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silveradeptChallenge #11 says to indulge in the creative urge.
Expansive definitions of fanworks are things I love to see. Even if I tend to stick to some specific forms of them, ones that are more traditionally recognized, I do appreciate when the creativity comes out in cosplay or in crafting or cooking. (And it takes a while to put those ones together, so they're not always conducive to challenges like this.![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
threesentenceficathon is much better suited to this challenge.)
Because I know my lenses, my fanwork is likely to take on a comparative and meta aspect (which still makes it valid, but the default form of fanwork makes assumptions about pairings and relationships and the like as the primary drivers of what makes a fanwork. It's built into the AO3 form, for example. And, as far as I know, there's not all that many people known in fandom for legendary meta. Perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places.)
Someone has been blitzing my Pern read-through on AO3 and contributing to it from the perspective of someone who has been deeply engaged with the fandom over time and participated in aspects like official and unofficial Weyrs and communities. With specific opinions about who is generally canonical (and where that canon stops) and the thought about what it might take to logic and harmonize Pern so that it is less inconsistent with itself. That will be a grand project, and I wish them well on it. (And will be curious to see the output.) One of the regular topics of interest as I read through Pern was the way in which the authors presented a world with specific scenarios and logical conclusions and then ran away from them as hard as they could. If only men ride a green dragon, blue dragon, brown dragon, and bronze dragon, and there's enough feedback from dragons when they get going that orgies happen among their riders, then there's a lot of men who have sex with men in the Weyrs. Which the fandom picked up and ran with, of course, in the same way they saw Kirk and Spock as having a relationship. Science fiction could speak on such things, especially when it was aliens being talked about, rather than contemporary humans. And there are one or two m/m couples given on-page time, even if P'tero and M'leng are played for camp, essentially. It's a missed opportunity to use a different world to reflect on our own, because there's an authorial insistence on heterosexual pairings (and specific, non-kinky, only-with-your-own-claas pairings at that) as the important ones for the books.
If we hop ahead to about the time of the Wizard Boy books, there's increased visibility and sound around men who have sex with men, because the HIV/AIDS crisis and the general governmental policy that it was a punishment sent by God and therefore nothing needed to be done about all the people dying. But Section 28 is still in effect at the start and the first legal marriages between people of the same sex (for governmental definitions thereof) in the States are still a few books away. By the end of the series, though, Section 28 is repealed and marriages are legal in at least one state of the U.S. (Nationwide recognition in the U.S. with the Obergefell case is still nearly another decade away.) We can still see the framework of an author who does not want to address the possibility that plenty of wizards at boarding school might find each other very attractive as they come into their hormones. We have gendered staircases, and some characters who are apparently just hotter to humans through virtue of their non-human ancestry, and somewhat of a substitution of lycanthropy for HIV/AIDS, but we also have a fandom that is much more loud and visible and more than happy to imagine that people trapped in life-threatening situations and war footings might be willing to express their deepest feelings to their most trusted companions and act on them. And not necessarily in a het way, either (although that's also possible.)
It's not that the sections of fandom where The Premise was acceptable were quiet. (Northstar was allowed to be unambiguously gay in 1992, five years before the Wizard Boy books start.) Perhaps it was that we hit critical mass for the World Wide Web and therefore the Internet being for porn at the time, but even though I was still fandom-adjacent for a lot of that time, and much of my hearing was about the endgame het ships, there absolutely was enough of other combinations to fill an entire restricted section. It wasn't textual representation, but there's definitely a feeling of "we're here, we're queering your work, deal with it." (And we've seen the reaction and backlash to it from said creator, which is definitely not "dealing with it.")
Stepping into the tail end of the Wizard Boy publications, Pern, for as much as we generally give a strong side-eye to how young of characters Todd puts into sexual situations, does manage to devote an entire book to the adventures of a lesbian couple (who both also have penis-in-vagina sex because they want to become pregnant), and has a gold rider who codes strongly as bisexual or pansexual, even though she only has heterosexual sex and explicitly disclaims that she might be interested in the lesbian girl with a crush on her (who also suffers from apparent lesbomisia for no apparent reason.) And Lorana, Fiona, and Shaneese, at least, have on-page polyamory (even if they suck at communication in those relationships.) It's clumsy and ill-executed, and I'm still pretty sure that Todd wanted bisexuals but said they were lesbians, but it's closer to what I would have expected Pern to be, based on the rules laid out for us about dragons and their riders.
Gay characters are openly present on television (perhaps most notably in the SF/F fandoms, Willow and Tara from Buffy, although we now understand how little legacy Joss Whedon deserves) and in movies, and the Hays Code isn't demanding their deaths or other such storytelling that made them always wicked. It's taken them a long time to get there, but corporations are starting to understand that there's money to be made in telling everyone's stories, and that the entities that demand censorship and a return to the times where everyone politely pretended that everyone was straight are less powerful than they've made themselves out to be. The world did not end nor did society erupt into anarchy. (And so the goalposts moved, but that's a different bit of meta.)
Children's media in the US is inherently conservative (they changed Sailors Uranus and Neptune from a couple to cousins, after all,) but even there representation started to appear, whether coded (Steven Universe and the various ways that fusion is treated, and possibly Pamela and Harley in the DCAU at some point?) or obvious (the Korra/Asami kiss and several of the Owl House characters, and eventually, Pamela and Harley, unmistakably, in just about all of their incarnations.) In teenage media and young adult books, a veritable explosion of representation has been underway as (yet again) corporations realize that there is money to be made by publishing books with protagonists and situations that are relatable to their readers and viewers, on multiple axes, not just of sexuality or gender, but race, mental health status, traumatic events, family configurations, all of it. This has an effect of making teen and young adult-focused media appear "terminally online" and can bring out many of the same conflicts from earlier eras of fandom, with the additional dimension of whether or not the media is sufficiently "pure" to be worthy of praise. It also has the effect of making YA and teen-focused media the most likely space for backlash and censorship efforts, with an argument that still mostly amounts to "there's no way a child in a media-saturated environment is able to make a decision that is fully their own, therefore if we remove the media properties putting ideas on their head, they'll choose the ideas that their parents and government are putting in their heads instead."
Which is a very long introduction to talking about what happened in the ninth volume of the Rooster Teeth series RWBY. Spoilers from this point forward, also, this is where the content warnings about suicide and mental health instability are.
Rooster Teeth itself is not strictly pure and has been involved in several acts of extraordinarily bad behavior by some of its talent toward other talent, and over characteristics that are now not things to be made fun of or used as slurs. RWBY the show had the additional difficulty of the creator's death happening around Volume 3, so there isn't Monty Oum guiding the show in real time. And it had cast Vic Mignogna for a key role for several seasons before his scandalous behavior was brought to light. So there's certainly no shortage of things that can be used to dismiss the whole thing out of hand, if so desired.
At its core, in addition to being about a lot of flashy action sequences, RWBY is a story about teenage prodigies training to be fighters in an endless feud between two lovers, who are themselves the representation of a debate between two brothers who created the world and the inhabitants of it. In Volume 9, the governing tale changes from The Wizard of Oz to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the principal cast, plus one ally and one enemy, visit the birthplace of the brothers, the Ever After. While the showrunners and a character who turns out to be very important to the plot will likely tell you that the theme of this volume is balance (and specifically, about balance that has not been obtained through the striving of opposing forces, but by an ecosystem in harmony with itself,) but I'd suggest this volume is actually the answer to the question "What happens when the chosen one breaks?" Because the Ever After functions on very different rules than Remnant, it allows for different pressures to be put on all the characters, and most of them turn out not to be up to the challenge.
The end of the eighth volume that put the principals in the Ever After was a complete setback for the heroes. They did manage to save the civilian population of the two places that needed it, but other than that, they could not convince the Tin Man to have a heart, they could not save Pinocchio after being turned into a real human after the Blue Fairy did it, and they could not repel the forces of the Wicked Witch that came for them. Weiss lost her entire kingdom in the assault, but she turns out to be the one in the volume who is the least broken. Possibly because she's suffered eight volumes of being broken and having to accept she's not the chosen one, to turn a member of her family in for conspiring against the government, that her upbringing was abusive and not very full of love, and that everyone probably loves her older sister more than they ever will love her, because her older sister has basically been better than her at everything forever. The Ever After doesn't really have anything that it can throw at her that is worse than what she's already experienced. It honestly makes her out of place in the volume, which is probably why we don't see or hear a lot of her.
Blake and Yang are only moderately broken characters by the time they hit the Ever After. A couple of volumes ago, they worked together to ensure that Blake's stalker could no longer terrorize her, and since then, Blake has been rapidly blossoming into the person she was before the abuse. She's the closest we have to bisexual representation in the show, having seemingly been interested in the character based on Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and also having been pursued by the chameleon Ilia Amitola.
Yang, for her part, has had a parent that abandoned her, and suffered, in one of the early volumes, a wound that left her without a right arm. This is a sufficiently-advanced world that a prosthetic was available for her afterward, but she took a volume to herself to adjust to the trauma, recover from the nightmares, and eventually return to active work as a member of the team in the care of her stepfather, who was worried about his daughter's mental and physical health. By the time of this volume, Yang has already adapted to the combat values of having a prosthetic arm, and in this volume, uses the hand for making (arguably inappropriately-timed) jokes with.
In this volume, Blake and Yang get caught in a ponderstorm, where they have to work out their issues and admit to each other that they've fallen in love. They've been hinting at this for several volumes, and it falls to Weiss to make the remark of "about time" when Blake and Yang finally start to behave like two people who love each other around each other. So we have greater representation there from the two of them. Although it took a long time to get there, and I wonder whether some of that started showing up because the fans started grumbling about what kind of world we were in and how there wasn't much need for the showrunners to continue to be coy about the relationship between the two. It helps that it's happened in this time and place, where there's severe backlash against queer content and attempted censorship of queer material is going into overdrive in schools, libraries, towns, cities, and states in the United States. And while Yang might be possessive and only interested in Blake, Blake seems like the kind of character that can maturely hold down more than one relationship, if all of her paramours were ever in the same place so that she could love and be loved by all of them. If there's a Volume 10, and I do hope for a Volume 10 and beyond, there's a significant opportunity for the showrunners to continue developing the Blake and Yang relationship and to possibly see what kind of weight Blake and others might be able to hold as well.
Jaune suffers pretty terribly in this volume. He's been the comedic relief character for eight volumes, even as the entire time, he's been growing and developing his skills in an environment where the supports he's had have been his teammates, and not much else. It took a moment of genuine panic and desperation for him to unlock his superpower, and while he's decent at tactical thinking, he's generally always been put into a situation where his opponents have more raw power than he does and his superpower is very much a support one, at least until he learns how to apply it so he can buff himself into the stratosphere. One of his teammates has died, and someone he cares greatly about nearly died, and he's basically been working on a template where he's supposed to be the knight in shining armor that can rescue and protect others. It should not be a surprise to us that his character for this volume is instead a Rusted Knight, and we find that he has been spending a large amount of his time trying to keep alive a group of Ever Afterans that seem determined to destroy themselves every time his back is turned. He's got a savior complex, and he has yet to actually succeed at saving anyone, and it's severely wearing on his mental health to both have failed at the important things and for the thing that he's trying to do is so extremely stressful to him, because the Ever Afterans are clever at their attempts, such that his schedule of how to try and save them is very, very involved. Jaune cannot get rid of his own demons and his own belief in what he should be, but he ranks above others in this volume in how broken he is because he is lucid enough to realize that he's coping extremely poorly, and I think he grasps that his attempts to keep something static in his life is actively interfering with the way the Ever After works. Once Jaune learns to stop pretending to be something that he isn't, he's likely to start healing. Or, perhaps, he will die trying to be a hero. With Jaune, you're never quite sure.
At the bottom of the rankings, though, of who has broken and how well they have been snapped, are two pairs of direct antagonists. The Curious Cat and the Jabberwalker were creations of the brothers, meant to help the Ever After in the tasks of creation and destruction, but they have become a being that heals broken hearts and guides others to their next lives when they lose their way and the embodiment of final destruction for any member of the Ever After. The Jabberwalker is broken, because it attacks everyone without discretion. The Curious Cat, it turns out, has suffered from the very same condition that it is supposed to heal in others, but they cannot help themself. Instead, they wish to leave the Ever After and continue to satisfy their curiosity on Remnant. To do so, however, they have to commit great acts of cruelty to another being so they can possess them and try to leave. The Curious Cat, at least, seems to be aware of the fact that something has gone terribly wrong with them, but also seems to be aware they can't do anything about it.
Which leaves us with Ruby and Neapolitan (Neo) at the bottom of the tier rankings, the characters who are the most broken in this volume and who spend the most time in that state. We don't see Neo for much of the volume, but when she is around, she wants to take revenge on Ruby for having gotten her love, Torchwick, killed, and she wants to do it by using her power of creating illusions and mirages to break Ruby's brain and make her cross the despair horizon to the point where she willingly commits suicide to get away from all of the pain that Ruby has been shouldering for eight volumes.
For her part, Ruby has been shouldering the expectations of being the Chosen One, selected by The Wizard of Oz against the Wicked Witch because people with her eye color have a hidden inner power that allows them to destroy the Wicked Witch and her minions by petrification. She was also made the leader of her team, having skipped a couple of grades to start studying at the more advanced academy at the beginning of the series. The expectations of the entire world are resting on her shoulders, or so she believes, and so all the setbacks that have been piling up, the adults that aren't listening to her, the strategic planning that she has not been able to outmaneuver, and losing people that she's tried to protect, including what could be seen as a love interest of hers with the right shipping glasses on, they're all being taken very personally. (And that's with the whole dead parents as well, so she also was raised by Yang's father.) The Curious Cat and Neo are both working toward the same goal, to try and break Ruby for their own purposes, so volume 9 is a Trauma Conga Line for Ruby, where she finally cracks under the strain of everyone's expectations and her own expectations. She tells another character that she's been constantly haunted by the feeling of never being enough, and in return, gets asked the question of what she thinks would be enough. That's easy enough for her to answer, but when that character offers Ruby the opportunity to set down the burden of being Ruby Rose and to be any other character that she might desire, Ruby resists the offer. She doesn't know what she wants, other than to not be crushed by the weight.
And so when Neo tortures her with the images of people she's respected, or who have died, or who she is trying to live up to the expectations of telling her about all of her failures and how disappointed they are in her, and then offers Ruby a teacup of what, for all she knows, will kill her, Ruby commits suicide by drinking the cup down. Neo gets her revenge on Ruby, but because this is the Ever After, it doesn't actually kill Ruby, but starts the process of Ascension, where Ruby gets the opportunity to choose who and what she wants to be in her next life. Ascension is what Jaune was trying to stop with his attempts to keep things static, and he gets to see the results in that the entities he was trying to hold back have become better and stronger and more capable for their next purpose. The only thing that was in doubt was whether Ascension would apply to those who came from Remnant or was only for the Ever Afterans. It's a powerful image on the screen to have the main character of a show complete suicide, and not in a romanticized way or in the way that The Magicians ultimately chose to portray one of their main characters completing suicide. It felt like a character making a choice because they were so blinkered by pain and grief that they couldn't see a way out of it. So it resonated with me, because in this teenage prodigy who had the weight of saving the world piled on her shoulders and then finding out that life was far less like a bedtime story than a tragedy with no big reveal of the hero's glory I could see myself and some of the same expectations I had placed on myself. (And also, I could see some of myself in Jaune's frenetic desire to be a hero and to save the day and live up to the family name, despite being utterly unqualified for the role.)
As it turns out, Neo getting her revenge leaves her without a purpose, which makes her the Curious Cat's chosen vessel to try and leave the Ever After, but it turns out that Neo's so broken by the complete success of her revenge that she no longer has an attachment to Remnant, having basically nobody there to go back to, so the Cat's plan fails because Neo doesn't want to go back. And, having killed herself under the weight of other expectations, and having been given the opportunity to become anyone else in her next life, Ruby eventually makes a decision.
And the implication is that Ruby has finally found herself again and is no longer quite so burdened, making her the last of the characters to do so in this trip to the Ever After. Weiss was already basically fine. Blake and Yang finally admitted their love to each other. Jaune supposedly is able to embrace change and stop constantly seeing himself as a failed hero. The Jabberwalk and the Curious Cat both are destroyed, or possibly Ascended so they can take on a new purpose. Neo, for her part, having accomplished her revenge (and her purpose), stays in the Ever After and activates her own Ascension, with the idea that she will find herself another purpose, and possibly another form, to come back later for. We will see whether it proves out in the next Volume, if there is one.
Which brings me back to the point about representation in U.S. media that we started in, nearly four thousand words later. Science fiction and fantasy material had reasonably wide latitude to explore and demonstrate that what the reader might consider so normal as to be the unmarked default was simply one of a myriad of possibilities, and that aliens who developed in different conditions often produced different way of building and maintaining their society. Stories that were in a more "realistic" setting often had "edgy" content, or the subject of a Very Special Episode, for characters to be "revealed" as being somehow outside the assumed default of cisgender, heterosexual, mentally and physically able, and with a stable nuclear family where the children were body-birthed by a cisgender woman married to or at least partnered with a cisgender man. Most of that content wanted to deliver a message that was somewhere in the "humanize this Other" ballpark, often to the point of hammering on the anvil of "this person is just like you, and therefore you shouldn't make a big deal out of this difference, even though we devoted a Very Special Episode to it." Because of dropping the anvils, though, it often had the opposite effect and could sometimes lead to the characterization being flattened so that this difference was the only way of differentiating them from any other member of the cast. As time went on and we were able to more openly talk about these aspects outside of media, the representation in the media managed to get more complex, because it was no longer "edgy" content to include those things, and it was possible to include them directly, rather than dancing about the edges of acknowledgement and leaving enough plausible deniability. Or putting the big kiss at the end of the series or episode in such a way that it could be excised if necessary. So it's something impressive for all of us that we can have a volume of an animated show that contains the confirmation of a relationship between two women (one of them has nekomimi and a tail, the other is an amputee with a cybernetic prosthetic), and several different portrayals of mental illness and instability (and the consequences thereof), including a main character that chooses suicide, another character that willingly bullies that main character to that decision out of revenge, and a third who has trouble with his own traumas and tries to prevent others from growing and changing because he needs something to protect. Any one of those things could have been an After School Special all by themselves in an earlier era. Now they're components of the narrative plot, and because they're components of the narrative plot, it's so much easier for us to see ourselves in the characters, rather than having to fight through all of the way that we're being presented as strange and Other in a situation where the idea is that we're not supposed to be strange and Other. It's a better media environment, which can cover more aspects of the human condition, and in doing so, that allows the fandom to both have more material to work with and to be able to push the boundaries even further out, as they work with things that the source material may have only hinted at or that requires a different reading than where the canon is headed.
And I, for one, not only welcome our new fannish frontiers, but also hope we can manage to successfully deflect, redirect, and otherwise defeat the campaigns currently underway to restrict and reduce those frontiers to a smaller area than even where the After School Special would be willing to go.
In your own space, create a fanwork.
[…]
Now, a fanwork is anything that you, a fan, creates. Fic, icons, and filling sparkly requests from your fellow snowflakes’ wishlists absolutely fit the bill. But really, your creation can be anything! Draw something, paint something, compose an ode to your current favorite movie. Whittle something to represent your fandom from a bit of driftwood or model it in clay and matchsticks or legos! Whip up a song about your favorite trope or concoct an interpretive dance number for your OTP. Bake some cupcakes and decorate them in homage to your favorite TV show or author. The possibilities are endless. Whatever means of self-expression tickles your fancy right now, embrace it! But most of all - have fun!
Expansive definitions of fanworks are things I love to see. Even if I tend to stick to some specific forms of them, ones that are more traditionally recognized, I do appreciate when the creativity comes out in cosplay or in crafting or cooking. (And it takes a while to put those ones together, so they're not always conducive to challenges like this.
threesentenceficathon is much better suited to this challenge.)Because I know my lenses, my fanwork is likely to take on a comparative and meta aspect (which still makes it valid, but the default form of fanwork makes assumptions about pairings and relationships and the like as the primary drivers of what makes a fanwork. It's built into the AO3 form, for example. And, as far as I know, there's not all that many people known in fandom for legendary meta. Perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places.)
Someone has been blitzing my Pern read-through on AO3 and contributing to it from the perspective of someone who has been deeply engaged with the fandom over time and participated in aspects like official and unofficial Weyrs and communities. With specific opinions about who is generally canonical (and where that canon stops) and the thought about what it might take to logic and harmonize Pern so that it is less inconsistent with itself. That will be a grand project, and I wish them well on it. (And will be curious to see the output.) One of the regular topics of interest as I read through Pern was the way in which the authors presented a world with specific scenarios and logical conclusions and then ran away from them as hard as they could. If only men ride a green dragon, blue dragon, brown dragon, and bronze dragon, and there's enough feedback from dragons when they get going that orgies happen among their riders, then there's a lot of men who have sex with men in the Weyrs. Which the fandom picked up and ran with, of course, in the same way they saw Kirk and Spock as having a relationship. Science fiction could speak on such things, especially when it was aliens being talked about, rather than contemporary humans. And there are one or two m/m couples given on-page time, even if P'tero and M'leng are played for camp, essentially. It's a missed opportunity to use a different world to reflect on our own, because there's an authorial insistence on heterosexual pairings (and specific, non-kinky, only-with-your-own-claas pairings at that) as the important ones for the books.
If we hop ahead to about the time of the Wizard Boy books, there's increased visibility and sound around men who have sex with men, because the HIV/AIDS crisis and the general governmental policy that it was a punishment sent by God and therefore nothing needed to be done about all the people dying. But Section 28 is still in effect at the start and the first legal marriages between people of the same sex (for governmental definitions thereof) in the States are still a few books away. By the end of the series, though, Section 28 is repealed and marriages are legal in at least one state of the U.S. (Nationwide recognition in the U.S. with the Obergefell case is still nearly another decade away.) We can still see the framework of an author who does not want to address the possibility that plenty of wizards at boarding school might find each other very attractive as they come into their hormones. We have gendered staircases, and some characters who are apparently just hotter to humans through virtue of their non-human ancestry, and somewhat of a substitution of lycanthropy for HIV/AIDS, but we also have a fandom that is much more loud and visible and more than happy to imagine that people trapped in life-threatening situations and war footings might be willing to express their deepest feelings to their most trusted companions and act on them. And not necessarily in a het way, either (although that's also possible.)
It's not that the sections of fandom where The Premise was acceptable were quiet. (Northstar was allowed to be unambiguously gay in 1992, five years before the Wizard Boy books start.) Perhaps it was that we hit critical mass for the World Wide Web and therefore the Internet being for porn at the time, but even though I was still fandom-adjacent for a lot of that time, and much of my hearing was about the endgame het ships, there absolutely was enough of other combinations to fill an entire restricted section. It wasn't textual representation, but there's definitely a feeling of "we're here, we're queering your work, deal with it." (And we've seen the reaction and backlash to it from said creator, which is definitely not "dealing with it.")
Stepping into the tail end of the Wizard Boy publications, Pern, for as much as we generally give a strong side-eye to how young of characters Todd puts into sexual situations, does manage to devote an entire book to the adventures of a lesbian couple (who both also have penis-in-vagina sex because they want to become pregnant), and has a gold rider who codes strongly as bisexual or pansexual, even though she only has heterosexual sex and explicitly disclaims that she might be interested in the lesbian girl with a crush on her (who also suffers from apparent lesbomisia for no apparent reason.) And Lorana, Fiona, and Shaneese, at least, have on-page polyamory (even if they suck at communication in those relationships.) It's clumsy and ill-executed, and I'm still pretty sure that Todd wanted bisexuals but said they were lesbians, but it's closer to what I would have expected Pern to be, based on the rules laid out for us about dragons and their riders.
Gay characters are openly present on television (perhaps most notably in the SF/F fandoms, Willow and Tara from Buffy, although we now understand how little legacy Joss Whedon deserves) and in movies, and the Hays Code isn't demanding their deaths or other such storytelling that made them always wicked. It's taken them a long time to get there, but corporations are starting to understand that there's money to be made in telling everyone's stories, and that the entities that demand censorship and a return to the times where everyone politely pretended that everyone was straight are less powerful than they've made themselves out to be. The world did not end nor did society erupt into anarchy. (And so the goalposts moved, but that's a different bit of meta.)
Children's media in the US is inherently conservative (they changed Sailors Uranus and Neptune from a couple to cousins, after all,) but even there representation started to appear, whether coded (Steven Universe and the various ways that fusion is treated, and possibly Pamela and Harley in the DCAU at some point?) or obvious (the Korra/Asami kiss and several of the Owl House characters, and eventually, Pamela and Harley, unmistakably, in just about all of their incarnations.) In teenage media and young adult books, a veritable explosion of representation has been underway as (yet again) corporations realize that there is money to be made by publishing books with protagonists and situations that are relatable to their readers and viewers, on multiple axes, not just of sexuality or gender, but race, mental health status, traumatic events, family configurations, all of it. This has an effect of making teen and young adult-focused media appear "terminally online" and can bring out many of the same conflicts from earlier eras of fandom, with the additional dimension of whether or not the media is sufficiently "pure" to be worthy of praise. It also has the effect of making YA and teen-focused media the most likely space for backlash and censorship efforts, with an argument that still mostly amounts to "there's no way a child in a media-saturated environment is able to make a decision that is fully their own, therefore if we remove the media properties putting ideas on their head, they'll choose the ideas that their parents and government are putting in their heads instead."
Which is a very long introduction to talking about what happened in the ninth volume of the Rooster Teeth series RWBY. Spoilers from this point forward, also, this is where the content warnings about suicide and mental health instability are.
Rooster Teeth itself is not strictly pure and has been involved in several acts of extraordinarily bad behavior by some of its talent toward other talent, and over characteristics that are now not things to be made fun of or used as slurs. RWBY the show had the additional difficulty of the creator's death happening around Volume 3, so there isn't Monty Oum guiding the show in real time. And it had cast Vic Mignogna for a key role for several seasons before his scandalous behavior was brought to light. So there's certainly no shortage of things that can be used to dismiss the whole thing out of hand, if so desired.
At its core, in addition to being about a lot of flashy action sequences, RWBY is a story about teenage prodigies training to be fighters in an endless feud between two lovers, who are themselves the representation of a debate between two brothers who created the world and the inhabitants of it. In Volume 9, the governing tale changes from The Wizard of Oz to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the principal cast, plus one ally and one enemy, visit the birthplace of the brothers, the Ever After. While the showrunners and a character who turns out to be very important to the plot will likely tell you that the theme of this volume is balance (and specifically, about balance that has not been obtained through the striving of opposing forces, but by an ecosystem in harmony with itself,) but I'd suggest this volume is actually the answer to the question "What happens when the chosen one breaks?" Because the Ever After functions on very different rules than Remnant, it allows for different pressures to be put on all the characters, and most of them turn out not to be up to the challenge.
The end of the eighth volume that put the principals in the Ever After was a complete setback for the heroes. They did manage to save the civilian population of the two places that needed it, but other than that, they could not convince the Tin Man to have a heart, they could not save Pinocchio after being turned into a real human after the Blue Fairy did it, and they could not repel the forces of the Wicked Witch that came for them. Weiss lost her entire kingdom in the assault, but she turns out to be the one in the volume who is the least broken. Possibly because she's suffered eight volumes of being broken and having to accept she's not the chosen one, to turn a member of her family in for conspiring against the government, that her upbringing was abusive and not very full of love, and that everyone probably loves her older sister more than they ever will love her, because her older sister has basically been better than her at everything forever. The Ever After doesn't really have anything that it can throw at her that is worse than what she's already experienced. It honestly makes her out of place in the volume, which is probably why we don't see or hear a lot of her.
Blake and Yang are only moderately broken characters by the time they hit the Ever After. A couple of volumes ago, they worked together to ensure that Blake's stalker could no longer terrorize her, and since then, Blake has been rapidly blossoming into the person she was before the abuse. She's the closest we have to bisexual representation in the show, having seemingly been interested in the character based on Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and also having been pursued by the chameleon Ilia Amitola.
Yang, for her part, has had a parent that abandoned her, and suffered, in one of the early volumes, a wound that left her without a right arm. This is a sufficiently-advanced world that a prosthetic was available for her afterward, but she took a volume to herself to adjust to the trauma, recover from the nightmares, and eventually return to active work as a member of the team in the care of her stepfather, who was worried about his daughter's mental and physical health. By the time of this volume, Yang has already adapted to the combat values of having a prosthetic arm, and in this volume, uses the hand for making (arguably inappropriately-timed) jokes with.
In this volume, Blake and Yang get caught in a ponderstorm, where they have to work out their issues and admit to each other that they've fallen in love. They've been hinting at this for several volumes, and it falls to Weiss to make the remark of "about time" when Blake and Yang finally start to behave like two people who love each other around each other. So we have greater representation there from the two of them. Although it took a long time to get there, and I wonder whether some of that started showing up because the fans started grumbling about what kind of world we were in and how there wasn't much need for the showrunners to continue to be coy about the relationship between the two. It helps that it's happened in this time and place, where there's severe backlash against queer content and attempted censorship of queer material is going into overdrive in schools, libraries, towns, cities, and states in the United States. And while Yang might be possessive and only interested in Blake, Blake seems like the kind of character that can maturely hold down more than one relationship, if all of her paramours were ever in the same place so that she could love and be loved by all of them. If there's a Volume 10, and I do hope for a Volume 10 and beyond, there's a significant opportunity for the showrunners to continue developing the Blake and Yang relationship and to possibly see what kind of weight Blake and others might be able to hold as well.
Jaune suffers pretty terribly in this volume. He's been the comedic relief character for eight volumes, even as the entire time, he's been growing and developing his skills in an environment where the supports he's had have been his teammates, and not much else. It took a moment of genuine panic and desperation for him to unlock his superpower, and while he's decent at tactical thinking, he's generally always been put into a situation where his opponents have more raw power than he does and his superpower is very much a support one, at least until he learns how to apply it so he can buff himself into the stratosphere. One of his teammates has died, and someone he cares greatly about nearly died, and he's basically been working on a template where he's supposed to be the knight in shining armor that can rescue and protect others. It should not be a surprise to us that his character for this volume is instead a Rusted Knight, and we find that he has been spending a large amount of his time trying to keep alive a group of Ever Afterans that seem determined to destroy themselves every time his back is turned. He's got a savior complex, and he has yet to actually succeed at saving anyone, and it's severely wearing on his mental health to both have failed at the important things and for the thing that he's trying to do is so extremely stressful to him, because the Ever Afterans are clever at their attempts, such that his schedule of how to try and save them is very, very involved. Jaune cannot get rid of his own demons and his own belief in what he should be, but he ranks above others in this volume in how broken he is because he is lucid enough to realize that he's coping extremely poorly, and I think he grasps that his attempts to keep something static in his life is actively interfering with the way the Ever After works. Once Jaune learns to stop pretending to be something that he isn't, he's likely to start healing. Or, perhaps, he will die trying to be a hero. With Jaune, you're never quite sure.
At the bottom of the rankings, though, of who has broken and how well they have been snapped, are two pairs of direct antagonists. The Curious Cat and the Jabberwalker were creations of the brothers, meant to help the Ever After in the tasks of creation and destruction, but they have become a being that heals broken hearts and guides others to their next lives when they lose their way and the embodiment of final destruction for any member of the Ever After. The Jabberwalker is broken, because it attacks everyone without discretion. The Curious Cat, it turns out, has suffered from the very same condition that it is supposed to heal in others, but they cannot help themself. Instead, they wish to leave the Ever After and continue to satisfy their curiosity on Remnant. To do so, however, they have to commit great acts of cruelty to another being so they can possess them and try to leave. The Curious Cat, at least, seems to be aware of the fact that something has gone terribly wrong with them, but also seems to be aware they can't do anything about it.
Which leaves us with Ruby and Neapolitan (Neo) at the bottom of the tier rankings, the characters who are the most broken in this volume and who spend the most time in that state. We don't see Neo for much of the volume, but when she is around, she wants to take revenge on Ruby for having gotten her love, Torchwick, killed, and she wants to do it by using her power of creating illusions and mirages to break Ruby's brain and make her cross the despair horizon to the point where she willingly commits suicide to get away from all of the pain that Ruby has been shouldering for eight volumes.
For her part, Ruby has been shouldering the expectations of being the Chosen One, selected by The Wizard of Oz against the Wicked Witch because people with her eye color have a hidden inner power that allows them to destroy the Wicked Witch and her minions by petrification. She was also made the leader of her team, having skipped a couple of grades to start studying at the more advanced academy at the beginning of the series. The expectations of the entire world are resting on her shoulders, or so she believes, and so all the setbacks that have been piling up, the adults that aren't listening to her, the strategic planning that she has not been able to outmaneuver, and losing people that she's tried to protect, including what could be seen as a love interest of hers with the right shipping glasses on, they're all being taken very personally. (And that's with the whole dead parents as well, so she also was raised by Yang's father.) The Curious Cat and Neo are both working toward the same goal, to try and break Ruby for their own purposes, so volume 9 is a Trauma Conga Line for Ruby, where she finally cracks under the strain of everyone's expectations and her own expectations. She tells another character that she's been constantly haunted by the feeling of never being enough, and in return, gets asked the question of what she thinks would be enough. That's easy enough for her to answer, but when that character offers Ruby the opportunity to set down the burden of being Ruby Rose and to be any other character that she might desire, Ruby resists the offer. She doesn't know what she wants, other than to not be crushed by the weight.
And so when Neo tortures her with the images of people she's respected, or who have died, or who she is trying to live up to the expectations of telling her about all of her failures and how disappointed they are in her, and then offers Ruby a teacup of what, for all she knows, will kill her, Ruby commits suicide by drinking the cup down. Neo gets her revenge on Ruby, but because this is the Ever After, it doesn't actually kill Ruby, but starts the process of Ascension, where Ruby gets the opportunity to choose who and what she wants to be in her next life. Ascension is what Jaune was trying to stop with his attempts to keep things static, and he gets to see the results in that the entities he was trying to hold back have become better and stronger and more capable for their next purpose. The only thing that was in doubt was whether Ascension would apply to those who came from Remnant or was only for the Ever Afterans. It's a powerful image on the screen to have the main character of a show complete suicide, and not in a romanticized way or in the way that The Magicians ultimately chose to portray one of their main characters completing suicide. It felt like a character making a choice because they were so blinkered by pain and grief that they couldn't see a way out of it. So it resonated with me, because in this teenage prodigy who had the weight of saving the world piled on her shoulders and then finding out that life was far less like a bedtime story than a tragedy with no big reveal of the hero's glory I could see myself and some of the same expectations I had placed on myself. (And also, I could see some of myself in Jaune's frenetic desire to be a hero and to save the day and live up to the family name, despite being utterly unqualified for the role.)
As it turns out, Neo getting her revenge leaves her without a purpose, which makes her the Curious Cat's chosen vessel to try and leave the Ever After, but it turns out that Neo's so broken by the complete success of her revenge that she no longer has an attachment to Remnant, having basically nobody there to go back to, so the Cat's plan fails because Neo doesn't want to go back. And, having killed herself under the weight of other expectations, and having been given the opportunity to become anyone else in her next life, Ruby eventually makes a decision.
"What happens…if I choose me?"
"Then maybe, that girl is enough."
And the implication is that Ruby has finally found herself again and is no longer quite so burdened, making her the last of the characters to do so in this trip to the Ever After. Weiss was already basically fine. Blake and Yang finally admitted their love to each other. Jaune supposedly is able to embrace change and stop constantly seeing himself as a failed hero. The Jabberwalk and the Curious Cat both are destroyed, or possibly Ascended so they can take on a new purpose. Neo, for her part, having accomplished her revenge (and her purpose), stays in the Ever After and activates her own Ascension, with the idea that she will find herself another purpose, and possibly another form, to come back later for. We will see whether it proves out in the next Volume, if there is one.
Which brings me back to the point about representation in U.S. media that we started in, nearly four thousand words later. Science fiction and fantasy material had reasonably wide latitude to explore and demonstrate that what the reader might consider so normal as to be the unmarked default was simply one of a myriad of possibilities, and that aliens who developed in different conditions often produced different way of building and maintaining their society. Stories that were in a more "realistic" setting often had "edgy" content, or the subject of a Very Special Episode, for characters to be "revealed" as being somehow outside the assumed default of cisgender, heterosexual, mentally and physically able, and with a stable nuclear family where the children were body-birthed by a cisgender woman married to or at least partnered with a cisgender man. Most of that content wanted to deliver a message that was somewhere in the "humanize this Other" ballpark, often to the point of hammering on the anvil of "this person is just like you, and therefore you shouldn't make a big deal out of this difference, even though we devoted a Very Special Episode to it." Because of dropping the anvils, though, it often had the opposite effect and could sometimes lead to the characterization being flattened so that this difference was the only way of differentiating them from any other member of the cast. As time went on and we were able to more openly talk about these aspects outside of media, the representation in the media managed to get more complex, because it was no longer "edgy" content to include those things, and it was possible to include them directly, rather than dancing about the edges of acknowledgement and leaving enough plausible deniability. Or putting the big kiss at the end of the series or episode in such a way that it could be excised if necessary. So it's something impressive for all of us that we can have a volume of an animated show that contains the confirmation of a relationship between two women (one of them has nekomimi and a tail, the other is an amputee with a cybernetic prosthetic), and several different portrayals of mental illness and instability (and the consequences thereof), including a main character that chooses suicide, another character that willingly bullies that main character to that decision out of revenge, and a third who has trouble with his own traumas and tries to prevent others from growing and changing because he needs something to protect. Any one of those things could have been an After School Special all by themselves in an earlier era. Now they're components of the narrative plot, and because they're components of the narrative plot, it's so much easier for us to see ourselves in the characters, rather than having to fight through all of the way that we're being presented as strange and Other in a situation where the idea is that we're not supposed to be strange and Other. It's a better media environment, which can cover more aspects of the human condition, and in doing so, that allows the fandom to both have more material to work with and to be able to push the boundaries even further out, as they work with things that the source material may have only hinted at or that requires a different reading than where the canon is headed.
And I, for one, not only welcome our new fannish frontiers, but also hope we can manage to successfully deflect, redirect, and otherwise defeat the campaigns currently underway to restrict and reduce those frontiers to a smaller area than even where the After School Special would be willing to go.
