OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)RWBY awaken in Jaune’s cabin after finally getting a good night’s sleep and learn that Jaune has spent most of his time saving the lives of Paper Pleasers, tiny star shaped paper villagers who helped him after Alyx left him to die, but who also seem to get into trouble very often. He’s even named all of them after all his friends, which is not creepy at all. He’s also been searching, basically in vain, for a way to get them all back home. While he leaves to go look again, he puts RWBY in charge of looking after the Paper Pleasers, who tell them that they’ve actually been trying to “ascend” and get a new purpose from the tree, which Jaune has been keeping them from doing out of guilt for not keeping his loved ones safe. Clearly there are still things they don’t understand about the tree and this world.While they try to explain things to Jaune, Neo’s legions of Jabberwalkers invade the village. RWBY and Jaune manage to fend them off, but RWBY has a triggering flashback when facing one and Neo gets away, and the Paper Pleasers end up ascending by flooding the village. Ruby goes on a rant about how much is expected of her, to which Jaune shouts back that the only reason any of them are there is because of her plan that failed, as well as feeling guilty about Penny’s death. Unable to cope with everything happening, Ruby runs from the group.OUR TAKEYou may not know this if you weren’t following the discussions and subreddits of this show for a long time like I have, but ever since Volume 4, back in 2016, people have been eagerly anticipating Ruby finally feeling the weight of everything that’s happened to her and having a total mental breakdown of some kind. The reasons people wanted this varied sometimes, but much like the confirmation of Blake and Yang getting together-together that we finally got last week, every season had people speculating and getting hyped up for Ruby’s big PTSD moment. My most charitable interpretation of why people were so invested in this hypothetical moment is that they wanted a moment where the main protagonist finally acknowledged that shit had actually gotten real. A common criticism of Ruby herself for the majority of the show up until now was that she felt like she was basically stuck in place developmentally despite everything she’d witnessed that would normally traumatize some people. Some defended this by saying she was actually just a ticking time bomb of trauma and that eventually it would reach its breaking point and all the waiting would be worth it!Well, just like with the Blake and Yang kiss last week, my response to this is basically “better late than never, I guess”. We’ve once again reached a moment that, while cathartic, should’ve happened several seasons earlier so we could have more time to build on it, but we’re only getting it now. And don’t get me wrong, this is the most human Ruby herself has felt since Volume 2. I am GLAD she has finally gotten a chance to vent her feelings and show that simply having a positive attitude is not enough to make it through every situation. I am GLAD that Team RWBY are put in situations where the problems are morally murky and complicated instead of just basically saying “we’re right, fuck you, get out of our way” to any adversary that even thinks of opposing them like they have for the past few seasons. I am GLAD that the main group is actually disagreeing and having character-specific perspectives that end up clashing and aren’t just glossed over later. But we could’ve gotten here a lot sooner if they wanted to.Putting all that aside for the moment, I actually really like what the Paper Pleasers teach the girls about the nature of “ascension” in this world, as well as what Jaune’s reluctance to let any of them die says about him and what he’s gone through. Becoming a hero who can save others instead of being saved himself was his original goal at the start of the series, and now, even after all of his missteps, he now has a whole village of citizens he can save from danger over and over for as long as he likes. HOWEVER, after saving them so many times, they now no longer want to be saved, which he could not accept, making his savings no longer altruistic or heroic, but selfish. And Jaune is not someone who would normally act like this, but he’s been through so much shit and been alone for so long by now that having something he can cling to and tell himself he can AT LEAST do this right. Not to mention his logic is sound enough about whether or not this world is straightforward enough to not see this as anything more than surface level. But at a certain point, you have to let go of a situation that is not serving you, or even accept that you have made mistakes or failed in your life, which is what I think is the main point being made here by the story.We’ll hopefully see how Jaune processes this in the remaining three episodes, but we also have A LOT of other things to cover in that time that we haven’t really dug into enough. Neo seems to be enacting her plan more directly and has polished her evolved Semblance to make several formidable Jabberwalker clones, but we still have no idea what she’s after, how she plans to get it, or even what exactly she’s feeling right now. I realize that’s a tad more challenging to communicate when she can’t talk, but even a short moment alone with her could probably tell us a whole lot. Likewise, there’s still quite a bit we don’t know about Alyx’s initial journey here with Lewis, partly due to most things about her only coming up in this season but also because we just haven’t gotten all the information yet. Alyx herself is pretty prominently featured in the OP, which made me think she would be a more active participant in events, but we’ve only had her mentioned so far. Supposedly she made it back to Remnant to write an edited version of her trip to the Ever After, so does that mean she’s alive in Remnant now? Is she going to come back as a malevolent force later? And what the heck happened with Lewis and the tree? I guess we’ll find out in the next three weeks. I’m cautious about how much of that will actually pay off, but I’m certainly the most optimistic about RWBY I have been in many years.
