RWBY General Discussion

Wouldn't be a first for RWBY. And yeah, going by what we were shown, Salem's request was understandable, especially by the metric that Ozma was in love with her and still thinking of the Salem he knew, not the Salem in front of him.

I mean, that's still a mistake on his part. An understandable one, but one none the less.

Monty must have had a different idea in mind, because as it stands now its' a tad oversold.

With how many lives he has lived, there is still plenty of room for him to make mistakes, such as trusting the wrong people or accidently leading people to their death.

There's also "multiple lifetimes worth of attempts to set things right and failing" to fall back on as 'mistakes' that were made.

Hell I got zipped.

On a side note I feel too many are stuck on wanting the good guys to be secretly bad and the bad guys to be in the end good. Given the HEAVY fairy tale motifs running around the show in all honesty how likely is it to happen?

Edited by CryoJNik on Nov 20th 2018 at 2:33:02 AM

It's a mistake, but not such a serious one that he'd be willing to tackle Ruby to keep it from being found out. Certainly nothing so serious as to justify all that secrecy and expectation that the show put on.

True.

Yeah, that's a good point. Oz was so desperate to hide this that he resorted to physical violence to try and protect the secret from Ruby.

That's weird.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 20th 2018 at 4:20:48 AM

And then everyone is like 'THIS IS ALMOST AS BAD AS THE BIRDS'

Like, the only part of that that is really bad is that he has no plan to beat Salem, but what the fuck can he do about it? And like, even if they didn't know, or Oz didn't recruit them, Salem would still be out there being immortal trying to destroy humanity. How would that be better for them?

Something I noticed if that Salem kept saying "these humans". I wonder if that's because she no longer considers herself human, or if she's making a distinction between herself, the last of old humanity, and new humanity which she considers beneath what used to be.

Oz wasn't going to physically attack Ruby, he was reaching for the Relic to stop her from asking.

Also we know when the Maidens came up as an idea. Monty came up with them after V2 and insisted on there inclusion. M/K did it and kept it to honor him after he passed and thats why there was no foreshadowing for them beforehand.

And the Brothers were the first major contribution to the story Miles ever made after he was brought on in the wayyy early days, he said so himself.

I mean at the end of the day he still hid that fact them.Can't really say I wouldn't be pissed about that.

As for the rest,I think its more do to personal shame.People tend not to want their secrets to be played bear for other people to watch.

Edited by DeanCole on Nov 20th 2018 at 3:44:40 AM

I thought they said the maidens were created to fix a plot hole they had (presumably, they needed a reason the villains couldn't obtain Lionheart's relic)

" RNJR decides to walk to Haven until they're airlifted most of the way, Yang angsts a bit over whether she deserves her arm then goes right ahead, Blake goes home and does nothing at all. "

Because volume 4 at least try something, you can see the ideas: Yang try to resemble herself, Weiss finally stucking to her father and RNJR aventure was cool, we know more about the world and the grimm was cool.

Now about monty note...I will said the backstory feel in fact pretty much Monty original draft with almost not changes: you can see how the grimm play not part AT ALL or how the moon broke, and explanation is show but...it feel very matter or fact, as it was just wrote in a early draft and let there.

In fact a moment it feel revised and you can tell is Ozpin and is sons since they are conect with the maidens.

Plus in that specific instance the "most of the way" was the walk. They were only airlifted the final step and as a direct result of their victory over the Nucklevee.

So, as regards Oz not telling everyone about this, here's a question. I, uh, I've been watching a lot of The Good Place recently.

So, the way the deal works is that when the Brothers are summoned back to the world, they will weigh humanity and determine whether to exterminate us for good or come back and live among us once more.

Let's say Oz doesn't keep his secrets and goes around explaining himself to everyone. He tells his story, publicizes it, and makes the whole world aware of the fate that awaits them. Cool.

How does that influence the final accounting? What happens if the Brothers come back to judge the world and humankind is pretending to get along just to get a slice of that sweet, sweet moral dessert? We haven't truly learned to cooperate and coexist, but are totes willing to fake it for the prize - essentially trying to defraud the Brothers.

What judgment do you think they would pass down?

Meanwhile, with Raven Branwen: https://imgur.com/a/gaH57FE

I feel like this is more accurate, especially the chorus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roPQ_M3yJTA

Brilliant!

That seems like a very Abrahamic way of thinking; I don't think the brothers, whose reward, remember, is setting up shop smack-dab in the middle of the physical plane, would be too bothered if we were only doing it for their sake.

Besides, to get to that point, all of humanity would have to be on board, and that's an achievement in its own right. Sure, if the relics were sure to come together, and everyone believed it, and believed in the consequences, it'd be a choice between unity and extinction (hell, that may be Salem's endgame), but plenty of interests will reject unity in favor of devastation - that's every single war. Every existing dispute would become a game of cosmic chicken, and it's not hard to believe someone'd go over.

Absolute best case scenario is that Oz is decried a nutcase and disgraced. As Ozpin, he'd probably be forced to relinquish control of Beacon as a Headmaster on top of that (assuming Vale Council has such power).

Worst case scenario, people start actively searching for Relics and sooner or later some intrepid treasure hunter gathers all four before Oz can put together the vaults to safekeep them. That only happened 80 years ago, mind you. Gods come in prematurely, see whatever petty warlord grabbed all four relics at the end and promptly destroy Remnant.

Edited by FergardStratoavis on Nov 21st 2018 at 6:51:56 PM

Blegh. Scrap this. For some reason this didn't want to be sent when i wanted it sent

Edited by CryoJNik on Nov 21st 2018 at 10:30:08 AM

Yes. I want the answer to that question, too.

That was my point.

It seems fairly self-explanatory to me. Salem was told that her immortality would last for 'as long as the world keeps turning'. Now the gods have promised to stop the world from turning (destroy it) if they're summoned back to a world full of divided, in-fighting humans. She's finally got the get-out clause to this immortality that she can't end through either mortal or supernatural means.

It sucks for humanity that the only way she can commit suicide is by destroying the entire world but, from her point of view, it's the only option she's got left that she can try. And if she makes Ozma suffer and feel like a failure in the process, that's just the cherry on the top.

Of course, it would be better for everyone if she just learned her lesson because that would end her immortality without anyone having to die. But, unfortunately for the world, she's not very good at admitting she makes mistakes (unlike Ozma, who seems to determined to blame himself for mistakes made by him, her and the gods).

I think the biggest one for Team RWBY right now, especially in light of what Raven said to Yang and Weiss (who have been the most notably intolerant of Ozpin's secrecy, which suggests Raven's words did have a strong impact on both of them), is what on earth is Ozpin trying to achieve, if he knows that Salem cannot be destroyed. Why is he putting people in danger, getting people to fight, against a threat he knows cannot be stopped? And why is he doing this over and over, lifetime after lifetime, if there's no hope for an outcome other than the deaths of everyone who fights against Salem — including his own hosts?

Does he even have a plan? Or is he just pretending to have one and getting people killed for nothing?

That, I think, is the big in-universe issue, and is pretty much the position Raven appears to have taken on the matter. Look what happens when Ozma collapses in front of Jinn when her answer is 'You can't' — Ruby, Weiss and Blake all have expressions that go from shock at Jinn's statement, to empathy as Ozma collapses to his knees in horror. But that isn't Yang's reaction. She goes from shock at Jinn's statement, to squeezing her eyes shut, gritting her teeth, clenching her fists, and looking like she's about to turn volcanic. Unlike the other three, she doesn't witness or respond to how Ozma has taken the news. Yang's rage is, I think, very much going to be 'Mum was actually right all along'.

And if that's Yang's reaction, imagine how Jaune is going to react given how he feels about Pyrrha's death. We know he's got unresolved issues regarding Pyrrha and the Fall Maiden offer that he's been bottling for now. I don't think they're going to stay bottled when JNPR gets the catch-up talk.

So, this, I think, is where Ozpin's mistakes become very important: what kind of plan does he have if he believes that Salem cannot be destroyed, and how many people are dying while he tries to figure out one tactic after another and another and another to discover something that sticks?

No. That's my theory.

What they said was that the Monty came up with the Maidens betwen V2 and V3. However, while they did have to rearrange the story planned for V3, they didn't have to tweak very much of the plot to add them in.

I theorised that this might mean that they had a plot hole in the original storyline that gets fixed by adding in the Maidens. Otherwise, the story wouldn't be so easy to 'tweak' just to fit them into both V3 and the wider plotline. They did come across as thinking that the story itself barely changed by adding the Maidens. V3 needed the most tweaking, purely because they'd already decided what was going into the volume by the time they settled on adding in the Maidens. However, the impression I got was that even V3 didn't need that much tweaking to fit the Maidens in.

I've put this at the bottom of my post, even though it's out-of-sync in terms of post timelines.

Taking what I saw in interviews while Monty was still alive:

• Monty claimed he was terrible at writing stories, he just wanted cool animation scenes, so Miles and Kerry took the story while he took the animation.
• Monty would often say that the way he imagined the story unfolding would sometimes fall apart when he tried to animate it, and discover that what he'd originally imagined was going to look absolutely crap — so they were often rewriting and reanimating things that deviated from the original story because sometimes, things look better in your head than on paper. The reverse was also true — sometimes something that seemed absolutely crap turned out to be awesome when animated. So, the story sometimes got rejigged based on these factors.
• The story plotted out long before he died, mostly with Kerry. Miles came on board a little bit later, but became well-versed in the plotting as well. His earliest contribution was to come up with the Two Brothers. So we know the God of Light and God of Darkness have been part of the plotting from an early stage.
• Monty was very adamant from the beginning that we should not view Dust and Semblances as magic, and that they should not be conflated with magic.
• Monty said that religion did exist on Remnant and would become much more important as the show went on.
• Monty even had post-story stories noted down (stories for after this story was over, when the kids were adults, just in case the show was popular enough to keep going after the main story finished).
• He had a habit of spilling the entire story, start to end, to anyone who would listen during late night talk/coffee binges.
• Once the story started being animated, they had a tendency of rejigging the order of the story — so something that were supposed to happen much later were brought forward to Volume 1 and some things that were supposed to happen early were pushed back to later volumes.
• Roman was intended to be a starter villain, a one-off. The creators liked the voice actor so much that they wanted to do more with him, and the fans took to Roman so well, that they decided to run with it. Room was therefore made in V1 for Roman to be given an expanded role.
• Ozpin was the single most well-developed and detailed character; right from the very beginning, they knew exactly what was going on with him and his back story. The story developed around that.
• Monty had extremely strong opinions on exactly how Ozpin's first on-screen fight should be shown from very early on.
• We haven't seen Ozpin's weapon.
• Shannon McCormick made a throw-away comment once to Monty and the writers about Ozpin. He was quite vague on what, but whatever it was, the creators told him they thought hard about it and decided to add it. What that addition to Ozpin was, Shannon never said (because spoilers). He just mentioned it because he couldn't believe they decided to run with it. Monty was involved in this decision.
• The Maidens were created by Monty between Volume 2 and Volume 3. Although V3 had to be tweaked to accommodate the existence of the Maidens, the plot as a whole didn't need to be changed much at all. (My opinion only, but it sounds like the original plot had some kind of issue and inventing the Maidens solved that issue which is the plot didn't need much tweaking to bring them into the story).

All of the above was information given to us in various interviews while Monty was alive — most of this information either came from Monty interviews, or interviews with Monty, Miles and Kerry.

We'll never know how much of what we've seen since Monty's death is what he would have signed off on, but judging by the way the structure and order of the planned story would get rejigged and rearranged even when Monty was alive, there's absolutely no guarantee that what he initially envisaged would end up being what we see, even if he had still been alive. It's a point worth considering because it's a point the fandom often forgets.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 21st 2018 at 11:51:49 AM

I think the plot issue in question was "Why doesn't Salem's team already have the relic of knowledge given their control of Lionheart?" The addition of the maiden's fixes this, because without the Spring Maiden they can't open the vault.

Given how upset they were with Salem manipulating them over Ozma's death? They will declare humanity irredeemable and destroy the world, exactly as promised.

If there was a plot issue. They never claimed there was. That was only my interpretation.

I want to make that clear because I prefer it if people know what the creators actually say and what is interpretation by fans. The two things are often conflated when they should be completely different. I was the one who started theorising about a possible plot hole, but that doesn't come from anything they said. It comes from my interpretation of things they both did and didn't say.

I could be completely wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.

So, having emphasised that, regarding possible plotholes:

• They would need to explain why Cinder is so incredibly powerful that people can believe she'd be able to kill Ozpin with the kind of back story Ozpin actually has (remember, Monty said, as did Kerry and Miles, that Ozpin's Semblance is completely broken — so if he's that insanely powerful, how can Cinder plausibly kill him in a straight duel).
• It explains why Cinder has a crippling vulnerability against Ruby.
• It might limit Ozpin's own ability to access the Relics whenever he wants (that depends on whether he can open the Relic vaults as well as the Maidens given that he created both the vaults and the Maidens).
• Most importantly, it, as you say, adds a reason for why a headmaster who is in Salem's pocket cannot simply hand her the Relic he's in charge of protecting.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 21st 2018 at 11:30:06 AM