YMMV / Arc Royale

• Complete Monster: Adam Taurus willingly serves Salem's goals despite knowing that her victory would end the world. Upon being Anchored to Revolutionary, Adam brutally tortures him just for being human, leaving him dehydrated and malnourished while regularly beating him. Rejecting Blake's attempts to redeem him while acknowledging that his victory will also kill every Faunus on Remnant, Adam throws away the lives of his soldiers against Knight and Atlas, uncaring of their deaths as long as he gets to satisfy his personal grudges. When he later kills Magnis, even the Adam inside Revolutionary's head fights him to the death out of pure disgust for his selfishness.
• Fridge Brilliance: Salem, during the scenes where she appears personally, seems more visibly angry and short-tempered than her appearances in canon, and in some of Coeur Al'Aran's other works. Considering how she's thousands of years old with Complete Immortality, and therefore perfectly used to playing the long game in her and Ozma's eternal war when she needs to, it's easy to imagine that with the Brother Gods having changed the game by introducing the Jaune iterations, Salem during the fic is feeling overwhelmingly stressed and pressured now that her aforementioned temporal advantage has been abruptly taken away from her and she's on an extremely (by immortal standards) narrow deadline to win or lose the war altogether by ensuring it's a Jaune on her side that's the last one standing. Getting too used to working in one's own time and having all the time in the world can be a handicap in its own right, and when one loses that freedom, they feel stressed and pressured.
• Fridge Horror: The fic confirms that the mythos expansion concerning the Creatures of Grimm's sentience in White Sheep (Grimm!Jaune's native universe)^note which is that the Remnant-wide conception of Grimm as mindless entities driven solely by programming to destroy anything human is in fact a misconception; in actuality, most species of Grimm, though instinctively aggravated by exposure to humans' negative emotions into lashing out, are otherwise sentient and social animals with a full emotional range, whom are mainly so hostile to human civilzation at large because of Salem's influence also applies to the "playing field" universe in which this fic is set. This implies that it applies to most of the alternate universes in Coeur Al'Aran's multiverse, which makes the universes where there isn't a mutual peace between humanity and the Grimm, and where humans go on living with the conception that the Grimm are a mindless, evil force, that much more horrifying, especially in universes where Salem's influence over the Grimm ceases and humanity becomes the dominant force (Relic of the Future, Knight of Salem). Generally, it makes any time that the characters kill or cut through Grimm in any of Coeur's other works seem that little bit more unsettling.
• I Knew It!: Chapter 28 confirmed the suspicions of everyone who guessed that Fate has been sandbagging, as well as distancing himself from everyone on his side, so that he’ll be able to kill anyone he has to in order to win the prize for himself.
• Jerkass Woobie: Fate, just like in his home story, is an unapologetic jackass to everyone he meets, especially his own younger self, but he's carrying an astronomical amount of trauma that literally no one could ever possibly endure or understand. Despite his best efforts, he can't help but let down his walls around his friends, revealing just how broken he is inside and how desperate he is for his life to be over already. To the point of accentuating his abrasive traits as he’s been carefully planning to win on his own terms, even if he has to kill versions of his friends to ultimately accomplish it.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Jaune Ashari keeps his head down and focuses on redeeming his daughter Emerald once more, managing to defeat Teams RWBY and JNPR literally singlehandedly and being the only person to ever scratch Knight. His death protecting Emerald then motivates her to kill Cinder in his name, completing her redemption.
  • Jaune "Xiong" Arc proves himself to be one of the most dangerous threats to both sides of the war despite his lack of combat prowess. An information broker who can reach even into General Ironwood's circle of trust, Xiong forces the heroes to let him stay neutral by threatening to expose the war and incite mass panic, later secretly aligning with Headmaster Arc to weaken both sides. After giving Cinder's location to the heroes, Xiong takes advantage of their distraction to kill all of the Xiong Clan's enemies, making them more powerful than ever before; later on, he uses his new empire to cause a citywide blackout as part of Headmaster's plan. When Cinder gets to Amber's life support pod, Xiong reveals that his true motivation in the war wasn't the wish, it was to get revenge for what Cinder did to him in his homeworld; to that end, he took Amber to the Malachite twins, ensuring that when she inevitably dies, one of them will get the power instead of Cinder. When she kills him, he laughs in her face, having accomplished everything he set out to do during his time in the new world.
• Tear Jerker:
  • When we first see the Jaune from A Rabbit Among Wolves, we find out that he was bonded to Adam Taurus - the vicious, human-hating monster. He's already in terrible shape due to a lack of consistent food and water while being locked in a cage, and even the Adam inside Jaune's head is apparently shaken enough to apologize for his counterpart's actions. What only makes this even worse is that at the time of publishing, the last time we'd seen him in his home setting, he'd just been shot at the Vytal Festival, and he confirms later that he lived through that point of his story already.
    Inside the cell, Jaune Arc stared down at the broken fragments of a white mask that had once adorned his face and smiled bitterly. Inside his head, an oft-obnoxious voice remained sullenly quiet, only uttering the shortest, and smallest, of apologies.
    "It's alright," he croaked. "He's not you…"
    Silence was the only answer.
  • Leviathan’s death. Not only is it already tragic that he has to be put down by his own side once his mere presence proves to be a threat, but it’s even worse when you remember why he was so desperate to win: it was his only escape from an eternity of complete isolation in the Grimm World, so he’s been sent back to a life of pure solitude.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The story begins with the unexpected news that Team CFVY are going to be involved with the game due to Velvet being Barista's Anchor, as Team CFVY are not common characters in Coeur's fics that are based around canon (besides Velvet being a main character in Service with a Smile). Unfortunately, they get very little time to themselves due to Barista sitting out the actual battles, and once he's killed, they vanish into the background without actually accomplishing anything. They come back in the last chapter after the fighting has passed, but that's pretty much it, so there's no real payoff to their involvement with the game.
  • A few of Jaune’s iterations are short-served (mostly deliberately, to emphasise Anyone Can Die), but this is best felt with Ghost!Jaune; his already being dead when he arrives due to being dead in his own world could have been a Bait-and-Switch for the revelation that like at the end of his story he’d possessed Amber’s body, making for a fun turnaround in the conflict. Instead he’s just immediately dead, with his presence contributing nothing beyond the story’s critiquing the Brother Gods and their Immortal Immaturity — something the story still does with other characters and arcs in far superior ways — and ends up feeling like a pointless joke in the grand scheme of things.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Jaune is implicitly introduced as a corpse, due in no small part to it being established early on that dead Jaunes dissolve into motes of light pretty much immediately. It happens explicitly to Stress Relief Jaune and implicitly happens to Entertainer Jaune (where the non-existent body is made a big point). Having an actual corpse appear and persist seems like a big deal. Having it persist in Amber's proximity is an even bigger deal. The fact that the subsequent deaths are folks like Grimm (who would, theoretically, dissolve like a Grimm), Knight (who uses enough RPG rules that corpse-persistence might not be a thing in this world), and Barista (who was caught point-blank by an IED and said to be functionally disintegrated [issues with that aside]) seems like it would be significant. Instead, it doesn't matter. Bodies only start disappearing when they're offscreen and no longer relevant.
• The Woobie:
  • The original Jaune. His canon self-confidence issues were already crippling enough, but now he's surrounded by both better and worse versions of himself, seeming to show him the various lows he could reach and the highs he will never see. Fate only continues to make this worse by belittling him as worthless every chance he gets before easily kicking his ass in a spar, giving him firsthand proof of just how useless he is in the ways that matter.
  • Revolutionary Jaune goes through absolute hell before Beacon's forces rescue him, and based on when he comes from in the timeline of his home story, he's gone through hell there as well, having survived an assassination attempt. By the time he's rescued, he can barely speak without needing to catch up on hydration and desperately needs medical attention from the torture Adam gave him.
  • Emerald is the Jerkass Woobie version for much of the story; she’s antagonistic towards Ashari due to her Undying Loyalty towards Cinder, which his dissatisfaction with takes Emm out of her favour, but she’s ultimately desperate to be loved by the one person who saved her from her prior life. Ashari, knowing his own daughter could have become this from experience, takes this and more to protect her and give her a chance to survive and better herself outside of Cinder’s influence. When her iteration loses an arm defending her in the same battle Mercury dies, she’s left conflicted and distraught by both events. This culminates in Cinder having Null shoot her, knowing that even if Ashari had failed in Taking the Bullet she’d have eliminated him as an opponent, ultimately leaving Emerald mourning over the corpse of the one person to have truly loved her despite her treatment of him.

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