"Storytellers hold great power over their audiences."
"Our world has a long history, and a mysterious past. While we may not have the answers we desire, we do have stories; stories of horror and heroism — stories that reveal more than we know. And, no matter our past, or our future, one thing is certain: it is stories that will endure."
— Professor Ozpin
RWBY: Fairy Tales is an animated work by Rooster Teeth that began airing on the 30th October 2021 for FIRST members and the 31st October 2021 for the general public.
An animated retelling of the defictionalised book RWBY: Fairy Tales of Remnant, the series explores some of Remnant's fairy tales. An expansion of the original web animation RWBY, these are stories that inspire, teach, and hold clues to the secret history of Remnant.
Tropes pertaining to individual fairy tales are troped on the RWBY: Remnant page.
Previews: Trailer
Fairy Tales contains examples of:
- Allegory Adventure: "The Warrior in the Woods" is retold by Tai as a bedtime story to his daughters. In it, the boy resembles Tai, and the warrior looks somewhat like a cross between Raven and Summer. She says she'll only save the boy once like Raven does, and she disappears mysteriously at the end like Summer did, leaving the boy to protect the village alone like Tai was left to raise his daughters alone. While Tai doesn't change anything major in the actual story, the way he's crying at the end heavily implies that he relates to the boy.
- Blunt "Yes": In "The Shallow Sea", the new Faunus being ostracised by the Human villages some of them were native to causes one ex-Human to wonder out loud "Were we so narrow-minded when we were Human?" It's a rhetorical question, but an ex-Animal Faunus declares "Yes" with simple, brutal honesty.
- Character Narrator:
- The series is based on RWBY: Fairy Tales of Remnant, which is a defictionalised book of fairytales collated by Professor Ozpin, and filled with his notes and personal thoughts of each tale. Both the trailer and the first five episodes are narrated by Ozpin, who is shown at the end of the fifth episode with the notebook that once belonged to the Hunter, and the Hunter's youngest daughter after his death.
- The sixth episode is narrated by Taiyang, in the form of a bedtime story being read to his daughters, Yang and Ruby. The episode deviates from the original story in the book by making the boy look like Taiyang, and making the girl look very similar to Ruby, while also having elements of Taiyang's two wives.
- Horned Humanoid: The trailer introduces the appearance of the god of the Faunus, a humanoid being created from a composite of different animals. On top of its goat-like head are four different sets of horns: palmate antlers like certain species of deer, horns that curl back like goat-antelopes, huge horizontal spiral horns like certain types of bovine, and smaller angled black horns.
- Human-to-Werewolf Footprints: Episode 3 about the two Faunus origin stories, and opens with The Shallow Sea. The first scene follows a line of footprints in the sand from the water's edge, showing the transformation from human footprints into paw prints. This is a visual summary of how the Shallow Sea transformed humans into the first Faunus.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler:
- The trailer is targeting an audience that has already watched the main show. As a result, it spoils the origin story of the show's Big Bad, where it's a plot-significant secret until revealed with great drama in Volume 6.
- It's heavily hinted in the book that the Hunter from "The Hunter's Children" is one of Ozpin's previous incarnations. The trailer gives this away by showing both the Hunter's personal symbol and the same symbol on the notebook Ozpin holds in his hands. In the series, "The Hunter's Children" doesn't create an overt connection between the Hunter and Ozpin, leaving that to be revealed by the symbol on the notebook when it's shown at the end of the fifth episode.
- Meaningful Echo: Professor Ozpin opens the trailer with the main show's thematic phrase "What is your favourite fairy tale?"; it sets the tone for the trailer as advertising a show about fairy tales, but acts as an anchor to the main show, where this phrase symbolises how Remnant's fairy tales contain plot-heavy clues to the secret history of Remnant.
"We must read with some skepticism, and decide the truth for ourselves — because, in real life, there is no happily ever after."
