Confessions Within Cumulonimbus Clouds
Written by Eddy Rivas
Directed by Yssa Badiola & Kerry Shawcross
Directed by Yssa Badiola & Kerry Shawcross
"I thought maybe I'd never see you again. But... I knew if I waited long enough, that you would fall. Just like I did."
— Jaune Arc
To continue their journey, someone must confront their problems...
Tropes in this episode include:
- Accidental Time Travel: Jaune wakes up on the beach and explores the forest, eventually finding a tree with a fruit resembling a giant pocket watch. Upon picking it from the tree, the watch's arms and the Ever After itself spin backwards in time. Jaune destroys the watch with his sheathed weapon to stop its motion, trapping him so far in the past that he actually meets Alyx and becomes a part of the very fairy tale he grew up reading.
- All for Nothing: Weiss believes the heroes' plan to rescue Atlas failed, since they intended to protect the Atlesians and the Relics but Salem got them anyway, while Ruby says everything's pointless if Salem destroys Remnant. According to Blake and Yang, saving the Atlesians counted for something.
- Art Shift: The story Jaune tells about Alyx and Lewis is rendered in 2D storybook style with minimal animation.
- Audience Surrogate: Jaune pretty much says what a lot of long-time viewers feel when he sees Yang and Blake's Big Damn Kiss, quipping "Feels like I've been waiting forever for that".
- The Big Damn Kiss: The punderstorm puts Blake and Yang into an emotional puzzle where they can only get across a rope bridge by confessing their unspoken feelings. When they do so, they end up on the central platform together and share their first kiss. This results in shining light, grass growing exceptionally fast and lily-like flowers bursting into bloom. After being freed from the storm, they're still kissing when returned to the rest of their companions. Jaune's only reaction is a rather dry "It feels like I've been waiting forever for that."
- Color Failure: The Curious Cat's colors dim upon being confronted by Team RWBY after Jaune informs them of what he thinks their intentions are.
- Death of Personality: This is what Jaune believes Ascension to be, as he says it just erasing who a person is and replacing with something else, flat out calling it "death".
- Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Weiss very much appreciates Jaune's older appearance as the Rusted Knight. Unfortunately, she purrs the word mature out loud earning odd and knowing looks from her teammates.
- Did You Think I Can't Feel?: The Curious Cat calls out Team RWBY and Jaune on using them for information to return home like Alyx. As they leave, they note the heroes know what not to do.
- Eating the Eye Candy: Weiss outright purrs over Jaune's maturity, as she gazes at him with appreciation. After realising her teammates are staring at her and Blake and Yang are openly amused, she begins blushing furiously and primly smoothes down her dress like nothing happened.
- Empathic Environment: Punderstorms trap people in a visualisation of whatever mental or emotional problem is assailing them. This forces Ruby and Weiss on a crossroads where they have to choose between traveling with Jaune or the Cat, and traps Blake and Yang on a precarious rope bridge where they have to confess their feelings for each other to reach safety. As Blake and Yang start kissing, the weather becomes sunlit and beautiful.
- Epiphanic Prison: Blake and Yang are trapped by the punderstorm on a half-broken suspension bridge until their Love Confession, when they are brought together on the central platform and kiss.
- Everyone Can See It: Like Nora and Weiss before him, Jaune is unsurprised by the sight of Blake and Yang kissing. He simply states he's been waiting forever for that, then turns around and continues leading them towards his village.
- Evolving Credits: After Jaune's reveal in the previous episode, this episode is the first to feature new visuals of an un-masked Jaune standing in flames where previously the anonymous Rusted Knight stood.
- Failure Knight: After killing Penny and feeling like he's failed the Atlesians, Jaune believes he was ruining the original story of Alyx. He desperately tried and, he believes, failed to fix the story, and says he can't even be a make-believe hero.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: During Jaune's montage of him waiting for Team RWBY to fall into the Ever After like he did, he sees and reaches out towards two blue-shaded falling stars in the night sky. The rest of the episode deals with Jaune's experiences with Alyx and Lewis and how he handles the Cat's presence with Team RWBY as a result of that experience. In a longer case of foreshadowing, the two blue comet streaks have been in every opening since the first episode.
- Foot Popping: As Blake and Yang kiss, Blake pops her foot in response.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- A mirror very briefly shows a reflection of Summer Rose when Ruby comes out of a door.
- As the scene transitions from Alyx poisoning Jaune to the present day, the Curious Cat's eyes appear in the corner, watching.
- I Will Wait for You: Rather than try to escape himself, Jaune waited for Team RWBY even as he grew older. He didn't even leave the beach acre until Alyx and Lewis showed up. After finally reuniting with the team, he is unsure if they're real or not, and cries when they hug him.
- Internal Reveal: Since Jaune was the very last one to fall, he tells Team RWBY Cinder managed to take both of the Relics from them.
- Interspecies Romance: Blake and Yang finally form one, with Blake being a Faunus and Yang being a human, the two admit their love for each other and the two share their first kiss, becoming an Official Couple.
- It's All My Fault: Jaune initially blames himself for Alyx's presence in the Ever After not matching her story. Later, he seems to place more blame on Alyx herself and the Curious Cat.
- Knight in Sour Armor: Depressed by his loneliness in the Ever After and his time with Alyx, Jaune's sometimes a little impatient or dismissive of Team RWBY's rawer emotions or confusion with the realm they're in. Even when he realises the Cat is involved, his tone becomes clipped rather than overly emotional.
- Lack of Empathy: According to Jaune, Alyx was selfish and treated everything around her with a lack of seriousness like she was playing a game. After visiting the Herbalist, she becomes ruthless and treacherous in her desire to go home, attempting to kill Jaune, betraying the Curious Cat, and possibly sacrificing Lewis to do so.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After Jaune, Ruby, and Weiss catch Blake and Yang kissing, Jaune resumes the Audience Surrogate role he had in the first few volumes to state "Feels like I've been waiting forever for that."
- Likes Older Men: Weiss becomes attracted to Jaune's older, more rugged "maturity" in stark contrast to her "tall, blond and scraggly" first impression of the 17-year-old Jaune.
- Literal Metaphor: While caught in a punderstorm, metaphors, analogies, and colloquialisms become fact, and those caught in it must either resolve their personal issues or wait for the storm to pass. For Ruby and Weiss, this takes the effect of having them at a literal crossroads where they have to choose between following Jaune or the Curious Cat, while for Blake and Yang, it leaves them on two rickety bridges that they have to build up by expressing their true feelings for one another, literally taking "the next step" in their relationship, culminating in their sudden appearance on the platform after their Love Confession. Weiss discovers the effect for herself after calling the Ever After "the pits", which causes an actual pit to drop and deposit her to where she started.
- Loss of Identity: Jaune knows about Ascension, though he sounds more bitter about it because Alyx's brother Lewis was seemingly put through it. According to him, Ascension is performed by the World Tree that Team RWBY has been attempting to reach since they've arrived, and it's the Curious Cat's role to give people over to it should they no longer perform their roles.
- Love Confession: Amidst the punderstorm, Blake and Yang have to admit their true feelings to each other in order to reach safety on a platform between two rickety bridges. After a number of confessions building up to it, they finally profess their love, and are reunited on the platform to happily kiss.
- Luminescent Blush:
- Weiss blushes brightly when she's caught gushing over Jaune's older form.
- Blake and Yang both blush as they make various confessions to build the bridge, and especially when they find themselves on the platform, having just professed their love for each other.
- Magic Mirror: When the protagonists are caught in the punderstorm and Ruby, Weiss, Jaune, and Juniper are in a manifestation of a metaphorical and literal crossroads, they walk by mirrors that show reflections of things from their past that trouble them. For Jaune, it's Penny and his younger self; for Weiss, it's the destruction of Atlas; for Ruby, it's her mother, Summer.
- Mood Whiplash: After the tense and bittersweet discussion with the Curious Cat, the punderstorm ends, and Ruby, Weiss, and Jaune go from conflicted and uneasy to humorously shocked when they see an oblivious Blake and Yang still locked in The Big Damn Kiss.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Jaune tries helping Alyx and Lewis travel to the tree so they can return to Remnant in the manner of his childhood story. However, they end up in places the story never mentions and Alyx's a nastier person in reality than depicted in the story. Upon meeting the Herbalist, she becomes distrustful and paranoid. Despite his attempts to help them complete the story and leave, she poisons and abandons him, with Lewis and the Cat in tow.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Team RWBY accuses the Cat of using him for information, prompting them to say both Team RWBY and Alyx used them for the same.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Jaune found Crescent Rose long ago and has been looking after it in the hopes of giving it back to Ruby one day. Although she loves the weapon, all Ruby can do upon reuniting with Crescent Rose is grudgingly thank Jaune and close the weapon's case.
- Official Couple: Having confessed their love in the punderstorm, Blake and Yang officially become a couple by the episode's end.
- Queer Colors: As Yang and Blake share their long awaited Big Damn Kiss, the sky behind them takes on a gradient between their colors of purple and yellow, causing it to resemble a rotated version of the lesbian pride flag.
- Queer Flowers: Following Blake and Yang's Love Confession, white flowers begin blooming around them which look extremely similar to lilies. Theses fantasy flowers play the role of the lily as a symbol of sapphic love in the Japanese yuri ("girls' love") genre.
- Relationship Upgrade: After years of being friends, with increasingly frequent hints of deeper feelings, Blake and Yang admit their love for each other and quite literally take the next step in their relationship together as a romantic couple.
- The Reveal: Jaune arrives in the Ever After last, but inadvertently travels back in time to years before they fall. He thus ends up becoming Alyx's Rusted Knight in the fairy story they all grew up reading. It allows him to reveal to Team RWBY and the viewers how much of the fairy story is a lie, what Alyx was really like and she had a brother who is written out of the story.
- Sanity Slippage: In the episode, after hearing Jaune's understanding of the Cat and their role in the Ever After, Ruby and Weiss accuse them of manipulation, but the Cat suggests Jaune's no longer of sound mind. Jaune growls in response, but doesn't outright deny it. The mirror he's standing beside, which reflects the regrets and traumas of those who look into it, changes to show his younger self, suggesting that the Cat isn't entirely incorrect and that Jaune is dealing with some deep trauma from his long solitude and lost youth, further exacerbated by the issues he had before falling into the Ever After and his betrayal and near-fatal poisoning by Alyx, the only other humans he'd seen for years; it is implied earlier in the episode that he may have started to have hallucinations of Team RWBY being there with him over the years. Regardless, Ruby isn't distracted from insisting on straight answers from the Cat.
- Seen It All: Having been in the Ever After for years from his perspective, nothing Jaune sees there fazes him anymore. He depressingly tells Ruby and Weiss what the punderstorm is once it hits; he also takes a few levels in snarkiness.(rolling eyes on finding that Blake and Yang aren't with them): Must have had something bigger to work out.
(on Ruby and Weiss facing the road fork to trust either him or the Curious Cat): Y'know this would go quicker if you make up your minds~!
(concluding his recounting of his experiences with Alyx): So. Not exactly my favorite story anymore. - Shipper on Deck: Both Jaune and Weiss are pleasantly surprised to see Blake and Yang in a romantic embrace.
- Shout-Out: Lewis is named after Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, the overall inspirations for this volume.
- The Slow Path: Jaune accidentally touches a fruit which sends him back in time, and waits many years for Team RWBY to fall into the Ever After. During his wait, he runs into Alyx and her brother Lewis, thereby becoming part of the fairy tale he read as a child.
- The Sociopath: According to Jaune, Alyx was "selfish, cruel" and grew worse over the course of the journey. She poisoned Jaune and the latter believes she sacrificed her own brother to get back home.
- Stable Time Loop: After Jaune's sent back in time in Ever After, he meets Alyx and her brother Lewis. Jaune realises he's in Alyx's story as the Rusted Knight, but there seem to be differences, such as her cruel personality and Lewis' existence. When Alyx's behavior deteriorates further upon meeting the Herbalist, Jaune unsuccessfully tries getting the story back on track. A paranoid Alyx poisons him and leaves him with Lewis, declaring she won't let anyone stop her from leaving. Although he originally feared he had inadvertantly changed the story, by the time he reunites with Team RWBY, he's come to believe she lied in its telling.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: In the flashback, Alyx is shown giving Jaune a bowl of poison-laced soup, nearly killing him, as Jaune ironically quotes from the fairy tale that "the Rusted Knight drank the poison in her stead".
- Tears of Joy: As Team RWBY confirms that yes, they're not hallucinations and subsequently move in to embrace him, Jaune's eyes well up with unshed tears.
- Took a Level in Cynic: Years alone in the Ever After, as well as his time with, and subsequent betrayal and poisoning by, Alyx, have left Jaune far more bitter and subdued than when Team RWBY saw him last. He frequently has depressed reactions to the unexpected and believes the worst about the motives of Alyx, the Cat and the Tree itself.
- Tranquil Fury: Team RWBY's mention of "the cat" prompts a furious Jaune to quietly say "What... cat?". Jaune's frustrated by his frequent interactions with the Cat, but he rarely expresses it as anything more than clipped tones, slightly widened or narrowed eyes, and the occasional growl.
- Un-person: Lewis is never mentioned in the fairy tale. Jaune believes that Alyx lied during the writing of the tale to hide the fact she sacrificed him to the tree in order to escape back home to Remnant.
- Unreliable Expositor:
- The fairy tale is supposed to have been written by Alyx about her experiences in the Ever After, and how she learned to become a better person. According to Jaune, Alyx became more selfish and cruel, sacrificed her brother's life to secure her own return home, and omitted him from her story to make herself look better.
- The Curious Cat snidely accuses Jaune of being this towards them, framing their aid as being more malicious and intentionally deceitful than it really is, out of his distrust towards them regarding the previous outing with Alex and the Cat's role in helping people 'Ascend'. Notably, when the Cat implies that his attitude towards them is partially due to Sanity Slippage from the long time he's spent alone and his lost years in the Ever After, Jaune doesn't outright deny it, implying that he does have some issues he's covering up.
- Visual Pun: The punderstorm transforms mental and emotional problems into physical puzzles for people to solve.
- Weird Weather: The punderstorm is a thunderstorm that creates visual puns and physical representations of emotional or mental problems the people caught in it are suffering from. The only way out of such storms is to solve the problem or wait for the storm to pass. When the Cat mentions a crossroads, the punderstorm transforms into a Portal Crossroad World that forces Ruby and Weiss to choose between Jaune and the Cat; Blake and Yang find themselves on two swinging bridges that bring them closer together as they admit their feelings.
- We Used to Be Friends: Jaune and the Curious Cat were both part of Alyx's group. Lewis' unknown fate, however, leaves Jaune frustrated with the Cat and believing they had planned the whole thing to give people to the tree. When they meet again he has to be stopped from stabbing the Cat. According to the Cat, humans just use them for information only to betray them in the end; they stop helping them and let them figure out their situation personally.
"We've been following the story this whole time, and it's not even true?!"
— Weiss Schnee
