EXCUSE ME WHAT IS THIS?

WHAT IS THIS??

WHAT IS THIS??????

I'M GONNA DIE.

AND THEN IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS

I'm not making it through this volume I'm having too much fun and winning too much and I'm not made for that.

Speaking of not being made for it, I. Love. Weiss.

Weiss "Third Wheel" Schnee

Weiss "already sick of these fruits" Schnee

Weiss "let's be logical in a fairy tale because that always works out" Schnee

I'm gonna make so many emotes out of her assorted angry rants, I love it.

Weiss plz

/STARES AT FLIRTING GIFS, HASN'T EVEN SEEN THE FIRST EPISODE but saw the most important gif from it

oh no weiss

RIP in effing Pepperoni Weiss

She's having a great time.

I can't even get into Ruby's stuff in this episode because she's just so many levels of Not Okay at this point that I can't even joke about it. She's just...WELL AND TRULY NOT OKAY.

a Mood honestly

malkuthsoldier baranohanabira Weiss is Fine.

Also Jinksy is great and I love him. I'm so sad we probably only get one episode of him but I love him.

Little Tanuki Tom Nook swindler goblin what a great character.

Oh good somebody gif'd the best part:

I really hope this becomes the new "Draw the Squad" meme.

This moron

I seriously love that it's Blake getting to re-tell a lot of this fairy tale though?

And that she's having the whole crisis of "Oh pft, well if it was me in that story I'd have just done stuff Better" and then it's like "Oh no, sorry, the story is going to actively work against any efforts to do that "

Like who of us hasn't been there reading a book and going, "Oh man, I'd totally do this all differently and quicker and the Best" I love the idea of the story itself going, "LOL YOU THOUGHT?"

Anyway, I'm having a great time and I'm gonna need to re-watch this episode a couple more times to unpack everything because wow. Wow.

Also I can tell my boy is going to be going through it when we see

malkuthsoldier Omigod, the more they set up how OBVIOUSLY RUBY ROSE IS HAVING A BAD TIME the more I am vibrating for the moment Jaune shows up because HOO BOY

YEP

just, I have a feeling we're going to see him right around when we get to the "Shit really going bad for Ruby" portion of things.

This. Especially if he sped-run what Ruby's currently building up to and it'll be like, "WELP. This is Bad."

yep this is deep speculation, but I think Jaune is that one knight we see in the preview and he's basically cast himself as a villain because of what happened with Penny.

and because Fairy Tale logic everything has built around, and reinforced that identity.

YES. I think that might be what's happened too. Like he's been almost fully enchanted/absorbed by Ever After or whatever or basically something that it's like, "Uh Ruby...you...really need to get yourself some help because otherwise this happens and Boy Oh"

Especially since the Knight in the preview seems to have some kind of association with a White Rabbit and Jaune and White Rabbits HMMMMMMM

plus fire

Which, both Joan of Arc and Pyrrha's death

YEP

Hey CRWBY can you come over here, I just want to talk.

Arryn plz

They were a reactor/super fan before being on CRWBY so they know how to hurt us.

This was also my interpretation as well; Yang does know what it's like to be loved (Tai made mistakes but he still obviously gave her love for example) and knows how rare and precious that is to her and she'd rather just remain armless than lose that.

Like I get the fans who are/were saying, "OOO SHE COULDN'T BID THAT BECAUSES SHE DOESN"T KNOW WHAT BEING LOVED FEELS LIKE" but nah mate, she knows how valuable being able to feel love is; like hell is she giving that up just for an arm.

RUBY NOT HAVING ENOUGH HOPE LEFT IN HER TO FILL A SMALL JAR THOUGH.

WE IN TROUBLE FOLKS.

I'm like this close to making all 4 of these into emotes. What am I gonna do with 4 different "Weiss having a Normal One" emotes? HELL AS IF I KNOW BUT I THINK I NEED 'EM.

make all the emotes

pageantry I think I'm gonna do it. They're all too good.

It is done.

I shortened the third one to just the impatient foot-tapping so that Weiss can do her best Sonic impression.

Okay after a re-watch I wanna talk some theory/WMG because there's things going on here about the Ever After canon that intrigue me.

So obviously, while it's definitely based on Alice in Wonderland, The Girl Who Fell Through The World is without a doubt, distinctly different from the Alice in Wonderland book.

For starters, Alice and Alyx seem to be extremely different characters. Alice is generally portrayed as a sweet, unassuming girl if kind of naive and a little judgy in the ways that kids can be.

Alyx on the other hand appears to have been either a Huntress or some kind of warrior if this book was written pre-War, given that she full on had A DAGGER ON HER which is not the kind of thing "normal kids", even in RWBY-verse are going to have.

Yang also describes her as being a sort of mean character, lying and cheating to get her way alongside Blake casually dropping that Alyx apparently started a full-on war amongst the townspeople.

Now of interest to me is Weiss defending those actions with the statement that children's books morals are too simplistic" and "Alyx was just trying to survive" which, is Interesting on several levels.

Since we, the viewers, don't have the actual book in front of us to make our own interpretations of the text, we're going to have to 1) view Ever After through RWBY's interpretations of the text and 2) make our own judgement calls of those interpretations.

For example, Weiss defending Alyx's actions in the book could indeed be a legit critical analysis of those actions. HOWEVER, Yang might also be correct in that Alyx really wasn't a nice person, even if the actions she took were understandable in some contexts.

We the audience aren't going to know, at least not for now.

tl;dr they've set up a scenario where we're viewing a small sliver of the Ever After fandom literature analysis through RWBY and how they related to this book from their childhood.

Which is fascinating.

Particularly because RWBY are currently acting like somebody showed them all the worst RWDE subreddits as they reflect on their actions in Atlas and the outcome.

Weiss has explicitly stated that she feels they caused more trouble than they solved. Blake is having a crisis of morality as she tries to figure out the Most Right thing to do in any given situation likely so that she won't accidentally do the Most Wrong thing like Adam would which is an Impossibility but I'll get back to that.

Ruby is full on depressed and distraught because, from her point of view, they failed on all points: Atlas and Mantle are gone and Penny is dead so literally nothing they did "worked". It was a full on "Failure" for any of their goals, with failure in air quotes like that because we know that's not the actual case.

Yang meanwhile is just Vibing which honestly good for her but anywho.

Basically, what I think might ultimately be going on here is RWBY getting to come to terms with their choices and actions set against the actions and choices of a literal storybook protagonist. Alyx lived her story, a story they're currently taking part in, and they'll have a chance to reflect on the actions she took in her story vs the actions they've

taken in theirs. Did they do everything Wrong? Did they do everything Right? Did they do somethings Wrong but the reasons they did them were understandable/in order to survive? Was any Harm they caused outweighed by the Good they did. IS RIGHT/WRONG AND GOOD/HARM TOO SIMPLISTIC WHEN WE'RE TALKING ABOUT A WAR GEE I DON'T KNOW.

In any case, I am like 99% certain they're going to run into Alyx herself. And I think it's going to be an older Alyx, not the Alyx they remembered from the book. An Alyx who has already lived that story and has grown into whatever person she decided to grow into (or not grow into).

There's a very faint reflection of an older woman's silhouette in the mirror behind Alyx in the illustration pan down during the OP and I think that's gonna be a big reveal. After she fell through the World, who did Alyx become?