i am inhabited by a cry

PART ONE: A Blanker Whiteness of Benighted Snow

PART TWO: Blind and Blackening in the Moonless Air

ough

i have posted abt this before but it was. a while ago and i can't find the post anymore lmao so take two!!

some facts:

some more facts:

ok. so, we've got

☑️ a boy with silvery-grey eyes

☑️ alluding to a mythical psychopomp

☑️ named "quicksilver"/"silver water"

☑️ or "keeper of boundaries"

☑️ raised to be a killer/warrior

☑️ violently denied his personhood

☑️ nihilistically feels destined for this life

lol. lmao, even!

some more facts:

quirks. eyebrow.

ok. ok

think about what happened with ruby's eyes solely from hearing salem say "your mother said those words to me; she was wrong, too"—because her conception of herself is so bound up in the idea of summer rose, ideal huntress, the best of us, supermom, perfected reflection of ruby rose, all she wishes she was—confronting the real summer rose, who tried and failed and never came back, fractures ruby's self-identity and precipitates her tailspin in v8-9 and that begins with her light rebounding on her.

(this is because silver eyes require true self-knowledge and clarity of purpose which is why ruby struggles with them, in this essay i will—)

so think about that. and consider the implications for a silver-eyed boy abused and molded from birth into something antithetical to the nature of this magic—a remorseless killer—whose true self was literally stolen from him by his father. and he never got it back. 

(*i think mercury is probably not a reliable narrator in regard to what his father did to him—he was a kid and he's still taking what his horrifically abusive father said to him as objective fact—and i expect he'll find his semblance again in vacuo. but this is what mercury believes is true.)

like. we know silver-eyes can be harmed by their own light: ruby's first glare put her in a coma for several days after beacon fell, and the light turned inward and hurt her when her self-image cracked. right?

gestures: mercury. quicksilver. poison.

(but also: mercury can be used to draw elemental silver from ore.) (patio process)

my theory is that 

it's death-and-rebirth and psychopomps all the way down

my favorite thing about this discourse is that it inevitably comes back to self-identified penny fans screaming that their favorite character was completely pointless and irrelevant to the narrative of the atlas arc like do you. hear yourselves

with a company that can actually like. afford to produce it? yeah

(yeah i'm doing fine. just busy irl)

anyway—prior to v9 i would have said definitely they both wind up mortal again, but then v9 threw its curveball of overtly questioning the premise that everything must die. immortality for ozlem has hitherto been framed strictly as a curse, because ozma sees it that way; i think it remains to be seen whether salem feels the same, because:

a) "if she were to turn humanity against Light and Darkness, she could rid herself of their curse, or at the very least… she could make them suffer." <- even before her rebellion, salem had begun to accept the possibility that she might never be able to make herself mortal again if she defied the brothers, and she made a deliberate decision to fight back anyway.

b) it has been so long that i have to imagine it is hard for her to even conceive of dying as a real possibility anymore? so even if she theoretically would welcome the chance to die i'm skeptical that it's more than a "what if the world was made of pudding?" type of nonsense hypothetical in her mind. 

and c) everything points to "salem wants to change the world" being the correct view, with salem herself envisioning a "new world"—and in the event that is true, salem isn't suicidal full stop.

the thing that makes her immortality a curse has always been isolation and exile, neither of which are innately because she's immortal. indeed the very first thing salem used her immortality to do once she decided to live was connect with people and build a coalition. the reason for her exile in the present is not her immortality per se but the fairytale narrative construing her as the Great Evil. becoming mortal again won't materially change those circumstances. 

ozma is in a different boat because, as you note, his form of immortality is bad per se—fatal to his hosts and torturous for him. we have however seen that a living soul without a body will just manifest a new body, both on remnant (penny) and in the ever after (ruby isn't just magically healed in the tree—her whole self is remade, hence the burning rose returns to her in the end—she's disembodied and remakes herself). so the immediate concern with oscar and ozma is to divide their souls, and i think there are a few of possibilities as to how:

from that point the crucial question is whether separating ozma and restoring him to his own body oncedoes or doesn't break his cursed reincarnation forever. if it doesn't (or if he isn't willing to take the risk that it doesn't) then… frankly the simplest and surest way to put an end to ozma reincarnating as a parasite forever is to make him immortal the way salem is immortal. if his soul can't die, he can't be bound to another by light's curse. it is death that empowers his curse. 

so to take away what gives light power over ozma, give ozma infinite life. right? 

which… i mean, the well of creation gave salem infinite life; she hoped that the pool of grimm would take it away; take from an infinite quantity, an infinite quantity remains; this force of pure destruction could not destroy, so it created… it's possible for two souls to be bound together as one and it's possible for one soul to be divided into two. the possibility of salem dividing her infinite life in order to share it with ozma isn't exactly a leap.

certainly i wouldn't rule out a straightforward ascension through the tree being the answer—it is kind of the obvious course—but i've been rolling dark's parting words to salem around in my mind a lot since v9. "still making demands of your creators?"

that rebellion ended in crushing defeat because they tried to fight back with the gifts the brothers gave them—power that did not in truth belong to humanity, because those gifts were not freely given. this is a lesson salem took to heart, hence her insinuation (in WOR) of aura/semblances being much greaterthan mere magic, cinder using grimm (a kind of power salem claimed for herself after the brothers abandoned it) to mediate her inheritance of the fall maiden (a mere remnant of god-given power bequeathed to modern humans by light's champion, which salem has repeatedly warned cinder to be cautious of), and her recent experiment with combining silver eyes with grimm. 

presuming salem is involved in the separation and breaking of ozma's curse at all, i think it's deeply unlikely she would be willing to trust the tree to just fix everything; i think there's a not-insignificant possibility that she has met the blacksmith herself before and may be factoring what she knows about the tree and/or the brothers' history into her plans, but if so it would be more on the level of knowing the brothers are finite and broken, not expecting the tree to save her. 

(sidebar: there's an expectation across a lot of the fandom now that the brothers can/will be 'defeated' by tagging in the blacksmith to scold them for being naughty, and that is just… not going to happen. lol. the blacksmith makes it crystal clear that neither she nor the tree can or will intervene, and while the brothers need to ascend and that's the obvious outcome the narrative is moving toward now, convincing light [and dark if he's still around] to do it is a problem remnant's people are going to need to figure out for themselves. also the fandom-wide treatment of the brothers as spoiled little boys who just need mom to scold them is both inane and, frankly, misogynistic—because "well, the brothers are petty assholes but salem is just a spoiled bitch throwing a tantrum because they didn't give her what she wanted, and actually all her problems are self-inflicted" is an outrageous position to hold about a woman hating the genocidal monsters who murdered an entire planet to spite her. and then the cherry on top is anticipating that the conflict will be solved by way of "mommy" swooping in to clean up the mess her silly boys made. come the fuck on.) 

anyway, i figure salem will be stridently in the camp of "no, we need to forge our own path." ozma, likewise, i can only imagine feeling extremely dubious of just putting his life into the hands of any god after what light did to him—let alone a god who is completely unknown to him. if he and salem think there is even the smallest chance that the two of them can break his curse by working together without divine intervention, i… think that will be Plan A for sure. after all, THIS is how ozpin closes out 'fairytales of remnant':

a parable about humanity claiming the powers of their creators to perfect their own design; a parable about the world coming together to replace their divine gifts, and in doing so create a better world in divinity's absence. like i'm always saying, ozma's zealotry is grounded in fear—in his terrified certainty that the brothers are all-powerful forces of nature who cannot be fought—but the world salem aspires to create is the one he dreams of too, in his heart of hearts. 

as for oz becoming a faunus—i honestly would not be surprised if he did? both thematically (the faunus in the myth are liberated through transformation into their true inner selves -> ozma must be liberated from oscar through transformation into his true self; the faunus mythically participate in their own creation and in doing so free themselves to choose their own destinies, making faunus the symbolic if not literal triumph of salem's rebellion) and, if i'm correct about faunus having been created by salem's transformation in the pool of grimm, also mechanically (in that event she would be the literal god of animals and manifestation of animal-like features representing the inner self follows the metamorphic pattern she created, so if it's predominately her magic mediating ozma's transformation/restoration then it would follow for him to become a faunus.)

but if he does, i think what he'll end up with is an avian trait—like trust love ("if you could only open up a door/spread your wings and fly away from here/write yourself into a fairytale/all your problems would just disappear") and sacrifice ("born an angel, heaven-sent/falls from grace are never elegant") both pretty explicitly, in opposite ways, equate wings with ozma's freedom. (hi @st-whalefall i see you.) and then there's the way ozma describes the branwens' bird forms: "Using this power, I was able to gift the Branwen twins the ability to "see" more, to move freely and be unburdened by their natural bodies. I... well... gave them the ability to turn into birds." <- freedom, unburdening, and clearer sight. IF ozma becoming a faunus through breaking his curse is in the cards, i would think this is pretty blunt foreshadowing. 

and if it isn't—well, it's symbolic and might well remain symbolic but another thought i've been rolling around for a while is ozma finding some way of separating himself from oscar as a bird. they're fighting this curse together now; the curse is fighting back, and with the kids returned from the ever after, oscar and oz are going to be hearing about ascension and afteran magic and—maybe, depending on how detailed team rwby is in their account—about "you could just be human, or just a cat, if you wanted." 

in one myth, faunus are created by the combination of sapient animals and human beings—through, it might be said, the merger of two souls into a singular new being. blake, in v1, is reading a novel about a man with two souls, fighting for control over his body. ozma loves stories, myths, fairytales—relies onstories to make sense of himself and his life. his curse is a false, corrupted form of ascension, and when blake looked at herself in the tree's mirror, it asked "are you complete? do you wish to return human-and-animal, separated?"

for blake, that was the tree's gentle way of confronting her with her past self-hatred, to help her see and crystallize how much she's grown from being that terrified girl who secretly wished she could just be human. but think about how oz and oscar might take that story. 

oscar doesn't like using magic because it makes the merge faster. long ago, ozma carved out his divinely-given magic and created the maidens in hope of sparing his hosts, but the magic of his curse remains. he can't sever himself from his hosts, and fighting the curse outright causes it to lash out and hurt them both. but ozma also did *something* to grant the branwens shapeshifting; either he really did draw on his own curse to do that, or else he used the crown of choice to make it so. either way… the curse keeps trying to force him forward. force him to come out. 

in the lost fable, the final outcome of his curse is at least represented by something like a haunting—ozma sees his other-self watching him from outside of himself. this may or may not be literal in the sense of what ozma experiences, but the idea of 'one soul in the body, one soul outside' is narratively in play. and ozma was able to seal himself off from oscar in a way that does seem to have altered the nature of their connection, or at least created room for oscar to reclaim his individuality. 

so what happens if ozma gathers all the magic and throws his will behind the curse's attempts to shove him forward, instead of against, with the specific purpose of manifesting himself in some physical form outside of oscar's head, drawing on old myths about faunus being similarly two-in-one that blake's account of the ever after seems to corroborate as having a kernel of truth? 

like—why not try something weird and out of the box? what have they got to lose? if it doesn't work then they're back to square one of grappling with the curse, and if it does then not only have they figured out a new way to give oscar some room to breathe but ozma emerging as a bird with a psychic connection to oscar would be real fucking helpful for the coalition as a spy/scout. 

in all honesty i think her immediate reaction is more likely to be anguished guilt than fury, because the god of light deftlymanipulated her into acting as the lock on ozma's cage. it's been evident since 6.3 that salem already feels an immense burden of self-blame and guilt and in v8 we see, with cinder, salem turn on a dime while articulating a very precise and accurate understanding of why cinder acted as she did in response to the way salem treated her.

(and i do also think ozma's view that salem is at least partially responsible for what the brothers did to her and to the world may be, ultimately, because she told the story that way: if salem really did hesitate to tell him parts of it at first because she feared ozma would reject her, then it follows she felt ashamed and guilty, and feeling that way would undoubtedly color her account.) 

and in 6.4, the one time in the present we've ever seen salem truly lose her temper, what happens? she sends everyone else out of the room and self-harms. the windows shatter inward—the scene cuts away before we see salem get ripped apart by broken glass, but that is what she's doing. that unbearable uncontrollable rage is for herself. 

so how will she feel when she learns that all this time she spent believing that ozma  cynically took advantage of her trust and love to manipulate her into serving her tormentor, that he willingly bent the knee to tyrannical monsters and never wavered from his obedience—how will she feel when she finds out that actually, all that time, ozma was being tortured and forcibly twisted into an unwilling pawn by a curse he was tricked into accepting?

like. 

look at what she did to herself when she realized her decision to abandon cinder meant leaving cinder to infiltrate atlas and recover the lamp from oz all by herself, with no support, mere weeks after cinder nearly died at haven. and that was harm of a much smaller scale, spanning just a couple weeks. salem fled into exile after that horrible fight and left ozma to suffer alone in a state of inescapable torment for thousands of years. 

i think she's going to be devastated and furious with herself first, and she'll have to navigate that before she can reach being enraged at the god of light for ozma's sake. but yeah once she's had that time to process her hatred of the brothers and conviction that they must be cast down will only deepen. 

for ozma it's far more important that he sees the anguish and grief and guilt clearly. he already knows her rage. he knows she hates the brothers and why. salem is a deeply emotional character but her affect is blunted and notably in the narration of the lost fable, spite and anger at the gods are the only emotions jinn ever describes salem feeling—everything else we see salem feeling in that episode is framed as a manipulative lie, because ozma is terrified that her spiteful anger at the gods might have been the only thing that was real. 

and again i think this is a misconception rooted in the way salem presented herself because in both the kitchen scene and even more so in their last conversation, salem keeps what she wants and what shefeels very tightly locked down. from the instant ozma suggested that he wanted more than their cozy little life in her cabin, salem was one hundred percent focused on giving him what he said he wanted. literally, "whatever we want—what you want!"

salem fearing ozma would reject her didn't begin and end with just flinching before she plucked up the courage to tell him of her rebellion. it also encompassed what she wanted, if he wanted something else, and anything she felt that she feared might upset him. even when he told her the whole truth, she crushed down her own feelings and quoted from a myth—spoke in his language—and tried to reach out to somehow find a compromise because even then she was putting him and what he wanted so far above herself that she couldn't even bring herself to admit that she felt hurt. 

fundamentally what ozma needs is to see her pain, her grief, without any restraint—not just for her sake but also for his own. anger is what he expects. it's the only thing he expects. and i think a lot of the resentment he feels toward salem in the present comes from a place of believing on some level that he's just her excuse for being angry at the gods because he feels so much doubt that she truly loved him. 

which is where the maiden-in-tower allusion becomes salient; when the prince is blinded his sight is healed by her tears. ozma won't be able to see her clearly until he sees her sorrow.

"undertones"--even in the extremely biased narration of the lost fable, jinn, telling the story as ozpin understands it, draws an overt equivalency between the god of light and SALEM'S FATHER. you know,

the man who was so viciously abusive that this is how ozpin depicted him in a sanitized fairytale account of what happened.

note, for emphasis, that by the time salem was eleven she was so actively suicidal that her father had to vet every object that went into her room against the risk that she might try to kill herself with it, and he didn't care.

ozma modeled beacon academy after salem's father's castle and put the headmaster's office at the top of the tower—in her cell. whether or not he could actually articulate this feeling consciously, deep down he regards the god of light as an abusive parent too powerful to defeat or escape. and we have seen, with light, that he becomes angry and violent whenever something doesn't go his way and that his immediate, first reaction to one of his creations doing anything he doesn't approve is brutal murder. he tears jabber apart, incinerates ozma, bites salem, shrugs when his brother vaporizes mankind. his ultimatum for remnant is "obey me or die." there's no undertones he is explicitly abusive toward everyone he comes into contact with including his brother.

the reason wolves kill and eat deer is because they're ontologically evil. and full of malice

that is your opinion, yes.

look--being cynical is a choice. it is a choice to surround yourself with doom and gloom and to only pay attention to shit that makes you feel bad; it's a choice to be apathetic and incurious and to keep yourself uninformed about the world you live in because it means you never have to be vulnerable or try to DO anything about the bad things happening in the world. because it makes you feel smarter or safer or it gives you a reason to not care.

"i project my misanthropy onto a character whose defining trait is that he keeps sacrificing himself for the sake of humanity, and i think it's dumb and naive to think that people are worth anything" do you enjoy living like this? do you want, like, a medal? do you want a fucking non-participation trophy

for going on anon to brag about being a shitty person lmfao. grow up

rwby fandom has a Particular very funny set of incentives where its like

a) rwby itself is a story written with and interested in nuance + moral complexity and it's most rewarding to engage with the narrative in that way;

b) rwby has a dedicated hatedom, which entails the development of a hate-fanon predicated on deliberate misinterpretation and bad faith reading of the text;

c) the fandom-wide persecution complex re: the preceding point makes platforming the hatedom [via mockery, rebuttal, or whining] broadly socially acceptable within rwby fandom spaces;

d) which serves to embed "[you/these people] don't understand nuance" into the fandom vernacular as an automatic response to perceived Bad Takes;

f) fans making hatedom watch a core part of their engagement with rwby fandom tend to gradually degrade their ability to differentiate hatedom bullshit from good faith discussion on parts of the narrative the hatedom fixated on (e.g., "ironwood right!" vs "ironwood's decisions all make sense from his point of view and it's reductive to read him as a one-note villainous caricature");

g) in a similar vein, because rwby hatedom constructs the hate-fanon primarily around (misogynistic) moral-reversal whereby male antagonists in prominent conflict with the main heroines are lionized while the heroines are reinterpreted as the 'real' villains (and female villains are variously either ignored, treated as accessories for male characters, or demonized), textual interpretations that engage with the moral complexity + nuance in the text (good characters can do bad things and be wrong in non-trivial ways, bad characters can be right and are always unapologetically humanized) become suspect in certain circles of the fandom;

h) ^ that is in addition to the general tendency, not at all specific to rwby fandom, among people who can't handle moral complexity or nuance to project their own black-and-white thinking onto everyone else.

…& the outcome of all this is to create a social environment in which the accusation of "lacking nuance" gets leveled at specifically readings predicated on the understanding that rwby is a story that wants and invites the viewer to think critically about its characters.

the teacup mirror symbolism is about apostasy btw ->

exhibit a: blake

"we were being treated like equals, but not out of respect; out of fear. so i left."

exhibit b: ozma

"this curse was bestowed upon me by the gods because i failed to stop salem"

exhibit c: salem

"we could become the gods of this world: our powers surpass all others. our souls transcend death."

& exhibit d: ruby

"how did it all get like this?"

<- this is a conversation.

adam is to blake as the god of light is to ozma; blake rejects adam's vision of domination through fear and flees the white fang into what she perceives as the moral sanctuary of the huntsmen academies--noble warriors, pure and good.

but those academies are merely the most recent permutation of ozma's god-fearing zealotry, an institution built on a foundation of his terrified acceptance of the premise that humankind as it is now does not deserve to exist, and must submissively repent or else be annihilated. deep down he knows this--until the end, "the enemy was right" and so forth--so he lies, casting himself as the failure cursed to discipline his defeat at salem's hands.

but salem, pressed on what she truly believes, outlines the case against divine rule in succinct terms: the brothers are not the highest power, and they failed utterly to achieve their ends--they couldn't even kill humankind in a way that mattered, because people were reborn phoenix-like from the ashes--and so remnant and its people owe them nothing at all. it is our world now, she says. we could become more than the old gods could ever be.

how did it all get like this? ruby asks. and the answer is thousands upon thousands of years of ozma's fearful obedience to a god who sent him here to contort remnant into an inescapable saw trap for the apostate scapegoat, who is fighting now to escape by any means necessary.

grips you. when ruby drinks the tea and meets the blacksmith and the blacksmith says "what if you could be anyone?"--ruby is offered ozma's curse exactly, what if you could slip into any like-minded soul, someone who is you but isn't, who is you but Better, would that fix you? and the rhetorical point that the blacksmith intends to make and succeeds in making is that the only person who can be ruby rose is ruby rose. this is what we might call sledgehammer foreshadowing with regard to ozma and how ozma's desperation to be anyone else but ozma (hey man why were you suicidal before you met salem. what broke you, the first time) informs his resignation to the curse that forcibly breaks and remakes him into anyone else, and what needs to happen before he can escape the false-ascension inflicted upon him