapons, which is why some look really similar to each other). It's very likely that the Nuckelavee is a medium-sized fish in a small pond and has never actually had to face a concerted attack by Huntsmen/women. The Huntsmen shortages mentioned in the World of Remnant videos meant that finding and destroying the Nuckelavee was likely a low priority, and most Huntsmen/women moving through the area would probably have just avoided it on the way to more important assignments, like RNJR would've done if Qrow wasn't incapacitated.
• We don't actually see Ren's Semblance until Volume 4, but in retrospect, it makes sense. Ren's Semblance is hiding himself and other people from the Grimm, and with the exception of a couple of fights in Volume 1, he's never been in a fight involving the Grimm where that Semblance would be useful. Since his Semblance takes time and concentration to activate, and in those fights against the Grimm were close in and actively attacking him, he didn't have the option to hide himself... or the Grimm were relatively easy to kill and he didn't need to hide from them.
• The Nuckelavee is the first Grimm shown to mimic a domesticated animal, in this case a horse, in its design. It's only fitting that rather than being defeated in battle like other Grimm, it meets its end by being calmly and methodically butchered by Ren.
• The difference is actually notable as to which weapons work. Only Jaune and Ren manage to get the beast to scream and recoil in agony, or do real damage, when they attack it; the weapons they use for this are both mementoes of loved ones - loved ones, no less, who died fighting for others.
• Why does Ruby writes her letter with her right hand? Isn't she left-handed? Try writing left to right with a fountain pen left handed. Also, it may serve as foreshadowing that Ruby is ambidextrous, which may come in handy in the future.
• The credits song about Yang being back in the game has Yang claiming to be "Armed and Ready". Of course the Pungeon Master would make a pun about getting a new cybernetic arm wouldn't she?
• Ren and Nora have the same color of Aura. They're literally soulmates.
• Blake and Sun's relationship becomes a bit more heartwarming once you see that it's strikingly similar to Blake's parents: Ghira is like Blake: Strong, serious and righteous but not all that great with people and Kali is like Sun; Silly and joking but very loving, good with people and forces her husband to interact with their daughter (similar to how Sun tries to force Blake to face her problem.) Considering how well adjusted Blake is, it's no doubt a healthy relationship.
• Ozpin is based on the wizard, whose full name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, which spells OZPINHEAD, which is where he gets the name “OZPINâ€$ from. Come Volume 4, guess where he is? In Oscar's head.
• Look at "Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back". The two people who took their steps forward did not partake in a fight at all, or if they did, they fought in the loosest sense of the term (an argument and a spar respectively) while the two who take their steps back fought both Grimm and a Huntsman in their journey by that point (The Geist/Tyrian for Ruby and the Sea Dragon/Illya for Blake).
• When Ren uses his Semblance to mask Jaune and Qrow from the Nuckelavee, he does so by touching the ground and casting it out. Now, remember how Ren was able to detect Tyrian from some distance away? Well, considering that his Semblance seems to work by sensing and calming emotions, then Ren's Semblance allows him to detect people through the ground by sensing emotion.
• We never actually see Qrow receiving anti-venom medical treatment after being flown to Mistral, only sleeping in an inn afterwards. For the series that gave its characters functional Life Meters, and generally heavily influenced by video games, the Trauma Inn trope is a perfect symbol for recovering.
• The complete version of "This Life Is Mine" is a brilliant example of Weiss using her music to rebel against not only her father but also Atlas' upper crust. While we only hear the first part of it in the show, where it would be appropriate for the genteel aristocracy of Atlas to hear in a concert hall, the more dramatic middle part and especially the aggressive rock part at the end not only show Weiss' rebellion against her father, but are the kind of music that neither her father nor the rich folks of Atlas would approve of and may even be offended by. It's also the first time any of Weiss' songs about not being under her father's thumb also break away from the classical piano and orchestral style of the earlier songs, which fits how Volume 4 is the first volume where Weiss openly rebels against her father, rather than covertly rebelling.
• It's interesting to note that the catalyst to Weiss' ultimate rebellion against her father and attempting to escape isn't simply Jacques cutting off her inheritance, but also Whitley siding with him against her. When you look back at how Weiss treats her family, it's obvious that she highly values her family's name and history, and idolizes her sister and grandfather. Whitley is more uncertain and a wild card that Weiss can't figure out, however, and Weiss' ultimate loyalty remains to the Schnee family, but until she knows where Whitley stands she's not certain what to do beyond trying to reluctantly support the Schnee name. It's when Whitley finally turns against her and sides with her father that Weiss has her brief breakdown, and then resolves to escape; once she knows where everyone stands, and that she has no allies in her house beyond Klein, the decision of what to do next comes very quickly to her.
• Following the finale, it's crystal clear that Volume 5 will feature the reunification of Team RWBY, and feature a more balanced fight between heroes and monsters. While the heroes' reasons for going to Mistral revolve around the pending attack (as noted in the finale's recap page), there is a less obvious reason why the villains are targeting it in the first place - sheer geography. Vale is still getting rebuilt, and every other city-state is either too hostile (Vacuo), too cramped (Menagerie) or too isolated (Atlas after the lockdown) for the villains to infiltrate without getting exposed. Therefore, it's little wonder that the villains are set to surface in Mistral; it's the only "safe" place in Remnant which can be infiltrated relatively easily (due to having the largest inhabited area of any kingdom and the largest criminal underbelly). Therefore, the heroes and villains must cross paths in Mistral; it's the only place where the story can feasibly be continued.
• In a post-credit scene, we have Qrow seated at a bar as Oscar approaches him. Qrow responds by calling him "Pipsqueak". Both Qrow and Oscar are voiced respectively by Vic Mignogna and Aaron Dismuke, who are most well-known for voicing the Elric brothers in Fullmetal Alchemist. One of the biggest running gags was having Edward, voiced by Mignogna, being called out for his diminutive size compared to his brother, Alphonse, voiced by Dismuke.

Volume Five

• We learn from Professor Lionheart and Qrow that the Maidens alone possess the ability to open the chamber where each Academy's respective Relic is kept. The Winter Maiden can access Creation, the Summer Maiden guards Destruction, the Spring Maiden is the key to Knowledge, and the Fall Maiden is the steward of Choice. It can be inferred, therefore, that the Choice Relic is/was hidden at Beacon and the Knowledge Relic lies within Haven's walls - thereby meaning that the Spring Maiden running to a thriving Branwen bandit tribe and staying there for the last decade (and some) made the relic safer than anyone ever realized.
  • This also explains why Salem originally had Tyrian searching for the Spring Maiden and why Haven is her next target: Spring is the only one who could access the Knowledge Relic hidden within Haven Academy.
  • This also explains a big question from the previous season. Namely why if Leo was already working with Salem he didn't just up and give her the relic straight off. Without Spring he can't.
• The reveal that the Relics are locked in chambers that only the Maidens can access sheds a bit of light on something Glynda and Ozpin said in Volume 3; that word of the Maidens' existence getting out would lead to religious chaos. Because the Maidens have a connection to the two brothers, learning of the Maidens' existence could also lead to learning that at least some aspects of this religion are real, meaning that every other religion would be called into question. It's easy to see why that would cause panic.
• We never saw how Qrow learned that Raven has recruited the Spring Maiden. Is the information pulled out of his ass? Oh wait, we know when he learned it. During his conversation with Raven in the inn.
  • Qrow is a master spy. And any master spy worth his salt knows that what people tell you is the least interesting thing about a conversation. Much more interesting is the way they say it ("I saved her!", almost but not quite Suddenly Shouting, as if saving her own daughter once was something extraordinary, even though she then washed her hands of helping her own daughter again). Even more interesting, is what they don't say. Omissions are the most telling thing a person will do in a conversation. ("I don't know where the spring maiden is either, but if you know, I need you to tell me." "And why would I do that?" She could have said no, she had no idea where the Maiden was. She didn't. Qrow picked up on this, and deduced Raven knew. "Because without her, we're all going to die." "And which "We" are you referring to?", the way she said it almost made them sound like Qrow and Raven were enemies. That told Qrow Raven has taken the Spring Maiden in some fashion.)
  • Qrow's familiarity with the Maidens allowed him to realize that the extensive damage dealt to Shion might have required some massive power, and filling in the blanks with the fact that the Branwen tribe attacked the village... Raven has recruited Spring.
  • Lastly, Qrow is able to manipulate people into doing his bidding. He provoked Winter into attacking him. That's provoking a highly trained, highly disciplined soldier (as proven by the fact that she just stops anything in a split second when her CO orders her to stand at attention. Stopping mid strike just when barked an order takes some massive discipline, especially if you hate your target as opposed to more impersonal fights that might happen on the field) into attacking him without taking hostile actions beyond property damage. And getting her in trouble with her CO, a guy who absolutely, positively, does not like him in the slightest. And that was while being completely sloshed. Qrow was sober, dealing with someone he literally knew from birth as they are twins, so he has an immense advantage here. Qrow didn't just pick up on Raven because she had a classic case of Saying Too Much (or too little in some cases)-itis, he intentionally probed and prodded her to trick her into revealing sensitive info to him.
  • Furthermore, Raven later reveals that she's aware Qrow knows this. How did she find this out? She probably thought back to this conversation and realized she inadvertently gave it away. Or, she intentionally made him suspect that she's recruited Spring to keep him from considering that she is Spring.
• The reveal that the Albain brothers are using Adam and plan to dispose of him if he gets out of control makes way more sense given the animal motifs. Foxes are cunning and known for trickery. Bulls have a more varied impact. Across various cultures and religions, bulls have been viewed as everything from sacred to demonic, which certainly describes how Adam is viewed by the cast. Some cultures such as the Roman Empire and the Celts would sacrifice bulls to ensure their peoples' well being, which matches the Albain brother's plans as well (even the name of Albain is of Latin origin). Adam's descent into madness could also be a reference to mad cow disease, with him being "infected" by Sienna Khan's ideology.
• Yang's complete lack of interest in emotionally connecting with her mother after she'd previously been shown almost desperately searching for Raven is neatly explained by the reveal of Raven's semblance. Once Tai told her that Raven, wherever she was, could have visited Yang any time she wanted to but didn't, Yang realized Raven wasn't going to be the type of mother she wanted or needed.
  • Never mind visits, from learning about Raven's semblance to finally meeting her, Yang no doubt considered that her dismemberment and Blake running away might not have happened if Raven was at Beacon when it fell.
• Raven's dressing down of Cinder, regarding how her name was so appropriate she probably picked it herself, can seem a tad ironic coming from a woman named Raven, whose last name means 'Beautiful Raven', who can turn into a raven. However, the brilliance sets in when you realise they're in exact opposite situations; Raven infers that Cinder picked the last name 'Fall' because she intended to gain the Fall Maidens power, but Raven got the power to turn into a raven from Ozpin with the implication she got that power specifically because her name was Raven.
• It's noted multiple times that, with Ilia being a chameleon Faunus, she could hide the fact that she's a minority if she wanted to. The thematic reason for this becomes clear with the reveal that Ilia is gay. Her hiding her Faunus nature by pretending to be a human is similar to how members of the LGBTQ community can also pass as straight, even though it is denying a fundamental part of themselves, just like how Ilia's colors are a fundamental part of her.
  • Or it's a reference to how Blake hid her own cat ears with a bow for three seasons and change. Blake lost the bow when she decided to stop hiding who she was and running away. Ilia never bothered with either of those.
• A lot of people might think that Ilia's heel face turn was rushed, but there are a few very simple justifications for it:
  • Ghira saved her. Ilia came to the Belladonna household with the intent to help the other White Fang kill Blake's parents, but then one of the people that she was going to help kill saved her when he didn't have to. Also, she was only in a position like that to start with because of her own refusal to stop fighting, and Fennec didn't make a single move to help her.
  • Also, think about how the Albains were acting. One of them snapped at her to get back to fighting when she locked up at how much damage they were doing, one of them showed a self-entitled attitude when the other got knocked out by Ghira, Fennec tried to kill Ghira while he was vulnerable from just saving Ilia's life, and Corsac angrily blamed Ghira for how badly things turned out. She saw that too many in the Fang had become a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist because they put their rage above the group's original noble goals.
  • Also, despite saying that she doesn't like hurting people, we haven't seen Ilia do anything too awful with the exception of giving Sun a minor shoulder injury that he recovered from quickly, which he forgave her for anyway. The only contribution Ilia had to the attack was leading Blake away and keeping her busy with their fight. She didn't even participate in the fights against Ghira and Kali.
• Fridge Hilarity: Of course Kali could take down Yuma. Who better to get the drop on Batman than Catwoman?
  • Though on a more serious note, consider Blake's backstory. Travelling between Kingdoms for protests, having to fight to survive? Kali would've been there too - her and Ghira's current lifestyle, the big house in Menagerie, that's only happened in the last five/six years. Before that, she would have been having to fight out in the world as part of the White Fang.
  • While Kali attacking with the tea tray definitely seems silly, remember that Aura allows those trained in its use to effectively be able to fight with anything as a weapon, best demonstrated back in volume 2's food fight - Kali's Aura would've enhanced the tray's durability, making it more effective as a bludgeoning tool.
    • The Faunus are a persecuted group in Remnant. In our world, it was a persecuted group that brought us Krav Maga, a school of fighting based on being a pure Combat Pragmatist and using an Improvised Weapon whenever a real weapon isn't available. The Faunus seem the most likely group to have developed a fighting style based on the same principle of being a Combat Pragmatist and using an Improvised Weapon whenever a real weapon isn't available.
• Ilia is very effective against Blake. Not only is Blake holding back, but they have similar weapons, and probably trained together. By contrast, Sun's fighting style relies on overwhelming close-range force from unpredictable angles, and Ilia's style relies on keeping opponents at range. Not to mention the disorienting effect of having shotguns go off next to your ears and her own weapon still being frozen up.
• It seems rather boneheaded of Adam to order the Belladonnas' deaths, even though it will obviously turn the people of Menagerie against him. But he's done this sort of thing before, a pointless act of spite that pushes his would-be supporters away. Where? In the Black Trailer. After successfully securing the SDC cargo, Adam was going to blow up the train and kill the entire crew as an act of defiance to the human-run Dust Company, even though the train's workers have no say over the Company's policy. That attempted murder is the thing that convinces Blake to leave the White Fang, and now the attempted assassination has convinced Menagerie to get over their Bystander Syndrome.
• The pairings that were made during the battle in Episode 11 of Volume 5 make a lot of sense as they were grudge matches that were waiting to happen:
  • Jaune vs. Cinder: Cinder killed Pyrrha, so there's an obvious reason for him to be angry.
  • Ruby vs. Emerald: Emerald killed Penny, who was Ruby's close friend, even closer than Pyrrha.
  • Weiss vs. Vernal: Weiss was captured by Vernal's tribe, personally stole her weapon and crushed her hopes of Winter coming to save her.
  • Yang vs. Mercury: Mercury participated in the framing of Yang during the Vytal Tournament.
  • Qrow vs. Raven: Sibling Rivalry.
  • Oscar/Ozpin vs. Lionheart: Headmasters on different sides of the coin.
  • Nora/Ren vs. Hazel: The odd ones out.
• After several fighters leave, the fight gets reshuffled.
  • Oscar/Ozpin vs. Hazel: Driven by revenge over the death of Hazel's sister.
  • Qrow vs. Lionheart: Qrow personally knew some of the huntsmen that Lionheart compromised and let die.
  • Ruby/Yang vs. Mercury/Emerald: Same reasons as before, but now it's sisterly teamwork.
  • Raven vs. Cinder: Both are Maidens. Not to mention that Cinder just killed/wounded Vernal.
• The reveal that Raven is the Spring Maiden:
  • Why was Raven wearing a mask for most of their talk? A Maiden's eyes have a ring of power around them when they use their powers and she didn't want to give herself away while she is making all that wind blow.
  • It was foreshadowed in the Volume 5 intro. One image shown is Cinder and Vernal facing each other, followed by Raven and Yang turning away from each other. The Foreshadowing comes in when you realize that Raven is in the same spot as Cinder. It was also foreshadowed on the poster for the volume where Raven and Cinder, both Maidens, appear opposite each other at the top of the image.
  • Note that every time the Maiden's power was used, not only was Raven wearing her mask but the actual source of those powers was not directly shown. The camera would focus on Vernal to make it look like she was the source of the power, but at no point did Vernal have the fiery eyes, nor was she shown actually casting the magic like Cinder did.
  • Might be a coincidence, but rearranging the letters and removing the 'L' from Vernal's name gives us Raven's.
  • It seems oddly arrogant for Raven to tell Vernal not to bother using her powers against Weiss - unless Vernal had no powers, and Raven knew she'd be too busy fighting Qrow to fake it. Vernal is too headstrong and cocky to voluntarily restrain herself to physical combat if she had the power, especially against Weiss who's been winding her up for a bit; Raven had to say something to keep Cinder from getting suspicious.
• Cinder's desire to simply steamroll the Branwen Tribe rather than convince them help makes sense in light of the fact that she has a Grimm arm that can steal the magic of the Maidens. She sees no reason to bother playing nice when they can get what they need without the roundabout approach.
  • Likewise Salem's decision to convince the Raven to help her side is actually quite tactical. While they could slaughter the tribe and take the Spring Maiden by force, that runs the risk of a warrior on Qrow's level turning against them and only works on the off chance they can actually subdue said Maiden. Gaining willing cooperation on the other hand means they have an ally that equals Qrow, the largest active threat against them, as well as someone who likely knows Ozpin's secrets.
• The Relic of Knowledge being inside a giant tree is a dual reference to both Yggdrasil and the Tree of Knowledge.
• Salem has clearly planned out the roles that each of her subordinates play in fighting Ozpin's forces and obtaining the relics, but it was difficult to tell why she made Hazel a part of her circle. While he's exceptionally strong and the most diplomatic of the group, she has other people who have these traits (Cinder and Tyrian are also strong fighters, and Watts can be diplomatic when he needs to be). After “Vault of the Spring Maidenâ€$, though, his most important purpose is clear. His grudge against Ozpin is so strong that, as Hazel himself states, he wants to kill Ozpin every time he reincarnates. When it comes to his hated foe, Hazel can't be swayed by words or force, and every death that Ozpin goes through sets him back and temporarily removes him from the board. And given Ozpin's open fear of him, he may be capable of doing so in the right situation. Hazel is a major setback for Ozpin that can't be turned, and therefore very useful for Salem.
• Fans hark to Volume 1's "Forever Fall Part 2" as when Jaune's Healing Hands were foreshadowed, but a careful look shows that they've been hinted very subtly throughout the show;
  • According to Ren, Some Semblances might be an example of Personality Powers. Jaune is the poster boy for niceness. Even in a fight, the only thing he's been able to turn his sword on are the Grim, which are not strictly "alive" as we know it. When he does go for people, he almost always ends up blocked or dodged. Almost as if it's against his nature to harm others...
  • In RPG games, the healing character is nominally the weakest fighter at the beginning, at least until they are buffed. Jaune started the series as the weakest fighter among the students.
  • Even taking into account that Jaune's power isn't actually healing but strengthening someone else's aura so they can heal themselves, it still fits: Jaune's been shown to be a weak fighter, but an excellent tactician when he's focused; in other words, his primary combat skill is to get others to be more effective, just as his semblance is revealed to make others more powerful. To use RPG terms again, he's the support member of the team directing traffic while flinging out buffs on individuals.
  • And in Grimm Eclipse, this is subtly manifested as Jaune's Ult.
  • When Pyrrha first unlocks Jaune's aura, she comments that "you have a lot of it." Yet Jaune repeatedly gets his aura depleted in battle in Volume 1. He has an abudance of power, but isn't very good at protecting himself with it, because it's a pool of power meant to be used to strengthen and protect others.
  • Jaune is really an awesome case of misdirection. He seems to be a stereotypical sword and board D&D Fighter, but he's not particularly good at fighting. Because he's not a Fighter, he's actually a Paladin, a front line combatant whose true role is taking a lot of damage while keeping his allies on their feet, letting him still be effective in a straight fight, but overshadowed by the true Fighter of the team, Pyrrha. Complicating the issue is that Jaune himself (to continue using the D&D analogy) thinks that he's a Fighter and continues training as one, only realizing that he's a Paladin after unlocking his Semblance.
• It seems odd that Blake managed to do so well against Adam in "Downfall" until you take into account his fighting style. It's confirmed that his Semblance is like Yang's and against others he does best by staying on the defensive until he's in the right position to attack. Here he charges at Blake out of anger and she's able to trip him up by using her Semblance to set him up for the hit. Basically she turned his fighting style against him because of his own temper.
  • Crossing over with Fridge Hilarity: what animal is Adam commonly associated with? The bull. What do bulls do when they're enraged? Charge at people without a second thought. In other words, it's a literal Bullfight Boss, and Blake won in the classic fashion of using the bull's temper against him, dodging out of the way, and striking back. ¡Olé!
• Adam seems quite pathetic in his entire confrontation with Blake, but it makes complete sense why he would be like this. In all prior moments where Adam was shown as a cool and badass character, he was in the position of power, with no significant threat to himself or his plans facing him. But one's true strength is shown only in their lowest moments. Adam has one such moment when Cinder invades his camp and threatens him with her newly-acquired Fall Maiden powers - and he immediately caves in, without even a token attempt to uphold his previous policy of not helping humans, or to avenge his defeated "brothers and sisters" before him. While he presents himself as strong and cool when given opportunity, rationalizing that he made those "powerful friends" of his own accord, in reality he's a weak and petty person who easily breaks down under pressure.
• Back in season three, Mercury took advantage of Yang because of his artificial legs, tricking her. Now in season five, Yang takes advantage of Mercury with her artificial arm, tricking him and escaping his grasp. The irony is as palpable as it is delicious.
• Raven is the perfect opponent for Cinder because Spring is the complete opposite of Fall.
• Blake's Big Damn Heroes moment is also a reflection of what the heroes did wrong in Vale; In Volume 2, Team RWBY tried to go at it alone, and as such, merely provoked Torchwick into causing the breach ahead of schedule, allowing the true mastermind, Cinder, to get away Scott-free. In Volume 3, Ozpin's group, despite seeing the warning signs, didn't tell anyone what the stakes truly were. The most they did was pressure Pyrrha into joining (breaking her emotionally), and when things took a turn for the worse, the good guys could barely do anything because they had no idea what was going on. When Blake heard that Adam was going to attack Haven, rather than trying fix things on her own, she took Sun's advice and rallied the people of Menagerie to fight against the White Fang, and got the forces of Mistral to join on the counterattack. By letting other people in and allowing them to help, Blake saved Haven, turning things around.
• Raven blasting Cinder off the ledge and then freezing her instead of stabbing her: Raven is both a cunning strategist and fully aware of the rules behind Maiden succession, she might not be trying to kill Cinder, but rather take her out of play. If Cinder dies, then the Fall Maiden's power would most definitely either pass to one of Cinder's subordinates or to some random bystander, both of which are unfavorable outcomes to Raven given how the former is a strategic nightmare and the latter hits upon Raven's personal hatred of innocent people getting dragged into the conflict between Ozpin and Salem. Freezing Cinder offers the best chance for Raven's best case scenario to occur — The Fall Maiden is taken out of the equation either permanently or long enough for Raven to make off with the Relic, and nobody else has to get a power that they may not want.
• Emerald's illusion in the finale uses red and black imagery, along with a warped and distorted version of Salem. It's literally an Emerald Nightmare.
• The Relic of Knowledge is constantly emitting a whispering sound, as though the secrets it holds are incapable of being held.
• The Menagerie militia being armed with melee weapons and shields seems anachronistic, as their adversaries have guns and even hi-tech weapons. However, while it's impossible to give someone a proper Huntsman training within two weeks, let alone an a whole company, it's perfectly possible to teach them to use shields in formation - and to unlock their Auras. As evidenced by Jaune, shields and Aura go together incredibly well even when used by a novice: raising a shield is a perfect metaphor (and trigger) for engaging your Aura, and Aura reinforcement makes even the flimsiest shields bulletproof (as shown by Kali blocking a shot with a freaking serving tray). While individually Faunus volunteers may be no match against White Fang, together they can form an impenetrable wall.

Volume Six

• In the opening, the lyric, "We're the same / You and me" is played during a close-up of Salem's face before she goes ballistic. And this is 100% true. Despite their difference in ideology, Salem and Ozpin have virtually identical methods to achieve their goals; They both manipulate society from the shadows through their chosen agents, manipulate their agents through lies and half-truths, and while they try to present themselves as composed and enlightened, the Sixth Volume will show just how broken they truly are.
  • The opening also starts by showing a whole moon before dramatically breaking it. Subtle foreshadowing how this volume will be the one explaining why Remnant's moon is shattered.
• The official story of the Battle of Haven holds that Professor Lionheart died a hero's death defending his academy. In other words, he's been... lionized.
• Remember Blake's conversation with Sun in "A Necessary Sacrifice" about how she sees her friends as the personifications of certain words? Well, Ilia's reflections on Haven's salvation gives a hint at how Blake viewed her all this time: she represents the concept of faith. For so long, Ilia had faith in the organization that took her in as an orphan; that faith was ultimately misplaced and taken advantage of, and she realized it before it blinded her completely. And now, as Ilia herself notes, being given a new start and a new movement to work with has given her more faith than ever before.
• Covering up Lionheart's betrayal, while a kind gesture after what he did, actually has pragmatic value to it. Leo was both the head of Haven Academy and a Faunus, meaning if word got out it could cause people to distrust the headmasters of the other Huntsman Academies, but also cause people to suspect that Ghira and the Faunus Militia staged the whole thing.
  • Additionally, the outburst of negativity that would've come about had the truth been told in the first place could very well have caused another Grimm attack - with Mistral suffering from a huntsman shortage, there's no way Leo's actions could ever have come to light.
• Ozpin's statement that the Relics might be attracting the Grimm might not be accurate. On the one hand, of course the Relics would attract Grimm. Not only are they probably giving off a lot of energy that anything with enhanced senses could pick up - such as Grimm, who can sense negative emotions from miles away if they're strong enough - but they must seem familiar to the Grimm, in more ways than one. If there's any truth to Qrow's story about the Two Brothers, that the Relics were gifted to mankind by them, not would only the Relics smell of their own maker, but also of his opposite (who represents everything they were created to destroy). On the other hand, Adam was on the train; the Grimm might've attacked because of his rage issues.
• The Reveal of "Uncovered" sheds new light on Ozpin's conversation with Pyrrha back in Volume 3's "Fall". Note how Ozpin gently cuts Pyrrha off when she mentions the fairy tale of the Girl in the Tower.
  • To drive the point even further, once Volume 6 got released on YouTube, the very first sentence of the description for "The Lost Fable" is, what else, "What is your favorite fairy tale?"
• Why is Jinn naked? Ask yourself this: Why do we wear clothes? To keep ourselves warm, but also to hide our bodies from others, which you could interpret as symbolism for keeping secrets. Jinn is naked because she has nothing to hide, and unlike Ozpin who tries so desperately hard to withhold information, Jinn gladly shares her knowledge.
• We've seen Jinn before Volume 6, Chapter 2. Where, you may ask? Well, take a look at the statue within the lift to Haven's Vault.
• There are some who ask why Salem couldn't just bust out of the tower from her own. This is because according to concept art, she was locked from the outside, with no doorknob inside her own chambers. So every time she had to leave, access to the castle beyond her room would be strictly controlled.
  • And because magic was a gift available to everyone at the time, she couldn't use her own magical potential to try and escape because someone stronger or more loyal to her father would make sure she couldn't get far. And that's not counting the traps already laid in place, which had to be overcome after the evil noble was defeated. When her father wanted to make sure she stayed inside the Tower, he damn well made sure she did.
• Some have wondered why Salem simply didn't bother to go to the Brother of Darkness first. Well, this is because she figured death was his domain, so like Hades in Greek mythology, she would fear a rejection from him should he take offense at her requesting Ozma's resurrection. Second, the brother was responsible for introducing not only the Grimm, but also famine, and disease - the same one that killed Ozma, no less - all out of disgust for his brother's creations, and apathetically left them there to plague mankind, their masterpiece! It's no surprise why she, like many others, refused to consider him an option when making requests at all, and why Salem thought of him as a last resort in the first place!
• The Brother of Darkness' comments on Salem's army using magic against him ("My own gift to them. Used against me.") would explain how Cinder's inner Grimm was able to "steal" the Maiden's powers- They come from the same source, and are thus compatible.
• There's also a reason why the Two Brothers' are the respective patron Gods of Creation and Destruction respectively - their personalities match what the tale portrays their description and their feud as. The Older Brother, the God of Light, is perfectly suited as the God of Creation as he is able to successfully create many different things through focusing his thoughts in a logical process and never losing his cool, even in speech. Meanwhile, the Younger Brother, the God of Darkness, has Creative Sterility because he is more emotionally driven, which leads to his disgust with his brother's creations. This kind of behavior leads to more petulant tantrum throwing and aggressive acts towards violence, which is why he is better suited as the God of Destruction.
  • It also explains their reactions to Salem's request - besides the fact that the God of Light receives countless requests that he takes for granted (or is outright annoyed by), his colder, more logical thought process has made him appear more detached from humanity, including Salem herself. Meanwhile, his attention-starved brother finds a follower that isn't repulsed by him immediately, and therefore, is overjoyed to receive some form of emotional support- which is why he appears more empathetic to her because he can feel empathy and express emotions more acutely than his brother.
• Remember back at the beginning of the series, where Salem's speech described 'man born from dust' and that man was remnants of a forgotten past? Well, after learning of how the conflict between Salem and Ozpin started and that humanity was wiped out once by the God of Darkness before he caused an extinction level event, we now know that she literally meant man was born from dust.
• Salem cannot be killed, but the key to defeating her doesn't lie in battle. Remember how she was cursed with immortality to begin with, and what the gods told her. The only way she'll become mortal again, is if she acknowledges the value of life and death. She needs to be convinced of their value, and once that happens, she will die. Of course, this is easier said than done...
• Ozpin's form of Resurrective Immortality, though not perfect, is considerably more advantageous to his long-term psychological integrity than Salem's is^note Ozpin is never alone, his soul is constantly assimilating someone new and thereby evolving with every successive reincarnation cycle, and he can apparently stay dead (rest) for a significant length of time during the reincarnation process's interim; whereas Salem's Complete Immortality has isolated and detached her from all mortal life even more than she already was as a mortal, she's stagnated into what Ozpin believes is a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum, and her body simply reforms ASAP after tanking lethal damage. Note that the God of Light granted Ozpin's brand of immortality after Light's initial cursing of Salem with Complete Immortality led to her going down the opposite path to the one that the Gods had initially hoped she'd take, which in turn led to the utter ruination of the Gods' initial "experiment". Even if the God of Light doesn't openly admit that he and his brother share some of the blame with Salem herself for how much of a threat Salem has become, it seems he's learned where they went wrong with Salem's immortality penance, and he wants to make sure he doesn't accidentally sabotage Ozpin's purpose the same way.
  • What did the God of Light say before departing Remnant? "We will learn from this failure." And he was talking at Salem rather than his brother when he said it. It's possible that Light was acknowledging the above point even then.
• The fact that Salem, an untrained fighter, could somehow get the better of the defeat a warrior like Ozma may at first seem odd. Until one remembers that Salem can't die, she doesn't need to beat him with skill or strength but rather attrition. Salem can't be stopped but Ozma can, as such it's inevitable he would eventually lose. Strength will not bring you victory indeed...
• Ozpin's reluctance to trust in Ironwood's military back in Volumes 2 and 3 takes on a new light when you learn that Ozma and Salem were essentially warlords during Ozpin's first reincarnation, and they (or at least Ozpin was) well-intentioned much like Ironwood. Ozma's Heel Realization is part of what led to his and Salem's falling out.
• When looked at critically, a lot of Salem's initial actions can be explained as her having the emotional maturity of a child, being unable to cope with and grasp many concepts a normal adult could.
  • Salem's Start of Darkness is more than just Love Makes You Evil. As the archetypical Girl in the Tower, she had probably been raised with very minimal social experience, while being waited on hand and foot. A nice guy finally breaks her out... and then dies. Of course she wouldn't have the emotional maturity to handle it, nor would she probably have anyone else to help her through this difficult time.
  • Salem doesn't even seem to consider Together in Death with Ozma until after such a choice is denied to her. She wanted things to be the way she chose and would settle for nothing else, much like how a child will throw a tantrum if not given what they wanted.
  • After failing to kill herself in the God of Darkness' domain, Salem seemed perfectly content with hiding herself in a small woodland cottage, scaring anyone away from confronting her. She effectively returned herself to her former conditions of being alone, but this time of her own volition and in a place of her own design, much like how an angry child would run to their room and desire to be alone. It's only when Ozma returns does she leave the cottage, for she had been given what she wanted. And when Ozma tried to leave with her daughters, she responded by lashing out in a rage and wanting to see Ozma burn, much like a child would get angry when someone takes their toy and start to hold a grudge.
    • Of course, it's logical seeing why Salem would actually have that mentality - she was imprisoned for Gods-know how long inside the damn tower. Locked in complete isolation, surrounded by her father, any loyal/sycophantic guards, and with no one to visit. The reason why she latched onto Ozma wasn't because he was handsome or strong, it's because for the first time in her life, she had someone treat her decently as a person, not as a prize or possession. Ozma not only was the first person able to make good on his promise to survive against, let alone defeat her father, but also cared about her well-being, and was able to genuinely provide for her emotional needs, without ordering her around, unlike her father, who demanded her to be at his beck and call for most of her life until that day.
    • And because she spent most of her life cooped up in the tower, she probably lacked the emotional maturity and social skills to actively form new connections with other people. This imprisonment emotionally stunted her and made her akin to a shy child. With Ozma actively approaching her first, she clung onto him as a symbol for warmth and comfort and never let go, just like a teddy bear. This explains why she was never able to make emotional connections with other people outside the tower despite having long left it for many adventures afterwards - they were all too foreign to her from her years of isolation and little contact from the outside world, so she essentially didn't trust them enough to join her inner circle to become a friend, and kept them at arms' length as acquaintances at best, unlike Ozma, the one person she always trusted.
    • So when Ozma died, the factors above, combined with the inability to comprehend loss, nor the coping mechanisms to deal with such a situation, it makes perfect sense as to why she couldn't simply move on as most people would assume. No social or emotional support beyond Ozma, no chance to develop emotionally or socially beyond her imprisonment inside the tower, and you have one emotional wreck in the form of a womanchild desperate to reclaim the one person that she could find any sort of happiness in.
  • The above interpretation of Salem's Start of Darkness overall makes it harken back to Ruby's character development in Volume One, where Ruby was quite resistant to the idea of opening up to and bonding with new people outside of her relatives not least due to feeling that Yang was all the friendship she needed for their time at Beacon. With the above interpretation in mind, Salem's origin story can be construed as showing where that kind of mindset could have led Ruby (or could lead anyone really) if Ruby had never come out of her shell.
• It may seem excessive what the Deity Brothers do to Salem. But then you realize that she's basically jumping up and down on whatever Berserk Button she can find that they both have, and the increasingly harsh consequences are escalation for someone refusing to repeatedly learn her lesson.
• It's been noted Remnant's moon rotates on its own, instead of the same side always facing the planet like our own, which is unusual. However, the force of an impact powerful enough to shatter part of the moon - via the God of Darkness departing - would also be enough force to send it into a spin, regardless of whether it was spinning before or not, which would then stabilize over time into the current norm.
• Why are the ones with powers that come from being the embodiments of seasons always the "Maiden" i.e. Always Female? Is there some cosmic reason? Turns out, Ozpin (or whatever this specific incarnation was called) created the maidens, at least subconsciously, as a Replacement Goldfish for his 4 daughters he had with Salem. If they're Replacement Goldfish for his children, who were young girls, no wonder only young girls can become Maidens.
  • Going a step further, this means that whenever a new Maiden is being selected, such as Pyrrha, Ozpin's looking for someone who reminds him of that specific daughter.
• Tyrian referring to Salem as his goddess and grace comes off as more than just terms of affection or madness with the knowledge that Salem and Ozma were once treated as Gods to early Remnant. Tyrian legitimately sees Salem as a goddess because that is what she passed herself off as before, and possibly still is doing with Tyrian.
• In "The Shining Beacon: Part 2" Ruby and Yang noted that Ozpin seemed off during his opening speech. Jinn explains that Ozpin's Resurrective Immortality works by sharing a body with his next vessel, so it's possible that the "Ozpin" giving the speech was actually the true owner of that body.
• The Reveal about the truth of Salem and Ozpin's connection, also comes with the confirmation that Ozpin wasn't wrong to keep such things secret. What happens as soon as everyone finds out Salem is completely immortal? They give up. They give up and stop fighting, which is likely what Ozpin in part feared. He's been fighting a hopeless battle for a very long time and he refuses to give up, but judging by his past incarnation's reaction to when he first found out the truth that he cannot destroy Salem, he knows that finding out your opponent is immortal is a hope-crushing revelation. He doesn't want people to give up the fight; if they give up, then Salem really wins.
• Look at the castle closely. It's strikingly similar to the one Salem currently uses as her base of operations. This has one of two meanings, possibly even both. One, Salem rebuilt the home where she lost the love of her life and their daughters, effectively serving as a reminder for herself that she has no possibility of happiness anymore. Or two, she build her base in the same style of her old home to serve as a reminder of the betrayal and the things she has lost. In all likelihood, her (current) home may just be a substitute of the one she sought after so long ago.
  • On the opposite side of the war, we have Ozpin and Beacon Academy, which also looks extremely similar to the castle where Salem was kept, specifically the tower. It's very possible that Ozpin established his office in the very tower that once housed the woman he loved, either in appearance or in actuality, to serve as a reminder to himself of what he too lost. Seriously, it's depressing that these two former lovers choose to remember the days they enjoyed by the buildings they call home.
    • This makes the destruction of Ozpin's office, which happened to house the CCT tower, surprisingly apropos - Cinder, on behalf of Salem, just also happened to have destroyed the one place that reminded her of her abuse in the tower - the one thing that messed up her mind and made her life hell in the first place.
• Though Ozpin kept secrets from Salem, it's mentioned before by Jinn that Salem didn't tell him the truth of how the original humans fell. Both of them kept secrets, important secrets, from each other and thus it's no wonder their second chance ended in horrifying failure.
• Remember the reason why Ozpin never chastised Qrow for drinking in Volume 3? That's because one of his past lives was an alcoholic. He perfectly understood how hellish Qrow's life must have been to get him to drink, given their similar pasts.
• Salem says that Cinder will not be killed for botching the Haven mission, but will be on her own until she redeems herself. Salem was a mother, so this is the equivalent of a time-out.
• Right before Salem's meltdown over learning Ozpin's revived again and her enforcers leave the room, one individual notices something wrong before anyone else; Mercury. Why? Because Mercury is a former victim of child abuse at the hands of his drunken father. Abuse victims have been known to recognize micro-expressions due to repeated exposure to an abuser and their behavior, allowing them to pick up on signs of when the situation will become volatile. When Salem first hears Ozpin's revived, he's already tensed up, and is the first to notice the cracking of the windows around them, something the others don't notice until they're about to shatter. When she tells them all to leave, Mercury is the first one out the door, already aware something nasty is about to happen.
• Speaking of Neo and Cinder's fight, notice what Cinder does when she says she's "gotten stronger". She hits Neo with a fireball as she tries to sneak up on her, whereas last season she lost her fight with Raven because she didn't pay attention to Vernal—who was behind her. Looks like someone's taken Raven's advice to heart.
• There's a small bit of brilliance as to why Bartleby, knowing how dangerous the Apathy were, would choose to leave closing the cellars to the next day and thus leaving the entirety of Brunswick Farms to suffer their fate; the two Apathy he already lured were taking their toll on him, thus ironically leaving him too apathetic to properly finish the job on the same day. His plan was pretty much doomed to fail even at that point.
• Weiss burning down Brunswick Farms is still practical even if it didn't immediately stop the Apathy; future travelers in the area who pass by are far less likely to stop at a burned-out building for shelter and risk getting killed by any of the Apathy who remain.
  • There's also a major catharsis element for her. Given her family history, she's probably been fantasizing about setting fire to a room full of booze for quite some time.
• In Volume 2, Oobleck stated that regarding packs of Grimm, lone Grimm have been observed to stay isolated from the pack for days or weeks, even months. This line-of-thought could've influenced Bartleby's plan: if lone Grimm can stay away for that long and the others don't react strangely, then it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to split off two and take them away. Normally, by the time the pack realized the others weren't back for some time, they would either be much farther away, believe they were killed, or eventually lose interest to more current matters. Unfortunately... the Apathy Grimm didn't follow normal Grimm pack patterns.
• The various victims of the Apathy's despair aura are affected in different ways, depending on their personality and history.
  • Ruby, a Paragon of optimism and hope, manages to hold out the longest. However, with her driving inner spark dampened, her insecurity and fears gain the upper hand, leaving her timid and panicky.
  • Weiss, still upset over having to return to a broken home after working so hard to escape it therefore leaving her unbalanced, would understandably be one of the first to be affected.
  • Yang starts looking for an easy way out of their current predicament and tries to rationalize her choice for abandoning their journey - much like her mother.
  • Blake seems to be the most affected by the Apathy in the cellar, most likely because of her extreme guilt about leaving her team being unresolved and her recent rejection by Yang.
  • Maria, like Ruby, manages to resist the worst of the despair for quite some time, being an extremely stubborn old lady who refuses to do anything - including dying - that's not on her own terms.
  • Though Oscar would have experienced the effects just as much as, if not worse than, the rest of RWBY (because he's housing the spirit of a millennia-old mentor who was only recently revealed to be untrustworthy, and he's still processing the fact that he essentially left his farm home on a suicide mission and might go through a Loss of Identity someday), he's still able to keep some bearing through the cynicism and follow Qrow's instruction to fix the plow tire before everyone has to flee for their lives. Along with some youthful resilience on his part, he was never directly exposed to the Apathy unlike the rest of the girls, and he's also used to making himself useful as quickly as possible from his aunt (of course, depending on how much work he had to do around his home and how bossy she was as a parental figure).
  • Qrow, despite having the similar benefit of not being directly exposed to the Apathy, had it just as bad as Weiss, Yang and Blake. His alcoholism relapse aside, his overall cynicism and the grief he felt at Ozpin's deception exacerbated the Apathy's effects on him and would have caused the Grimm proper to kill him if Ruby and Weiss hadn't pulled him out of the bar.
  • Furthermore, he recently had his twin sister try to kill him and side with the enemy while a trusted friend and colleague had been proven a traitor. And we saw in his time in Mistral he found that several Huntsmen and Huntress he knew personally had been killed. Add in the points above and he was an emotional wreck waiting to happen. No wonder the Apathy had such a potent effect on him.
• A meta example: Argus is clearly based on San Francisco and just like the latter it has an island in the middle of its bay. Said island is military base just like what Alcatraz was originally.
• Maria, despite being a seemingly harmless old lady, has some very strong nerves. From her reaction to surviving a train crash, to being stranded in the middle of the woods, to learning about a hopeless war that may end in Humanity's extinction, to coming across a village whose residents seemingly died in their sleep, nothing seems to phase her. With the revelation that she used to be a legendary huntress called "The Grimm Reaper", her prior calmness at such extraordinary situations makes sense.
• How did Maria remain completely unscathed after the train crash the heroes survived only thanks to Weiss gravitically tethering all of them to the roof? The same way. Her weapon, which she is now using as a cane, has its own gravity Dust supply.
• So Maria turned out to be a legendary huntress, who was idolized by Qrow to the point he designed his weapon after hers. Who, in turn, is idolized by Ruby to the point she designed her weapon after his and generally views him as father figure despite them being not blood-related. So, Maria, in an unusual spiritual way, is a Grandmother to Ruby's Little Red Riding Hood.
• It starts to make sense why after three volumes Ruby got no training or advice from Ozpin and Qrow about her silver-eyes. Maria and her father knew very little other then how their powers work. It is likely that Qrow and Ozpin knew even less.
• The power of the silver eyes is triggered by emotion and the desire to protect others. No wonder that the first time it works is when it freezes the Wyvern (right when Ruby's emotions are running high and she's desperate to stop anyone else from dying), but only slow down the herd of Apathy, who have the ability to dull emotion and that ability gets stronger with numbers and proximity. By the time she's close enough to use it on them, they've already got their claws in her soul and are weakening the emotions that she needs to actually hurt them.
• Mercury not having a Semblance certainly explains why he is such a smug little jackass. Thanks to his father, he'll always be surrounded by people who have this cool ability, while he's essentially stuck with Boring, but Practical martial arts, so feels compelled to look down on others just to keep down from doing the same (in his mind). Combined with his abusive past, he's probably developed a Inferiority Superiority Complex.
  • It can also be seen in a different perspective: he's such a smug jackass because he's a Badass Normal that doesn't need a Semblance. He's got a crippling handicap that most would never have, and the only two other characters who were specifically established as not having a Semblance are Torchwick and Jaune; the former due to never unlocking it and the latter only unlocking it very recently in-universe due to inexperience. But that's the thing; Roman never unlocked it, but he always had the chance to do so. Jaune always had the chance, but just didn't do so until later. MERCURY will NEVER be able to get his back, no matter what he does because it's been permanently stripped away from him, and the person that did this to him died without returning it (and he likely never would, even if Mercury hadn't killed him). And yet despite that, the fact that Mercury can more or less easily keep up with people that have far greater advantages than him, or always had the means to become stronger but just needed the chance to do so, a chance stripped from him, and arguably do even better than them in many circumstances would make his smug sense of superiority pretty valid.
  • The fact that Marcus Black's Semblance lets him take away and return other Semblances, control a part of their soul, sheds more light on a few plot points:
    • How Mercury was able to kill him. Marcus's fighting style would have involved crippling his opponent by taking their Semblance, then kill them by taking advantage of their weakened state, meaning his powers worked very fast. This also means that he has only one special move and has nothing else if it doesn't work - he's reliant on his powers, like a crutch. He had no real advantage over Mercury, who was not only trained in his very fighting style, but didn't rely on a Semblance, ironically thanks to his Semblance.
    • Salem's original plan. The Maiden powers first belonged to Ozpin, so a man could contain them, just like Qrow and Oscar and their inherited magic. Originally, Marcus would steal Amber's power, and then either relinquesh it to Cinder, or have it stolen from him when Cinder used the Beetle Grimm like she actually did. If Marcus hadn't been killed, Cinder would've become a fully powered Maiden much sooner, preventing the chain of events that led to her being injured by Ruby.
• Oscar returning ready for combat and willing to take up the metaphorical sword to continue the fight has an interesting bit of trivia about it; if you use his last name of Pine he can slot into Team JN_R. Though it's also sad, the same episode that had him do so also showed that Jaune, Ren, and Nora are starting to find the way to truly move forward despite the loss of Pyrrha. And Oscar is ready to step forward to become a Huntsman; Jaune would be the perfect team leader to another member who is currently struggling to catch up to the rest and discover his Semblance, having gone through the same!
• Adam's new headgear is perfectly symbolic of him. He can't see the world in anyway other than shades of Black, be they the evil that the world has inflicted onto the Faunus and conversely onto him, or Blake and how it's her fault he lost everything.
  • His being "unable to see the world in anyway other than shades of Black" takes on a whole new meaning once we see the blindfold come off. He can only see the bad things.
• The sensor feed plug that Maria uses provides a good explanation for why the Atlesian pilot that Weiss flew with in Volume 5 was wearing a helmet with a visor inside his cockpit. His helmet likely had a sensor feed socket, providing him with a comprehensive HUD. What with air routes in Remnant passing along floating islands, flying Grimm and other hazards, an increased awareness of one's surroundings can only be good for a pilot to have. Given the Atlesian love for uniformity, it also makes sense that the data plug system would be standardized across their tech, allowing Maria being able to plug in without issue.
• Qrow wasn't selected to take out the radar, despite having the best skill-set for the task. This is because: the near-Volume long funk he's been in has ruined his focus, his Semblance could accidentally wreck Argus communications (which the team doesn't want), and his bird powers are a secret the team can't risk blowing.
• Yang's doing at lot better against Adam this time, for multiple reasons;
  • Why was Yang, an up close brawler, able to thrash Adam, an Iaijutsu Practitioner fast enough to parry bullets and blitz others from across the battlefield, while Blake, someone who knew Adam's fighting style well enough to create a strategy to disable it, could only land a few hits by tripping up his normal style? Because Adam is actually best matched against Long-Range Fighter types. He can react to long distance attacks fast enough to completely negate them, catch the projectiles with his sword, and then throw off Sword Beam attacks much stronger than anyone trying to snipe him would likely be able to. When he gets close, he takes advantage of the relatively-poor melee skills of these fighters and goes for the throat immediately. Yang however is best off getting in close enough to pummel enemies into submission which actually counters Adam's style quite well. She's in close enough that he doesn't have enough time or room to fully draw his sword in quick draw fashion for his strongest attacks, him trying to blitz her won't work because she's able to tank most low level blows and power up from them, so wearing her down would fail. While he can hit hard and move fast, his defense isn't quite as polished due to him focusing on pure offense and always nullifying hits with his sword, meaning he lacks endurance to pain and can be staggered by taking a hit, which leaves him open to taking even more so long as you can keep up an assault.
  • Blake also didn't do as well because while she knows Adam's strategy, he knows hers just as well. They previously fought together as combat partners, remember. Add in how well his style counters hers (parrying her shots easily, able to easily destroy her shadows and guess when she tries to use them, etc.) and Blake wasn't likely to outfight him without some very good fortune.
  • This also explains Adams's tendency to rush in near his enemies during a fight. It's a psychological tactic to keep them from realizing the flaws in his fighting style, and he focuses on killing his opponent before they can get his measure.
  • Why was Yang's replacement arm able to withstand an attack far more powerful than the one that cut it off to begin with? Ironwood worked closely with the headmaster of her school and her uncle and was responsible for security at the Vytal Tournament. He would have had several ways of learning about her Semblance and gave her a model that would work well with it.
  • Ironwood would have extra incentive to gift her an especially durable replacement. He's expressed the view of always improving rather than settling for what already works. He didn't just give her an arm that could work with her Semblance, but one that would actually improve her ability to use it.
    • Yang's Bare-Handed Blade Block actually has a much simpler explanation: by the end of the fight, Yang has purposefully gone on the defensive, effectively baiting Adam into attacking wildly and burn through his Semblance and stamina. By the end, he has no energy left to give his sword its absurdly sharp quality, so Yang can catch his sword with little danger to herself. Yang effectively counters Adam's abilities with a strategy similar to one Neo used to counter her own back in Volume 2.
  • Furthermore, take their mindsets into consideration. In Beacon, Yang is confused and angry over what is happening - first the world turns on her, and then it begins to violently end. When her rage broke over Adam stabbing Blake, so did her concentration, and with her loss of focus she couldn't summon a defensive aura. In Argus, while still anxious, Yang has better control over her emotions, while Adam is now lashing out at everyone.
• Adam nearly executing a downed SDC guard back in his trailer was just another example of his cruelty before. Now, however, it makes a lot more sense. The SDC branded Adam. Of course Adam would jump at the chance to butcher SDC employees!
• Adam has one good eye and one bad eye. The bad eye was the result of a brand onto his face at a very young age, because he was viewed by humans as something less than human, a monster. It serves as a nice bit of duality symbolism for him, representing who he tries to pass himself off as, and who he actually became underneath it, with the camera taking different perspectives to highlight this during his encounter with Blake and Yang. The camera likes to view Adam's face from the left side, emphasizing his branded eye, but nearly always keeping his good eye within view and near the center of frame, especially whenever Adam is trying to manipulate Blake and Yang during the fight. Adam has long been corrupted into a Revenge Before Reason / Evil Is Petty kind of person, and his branded eye is symbolic of that, which is why it is always in view and spatially closer to the audience. It also emphasizes the fact that we as the audience have only seen Adam do bad things, and therefore it's also a representation of the audience's perspective of Adam. However, Adam's good eye is in frame along with his branded eye isn't representative of a good side, but rather Adam's more sympathetic qualities, which he tries to use in order to manipulate Blake and Yang. But, we, Blake and Yang know better, and when the time comes for Adam to be stabbed with Gambol Shroud, his face is entirely viewed from the left side, emphasizing that any sympathetic qualities have long been eclipsed by his evil, and that Adam will die as the monster he became to fight other monsters.
• When Blake and Yang speak about Adam's Semblance, it suddenly becomes apparent that Moonslice is emblematic of Adam himself. Adam absorbs damage with his sword, not taking it himself as Yang does, then unleashes it when he's ready. Similarly, Adam can't stand people criticizing him for his choices (as seen in "Argus Limited") while he constantly hunts Blake for choosing to leave him - in short, he dishes out damage which he can't take.
  • Another way of looking into Adam's Semblance is that he wishes to absorb damage - symbolizing the suffering brought by his brand - and repay it back tenfold, indicating his furiously Disproportionate Retribution for injuries towards him that's aimed at the entire human race instead of only those who hurt him, along his desire to turn his enemies' strength and cruelty against them. Additionally, the fact that Adam requires a medium such as his sword to do so signifies the fact that he can't move past the pain he felt in his life (and therefore, would rather not feel it directly). Adam prevents himself from feeling and accepting pain, causes others to feel way more, but never addresses the core of his issues and blames others for his own choices. Yang has to take all her pain and injuries on but makes herself stronger for it, and she was inflicted with a similar injury but faced the resulting trauma and moved on.
  • Also, remember how when Yang was framed during the tournament, Blake thought that maybe Yang was guilty? Semblances are considered to be reflections of the soul. With Yang having a semblance similar to Adam's, it may have played a role in Blake doubting her partner.
• The shot of a lone Ruby confronting Cordovin in her giant mech profoundly mirrors the Episode 7 shot of Maria in her prime, preparing to take on the Giant Nevermore. Ruby truly is Maria's heir, the next silver-eyed Grimm Reaper.
• The Leviathan doesn't seem to notice the Hard Light barriers until bumping into one. Given the placement of its eyes and the shape of its skull, the creature is seriously lacking in the binocular vision department.
• Adam's entire downfall in Volume 6 mirrors that of a Professor Moriarty: he loses his organization and all of his power overnight due to the hero's scheme and, unable to move on, vows for petty revenge, stalking his train-riding target across the continent, waiting them to separate from their friends and eventually chasing them up to a waterfall - only to overestimate his fighting ability and die in said waterfall, striking a rocky outcrop before disappearing into water.
• In the song "Nevermore", one of Yang's part's lines is "The goal of a savior is not to be lionized". Yang understands it because she has known, for a very long time, someone who truly wants to save people, not asking anything in return: Ruby.
• While Adam's white emblem on the back of the jacket initially first appears as fancy floral designs or possibly referencing a rose thorn, one should consider that Adam's sigil only encompasses red-colored rose designs, including his emblem. That means that the white sigil actually represents the curved stems and flowers of the deadly nightshade plant, aka the atropa belladonna. Sound familiar? Yes, that symbolizes his control over Blake. Well, with his eventual demise (through the same impact spot, no less), it signals that Blake has emerged victorious over Adam, and that his hold over her is now over. For bonus points, his rose sigil is superimposed over the nightshade symbol, adding further credence to Adam's abuse imagery.
  • Also the curved stems of the nightshade emblem may also represents Blake's willingness to change her perspective over time, while the straight stems of Adam's rose symbolizes his stubborn insistence towards violence that gets him defeated.
• Adam's full theme, "Lionize", combines brutal, intense thrashing sounds with heroic and uplifting music. Why? Because it's Adam in a nutshell. Part of the song is Adam's thoughts of himself, and part of it is Adam's facade breaking and his inner viciousness arriving!
• At first glance, the design of the Colossus mecha seems odd, with giant armored "boots" taking a good half of robot's bulk. However, the Square-Cube Law requires anything bipedal of that size to have incredibly sturdy legs to support its huge weight. Colossus cannot be strengthened by Aura like Huntsmen's weapons are, and material properties can only get you so far, so the only solution was to make its legs disproportionally large and thick. Additionally, the robot was intended to operate in the shallow sea; longer legs make it easier to stride through water, and thickness and armor plating helps deal with stress caused by water resistance and protects from smaller Grimm which could hide in the water and bite at the mecha's ankles. Either way, the designers were thoroughly averting the "Colossus on clay feet" situation.
  • In Pacific Rim, which most likely was among the sources of inspiration for the episode, Gipsy Danger is badly crippled when a kaiju chomps on its knee. That trick wouldn't work with Colossus nearly as well.
• Jaune's ability to recharge his Aura at will (like Hazel) was subtly foreshadowed in "Seeing Red". After taking a hit for Nora from the Colossus, which apparently shatters his Aura, he moves with noticeable pain and restraint and has to rely on Nora's support to walk. Then the mecha aims its cannon at Ruby and suddenly Jaune is seen sprinting towards the girl with no sign of injury. Minutes after, in "Our Way", he's amplifying Ren's Semblance, though his Aura does run out shortly. Seeing Ruby in apparent danger made him recharge some of his Aura to heal himself without even thinking, just like seeing Weiss dying in "Vault Of The Spring Maiden" led him to discover his Semblance to begin with.
• In "Haven's Fate", Raven claimed that she survives because she's strong enough to do what others won't, which Yang mocked. Raven ultimately failed to kill Cinder because she chose a more indirect method (knocking her off and freezing her), while Yang did kill Adam because she personally stabbed him through the chest. Yang was the one strong enough to do what Raven wouldn't.

Volume Seven

• Penny's status as the highly visible protector of Mantle hearkens back to Ozpin's criticism of Ironwood in Volume Two: "A guardian is a symbol of comfort. But an army is a symbol of conflict." Ironwood might still have his army out in force, but his giving the people of Mantle a lovable and comforting guardian like Penny shows that he is taking Ozpin's words at least a little to heart.
  • The Volume shows Ironwood is initially trying to follow Ozpin's example, creating a public guardian for the kingdom, his own secret circle, and is even trying to correct Ozpin's mistakes by not keeping secrets from his followers. But at the same time, he shows that he doesn't understand why Ozpin did things the way he did;
  • Penny is the "Guardian of Mantle", but this is on top of a very heavy military presence that's long since cracked down on the city and put it under overt surveillance, with an obvious priority on suppressing potential rebellion over defending Mantle or providing cover to actually fix the city's broken defensive walls. As such, she isn't seen as a protector but merely an enforcer of Ironwood's will and yet another implied threat against anyone trying to complain about Mantle's situation. And because she's so busy, no one can get to know her as anything other than "Ironwood's robot". This is why Mantle's populace swiftly turns against her once she's framed for murdering protesters at the rally; all they know of Penny is that she follows Ironwood's orders, and Ironwood's so distrusted in Mantle that it's very easy to accept she attacked the rally on his command. It's only when she proves that she's helping Mantle of her own volition that Mantle accepts her as their local heroine.
  • The reason Ozpin kept secrets was to get people to do what he wants for what he deems a greater cause; when Yang demands that there be no more secrets, Ozpin lies just to get her on board so that the task he and his remaining allies can continue. Ironwood doesn't even give people the illusion of choice, and that plays a part in why the anti-Salem alliance implodes. Furthermore, he spends most of the volume keeping secrets from the actual leaders of the kingdom, continuing Ozpin's mistake of not trusting people who need to know. It's only when Ironwood is convinced to let the Atlas Council know vital information that the situation in Mantle begins to change.
• Being the commander of the Atlas military, it stands to reason that Ironwood would be well aware of who's in charge of the Argus base. It's quite possible that he assigned Cordovin there himself. With that in mind, his Actually Pretty Funny moment when Ruby sheepishly admits to stealing their airship - which is almost certainly registered as hailing from Argus - could be taken as him having put two and two together.
• The teal of Clover's eyes is the inverse of Qrow's dark red. How appropriate for two men with opposing Semblances.
• The golden weld used to repair Gambol Shroud hearkens strongly to Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery using laquer mixed with gold. The philosophy behind the art is that the object is all the more beautiful for having survived damage and being mended, and that the repair should be highlighted, rather than hidden. It's immensely fitting for Blake, who learned to no longer run from her past and refuses to be afraid anymore. Adam damaged her, but he could not keep her broken. (There's also the fact that the gold is Yang's color, and Yang had quite a lot to do with Blake's development.)
• Compared to Ruby and Yang, Blake shows more support and anger for Weiss when Jacques tries to guilt trip his daughter. Even going as far as to hold Weiss's hand. This makes sense when you remember that Blake is a victim of abuse, manipulation and victim blaming herself. So, seeing someone else, especially a close friend, getting the same treatment would upset her.
  • Not to diminish Yang's anger, she looks just as mad as Blake does during the shot of them and Ruby reacting to the aforementioned guilt trip. Then you remember that she was the first and (apparently) only one of them that Weiss told of the circumstances surrounding her terrible childhood, so Yang knows what really happened and therefore sees Jacques' manipulation for what it is. It makes sense, then, that she'd be angry as well.
• Holding up a military transport as a civilian is a rash move by any metric, and seems like the sort of thing that ought to get you arrested, if not shot at. However, given the circumstances, Robyn's move actually makes a good deal of sense. With tensions in Mantle and Atlas being what they are, James Ironwood cannot afford to have an outspoken political opponent get mysteriously arrested right before an election. Any vague statement along the lines of “Interference with military business” simply screams of trumped-up charges; the military would have to come clean about why Robyn was being arrested. And that means admitting that a military transport carrying extremely valuable construction supplies was being sent to the middle of nowhere, rather than the walls of Mantle that desperately need repairs. Suffice to say, that’s a situation that the Ironwood regime does not want on its hands.
  • This would explain why Robyn was invited to the meeting at the Schnee Mansion; given that Ironwood wants to keep the diverted resources business as quiet as possible to protect Amity's secrecy, he could not issue a solid warrant without drawing attention to it.
  • At the end, Penny asks Robyn to call off the two Huntresses - May and Joanna - approaching the truck foreshadows Penny having thermal vision, as seen in V8. May's Semblance allows her to make anything within a certain range invisible, but that only bends light, not heat.
• Winter being the designated new Winter Maiden explains why she's appearing alongside Ironwood in the government's public service announcements in Mantle. When he goes public with the truth about Salem, Ironwood may well intend to use the Maidens as Propaganda Heroines, magically empowered champions of humanity in the face of a supernatural evil. The videos are introducing her to the people ahead of time, and associating her with order, safety and the government of Atlas.
• In contrast to most Huntsmen, who dress in bright and vibrant colors, the Happy Huntresses have drab and muted clothing. This can be seen as a show of solidarity with the similarly dressed people of Mantle... and also ensures that they won't stand out in a crowd if the authorities happen to be looking for them.
• Nora of all characters is the one to get upset enough to properly call Ironwood out for how the people of Mantle have been treated. This seems fairly out of character for her to be the most serious - but think about it. Of the entire main cast, Nora probably relates the most to the Mantle people since she herself was homeless. Even Blake having to deal with racism never actually grew up needy, since her parents were still well off. Nora understands better than anyone else there what it's like to not get any help at all from the people in power when you need it the most.
  • Ren by contrast supports Ironwood wholeheartedly to the point of conflict with Nora and starts acting very unlike himself. Which makes sense because he was a child during the last time a bunch of people didn't want the frustration of dealing with the government and high class snobs, and struck out on their own without their assistance. The result was that everyone but him and Nora died horribly when the Nucklevee attacked the isolated town. In his mind it's better for Mantle to suck it up and deal with Ironwood bossing them around and the Atlas higher ups treating them like second class citizens, because it beats having your whole family killed by Grimm because you wouldn't accept their protection.
• The Staff of Creation being used to levitate Atlas off the ground makes sense when you look at it from different angles. Alongside Mistral, Mantle was one of the losers of The Great War; the people probably felt beaten and downtrodden. Ozma suggesting to have its relic lift up Atlas could be seen as him trying to inspire the people there and literally rising them up out of the darkness. After all, a kingdom of innovation would certainly appreciate a symbol of them not settling for the average level and aiming for something higher. Sadly, it seems this purpose was misinterpreted as Mantle was left behind and there is such tension between the two cities.
• There may be another reason why Whitley is the way he is. The Resenter he may be, but his insistence on speaking to Weiss in "Cordially Invited", along with Willow's statement about the latter leaving him behind implies that he is trying to make sure Weiss stays with him.
  • It's implied that his polite, supportive demeanor towards her (compared to everyone else), and his scheme to get her disgraced from the company is to make sure she stays in the manor as long as possible to support him. After Jacques and Willow proved to be poor parental figures, Whitley may have turned to Weiss as the Parental Substitute after Winter effectively cut all ties to the family.
• The Schnee family's responses to Jacques' abuse directly mirrors the four ways abuse victims respond to trauma: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
  • Weiss: "Fight". Weiss's response has always been to fight. Those who are stuck in a constantly activated “fight” response to trauma tend to act entitled, angry, and contemptuous, which is what Weiss was like at the beginning of Volume One. “Fight” types typically see themselves as perfect and morally superior to others as a defense mechanism against abandonment, which, unfortunately, tends to perpetuate their loneliness. As Weiss grows and begins to heal from her trauma through healthy relationships, she is able to use her “fight” response in healthier ways. For example, instead of completely removing herself from the family, she intends to reclaim the family name and restore its honor, which is a great goal to have and one that gives her purpose. As Blake has said, the word that best describes Weiss is “defiance”.
  • Winter: "Flight". Winter’s response to trauma was flight. Her goal was to get away from Jacques as quickly as possible, and her chosen escape route was the Atlas military. “Flight” types tend to have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, believing that order and perfection will keep them safe. They lose themselves by constantly being busy so that they do not have to present with their emotions, which they don’t know how to deal with. Winter still seems to struggle with actually confronting her feelings, but as she works through her trauma, we begin to see a healthy manifestation of her “flight” response: she has gained the distance needed to create her own destiny.
  • Willow: "Freeze". Willow Schnee, knowing that there is no escape from her husband and that resistance is futile, did the only thing she knew she could do; she froze. “Freeze” types tend to withdraw into themselves and dissociate as much as possible in order to numb the pain. This is learned helplessness. They self isolate, avoiding others and using whatever method of distraction best distances them from reality. In Willow’s case, she uses alcohol. While Willow is still stuck in her “freeze” state, we see one positive way she has used it; she has been able to gain an advantage over Jacques by placing cameras all over the estate without his knowledge. Only someone like Willow, who presents as helpless and detached, would be able to get away with such a thing without being caught.
  • Whitley: "Fawn". Unlike his sisters, Whitley doesn’t have the Schnee family semblance or the talent that would have allowed him to join the military or enroll in an academy. As the last of the children, he must be aware that his father is going to hold on to him tightly and not let him get away like the other two. So what does he do? He “fawns”. “Fawn” types seek safety by forfeiting all of their needs, preferences, and boundaries in order to become exactly what the abuser wants them to be. They essentially try to do damage control by complying with the demands of others and by trying to be as agreeable as possible. These are the codependent types. Whitley, knowing he was left alone by his sisters and cannot depend on his detached mother, must do everything in his power to get along with Jacques so that he can survive.
• As noted in Fridge Horror below, Weiss's Knight summon wears the armor of Nicholas Schnee, her grandfather and the Honest Corporate Executive founder of the SDC. It's immensely fitting that she should use the specter of Nicholas to arrest his corrupt son-in-law.
• Compared to Qrow and Jaune's violent reactions to Ozpin's big reveal in Volume 6, Ironwood's response seems understated. But, Ironwood has always been a man who has tried to keep his emotions under control, even to the point of seeming heartless. Furthermore, there has been no indication that Ironwood has suffered any personal losses; Pyrrha, Jaune's partner and love-interest for Volumes 1-3, was killed by Cinder after being pressured to become the Fall Maiden, and it's strongly implied that Qrow's sister Raven left because of Ozpin's frequent manipulations. By contrast, Ironwood is predominantly surrounded by people who are essentially his yes-men, rarely if ever contradicting his orders and being reliable soldiers, but also meaning that they cannot truly understand or help Ironwood bear the burden he has. On top of this, he has a known history of being inflexible, paranoid, and confrontational when things don't go his way, and while he was able to deal with the pressure of the truth about Salem and Ozpin at first, when he finally crumbled under the strain, his failings as a person and a leader on top of a lack of a strong support network ensured that his breakdown would be SUBSTANTIALLY worse than either Qrow or Jaune.
• Ironwood's duel with Watts is a good reflection of his overall progress against the villains. Ironwood's always preferred direct confrontations, but Salem's forces are always one step ahead, manipulating the environment to trip him up and render his strength useless, just like how Watts manipulates the Amity Arena to attack Ironwood. Ironwood is only able to catch up to Watts by coming at him from a different direction, just like how he finally drew the doctor and Tyrian into the open by opening himself up to Robyn's help. However, Watts manages to trap Ironwood's flesh arm in a Hard Light barrier. While most people would at least try to damage the rings generating the Hard Light, Ironwood just sacrifices his arm pulling it out, a testament to how little he views his own humanity in pursuit of victory, as well as demonstrating Ironwood's inflexibility when it comes to finding solutions for his problems.
  • What happens to his arm is also an allusion to the Tin Woodsman from the original story: The Wicked Witch of the West enchanted the Woodsman's axe so that every time he swung it, he would chop into his own limbs. Gradually, his entire body was replaced by metal. Here, Ironwood has already lost roughly half of his body in what was implied to be a terrible ordeal and now practically flays his last flesh arm indirectly due to Salem, seeing as Watts is her subordinate. The difference is that the Woodsman still considered himself human, whereas James doesn't appear to care about how much humanity he has to give up to stop Salem.
• Ironwood's Image Song "Hero" contains the lyric "I would fly into the sun", which at first seems to be foreshadowing Ironwood's eventual plan to raise Atlas away from Remnant to escape Salem. However, it can also be taken to be part of Ironwood's low-key Icarus Allusion; on the floor of Ironwood's office, you see constellations painted on, indicating that Ironwood seems himself as someone who walks the heavens. Watts accuses Ironwood, "You stood atop [my genius] and called yourself a giant!" something that Ironwood technically does not deny. It also highlights Ironwood's tendency towards plans that appear grand and epic, but are actually self-destructive and stupid in hindsight.
• Tyrian not doing so well in his rematch with Qrow makes sense when you consider the circumstances. First, last time, he ran circles around four first-year students and Qrow was the only real threat; Ruby just caught a lucky break in chopping off his tail. Not to mention, he had the element of surprise. Here, Tyrian's opponents are three fully trained Huntsmen who deliberately lured him out in the open, and Qrow knows how he fights as a bonus. Second, the place where they fight was also different: instead of the remains of a village full of open ground and buildings to hide in, he's stuck in a narrow alley with little room to maneuver, which hampers his Dance Battler style. Robyn probably chose that spot deliberately so that they could box him in. Finally, the strategy is what takes him down: Qrow takes the direct approach with Clover lending support and tripping up Tyrian, while Robyn hangs back and only fires normal arrows. The former two pummel and exhaust Tyrian until, seeing as how he's been catching arrows left and right probably believes that's the extent of Robyn's arsenal, he catches the last one in his mouth, which turns out to be an explosive, and delivers the final blow. The three of them had probably planned that strategy ahead to take him down, and it worked flawlessly.
• Shock from physical trauma can cause confusion, anxiety and restlessness. Ironwood's mental state wasn't going to be in a great condition to begin with, but flaying the skin off his arm can't have helped much, either.
• Ironwood going from seemingly accepting the fact that RWBY hid the truth about Salem from him to being furious about them going behind their backs can be attributed to more than just seeing the chess piece on his desk. At least when Oscar told him the full truth, he did it of his own volition and expressly apologized for covering it up. When he confronts Blake and Yang about telling Robyn about Amity Tower and letting her escape, the two offer no apologies for their actions and simply act like they did nothing wrong. Weiss chiming in with, "That doesn't matter right now," doesn't help their case much, as Ironwood furiously yells back, "Loyalty always matters!" In his eyes, he has given the team everything: lodging, licenses as official Huntresses, better weaponry, extended training... and the girls have apparently consistently abused his trust, and their actions indicate to him that they'll disobey him in spite of the boons they've received. Ironwood deeming them unreliable is unfortunately justified from a certain perspective. His rant about how loyalty always matters is also set against the fact that the villain he faces has the M.O. of making people turn against each other and had The Mole on her side. Kinda helps to know who's on who's side when your villain works like that.
  • Team RWBY has also repeatedly shown to have few qualms about not following the rules to do what they think is important. From Ruby's first appearance where she beats up a group of thugs robbing a Dust store, to throughout their first semester where the four girls (with Weiss offering minimal protest at best) taking it upon themselves to go after Torchwick and the White Fang without following any sort of protocol, or getting the authorities involved. Ozpin recognized what they were up to and kept covering up for them so they could walk away scot-free, though he partially tried reining them in a bit. But both the later half of Volume 6 and this volume begins to deconstruct their Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! mentality. By stealing an Atlas airship to get past the lockdown, the group gets Cordovin chasing them in a Humongous Mecha and nearly leaving Argus vulnerable. And the airship's flight into Atlas being unrecorded and unauthorized leads to them being arrested; Winter even angrily points out they could've been shot out of the sky. And finally, Ruby lying by omission about the truth of Ozpin and Salem, along with Blake and Yang letting a wanted fugitive run off with vital intel (and as previously mentioned, showing no regret whatsoever) has proven to Ironwood they can't be trusted. They're in Atlas Academy, a school that famously encourages discipline, obedience, and strict behavior, so of course neither Ironwood nor the Ace-Ops are at all happy with their antics. Team RWBY has simply grown too comfortable with breaking rules in favor of doing their own thing, and only now it's starting to cost them.
  • Ironwood, on the other hand, has a history of tossing people under the bus when they disagree with him, regardless of how much help they've been beforehand; Ozpin made him a headmaster, giving him two seats on the council, but when Ozpin criticizes the large army Ironwood brought to Vale for the Vytal Festival, Ironwood near immediately pushed the council to remove Ozpin from his post soon as incidents started happening in Vale: he effectively blamed Ozpin for not preventing apparently random incidents from happening at all, even though local Huntsmen students (i.e. Team RWBY) react in time to prevent or mitigate the resulting damage, spinning all of it as negligence to the council so the defense of the city could fall to him. The SDC helped build Ironwood's army, with Jacques Schnee calling him an "old friend" in Volume 4, but Ironwood had no issue with crippling the company's profits with an embargo to sate his paranoia. And while he suffers blows to his reputation, Ironwood has so far faced no repercussions for this attitude or his own past failures - he's still a general with two seats on the council. While the Ruby Gang are growing out of their chaotic ways, Ironwood is too spoiled by his past enabling to consider any alternative he doesn't like. Soon as Team RWBY shows they won't do things his way, they're just another enemy to be taken down.
• Weiss going "None of this matters!" in regards to Ironwood's Control Freak tendencies going berserk is an excellent Call-Back to her own Character Development in Volume 1; There, she learned that she didn't have to be a leader to be a great Huntress ("The Badge And the Burden"). Then there's Ironwood, who can't function unless he's in a position of power. His pathological obsession to have his orders followed to the letter must be especially frustrating to her, as just hours ago Team RWBY had saved Ironwood from losing his place on the council; had they truly been against him, they could have just waited for him to be ousted. From her perspective, he's throwing a hissy fit because things didn't go his way.
• The ease with which Ironwood shut off the Ruby gang's new Scrolls - that he himself provided - puts all of his previous speeches on trust in a different light. Whenever Ironwood spoke on how trustworthy Ruby and the others were, they were clearly uncomfortable, given the truths they were hiding concerning Salem. But the fact that Ironwood put a kill switch on their Scrolls at all proves that he never trusted them; his previous speeches and gifts were nothing more than ploys to guilt the heroes into serving him, much like how Adam used Ghira and Kali leaving the White Fang to guilt Blake into sticking with him during the "Adam" Character Short.
  • Or it could be that he did genuinely trust them at first, but his own paranoia drove him to add safety precautions to the Scrolls.
• In their broadcast about Salem, Robyn is seen holding Ironwood's hand with her Semblance active, proving to the viewers the general is telling the full truth. While editing the video tricks Tyrian and Watts into falling for prepared traps, another interesting detail is that it's James's left arm Robyn holds, the human one that he later sacrifices to apprehend Watts. And later on, he decides that Mantle needs to be sacrificed to save Atlas, shattering any unity between the two. In a way, that moment when Ironwood cast off his human arm is also when he cast off Robyn's support.
• Robyn attacking Clover even though she's not technically under arrest is in character for her. Throughout this Volume, she's shown to be very passionate about defending the needs of Mantle, often to the point where she makes drastic steps (like holding up a military transport, as noted above). When those she cares about are hurt, she gets particularly furious. This is seen with Robyn pushing aside Ruby who was trying to help Fiona and throwing a chair against the wall when Jacques seemingly dismisses the lives lost in Tyrian's massacre. Plus, despite saying she fully supported Ironwood's plans, she (correctly) figures the general has abandoned her home, raising her hackles again. Clover being the loyal soldier doesn't win him any favors with Robyn either, so she decides to fight back, forgetting in the heat of the moment that an airship in flight isn't the best spot for a confrontation.
• The Ace Ops' defeat at the hands of RWBY and Qrow seems out of place since they are obviously better fighters, but is in a fact a beautiful representation of an Aesop. An Aesop is a story that warns us of a moral that is important to follow; even the best can fall if they aren’t careful. The Ace Ops did themselves in by ignoring the very lessons they represented, while Team RWBY succeed by heeding those same lessons:
  • Harriet is based on the titular hare from “The Tortoise and the Hare”, an Aesop about how overconfidence will cause you to fall behind and ultimately fail. Harriet’s pride in her skills riles up her competitive nature when Ruby provokes her at the start of the fight by insulting her, and she refuses to listen to the latter’s pleas due to said pride. Harriet's ego causes her to focus on fighting Ruby exclusively, the girl who innocently compared the speed of her Semblance to Harriet's all of once, ignoring her team in the other room and not supporting them at all; as established in previous encounters, her role in the Ace Ops is to plug gaps in their defence and give them openings through rapid attacks, and her absence leaves them vulnerable. As Harriet becomes more impatient and angry, she becomes sloppier (missing attack openings, letting Ruby escape her grip). Finally, when she becomes hyper-focused on taking down Ruby, she fails to notice Weiss who creates a thick wall of ice for Harriet to run into at full force, knocking her out. Ruby is fully aware she might fail in this fight, but in spite of her obvious fear of fighting the more experienced Huntress, she stays focused and rolls with the punches until Harriet goes down.
  • Elm and Vine are based on “The Elm and the Vine”, a story about the importance of cooperation in marriage. During the fight, Elm lets her anger get the best of her, openly declares she's aiming to kill, and ignores Vine’s attempts to only subdue their opponents. Likewise, Vine refuses to go along with Elm’s desire to use lethal force that's contrary to their orders. This destroys their teamwork and causes them to barely help each other at all, and against Blake and Yang whose synchrony is unparalleled, this is bad news. This disadvantage becomes most apparent when the two girls subdue Vine, leaving Elm completely shocked and alone, and allows Blake and Yang to take her down within seconds.
  • Marrow is based on “The Dog and its Reflection”, which warns the reader that if you covet everything, you lose what you have. Marrow is the most conflicted of the Ace Ops, completely loyal to General Ironwood but genuinely wants to cooperate with Team RWBY. By trying to simultaneously fight Weiss but also talk her down, he leaves several openings for her to attack. Even his Semblance reflects this: he can only freeze targets in one direction at a time, but he can’t stop more than one fighter if his opponents aren’t grouped close together. When he tries to freeze the Armas Gigas, he releases Weiss and she’s able to knock him out. He wanted to covet both his loyalty and his relationship to his new allies, and it led to his defeat. Weiss completely ignores his pleas (return to Ironwood's custody and cast in her lot with Atlas) because she is fighting for what she has, and refuses to betray her team for anything.
    • Before this particular fight, there's another reason for RWBY's victory which Ruby herself outright clarifies; the Ace-Ops trained her and her teammates. Getting tips and pointers from Atlas' best huntsmen means they likely went up a few levels, enough to close the gap (especially when combined with the above-mentioned factors).
  • Clover is based on “A Fisherman’s Good Luck”, a tale saying that the best luck comes from being patient. Clover immediately prioritizes his newest orders of arresting Qrow in mid-flight back to base, ignoring both Qrow’s offer to peacefully discuss the sudden changes with Ironwood and that he’s supposed to be transporting the deranged serial killer Tyrian to Atlas. This impatience forces Qrow to defend himself and gives Tyrian an opening to crash the plane, and then Clover continues to irrationally focus on incapacitating Qrow first instead of Tyrian in their Mêlée à Trois. The situation resulting from his impatience puts Clover in the unluckiest situation possible: Qrow being forced to pull an Enemy Mine with Tyrian, breaking the Ace Ops leader’s Aura and allowing for Tyrian to stab him in the back, leading to his death. While the outcome is definitely not in Qrow's favor, he at least tries to de-escalate the situation in spite of Clover effectively betraying his trust, spending most of the ensuing fight trying to talk Clover down, and is set to patiently keep trying (until Tyrian took the chance away). He at least walks away from the fight due to that patience.
• Harriet’s Hidden Disdain Reveal makes a lot of sense when you compare her source material to her fellow Ace Ops'. The other four are based on stories where the focal characters are neutral protagonists. Harriet's story? The hare in that Aesop is an antagonist who belittles the tortoise as being weaker than him, like how Harriet openly sneers at the RWBY girls once they become enemies and underestimates their strength.
• Looking closely at the Mêlée à Trois between Qrow, Clover and Tyrian, one'll notice that there is actually little teamwork between Qrow and Tyrian. Qrow mainly attacks Clover, but he doesn't help Tyrian in any way; he's likely trying to come up with a way to both knock out his friend and take down the lunatic. But that's where Tyrian comes in: he consistently closes the distance between them and actually nudges and pushes Qrow around with his tail to put him up against Clover, while also not attacking Clover as much. Tyrian has already proven he can think, and sowing chaos in the battle forces the other participants to get increasingly desperate. When Clover's Aura is shattered and both combatants are physically and emotionally exhausted, Tyrian seizes his chance due to being relatively fresh and ignored, striking at his prey's most vulnerable spot.
  • Another factor that played in Clover's death is his own personality. Throughout his time in this season, he shows little worry in dangerous situations: the severely unstable mine with catastrophically dangerous Dust deposits, the Teryx tearing into the ship near his seat; both times he's completely calm, even a little careless, because his Semblance protects him and it apparently has always done so since he unlocked it. Clover is definitely a skilled fighter, but he tends to rely too much on the fact that the odds are usually in his favor, which shows in how relaxed he generally is. If luck's in his corner, why should he worry? This contrasts with Qrow, whose Semblance brings bad luck; due to his own power actually being a hindrance most of the time, Qrow's had to fight tooth and nail his whole life to reach his current level. He knows luck probably won't be on his side, so he doesn't count on it, and he's prepared for things to go wrong at any moment. Clover has unconsciously come to rely on his Semblance like a crutch, and his luck eventually ran out.
  • Literally. Note that Clover's death came seconds after his aura failed. Fighting two vastly superior and more ruthless opponents, after surviving a plane crash without a scratch, his luck was probably the only thing keeping him alive in that fight. So the second his aura failed, and his luck with it, his time was up.
  • Also, it's insinuated above, but to clarify more clearly, it should be noted that Clover's semblance is probably at least partially canceled out by Qrow's. He's not used to fighting on "fair" terms, let alone unfair 2v1 fights against better fighters, which explains why he's so brutally broken by the two.
  • Additionally, Clover's fighting style works best in groups, with him acting as support for more powerful fighters by giving them openings. In the Tyrian/Clover/Robyn/Qrow fight in the beginning, he rarely ever hit Tyrian directly, instead trying to tie him up to give openings for Qrow and Robyn. He tries to use the same techniques in the T/C/Q fight, regularly getting Qrow and Tyrian with his fishhook to trip them up, even knocking away Qrow's weapon. But Clover couldn't capitalize on any of this because he wasn't aggressive enough, and even if he was, he just couldn't put out enough damage with his weaponized fishing pole to put them down. But both Qrow and Tyrian are plenty aggressive fighters, and with their numbers advantage, they quickly overwhelmed him, breaking his aura and with it, the luck that was the only thing keeping him alive.
  • Also, Clover's semblance probably wasn't just propping him up. The Ace Ops losing to RWBY seems out of character, until you realize that the Ace Ops are used to operating with a good luck charm on the team, while RWBY tends to operate with a bad luck charm (unintentionally) working against them. RWBY's been playing with a handicap, while the Aces have always been working with a loaded deck. But now they're on even footing, and the Aces are the ones with a handicap of missing their leader, and losing team cohesion because of Ironwood's actions. Not to mention that they're a five member team in a world of four member teams, funded and armed by the greatest city on the continent with an nation's army to support them. The last time they've had to fight an uphill battle against other huntsmen was probably in the academy.
• When Cinder did her hacking in volume three, it seems strange that she would leave the chess piece display where it could be found, given that Salem works in secret and didn't want any hints of her existence left behind. Given the plan was to leave people thinking the White Fang were the sole organizers of the Grimm invasion, why leave evidence there was another party involved? At the time, it was probably written off as a taunt aimed at Ozpin. Come volume seven, we see that same chess piece used to tip Ironwood over the edge. The chess piece wasn't just a taunt to Ozpin, it was also preparation for a psychological attack on Ironwood, who Cinder knew would soon be seeing the forces he brought to safeguard the public attacking and killing people instead and would be reminded of that when he saw the chess piece in what should have been a safe and secure location.
• Oscar saying he has to meet James alone is a smart move on his part. Ironwood is already on edge, and a group of people who he currently wants arrested will just start a fight that neither side wants. Jaune and especially Nora have already called him out in one form or another for his actions, so neither one would have any chance of getting through to him. Oscar, on the other hand, has been able to establish some sort of a friendship with James throughout this volume, even convincing him to bring in Robyn and the Council into the fold. He's probably got the best chance out of all our heroes of talking the general down from his paranoia. However, James is simply too far gone to listen to reason.
• At first glance, the title of the volume's theme song Trust Love might seem like it isn't relevant to the theme of the arc, that it's just an upbeat detail for the audience to learn from. But the message permeates the entire volume:
  • Ironwood needed to think about the people around him instead of letting his paranoia drive him into callousness. But he doesn't and alienates nearly everyone around him because they don't agree with his methods.
  • Ruby became cautious over trusting Ironwood with the truth regarding Salem's immortality even though part of Ironwood's plan is to unite people against Salem. Oscar decides for her to tell Ironwood the truth in the not-so-optimal situation of a rioting Mantle being attacked by Grimm and being confronted by the Council and Jacques over his plans. As a result, the piling stresses caused Ironwood to snap and go full dictator mode.
  • Robyn refused to trust anyone besides the Happy Huntresses wholeheartedly (understandable considering how little Atlas seems to care about Mantle), so they unwittingly delayed the Amity Tower project, and her jumping into a fight with Clover indirectly led to Tyrian freeing himself, killing the pilots of the airship they were in and crashing it to get away.
  • Qrow and Clover should have focused on fighting Tyrian together instead of being at each other's throats. Their mutual mistrust resulted in Clover being done in by his own impatience and Qrow getting screwed over by Tyrian.
  • The Ace Ops treat those who should be their friends (even each other) like either work tools or obstacles depending on Ironwood's orders, and care more about what their boss says than protecting their own people. Their lack of camaraderie is the principal reason they get defeated by Team RWBY.
  • Ren and Nora have been more at odds with each other than we've ever seen them be so far. Nora's attempt to bridge the gap between her and Ren resulted in the two of them being distracted when Tyrian started killing people and Ren's care for Nora caused Neo to get away with the Relic.
  • Even Cinder, who only cares about power and rejects loving or trusting anyone she knows, failed in her pursuit of the Winter Maiden's power, and she feels nothing for Neo who is her only ally at the moment, and going by Neo's reactions to Cinder's commands, the feeling's mutual.
  • Meanwhile, Penny and Winter's arcs this season have been about learning to trust their hearts instead of blindly following orders. In the end, the entire point of the volume is that things have gotten so bad because people just wouldn't trust those they're surrounded by. The only ones who did the right thing here have proven that they "trust love".
  • Then there's Blake and Yang, who strike the middle of both extremes. Yang puts her faith and trust into Blake's judgement in telling Robyn the partial truth about the CCT and this results in Robyn understanding why Ironwood is doing what he is doing (and by extension, leading him and Oscar to tell the truth to the Council and Ironwood respectively), but at the same time, pushes Ironwood further into distrusting RWBY as he told them not to reveal that to anyone out of fear that the plan would be leaked to the enemy. This plants the seed of distrust in Ironwood's mind that Team RWBY will not obey his orders whenever they feel like it.
  • Ultimately, though the volume ends badly, there's a difference in how the protagonists are;
    • The Ruby Gang, who treat people with respect and compassion, while they've lost the Lantern and their one-sided "friendship" with Ironwood's army, managed to keep their allies in Robyn, Pietro, and Penny as the Winter Maiden. Also, Oscar has accessed Ozpin's magic.
    • Ironwood, who views everybody around him as either a tool or an obstacle, has nothing. His best agents are either dead or injured, and his strongest weapon Penny has defected in response to his heartless attitude.
• During the opening, a screen showing Ironwood briefly flicker's to Jacques before the scene changes. This could be Foreshadowing that ultimately, Ironwood and Jacques aren't that different. They are both serious Control Freaks who hide behind a kind veneer (although Ironwood's is sincere) that slips whenever their authority is challenged. Just as Jacques tried to isolate Weiss from the world while providing her superficial luxuries and safety, Ironwood used a similar tactic on the heroes: he dismissed their concerns and complaints on Mantle's conditions by giving them new equipment and licenses, and then put them through an unending barrage of training and missions so they'd have no time to interact with anyone else ("A Night Off" is implied to be the only serious rest time Ironwood gave them). When Weiss made it clear that she wasn't going to be Jacques' precious propaganda mascot, her father had her permanently grounded until she changed her tune. When Team RWBY refused to follow Ironwood's plan of self-preservation, he put out arrest warrants on the entire group.
  • Similarly, "Out in the Open" and "Gravity" eerily parallels Cinder and Ironwood. After learning that Salem is coming, they are both shown staring out the window declaring, "The timeline has changed." Looking back, one can see how much alike they are; both are egotistical, who prefer to demonstrate their power with overt displays of what they have (Cinder, her Maiden powers, Ironwood is his military), and have a pathological compulsion to be in a position of authority. Furthermore, both have lost parts of their body and need artificial enhancements to function (Cinder's Shadow Arm, Ironwood's cybernetics), and while they can be cunning, they grasp the Idiot Ball whenever their alleged superiority and control of a situation is threatened.
• A nice hint of Foreshadowing is seen in the intro of Volume 7. Penny is focused on during the final line of the pre-chorus, specifically the line "your power will shine" where she turns to the screen and smiles, a scene immediately followed by the lines "But in time you'll through love" which display the members and allies of Ruby's group. This foreshadows that Penny would ultimately be the character who fully chooses love and trusting her instincts over her orders/self-interest, making her worthy of the Winter Maiden's power by protecting Fria. With her new Maiden power and implied to now have a genuine Aura, her powers now literally shine through. Her coming into focus after the shot of Ruby's shows that she would ultimately side with them and not Ironwood's army, since the former group believes in love and protecting others over victory at any costs.
• Penny becoming the Winter Maiden isn't just a big win for herself, but is also the ultimate humiliation to Cinder's ego and the perfect payback for what the latter put Penny through. Cinder inflates herself as being stronger than others by kicking them down into nothing, and if any of those victims try to fight back, she'll sink them down even further to reassert her dominance. Cinder orchestrated Penny's live dismemberment in Vale that traumatized the robot girl even after she was rebuilt. Fast forward to Volume 7, Cinder loses one of the four powers she has been seeking to her former victim, making that victim an equal to Cinder in terms of magical potential. Second, Cinder implanted her Grimm arm as a means to suck the life and power out Maidens and let them writhe in agony as they die. However, Penny being a robot means that it's unlikely Cinder could even penetrate the former's inorganic body to steal the Winter Maiden powers, considering she had to rely on Pyrrha's semblance to achieve Penny's first death, and Penny can shrug off most Grimm attacks no problem. Little wonder Cinder was spewing flames by the end, she lost one of the easiest Maiden powers to nab to the last person she could hope to steal it back from, and Penny got the revenge she wanted without even trying.
  • It's also a huge middle finger to Ironwood, who treated both robot and Maiden horribly. In order to gain total control of the Winter Maiden's powers by proxy, Ironwood imprisoned and isolated Fria, with her only visitor being Winter Schnee in the hopes that Winter will be in Fria's dying thoughts. But Fria could have bestowed her powers onto Winter anytime she wanted, but clearly did not trust Winter (And by extension, Ironwood) with that all. Penny, meanwhile, had no freedom, and if she hadn't met Ruby by chance, would have had no friends. "Penny is completely under my control." is how Ironwood defines her - as a tool with no agency. Except, Penny's brief escapes in V1-2 show that she can defy Ironwood. When she learns of how Ironwood is going to abandon Mantle and put Atlas under martial law, she only sticks with Winter because she has no other alternative. When Team RWBY shows up to help her escape, she goes with them. Ironwood thought he had mastery over both, and like everything else, he was wrong.
  • This is also a sort of way to rub salt in the wounds from the ending of Season 5; both times, Cinder took on two enemies in hopes of taking Maiden powers for herself, both times the enemy who didn't end up with the Maiden powers attacked Cinder at a crucial moment to distract her at the cost of being heavily injured themselves, and both times, she ultimately failed to take the powers for herself.
• Nora's rage at keeping secrets from the people in Mantle makes a lot more sense when you remember that a key part of Pyrrha's breakdown and eventual death was her own stress and fear from being unable to confide in her teammates, and Nora herself is struggling with Ren's inability to confide in her after learning Ozpin's secrets. Secrets have been the bane of team JNPR since the beginning.
• Why does Ironwood jump off the slippery slope and become a full-on dictator at the end of Volume 7? Because he knows no other way than the straight-forward, militaristic path of Appeal to Force. He's been repeatedly described as the kind of person who, when confronted with a threat, immediately resorts to lethal force and sending in soldiers, and the concept of considering any other solution either never occurs to him or, as shown with his debate with Oscar/Ozpin, outright ignored. Him taking absolute control of Atlas, declaring the heroes fugitives and becoming Remnant's equivalent of Handsome Jack is because his greatest strength—his keen military mind, was turned against him.
  • This also extends to Atlas as a whole. Throughout the series, their greatest strength is shown to be their united kingdom and powerful military, along with their philosophy. As anyone will tell you, RWBY is a show about Grey-and-Grey Morality, and as such, when properly manipulated, Atlas falls into Black-and-White Insanity very easily, because their opponents are hiding in the shadows rather than coming straight at them with an army... at least not until it's too late.
• In Volume 7, Ironwood believed he had to step up and take Ozpin's place as the Big Good; he notably upgraded his outfit to include a Badass Long Coat, which makes it look like he's wearing a cape. This shows he's trying to step up become the paragon that will save Remnant, even though he still clings to his rigid my-way-or-the-highway attitude. Cut to the last 4 episodes where he’s completely ditched the longcoat and stays that way as he descends into tyranny and paranoia. Ironwood threw away his image of a hero and is willing to go full Knight Templar and He Who Fights Monsters for the sake of defending Atlas, the rest of Remnant be damned.
• Clover's last words to Qrow, "Someone had to take the fall" seem a bit odd at a first glance, but when one takes Ironwood's Never My Fault attitude into account, they make total sense. Ironwood refuses to acknowledge his mistakes and failings, so when he does blunder, his first instinct is try and foist blame onto someone else; when Jacques talks about his lack of trust, Ironwood mentions that "If Oz had listened to me", indirectly putting the fault for the Fall of Beacon on Ozpin even though Ironwood's automated army did most of the damage to the Kingdom of Vale as a whole and that he likely wouldn't have been able to stop the Fall in Ozpin's position. And this attitude bleeds into his subordinates, such as Winter blaming Qrow's drunkenness after she attacked him for his words in "Brawl In The Family" or Clover telling Qrow, "I thought I could trust you!" in "With Friends Like These". When Ironwood put out arrest orders for RWBY, JNPR, and Qrow, it wasn't just because they were a threat to his plans, he also wanted them as scapegoats for the negative consequences of his decisions. With his dying breath, Clover admitted the real reason why Qrow and the kids had been named enemies of the state (or, more accurately, enemies of Ironwood).
• The upgrades that Pietro provides to (most of) the team improve upon the faults that got Ruby's team knocked about or outright defeated in previous volumes.
  • Ruby's scythe can now change directions by rotating on the axis, meaning she no longer needs to twirl about to change the angle with which she swings Crescent Rose at. This necessity for fancy maneuvers resulted in opponents quick to close the gap, like Tyrian, incapacitating Ruby in battle because she simply couldn't swing Crescent Rose about in time to reach them.
  • Weiss is an exception and as such, Myrtenaster doesn't get any upgrades, as it is already existing Atlas technology, which is state-of-the-art wherever possible. Everyone else uses technology that exists outside of Atlas' industrial templates, and as such Weiss, who grew up in Atlas and lived and breathed their culture and technology, has no need to improve upon what is already mechanically perfect.
  • Blake's Gambol Shroud is a zigzagged sort of manner. Gambol Shroud's broken blade is repaired with Atlas technology, giving it a golden accent and strengthening the weapon so that it will likely not break again when facing down an opponent of similar caliber to Adam. However, as Blake spent a significant part of her life fighting Atlas, Gambol Shroud is naturally versatile, and as such she has no need for it to be given a dramatic upgrade like the others.
  • Yang's robot arm and Ember Celica are a dual case. Yang relies on brute force and sheer firepower, but she has also become a much more cerebral fighter due to Taiyang's mentorship and the fact that losing an arm is a very harsh lesson that strength alone is not enough. As such, Pietro's upgrades include making her robot arm bulkier and stronger, in addition to adding sticky bombs to Ember Celica's arsenal, seeing as it already has explosive shotgun rounds as a default and high-explosive missiles as a secondary. By augmenting Yang's brute force with a more powerful, combat-ready robot arm, he enhances her Close-Range Combatant capabilities.
  • Jaune's sword is not upgraded, as it is a case of Boring, but Practical and therefore cannot really be improved upon by Pietro, given that the blacksmith in Mistral upgraded it already with the remnants of Pyrrha's armor and weapons and it can be combined with his shield to turn it into a greatsword.
  • Nora's Magnhild lacks an upgrade, mostly because of the same reasons regarding the blacksmith. It can be charged with electricity, which is Nora's forte, and it can be used as a transport, but a controllable one, meaning she doesn't need to continuously fire grenades to move around in battle. Between the brute force of the hammer and the grenades it fires, Pietro likely didn't see a need to upgrade it.
  • Ren's Stormflowers gain an increase in firepower, which is a major weakness of Ren as he relies on Death by a Thousand Cuts when it comes to shooting at people. This poses a problem when facing down larger enemies, and as such the higher damage now means he is less likely to face this issue. It also gains a Grappling-Hook Pistol ability by way of rotating the blades and firing them, allowing Ren to grapple opponents at range or swing about from one place to another, enhancing his mobility and ensuring he doesn't necessarily have to charge his opponents if his bullets prove ineffective, he can simply hook his opponent and pull them to him, or swing about to find another angle.
  • Oscar's cane doesn't get an upgrade, because it was crafted by Ozpin himself and is essentially as perfect as it's going to get. That, and Ozpin would likely be very unhappy if someone messed with his cane, considering he has stated it is precious to him.
• It's revealed that Watts faked his death in what was called the "Paladin Incident" some time ago. The Paladins used in Volume 2, which Winter identified as prototypes in Volume 3, were stolen by Watts when he defected.
• When Salem offers to leave Atlas in return for the Relics, she never says that she won't harm the people of Atlas, just that "they won't suffer any further" and that "this can all be over". Both phrases would technically apply if everyone in the city was dead, and by the end of Volume 8 it appears her plan for Atlas was to completely destroy it.

Volume Eight

• The opening features Salem and Ironwood on a chess board. But if you look closely, you see a queen piece on Salem's side, and a king piece on Ironwood's side... meaning that Salem is the king of her side, and Ironwood is the queen. This may seem strange because of their respective abilities (The king can only move one space at a time, the queen can go as far the player wants), but makes more sense when one considers the roles each piece;
  • The king is the most important piece in chess. The goal of chess is to place the opposing player's king into checkmate, a position where they cannot escape capture. Salem, as the one who controls both the Grimm and the lesser villains, is the most important, and the goal of the series is to defeat her. While the King might be limited in movement, the use of pawns is vital to achieving victory. This mirrors how Salem always hid in the shadows, and used pawns to make her goals easier to achieve, as long as it clears a path for her.
  • The queen, on the other hand, can be captured, even by a pawn. If it is, the game goes on. And a pawn can easily be made a queen if it reaches the other side of the board. Ironwood may be a powerful figure in the war, with his influence and resources, but is merely the latest in a series of so-called heroes Ozpin has set out to defeat Salem. A queen is far more likely to achieve victory when the pawns clear out the opponent's pieces, but in the opening Ironwood's board falls apart around him. Ironwood pushes away his allies with arrest orders, callous decisions and disregard for life, slowly leaving him alone to fight a game he cannot possibly win by himself.
  • Another aspect to this relates to what Salem tells Cinder when she opts to return to Atlas without her orders. To quote, 'Just because you are more important to me than a pawn does not make you a player.' Now apply this quote to Ironwood. While he is a powerful piece, he is never as in control of the board as he likes to think he is. Therefore, while he tries his hardest trying to be a player in this game, he is not the 'king' he thinks he is.
  • Alternatively, Ironwood will sacrifice anything to beat Salem. He thinks of himself as powerful, but still expendable (or at least his body is).
    • Interestingly, this was given more depth in the final episode: As Winter so bluntly puts it, he'll sacrifice anything to beat Salem... except himself. Thus explaining why the pieces are gone, but he remains... and has lost the game as a result, since there's nobody left to throw at Salem.
  • There is actually a far simpler explanation for that symbolism. If Salem is the King, and isn't present on the board (she's not standing on it, she's floating in the space behind her side of the board), her team can't lose. Winning a game requires taking the king of the opposing side. With Salem's immortality, Remnant's situation is functionally like that lopsided chessboard. They can kill all the pawns and pieces they want, and that might delay the end of the game, but they can't ever win, since the thing that they need to win, killing Salem/taking the king, is impossible, or "off the board" so to speak.
    • Furthermore, if you are looking for a better foil to Salem, Ozpin would be the rival king in this analogy. A rival king that, unlike Salem, is on the board, playing as Oscar, who is fully capable of dying. (Yes he can come back, but there are strong hints that Ozpin's reincarnation cycle is not nearly as powerful as Salem's immortality, and it's outright stated that his power is fading, at the very least from giving magic to the Maidens and the Branwen Twins, if not from the constant reincarnations.)
    • Additionally, if you interpret Ironwood representing not himself, but Atlas, the symbolism works as well. Atlas was one of the pillars of Remnant, one of the world's most powerful defenses against Salem. With Atlas gone, it's like a chess game where you lose a Queen. The game isn't over yet, but unless you're clever and fast, you are at a massive disadvantage.
• Given that apparently less than one in-universe day has passed between the last Volume and this one, the speed with which Atlesian medics have replaced Ironwood's burnt arm with a mechanical one may seem astonishing, as connecting all the nerves would require a lot of surgery. However, unlike Yang or Maria, Ironwood does not control his pre-existing prosthetics through nerves due to sheer amount of metal in his body (with the addition of a new arm, he is literally more a machine than a man) and, possibly, spinal damage, relying on the wireless node on his forehead instead, meaning they simply had to secure the arm to the stump and connect it to the node to allow him to fully use it instantly. In other words, James's limbs are plug-and-play devices.
  • Of course given that Yang is simply shipped her replacement limb at home, and simply attaches it and it starts working perfectly without any surgery or complicated nerve connections required, it could be that the technology is just easy and fast to attach in general.
• The way Cinder scratches her Grimm fingers on the back of a seat to the pace of her past self scrubbing the floor is foreshadowing psychological scars stemming from the abuse she suffered at the hotel.
• There is considerable black humor and irony to be found in General Ironwood carrying out a summary execution with a gun called Due Process.
  • The Ironwood of previous Volumes may well have made Due Process his personal weapon to remind himself of its importance. His weapon should only ever be used on those to which Due Process has been given, which is reflected in how he only ever brought it out to shoot Grimm or Watts. Following his change in direction, he changes how he uses his weapon. He now has it on his person at all times, and uses it to deliver the only Due Process he feels they deserve.
• It makes sense that Ruby's 'Petal Burst' Semblance involves her "breaking herself down to component pieces, then putting herself back together". Most of the times Ruby used her Semblance, she was either by herself or occasionally had others along for the ride, such as Nora in V4 or Weiss in V6. But on occasion, Ruby - while traveling in her Semblance state - has split herself apart in mid-travel before coming back together (the V4 pre-release trailer, practice training in V7, etc). If she were 'just' fast, she (plus any passengers) could only be one fast speed-blur, not several.
• Back in "Players and Pieces" episode, Ruby's Moment of Awesome - dragging a Nevermore possibly hundreds of her own weight up a sheer cliff before decapitating it - was attributed in equal parts to Weiss's anti-gravity glyphs and Rule of Cool, especially since the glyphs mostly affected Ruby and only partially her prey. Now, it's clear it has less to do with the Rule of Cool and more with Ruby's then-unrevealed mass-negating Semblance which she was using, probably without even thinking, during that stunt.
• Throughout the series, most of the characters that are capable of moving at some degree of Super-Speed also possess Super-Reflexes as a required secondary power. Ruby, however, curiously does not have those, which frequently gets her outmaneuvered and successfully hit by other fast characters (and even some Badass Normal ones like Torchwick), and in mundane life she's almost clumsy. This could be explained by her being young and inexperienced, but the reveal that her power is more of a teleportation than speed also shows that lightning-fast reflexes aren't actually required for her Semblance. Since she's been living her whole life under the assumption that it's super speed and teleporting would be naturally disorienting, it's no wonder she's had issues with coordination.
• As stupid as it is, Ironwood's plan to get Watts to hack Penny is consistent with his character; throughout the series, Ironwood has clung to the belief that he can force or cajole people to do what he wants, even when it obviously doesn't work in his favor. Combined with his tendency to overestimate the effectiveness of his decisions, it's perfectly reasonable that he thinks he's gotten Watts under heel and that simply holding a gun to the latter's head will make him comply without problem. All Watts has to do is feign submission while working very subtly to set things up for Salem's benefit later on.
• Cinder's rather contemptuous attitude towards Atlesian characters (such as General Ironwood, Dr. Watts and Winter Schnee) makes sense once her back story is revealed. The fact that Watts reciprocates the sentiment also makes more sense if you assume that he knows of her background, because to him, Cinder is a lower-class slave from the middle of nowhere who is now supposed to be his equal. He treats her with no compassion (he mocks her severe, debilitating injuries after Vol. 3's finale) or respect since, to him, she's a replaceable nobody that has risen far above where she belongs.
• Cinder placed her trust in Rhodes because he was a Huntsman, a symbol of freedom to her, hoping that he would be able to help her escape her abusers, but what he did to help wasn't enough. No wonder Cinder puts so much venom in her Breaking Speech in "PvP":
  Cinder: "This is what happens when you hand over your trust, your safety, your children, to men who claim to be our guardians, but are, in reality, nothing more than men."
• Speaking of parallels which Cinder's backstory draws, it also makes her a dark reflection of two of the series' four main heroes with whom she otherwise has little in common:
  • Weiss and Cinder both spent their childhoods in an upper-class Atlesian home with a loveless and horribly controlling parent, whom they ultimately escaped out of a drive to attain their freedom. Unlike Weiss, Cinder snapped and resorted to murder instead of escaping the household through legal means, and from there Cinder only became an even worse person instead of bettering herself like Weiss did. Whereas Weiss is almost nothing like her sociopathic father (especially after her character development), Cinder subconsciously imitates her wicked stepmother as an adult. Ironically, Cinder's powers and colors are fire-themed whereas Weiss' are ice-themed.
  • Cinder and Blake have both been on the receiving end of systemic social injustice during their early lives, and it plays a part in both their core motivations — it also pushed both girls in their backstories to turn against their own "families", whom were high on the local social hierarchy (Blake's father is the original White Fang leader whereas Cinder's stepfamily were Atlesian socialites). But Blake's parents love her, and she wants to make the world a better place for everyone; whereas Cinder was atrociously abused by her stepfamily, and she's solely motivated by making circumstances better for herself alone according to her warped megalomaniacal view.
• Notably, the Atlas defence force in the seventh episode consists mostly of living soldiers (with the addition of some Paladins piloted by living soldiers), even though fighting Grimm off with huge numbers of disposable robots used to be a primary strategy of the Atlesian military. However, given the state of Ironwood's mind after the fiasco at Beacon, it's understandable that his trust in combat droids has plummeted, so he had them reassigned onto less important tasks (i.e. guarding Mantle) and did not bother to build new ones as they were continually destroyed by Grimm attacks.
• Ren's semblance developing such that he is able to sense the emotions of others could seem like an Ass Pull to some. But let's consider the nature of semblances for a moment: semblances are said to be projections of one's soul. If we were to take that at face value, it would go along with the idea of one semblance's being their Personality Power. When Ren's semblance first awakened, it was due to a Grimm attack by the Nuckelavee. Assuming he knew that the Grimm were drawn to negative emotions at the time, it's possible that his semblance developed due to his psychological response being that his emotions were not a part of him, enabling him to cloak himself and eventually Nora. This would result in him developing a stoic personality in attempting to deny that his emotions were a part of him. And through the majority of the series till "War", he would continue denying his emotions were a part of him until the thought of Oscar dying forced him to confront a simple truth: that his emotions were a part of him, expressed in the line "NO ONE IS REPLACEABLE!" enabling him to use his semblance to sense emotions upon accepting them as intrinsic to people.
  • It potentially could also explain why attempting to clock his, Jaune's, and Yang's emotions failed upon encountering the Seer: while fatigue may have been part of it, having to use his semblance on a large group of people moving to the crater, he also accepted that his emotions were a part of him and no longer denied it, weakening his ability to cloak his emotions, as it could have relied on his denial.
• The parallels between Ironwood and Cinder continue to grow from last Volume. Like Cinder, Ironwood loses his left human hand and has it replaced with a black-colored prosthetic, symbolic of them losing their humanity. After the incidents they both begin to lose their sanity as they become more obsessed with their goals, to the point they take dangerous, unnecessary risks just for a shot at what they want. Their behavior starts to worry their closest allies and leave several others frustrated as their unhinged and reckless behavior takes over their common sense. In fact, this leads to the both of them being called out for their past mistakes and current mindset by their allies, Watts for Cinder, Marrow for Ironwood. But the difference is that Cinder takes Watts' words to heart and dials back her viciousness to work with others and accomplish her goals (at least, until they are accomplished). Ironwood, whose Semblance is pushing out distractions to pursue his goals, doesn't and continues to blunder his way from one mistake to another.
• When Ironwood learns of Yang, Jaune and Ren being let got by Winter, he angrily mutters that holding them hostage was "their last chance" before blowing up and yelling "Now I have nothing!". For all of Ironwood's talk about protecting everyone and saving Atlas, him declaring that "he" has nothing shows that he's more concerned with being right and getting his way than actually saving lives. He also had a similar slip in the seventh volume's finale when he turned on Oscar, angrily proclaiming: "The fact of the matter is I. Was. Right!", showing that self-validation is actually his top priority.
• Ego aside, it makes sense that Ambrosius would find lifting Atlas to be “pedestrian”; he’s clearly shown to enjoy challenging assignments that require him to think or invent - albeit with the caveat that he won’t accept criticism due to someone making a poorly worded request - whereas levitation already exists in the form of gravity dust, and thus all maintaining Atlas’ altitude would require is taking that effect up to eleven and make it consistent.
• Atlas sinking beneath the local lake is more than just an allusion to how the Kingdom of Atlantis sank: if the letters t, i, and n are removed, it will spell out Atlantis. The word "tin" spelled from the combined letters refers to the Tin Man, which is the character Ironwood is based on.
• It may seem a bit strange that Qrow was able to use his Semblance for a "good luck" effect... until you realise that at that moment Qrow's good luck was Harriet's bad luck. And Vine's.
  • Given that it's difficult for luck of any kind to affect everything simultaneously - as someone's good luck is often another's bad luck, and vice-versa - it's also likely that Qrow's focus in that moment, rather than causing an opposite good luck effect for himself, was instead focusing his bad luck onto a specific target, i.e. Harriet, allowing himself to avoid bad luck. After his focus was gone, it likely kicked back into causing bad luck for the area at large, resulting in the follow-up events.
• One of the lines from the opening is "Some dreams will rot on the vine" followed by Some lives will end much too soon." The intro's lyrics foreshadowed Vine's death.
  • Similarly, Ironwood's death was foreshadowed in the opening of Volume 3. During the lyrics "Crushed by the weight of the world" there is a close-up on Ironwood's face. And that's exactly what happened. Ironwood always saw Atlas as the only part of the world worth saving. His ultimate fate is to be crushed by the city he treasured so much.
• "Midnight" once again shows the peril of being divided, a common theme in RWBY. The Atlesian Air Fleet, having the high ground, should certainly have seen a literal river of black destruction carving a path through the mostly-white tundra. But so long as it only appears to be a threat to Mantle, they ignore it. Salem was no doubt counting on that lack of reaction, already having heard from her subordinates that Ironwood would do nothing to protect the lower city. By the time anyone realized that Atlas itself was the target, it was far too late. Abandoning Mantle only played into Salem's hands.
• In "Worthy", when it finally seemed like Cinder learned her lesson to treat her fellow villains with respect and focus on long term objectives, she immediately disposed of both in the following episode without a second thought. This sudden Bait-and-Switch of hers proves she still hasn't learned Salem's lesson about using people for as long as they are useful. Cinder taking Neo and Watts out of the picture at the first convenient movement proves she did not think about how she could use them beyond Atlas. By getting rid of them at the first possible chance out of spite, she costs Salem a near-untouchable combatant with an exploitable motive and a genius hacker. Both could still have been used to obtain the two last Relics, and with the loss of Emerald and Hazel, brings down Salem’s forces to only four members. It shows that no matter how much she is lectured, Cinder will always focus on short term gratification over long term planning.
• For that same episode, there's the scene where Cinder leaves Watts to do his thing in the Central Command room. The last thing she says to him is this: "You deserve this, Arthur.". It's actually a reference to what Watts told Cinder in his "The Reason You Suck" Speech: "You can't just be deserving, you have to be worthy!". Cinder basically dismisses Watts as merely "deserving", while she aspires to be "worthy". The reversal hints toward what she has in mind for him.
  • It's also a demonstration that, as cathartic as his speech to Cinder is, much of his own criticisms of Cinder can just as easily apply to him. Watts believed himself more deserving of Ironwood's respect than Pietro, and betrayed his country instead of buckling down to prove himself worthy. He claims that you need to be smart, but a number of his gambits fail because he's too arrogant to perceive any flaws in his thinking. Watts's furious rant ends up being a case of the pot calling the kettle black, given that his inability to recognize these flaws in himself allows Cinder to arrange his demise with him none the wiser.
    • It goes even further than that. Cinder survived an absolutely hellish childhood, with authority figures either abusing her or refusing to help her except in the most half-baked ways, culminating in her servitude to an even more dangerous and malevolent abuser in the form of Salem. Watts could have lived a cushy life as a respected Atlesian scientist, but threw it all away to join Salem just because his ego was bruised. His ultimate desires paint him as an incredibly cruel and petty man who for all of his genius, wasn't as smart as he believed himself to be.
• As petty as it seems, Watts putting a self-destruct function in Penny's virus makes strategic sense. As far as he knows, Salem's goal is to attain the Scepter, with the Maidens being a means for that. By having Penny destroy herself after opening the vault, this not only prevents Ironwood from literally controlling the Winter Maiden, but also stops him from sealing the Scepter up after use. The Winter Maiden would ideally pass from Atlesian control entirely with her death, and yet another obstacle in Salem's path fades away.
• As much of a coward as Jacques is when faced with a potential threat to his desires, he doesn't ever think about taking advantage of the prison break that takes place. Why? Because he probably assumed that Ironwood would have had Atlesian soldiers patrolling the prisons to prevent any chances of escapes, likely with the orders to open fire during a mass escape (especially with how ruthless Ironwood has become over the Volume). He couldn't risk losing his life over a desire for freedom.
• Cinder flings Neo into the Void after telling her that "you shouldn't have threatened me". When she and Neo started their partnership, Neo was originally targeting Cinder before being convinced to switch to Ruby. If she killed Ruby, Neo would at best leave and at worst target Cinder next, and her stealing the Lamp made clear that she's too much of a Wild Card to serve either Salem or Cinder. Cinder wasn't just being petty: the blackmail made her realize that Neo was too big of a threat to be left alive.
• Why exactly is Ironwood, despite being the General of Atlas which would have taken years to reach his position, so utterly incompetent when it comes to actually acting as a military leader during the Siege of Atlas, for that matter for a good chunk of Volume 7? While it can be easy to dismiss it as being the writers not understanding the military and for plot reasons, the reality is that James has likely never FOUGHT in anything related to an actual war before. Keep in mind, via the World of Remnant videos, that Atlas only existed after the end of the Great War 80 years ago, when it was created from Mantle using the Staff of Creation, and that much of Atlas' time was spent during times of peace and prosperity. With that in mind, one realizes that James, for all of his posturing about the might of Atlas' military and his own greatness, has likely never been in any real confrontation that didn't involve easily controlled groups of Grimm, or innocent and defenseless civilians. Additionally, the position of General is more often than not, a non-combat position, and combined together with his other jobs as Headmaster of Atlas Academy and Councilman, he very likely hadn't had many opportunities to gain any kind of significant combat or war related experience outside of Atlas. The Siege of Atlas was likely the first time other than the Fall of Beacon that he's actually fought in a real battle, and it shows.
  • Atlas being born during peacetime and having never been in an actual war also explains the ridiculously poor tactics being shown during their attempts to defend from Salem's Grimm horde. The city of Atlas is separated from the ground, meaning only flight-capable Grimm would have had any chance of reaching it assuming they managed to get past the Hard Light shielding. And because the last war was over 80 years ago, combined with Atlas' arrogance and technology, their tactics likely haven't been updated from when their primary opponents would have been other humans on the ground and they likely would have never considered the possibility of being attacked due to their technology basically shielding them from any real danger. The end result is that when the military is pitted against a centuries more experienced leader and commander in Salem, they have nothing but extremely outdated and useless tactics and an increasingly irrational and under-experienced leader to fall back on, inevitably leading to massive casualties.
  • There is also precedent in their past: Atlas (even when it was just Mantle) has never actually WON the majority of their battles or wars. They failed to win the Great War even when allied with Mistral. One of their past generals Legune literally botched a campaign against the Faunus because he didn't bother to find out that they had night vision during a night-time operation. They ultimately lost the battle in the Fall of Beacon due to their own robots being turned against them. Cordovin couldn't defeat a group of young adults despite having more firepower. They've consistently failed to keep Mantle safe or apprehend a small group of vigilantes in the Happy Huntresses despite vastly outnumbering and outclassing them technology-wise. For all of their boasting about their might and superiority, their own history is one of failure and humiliation in the face of vastly weaker opponents, and it's only sheer denial, hubris, and lack of any significant opposition that allowed them to avoid this truth until Salem came along.
• Our heroes survive into Volume 9. Just an Ass Pull to keep the show going? Not at all! Ambrosius is shown regularly to believe in exact words. He never says "you die if you fall off" - just a warning not to fall, with no claims of what happens. Seems perfectly fitting for a guy obsessed with the exact wording of what others ask him.

Volume Nine

• Exactly why did falling into the Void Between the Worlds send everyone to the Ever After? Simple! When it all starts vanishing from Cinder's use of the Staff, only the platforms themselves vanish, with the dimension itself remaining extant. Late in Volume 9, it's revealed that beings enduring Ascension appear in said void, and the Blacksmith's workshop is there too. The void already existed, a facet of the Ever After. Anything falling in gets sent into the Ever After. All Ambrosius made was the platforms and portals, and let the extra-dimensional space assist him in that regard.
• If you watch the opening after finishing the volume and pay close attention, you'll notice that almost if not all of the scenes that Ruby is in fully reference her physical and emotional journey throughout the current story.
  • When showcasing team RWBY's costume changes from previous volumes, Weiss, Blake, and Yang are all shown moving to the foreground with more confident faces and body language and continue walking forward as they reach their current outfits. Ruby on the other hand, falls into the background with her showing concern and has both stopped and turned around when reaching her current outfit. This represents how while everyone else has overcome their emotional trauma and is "moving forward," Ruby has fallen behind them and is now not only "looking back" on everything they, or more accurately she, has failed to do and is unable to move on because of it.
  • The above scene is further emphasized by how the team is shown to be following Alyx. While everyone starts at the same pace, Ruby slows down while everyone else speeds up, representing her feeling that everyone keeps moving on without noticing that something is wrong with her.
  • When the team is caught in the Punderstorm, Ruby is shown to be on the the same bridge where Blake and Yang had to confess their feelings for each other, the other person in this case appearing to be Alyx before she transforms into Ruby herself with a cracked grin. This represents that not only the possibility that Ruby and Alyx have some similarities, but also that Ruby isn't being honest with herself. The fact the other Ruby is shown to have what looks to be a broken smile for a split second can also be a reference to how Ruby has been forcing herself to stay positive for who knows how long.
  • Immediately after the other Ruby is revealed, she drops down and the scene cuts to a sugar cube falling into a teacup held by Neo as she sits in front of a group of shadowy figures. All of this details correlate to chapter 8 of this volume.
  • When they finally reach the tree, Ruby is finally in the front the group (which could also represent her technically being the first to reach it) only for everyone to fall off, showing how she's started to feel unworthy of being the leader. Even worse, she's the only one who is shown to still be falling, implying either that the others have either managed to catch themselves without her, or have already hit the ground because of her, further fueling her mental issues either way (though one is obviously worse).
• Ruby lacks Crescent Rose at the beginning of the volume while the rest of her team still carry theirs. Sure, she lost it during the battle with Cinder and Neo, but its absence also represents her insecurities. Weiss, Blake and Yang have accepted their flaws and grown past the people they were upon arriving at Beacon, so they retain their weapons and their resolve as Huntresses. Ruby's dream to be a Huntress like in the stories she heard in her youth has shaped so much of her life, and the object that symbolizes this better than anything else is the weapon she lovingly constructed and wields throughout the story. Now, she is beginning to doubt her own dream, so Crescent Rose is beyond her reach. Even when Jaune reunites her with it, she still hesitates in truly reclaiming it because she feels unworthy.
  • There's also something to be said regarding the symbolism of a hero and their weapon. Yang lost her arm, but reclaimed it relatively quickly, and still had to "earn" it back, proving her worthiness to use it. Much is made, early in the Volume, of finding Crescent Rose, yet when they do, it's because Jaune already found it and just gives it to Ruby. She didn't earn it back, didn't face anything specifically to prove her worth to wield it. It's just handed to her. . . or, one might say, thrust upon her, just like the responsibility of leading her team, and now defeating Salem. Crescent Rose, in that sense, comes to represent everything about herself Ruby no longer feels she's worthy of. It's no longer a weapon, but a burden she doesn't feel fit to carry and doesn't want to carry anymore. Notably, at the end of the Volume, Ruby chooses to remain herself by willingly taking up Crescent Rose again, symbolizing her choice to shoulder her burdens again, to accept all the great and terrible power and responsibility that has been thrust upon the girl named Ruby Rose.
  • Additionally, let's recall the circumstances in which Ruby lost her weapon: she was disarmed shortly after being forced to dual wield it along with the Staff of Creation, which went very poorly since Crescent Rose isn't suited for one-handed combat, and that's because Ruby, by her own words, went "overboard" with its design. No surprise that, in her depression, she now views her formerly beloved weapon as yet another (and possibly the oldest) of her own poor decisions, embodied in metal.
  • Similarly, Jaune's sword remains broken from the events of Volume 8, and has rusted away like his armor, symbolizing how the trauma of performing assisted suicide for Penny broke him, and how the years he left it unaddressed have continued to wear at his mental health. Both being restored from their worn-down rusted states by Alyx's wish represents Jaune starting to heal from old wounds and accepting his faults.
• Ruby's game with the Red Prince parallels how Team RWBY's time in Atlas develops. At first, Ruby is at a distinct disadvantage due to her side having less Pawns than the Prince's, much like how Salem perpetually holds the upper hand through her power over the Grimm and her immortality. But once Weiss, Blake and Yang join the battle as surrogate Pawns, their side is seemingly winning, like when Ruby and Oscar convince Ironwood to put his trust in Robyn and the Council and have Mantle evacuated. Victory appears to be in the bag... until the Prince and Ironwood learn a truth at the most inconvenient time, causing Team RWBY's new allies to turn on them. The end result leaves them worse off than they started: for Atlas, it's the kingdom's eventual destruction and Salem claiming two Relics, and with the Red Prince, three of RWBY are still shrunk down and they still have no clue how to reach the Tree.
• The Herbalist's insistent questioning of what Team RWBY are and demanding specifics all come from his role as an herbalist, a medicine man. When it comes to medicine, the dosage is everything; too much medicine is poison and too little medicine is ineffective. For the denizens of the Ever After, their roles in life is as integral to them as their vital organs. To make the proper dosage of medicine for the growgurt parfait, the Herbalist needs to know exactly who and what is taking his medicine. Asking what they are is like asking what their blood type is, any allergies they have, etc..
• Weiss commented that the Rusted Knight was described as "handsome", which is kind of weird as the Ever After is filled with strange creatures like talking animals, sentient toys and cutlery, and whatever the hell the Jabberwalker is, not exactly things one would consider handsome or pretty to a human or faunus. So it makes sense that the Rusted Knight is actually a human.
• In a Punderstorm, metaphors and turns of phrases are made literal. Blake and Yang find themselves on opposing rickety drawbridges missing several planks connected to a single pillar in the middle. By admitting things about each other, a new plank is formed to bring them closer to the pillar. They have to use their words regarding how they feel about each other to bridge the gap and find stability in their relationship.
  • Yang actually asks "How do we take the next step," and later compares what they've figured they need to do to "falling off a cliff," to which Blake counters "I think we're already falling." The metaphor about as unsubtle as it could possibly be: the only thing keeping them apart is their own fear and hesitance, and on some level, they're completely aware of that.
• The flowers that start growing as Yang and Blake confess their feelings? Those are white lilies, which are often used in weddings to signify rebirth, or purity, or a new chapter. How fitting that these are the flowers that appear as the two begin a new chapter in their relationship with each other.
  • Also, lilies are often associated with sapphic love in the yuri genre.
• The Curious Cat's outright angry reaction while dispelling the Mushroom Samba created by the Herbalist makes more sense in context now that we know more about Alyx. It was after Alyx met the Herbalist, and likely had the same spell cast on her to speak with her inner self, that she became distrustful enough to poison Jaune and trick the Cat out of her promise to them. The Cat knew the Herbalist was responsible for Alyx's change and feared the same thing happening to Team RWBY. Though with revelations from chapter 8, we now know that anger was because the Cat feared Ruby would be changed beyond their ability to possess her.
• Ruby and Jaune finally reach Meltdown status, but end up being horrifyingly toxic after spending years of subconsciously bottling up their feelings. You'd think a team of trained soldiers would notice all the signs of an impending mental breakdown - until you realize that Grimm-infested Remnant never needed to refine that skill. Every time a huntress started losing their grip, the stress would literally attract Grimm to their location, meaning other teammates could easily determine how bad the stress gauge was based on how aggroed the Grimm were. And if someone got angry enough to murder something, there'd be an endless slew of monsters to vent (or die) to. Everyone on Remnant has exchanged their training in emotional awareness with monster-detecting awareness. Ruby and Jaune could only have this level of uninterrupted Meltdown here, on a whole different planet, which doesn't immediately react to their angst with 'karmic' monster attacks. Without Grimm to indicate an issue, WBY automatically assumes everything is fine with both Ruby and Jaune and then get blindsided by their respective breakdowns.
• At first having Leonardo Lionheart included among the illusions that Neo makes to torture Ruby doesn't seem to make much sense, especially since he betrayed everyone he stood with in a bid to avoid Salem's wrath, but it all makes sense once it becomes clear that Neo didn't probably know that. It was said in volume 6 that everyone agreed to keep his betrayal a secret from the population of Mistral, instead they covered it with the lie that he died in battle against the White Fang. By that point Neo was searching for Cinder with the purpose to kill her, and after that failed she moved on to do the same to Ruby. The only people that knew the secret were either with Ruby (and thus unlikely to mention it themselves), with Salem (with whom Neo barely spent more than a day with during volume 8) or Cinder herself (who barely cared about Lionheart as more than the means to an end). She probably thought that he was another person that was close to Ruby and died.
  • Not to mention Neo had connections to Lil' Miss Malachite who was second in influence over Mistral to Lionheart, so she could at least be aware of his abilities.
  • Alternatively, Neo knows all that and included Lionheart because it was Ruby's shot that broke his Aura (something that Neo could learn about from Emerald off-screen), both forcing him to flee to his study to be ambushed by Seer and making him extremely vulnerable to said Seer. Thus, Ruby actually did contribute to his death, though indirectly, and the fact she never really intended to, combined with Ozpin's recollection of what Leo used to be, had left a deeper mark than she would show, as usual.
  • The lack of information would also explain why there isn't any mention of facts that would definitely hurt Ruby (i.e. The information that Ruby told everyone to keep away from Ironwood back in volume 7) as well as the imperfections in the way her other illusions attack Ruby. The illusion closest to the real deal is Torchwick's due to him and Neo having spent so much time together, but the rest are all based off of what Neo knew about them, and accuracy isn't that crucial anyway when Ruby's in such a vulnerable state of mind.
  • This also explains why Clover just stands around doing nothing and has no lines of his own: Neo could possibly have learned of the Ace-Ops' initial alliance with team RWBY and Clover's death by Tyrian and Watts' reports to Salem, but she probably had no idea who he actually was, his relationship to Ruby or even his weapon: Neo just figured he was yet another ally who had died due to Ruby's actions, so she threw him in the mix.
  • Similarly, while Penny and Pyrrha's illusions fight much like the originals, Ozpin shows none of his fighting style's usual finesse and simply beats his cane down on Ruby like a club. Neo's most likely never seen him fight as she has with Pyrrha during the Tournament or Penny at Amity Tower, but since Ozpin's weapon is a cane like Torchwick's, she bases her illusion of him on how Torchwick would fight with his cane, brutal swings to vital areas and beating an opponent while they're down (not to mention she wants to make it as painful as possible for Ruby).
• Having Neo’s illusion of Ironwood deliver the following words to Ruby is incredibly ironic, considering both that they applied to him as much as, if not more than they do to Ruby, and that Neo herself was probably the most effective of Salem's henchmen in bringing Atlas down:
  Ironwood: And yet with all your "best intentions", had you ever stopped to wonder if you’d done more harm than good?!
• Considering how much of an Eldritch Location the Ever After is with team RWBY walking in circles without a guide and the native Little admitting they have no idea how to return home after walking too far away from it. It makes sense that the Brothers made the Curious Cat, who's role is to help Afterans Ascend is so Constantly Curious in order to prevent them from Ascending themselves and needing to re-learn themselves on how to navigate throughout the Ever After.
• The fact the key to entering the Tree is In-Universe Catharsis explains just why neither Jaune or Team RWBY could reach it before Episode 9. Team RWBY was still dealing with their hang ups, Yang and Blake's relationship and Ruby's mass of issues. Once they were done with the former, the latter kept them from being able to get to the tree until Ruby goes missing. But at that point, they're now travelling with Jaune and his own issues act as effectively the new barrier preventing Weiss, Blake, and Yang from reaching the tree. It's only once everyone in the group has their issues resolved and their new purpose decided (Getting Ruby back and leaving the Ever After) that the Tree finally lets them in.
  • It also makes sense given that the Tree itself and its affiliated deity are effectively the Ever After equivalent of therapy and renewal; a key aspect of the former is that it is very difficult to force a person to change or go into therapy, since there is no guarantee that they'll have actually internalized any of their need for help. A person can only truly change if they want to change.
• WBY and Jaune finally getting to the Tree in Episode 9 is the perfect parallel/metaphor to Salem's curse. Salem was made immortal by a higher power in the hopes of understanding the importance of life and death. Once she did, she would be free of the curse to join Ozma in the afterlife. But she refused to accept the cycle or admit her mistakes, barring her from the afterlife for eternity. In the Ever After, Ascension or escaping to Remnant is only permitted to those who accept the cycle of renewal and moving onward though life and death. While this is a natural belief for all Afterans, those who don't agree with this philosophy or only focus on escaping find themselves stuck in an Unnaturally Looping Location and denied access. The heroes making it shows they did the one thing that Salem can never do: accept that both life and death are precious gifts, that change is nothing to be afraid of, and not let their mistakes define them.
  • Alternatively, it's also a further demonstration of how much Salem is as much of a victim of the Brother Gods as everyone else despite being the Big Bad. She was condemned to never be able to move on because of her grief-stricken desire to see her lover again to a spiteful perversion of immortality. Of course she can't change or move on; her curse prevents her from ever doing so! Same also applies to Ozpin, since his version of Reincarnation is a perversion of ascension; being able to "reincarnate", but forever doomed to be a parasite that destroys his hosts' identity, effectively ensuring he can never be refreshed of his past mistakes and attempt anything new.
• Despite Ascending roughly an hour ago, the Paper Pleasers are reborn as the Genial Gems much faster than Herb is reborn, who took a whole day to figure out what he wanted to be. The Pleasers had years to figure out their next forms due to Jaune keeping them alive, which had the added bonus of giving them the time to figure out what material would make them the most resistant to outside elements that they were fragile to as paper. Meanwhile, Herb needed the Curious Cat to remind him of his purpose and realize he was due to Ascend, requiring extra time to sort through his issues and decide what adjustment would help him with his job.
• Ruby effortlessly goes toe-to-toe with the Curious Cat when the whole team struggled against them collectively. While it can be chalked to her Character Development, Ruby was shown to effortlessly slay Beowolves so something of similar stature wouldn't be a problem for her.
  • Not to mention, the Curious Cat has absolutely zero experience actually fighting anything. They barely contended with the Jabberwalkers for obvious reasons, and the only person they seem to have ever directly killed was a literal child who's only form of defense was a small dagger. Their explicit modus operandi is to manipulate someone into hopelessness, not fighting. Neocat was only able to hold their own against WBY and Jaune due to having Neo's semblance and skills, and once those are gone, they lost the only advantage they had.
  • Another note is that the Cat knows how the others fight (Jaune due to knowing him through Alyx, and WBY when they fought the Jabberwalker at the market). Ruby, however, didn't participate in any fights throughout the volume, so the Cat wasn't expecting any of her tricks.
  • There's also the likelihood that it's a simple issue of Ruby coming to the battle late, and therefor fresh. The Cat was actually holding its own fairly well against Blake, Weiss and Yang all at once, but fighting against three people at once would still take a told on its stamina. With Ruby showing up at the fight's tail-end, the Cat just didn't have enough left in the tank to do as well as it had beforehand.
• The revelations about the nature of the Tree and the true meaning of Ascension in the Volume's climax puts a lot of Ruby and Little meeting the Blacksmith in Chapter 5 into a whole new context:
  • Ruby was fresh off the heels of the Herbalist's Mushroom Samba that confirmed her deep depression about seeing herself as a failure and her Chronic Hero Syndrome. Herb using the Tree's leaves meant the Tree could directly communicate with Ruby and understand what is troubling her, but the Cat interrupting the hallucination meant the Tree could not help Ruby ascend sooner or provide further assistance. In the Garden Acre marketplace, the Blacksmith sought out Ruby to talk to her one-on-one and kickstart her eventual self evaluation, beginning with the Secret Test of Character about putting her burdens down to become someone else.
  • Little is very concerned about seeing the Blacksmith, nervously telling Ruby that they should not be there. All denizens of the Ever After are aware of the cycle of ascension, and that they meet with the Blacksmith to choose their new paths in their next life. Little had not found their actual purpose at that point, and had not finished their self-appointed purpose of getting Ruby home. They were not ready to ascend, and were likely afraid that Ruby might leave to ascend before she was ready as well.
• Weiss's pep talk to Jaune in Chapter 9 seemingly undermines the series wide message (that was particularly prevalent in this Volume) of moving forward by brushing off the heroes failure in Volume 8 as "we can't expect to be perfect"... except they already acknowledged their mistakes and flaws before they enacted their evacuation plan. Specifically, they mended fences with Ozpin, Emerald joined the group, and the plan itself was made with input from every ally they had in Atlas at the time, including experienced Huntsmen like Qrow, Winter and Robyn. In doing so, they acknowledged their limits and prior failures and ensured that the plan they came up with covered as many bases as possible. With this in mind, Weiss's comment isn't about not learning any lesson from it all, it's about making sure they remember the lessons they already learned in Atlas without stewing in their failures.
  • Related to this, Weiss' comment that even the greatest Huntsmen in history have lost could also apply to the fact that several of their allies at the time could fit that description, and were just as blindsided as RWBY and JNR by the intervention of Salem's faction.
  • Even if you make the most perfect, airtight plan, even if you do everything perfectly, luck is still a bitch. Even the most painstakingly thought-out plan can fall apart because of an element impossible to anticipate, even the most refined fighting style can fail because of random factors slowing you by a crucial split second. Those kinds of failures are extremely difficult to learn from, since you just can't anticipate random failures without becoming paranoid. So the point would be, yeah, even if we do everything right, we will might mess up, but that doesn't change anything. We still get back up and do our best again next time.
• Similarly to the above, the solution to Ruby's situation being "just be yourself" appears to clash hard with the aforementioned message, except in Ruby's case they aren't mutually exclusive. Ruby had a lifelong dream of becoming like her mother (or rather, like an idealized image of her mother mixed with heroes from stories), and though she wasn't always able to live to this high standards she always believed that one day, she will be, and recovered from her failures. What starts her downward spiral in the Atlas arc is not just doubting she'll ever be as good as Mom, but also the realization that even the supposedly flawless Summer was not "enough" to stop Salem, therefore it's all hopeless. The vision of Summer she has deconstructs the image of a perfect Huntress, showing Summer as a real person - just a really good fighter who knew fear, could get overconfident and reckless, would lie and keep secrets if she thought it was worth it, but also was kind, compassionate and determined... in other words, everything that Ruby herself already is, having reached her goal "to be like Mom" without knowing it, and arguably surpassing it if we remember Ruby's own feats. Now, to truly be herself and fully realize her potential, and to get the chance of stopping Salem, she has to set her own goals and keep moving forward to outgrow her mother, and to succeed where the latter failed.
• After it possesses Neo, the Curious Cat gives Jaune a pointed rant about how frustrating he is and how much it doesn't like him. Of course it wouldn't like Jaune. The Cat revealed to Ruby that it can possess someone from Remnant when they have completely broken down mentally. Jaune was probably a target for this but his own Determinator nature and the way Jaune deals with guilt, meant that he never fully gave up. So the Cat has been forced to watch Jaune stubbornly deny it the goal it wants for his entire stay in the Ever After despite hitting rock bottom twice.
• When deciding their name is Somewhat, they are described as 'a friend, a guide, a protector'. Somewhat has become someone who can replace the Cat as a Psychopomp while having a better foundation and stability, being said protector, guide, and friend, to help others reset, rather than one with a baseline desire of curiosity that can become destructive.
• The Volume shows a notable difference between the way Afterans and humans ascend. Any Afteran that wants to change their role in life or dies, whether it is by accident or on purpose, are automatically absorbed by the Tree to begin the process. However, the only way humans have been able to ascend is through manual induction. Ruby drank the spiked tea, Neo willingly jumped into the Tree branches, and the smoke from the burned leaves allowed the Tree to converse with the heroes to decide if they should ascend or stay as they are. We later learn that when the Cat killed Alyx, she did not ascend, as the Blacksmith confirmed her spirit moved on instead of reincarnating. It would make sense that the Tree would give their denizens a natural ability to ascend if they die. Meanwhile, humans were created by the Brother Gods, who abandoned the Ever After to create new worlds and inhabitants, likely never thinking about returning home. Why would they bother to design humans with the ability to ascend upon death in a world without the Tree?
• Ruby being able to choose to stay herself when Afterans are never described as doing so makes sense once the difference between humans and Afterans is considered: An Afteran is completely dedicated to their purpose, to the point where all of them (with a handful of notable exceptions) are named after their purpose. When their purpose is fulfilled or they simply aren't able to do it anymore, they Ascend to find a new purpose/continue doing it better. When they Ascend, although they lose their memories, that purpose remains. However, humans are much more multi-faceted, not having a defined purpose and being capable of growing and changing without the need for Ascension. Since their sense of self is quite different from that of a humans, they simply have no reason to reject being changed by the Tree like humans do.
  • This was actually alluded to in a previous version of the script for Of Solitude and Self, where the Ascended version of the Herbalist actually says this to Jaune in regards to the differences between humans and Afterans.
• The Brothers choosing Ozma as Remnant's uniter and savior greatly resembles ascension: Choosing someone to be reborn with a new purpose. However, like the rest of their methods, it is extremely flawed compared to the Tree's. First, they gave Ozma a monumental task with no way to quit or find reprieve, much like how they damned the Cat with impossible-to-sate curiosity. Second, they allowed him to keep his memories, leading him to reunite with Salem, sparking their centuries long conflict and forcing Ozma to deal with the draining misery of remembering all his past failures. Lastly, instead of creating a new body for him every time he dies, they designed it so he would be forcefully assimilated with a like-minded person, robbing innocent men on Remnant their autonomy and lives. Light and Dark are so inept and uncaring about their methods that their form of "ascension" misses its key components, leading to multiple lifetimes of constant pain and trauma for Ozma/Ozpin.
• The Grimm being drawn to and attacking sources of negative emotions makes more sense when one considers that they’re essentially the successors to the Jabberwalker. The Jabberwalker was made to deal with Afterans too troubled for the Curious Cat to fix, who logically would be suffering because of that, by eating them, and how could it be expected to do so without a way to find them?